'Forth now, and fear no darkness!'

Hi hello! I have not become a missing person; I'm just in the middle of my ranger season and haven't had reliable access to WiFi. Daily activities have included! Night hiking, hunting for aquatic macroinvertebrates, quilting, mimicking gray-cheeked salamanders, mimicking fireflies, inadvertently attracting owls, avoiding elk, wrangling chickens, dressing in 19th century garb and baking cornbread on the hearth of a 126-year old house, other duties as assigned. A standard season!

Anyway, I saw this ren faire photo from user Shakespeare922 on reddit and had to turn it into twentysomething Boromir suited up for tournament. HAD to.

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.

Writing & Illuminating & Lettering by Edward Johnston

Well you see. There was a good gif of the new harry potter series on my mutual's blog. And I reblogged it.

Less facetiously: people are allowed to think whatever they want about jk rowling. However, the most-sold book series in history doesn't just... y'know, vanish from culture at-large because people stopped liking its author.

For the past decade and a half the political side of fandom culture has continuously been trying to turn Harry Potter into a shibboleth. Originally it was that you showed you were a good progressive ally by comparing every conservative political figure to Voldemort and the Death Eaters and anyone opposing them as plucky young adult protagonists. I distinctly remember the exasperated refrain of "read another book" because political discourse was just that oversaturated with such comparisons.

And then Rowling went against the mainstream progressive grain on gender politics and went from a celebrated leftist figure to The Actual Devil more or less overnight, and suddenly the way to show off how enlightened and progressive you were was by how much you hated the series and how hard you could harass people who didn't hate it enough. It has progressed firmly past the point of any actual criticism of the books or of rowling herself and into 'if you like this thing or are even neutral towards it, it is because you are The Outgroup' territory. It's boogeyman thinking.

It's going into random people's inboxes to try to passive-aggressively police what they put on their blog and throwing a fit when they don't bend the knee, or sending mass death threats and verbal abuse to streamers for playing a video game. It's seeing someone reblog a gif and responding with "by doing this you are literally killing trans people," an accusation that is self-evidently, absurdly false to everyone who doesn't already believe it. At its best it makes the person saying it look like they have absolutely zero sense of proportion, and at its worst it becomes functionally indistinguishable from any other form of internet harassment that seeks out a veneer of self-justification.