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Rochelle 🇨🇦

@mazar.bsky.social
316 followers 335 following 324 posts

Librarian. Writer of middle grade fiction. Dangerously optimistic. She/her. London, ON.

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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Of the many calls to action to be found in this AI bizarro world, the one that keeps getting my attention is the apparent need and desire from so many people for a private, shame- and judgement-free space to ask questions.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Librarians: we have been hard at work designing and offering information literacy programs for the last 40 years. And here we are. Were we doing it wrong? Did we achieve something, and the timeline would have been much worse without our work? It's hard to fathom.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Lately I have been in multiple meetings where we appear to be reinventing library services and approaches we jettisoned 20 years ago. That's not shade: more than half the time I'm the one doing the re-inventing. I can't believe the words coming out of my mouth half the time, but things have changed.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I’m a one-issue London municipal voter, and that issue is narrowing Wharncliffe.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I know there's no evidence of ice age people knitting, but it really seems like a reasonable ice age technology. And it wouldn't necessarily leave easy evidence, would it.
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Surprised Eel Historian, PhD @greenleejw.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
I wrote a thread the other day about eels' life cycle, 'cause it's a wild story. Fun stuff! But did you know that I also did a map? And that you can own it? It's true! I drew a map of the eels' life cycle, from their perspective, and you can order one for your wall! #eels #maps etsy.me/3Nvk5jK
etsy.me
Eel Life Cycle Map - Etsy
This Wall Decor item by SurprisedEelMaps has 15 favorites from Etsy shoppers. Ships from Hialeah, FL. Listed on Jun 15, 2026
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
The convention of Americans referring to "the South" in international contexts: that's odd, isn't it? Doesn't every place have a south?
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Nice to get this Treaty 6 #landback preview. The future is Indigenous.
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The Breakdown AB @thebreakdownab.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
BREAKING! "Saddle Lake Cree Nation is asserting its Treaty rights and jurisdiction to provide safe refuge for those seeking and providing gender-affirming care. Any Albertan will be able to access gender-affirming care on Saddle Lake Cree Nation reserved lands and territories"
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
A thought that is brand new to me: are there not rules about how wide a lane has to be? Is it legal, or wise, for a lane to incorporate the curb?
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Dr. Scott Hartman - but not THAT kind of doctor @skeletaldrawing.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Have you ever wanted to visually compare the size of your favorite extinct animals? Now you can, as I'm launching an interactive size comparison tool on my website. Give it a try and let me know what you think: www.skeletaldrawing.com/compare/
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Write what you know, they say. What if someone cloned Neanderthals and pygmy mammoths in modern day Vancouver? Check. Neanderthal twins living in Chemainus chasing Sasquatch sightings? Drafting it. Kid living in a winter house on the mammoth steppe during the last glacial maximum? On it.
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🇨🇦LisaFellarinaAntifa📎 @lisaantifafella.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
You can sign until November! Let’s get that number up!
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
On Saturday morning at 4am, I fell down some stairs and bashed my head into the corner of a pony wall. With a bleeding head injury and a massive bruise in a straight line down my upper arm, I was briefly worried that the pony wall might be structurally important and I may have hurt my house.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
My sectional arrived in Toronto last week, spent this week like a tourist I guess, is taking the long weekend to recuperate, and is arriving on Wednesday. Will it be worth the wait? Will it fill the gap in my living room?
Living room with a missing sectional.
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Tony Corsentino @notalegalrecord.net · 21/07/2026
AI companies are buying, scanning, and destroying older books to improve their models' training data & avoid problems of "model collapse" (wherein LLMs choke on their own slop). One of their suppliers is Better World Books, which partners with public libraries. www.404media.co/ai-companies...
404media.co
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Imagine assuming people rake thousands of square kms of forests.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
That thing when you're getting going on a new story draft and the tipping point happens: now you're in it. You're there, it's real, you can feel it and smell it. You know that moment? Glorious.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Surely there's a financial penalty to breaking a trade agreement.
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Maureen Johnson @maureenjohnsonbooks.com · 13/07/2026
JKR and her new org apparently helped get the new Amnesty International report on how TERF organizations destroy lives taken down from their site. Well, guess what? The Streisand Effect is real. Here's the entire report in a thread. Read it. Share it.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
I'm halfway through Tae Keller's JENNIFER CHAN IS NOT ALONE and I'm just
static.klipy.com
Michael Urie: I Adore You (Younger)
Alt: Michael Urie: I Adore You
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
rochelle.mazar.ca/2026/07/12/a...
rochelle.mazar.ca
Putting in a Hard Day’s Work at the Word Factory - Working Title
I am fascinated the whole phenomenon of generative AI as a fiction-writing machine. Not because I think it's a good idea (it's a terrible idea), but because of what it tells us about what we think the...
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
I wrote a story set in Wesbrook Village, one of the neighbourhoods at UBC. It's an experiment in utopian urban density. The UBC farm is there, I gave them a herd of pygmy mammoths. The student who worked there were with me on the need for pygmy mammoths. #QueerWriters #writesky #writers
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
I wonder if it's even technically possible for AI to write good fiction. I know it can write prose that's technically proficient at the line level, but can it construct a unique and specific emotional experience that resonates with human beings across ~70K words? Or even 5K?
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
indigenous.ubc.ca/2026/06/02/x... 🙌❤️
indigenous.ubc.ca
Xwi7xwa Library Head appointment announced - Indigenous Portal
UBC Library recently announced Kayla Lar-Son, Métis, as permanent Head of Xwi7xwa Library. She takes the helm of the branch library after serving as Acting Head for the past two years. “Kayla has prov...
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Buy a beautiful gothic revival Ontario cottage, immediately discover the clay pipes of your sewer line are collapsing. Is there a better introduction to homeownership?
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
I feel like i've been unpacking for 17 years. But at least I'm almost done. Hopefully I never have to do this again. Moving, amirite?
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
@jessglanz.bsky.social <3
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Both packing and unpacking are their own unique and terrible beasts. In both cases, I have to ask myself why I own so much stuff. The movers tell me I don't have much stuff at all, but I very much beg to differ.
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Jessica Price @delafina777.bsky.social · 25/03/2026
Oh hey, I am once again going to talk about lack of distress tolerance, specifically for shame, and how it ties together AI, the “male loneliness epidemic,” Trumpism, and yes, people’s indignation that anyone might think they’re a bad person for continuing to buy Harry Potter merch.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 19/04/2026
I proposed, and she said yes! My new spouse is 145 years old, blonde, and gothic revival.
Gothic revival yellow brick Ontario Cottage with gingerbread ornamentation, a centre gable, and bay windows. She’s a beaut.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
Oh sure, I'll put an upholstered bed frame together by myself. How hard could it be? #famouslastwords
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 21/03/2026
I'm fascinated by the Shy Girl fiasco. We clearly underestimate fiction as a culture, because some people think you can just have ideas and get a machine to generate a novel for you. But when you do that, what comes out is words that communicate nothing. Because a novel is way more than some ideas.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Our student staff just learned how to use a DVD player. No part of it works the way they thought it would.
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Dr Rebecca Wragg Sykes @lemoustier.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
🧪 So if de-extincted 'mammoths' really are "about two years" away, then they need to be implanting embryos right now, as @toriherridge.bsky.social pointed out in 2024. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...
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Nice to meet you. @ahuihou.org · 03/03/2026
"AI is turning research into a scientific monoculture." www.nature.com/articles/s44...
nature.com
AI is turning research into a scientific monoculture - Communications Psychology
The rush to study generative AI is producing a feedback loop of topical and methodological convergence, flattening scientific imagination and crowding out the pluralism needed to keep research adaptiv...
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 28/02/2026
I just want an endless stream of pictures of dinosaurs looking like fat, fluffy birds. For my mental health.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 15/02/2026
I don't think you have to be MEAN to people who use AI. Just be HONEST and don't accept their claim that the AI slop they prompted was authored or created by them. That's not mean, that's just the truth. Granted, being bluntly truthful can land as meanness to some people.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
Ooof. Hug your kids.
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Ontario Library Association @onlibraryassoc.bsky.social · 09/02/2026
OLA is accepting proposals from all libraries to share experiences & ideas about washrooms for the first-ever Safer Spaces Symposium. The goal is to create a day that benefits & speaks to the experiences of library systems, users, & staff. Submit your proposal by Feb. 13! buff.ly/gvnuAYb
A multi-coloured OLA Safer Spaces Symposium event graphic. Text reads: “Safer Spaces Symposium. Library Washrooms. Virtual Conference | March 25, 2026. Submit your presentation idea by February 13.”
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Spider-Man: Pre-owned Day @redderbeanpaste.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
i think we all need to step back and realize that peak art was made when neolithic pot in the shape of a pig was fired
a round pottery piece with pig eyes and a snout
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Jason Paris @jasonparis.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
Join me for an uncanny and nostalgic journey through Brampton's tragically forgotten malls. Curated by yours truly! Feb. 28 leaving from Toronto’s Chinatown Centre. #LiminalAssembly
eventbrite.ca
LIMINAL ASSEMBLY: Dead Malls Field Trip | Brampton
Join us for an uncanny and nostalgic journey through Brampton's tragically beautiful forgotten malls.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 02/02/2026
My uncle got typhus is the late 1940s Berlin. There were so many cases they turned a morgue into a children's isolation ward.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 01/02/2026
I'm listening to the Sold a Story podcast, and it's blowing my mind. I had no idea this was happening. And I'm baffled by concept three cueing.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
It seems like everyone is struggling and/or emotionally overwhelmed. There's so much going on. The smallest thing might be someone's last straw. It's a lot of absorb, and it's a lot to hold in. Can we take the year off, or something?
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 23/01/2026
Emotionally exhausted, but so proud of the UBC students who turned up in the hundreds today to expressed peaceful solidarity in the face of unwelcome and uninvited "debate" about residential schools.
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Justin McElroy 🇨🇦 @jmcelroy.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Fair bit of a scene at the OneBC event at UBC and the counterevent organized by students. Close to a thousand people here, mostly drowning out OneBC supporters. Some pushing and shoving, nothing escalating past that yet it seems.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Today is going to be a difficult day in my part of the world. But this difficult day is a reminder that as long as we don't work towards decolonization, reconciliation, and dismantling white supremacy culture, we pave the way for more difficult days like this one.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
I'm stuck on the idea that someone might *unknowingly* use genAI to write fiction they're claiming as their own. This seems like a plausibility shield being raised pre-emptively. There is no way to *accidentally* outsource your writing to an LLM, no matter how many systems it's built into.
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Rochelle 🇨🇦 @mazar.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
Sometimes you fly from Toronto to Vancouver, but end up spending the night in Calgary. One of life’s little surprises. Why visit just one province when you could visit two? Maybe tonight I’ll be in Winnipeg, who knows? Life’s rich pageant.
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