Ryan P. Randall @foureyedsoul@scholar.social

Software & libraries are both designed as interventions in the world.

Neither can be "neutral"—they can either reinforce or alter existing power relations.

If you mistakenly believe they can be "neutral," you've always encountered ones designed for you & your various privileges.

We're stronger together. Since people seem to like the collective Etherpad notes some of us have been sharing from conferences, here's a site that makes them easier to find: http://ryanpatrickrandall.com/our-conference-notes/

I'm thinking of moving it from a project to an organization, so it will have its own domain rather than be related to mine.

Let me know if you've got notes you'd like to share, would like to help moderate it, or have other feedback! #critlib

Apparently there's a code execution vulnerability in Vim & Neovim?
https://amp.thehackernews.com/thn/2019/06/linux-vim-vulnerability.html

Enough folks on here use Linux distros that I'm passing this along out of an abundance of caution—I don't know much about the issue itself beyond the article.

Sardonic belly laughs at even including "Contains #OA/Free/Purchased" in the icon legend for this library & information studies journal.

75 volumes and not a single issue has #openAccess / free content.

But hey, they've painted their #paywall rainbow for Pride!

Turns out there is something I dislike even more than formatting my works cited section—formatting someone else's!

Just spent a few hours writing documentation on how to create screenreader accessible html tables for the journal's other editors… hours in which I was getting increasingly punchy.

My fave bit is:
- watch out for whether cutting & pasting into our journal platform turns straight quotes (") into curly quotes (“”), since html can only handle straight quotes
- the "h" in "html" apparently stands for "heteronormative"

Hmmm… actually, I think I might ask whether snippets could be added to nvUltra whenever it comes out.
https://brettterpstra.com/2019/04/10/codename-nvultra/

Snippets in text editors is such an excellent feature. May the universe bless the forgetful, efficient, (I'm gonna assume) undiagnosed ADHD developer who came up with this software gift.

This toot brought to you by me finally making snippets in Atom for YAML headers, the schema I've landed on using, and BibLaTex entries—and really feeling the lack of snippets in nvALT.

Just remembered how a patron smiled yesterday when he asked whether "alludes" means "refers to." I nodded and said, "Yeah, if you're alluding to the Lord of the Rings, you might be making a joke about a hobbit."

Dude's sleepy finals week eyes really brightened up for a second, both at my example and that he was using that word the right way.

Whoa. Just got back some kind & unexpected praise from this semester's professor on my final paper, suggesting I submit it to both a specific conference & journal.

Gotta use that as wind in my sails as I grind out a lot of less-interesting work in the next 24 hours for a different seminar.

I do still wish that Pandoc & Markdown didn't treat block quotes as block elements. Can't think of any reason a humanities document would conceptually or typographically consider a block quote to be outside of the paragraph within which it supplies textual evidence.

I like writing in an editor more than Word, so I'll just resign myself to keep "mopping up" after outputting a draft.