Mþ. Kestrel (pronounced Myth)

It's easy to be mean and it can feel real real good to be nasty if you're not used to getting your dopamine any other way, but with my own eyes I've seen shame cause people to dig in and compassion help people climb out.

Yesterday's strike on Tehran fuel depots caused a spill that sent burning fuel flowing through the capital's street drains, triggering additional fires across the city. #Iran

The Spectrum of GLAM

Today's post is just on a subject I've been pondering lately, and which has been coming up in some of my professional circles: the relationships and differences between the different parts of the so-called GLAM sector.

Anyway, i still contend that we need an AO3 for Queer Tumblr, so if you have resources to start building that, hit me up, I've got lots of ideas! And read my paper about it, please! #lgbtq #archiving #CommunityArchiving #DigitalArchiving #CulturalPreservation #lgbtqHistory

And is then ported to large swathes of the internet through other social media avenues. And it's all held precariously in the hands of private equity firms, and unsearchably on the servers of the Internet Archive. How do we make sure this history is accessible to future generations of queers?

I have no institutional capital to work on my proposed solutions to the problem of preserving the queer culture on Tumblr past the point the tumblr owners decide to shut it down, but I still believe its incredibly important. There is SO MUCH modern queer culture that starts out on Tumblr

Reread it myself just because I haven't almost since it was published almost 2 years ago (naturally found a copying error where I had elided a whole sentence clause, visible to the public for 2 YEARS ARGH) & I was really cooking here tbh.

Anyway. First citation of anything I've ever written (that I know about anyway)!! This is a big moment for me as an author, academic, and researcher!

I should note, no such pdf exists because the original format of the article is as a tumblr blog, with individual posts making up the parts, each interspersed with relevant tumblr reblog posts. Yes I *DID* include Do You Love The Color of the Sky and a Kung Pow Penis example in an academic paper! 😁

Someone reached out to me this week asking for a pdf of my paper for the Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship on queer culture, digital archiving, and Tumblr (read it here! journals.litwinbooks.com/index.php/jc...) I have never felt more like a real academic than in this moment. 😀

The Spectrum of GLAM

Today's post is just on a subject I've been pondering lately, and which has been coming up in some of my professional circles: the relationships and differences between the different parts of the so-called GLAM sector.

Periwinkle on his back on Anyaugo’s legs

#caturday 🤣

Air travel has become a lot riskier for certain racialized (regardless of citizenship status) groups and I don't think we understand the extent of it.

Yes. These are all braided together.

If I can’t unionize Claude then it’s not conscious, next question

they brought back fucking polio

you don't need to argue with people online. it wastes precious energy and you're not likely to change their mind anyways. you can't logic someone out of something they didn't logic themselves into. just block them.

Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh

Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,

Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below

Stay safe and have fun!

A large Welcome Bienvenue sign between the book return slot and the accessibility button.

Your local public library is a welcoming place. It's a community hub and third place that nurtures meaning. Protect it.

21/20:

PS. I shouldn't have to say this, bc I said it at the beginning, but some readers will forget that I was clear the outsiders also have to define *what the problem is* if we want to motivate the insiders to provide the correct solution.

So be a problem, but be the problem you want solved.

20/20:

Rather than making the trans goal, "Let's be respectful!" The trans goal should be, "Let's be a problem!"

Unless we're a problem, nothing will get fixed.

/end, sort of

15/x:

but either way, they're engaging in the conflation of RESPECTABILITY with GOODNESS.

This has to fucking stop. Not only does it lead to retconning queer history by tricking these idiots into thinking, "Since we were good, we must also have been respectable," ...

1/x:

It was so fucking messy.

We couldn't even keep things civil within queer spaces (Queer Nation, which I love, wasn't without its flaws: PDX chapter screamed insults at PDX BiNet chapter all through the pride parade for a couple years, bc bi people don't exist, I guess)

Messy protest worked.

"These state directives are telling us to abandon professional ethics & to refuse to root our lessons in existing sociological lit, abandoning norms of our prof org, the American Sociological Assoc. Instead, we are being openly threatened if we do not teach what amounts to state-produced propaganda"

Alice Wong's Celebration of life March 25th, 2026 11am PST This toolkit is an invitation and a resource for individuals and communities to participate in Alice Wong's Celebration of Life. Be it from bed, your living room, local community center, classroom, or in the streets... You can join Alice's Celebration of Life through: * The livestream + virtual reception: Join the livestream and gather for the virtual reception hosted by Calling UP Justice & San Francisco Disability Cultural Center. * In-person livestream watch + your own gathering: host an in-person gathering to join the livestream and connect in person to celebrate Alice. * Detailed Toolkit with links, photos, and resources to make your gathering accessible, plus ways to honor Alice Wong's legacy: https://bit.ly/aliceislove

For those who have forgotten the past 40 years:

Tax cuts for the rich
...don’t trickle down

Boosting military spending
...doesn’t bring peace

Slashing regulations
...doesn’t create jobs

Folks, we’ve seen this all before.

The recordings themselves were deeply interesting, enlightening, and sobering. Even the 3-d hologram aspect was interesting. But the interactive format felt…troubling.

Anyway, I think about that installation a lot recently with the AI thing.

But it still made me extremely uncomfortable on a moral level as most of these people were dead now & this felt like a grotesque way to sort of…pretend they weren’t in a way. It felt invasive in a way that a normal video recorded interview with a person now dead doesn’t.