ʍɥɐʇ po ʎon ǝxdǝɔʇ?

a rare closeup of a black swift, found throughout north america and small parts of south america. swifts are rarely seen up close; they spend more of their life in air than any other species of bird - they eat, drink, mate and sleep while in flight. they are incapable of perching like other birds; they must cling to vertical surfaces.

but yeah, apparently completely true.  these birds stay aloft for as much as 10 months nonstop, feed on insects, spend more energy at night (when there aren’t warm thermals to ride) and at dawn and dusk climb to 10,000 ft altitude where the 30 min slow descent is probably when they catch their sleep.

they’re unusually long-lived for such active critters (20 yrs) and they may be limiting energy expenditure by being extremely aerodynamic and narrow bodied.  Also a single bird travels the distance of about 7 roundtrip journeys to the moon in its lifetime (>3 million miles).

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.

I don't have any experience with the weirder corners of university campuses – my work in that particular job just never happened to take me there. I did, however, once have to do a cable trace in the basement of a former Christian elementary school. It had haphazardly been subdivided into numerous tiny rooms, some as little as ten feet across, with no central hallways or apparent floor plan. Every single room was, for reasons that were and remain unclear to me, full of broken kitchen appliances. One room in particular contained an enormous industrial freezer unit that was larger in its smallest dimension than any of the doors leading to it. Was it delivered in pieces and assembled on site? Did they build the room around it? That one still bothers me a little bit.

Recently, Nigel Farage (the Member of Parliament for Clacton, and the frog-faced leader of right-wing fascist party Reform UK) has come under scrutiny for receiving a £5 million "gift" from a crypto billionare, and being unable to give a consistent answer for why. He has denied any wrongdoing, he has threatened reporters for asking questions about the matter, and he is currently under investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commission.

If the Standards Commission finds Farage in breach of conduct, he will likely face a recall election in his district in September. He is unhappy with this possibility, so he has decided to "resign" and trigger a special election now. I say "resign" in quotes because he is standing in said election, and intends to remain in Parliament. Theoretically, winning this election will demonstrate that he has a mandate from the people in his district to continue representing them in spite of the allegations against him.

This is idiotic for several reasons. First, resigning now does not permanently shut down the Standards Commission investigation; if he is re-elected, the Commission can still find against him later on and still force him to face a recall election, meaning the Clacton constituency might have to hold two elections in the space of a few months.

The other problem for Farage is that essentially nobody else is bothering to entertain this farce. No major party is running a candidate against him, arguing that Farage is throwing a tantrum and wasting public money in the process. Only one opponent of note has put their name forward: intergalactic space warrior and perennial satirical candidate Count Binface.

The above image gallery is, at time of writing, the entire slate of candidates for this election.

This gambit has backfired spectacularly on Farage. He thrives on media attention, but with no serious candidates standing, this campaign won't receive any. No journalist who does cover it will bother asking him policy questions, so they will have to ask him about the £5m "gift" instead, which he hates discussing. He cannot run his usual shtick of presenting himself as the "anti-establishment voice", because the only thing more absurd than running against a comedian with a dustbin on his head is referring to said dustbin comedian as an "establishment politician". He cannot even attack Binface for not being local to the district because, to quote Binface himself, Farage "spends more time in America than in Clacton". The whole process will humiliate Farage --doubly so if Binface (as the sole protest candidate) garners a significant portion of the vote -- and one of the few things that fascist politicians cannot stand is humiliation.

me: yeah i know, they’re all primary colors, it’s perfect

When you go for an MLS (Master’s of Library Science, which is a thing, and which is usually required for “professional-level” library work [which is also a weird and contentious concept that I won’t go into here]), one of the things you study is the organization of information. This deals with how to determine what a book or other material is “about"—a concept we tongue-in-cheek call “aboutness"—and how to convey that to a potential user of the item and make it easy for them to find. Things like keywords and subject headings, do I put this book about how often wild birds attack aerial drones in with books about birds or with books about technology, if its a fictional novel do I put fantasy in it’s own section or mix it in with all of the other fiction, so on and so on.

OP is organizing books by how they would look for them. OP’s partner is thinking in terms of aboutness. This is a system that works for OP because it’s their personal library: they know basically what books they own and they only own books that are relevant to them, and if they know what the book looks like, that can be a quick way to find it.

In a library that assumes the public (or people who do not own that particular collection of books) are using the collection, that doesn’t work. Books are often re-issued in multiple covers, or re-bound in new covers when they get worn out, and if the user doesn’t know what the book looks like or is expecting a different cover, they’re lost. That’s why non-personal libraries used standardized cataloging systems like the Dewey Decimal System or Library of Congress System to organize a book by what it’s “about”, and then put books about the same or similar topics together, marked with labels and signage so a person unfamiliar with the book or collection can find their way to it.

Basically, OP’s system works for their own personal library, because it’s best suited to how the primary user—OP themselves—looks for books. OP’s librarian partner is coming from a background of thinking in terms of a public-facing collection, where aboutness is the key criteria and communicating it to a user unfamiliar with the collection is the priority.

“You’re the one I’ll never get, but you’re the one thing that I need.”

And I label it Klance.