Tag: perception
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Utang Sa Loob: On What Made Me
The Occasion In the summer of 2017, a magazine story circulated about a Filipino family and the katulong who had lived and worked with them for fifty-six years. She had started as a young child, gone to the United States with the family, cared for their home and their children. She never married. Never had…
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You Can’t Take the Sky From Me
This Firefly poster has been hanging on my office wall since 2018. I’ve been seeing it almost everyday since. But today, it’s as if I’d just laid eyes on it for the first time. The quote at the bottom feels like it just found me. Today. Right now. It did in that way certain lines…
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You Never Truly Quit: Belonging, Meaning, and Maslow With Better UI
A YouTube essayist named Kneecap Jake made a video called You Never Truly Quit World of Warcraft. He could have stopped at addiction. The algorithm would have rewarded him for it by sending many viewers his way. Instead, he kept pulling the thread until he found what was actually there: belonging, meaning, competence, purpose. Four…
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The Optional Chain: Fandral Staghelm and the Question Nobody Had to Ask
In the Cenarion Enclave in Darnassus, there is a quest chain that most players have completed without thinking twice about it. The Arch Druid, imperious, shirtless, radiating barely concealed contempt for your presence, had a research program. Morrowgrain. A mysterious herb. Grow it from Tharlendris seeds in Un’Goro soil, bring him ten, receive a goody…
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The Faculty Governance Gala: Where the Cricket Chorus Performs Their Greatest Hits
In the hallowed, slightly drafty halls of Biblios Heights Stacks Academic Library, “Governance” isn’t just a series of meetings—it’s a performance. And once a year, when the budget cycles align and the institutional mediation is at its peak, we host the Faculty Governance Gala. The gala is the only time the Cricket Chorus leaves the…
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The Great Cataloging Glitch of ’24: When the Sloth Accidentally Moved the Entire Fiction Section into “Applied Sciences”
In Biblios Heights, we try to keep the chaos organized, but some days the infrastructure just decides to take a nap. And in the library world, there is no nap more dangerous than the one taken by the Slow Processor Sloth. It was a Tuesday (traditionally a day for “Optimistic Metadata”) when the progress bar…
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Et tu?
Being harmed by someone who knows exactly what harm feels like is not the same as being harmed by someone cruel, or careless, or ignorant. Injury is produced in those sorts of situations. Harm caused by one who knows how it feels to be harmed in the exact same way is different. It’s a particular…
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The Mystery of the Silent Steamer: A Biblios Heights Stacks Academic Library Noir
The rain in Biblios Heights was coming down in cold, gray sheets, the kind of drizzle that turns the Social Science stacks into a labyrinth of shadows and damp wool. I was at my desk, navigating the precarious centrality of my own dissertation, when the silence hit me. It wasn’t the “shhh” of a student…
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The Official Wild Stacks Survival Guide: How to Handle the Silence Behaviors in the Stacks of Your Academic Library
Welcome, fellow academic library explorers! Have you ever noticed that a university library isn’t just a quiet place for study? It’s a dense, thriving ecosystem of institutional logic and relational labor! And like any wild habitat, it has its distinct, and often amusingly predictable, inhabitants. Today, we’re going to help you identify and manage the…