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Liebraries

Hello there

I like libraries. I like them a lot. I like the feeling of being in a place where everyone simply wants to be left alone to drown in whatever novels or textbooks that they happen to be reading, and will react with great adversity the moment they are disturbed in the very slightest because they know that the majority of people in the building are on their side. I like the idea of a place that is put aside for the sole purpose of being able to be left alone, something that I'm not able to find even in my own room at times, so it's nice to be able to sit down and write completely pointless articles on Wordpad (my previous flame used to be Notepad, but we fell out of with each other after I realized that she gave absolutely no regard towards formatting). So I go to libraries a lot, but not, as one would expect, for the sake of the actual resources and books. Goodness no, I find all of that on the Internet. I come here simply because I like the atmosphere's wetness, probably due to the fountain on the ground floor of the library that has no doubt been exhaled and inhaled thoroughly by countless other people who also come here for the atmosphere.

And there do seem to be a lot of people who don't actually come to the libraries for the books. Many of the people sitting at the tables next to the very bright windows that outshine whatever might be on your computer's screen thus making the tables the exact place that you shouldn't sit if you're going to use a laptop, which is also where all the powerpoints are which makes the tables an okay-ish sort of place to use your laptops, have, not suprisingly at all by this point, laptops with them. They are also open and they (the people) seem to be using them a lot.

Maybe they're here because of the environment or for something else, perhaps the free wi-fi. In any case, they don't actually seem to be here for what libraries exist for: books.

The wonderful and late Douglas Adams wrote an article about this that I found in the Salmon of Doubt (which by the way, Gan, you should read once you emerge from the beneath the waves of programming that you seem to be diving into a lot lately). He basically wrote about how some things have features or components added to them that essentially make something else in those things redundant, and thus need to be removed. For instance, advertisments in magazines. Now that many magazines are online, advertisments no longer need to take up more space than the actual articles in the magazines because of links, which only need to be so large to get your attention, and can lead you to an entirely new page with plenty of detailed information about whatever the ad is about. The idea that advertisments need to be intrusive is removed. Online magazines also remove a lot of dead wood from magazines. Some things become redundant along the way, and should be removed.

But we still see magazines that you can actually hold in your hand. Papery ones as well. Which is puzzling seeing as how almost all of us possess some sort of device capable of accessing the internet. But it really isn't as puzzling as it sounds. Magazines still have the advantage of not running out battery, seeing as how they don't have any battery. People still favour the convenience of being able to take out a magazine and read without having to connect to a wireless hotspot, type in the URL of the magazine and so on and so forth. And in actual fact, we've really just subsitutted dead wood for burning already dead things that have become fossil fuels. We haven't actually removed anything overall.

I've got nowhere to go with this, really. Anything random comments on the tagboard, please.