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“Got the morbs” should be a thing.

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I think this is funnier than I probably should...

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They’d never buy it for us. They know we’d figure out how to deliver liquor to each other using that thing.

When a librarian overhears a colleague talking about the NYPL conveyor system (via whenalibrarian)

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This is the Black Gnosis: when all is madness, there is no madness.

Scott R. Jones, When The Stars Are Right: Towards an Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality (via astranemus)

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Wittgenstein Jr, Lars Iyer

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Wyrd spins a complex web, one adorned with boons of both strife and splendour. Treversing through or upon it, one encounters portals, and passage through these portals begets further portals. To the man of reason such passages, if noticed at all, are classified as mere accidents, happy or otherwise. But to those for whom the apotheosis of life is descending from Mystery unto even greater Mystery these passages are precious alignments, as certain and as kosmic as the constellations that bejewel the black whorls of space.

Richard Gavin, The Benighted Path: Primeval Gnosis and the Monstrous Soul (via astranemus)

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I'll Never Understand Fashionable Girls

*nerdy girl and popular girl walk into bathroom together*

Popular Girl: *puts on make-up in the mirror* I watched that show you're so into last night.

Nerdy Girl: You have! I knew I'd convert you sooner or later!

Popular Girl: I didn't really like it.

Nerdy Girl: Seriously!? Come on!

Popular Girl: Like, the effects are really bad and the plots don't make sense. The British accents are weird too.

Nerdy Girl: The effects are part of the charm. You have to actually pay attention to the plot. Also, British accents rule. It's how real English is supposed to sound.

Popular Girl: *puts on lipstick and smacks lips* It's just not my thing. I don't like sci-fi space stuff. I like action and drama. Realistic stuff.

Nerdy Girl: Speculative fiction tends to influence science, so everything you're dismissing now could possivly be very realistic in a few decades.

Popular Girl: I don't pay attention to that stuff. I like the here and now.

Nerdy Girl: *sighs* Whatever, enjoy being boring.

Nerdy Girl: *notices a string coming out of the nape of popular girl's neck*

Nerdy Girl: *lightly tugs on string*

Popular Girl: *stops moving entirely*

Nerdy Girl: Are you alright?

Popular Girl: *remains silent and still*

Nerdy Girl: *completely pulls string out of popular girl's neck*

Popular Girl: *disappears in a puff of smoke*

Nerdy Girl: ...Oops.

*a decade ago*

Some Lady: I think I'm the only one who can see it.

Friend: See what?

Some Lady: The knitter. It's sitting up on that building there. It's huge, and it's just knitting.

Friend: What does it look like?

Some Lady: It looks big and pregnant. But, it's stomach is made of yarn. It's just knitting. People, animals, buildings, clouds. Millions of things.

Friend: That sounds weird.

Some Lady: I think it's god.

Friend: Mmm.

Some Lady: There's nothing on the horizon. Like, there's nothing beyond it. Everything just starts where it sits. Now that I think of it. I've never been beyond that building. There's nothing but white out that way. Emptiness.

Some Lady: *looks at fuzzy yarn hands*

Friend: *lights up cigarette*

Friend: The I-95 takes you into Baltimore that way. But, you should write a book about that before anyone else does. I'd read it.

Some Lady: I don't like to write about what's on my mind.

The Knitter: *opens third eye on its belly*

*in the present, a week after our initial events*

*missing poster with popular girl's face is blown away by a careless wind*

Nerdy Girl: *stares at string on her desk*

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Movie Witches: For this spell you must gather these sacred items three, soak them in water held by the skin of a deer, and drink half a cup each night before bed until the full moon...

Real witches: imma just draw a sigil or something on this toaster strudel and have it for breakfast

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The Greek word pistis is not at all what we understand by believing; it means the loyalty to the fact of the experience.

Carl Jung (via lakanen)

Pistis is also translated as faith, which is in the sense of being faithful. Having faith in a deity is being faithful to the fact of their existence, which is to say maintaining a status wherein whatever happens, one orients one’s existence in relation to that fact, like a planet around a sun. 

Contrast this with Gnosis “knowing” which is not related to fidelity, faithfulness, or loyalty. To experience Gnosis is to partake of that existence and to be changed by it.

Those with Pistis are like ships or aeroplanes finding their way by constantly following the signal beacon which will lead them home to safe harbour. But the pistis is not ‘for’ the purpose of gaining safe harbour - it is loyalty to the signal’s fact, wherever it might lead, even if that be rocks.

The Gnostic is different; they are become a beacon in their own right, becoming aware by their knowing-of, of that which surrounds them. Their loyalty, their fidelity renders them aware of the duty they bear to themselves - the signal-lineage they carry - and its consequent  implication that they alone must chart their course, must orientate themselves completely by themselves.

This Kosmic Aloneness drives some Gnostics to wish to flee the world; this Nocturnal, oceanic all encompassing space seems to them to be smothering with its protean plasticity, its endless, all encompassing, and cloying touch. To them, this noisome and cacophonous Pandemonium is a prison.  They would seek a Pleroma where all is Signal, and noise never existed.

But there are others for whom the activation of the beacon within them, the lighting of the very blood itself, produces ecstasy - who who are seized by that same furor, that daemoniac frenzy.

To those enthused, that darkness is as to wine, a rich draught which brings us into the embrace of the Mother of All, bejewelled and garlanded as  the dance of existence continues. All-encompassing, All-infusing. Lover and Beloved; the Kosmos in all Hir play of form and absence. Origin and terminus. 

Inescapable. The indomitable muse of all creativity. Wisdom itself.

Sophia. 

(Queens of Heavens and Hells. Lost souls begging you not to look back.

There, in Endless Night, we find the pulse and the polarity. Ten Thousand Tricksters, A Multiplicity of Madmen & Magicians, the Hunters Who Are Hunted.

Hear them sing, hear them roar - drunk now - Would you know yet more?)

“Darkness preceded Light - She is Mother.”

For those Gnostics of which we speak, that Matrix does not imprison, but instead brings-forth. 

Poiesis.

Mother and Child. A primordial Mystery.

Think on that, perhaps.

(via coldalbion)

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Why all librarians should cultivate a very robust and healthy distrust of content vendors (aside from the fact that they can’t even provide a correct title list for the products they are selling half the time, much less accurate MARC records with URLs that actually work).

Not included in the headline: “For a journal archive to which the library had freely contributed 30% of its holdings”.

A breakdown of what happened, according to this article:

2008: Milwaukee Public Library is approached by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to assist in the digitization of the paper’s archives by Google.  Google’s plans were to make the papers available to the general public and to pull revenue from advertising, which would be shared with the Journal Sentinel.  The Library provides about 30% of the materials archived from its own microfilm collection.

2011:  Google cancels the Google News Archives project.  However, the materials digitized are still available at http://news.google.com/archivesearch.

Time undetermined: “ At the request of Gannett, the Journal Sentinel’s new owner, the newspaper asked Google to hand over the keys to the archives to NewsBank, and Google acquiesced.”

May 2016: NewsBank approaches Milwaukee Public Library, offering a chance to purchase the rights to the Journal Sentinel database to the library, with a May 30 deadline.  NewsBank quotes a price of $1.5 million for half the database (the Milwaukee Journal half)– over three-fourths the library’s entire materials budget.

August 16, 2016: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel archives disappear from Google News Archives.

August 23, 2016 (date of the article): The library and Journal Sentinel are apparently in negotiations, according to the paper’s president:

“Our archives should be available again soon — as we switch over to our new parent company’s systems we are also switching our archiving system from Google to NewsBank.  There is a delay in the process but we hope to have them available again shortly. I apologize for the inconvenience and hope our solution is up and running soon.”

But it would appear some kind of negotiation is going on between NewsBank and the Journal Sentinel. Kiely, who spoke to NewsBank Monday, says a representative told her they would “bring up the database as soon as they have an agreement.”

Incredible.  I suppose that a lack of attention paid to provenance can be the cause for this, but still– to charge a library most of its materials budget to access a database that it helped make possible to begin with is a special form of mind-blowing gall.

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First new-to-me car in 17 years.

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Inside everyone there are secret rooms. They’re cluttered and the lights are out. There's a bed in which someone is lying with his face to the wall. In his head there are more rooms. In one, the venetian blinds shake in the approaching summer storm. Every once in a while an object on the table becomes visible: a broken compass, a pebble the color of midnight, an enlargement of a school photograph with a face in the back circled, a watch spring---each one of these items is a totem of the self. Every art is about the longing of One for the Other. Orphans that we are, we make our sibling kin out of anything we can find. The labor of art is the slow and painful metamorphosis of the One into the Other.

Charles Simic, in Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell

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I <3 Fallen London.

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Winter kitty is PURRFECT

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Book I saw in the back of the library at work today.

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The last photo! Upon seeing the last photo I erupted into a maniacal gleeful cackle that startled and scared me for a moment. And then I started laughing again.

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“Java enterprise implementation of observer pattern” Author unknown

Drawing

(image: collaboration from Chris Lenart )