Started randomly leafing through the archives at my local library while I was there sorting out some medical forms and I saw this leaflet dated to the mid 00s advertising like free DJing classes for teens.

Cynically motivated by a desire to get allegedly violent working class youths 'off the street' mayhaps, but it made me like a bit mournful. Aside from my school's karaoke club, there were very few 'organised' fun activities for us growing up in post-financial crash britain.

Its probably better for the kids to make their own fun anyhow, but it does depress me slightly that councils aren't really providing much of a venue for them to like discover new shit outside of school anymore.

this is the future that silly goofy people want

Finished Reading Allowed by Chris Paling - it's a memoir of the author's year working in a public library, consisting mostly of anecdotes about the eccentric folks he encounters: my fave was the dude who talks very loudly and conspicuously about his Very Important Job desperate to impress the other patrons.

The authorial voice's primary flavour is snide judgement (I'm sorta reminded stylistically of that really awful memoir I skimmed a few years back by a primary school teacher who depicted her student as like a space aliens for wanting to write a poem about dragons instead of boys will maybe write a post about this in the future lol).

This playground bully sensibility is very uncomfortable when he is talking about people who to any reasonable observer very clearly have a severe mental illness or intellectual disability, which unfortunately is a significant portion of this book.

What I think I enjoyed most were the descriptions of day to day librarian life eg interacting with the community, grapping with the cataloging systems.

Thinkin about that time my mum stole like hundreds of pounds from my savings account so she could go on vacation to europe n insisted it wasn't theft bc 'we're family'

Kinda blows that no academic critics of english lit have readable prose, let alone clear and confident argumentation. I'm yet to read a work of pure (eg not also a work of philosophy or social criticism) Literary Criticism that's felt a anywhere near as energetic and engaging as the texts it's tackling.

'Foundational' and highly regarded works of literary criticism have consistently been among the worst I've read. For example I.A. Richards's Practical Criticism -the book that brought the world close reading - consists almost entirely of the author mean-spiritedly mocking his undergrad students for misreading poetry in their essays, then drawing impressionistic, unconfident non-conclusions from this exercise.

I wanted to be an academic when I was a teenager but reading pages of academese nonsense makes me feel actually nauseous, and fills me with a sense of dread about my life: as if going ahead with this dream equals dooming myself to life as the world's most boring and pedantic spinster.

I might add that I don't really get this feeling at all when I've read shit from other fields (eg psychology, history or even literary criticism outside of the anglosphere): even if the prose can be sorta unwieldy it has like a discernable sense and argument.

I don’t care if my ex-wife demeans it as “silly stuff for kids,” I’ve met every single one of my close friends in the Skibidi toilet fandom

Football (soccer) uniforms have such a cute and innocent vibe, light and breezy. The sporty boys in primary everyone crushed on, and the 30-something men having a chill kick-off with their work mates!

I kinda want these lol

The 3DS dating sim New Love Plus had an apparently completely broken feature where you could read together with your love interest: you'd try and read the physical book at the same pace she was reading on the screen. According to reviews she'd read at an unreasonable speed though and say stuff about the books sorta incongruent with where you were supposed to be in the story.

They released tie in editions of the books - Anne of Green Gables, Boku no Measuring Spoon, and Mouryou no Hako - featuring cover illustrations of the game's heroines. The tie-in edition of Anne of Green Gables used a different translation from what the in-game characters were quoting from which made things even more confusing.

This feature sucked so much that they patched it out of the game lmao, sorta wanna own one of the tie-in books as a curiosity but they're super expensive second hand.

The ostensibly useless Wii apps like the weather and news ones made an indelible impression on my childbrain. The cybermusak contrasted with the earth imagery to create this sense that like, wow I am on this planet and we are all connected through the net.

Oh my fucking god

Learned about fagmasters