140. Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends by Jan Harold Brunvald

141.The Margarets by Sherri S. Tepper

142. The Adventuress by Audrey Niffenegger

143. The Tattoo Artist by Jill Ciment

In other news I have decided to go over to flickr, and leave behind the frustrations of artconspiracy.com where it has often take twenty minutes to post a single item and much longer when "item size is too large," which is almost always. I'll post in link panel once I finish updating.

Also last night I played with the look of this blog to make it something I actually enjoy aesthetically, despite the fact that cerulean blue doesn't exist in the blogspot palette.

Dear Librarything, I think I love you...

Librarything is genius. When I first started an account with them I tried to tell everyone I knew about it and had to revisit the fact that not everyone is that into books, or, even if they love to read, they may well be very content to have them on shelves, or stacks, in no order what so ever.
Confession: I have been a compulsive book sorter since I had a enough picture books to cover half a shelf. I have sorted my shelves by primary cover color, main characters first name, setting, and title as well as by basic subject and/or author. When I was little I could spend a whole Saturday fiddling with the order of things on my shelves. Mostly I've gotten over it. "Mostly" because it is this very ability instantly change the layout of your catalog instantly that enamoured me so with Librarything after enter my first twenty books last winter. Since then it has become a sort of obsession, but a very useful one.
As in my childish sortings the goal is always to have the book or information about it on hand as quickly and easily as possible. Besides the ease of sorting and resorting in Librarything, I can enter any book I read even if I don't own it which is a major help when I'm trying to give a friend the name of that urban legends book that I know isn't on my shelf but can remember if I had gotten it out from a library or borrowed it from a friend (ah, the joy of tags).
My catalog is in need of maintenance but if you keep at it ca you come across things to hand the use of it is easy enough to not get out of hand, unless it does... as mine has but the there are always more books to read.

Flickr search

Search: subways

Cleaning last night I came across a NYC subway map. After living in New York for a while I came to take pride in not having to use this but when I first moved there I I kept one in on me if I was going anywhere other than class. The map wasn't just good for getting you from one stop to another, I'd also use it as a safety net to explore. If you're on Manhattan you really can't get to lost as long as you can get back to the subway. It doesn't matter a bit if you can't find your way back to the stop you came up from, every subway line connects to others in a combination that can get you back to Brooklyn.
The subway photos that came up in Flickr capture many things I love about subways. There are the street performers, they are often amazing. It is oftem more than worth is to keep a collection of ones, a five, and ten on your person at all times to buy CDs from extrememly talented muscians who haven't made it big, and may never do so despite theit amazing skills. If you think, "hey, I'll buy their Cd the next time I'm through this station," all rules of space an logic will bend to ensure you never hear them again.
Subways are also I great shuffling art museum of every art type that has ever been embraced by the people of New York from this goes from design work reminisent of Mackintosh and the Arts and Crafts Movement to Keith Haring cartoons.
People in subways can end up doing really strange things, not the majority of people most of the time, but there are people who just don't know what to do with the energy their saving by not having to navigate a car or feet. Funny things happen. I've seen people hang upside down from the ceiling holding rails like kids on monkey bars and I've seen absolute strangers start making faces at each other across crowded subway cars.
When you get alot of people's photos together, like on Flickr, these things show up.

137. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman & Terry Practchett (have a laugh at Armageddon)

138. Samurai: Arms, Armor, Costume

139.Psyche in a Dress by Francesca Lia Block (re)

RSS & the recovering over-reader

So my RSS feed experience has been not dissimilar to my experience with tagging, fine & dandy and should have happened a long time ago. The difference is that I actually had control of the RSS beast once before, but I let it get out of hand: too many feeds. I'm sure I could have skipped all my classes and stayed home all day to read rss when I was in college and eventually ended up ceasing to read them altogether besides a random few who I'd been reading for so long that their urls are permanently fused into my circutry (if the metaphor is broken its okay I'm not a elctrowiz). SO with this activity I've turned over a new leaf I've added to my Google Reader only the feeds related to 2.0 and those hardwired urls.
Mostly these blogs have stuck with me because i find them humorous or thought provoking and so I thought I should shared these because probably anyone could use a little laugh or to have their brain poked at.

http://miss-information.blogspot.com/
http://waiterrant.net/
http://mightygirl.com/
devotedbee.com/
http://www.explodingdog.com/

134. Blue Bed Sheets Bring Babies (The Truth, or not, of Old Wives Tales)
135. Yarn Harlot by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
136. Kushiel's Justice

the post about tagging

My delicious site is up: http://del.icio.us/poet13. I do wish I'd known about this a year ago, my poor lap top is laguishing, disconnected from the world at large ("the internet") since last december and full of my favorites from the 4 years previous. It's sad really and will have to be remedied. We shall get there, this is much like my librarything account which has gone un updated since Febuary or so...very sad that.
I think that as much as we need to figure out ways to make tools like del.icio.us useful for library staff use we would do well to get patrons into it. As I see it this could easily fill a major gap in using public terminals: the inability to quickly and easily save where a person has been browsing. I like it.
In the Library Journal articule, there was a bit about using a delicious page to help with a school topic we might know is being covered as well as to keep people us on evens which could be used both for library events as well as local news, a little word of mouth via technology. Thats sort of what makes the tagging thing sensible, its organic, it's a website and the internet, techie-mumbo-jumbo, but its also like show-and-tell just blown to a giant scale if you want that much information.
And I'm now having found memories of ridiculous glee the first time I looked at the subject cloud in my librarything.