I stand open-handed and soaked in your storm

Let us begin with the fact that Reading Rainbow, a staple of many a young child of previous decades, mixing in library promotion, books, reading, and activities, is getting a new season with a new host, Mychal the Librarian. Someone who has already proven that he's perfect for the job on social media as a librarian, and who has already been working with PBS as their resident librarian for at least a year. Which continues with the way that Reading Rainbow has shows us a well-known Black man being excited about books, libraries, and exceling at things outside what certain people believe he should be good at.

Eastman Kodak is once again selling still picture film stock, but this time it will be selling directly to film distributors, who will likely be more than happy to have Kodak film camera rolls for their photography buffs.

If you are not already aware, Archive.Today is one of the more popular ways for people to get content as it appears on a website, but without any of the login walls and demands for support. It will not last forever, and it's worth supporting local and independent journalism with your currency, but there are quite a few places that believe you should have to pay up significantly just for a single article to look at.

At the end of that particular piece, there's talk about sharing the already wall-leapt version of the thing instead of the original. While the site does offer the original URL for what it has scraped, my citation scholarship kicks in and says that I should offer the original place, even if the way to read the same content is through archive.today or some other paywall jumper.

Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, primatologist, animal rights advocate, and generally good sport, now gets to explore the secrets of the universe at 91 years of age. We know, thanks to her, that "tool-using animal" is a bigger catgegory than just homo sapiens, and much more about the lives of chimpanzees. My first exposure to Dr. Goodall, however, was the introduction she wrote to one of the Far Side comic book compilations, where she talked about having been the subject of one of the comics and how she found it an absolute delight to have been part of humor, even with other people who wanted to take offense on her behalf. (Including the insitute that she's founded, taking offense to the doctor being called a "tramp" by a chimpanzee in one of the comics.) Her serious work with apes and chimps and such is also entirely notable, but the Far Side introduction is just a nice reminder to us that even scientsists have a sense of humor. (And, in fact, they often have a very sharp sense of humor.)

Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, who gained a certain amount of fame as the chaplain of the men's basketball team for Loyola Chicago during an unprecedented NCAA tournament run, passed into the hands of her god at 106 years of age. 106 is an excellent innings, and from the report on her, it seems that she was someone who spent that time in the service that she dedicated herself to for her life.

Ninety-five years after the completion of her thesis, Oxford University awarded a posthumous Master's of Philosophy to the first Māori scholar they had admitted to their ranks. From the excerpts of her diary that one of her descendants shared, she seems to have been an excellent person full of an interesting life.

The online academic article and scholarly research repository JSTOR has opened their doors to non-institutional researchers, allowing a limited number of article viewings per month to registered users who are not affiliated with institutional subscribers.

( There's always more inside, from bad decisions to kidnapping squads and the use of truly shady surveillance software )

Last out, suggestions on where to go to get good programming and intersting shows if you've decided that you want less corporate oligarchy in your life. If you are thinking about taking up embroidery, there's a stitch bank that may be able to help you find and practice new techniques.

A prescient delineation between what the purpose of the library and the librarian is when it comes to a person's relation to information, and what the purpose of the ad company with a search engine or the LLM with inexhaustible confidence and (at best) an approximate knowledge of some things is for the same. Those who have lived through this era will not be surprised to find that the purpose of the LLM and the ad company is not to help you understand what you actually want and get you relevant resources, but instead to show you ads.

And finally, a searchable index of verious symbols that, when clicked upon, will copy the correct Unicode code point to your computer clipboard for easy pasting.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)