Boze the Library Owl 😴🧙♀️
@SketchesbyBoze
books, beauty, history, folklore • @wren_and_paper & Dickens lover • gets dressed up like a pillow so she's always in bed • http://patreon.com/sketchesbyboze
We just hosted a dinner party, and someone said, “I wonder where the word raspberry comes from?” I leapt up, shouted, “LET’S FIND OUT” and ran to my study, emerging a moment later with Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary (1883). (This is why I don’t get invited to parties.)
Mass illiteracy will have consequences we've only begun to grapple with. Literacy made democracy possible; it also enables us to communicate with each other on a basic level. We take for granted living in a nation where most people could read, but we'll miss it once it's gone.
What’s your most PRETENTIOUS opinion?
I actually think life was better when the internet was on a computer, and during the long hours when you weren't logged in you grew bored and started making sketches or writing stories or grabbed a book at random from the shelf and disappeared into some other world.
My 12yo son is begging me for a phone, but he got so bored this summer that he went to the bookshelf and pulled off a copy of the Iliad, asked me if it was any good, and has been reading it for the last three days. Not helping his case.
In Old English this would be: “An gescead hwy swa fela manna geortreowað is for þæm þe man fægernesse of openlicum life afeorde. Man mæhte fægre stallas gewyrcan, fægre tregnas. He mæhte þisne middangeard swa leoflicne gedon.”
One reason why so many people despair is because we’ve removed beauty from public life. We could have beautiful stations, beautiful trains. We could make this world so lovely.
One reason why so many people despair is because we’ve removed beauty from public life. We could have beautiful stations, beautiful trains. We could make this world so lovely.
I hate how old train stations were cathedrals to prosperity and airports now are just the dingy bus stations of the sky
Fake people listening to fake music. Teachers using AI to grade papers that students didn't write. It makes sense once you understand that many tech moguls believe humanity has no purpose other than building the machines that will replace us. They view us as unnecessary.
Human cultural replacement. Not just AI music but AI listeners too - a fake and fraudulent way for Spotify to generate Ad revenue. Who needs humans when bots can click on links and trick advertisers into paying for fake engagement.
Ray Bradbury; maturity is a process of learning to embrace the passions that were bullied out of us
No. Ignore this. You are capable of reading books again. The brain is highly malleable and you only need a few screen-free weeks to recover your focus. You will be amazed how quickly the hunger for reading returns. You will be inhaling words
If you haven’t read Proust already, forget it mate. Your brain is destroyed from short term dopamine burst addiction and algorithmic k-hole content.
Feeling more and more grateful I grew up before the internet was omnipresent, when we spent most of our time watching old movies on cable or browsing encyclopedias and accidentally acquiring a level of literacy that will cause future generations to think us wizards.
Today's library find: The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, by Edith Holden. These were seasonal notes made for her students in 1906 and never intended for publication. She fell into the Thames whilst gathering chestnut buds in 1920 and died aged 48.
