🎭

“Meet the Reaper” AKA Top 10 photos taken before disaster

if you have a well funded library you might even have access to maker spaces that have 3D printers. or video/audio recording equipment. libraries aren’t these tomb silent homes for books any more. they’re community spaces. they’re full of life and things. 

- wifi hotspots that can be checked out for weeks so you can have internet on the go or at home

- CDs, DVDs, blurays including usually multiple copies of new stuff

- A tech lab with a 3d printer, computers for graphic design and game dev focus, VR headsets, and a soundbooth for recording

- Study rooms for solo or groups

- Printers, copiers, faxes, and scanners for just about anything you need taken care of.

- Including a new printer big enough to make giant posters, maps, and business-grade ads.

- A seed library, both floral and food-related.

- A computer lab programed to erase your data and reading history so you’re never at risk while visiting sites like domestic abuse hotlines

- Laptops pre-programmed with Adobe and Office software so you don’t have to buy them

- Monthly author visits

- Ebooks including comics on tons of various platforms

- Classes for those who want to learn how to or better their computer skills

- Art you can check out to hang on your wall for as long as it’s available, including the work of local artists who get paid for their art, especially if it gets popular and we want even more of their stuff.

- Monthly papers ranging from local newspapers to multi-national magazines on just about any topic you can imagine.

- We used to offer food and drink at a loss but You Know ©

- Notaries with extensive legal knowledge including renters rights, getting you in contact with immigration protection, and contacts with pro-bono lawyers.

- A connection with all the libraries in the state, so if we don’t have something, we can have it shipped to you within a matter of days.

- Books translated into multiple languages

- A donation bin for old books/DVDs/VHSes that often turn around and get sold for two or less dollars

- A food donation site for local food banks

- A “suggest a purchase” section on our site where you can support your favorite indie writers/musicians by suggesting their work if we don’t already have it

- We’re growing butterflies this year, and in prior years we hatched chickens! \o/

- An outreach program for the elderly and disabled who hand-deliver almost everything I’ve just mentioned

number of checkouts

Program attendance (my system is holding fewer programs atm, but in addition to book clubs and author readings we’ve hosted cosplay panels, d&d, craft nights - lots of stuff)

number of reference questions (this includes book recommendations, computer questions, and lots of other stuff, and if we have a conversation where you ask follow-up questions, those count too)

Door count (literally how many times people walked in the door. Even if you only stood there for a few seconds and left)

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.