Category: General
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22JUN23 / accessions
The accessions department considered any new Ann Leckie a non-negotiable acquisition, given the institution’s response to previous volumes by the same author. Tchaikovsky is actually a newcomer to the institutional collection, which is somewhat surprising given the author’s astonishing productivity and sterling reputation. That this volume collects novellas rather than being part of an extended…
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it’s not the invisible hand that puts packages on our porches
As someone who tries on the regular to drop critiques of the passive voice and its role in the obfuscation of the infrastructural, it’s very nice to see someone making the same point from a much larger soapbox than my own: Through passive voice and other forms of labor-erasing language, delivery notifications ask us to…
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s’not unusual
** Attention conservation notice: man complaining about being ill ** Day six of an absolute stinker of a head-cold; at the end of each day, it’s felt like a turning point has been reached, only for the actual turning point to occur in the middle of the night, and to be a turning not exactly…
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freebird / against professional accomplishment
Been pretty quiet here of late, as I’ve been grinding away at the last cluster of academic commitments on my desk, trying to get free of the backlog so I can leave the building without the waiter chasing after me with the bill, so to speak. Along the way, there have been a number of…
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happy (belated) blogday
The arrival of a domain renewal notice by email reminded me that yesterday was VCTB’s 17th birthday. I bought the domain in March 2006, in order to map what was then still a Blogspot-based site onto a digital room-of-my-own. I don’t recall how quickly I then moved to using self-hosted WordPress, but I know it…