Matthew Murray 🦇

@midnitelibrary.bsky.social

248

Followers

259

Following

687

Posts

Data Librarian. Co-Host of Book Club for Masochists: A Readers' Advisory Podcast. Editor of Two-Fisted Library Stories. Spooky Librarian. Comics. Manga. Zines. Games. ScholComm. OA. RDM. Social Justice. He/They.

"A known human friend" - Graham Stark

Posts Replies Media

"Congratulations! You’ve been selected to be an exhibitor at the 2024 Denver Zine Fest!" Hurray!

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

Here's the thing. If a bunch of rich people manage to bully the party into kicking out the *elected candidate* and replace him with literally anyone and we go into the election with a person chosen by a bunch of rich people that nobody had a chance to vote for our democracy is already dead.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

"Any developers using links built with the Google URL Shortener in the form goo.gl/* will be impacted, and these URLs will no longer return a response after August 25th, 2025." developers.googleblog.com/en/google-ur...

Google URL Shortener links will no longer be availabledevelopers.googleblog.com Understand how you will be impacted by our decision to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

The billionaire who's been bribing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito donated a $10 million bribe to Senate Republicans to block Supreme Court reforms and investigations. Everyone understands these are bribes. Normalize calling them bribes.

Facing Dem Scrutiny, Alito Benefactor Paul Singer Donates $10 Million to GOPreadsludge.com The donation, to the Mitch McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund, is Singer’s largest ever.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

How DC wrote about feminists in 1973. Written and drawn by Mike Sekowsky, finished by Creig Flessel, both of whom started in the Golden Age! I love these wtf romance comics, but man they're pricey now. Guess the girls didn't save their books like us loser boy nerds.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

Pretty confident that all the people who say AI can replace human teaching are just outing themselves as being bad at teaching.

“Already, generative AI is capable of assuming, to a great degree, the roles of the traditional professor. Soon, we may begin to consider AI as a professor in its own right.” 💀

The synthetic professorwww.insidehighered.com We have reached a point in the development of generative AI that synthetic AI professors are poised to enter academe.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

people who believe that the media won’t immediately switch to ripping on a new candidate are just unfathomably gullible

Dumbest idea I keep hearing is that if the Dems oust Biden, the press will stop criticizing them because it satisfies the "old/mental acuity" criticism. They'll just pick whatever is wrong with the next Democrat and make THAT the Most Important Issue In The Campaign like with EMAILS.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

Alt-text, when done both accurately and with style, is a work of art.

You got it, sister

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

Reply to

Eiko Fried

My favorite part of this paper is that there was considerable variability across flippers, and one student who flipped 4000 coins did so with 60/40. Videos are online in case you want to learn this technique to start a long-run probability coin tossing scam business ;)

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

To reiterate, the UK has just jailed five climate protesters for *discussing* a climate protest. As I've said elsewhere, this isn't just a victory for the fossil fuel industries, but for the most extreme authoritarianism.

I've been mostly on X, sharing outrage with so many at the 4 and 5 years jail sentences given yesterday to 5 peaceful climate activists who had attended a zoom call to discuss non-violent climate protests. George Monbiot: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Protest is the wellspring of democracy – that’s why Labour must repeal the Tories’ draconian laws | George Monbiotwww.theguardian.com The pernicious, oppressive era of arresting people for holding signs or merely walking down the street must come to an end, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

I’m always eager to tell young readers that The Magic Fish is structured like an essay—starts with a thesis, then three supporting arguments, reiterate thesis again with a twist—because I want them to know they can always come to this with whatever they have.

I wound up in a conversation about writing that went hostile when I said I didn’t have an mfa. my lack of formal education makes some people lose their minds when they try to bolt me into the hierarchy. Big vocabulary, good writer, no degree? Obviously I stole this ability and don’t deserve it.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

i was once at a workshop of about 50 people, where a speaker ran over time &ignored the organizer's protests to the point that the organizer pulled the plug on the projector & then told the shocked speaker, "sir, you have exceeded your invited time & my obligations of politeness to you as my guest."

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

"People should come here legally." "Asylum is legal." "But they should apply first." "That is not allowed by law, you have to be here first." "Well, you know what I mean."

I'm so glad the Politics Understanders have decided today they're Immigration Understanders. I really wasn't aggravated enough this week

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

Reply to

Nora Reed (they/them ze/hir)

"security questions" do not improve your security, and they make it easy for people to get access your accounts. they use questions which can frequently be answered by combing your facebook or your responses to what seem like harmless memes. use fake info & keep track of it (password manager!)

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

I’m seeing enough people talking about the impracticality of “mass deportation”—tens of millions of people!—that I feel the need to point out that the numbers are a bit of a red herring here. What Trump et al. are signaling with the word “mass” isn’t scale; it’s arbitrariness.

Love being an immigrant in this country.

In case you missed it this was one of the official signs handed out by the RNC for delegates to wave. Not a joke, not a.i.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

I'm intrigued to find out whether it'll make a difference now that more researchers are saying exactly what librarians have been saying for decades. Welcome to the cause, Prof Abizadeh. 📚

"The commercial stranglehold on academic publishing is doing considerable damage to our intellectual and scientific culture. As disinformation and propaganda spread freely online, genuine research and scholarship remains gated and prohibitively expensive." 📚 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Academic journals are a lucrative scam – and we’re determined to change that | Arash Abizadehwww.theguardian.com Giant publishers are bleeding universities dry, with profit margins that rival Google’s. So we decided to start our own, says academic Arash Abizadeh

I miss the Vancouver Skytrain.

Alpha Flight #43

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

Ok I'm going to be corny and start a thread. Masking in public is hot!! Quote-post with your hottest masked photos, friends, I wanna see em 🖤😷

Discovered another weird audio setting when trying to figure out why Chrome is changing the audio in YouTube when I open a Google Meet window. (This did not solve my problem)

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

River crossing

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

we should publish a 925 page rebuttal to project 2025 that includes policies like legalizing molly, mandating eating ass, and a three day work week. we’ll put 100 justices on the supreme court and liquidate private equity firms. really hit the gas on moving the overton window. ban pickleball too.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

The victims at the Jonestown Massacre did not willingly drink poisoned Kool-Aid. The poisoned beverage was Flav-R-Aid, and most of the victims were forced to drink at gunpoint.

okay it's time for a prompt post: respond to this post with a correction to a common misconception about something you know a lot about. if you feel like it, boost your response. (please use a kindly tone about it, otherwise i, your prompt curator, will get anxious.)

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

There’s a bookstore in my town in SW Virginia with an entire shelf devoted to how much JD Vance sucks and doesn’t speak for Appalachia, which I’ve always had the sense is a somewhat bipartisan consensus out here, so I confess I am curious to see how that ends up playing.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

Reply to

Bronze Age Babies

My problem with the whole Ages thing is that the Golden and Silver Age divisions (and even the Bronze, to a degree) aren't about comics as a whole, they're about DC superheroes. The Golden Age starts with Superman and ends when ALL-STAR COMICS stops JSA stories. Silver starts with Flash, ends...

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

Democrats: {bash nominee for two weeks} Democrats, also: Weird. Our nominee is not polling particularly well.

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

"The pandemic is over" You know, it's really weird then that people are still getting COVID infections on a regular basis and are still dying from COVID infections and disabled people still can't go outside safely and that the World Health Organization says we're still in a pandemic and- (1/208)

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

A more recent piece points out the dearth of LIS articles that go beyond trans 101. #LeadPipeRetrospective Decistifying Trans and Gender Diverse Inclusion in Library Work: A Literature Review by Keahi Adolpho and Stephen G. Krueger

Decistifying trans and gender diverse inclusion in library work: A literature review – In the Library with the Lead Pipewww.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org

Reposted by

Matthew Murray 🦇

i've been enjoying the book review (particularly of romance stuff) side of youtube for awhile, but i am starting to get a little exhausted by the most popular "rant review" videos all basically summarizing to "this book... has a FET*SH IN IT? 😰🤢" like yeah bud, you read a book called Milking Farm