Friday, October 4, 2013

Dad From Mars, Mom From Venus


When I was a kid, the church I attended with my family was called Tims. Not quite the same thing, but still.

I spent part of yesterday determining how to promote some of the sad, forgotten books in our library collection. I ran a report showing which ones had never been checked out (and there are many!) and put a few that didn't look downright embarrassing in prominent places atop shelves in the fiction section. We'll see whether it helps!

(Some of them, incidentally, did look downright embarrassing. I thought about trying to draw attention to a Robert Heinlein novel called "Between the Planets," which when it was published in 1951 probably seemed very cutting-edge. It had something to do with a guy whose father lives on Mars and whose mother is from Venus. Or something like that. Anyway, I just couldn't do it -- I put it back on the shelf.)

Today there are no classes, and I'll be at a special training session away from school about a service that provides online e-books. I'm sure that sounds deadly boring but actually I'm kind of intrigued.

So remember when I launched a Tumblr blog? I've been doggedly updating it, and a few of my photos have taken off and been reblogged dozens of times, which is kind of cool. But I must admit Tumblr is kind of strange to me. Lots of folks seem to be running "blogs" that consist only of methodically recycled content from other people. I remember reading years ago that only a minority of Internet users are content creators, compared to the many who are content consumers -- I guess Tumblr illustrates that. But a blog full of other people's stuff doesn't seem much like a blog to me. It's more like a Pinterest page.

7 comments:

Ms. Moon said...

Love, love, love Heinlein. Yes. Save his books!
Tim's Church? Oh my god.
Tumblr? No clue.
Love from Lloyd...M

Elizabeth said...

Your Tumblr is gorgeous!

The Bug said...

I've looked at Tumblr a few times but I really don't get it at all. And since it's blocked at work I'm probably never going to take the time to figure it out :)

Linda Sue said...

The church of Tim. I love that! Tim's crede...I have had two Tim boyfriends and they were both hilarious...so, yeah, I could get behind the church of Tim.
I don't know what the point of having an online journal (blog) is if it is just a collection from the webnets...lack of a life? Lack of confidence? I have a friend who has a facebook page dedicated to the clothes in her closet! Geez, who cares? I look for slices of life because,basically, I am a snoop I guess. And photography of where that life is being lived. Your blog makes my day! It's an escape, as the sky falls down here in umerca. Plus I love to feed the Koi, makes me feel as though I have accomplished something good in the universe...

Sharon said...

I had a photo used by someone on Tumblr without my permission. I started seeing a huge amount of hits on Flickr and couldn't figure out why. I traced it to Tumblr and found it copied 100's of times but, each link I followed only showed the photo with now comments at all. It looked like people just posted the photo along with many other photos on their site with no explanation at all. I contacted Tumblr and told them it was used without permission and they removed all of the posts. My sister has a blog and recently found out that a woman was reposting all of her photos on a private Facebook group and claiming they were her own. She now puts a copyright on all her posted photos.

Peter Bryenton said...

You are most certainly a creator of original content. I read lots of that fifties sci-fi in the sixties. It was good then, but on re-reading it this year I felt that much of it -- inevitably -- had not withstood the onslaught of our relentless technological advances. The cover art is interesting though.

ellen abbott said...

They're saying, 'this is how cool I am, this is the stuff I think is cool.' Maybe it's the online form of preening.