Saga, Internet-ing teens, bingo, and more

You know those blogs posts or articles where it’s the end of the week and they give you a bunch of links to fun and interesting things and then you spend your afternoon working your way through them? Those are fun, right? This is going to be a bit like that, except it’s Tuesday and I don’t have that much to say. Some are library-related and some are not. Here we go!

Library things:

First off, I made a bingo board for a program (sadly attended by no one…) with this website that lets you put images into boards and then makes multiple different copies for you! Awesome! Here’s my fandom-themed one:

Also, I wanted to just chat a bit more about Danah Boyd’s It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens. Again, if you work with teens or really encounter a teen ever, you should read this book. The basic idea that keep coming back to is this: Teens don’t spend a lot of time online to cause trouble or be lazy but rather to socialize. We don’t allow them to go anywhere else to socialize so they go online. Either they have strange, very-scheduled lives, or we’ve told them that all of the public places that are available to them are unsafe or unwelcome to teens. You like hanging out with your friends, right? You get together, go have a drink or coffee, or go to the movies together, or go their house and have a grand old time. Yes? Teens like doing similar things but they rarely have the ways or means for transportation and activities, and oh yeah, there are those parental rules that may restrict their mobility and opportunities to socialize.

So if you like being with your friends, remember what it was like when you couldn’t because you had a curfew or no car or no money. Teens are just trying to be friends and navigate their social lives. We adults do that too, so maybe we should freak out less about teens and the Interwebz.

Finally, here’s my post for YALSA’s The Hub blog this month. It’s all about vacation reading: what and where you are reading. Some lovely bloggers went on vacation. I went to the town beach that’s five minutes from me on a cloudy day. It’s not ideal, but did I mention I live five minutes from the ocean?

Look at your life; look at your choices! Go see this stuff now!

If you like Star Trek: TNG – and why wouldn’t you – go read the Rikergoogling twitter feed now.

If you like space, fantasy, adorable children, scary monsters, beautiful art, characters of diverse races and body types (including robot), mercenaries, sexy times, cats, medics who are mice, or any combination of those things, and can tolerate a bit of strangeness, go read Saga. I don’t know what I was doing with my life before reading it. Just wasting it on other things, I suppose. Seriously, even if you’re not that into graphic novels read it for the art alone. It’s gorgeous.

I believe that is all. Oh, and The Magician’s Land is coming out next week and Lev Grossman will be at the Brookline Booksmith. I’ll be there!