Add a couple bookmarks, update postroll, add wa-2024-week-27.

_bookmarks/firefox-keyboard-shortcuts.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+title: 'Firefox Keyboard Shorcuts'
+date-posted: 2024-07-09T12:05:58-6:00
+last_modified_at:
+excerpt: 'Controlling tabs and other browser things with your keyboard.'
+link: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/keyboard-shortcuts-perform-firefox-tasks-quickly
+# source-name
+# source-link
+source-name-only: Web search.
+b-tags:
+   - accessibility
+   - web tools
+published: true
+---
+
+I'm a faster typer than most, and I've noticed that I get annoyed having to reach for my trackpad or mouse. So I'm increasingly trying to navigate my computer through keyboard controls like the ones Firefox outlines here.

_bookmarks/slash-pages.md

@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
+---
+title: 'Slash Pages'
+date-posted: 2024-07-09T12:54:57-6:00
+last_modified_at:
+excerpt: 'Common pages on personal sites.'
+link: https://slashpages.net/
+# source-name
+# source-link
+source-name-only: Scrolling through Mastodon.
+b-tags:
+   - web design or social
+published: true
+---
+
+I really like both the concept of slash pages (such as `/about`, `/colophon`, or `/now`). I've found that they're handy conventions when browsing other people's sites, as well as useful prompts / genres for things I'd like to share with the world.  
+
+If you're got a website of your own, or if you're thinking of starting one, this is a great list of pages you might include.  

_pages/postroll.md

@@ -19,26 +19,29 @@ This approach is not quite analogous to a mixtape full of things that work well
 
 This list is numbered chronologically, with "1" indicating the newest addition to the list. (It feels worth reiterating: `1.` **does not** mean "best", and it is also unrelated to when the post was published. The first link is just the most recently thing I've added to this list.)  
 
-1. Anil Dash's [Today's AI is unreasonable](https://www.anildash.com/2023/06/08/ai-is-unreasonable/) succinctly describes what I also find regrettable about the current generative AI hype: they generate [bullshit](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5) by design, this bullshit is inconsistently generated in ways that cannot be easily debugged by users, and systems designed around these types of unpredictability and unreasonableness tend to remove agency from users.  
-2. Sara Joy's [This is My Church](https://sarajoy.dev/blog/my-church/) resonates with me both regarding particular communities (I helped start a swing dancing club at UC Riverside as an undergrad) and regarding the ways that social media and blogging communities feel to me now. 
-3. Tracy Durnell's [The injustice embedded in our infrastructure](https://tracydurnell.com/2024/06/16/the-injustice-embedded-in-our-infrastructure/) quickly weaves together a game, a book, an email, a city's community budget process, and other people's blogs while making the post's point. This is a really nice example of how a blog post can act as a condensed essay, taking a reader on a quick travel through a set of ideas and perhaps coming away with a changed perspective.  
-4. John M. Jackson's [Befores and afters](https://www.johnxlibris.com/2024/04/befores-and-afters/) profoundly resonates with me in terms of no longer feeling like I'm "part of the new guard." Although I'm actually new enough as an instructional designer to not even know whether there's as much of a sense of "newer" and "older" guards in this field as there is in librarianship, I definitely feel like I'm traversing similar thresholds in life. As a side note, I also appreciate how John tends to add sections like "What I'm reading" and "Garden update" to his posts.  
-5. Keenan's [An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch](https://gkeenan.co/avgb/an-alarmingly-concise-and-very-hinged-summary-of-what-it-was-like-to-build-this-site-from-scratch/) relates how they built their site… a story told with enough zest and humor that I feel better about the peculiar blend of empowerment and continual facepalming that drive my own site.  
-6. Kathleen Fitzpatrick's [Generosity and Pragmatism](https://kfitz.info/generosity-and-pragmatism/) shares an insight from Deb Chachra's _How Infrastructure Works_ about how being generous is simultaneously being pragmatic. This post is also a great example of a type of blog post that hovers somewhere between a long social media post and a miniature essay.  
-7. Arthur Boston's [When Do Checks Become Review?](https://aj-boston.pubpub.org/pub/mtrwtisx/) asks what lines we can draw around peer review and integrity checks.  
-8. Olu Niyi-Awosusi's [Weeknotes #4 (Week 24, 2024)](https://olu.online/weeknotes-4-week-24-2024/) showed me how nicely one can style a site made with [Quartz](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/)—and the look of Olu's [Bear](https://bearblog.dev/)-based blog inspired me to trim the author sidebar links and some other elements from most of my own blog pages. Their various weeknotes are also a great example of that genre of blog post!  
-9. Spoiler alert! W. Evan Sheehan's [Twelve favorite problems](https://darthmall.net/weblog/2024/twelve-favorite-problems/) currently only has a list of 5. I can't remember previously hearing about this "favorite problems" framework, which Evan ascribes to Richard Feynman, but I'm instantly a fan.  
-10. Vic Kostrzewski's [My mental health stack – everyday things I use for my mental health](https://vic.work/51713/my-mental-health-stack-everyday-things-i-use-for-my-mental-health) shares a lot of technologies that I don't use, but I deeply appreciate this sharing of struggles and approaches.  
-11. Mandy Brown's [Common future](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/common-future) reading note connects Ursula Franklin's earthworm theory of social change to climate change, since talking about the weather is increasingly one way of talking about our common future.  
-12. Sri Seah's [GHDR Report 0404: Powered by Prosocial Motivation](https://dsriseah.com/ghdr/2024/0404/) shares a great insight into motivation—and I think I'm often motivated similarly, by feeling connections with other people. (The post also touches on how Sri has "conversations" with ChatGPT, a use I'd rarely considered before outside of working with students.)  
-13. John Maxwell's [All I Need to Know about DH I Learned in a MOO](https://imaginarytext.ca/posts/2023/everything-moo/) shares welcome insights about some early formats of online communities.  
-14. Robb Knight's [Slash Pages](https://rknight.me/blog/slash-pages/) is a brief and welcome backstory for why he started [Slashpages.net](https://slashpages.net/).  
-15. P.L. Thomas's [What Works?: The Wrong Question for Education Reform](https://radicalscholarship.com/2024/06/17/what-works-the-wrong-question-for-education-reform/) shares his personal educational history as well as pointing out various ways that "what works?" is untenable as a question for education reform.   
-16. Brandon's [On Adding A Blogroll Slashpage](https://wand3r.net/blogroll-slashpage/) gave me the idea for this alterative format in the first place.  
+1. As soon as you encounter the three-digit number in the title of John Coulthart's [Weekend links 732](https://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2024/06/29/weekend-links-732/), you can realize how long this blog has been running. It's been a constant in my RSS readers for coming up on two full decades—I feel like I probably first heard of it through Arthur magazine or something! This particular week includes a mention of a new album where Shackleton (purveyor of often-otherworldly bass & percussion music) collaborates with Six Organs of Admittance (conjuror of often-psychedelic folk), links ranging from a pulp paperback book artists to a Wire magazine article on experimental radio to a collection of 60s acid rock buttons, and a great Japanese woodblock print from the late 1800s.  
+2. Anil Dash's [Today's AI is unreasonable](https://www.anildash.com/2023/06/08/ai-is-unreasonable/) succinctly describes what I also find regrettable about the current generative AI hype: they generate [bullshit](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5) by design, this bullshit is inconsistently generated in ways that cannot be easily debugged by users, and systems designed around these types of unpredictability and unreasonableness tend to remove agency from users.  
+3. Sara Joy's [This is My Church](https://sarajoy.dev/blog/my-church/) resonates with me both regarding particular communities (I helped start a swing dancing club at UC Riverside as an undergrad) and regarding the ways that social media and blogging communities feel to me now. 
+4. Tracy Durnell's [The injustice embedded in our infrastructure](https://tracydurnell.com/2024/06/16/the-injustice-embedded-in-our-infrastructure/) quickly weaves together a game, a book, an email, a city's community budget process, and other people's blogs while making the post's point. This is a really nice example of how a blog post can act as a condensed essay, taking a reader on a quick travel through a set of ideas and perhaps coming away with a changed perspective.  
+5. John M. Jackson's [Befores and afters](https://www.johnxlibris.com/2024/04/befores-and-afters/) profoundly resonates with me in terms of no longer feeling like I'm "part of the new guard." Although I'm actually new enough as an instructional designer to not even know whether there's as much of a sense of "newer" and "older" guards in this field as there is in librarianship, I definitely feel like I'm traversing similar thresholds in life. As a side note, I also appreciate how John tends to add sections like "What I'm reading" and "Garden update" to his posts.  
+6. Keenan's [An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch](https://gkeenan.co/avgb/an-alarmingly-concise-and-very-hinged-summary-of-what-it-was-like-to-build-this-site-from-scratch/) relates how they built their site… a story told with enough zest and humor that I feel better about the peculiar blend of empowerment and continual facepalming that drive my own site.  
+7. Kathleen Fitzpatrick's [Generosity and Pragmatism](https://kfitz.info/generosity-and-pragmatism/) shares an insight from Deb Chachra's _How Infrastructure Works_ about how being generous is simultaneously being pragmatic. This post is also a great example of a type of blog post that hovers somewhere between a long social media post and a miniature essay.  
+8. Arthur Boston's [When Do Checks Become Review?](https://aj-boston.pubpub.org/pub/mtrwtisx/) asks what lines we can draw around peer review and integrity checks.  
+9. Olu Niyi-Awosusi's [Weeknotes #4 (Week 24, 2024)](https://olu.online/weeknotes-4-week-24-2024/) showed me how nicely one can style a site made with [Quartz](https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/)—and the look of Olu's [Bear](https://bearblog.dev/)-based blog inspired me to trim the author sidebar links and some other elements from most of my own blog pages. Their various weeknotes are also a great example of that genre of blog post!  
+10. Spoiler alert! W. Evan Sheehan's [Twelve favorite problems](https://darthmall.net/weblog/2024/twelve-favorite-problems/) currently only has a list of 5. I can't remember previously hearing about this "favorite problems" framework, which Evan ascribes to Richard Feynman, but I'm instantly a fan.  
+11. Vic Kostrzewski's [My mental health stack – everyday things I use for my mental health](https://vic.work/51713/my-mental-health-stack-everyday-things-i-use-for-my-mental-health) shares a lot of technologies that I don't use, but I deeply appreciate this sharing of struggles and approaches.  
+12. Mandy Brown's [Common future](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/common-future) reading note connects Ursula Franklin's earthworm theory of social change to climate change, since talking about the weather is increasingly one way of talking about our common future.  
+13. Sri Seah's [GHDR Report 0404: Powered by Prosocial Motivation](https://dsriseah.com/ghdr/2024/0404/) shares a great insight into motivation—and I think I'm often motivated similarly, by feeling connections with other people. (The post also touches on how Sri has "conversations" with ChatGPT, a use I'd rarely considered before outside of working with students.)  
+14. John Maxwell's [All I Need to Know about DH I Learned in a MOO](https://imaginarytext.ca/posts/2023/everything-moo/) shares welcome insights about some early formats of online communities.  
+15. Robb Knight's [Slash Pages](https://rknight.me/blog/slash-pages/) is a brief and welcome backstory for why he started [Slashpages.net](https://slashpages.net/).  
+16. P.L. Thomas's [What Works?: The Wrong Question for Education Reform](https://radicalscholarship.com/2024/06/17/what-works-the-wrong-question-for-education-reform/) shares his personal educational history as well as pointing out various ways that "what works?" is untenable as a question for education reform.   
+17. Brandon's [On Adding A Blogroll Slashpage](https://wand3r.net/blogroll-slashpage/) gave me the idea for this alterative format in the first place.  
 
 ## Other Peoples's Postrolls (OPP)
 
 Do you have a postroll page? Let me know and I'll try to add it here.  
 
+(I can't commit to maintaining this kind of list forever, for the same reasons that maintaining a blogroll can be awkward. But I'm excited to point to some other postrolls for now.)  
+
 - Brandon's [Postroll](https://wand3r.net/postroll/).  
 - Jedda's [Postroll](https://notes.jeddacp.com/postroll/).  

_posts/2024-07-09-wa-2024-week-27.md

@@ -0,0 +1,50 @@
+---
+title: "Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week 27"
+last_modified_at:
+categories: [weekly-assemblage]
+excerpt: 'Postrolls and Posthumans.'
+tags:
+    -
+# header:
+#  image: /assets/images/weekly-assemblage.png
+#  caption: 'Photo credit: [**Unsplash**](https://unsplash.com)'
+published: true # true
+toc: true
+comments:
+date: 2024-07-09T18:14:15-6:00
+---
+
+[Weekly Whaaa…?]({% post_url 2016-01-09-weekly-whaaa %})  
+{: .notice}  
+
+## Slash Page of the Week
+
+This week I added a [postroll]({{ site.baseurl }}/postroll) to this site. Distinct from a blogroll—itself a list that recommends entire blogs—a postroll recommends individual blog **posts**. If a blogroll is a general "hey, you might like these musicians or groups," and postroll is a more direct, "hey, isn't this song great?!"  
+
+[SlashPages.net](https://slashpages.net/) features these and many similar common genres of pages.  
+
+If you've got your own website, or especially if you're just starting one, these slash pages can be excellent prompts for writing or imagining what you'd like to share. There are a number of directories linked on that page, so you can also springboard from it to other personal sites / IndieWeb / cozy web places online.  
+
+## Viewing, Listening, and Reading
+
+### _How We Became Posthuman_  
+
+This week I finally finished my first reading of [[How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics]] by N. Katherine Hayles.  
+
+I'm very grateful that my dissertation advisor recommended it, since Hayles's exploration of the discourses of "information" in cybernetics has added a lot of nuance and context to the largely ahistorical account of "information" common to library and information sciences. (As usual, I have to speculate that if LIS had continued to develop as library and information **studies** there would likely have been more attention paid to historicization, context, and culture.)  
+
+I'd certainly recommend this to anyone interested in information, informatics, or science fiction—and especially anyone interested in combinations of those.  
+
+My single biggest caveat-slash-critique is that, despite the emphasis this work places on human materiality, it almost entirely avoids the differentiations in human embodiment that were huge influences in social/legal history, intellectual history, and literary works in the period the book covers. Although gender is acknowledged in some portions, racialization practically does not exist within Hayles's book. (Maybe subsequent works by her grapple with it?)  
+
+Racialization—and its related discourses that tend to link whiteness to "abstraction" and minorities to "particularities"—seems profoundly likely to have influenced any work involving bodies, subjectivity, information, identity, etc. (Barbara Christian's ["The Race for Theory"](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1354255) sketches out some of these discourses, as well as reminding us of the stakes. It's available through JSTOR, which lets you [read 100 articles a month](https://www.jstor.org/register?redirectUri=%2Fstable%2F1354255%3Fread-now%3D1%23page_scan_tab_contents) if you're unaffiliated with a subscribing library, as long as you create an account.)  
+
+This omission leaves me unable to keep myself from wondering what other crucial facets have gone unaccounted for in her analysis and summaries of the histories she recounts.  
+
+I'm still fumbling toward a reading notes process at the moment, as well as deciding what I'll leave in my own private "processing notes" and what more polished ideas I'll share here on my site. But I'll likely be adding a few posts as I highlight some of the best "takeaways" from this book—particularly the ones that could be useful within LIS. As I said, there's a wealth to appreciate in _How We Became Posthuman_, despite its overall omission of racialization and gender discourses from its analyses and history.  
+
+### _A Realist Theory of Science_  
+
+I've had Roy Bhaskar's [_A Realist Theory of Science_](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL9498188M/A_Realist_Theory_of_Science_(Radical_Thinkers)) floating in the back of my mental "to be read" pile for years, at least since I read Sam Popwich enthusing about it on social media or [his site](https://www.spopowich.ca/blog/social-theory-of-neutrality).  
+
+I'm thus far only through the introduction, and I'm not sure if I'll continue at the moment. It feels like it might be a really useful background to other thinkers like Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, or Sandra Harding. But with so many other things directly on my [exam lists]({{ site.baseurl }}/notes/Reading/Lists/)… well, we'll see.