Check It Out: Student Edition

Like the fine feline friends lounging real literary-like in the faux archival image above, your loving librarians are riding nothing but the mellowest vibes into 2023!

Though we're overflowing with dank insights and engaging commentary, we're keeping this missive tighter than a drumroll snare. Let's get it!

We were recently alarmed to hear that one of our most avid readers didn't know about the LMC's enormous array of ebooks and audiobooks. We could devise but a single solution to this heartbreaking, world-shattering confession: plugging some of our favorite digital platforms in WOHS's favorite newsletter as the year goes on.

Let's begin with...

Comics Plus gives you unlimited access to thousands of digital comics, graphic novels, and manga from popular publishers like ABDO, Andrews McMeel, BOOM! Studios, Capstone, Dark Horse, Europe Comics, Fantagraphics, Graphic Mundi, Humanoids, IDW, Image Comics, Kodansha, Lerner, Manga Classics, Papercutz, Tokyopop, UDON Entertainment, Yen Press, and dozens more.

There are NO HOLDS. There isn't a WAIT LIST. Ne'er-do-wells cannot LOSE THE BOOK YOU WANT, as the magic of digital reproduction grants you UNLIMITED COPIES OF ANY TITLE.

Want in? The tutorial below explains everything! (Be sure to maximize–there's no audio!)

We're immensely grateful to the students who shared their time and talent to create holiday cards for our community. We've attached but a single photo representative of the hundreds of cards you contributed to this awesome initiative. The children of Cooperman Barnabas Medical Center and the local Elks Lodge thank you all for your time, love, and creativity!

We're still busting out our Oculus Quest 2 headsets in the Bookstore/VR alley!

Stop by during lunch to spend some time with a virtual pet, float above the planet on the International Space Station, or engage in other immersive hijinks!

(Photo by Maximilian Prandstätter, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Celebrate the solstice by creating seasonal art during our month-long January Sip & Paint!

Stop by during lunch to enjoy a Capri Sun while you craft a magisterial winter masterpiece with your choice of paints and brushes. Seats are limited, so please see Mrs. Binns or Mr. Thompson for more information.

Seeking inspiration? Consider depicting:

1. A snow-covered landscape, featuring a frozen lake or river, snow-capped mountains, and a snowy forest.
2. A cozy cabin nestled in the woods, with smoke rising from the chimney and icicles hanging from the eaves.
3. A group of people enjoying winter sports such as skiing, ice skating, or ice fishing.
4. A winter sunset, with the sky painted in shades of pink, orange, and purple.
5. A holiday scene, such as a Christmas market or a Hanukkah celebration.
6. An animal native to cold climates such as a polar bear, a reindeer, a yeti, or a snowy owl.
7. A still life of winter flowers and foliage such as poinsettias, holly, and mistletoe.
8. A portrait of someone bundled up in warm winter clothing such as a scarf, hat, and gloves.

Everyone knows that chemistry teachers adore the LMC. In fact, your highly reactive librarians have been spending so much time beating down breakout boxes and manifesting multimedia marvels with the chem crowd that we've begun thinking deep chemical thoughts. Like...

Mountaineers are well-aware that the periodic table presents a tabular arrangement of the chemical elements ordered by their atomic number, electron configurations, and recurring chemical properties. The table's structure is what makes it periodic: groups of elements show trends that thicc brains can extrapolate from, expounding speculations about undiscovered elements.

Our dawg Dmitri Mendeleev smashed the share button on his version of the periodic table in 1869, when science nerds ain't know squat. His table rocked a mere 63 elements arranged according to atomic mass. Homeboy didn't even finish the job: the OG of periodicity flashed a gaptooth grin since D-Mend left space in the table for undiscovered elements, predicting their properties per the aforementioned parameters.

D-to-the-V wasn't the only clown squeezed into this car, as plenty of other scientists developed periodic tables around the same time. Mendeleev's table won out largely because it accurately predicted the properties of undiscovered elements, starting with gallium in 1875.

Improvements slowly accumulated, like in 1913 when Henry Moseley discovered that the atomic number (rather than atomic mass) determines an element's position in the periodic table. This momentous brain blast royally jacked junk up, rearranging the elements and tickling Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr pink.

As scientists put in work, the periodic table grew large and wide, packing on an additional 55 elements and becoming the swole beast we know today. The modern periodic table is organized into rows (periods) and columns (groups). The elements in a period stack the same number of electron shells and elements in the same group juggle the same number of valence electrons.

And the tally ticks higher! Today, the periodic table has been extended to include superfreaky elements with atomic numbers higher than 118—the sort you can only create through feats of artifice. Don't get too excited, sport: these elements, while mega-cute, are also highly unstable and exist but a brief moment before they decay, forming dowdy-but-stable elements.

Our book review challenge has been renewed for another month!

The next time you finish a fantabulous library book, swing by Destiny Discover, our most visually intensive catalog interface, and leave an honest review of what you've read!

We've appended a straightforward tutorial below. (Be sure to maximize–there's no audio!) We'll select three of our favorite reviews at the end of January, contact the reviewers, and reward their diligence with some health food (say, a bag of Cheetos or Doritos or what have you).

Start scribbling! We can't wait to read your reviews.

Do you love reading? Are you interested in books? Perhaps you enjoy the occasional snack?

The Mountaineer Book Club–cooler than Willa Cather munching an ice cream sandwich in the milking parlor on a moonless solstice night–hopes to see you at its January meetings!

The next two are scheduled for January 11th and January 25th in the LMC Computer Lab. See Mrs. Binns for more details!

How are you strutting into the new year?

Whether you're rocking tacky-trash Jordans or slapping the pavement with the swaggest dollar store flip-flops, put your best foot forward with one of these truculent reads!

Social anxiety is tough, but teens don’t have to figure it out alone. This empowering book will walk them through strategies that work. From practicing mindfulness to relaxing their bodies, readers can train their brains to help them gradually get back to doing more of what they love to do. These tools will help teens manage anxiety in the future and keep it from managing them.

This book uses evidence-based skills from cognitive behavioral therapy to give teens a toolkit to help kids overcome their anxiety and move toward becoming their bravest, fiercest selves.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless struggle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we could do things differently.