Thursday Morning Musings

Good morning! I realized that my Twitter account is separate from here. I've been retweeting a lot of good stuff. In the next few days, I'll add the widget back with my account. Eventually, I'm hoping to create an RSS feed account where you can see when I updated. All of this is eventually.

I practically live on Twitter. I've had a lot to muse on this morning and wanted to share some of it.

First, yes, it is cold and if you're in the south eastern portion of PA, you should follow these guys. Generally, they are spot on with weather predictions. Then occasionally they have stuff like this:

MEGA ALERT BREAKING WEATHER NEWS: It's winter and it's going to be cold. Cue flashing graphics and icons with tag team meteorologists!
— PhillyWx.com (@phillywx) January 7, 2015

Next, a comic artist I follow on Twitter muses about her library experiences as a page and in an awesome pop culture library I did not realize exists. Star Trek Memorabilia? YES!

I Was a Librarian http://t.co/JjZUdcg5hp
— Kelci Crawford (@KelciDCrawford) January 8, 2015

I manage 2 nonprofit Facebook pages (my library and another) and I admit, I haven't actually sat down to read this yet, but it looks intriguing. I like 99u for their inspirational posts.

A day in apps: The social media manager’s edition. http://t.co/f6tmW3Rbwa
— 99U (@99u) January 8, 2015

Remember Ferguson Library? They are still doing awesome work.

Now Trending on Twitter: Public Libraries http://t.co/gEYTl6dKDx
— Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) January 7, 2015

I love reading Questionable Content. Lately, he's been having a lot happen in the library with characters...but including some interesting commentary on libraries. Take a read here: First part and a follow up. I could go in-depth on this, but just enjoy the humor and how Marten and Claire (intern) and Tai (the head librarian) have their opinions of the [academic] library.

Last, Story Time Underground has this neat blog prompt called "Resolve to Rock." I first heard about it through Laura at Literacious (who is awesome). I may do this just for myself. I know it's time to set my vision and goals for the coming year so this might help me focus professionally.

Anything you found interesting so far this week? Want to discuss something? Share in the comments.

In Real Life by Cory Doctorow & Jen Wang

Title: In Real Life
Author: Cory Doctorow
Illustrator: Jen Wang
Publisher: First Second (:01)
Copyright: 2014
Price: $17.99
ISBN:  978-1596436589
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Summary and Quick Thoughts: The story opens with new-ish to town Anda, still getting used to Arizona. Yes, she misses San Diego, but seems to be settling into Arizona ok. She has friends, plays games, and takes a computer class/club. It is in this computer class/club, Anda is introduced to Coarsegold Online: an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game...think Minecraft or World of Warcraft or the oldie Runescape*). Anda joins and is sucked into a world of fun until she meets a "gold farmer" who is a low level avatar that collects cool stuff to sell to players. It's a rule breaking issue but when Anda "meets" the boy behind the farmer, she begins to question what she knows.
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Recommended Audience: YA. Middle School and up.
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Things to be aware of: Nothing out of the ordinary.
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Further Thoughts: I want to like this. I really, really do, but all it reminds me of is some "after school special" thing or The Tale of One Bad Rat. Basically, it's a nicely done graphic novel with a message or two.

I felt that the message is beaten over your head quite a bit before you even read the story. First there's the giveaway in the book jacket. Follow that with the intro by Cory Doctorow, which should have come as an afterward if it was needed at all, and at this point, my teen self is whining "stop! I get it. Life isn't fair and blah, blah, blah! I played Runescape. I watch Steam's trading cards during the sales." (Although, funny thing, I don't exactly remember the message except something about exploitation like this happens in all kinds of settings). Either way, I read all this text and thought "teachers will have a field day with this."


I started to read the story. The art is pleasant. Anda is interesting. She's a nerd of sorts and she knows her computer stuff. Then comes the special commercial from Liza McCombs who is from Australia (confusing point later) and "has a special deal for you! Girl gamers, buy the game, pay the monthly fee, and you can be in the special clan that Lizanator has in the game! Since I'm the game's creator, I can do this and we need more girls in this game!"

Ok, how'd she get into the classroom to advertise this and how did the boys feel? Yeah, we need more girl gamers, but how is this even cool in the classroom? Am I just out of touch with what happens in the classroom? And Anda's mom just kinda goes along with it as long as Anda talks to girls her own age? We really need an explanation about how looks are deceiving here. At least Anda is like every teen and just wants on the game.

She gets on, starts playing, and then meets a gold farmer. This is when she starts to realize things are not right in the world. As the story progresses, Anda talks to the gold farmer and finds out he's from China and works in sweatshop-like conditions with little pay. This angers her, so she starts to try to find ways to fix this. In the meantime, her dad's company is having trouble and the factory workers strike. This gives Anda an idea, but just makes the situation a thousand times worse and leads to Anda's banning from the game by Liza who hasn't returned to Australia. Will Anda figure out how to help her new friend in China? Will Liza do something to stop this in her game? Read on to find out.

If you take away all the contextual text, it really makes for a nice story with a few unbelievable parts (to me) like Anda meeting a gold farmer who is a boy from China, not a bot, or how Liza's "deal" for girl gamers is "ok" with everyone**. I also really feel if the foreword was actually an afterword, it'd have a bigger impact. Instead, teen me is freaking out before the story and educator/librarian me is noticing how this can be used as a book discussion book. On the flip side, teens might skip all that text and go straight for the story.

Overall feeling: It was ok. Loved the art.
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*I played Runescape and it was cool for a while. I don't play there any more.

**Granted, this was written before the video gaming drama going on right now, but even then, I'd think at least one guy in the story would be like "wait a minute..."
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Source: Netgalley

Machine of Death: a book (or [oh, see in the post])

(Or what to do when customers asks if you bought the book yet or they donate a copy...or five).

It all started last week (maybe before then, but last week it was on my radar) on Twitter when David Malki ! (of Wondermark fame who gave away books to LIBRARIES a while back) and Ryan North challenged the Twitter-verse and web comic fans alike to make their upcoming compilation book the number 1 seller on Amazon for at least one day, which was yesterday. Well, you can see here, here, and here (not sure that link will hold) that it happened, and it has gone into today. Impressive. Many, many kudos to the fact it is an Indie Book and it topped.

Well, today, the story just got a little more interesting. According to David Malki !'s Twitter here and continued here, Glenn Beck (of this book fame [I do not endorse this book, I just know that you may only know who he is by his book*]) called the book "an example of our 'culture of death.'" The Twitter-verse is just RUNNING with this and challenging the fans to buy MORE copies or convince more people to buy copies.

So, as a librarian do I purchase this book for my collection or not?

Non-librarians, here is the dilemma: there are no professional reviews backing this up (that I've seen) and it hasn't reached the NYTimes Best Seller list. These are two factors in most libraries when determining whether or not to purchase a book. While it is a talked about book, I find that the audience for this book will be small. The concept is different, but sight unseen, this is one of the few books I honestly can't say I'd pick up for my Library Collection. I'd be likely to pick it up if I knew that there was a huge Glenn Beck fan base in the area (Banned Book, anyone?), but a quick search of the county I work in** shows me this is not necessarily the case. A search of Worldcat also shows me that no one has purchased Machine of Death yet, and judging by what it is, libraries won't even start getting it until a month from now (if they do).


So, non-librarians, you now know why it might not be in your libraries and librarians, you are prepared if you should decide to purchase this book (due to all the suggestions) or know why you might suddenly end up with 1-5 copies of the book (guys, if you do donate, PLEASE don't donate more than 1, also, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE check with your librarians about their donation policy before donating).

I'm willing to review Machine of Death for this here blog, but I just want to warn you, I'm in a state of upheaval considering I'm hoping to move next week and am starting a new adventure shortly thereafter. If you want me to review before the end of next week, please annoy me (comment below or e-mail me at ReadsRantsRaves [at] gmail [dot] com or @me on Twitter.com/readsrantsraves) and I will get a copy one way or another.

For an added bonus, I challenge everyone to get this thing on the NYTimes Best Sellers list because then EVERYONE will be talking about it. :)
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*In fact, I'd like to go to DC this weekend for the Daily Show/Colbert Report March.

**Not for much longer. It's bittersweet.

So Farmville is a country!

This is probably old news by now, but I just couldn't help linking to this.

XKCD has made a map of the Internet as countries (at least that's how I see it). Either way, it is a nifty representation of web sites from Facebook to blogging and how "popular" one site is from another. It is pretty wicked cool. Although, book blogs don't rank anywhere...

In other news, I'm going to do some blog cleanup one of these days and move the blog to a better (more logical) address (I have it! I'm squatting!). I've got a small vacation (translation: lots of time at grandmom's house) coming up and hope that I can put some "blog" stuff on the agenda. My time has been eaten up by little things such as my job (yay school visits) and school work. Here's hoping I get a better handle by the end of next weekend!

Linky Link: Plagiarism and Copyright for this week

Part 1: Hot Topic, the store
First, flying around on my [private] Twitter Feed this week was the accusation that Hot Topic (popular teen "punk/goth" store) ripped off yet another Indie Artist with a t-shirt design. Since this is buried so deep in Twitter now (and was Retweeted [RT] often by web comic artists who fall under the "Indie Artist" category), see this link for thoughts and links to the original design. It seems Hot Topic did keep to their word and took the work down.

Now, just two days ago I saw this RT from web comic artist Rene Engstrom (of AndersLovesMaria fame - NSFW) saying Hot Topic had ripped off artist Kawaii Not by using her images in two buttons without her permission. Kawaii Not's images are difficult to link to as the buttons were all listed on the same page and hard to find without serious searching, but the images were basically the same as the Hot Topic buttons. The Hot Topic image links are in the RT and it seems, just two days later that Hot Topic has taken these buttons down as well (they are "Error Links").

I bring this up because one of my favorite web comic artists (Jess Fink - def. NSFW) had a design of hers taken about 2 years ago which was already a Threadless shirt at that point. Here's an excellent write up about that issue.

While I seriously should be more angry at the designers (and I am), it is Hot Topic's fault to be selling it. Hot Topic has been very good at taking stuff down when asked, but I can't help but wonder what is or isn't original about the stuff that isn't Twilight, Invader Zim, Lenore or "brand names" any more.

Part 2: Bleach Vs. Incarnate
I'm really not going to go into this one mainly because I have not read Bleach yet and Johanna Draper Carlson (I hope I'm attributing this to the right author) does a beautiful write up at Comics Worth Reading. She's included most of the links I've seen just browsing on this topic and I think it brings up a great point about "scanlations" (scans of titles unreleased in the U.S.A. [usually Japanese Manga] available freely on the Internet that may be in the original language or "fan subbed" [translated into English by fans]). I honestly did not know all of the history about scanlations or how the Japanese felt about plagiarism until I read this article.

Why bring these up? As I write these, I realize they are more relevant plagiarism cases for teens. Here are some great "real world" examples of what happens when you are caught and how fast this stuff moves. Basically, I think lessons like the two above are more likely to stick with students than those of "don't copy an author's work for your paper."

Part 3: Books too!!
Music, movies, TV shows, and other general media aren't the only things getting pirated any more and as librarians we need to be aware of this. Books are going that way too. Laurie Halse Anderson recently posted about "Book Pirates": Part 1 and Part 2. I suspect that the more we see eReaders coming out, the more book pirating will happen. I believe that as librarians, we need to be aware that this exists and try to do our little part in educating users.

November is NaNoWriMo

Have you heard of NaNoWriMo? It seems teen authors may or have in the past taken part in this national writing campaign. Do you know what it is? NaNoWriMo is short for “National Novel Writing Month,” which, if I remember correctly was started by a small group of writers needing a way to write. NaNoWriMo is pretty simple: write a 50,000 word novel about anything and then you can say you wrote a novel. The point is just to write, write, write and about quantity and not quality. Although, that’s not to say quality work isn’t written. Heck, a few NaNoWriMo projects have been published as books.

Why should you care? The short answer: teens. How often have you seen an article about a teen writing group? Seen a program write up on hosting a writing group? Writing workshop? I’ve seen quite a bit from ideas in professional works to an article in Voya. Teens write. I used to be a prolific writer as a teen to help sort through my anxieties and problems. NaNoWriMo now provides a division for younger writers such as teens and some schools have even hosted their own NaNoWriMos and it is simple if you just tell writers to scramble the word and do a word count.

Programming Connections: Does your library have a writing group? See if teens can become involved. Offer writing workshops this month, author visits, or host a writing group once a week this month.

You get the idea. :)