Nightingale

10h

Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.

This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.

A “pack” of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.

Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.

One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.

Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.

Getting a “pack” of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.

Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.

Only experienced silverbacks or the boldest young Dads dare venture into a craft store for long without his mate or offspring to keep roving Craft Ladies at bay and guide him in this strange ecosystem. If a Dad enters with his mate and is separated from her, he will often scuttle for the seeming familiarity of Woodcrafts, Models, or Paints (the latter not to be confused with Fine Arts, unquestioned territory of art students), but he eyes Scrapbooking and Jewelry with trepidation and will usually venture into those exotic areas only in the company of females of his pack.

Lumberjacks are rarely spotted entering craft stores of their own volition, for while they do not fear it as Dads do, they know it is an environment unsuited for megafauna such as themselves.

Hardware store Lesbians generally adapt more easily to craft stores, although they may enlist another Lesbian of a subspecies more adapted to that environment to guide them until they find their niche. Lesbians have even been known to seek the aid of a Craft Lady, a native fauna that share similarities with Lesbians but are usually smaller and nimbler to suit their chosen habitat. Dads who witness this are often awed by the Lesbians’ temerity, for although larger, Dads are generally wary of the cunning and dexterous Craft Ladies and may mistake their enthusiastic pack greetings as predatory swarming.

Craft Ladies, secure in their ecological niche, have no fear of interlopers and take the presence of non-native beings in stride, although they may become territorial about scarcer resources.

how’s your sleep schedule

have you eaten or drank anything besides sugar and caffeine

how long have you been sitting in one spot

have you gone out in public recently

have you taken a shower/brushed your teeth/groomed yourself properly

have you spent time doing an activity that doesn’t involve a screen

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

FOMO. "Fear of Missing Out." The concept is used in many, if not 90% of facets of capitalism to get you to buy in, to try this new toaster, watch this new show, play this new game so you don't miss out on THE DISCUSSION. The Discussion is a concept I'll be using in this shitpost repeatedly to refer to the cultural zeitgeist, mainly because zeitgeist is a pretentious word that people only say to make their peers believe they're cultured when in reality we can tell you took that take off Twitter Joe.

The Discussion, to explain a little more, is the cyberspace, the discord, twitter, reddit, your friends, your coworkers all talking about the same thing. "oh did you see Man U last night?" "Benedict Townsend dropped a new video did you watch it?" "Damn did you get the last boss?" and this has been weaponised for most of the modern age to get you to buy into products for fear of missing out on The Discussion.

Now video games are no stranger to this desire to be part of The Discussion but lately games have wanted their players and talkers to talk about everything. EVERYTHING. Right now. Everything needs to be discussed, all that hard work and artistic vision NEEDS to be seen, to be fawned over, to be critcised. And you can't miss out otherwise everyone will race ahead of you, so get on your PC! Get that new Genshin character, buy the battlepass and make sure you get that fried chicken gun or Tina from Accounting will laugh at you!

you thought I was joking

FOMO is weaponised not only in multiplayer games but in Single Player games too. Take for example God of War Ragnarok. Great game. Super fun. Does it have incredible gameplay, graphics, story, love within every aspect to the point you can tell this is nigh perfect? Yes. But it also utilises FOMO to great extent in the form of the map.

nothing left to chance

So the devs have made it so you do not miss a single thing. Every post is marked, every chest every draugr hole, every "secret" boss is shown clearly for our lovely ideal ADHD player who was concieved of in a boardroom that every game making company has to adhere to.

Every game company bar one.

the software of from

Hey, Hey! Stop writing that note! I am aware of Indie Developers doing shit like what I'm about to describe for years but this is about the mainstream damnit so stay in your lane (the next post will be about them)

So From Software. The guys that changed the ga- scene with their title Demons Souls and iterated it again and again until we got the behemoth that is Elden Ring. Let me take you back a decadeeand a bit, to the wonderful, military shooter filled, Obama-lusted times of 2009.

this wont have any repurcussions

2009 was a big year for video games, notable releases such as Call of Duty 6 Modern Warfare 2, Skate 2 and the critically acclaimed Sandy Beach for the Nintendo Wii

i cried at the end because someone threw sand in my eyes

The gaming scene was getting bland. This was the zero dawn point of the Horizon that was oncoming, that is to say Call of Duty became nuclear popular and every game was about to copy it and be even worse. The scene had many good games but all of them had little booklets, tutorials, checkpoints, save points, proper wuss shit for the average gamer. You couldn't walk 10 metres without a "checkpoint reached" littering your very cluttered UI.

this is america's joe biden

In comes Demon Souls, a game that flew in the face of this hand holding, quite far from it actually. there were barely any tutorials, you got killed in one shot by most enemies. Your only reliable defence was a roll and everything was hard. Most importantly, you didn't know wtf was going on. There's a vague character here, a secret you missed there, some weird world tendency bullshit going on in the background, people had no clue. It was a ball of black mystery dropped in a sea of devs enticing you with shiny gimmicks.

And that's why people still talk about it today.

this is the beginning.

Demons Souls was the blueprint. It had winding levels that double backed on themselves in ways you wouldn't imagine, side characters who had quests which made 0 sense on how to progress, difficulty upon difficulty for new gamers, it was so different. The beauty of it flying in the face of conventional gaming meant people HAD to talk about it. It didn't just grab The Discussion, it had it a nigh permanent place the other forms of media would die for.

You had to talk to other people to progress. Whether it be to find clues to secret weapons, to notice shortcuts others had found, to even finding boss weaknesses to give tips and tricks on how to progress.

By making all this knowledge unavailable from the get go, Demons Souls had forced players to become each others guides, and as a result people would keep playing it because you'd find something new someone else said that you'd wanna check out. It might not even be true, some guy could start a rumour about the penetrators armour being available and players would go and see if he was correct and find out the liar was ahead, but the wonder of naiivete had returned. From Software had taken a weary artform, and showed everyone there was another way.

And then they got good at it.

sony greenlit horizon 2 but never want anyone to mention this game for some reason

Admittedly I never played Dark Souls 1 or 2 (I'm sorry) but the one game where I felt From Software peaked in terms of utilising FOMO was Bloodborne.

Bloodborne is another From Software game that's set in 1990s England, where London has run out of beans so the denizens put blood from an alien on their toast instead and go crazy at the lack of flatulence it gave them. The gameplay was tight and faster paced than Dark Souls, and the aesthetic had gone from Dark Fantasy to Victorian Gothic architecture (if ur a smartass pls correct me on this).

It is fantastic. The story and lore created by this game is given to you in drips and drabs from small item descriptions and minimal lines from NPCs who either try to kill you or die from you trying to help them. This happens a lot.

This game was released in 2015, and never got a sequel, nor a remaster, just 1 dlc and that's it. It didn't follow convention, sticking to the tried and true method of lore and story you have to dig out, bosses who you'd need to look online to help with, sidequests that make 0 sense, Areas that require moon logic to enter, but goddamn it did it well. And, as a result, people STILL have discussions about Bloodborne to this day.

The Pale Blood Hunt is essential reading for any Bloodboner out there looking for lore btw, but I'm losing focus.

So this strategy of lack of direct information, lack of direction, no easy hints to what you have to do has led to a higher barrier of entry but also it leads people to WANT to explore more of your game. There is no checklist on a map, it's more "I found a spooky ass castle did you find the vampire in it?" and then you ask wtf what castle. Your next hours are spent trawling through nightmares again to find an invitation to a spooky carriage that whisks you away to 10 more hours of wonder.

this is an optional area

again, you're found wanting more, and the game giving it to you. Your friends, people online, youtubers are all diving into the content to find the nooks and crannies instead of having it all laid out to you as quest markers or on your map. The Discussion is still holding a round table for avid fans to talk about Bloodborne. This felt like peak From Software game making at the time. An interesting world, so much content, incredible gameplay, what more could they do?

Little did The Discussers know, From Software hadn't even begun to peak.

I'll shatter anything and anyone for a chance with you babydoll

ALL OF THIS you can visit

Elden Fucking Ring. The best open world ever created, the magnum opus of design, absolutely shattering the philosophies about overworld design and creating such an inviting vista that you beg to explore, rather than begging you to check out the neat trick it conveniently has marked for you.

The biggest beauty of Elden Ring to me compared to God of War is that God of War is afraid. God of War is scared you'll miss out on what they've worked hard on so they have voicelines reminding you of the berserker's existence, of any objective or sidequest you haven't accomplished, it has an exhaustive checklist so you can guiltlessly leave from any area without having your anxiety spike thinking you might miss something. Elden Ring says fuck tthat.

To get to the hardest boss in God of War Ragnarok, you just go to the marked berserker locations, smack em up and then find the final man.

he is really fun to fight to be fair

To get to the hardest boss in Elden Ring you have to get one half of a medallion by robbing a homeless person:

he tweaked so hard after i stole from him.

the 2nd half by beating up an angry paraplegic (if this isn't the correct term pls can someone lemme know) :

look i'm the one in trouble here

THEN you take that to a secret elevator

i need a manicure

you then end up here and have to find a secret town:

bring blankie

After finding the secret town you're treated to the invisible locals who have knives that wanna kill you:

thank you miyazaki

after solving the puzzle you get to ANOTHER area:

i wonder if that's edible

murder every innocent being in there to gain access to the SECRET CASTLE underneath:

it's more like a fort really

and take a giant elevator to see her sleeping:

hey!

and... this is all barely hinted at. This boss became a legend, one that could heal with every hit, one that had an "undodgeable move", and I went through all of this just to have a taste of what OTHER people were talking about. Nobody gives a rats ass about the Berserkers from God of War nowadays even though they were front and centre but Malenia, blade of miquella, is still talked about 2 years after the game released and will be for years on. She's a phenomenal design, the build is amazing and, most importantly, she utilises FOMO in the opposite way.

The Berserkers are there to say "hey! i know you have no content left but there's a superhard boss here for you to kill!" so the player does exactly that to get some rewards for a new armour.

Malenia is hinted at in the game but there is so much to uncover to get to her in the first place. And it's all discovered by The Discussion. Where to get the medallion, where the town is, what the puzzle fucking meant, how to beat the Haligtree and finally how to beat that waterfowl dance.

The Discussion loves this shit, there's so much implied, so much to talk about and the developers don't worry about the boardroom created ADHD gamer missing out because, in reality, one guy will find one step, one girl another, then someone else and someone else and that buzz, that wonder that curiosity will fuel people into going for the ultimate prize. Not the boss, not the rewards but the journey itself, the discovery, helping others, finding weaknesses of the boss, finding new shortcuts to get to her, and having it all documented, discussed because any shred of information discovered becomes invaluable in attaining the goal.

The game is FILLED with things like this but I've gone on long enough already, with more secret bosses, unassuming caves containing game changing items, weapons you need to go through confusing mazes to find, From Software don't beg you to engage with their content. They just give everyone a world and relies on every human's unique perspective and desire to help to find out everything for them. You're never going to be missing out when you start, you're just finally joining in.

i had to make a solution for this for myself, mostly because of depression, but it makes a nice How To for folks who are low on spoons or could use some help in the kitchen.

Fortunately i was a professional cook for over a decade. UNfortunately the first post i made explaining it was suuuuper long. Let's see if i can do better

So you select any protein that you can cook in a frying pan -- chicken breasts, ground beef, pork chops, sausages, steak, chicken thighs, whatever. You also select one or two types of veggie (mushrooms or tubers also work, i just did this with potatoes and carrots for dinner tonight).

[i like cooking for vegetarians, but this is how i cook for myself when i'm low on spoons - perhaps i'll do another post for meatless meals]

You'll also need some kind of oil, and a sauce or two of your choice in a bottle. All cooking gear is a large frying pan with lid (i prefer non-stick) a spatula, a cutting board, and a knife.

You cut the veggies into bite size pieces, cut up enough for two meals. One kind of veggie is fine, or you can do mix two or three

Put frying pan on medium heat with a little oil. Tubers or mushrooms or go in the pan a few minutes before the protein. 2 portions of the protein goes in the pan, about 5 minutes with lid (don't worry you can still get a good sear on both sides)

Now flip your protein if it's flip-able and add normal veggies, put the lid back on another five-ish minutes.

Take your protein out and put it with one portion of the veggies in a microwave safe container. That's going to be your lunch tomorrow. Put the other portion of protein on a plate to rest (you have to let a cooked protein sit a couple minutes before you serve it or when you cut into it all the juices run out and it goes dry - the liquids thicken as it cools, preventing this drying out if you let it rest, the goal is to serve it very warm but not hot hot)

While it's resting, pour some sauce from your bottle in the pan with the rest of the veggies and turn up the heat. A single sauce/bottle is fine, i like to get fancy and mix a couple. Two examples of personal favorite mixes are 1: bbq sauce and a hot sauce like sriracha 2: roughly equal parts low sodium soy sauce and worcestershire (makes something similar to a teriyaki sauce) A swallow of wine is almost always a great option if you want to add that to your sauce too, just add it to the pan before the other sauces so the alcohol has time to burn off.

...

Here is the important bit. While your veggies are finishing, wash your cutting board and chef knife. Then when you dump your veggies and sauce over your protein on the plate, while it is still too hot to eat, you wash your frying pan and spatula before you eat. Now the only dishes you have left to do are your plate and fork. Maybe a steak knife.

...

The whole thing takes about 35 minutes even with washing the dishes, and that includes your lunch for the next day- just pour a different sauce on and stick it in the microwave for a couple minutes (or five minutes back in the frying pan) and you have a full healthy lunch with a different flavor

You can use this technique every single meal and it yields hundreds of combinations, from pork and potatoes bbq, to salmon and broccoli teriyaki, to chicken and zucchini in a soy glaze.

It will keep you down to less than an hour of kitchen time per day total for both lunch and dinner including all dish clean up, uses the least dishes, the least effort, requires the least technique, and is, depending on what you pick out, very affordable

here are a couple more examples from this month; i didn’t take pictures of the salmon i did recently, but you get the idea

it's not super fancy, but it is easy, affordable, quick, and any flavors you want. Hope this helps some folks

Student: I can’t find any scholarly articles on this subject!

Me: Okay, what’s the subject?

Student: Creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies.

Me: Alright, and what/where have you tried searching?

Student: I searched “creating a culture of sharing in west-coast technological companies” on the library website!

Me:

And don’t say “they should have learned in [previous level of university education].” Do you think every person continues education within a few years of their first degree? THEY DON’T. Even if they did get a then-good introduction to research, you think nothing changed between 2008 and 2018? How about the doctoral student I met today whose last degree–and last experience with academic libraries–was in 1996? How about the guy in my master’s cohort who got his bachelor’s degree in 1987?

Because look. See that very specific topic the student wanted? There may or may not be actual scholarly articles about it. But here are a few things you can do:

First, zoom out. Start broad. Pick a few phrases or keywords, like “tech companies” and “culture.” See what comes up.

Actually, back up. First, does your library’s website search include articles, or do you have to go into a database? My library’s website searches some of our 200+ databases, but not all. And you’ll need to find (in advance search or adjustable limiters that pop up after your initial search) how to limit your search to scholarly and/or peer-reviewed articles.

What other keywords are related or relevant? For the search above, you could use a combination of “silicon valley,” “company/ies” or “organization/s,” “sharing,” “collaborative,” “workplace culture,” “social culture,” “organizational culture,” and those are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.

Did you find something that looks promising? Great! What kind of subjects/keywords are attached (usually to the abstract, sometimes in the description section of the online listing)? Those can give you more ideas of what to search. Does it cite any articles? Look at those! Some databases (ilu ProQuest) will also show you a selection of related/similar articles.

If you’re researching a very specific topic, you may not find any/many articles specifically about your subject. You may, for example, have to make do with some articles about west-coast tech companies’ work cultures, and different articles about creating sharing/collaborative environments.

And here’s what I’ve got to add:  

Ask a Librarian

Seriously guys librarians are here to help. We would love to help you find the right resource for your particular informational need and we’ve been trained to do so as efficiently and effectively as possible. Nowadays you don’t even have to go to the library in person as many libraries offer online chat services as well as the option to contact via email. Further, and I think very importantly we are dedicated to our patrons rights to privacy. To quote the American Library Association the “rights of privacy are necessary for intellectual freedom and are fundamental to the ethics and practice of librarianship.”  

Search the Stacks

This is one of my favorite ways  to immerse myself in an area of study. While a good subject or keyword search will lead you to some good results sometimes is just as fruitful to go the library and plunk yourself down in section and browse all the books in a topic area. Libraries will label the (book)stacks based on whichever classification system they use and you can use the links below to figure out which area of the stacks you’ll want to look through.

Dewey: used in public libraries

LOC /Library of Congress: classification system used in university libraries

http://www.usg.edu/galileo/skills/unit03/libraries03_04.phtml

Online Books

Some websites like gutenberg project are dedicated to making public domain books accessible to the public. Using the search term public domain books is a good way to go about looking for more sources of them. Open sourced is another good term to use when trying to find freely accessible books online and that’s not just limited to fiction books but textbooks are also offered by various sites.

Project Gutenberg is an online archive of tens of thousands of  books that have enter the public domain that can be freely accessed.

Openstax is one website that provides access to Higher Ed and AP open sourced textbooks.

Libguides and Pathfinders

As stated above librarians are in the business of connecting people to resources. If we can’t do so in person then we also do so by creating guides that can be found and used when we aren’t around. These guides are filled with search terms, books, articles, reviews, lists, links, and anything else we think would be helpful for patrons trying to explore a particular topic area. 

Pathfinder is a particular term used for these guides. Libguides is a particular platform which to host these guides. Using either word at the end of your search terms online will bring up guides that have been created in that particular subject area. Or you can explore libguides directly with your search terms to find what guides librarians across the country have created.

Note: Using pathfinder in your search terms may pull up resources about Paizo Publishing’s same titled tabletop RPG series and while dragons are cool you can modify your search to library pathfinder to exclude these resources.

Other than using a search engine or libguides directly I find a great many pathfinders on university library sites. Usually what I do is find a university’s library webpage, find their pathfinder/research guides/guides section, and then browse through their lists of guides. These are generally organized by field of study so just pick the one you are interested in and look through the resources they have listed.

Some of the resources will be accessible for anyone while some might be locked for students of the particular university.  If the article, book, or resource is locked by a school portal you can either search for it online outside of the university portal or you can go to your own university/public library to see if they have access to the resource there. Even if they don’t have it currently in their collection libraries are often connected with other branches and may be able to request an interlibrary loan of what you need.

Online Reference Resources

Sometimes the problem isn’t finding information but finding good information. Below are two sites that I use regularly to help me with this issue when searching online for resources.

The Reference and User Services Association of the American Library Association gives a list of the best free reference sites on the internet

The Ipl2 is a good authoritative source to find general information on a variety of topics. Even though the website is no longer updating there are still a plethora of subject guides that can be explored.

Open Sourced Journals and Articles

Just as there are open sourced books and textbooks so too are there open sourced journals and articles available. Again  you can add the term open sourced when searching for these resources.

DOAJ is the Directory of Open Access Journals and you can search through here to find both articles and journals freely available to access.

Journal Article Tips

Finally whenever I’m searching through journal articles there are a few things I always like to keep in mind.

Build context. Once you find an article that is relevant to your search you can do this by exploring the citations. Both those that the article you are using references in its bibliography and those that reference the article itself. 

Every database is going to do this differently but generally with a few clicks you can find out who has cited an article that you have read. If nothing else try popping the title of your article into google scholar and you’ll see a blue ‘Cited by’ below the description. Also in some cases you can click on the author directly in a database to see what else they have written in the subject. Totally ask your librarian for help navigating the particular database you are using again they will be stoked to do so. 

Building this context of literature by finding and reading these extra articles is important to building a critical understanding of your topic and will allow you to build the best possible defense of your arguments. This will also allow you to see if the article you’ve initially selected is in itself a viable position or if it is an outlier of its field.