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please rb if saving! ❦

YES, going fine-free encourages returns. I can tell you that from my own experience at the check-in desk. In the weeks after we went fine-free, we got SO MANY returns on books that were hella overdue.

YES, library fines disproportionately impact poor people. Here's how it works: you're a single mom who checks out 10 picture books for your kid. For whatever reason, you're unable to return those 10 books on time. In fact, you're unable to return them for a long time. Each of those books hits the maximum fine. In my system, this was $5. When you return the books, you owe $50. If you can pay off the $50, fine. If you can't, then you feel like you're fucked. Maybe you've had a bad experience with owing money before. Maybe you've had a bad experience with an incompetent or bigoted librarian. Either way, you don't feel like you can deal with the cost of returning the books. But eventually the books go into billing, and now you're on the hook for the full price of each book. Even if you return them, you still owe $50. An account with $50 or more in fines/fees is considered delinquent, meaning you can't even use the computer or printing services, let alone check out books. So now you're stuck with these books and these fines and no library access and you're fucked. It doesn't matter how you got here. Rich and poor people alike wind up here. What matters is that for rich people it's not a big deal, and for poor people it's a REALLY big deal.

YES, libraries do everything we can to avoid this situation. We send reminder emails. We offer payment plans. We cap fines at $50. This prevents MANY people from ending up in this situation, but it doesn't prevent EVERYONE from winding up here. Libraries serve a LOT of people!

NO, fine free doesn't look the same everywhere. In my library system, we've eliminated late fines on every type of item, but we still charge replacement fees for books that are very long overdue (60 days I think). The replacement fee is cleared if the book is returned. But if you look at the notes, you'll see other libraries using different fine-free systems. This is because every library is different and has to work within its own context. Which brings me to..

YES, libraries need the money they get from late fines. HOWEVER! Fine free IS possible for every library, if their parent organization chooses to fund it! Libraries are government entities. They exist to provide services, not to make money. The last time I reblogged this post, I didn't believe my library would be able to go fine free for a very long time. Then, we made a proposal to the government we work for to use a special fund to replace what we typically collect in late fines. We were able to go fine free because we got the funding from our parent organization - you know, the guys who collect taxes and fund social services with the taxes they collect (at least in theory).

THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE MEAN WHEN THEY SAY DEFUND THE POLICE.

(That's right motherfucker this was an anti-cop rant all along!)

City and county budgets are finite, but they CAN fund fine-free libraries. The question is always, what funds are going to be used? What might they have funded instead?

When people call to defund the police, it is in part because police are funded by public money. (It's mostly because the police are an inherently oppressive and racist institution, but bear with me here.) The exact same money that arms and empowers police officers is money that could be used for fine-free libraries, fare-free buses, or better supplied classrooms. It's money that could go to health departments or senior centers or parks. NONE OF THESE ENTITIES EXIST TO MAKE MONEY, but some of us have to because we're underfunded by our municipality's budget.

UNDER-FUNDING SOCIAL SERVICES IS A GRIFT. It directly displaces the cost of living in a society from rich people (homeowners and landlords who pay property taxes) onto poor people (the single mom in our thought experiment above, or someone who can't afford a car so they pay but fare, or the kids whose classroom doesn't have pencils).

If you're unhappy with social services where you live, look at your city and county budgets. Find out how much money your local governments have and where it's going. If you want to agitate, agitate. If you want to run for office, run for office. If you want to take direct action, then I would certainly never advocate for anything illegal hahahaha

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Snuffbox

c.1740

France

You didn’t have a costume or a sponsor or training or anything like that. You were just a kid who had just seen your entire world knocked down. So, in a moment of childish determination and belief, you thought you could fix it all. 

The first emergence of your powers wasn’t a huge triumphal moment. Moving stone and earth and steel doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about how to stack things up so they don’t fall back over again. 

Your first attempts crashed right back down again. That was your first lesson. 

—

Even when you got good at what you did, they didn’t call you a superhero. 

You still didn’t have a costume, but you’d gotten your hands on every architectural diagram you could and done plenty of practice. Then you started to show up to the aftermath of battles and put them quietly together again. 

But it still wasn’t right. You couldn’t do much if you didn’t have the diagrams for the buildings demolished–if the city planners didn’t let you have them.

So you stitched together a costume, something bright and colorful that would grab the attention of the cameras on the scene afterward as you tried to work. 

“Look! Someone’s putting those houses back together!” 

The effect was instantaneous. The moment you’d grabbed public attention, there were requests for interviews, think pieces–each giving you a platform to ask for the help you needed. 

This was your second lesson. 

–

You didn’t call yourself a superhero, or come up with the name yourself. You were never really good about all of those things. But once the attention was on you, you got offers from managers and sponsors. One, a blonde with perfect hair who introduced herself as “just Sandy” 

“I don’t have any money.”

“That’s alright,” she said, her grin showing spectacularly white teeth. “All I need is for you to take on some gigs and give me a cut.” 

Sandy set you up. She got you the costume people would know you for, gave you the name, managed all of the PR and set up interviews. Your fame skyrocketed, and soon you were seeing yourself on billboards. 

Soon you had access to hundreds of city plans and blueprints. After enough attacks happened, you learned them well enough to hardly need to reference them. After a few years, you could rebuild a tower in a matter of minutes, and cities in a matter of days. 

Your powers evolved as your understanding did. Soon, you could read the entire layout of a building just from touching. Then, just from touching the ruins. You no longer need blueprints, then–just your own hands on the metal.

The gigs were simple, too–just fixing up hero bases after they’d gotten wrecked in attacks. Feel good work that paid well. 

With the help of many people, you do more. That’s the third lesson.

—

The problems started with the homeless thing. 

You were in between projects and itching to use your skills more. Creating homes for the homeless seemed like the perfect, feel good project to flex on. 

It was, for the first few weeks. Then came the backlash. City dwellers crying foul, saying they hadn’t agreed to an enormous den of undesirables in their backyards. There were protests, white suburban moms holding up signs about drug dealers and rapists and criminals. 

It wasn’t your choice in the end. Eventually the city mandated that you deconstruct your shelter, or they would do it the hard way. 

Regretfully, you took it down. You did not look in the eyes of the people that had sheltered there as they had to go on their way.

It was the same story in every area you tried to build shelters in afterwards.

—

“Can we just buy the land to build them houses?” you asked Sandy. 

She clicked her perfect teeth. “Sorry, there are laws against building new things in the city. You need mayoral approval to start a new construction project.”

“Why?”

“Well, there are already too many empty houses,” she said matter of factly. 

You stared. “What? Then let’s just buy those and put people in them!”

“You don’t have that much money,” she pointed out. “Not when you’ve been giving it away every year. Also, it wouldn’t do as much good as you think. Just think of the effect on the market–”

This is not why you fired Sandy. But it was the first time you thought of it.

—

Opinion started to turn against you when you began using your interviews and platform to talk about this problem, to demand permission to build or otherwise help. Exasperation turned to hostility when you started to reshape the landscape to be softer to the unhoused, anyway–when you created caves in parks where people could easily shelter, or made every bench large and soft so that anyone could have a place to sleep.

Laws and ordinances passed, all regulating the amount of alterations one was allowed to make to public property. About how many changes you were allowed to make as you were reconstructing a city. The fines for altering things started to heap up. 

Firing Sandy didn’t help. Your good reputation was always as much her work as yours, but after what she said about—you couldn’t. 

You couldn’t. 

You learned not to read the scathing opinion pieces on you. That was the hardest lesson yet.

—

Of course, shit really hit the fan when you were contracted to rebuild another base.

It was a simple enough decision for you. You found out they had been building drones and firing them on civilians. That at this base Techno has been building surveillance technology that would be able to monitor every single person in the country at every moment, and be able to fire upon them with impunity the moment suspicious activity was detected. 

It made you rethink every base you had built in the past.

“No,” you told them. 

“You already signed your contract–”

Instead of dignifying that with an answer, you transmuted the entire area into the rockiest, most impossible terrain you could. Every trick you had learned to make land easier to build on–you reversed it, turning what had once been the base into a precarious canyon of jagged, diamond-hard steel, nearly impossible to remove or build on.

“I said no.” 

—

Stopping the construction of the stadium was the next kicker. 

“You’re insane!” said the heroes who came to remove you.

“They evicted a hundred families for this!” you spat. “Those were people’s homes. It’s disgusting that it’s allowed for the government to do that–much less to do it for-for a stadium? For entertainment?” 

And so you stood there for the next 48 hours, deconstructing every single thing they tried to put on their ill-gotten land. 

Then, they sent the heroes to stop you. You were never the best at fighting, so they knocked you out quickly.

—

They don’t call you a superhero now. Behind bars, you glance over every thinkpiece and profile about the world’s most beloved hero fell. You read speculation about evil, greed, madness. All things you’ve heard about “villains” who came before you. 

It makes you wonder about those people. If maybe you had misjudged them, too.

But that’s alright, you realize after the sting of it fades away. That was the second lesson, after all–more than anything, you need people to be talking. And for all the bitterness in these words, you realize grimly that people will never stop talking.

Once you’ve thought things through, you decide you’re ready. The steel of your cell melts away. After all, there is no prison that can contain you. No earth or stone or metal can withstand your will. 

Everything in that vase except the dark red flowers and the ivory roses was purchased, half wilted, in the reduced bucket an ENTIRE WEEK ago. The dark reds and ivories? TWO WEEKS  (I don’t normally premade bouquets because they end up in the reduced less often and even when they do they’re still more expensive than getting a few bunches of different types of flowers) TWO. WEEKS. From a wilted half price “we are become death” state. Here’s what it looked like a whole entire week ago when I put the new flowers in:

‘I’m a woman-leaning bisexual and you know what pisses me off? The fact that I’m dating a skinny white man and I love him and I’m happy, like what the fuck.’

And I just have to say. What pisses me off as a bisexual woman is that TikTok.

This is the Woke version of ‘my wife is the ol’ ball and chain, doesn’t it suck to be married,’ jokes. It’s not funny. Your queerness is not negated or tarnished by opposite-gender attraction, dating men isn’t inherently worse than dating women.

Love your partner.

Cherish them.

I’m getting REAL SICK of that “bisexual means I’m attracted to all women and two men” joke. I’m getting equally sick of the implication, in a thousand ways, that men are bad and it’s inherently worse to be attracted to them. If you’re a woman or woman-adjacent and you fall in love with a man, there’s this horrible and easy-to-internalize idea that you’re taking the lesser option.

Like y’all. Y’all? You know that’s gender essentialist radfem bullshit, right?

If you didn’t, I’d like to gently suggest you consider the idea that “Men are problematic (read: sinful) and violent, women are pure, beautiful and loving” is just conservative Christian ideology in a gay hat. We are not advancing towards equality for all genders by flipping which end of the scale is The Bad One ™.

I’m bisexual. I make a point of talking about being queer (because it’s my identity and culture, and that’s important to me), and I present mostly in the androgynous area of the spectrum. People often assume I’m only/mostly interested in women.

That’s actually not true. I like all genders, but when it comes to specific people, I’m most often attracted to men. And it makes me sad – really, genuinely sad – how many times I’ve felt ashamed to talk about that. Even though I’m not a woman, liking a man has made me feel “not queer enough.” Hell, some days it still does.

I’m gonna say this, even though I know a lot of people won’t like it. And I will also say in advance that I am not accepting criticism and I don’t argue on the internet as a personal mental health policy.

That said, here is the statement: This too is a closet.

If you’re a man, absolutely do not date someone who thinks their attraction or affection for you is something they ought to be ashamed of.

So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.

M Y    T I M E    H A S    C O M E

You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.

STORY TIME

Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.

Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.

But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.

BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.

Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:

Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.

For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus. 

With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:

Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.

Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.

Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.

A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I don’t know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts. 

Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.

What an interesting find.

Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:

This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.

It worked well.

It worked extremely well. 

So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as it’s more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witches’ brew freakin murdered it.

Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.

Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this. 

To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic. 

Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.

All that to say:  Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk

Further reading:

The 2015 Ancientbiotics report: A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity

NPR: ‘Ancientbiotics’ Researchers Look For Old Fixes To Modern Ailments

Mental Floss: 20 Anglo-Saxon Remedies from Bald’s Leechbook

Read a paper about how scholars are building on the work of the Ancientbiotics project to better understand how to apply ancient ideas effectively to modern medicine.

Look through Royal 12 D XVIII for yourself! Bald’s eyesalve recipe is on f. 12v and looks like this:

Muffin disclaimer

So you’ve ordered a muffin! We hope you’re up for a challenge.

Our wobbly tabby cat Bea REALLY likes muffins so there are a few things to be aware of if you have a muffin in the cat area.

- She WILL climb you to try and get your muffin - She is not very good at climbing so she will claw her way up your body - It WILL hurt - She WILL NOT give up - She may try to eat the muffin right out of your mouth - She is not allowed to eat muffins

You may pick her up / move her away if needed and if you’re really struggling, come and talk to us and we will help. No matter how much she wants to, it is still very important that you don’t let her eat any muffin as it will make her sick.

Good luck and we hope you enjoy your muffin experience!

She may look sweet and innocent but we promise you she’s not

Like when Bon Appetit and Harry Potter had their big(and justified) cancel this year a lot of people were saying stuff like “I always knew it was bad” or “lol I can’t believe people actually liked this crap anyway” or some other variation of “I was woke enough to realise this media was problematic before it was cool and now I’m gonna make fun of those who didn’t” and not only does that read as performative as HELL(social justice has very much become a clout game) it also ignores the fact that we live in a deeply shit ass society and it’s okay to be upset when something that made your life worth living gets ruined for you.

Maybe you weren’t on twitter or didn’t get the memo about Rowling or missed the dog whistles and now you have to grapple with something that brought you joy being vilified while the narrative around the discourse is full of people calling you terrible for liking it in the first place(I see you people who make jokes about adults caring about their Hogwarts houses and I am not impressed). Maybe BA was just something you switched on for a quick laugh and you were too tired to be on guard for the signs of problems. Maybe you didn’t know what copoganda was or never had all the different antisemitic dogwhistles explained to you or were too happy with representation to think too hard about it’s effects. That’s okay. No one is perfect. Every day there are 10,000 people just finding out about something everyone else knew, statistically you’re gonna end up in that group at some point. Do not shame yourself for not being versed in every type of issue from the start.

And when you do learn It’s perfectly okay to mourn the media that helped you get through another day in this hellscape of a society. Really, it’s natural to be upset.

Cuz I think we’ve all been there(and if havent your lying) and this purity culture idea that the only way to be truly woke is to have never liked the Bad thing in the first place and then openly tear it to shreds as soon as doing so will get you clout is so flawed and unrealistic.

I mean, for example, my freshman year of highschool was rough. I had just moved across the country away from my whole family and had no friends and was living in a studio apartment with my drug addicted neglectful dad and ngl, I probably wouldnt have survived if I didn’t have Hetalia. I know now that it’s problematic as hell and I do occasionally wish I had seen the issues sooner but I was also an emotionally abused lonely 15 year old and to this day I can’t get on the hate bandwagon because any time I do see the mocking I think of that terrified teenager just trying to get though another lonely day with only US/UK fanfiction to look forward to and I just can’t hate the thing that helped her survive.

And so if Harry Potter or BA or Voltron or whatever other problematic thing was your lifeline it’s okay to be upset that it was yanked away from you by bigoted creators and racist corporations and bad writing. It’s okay to mourn that thing, to miss the joy it brought you, to think back on the good memories you had of it, to not want to jump on the hate bandwagon, to be upset when people mock the people like you who cared about it.

Do not be ashamed of the life-raft that got you through the storm. Be critical, do not let it’s problems alter your perception of reality, and cast it aside if it comes to that, but do not be ashamed to have needed it, and do not feel bad for mourning it’s absence.

Listen in the past the poor have had to improvise cheap food the rich never wanted as a means to survive. And over the many years of innovation made the food taste good until eventually the rich where like: “Oh hay you actually like that garbage? Why on earth would you like it?” Then they try it, love it, start buying it, and then drive the price up so much it becomes a luxury good.

They do this and its devastating, the food typically never becomes affordable again. It don’t matter how cheap the foo dis to produce, it doesn’t matter if there is almost no meat on the bone or its super difficult to eat and messy. Once the poor discover how to make some bit of cheap food taste good, the rich take it away via driving the price of it up.

THEY DID THIS TO RIBS.

Ribs were garage meat. Just look at them, there is hardly any meat on the bone, you have to eat them by hand usually, and they are messy. They where an undesirable cheap source of junk meat. But the poor being the poor made them taste good. (Because they don’t have much to choose from.) The rich discovered the meals the poor made with them and decided they liked ribs too. People discovered they could sell a few ribs to rich people and make way more money then selling lots of ribs to poor people and the price was driven up.

It was a cheap meat because no rich person looks at the dangly part of the neck of a cow and goes ‘ooh, that looks tasty!’.

But then Food Network started showcasing things like barbecued brisket.  Rich people started showing up at places that weren’t just Rib Crib to get their barbeque.  And the price of brisket went up.  A lot.

I regularly see it for over five dollars a pound in stores now.  And while yeah, that might not seem like a lot when you’re talking only a pound or two of meat, brisket is normally sold in ten to twenty pound sizes.  It’s become completely unaffordable to the people that made it delicious.

Sushi used to be really cheap, too, until it became ‘trendy’.  Guess why you’re now paying twelve dollars for your order of California rolls?  Because rich people discovered something that poor people had been eating for ages.