§1

Last Friday I was interviewed for the podcast The Grasscast — a game-themed podcast named after the book, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. I ramble a little bit in the episode as I tried to be more open and conversational than concise and correct. But I also spoke that way because for some of the questions, no pat answer came immediately to mind.

There was one question that stumped me but in my trying to answer, I think I found something I had not considered before. The question was, What is one bad thing about games? And I tried to convey that, unlike video games where you can play with strangers, most tabletop games are generally constrained by the preferences of your social circles. In order to convince others to spend time on a game that might think is too complicated for them or not for them, you need to have be a successful evangelist.

Also the episode drifts into chatter about libraries, copyright and ebooks.

§2

This week, I reviewed and published another batch of works for our institutional repository from our department of History that was prepared by our library assistants at Leddy At this point, we have reviewed and uploaded the works of half the faculty from this department. I’m hoping to finish the rest this month but I think I have some outstanding H5P work that might push the end of this project til March.

§3

This morning I assisted with an online workshop called Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists that was being lead by a colleague of mine.

R Version 4.0.3 (“Bunny-Wunnies Freak Out”) was released on 2020-10-10.

The release of R 4.0.4 (“Lost Library Book”) is scheduled for Monday 2021-02-15.

§4

On Sunday, I published a short response to “Windsor Works – An Economic Development Strategy” which is going to City Council on Monday.

Why am I writing about this document here?

I am mention this here because the proposed strategy (L.I.F.T.) lists the following as potential metric for measuring the strategy’s success…

Take it from me, someone who knows a quite a bit about citations — the city should use another metric — perhaps one pertaining to local unemployment levels instead.

§5

A viral post from 2019 resurfaced on my FB feed this week and unlike most of the posts I read there, this one did spark joy:

And it struck me how much I loved that the anti-prom was being at the library.

So I started doing some research!

It appears to me that some anti-proms are technically better described as alternative proms. These proms have been established as an explicitly safe place where LGBTQ young people can enjoy prom. Other anti-proms are true morps.

I now wonder what other anti-traditions should find a home at the public library.