Dr. Ben Mitchell

@drlibraryben.bsky.social

1211 Followers 2306 Following

(he/they) Scholar. Geek. Nova Scotian. 🌍 Libraries (#GLAM), medical humanities, history/public history, neurodiversity and disability studies. 🌍 Geekier at: @willow0wisp.bsky.social

A Digital reconstruction of metaspriggina, an ancient precursor to all vertebrate animals that lived in the Cambrian sea about 500mn years ago © BBC Studios/Moonraker. It is a small, tube-like creature with tiny dot eyes on its forehead and a wide open mouth like the shocked emoji.
A screenshot from Avatar: The Last Airbender. It shows the character Joo Dee framed by columns overlooking a cityscape. She has long hair and an uncanny, large smile. Her eyes are glassy and expressionless.
A screenshot of a loading screen with far too much white space around a small single sentence. At the top left of the page it reads "Please wait while we transfer you to EBSCO Information Services..."
A version of the Marge and the Law meme. Two panels. The first panel shows Marge Simpson talking while looking forlorn. She is handcuffed and surrounded by three police officers. Chief Wiggum on the right is smiling and looking at her while holding an ice creme cone in his left hand. The text below her reads: "I thought you said metrics were important?" The second panel is near identical to the first, except Chief Wiggum is talking. The second caption reads: "Important for defunding you, not helping you."
A screenshot of a twitter post from 8/22/18, 2:36 PM. User Blurry McBronzeFace (@apollodorus9) writes: "At the end of this course, students will be able to..." Socrates: "... Know that they know nothing." Education Administrator: "I'm sorry, but that is not a measurable learning outcome."
A screenshot of an old tweet by Small History NS. Their icon is of a ship. The tweet reads "The Latest sensation here is the appearance of a sea serpent. One fine morning as Mr. B. Conrod was making his rounds 'smacking' lobsters for Smith Bros, he saw what he believes to be a sea serpent, about 30 feet long, swimming on the water quite near his boat. Popes Harbour, Jul 5th 1906.
A photo of an artificial reptile hide against a white background made to look like a log with a hole in it. It is affixed to the white with two transparent suction cups. A winding tawny gecko is poking its head and forelegs out of the hole in the artificial log.
A photo of a postit on a faux wooden desk. The postit reads "Your government assigned fursona is a unicorn" with a picture of a smiling face beneath it.
A selfie taken in a hallway from a slightly low and askew angle. A figure can be seen from the torso up. They are white with hazel eyes and thick eyebrows. They are wearing a bowler hat and have a slightly wide-eyed expression as if to say "oh well, world's on fire forever I guess." They are also wearing a shiny, starry, cosmic, white stars on a blue background face mask-like scarf that obscures all but their eyes, a purple collared shirt, and a dark grey vest.
A promotional image from the indy game "OneShot." It features a pixily text "One Shot" (bottom) beside an anime inspired cat person (top). The cat person has large eyes, a hat that has holes for their ears, overly long sleeves, and a long purple-blue scarf trailing to the left of the image. The "O" in One Shot is a stylized incandescent light bulb.
An old brown book with gold images and text that is standing virtually up so that it's spine and front cover are facing the viewer. The spine reads "British Goblins, Wirt Sikes, Sampson Low & Co." The cover features an image of a man at a doorway holding a slightly translucent spectre in his arms. The image is framed by rectangles that each have a bat in them, for flavour one assumes.
A black and white photograph of a bearded person in a flat cap, with thick glasses and a black medical mask. They are wearing a linen collared shirt and are standing with their arms clasped in front of them. There is an elaborate tattoo on the back of their left hand. They are standing in front of a natural history display, a circle of crustaceans with smaller ones radiating out to larger ones. The legs of a Japanese spider crab fan out on either side of them like chitinous wings.
A close-up photo of the small purple flower of tradescantia zebrina, set off against the purple/green leaves.
A photo of a menora on the 7th night of Hannukkah. The candles are lit. A colorful dreidel lays in front of it.
A photograph of a hawk in the sky carrying away a cartoon version of the autism creature in its talons. The autism creature is looking down expressionless. It is by Tumblr user molabuddy.
A poster with text framed with a fragmented collection of dark blue, light blue, and brown triangles. The text reads: APLA: Breaking Barriers/Brisons les Barriéres 2025
A Librarian Against AI, or, I Think AI Should Leave
A screenshot of a keynote slide titled "Not Always a Place of Honour." A bullet point on the left of the slide reads: "The difficult, messy reality is that we're somewhere between "All of this is BS" and "Everything academia says about itself is true." An image on the right displays a pair of red bootyshorts with "This place is not a place of honor" written on the butt, in reference to the "Long-term nuclear waste warning" from the 1993 report by the Sandia National Laboratories.
This is a variation on the "hey little man hows it goin" meme. It is a four panel comic titled "A true conversationalist." In the first panel a simple rounded drawing of a person wearing glasses looks down and asks "Hey, Chronicle of Higher Education, how's it going?" In the second panel, a simple image of a baby with a single curled hair on its head, arms wide, and mouth open sits on the floor. Above it is a screenshot of an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The accompanying picture is of a filled in bubble answer sheet, with text that reads "Do Colleges Provide Too Many Disability Accommodations? The third panel is of the person in glasses with a neutral expression, not saying anything. The fourth panel is the person in the glasses with an awkward smile saying "Yikes!"
This is a variation on the "hey little man hows it goin" meme. It is a four panel comic titled "A true conversationalist." In the first panel a simple rounded drawing of a person wearing glasses looks down and asks "Hey, Chronicle of Higher Education, how's it going?" In the second panel, a simple image of a baby with a single curled hair on its head, arms wide, and mouth open sits on the floor. Above it is a screenshot of an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The accompanying picture is of a filled in bubble answer sheet, with text that reads "Do Colleges Provide Too Many Disability Accommodations? The third panel is of the person in glasses with a neutral expression, not saying anything. The fourth panel is the person in the glasses with an awkward smile saying "Yikes!"
A pixilated picture of Shroom from the SNES game Earthbound. It is an uncanny mushroom man with noodly arms, a kind of melting texture to his body, and a vacant expression. He sits on pixilated patch of green surrounded by smaller mushrooms.
"Education universally extended throughout the community will tend to disabuse the working class of people in respect of a notion that has crept into the minds of our mechanics and is gradually prevailing, that manual labor is at present very inadequately rewarded, owing to combinations of the rich against the poor; that mere mental labor is comparatively worthless; that property or wealth ought not be accumulated or transmitted; that to take interest on money lent or profit on capital employed is unjust. ... The mistaken and ignorant people who entertain these fallacies as truths will learn, when they have the opportunity of learning, that the institution of political society originated in the protection of property. ~ Thomas Cooper, Elements of Political Economy, 1821."
A screenshot from the study featuring two illustrated boxes. The box on the left has the word "Interact" written above it. The illustration in the box shows an abstract human hand tickling the belly of a blobily drawn mouse on its back. The box on the right has "Return" written on it, and is an illustration of human hands returning the mouse to its box.
An extreme closeup of the face of the Philadelphia Flyers's mascot Gritty. His large orange eyes stare directly at the viewer. His mouth is open.
The Magic: The Gathering card Karn, Legacy Reforged ( https://scryfall.com/card/mat/49/karn-legacy-reforged )
A poster for a "ShrekRave" The text reads: "ShrekRave: It's dumb just come have fun! Shrek themed rave - June 29th, 2024. "Cool is dead!" "Who cares?" Marquee Ballroom, 2037 Gottingen St, Halifax, NS B3K 3B1, Canada. It it framed in green rave lights and maples leaves. Shrek is standing in the middle of the image with a wide stance, hands out in front of him, almost like jazz hands. His fingertips glow. He is wearing rainbow rave glasses, and a pixelated, smiling Shrek face necklace.
A vertical image focusing on a bald sleepy librarian in glasses. They wear a black face mask over a KN95. They are leaning back in a chair with their arms crossed, their conference lanyard over their arms, eyes closed. They are wearing a black vest and orange long-sleeved collared shirt.
A white feminine presenting hand holding up a green key chain against a black, red, and gold pained backdrop. The key chain has a simple picture of a goose on it. Above the goose is written "silly goose club."
A white hand in a long sleeve shirt holding up a crochet monster mushroom against a painted, arched backdrop. The mushroom has a black base with neon teal eyes, noes, and fang filled mouth. The mushroom's cap has the same neon teal for it's underside, but it's top is more of a fuchsia colour with orange ridges.
The scene from Ghost Busters where the team are told to "Choose! Choose the form of the destructor!" It features the four ghostbusters on top of a building looking up at the viewer. Behind them is a night scene of the New York skyline.
A photograph of a stone toad gargoyle perched on a ledge reading a book. The wall above it is brick.
A picture of the Skidaddle Skidoodle wizard from Tumblr
On March 12, 2024, Alison Li, an historian of science and medicine, presents the 6th MacLennan Lecture, “Harry Benjamin, hormones, and the early history of transgender healthcare.” Li writes about hormones and the culture in which they are shaped. She is the author of Wondrous Transformations: A Maverick Physician, the Science of Hormones, and the Birth of the Transgender Revolution. It is the story of Dr. Harry Benjamin (1885-1986), best known for his pioneering work in transgender medicine.
A presentation title page with a picture of Data and Lore from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is the image where Lore is holding a figure up talking to Data, who stands, as usual, dispassionate. The title of the talk is: Big Bang Bucks or Fandom Freedoms? Neurodivergent Cultures and Media Representation.
A 1950s styled magazine picture. On the right of the image, in the background, a white man is walking towards a house, wiping his brow. Beside him is an old push lawnmower. Text on him reads "People who think 'doing history' is reading a few Wikipedia pages." In the foreground, behind a door, his family (all white) are posed like they are about to welcome him home, but all of them are hiding knives. The mother is labelled "historiography," the children, a boy and a girl, are labelled "primary documents," and "Chicago Manual of Style."
A page from Samuel R. Wells' phrenological book "New Physiognomy, or, Signs of Character, As Manifested Through Temperament and External Forms, and especially in ‘The Human Face Divine," Some text with two pictures above it, on the left a drawing of a rather shaggy goose placed beside a human wearing a scruffy top hat labelled "goosey" who is supposed to look like the goose. Bellow the text is a drawing of a rather shaggy fox with an image of a man's face with mutton chops who is supposed to look like the fox. He is labelled "foxy."
A screenshot from and article in Commander's Herald. "How do you lead (and betray) a revolution in EDH? In our new article on Commander's Herald, we look at a deck Vladimir Lenin may have enjoyed playing." What Would They Play? Vladimir Lenin's EDH Deck, Commander's Herald.