Before we continue, I want to add the usual caveat that I actually don’t want to be right about these fandoms being dead. I like enthusiasm and energy and it’s a shame to see it vanish.
Mists of Avalon
Remember that period of time of about 15 years, where absolutely everybody read this book and was obsessed with it? It could not have been bigger, and the fandom was Anne Rice huge, overlapping for several years with USENET and the early World Wide Web…but it’s since petered out.
Mists of Avalon’s popularity may be due to the most excellent case of hitting a demographic sweet spot ever. The book was a feminist retelling of the Arthurian Mythos where Morgan Le Fay is the main character, a pagan from matriarchal goddess religions who is fighting against encroaching Christianity and patriarchal forms of society coming in with it. Also, it made Lancelot bisexual and his conflict is how torn he is about his attraction to both Arthur and Guinevere.
Remember, this novel came out in 1983 – talk about being ahead of your time! If it came out today, the reaction from a certain corner would be something like “it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that tumblr is at it again.”
Man, demographically speaking, that’s called “nailing it.” It used to be one of the favorite books of the kind of person who’s bookshelf is dominated by fantasy novels about outspoken, fiery-tongued redheaded women, who dream of someday moving to Scotland, who love Enya music and Kate Bush, who sell homemade needlepoint stuff on etsy, who consider their religious beliefs neo-pagan or wicca, and who have like 15 cats, three of which are named Isis, Hypatia, and Morrigan.
This type of person is still with us, so why did this novel fade in popularity? There’s actually a single hideous reason: after her death around 2001, facts came out that Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her daughters sexually. Even when she was alive, she was known for defending and enabling a known child abuser, her husband, Walter Breen. To say people see your work differently after something like this is an understatement – especially if your identity is built around being a progressive and feminist author.
Robotech
I try to break up my sections on dead fandoms into three parts: first, I explain the property, then explain why it found a devoted audience, and finally, I explain why that fan devotion and community went away. Well, in the case of Robotech, I can do all three with a single sentence: it was the first boy pilot/giant robot Japanimation series that shot for an older, teenage audience to be widely released in the West. Robotech found an audience when it was the only true anime to be widely available, and lost it when became just another import anime show. In the days of Crunchyroll, it’s really hard to explain what made Robotech so special, because it means describing a different world.
Try to imagine what it was like in 1986 for Japanime fans: there were barely any video imports, and if you wanted a series, you usually had to trade tapes at your local basement club (they were so precious they couldn’t even be sold, only traded). If you were lucky, you were given a script to translate what you were watching. Robotech though, was on every day, usually after school. You want an action figure? Well, you could buy a Robotech Valkyrie or a Minmei figure at your local corner FAO Schwartz.
However, the very strategy that led to it getting syndicated is the very reason it was later vilified by the purists who emerged when anime became a widespread cultural force: strictly speaking, there actually is no show called “Robotech.” Since Japanese shows tend to be short run, say, 50-60 episodes, it fell well under the 80-100 episode mark needed for syndication in the US. The producer of Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, had a solution: he’d cut three unrelated but similar looking series together into one, called “Robotech.” The shows looked very similar, had similar love triangles, used similar tropes, and even had little references to each other, so the fit was natural. It led to Robotech becoming a weekday afternoon staple with a strong fandom who called themselves “Protoculture Addicts.” There were conventions entirely devoted to Robotech. The supposed shower scene where Minmei was bare-breasted was the barely whispered stuff of pervert legend in pre-internet days. And the tie in novels, written with the entirely western/Harmony Gold conception of the series and which continued the story, were actually surprisingly readable.
The final nail in the coffin of Robotech fandom was the rise of Sailor Moon, Toonami, Dragonball, and yes, Pokemon (like MC Hammer’s role in popularizing hip hop, Pokemon is often written out of its role in creating an audience for the next wave of cartoon imports out of insecurity). Anime popularity in the West can be defined as not a continuing unbroken chain like scifi book fandom is, but as an unrelated series of waves, like multiple ancient ruins buried on top of each other (Robotech was the vanguard of the third wave, as Anime historians reckon); Robotech’s wave was subsumed by the next, which had different priorities and different “core texts.” Pikachu did what the Zentraedi and Invid couldn’t do: they destroyed the SDF-1.
Legion of Super-Heroes
Legion of Superheroes was comic set in the distant future that combined superheroes with space opera, with a visual aesthetic that can best be described as “Star Trek: the Motion Picture, if it was set in a disco.”
I’ve heard wrestling described as “a soap opera for men.” If that’s the case, then Legion of Super-Heroes was a soap opera fornerds. The book is about attractive 20-somethings who seem to hook up all the time. As a result, it had a large female fanbase, which, I cannot stress enough, is incredibly unusual for this era in comics history. And if you have female fans, you get a lot of shipping and slashfic, and lots of speculation over which of the boy characters in the series is gay. The fanon answer is Element Lad, because he wore magenta-pink and never had a girlfriend. (Can’t argue with bulletproof logic like that.) In other words, it was a 1970s-80s fandom that felt much more “modern” than the more right-brained, bloodless, often anal scifi fandoms that existed around the same time, where letters pages were just nitpicking science errors by model train and elevator enthusiasts.
Legion Headquarters seemed to be a rabbit fuck den built around a supercomputer and Danger Room. Cosmic Boy dressed like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. There’s one member, Duo Damsel, who can turn into two people, a power that, in the words of Legion writer Jim Shooter, was “useful for weird sex…and not much else.”
LSH was popular because the fans were insanely horny.
This is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the thirstiestfandom of all time.
You might think I’m overselling this, but I really think that’s an under-analyzed part of how some kinds of fiction build a devoted fanbase.
For example, a big reason for the success of Mass Effect is that everyone has a favorite girl or boy, and you have the option to romance them. Likewise, everyone who was a fan of Legion remembers having a crush. Sardonic Ultra Boy for some reason was a favorite among gay male nerds (aka the Robert Conrad Effect). Tall, blonde, amazonian telepath Saturn Girl, maybe the first female team leader in comics history, is for the guys with backbone who prefer Veronica over Betty. Shrinking Violet was a cute Audrey Hepburn type. And don’t forget Shadow Lass, who was a blue skinned alien babe with pointed ears and is heavily implied to have an accent (she was Aayla Secura before Aayla Secura was Aayla Secura). Light Lass was commonly believed to be “coded lesbian” because of a short haircut and her relationships with men didn’t work out. The point is, it’s one thing to read about the adventures of a superteam, and it implies a totally different level of mental and emotional involvement to read the adventures of your imaginary girlfriend/boyfriend.
Now, I should point out that of all the fandoms I’ve examined here, LSH was maybe the smallest. Legion was never a top seller, but it was a favorite of the most devoted of fans who kept it alive all through the seventies and eighties with an energy and intensity disproportionate to their actual numbers. My gosh, were LSH fans devoted! Interlac and Legion Outpost were two Legion fanzines that are some of the most famous fanzines in comics history.
If nerd culture fandoms were drugs, Star Wars would be alcohol, Doctor Who would be weed, but Legion of Super-Heroes would be injecting heroin directly into your eyeballs. Maybe it is because the Legionnaires were nerdy, too: they played Dungeons and Dragons in their off time (an escape, no doubt, from their humdrum, mundane lives as galaxy-rescuing superheroes). There were sometimes call outs to Monty Python. Basically, the whole thing had a feel like the dorkily earnest skits or filk-singing at a con. Legion felt like it’s own fan series, guest starring Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.
It helped that the boundary between fandom and professional was incredibly porous. For instance, pro-artist Dave Cockrum did covers for Legion fanzines. Former Legion APA members Todd and Mary Biernbaum got a chance to actually write Legion, where, with the gusto of former slashfic writers given the keys to canon, their major contribution was a subplot that explicitly made Element Lad gay. Mike Grell, a professional artist who got paid to work on the series, did vaguely porno-ish fan art. Again, it’s hard to tell where the pros started and the fandom ended; the inmates were running the asylum.
Mostly, Legion earned this devotion because it could reward it in a way no other comic could. Because Legion was not a wide market comic but was bought by a core audience, after a point, there were no self-contained one-and-done Legion stories. In fact, there weren’t even really arcs as we know it, which is why Legion always has problems getting reprinted in trade form. Legion was plotted like a daytime soap opera: there were always five different stories going on in every issue, and a comic involved cutting between them. Sure, like daytime soap operas, there’s never a beginning, just endless middles, so it was totally impossible for a newbie to jump on board…but soap operas know what they are doing: long term storytelling rewards a long term reader.
This brings me to today, where Legion is no longer being published by DC. There is no discussion about a movie or TV revival. This isamazing. Comics are a world where the tiniest nerd groups get pandered to: Micronauts, Weirdworld, Seeker 3000, and Rom have had revival series, for pete’s sake. It’s incredible there’s no discussion of a film or TV treatment, either; friggin Cyborg from New Teen Titans is getting a solo movie.
Why did Legion stop being such a big deal? Where did the fandom that supported it dissolve to? One word: X-Men. Legion was incredibly ahead of its time. In the 60s and 70s, there were barely any “fan” comics, since superhero comics were like animation is today: mostly aimed at kids, with a minority of discerning adult/teen fans, and it was success among kids, not fans, that led to something being a top seller (hence, “fan favorites” in the 1970s, as surprising as it is to us today, often did not get a lot of work, like Don MacGregor or Barry Smith). But as newsstands started to push comics out, the fan audience started to get bigger and more important…everyone else started to catch up to the things that made Legion unique: most comics started to have attractive people who paired up into couples and/or love triangles, and featured extremely byzantine long term storytelling. If Legion of Super-Heroes is going to be remembered for anything, it’s for being the smaller scale “John the Baptist” to the phenomenon of X-Men, the ultimate “fan” comic.
The other thing that killed Legion, apart from Marvel’s Merry Mutants, that is, was the r-word: reboots. A reboot only works for some properties, but not others. You reboot something when you want to find something for a mass audience to respond to, like with Zorro, Batman, or Godzilla.
Legion, though, was not a comic for everybody, it was a fanboy/girl comic beloved by a niche who read it for continuing stories and minutiae (and tojack off, and in some cases, jill off). Rebooting a comic like that is a bad idea. You do not reboot something where the main way you engage with the property, the greatest strength, is the accumulated lore and history. Rebooting a property like that means losing the reason people like it, and unless it’s something with a wide audience, you only lose fans and won’t get anything in return for it. So for something like Legion (small fandom obsessed with long form plots and details, but unlike Trek, no name recognition) a reboot is the ultimate Achilles heel that shatters everything, a self-destruct button they kept hitting over and over and over until there was nothing at all left.
E. E. Smith’s Lensman Novels
The Lensman series is like Gil Evans’s jazz: it’s your grandparents’ favorite thing that you’ve never heard of.
I mean, have you ever wondered exactly what scifi fandom talked about before the rise of the major core texts and cultural objects (Star Trek, Asimov, etc)? Well, it was this. Lensmen was the subject of fanfiction mailed in manilla envelopes during the 30s, 40s, and 50s (some of which are still around). If you’re from Boston, you might recognize that the two biggest and oldest scifi cons there going back to the 1940s, Boskone (Boscon, get it?) and Arisia, are references to the Lensman series. This series not only created space opera as we know it, but contributed two of the biggest visuals in scifi, the interstellar police drawn from different alien species, and space marines in power armor.
My favorite sign of how big this series was and how fans responded to it, was a great wedding held at Worldcon that duplicated Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa’s wedding on Klovia. This is adorable:
The basic story is pure good vs. evil: galactic civilization faces a crime and piracy wave of unprecedented proportions from technologically advanced pirates (the memory of Prohibition, where criminals had superior firearms and faster cars than the cops, was strong by the mid-1930s). A young officer, Kimball Kinnison (who speaks in a Stan Lee esque style of dialogue known as “mid-century American wiseass”), graduates the academy and is granted a Lens, an object from an ancient mystery civilization, who’s true purpose is unknown.
Lensman Kinnison discovers that the “crime wave” is actually a hostile invasion and assault by a totally alien culture that is based on hierarchy, intolerant of failure, and at the highest level, is ruled by horrifying nightmare things that breathe freezing poison gases. Along the way, he picks up allies, like van Buskirk, a variant human space marine from a heavy gravity planet who can do a standing jump of 20 feet in full space armor, Worsel, a telepathic dragon warrior scientist with the technical improvisation skills of MacGyver (who reads like the most sadistically minmaxed munchkinized RPG character of all time), and Nandreck, a psychologist from a Pluto-like planet of selfish cowards.
The scale of the conflict starts small, just skirmishes with pirates, but explodes to near apocalyptic dimensions. This series has space battles with millions of starships emerging from hyperspacial tubes to attack the ultragood Arisians, homeworld of the first intelligent race in the cosmos. By the end of the fourth book, there are mind battles where the reflected and parried mental beams leave hundreds of innocent bystanders dead. In the meantime we get evil Black Lensmen, the Hell Hole in Space, and superweapons like the Negasphere and the Sunbeam, where an entire solar system was turned into a vacuum tube.
It’s not hard to understand why Lensmen faded in importance. While the alien Lensmen had lively psychologies, Lensman Kimball Kinnison was not an interesting person, and that’s a problem when scifi starts to become more about characterization. The Lensman books, with their love of police and their sexism (it is an explicit plot point that the Lens is incompatible with female minds – in canon there are no female Lensmen) led to it being judged harshly by the New Wave writers of the 1960s, who viewed it all as borderline fascist military-scifi establishment hokum, and the reputation of the series never recovered from the spirit of that decade.
Prisoner of Zenda
Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose as him in palace intrigues. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity, swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political thriller.
The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs of Prisoner of Zenda. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950, I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). The only novel in the 20th Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. Robert Heinlein and Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda. Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s Kingdom of Latveria. Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a “Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode.
Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.”
One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Far and away, the largest immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. There were entire cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant story. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no longer exist. There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the US, the way the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day (there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). If you’re reading this and you’re an academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic.
A. Merritt
Pop quiz: who was the most popular and influential fantasy author during the 1930s and 40s?
If you answered Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, you’re wrong – it was actually Abraham Merritt. He was the most popular writer of his age of the kind of fiction he did, and he’s since been mostly forgotten. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has said that A. Merritt was his favorite fantasy and horror novelist.
Why did A. Merritt and his fandom go away, when at one point, he was THE fantasy author? Well, obviously one big answer was the 1960s counterculture, which brought different writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft to the forefront (by modern standards Lovecraft isn’t a fantasy author, but he was produced by the same early century genre-fluid effluvium that produced Merritt and the rest). The other answer is that A. Merritt was so totally a product of the weird occult speculation of his age that it’s hard to even imagine him clicking with audiences in other eras. His work is based on fringe weirdness that appealed to early 20th Century spiritualism and made sense at the time: reincarnation, racial memory, an obsession with lost race stories and the stone age, and weirdness like the 1920s belief that the Polar Arctic is the ancestral home of the Caucasian race. In other words, it’s impossible to explain Merritt without a ton of sentences that start with “well, people in the 1920s thought that…” That’s not a good sign when it comes to his universality.
That’s it for now. Do you have any suggestions on a dead fandom, or do you keep one of these “dead” fandoms alive in your heart?
I’m still in the Lensman fandom! It’s trash, but it’s *my* trash.
Tags:
#interesting #long post #history #the more you know #(I’d vaguely heard of Mists of Avalon and I’d heard the name of Lensman but that was about it) #I recommend the other posts in the series too #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
ok so i’m pretty sure i know at least one or possibly two people in toronto
so one of the players from my d&d group has a question for y’all
she says “me and my gaggle of rich white friends are planning a road trip to canada, toronto is only like 8 hours from chi town so like not terrible, i was wondering what’s like fun stuff to do besides niagara falls and excessive drinking”
so uh, yeah. any suggestions? :-)
The CN Tower is neat if you’re okay with heights. (The elevator hurts your ears a bit, though. Try to swallow a lot or otherwise relieve the pressure.) There’s a transparent panel in one part of the floor. I’m not sure if my Girl Guide leader ever gave me the picture she took of me lying on that panel, with the ground far below as the backdrop, but that exists somewhere and you might like to do the same.
Casa Loma could be good, but I’m not sure what it’s like when they’re not hosting a big Girl Guide event.
There’s a biggish† amusement park in Vaughan (just outside Toronto) called Canada’s Wonderland. I’ve been there, like, once, over a decade ago, but I think it was decent?
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I’m guessing from the Niagara Falls mention that it’s more of a “general Southwestern Ontario” thing than a “just Toronto” thing, so further out stuff:
Hmm. I mean, I went on a lot of field trips in my teens, but I feel like a lot of them are…like, they’re nice, but not in a *distinctive* way. (Also, some of them were *only* for school and school-like groups: the Woodlawn Memorial Park cemetery in Guelph would be pretty dull without their (great) school tour.) There are plenty of other museums in other places that are just as nice. Still, a general “always check out the local museums when touristing” policy will serve you pretty well here as it will elsewhere.
Some exceptions and possible exceptions to the general “check out museums”:
Last I heard the Ontario Science Centre (in Toronto) was kind of overpriced if you don’t already have a reciprocal membership with another museum††, but I think they’ve added more stuff since then and might be worthwhile now? And you might be rich enough not to care in any case.
The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame (in London) is basically just their website given physical form (a bunch of plaques and some screens with videos). If you’re interested in their stuff, just read the website (…if your computer can handle it): don’t bother showing up in person.
You note that most-to-all of the people in your group are white, so probably don’t go to any archaeology museums (the one I’m thinking of is the Museum of Ontario Archaeology in London) unless you’re the right kind of woke masochists (or are on the opposite end of the caring spectrum and aren’t bothered by Let’s Talk About These People Your People Oppressed at all; you do you, none of my business how many fucks you actually give about people as long you treat them okay). It’s too awkward otherwise to qualify as “fun stuff”.
(I kind of want to check out an archaeology museum in Europe someday. I bet they’re less awkward.)
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I can’t give a whole lot in the way of restaurant recommendations, because my ability to take pleasure from food is somewhat limited. (Like, I *can* enjoy food, but I don’t really enjoy fancy food much *more* than plain food, and it never gets to the waxing-rhapsodic kinds of levels I’ve seen other people reach.)
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The fact that you phrase it as “a road trip to Canada” implies you aren’t already in Canada, so maybe some more national-level stuff would be useful.
If you haven’t had Tim Tams before and are curious about them, they sell those at Zehrs (a grocery store chain of moderate fanciness/pricey-ness). Imported from Australia and everything.
If you haven’t had Mars bars before and are curious about them, they sell those pretty much anywhere with an impulse-buy rack. I don’t think they’re imported from Britain, but it probably doesn’t matter. They’re basically the same as Milky Ways in America, though. (to be confusing, Milky Way in Britain refers to what both America and Canada call “3 Musketeers”)
The best flavours of Tim Hortons bagel are Tomato Asiago (not as pizza-like as you would expect, but a different kind of good) and Garlic Parmesan, with Chive getting an honourable mention. Get them toasted and buttered for best results. They’re not available all the time in all branches, though, and tbh I don’t actually know if they carry them at all anymore; it’s been a while since I ate there. The fruit slushies are good too, and the muffins are decent. I don’t tend to buy anything else there (I don’t drink coffee).
(In general–and this might seem obvious to you already, I don’t know, but just in case–keep an eye out for interesting-looking food you wouldn’t be able to get in your normal location. I’ve lived here long enough that it’s kind of hard to dig through my memory for which things struck me as strange at first, though I could probably go “oh yeah, that was one of them” if somebody presented me with one.)
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(JT, let me know how this goes if you can; I’m curious.)
— †I went googling to confirm the name and Wikipedia calls it “the country’s largest”, so maybe I’m just spoiled by having seen Disney World.
††If you travel a lot and like museums at all (and haven’t already done this), maybe look into whether any of your local museums are part of a reciprocal-membership agreement and get a membership there. Back when I was an upper-middle-class South Jerseyan, my family had a membership at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and it served us well throughout the East Coast. (Would probably have served us well out West, too, if we’d ever gone there.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #the more you know #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #long post #food
anyone have any advice on getting out of bed in the morning?
i don’t even mean in the depressed way, but my alarm goes off, i’m awake, and i spend the first hour of my day lying in bed on my phone. which i don’t think is a very good habit.
i tried placing my alarm on the other side of the room, but that doesn’t help, i turn it off and go right back into bed. my morning self doesn’t agree with my evening self
Count aggressively up to 5 (in your head at first, but out loud if that’s not working for you) and then spring out of bed.
It doesn’t sound like it would work, but I find that if I simply lack the energy, then the counting with emotion is a low commitment activity for a short little boost; and if I lack the motivation, it hijacks the brain and keeps it from rationalizing reasons to stay in bed; and if I just feel depressed, I cant focus on the bad feels while i’m counting. Plus counting up is a non-daunting task that you can focus on instead of having to get out of bed.
I read this technique on the internet years ago and it worked for me.
Tags:
#yes this #counting to 5 is very helpful for this sort of thing #(I hadn’t heard the ”aggressively” part and I don’t think I do it like that) #(firmly maybe but not aggressively) #(but someone else might find that helps) #I’m not sure about that explanation of why but however it works it works
thank god for the mythbusters though because it used to be that whenever i knew i had insomnia i’d just kind of accept it and stay up doing whatever until my morning classes and spend the day feeling like shit
but then they did an episode where they established that even just fucking laying there for a half hour, not even sleeping just laying there and not even for an hour, makes a significant difference and you’ll feel way better
it has made a huge difference in my life to know that it’s okay if i can’t fall asleep, it takes a lot of the pressure off and ironically helps me fall asleep better
If anyone wants to look it up, the episode was specifically the Deadliest Catch crossover ep, and the myth was that it’s better/safer when working a 30 hour shift to take a 20 minute nap every six hours rather than try to power through. They did an obstacle course test, one without naps and one with, and even though they couldn’t even sleep half the time the naps resulted in their scores doubling.
So actually I undersold it, even if it’s 7:40 and your alarm goes off at 8 just lie down and shut your eyes and it will still be better than nothing
could have done with this information this afternoon when i was lying there unable to get up but still some variety of awake and mutinously angry with myself for not being able to actually open my eyes
Tags:
#so apparently lying there because I’m too stubborn to give up #is actually the correct response? #the more you know
TIL that not everybody can work the “rumble muscle” in their ear. I just assumed that everybody can do it, but nobody ever talked about it because it is so useless.
Tags:
#the more you know #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I don’t think I have this #though I looked at some of the notes and they seem to think it’s the same sound you get when you yawn? #which I do have
Holy cow, so y’all. A lot of us have sensory issues. A friend of mine has a toddler who is basically me when it comes to this sorta thing. A lot of OTs recommend weighted blankets but those are 1. expensive to try (I mean WHAT IF THEY DON’T WORK?) 2. HOT.
Now, I haven’t tried these myself because after decades of trial and error I have found what works for me (and I’m claustrophobic…so these frighten me as much as they fascinate lol), but I will tell you that my friend is RAVING about them on facebook. Her toddler has been sleeping through the night finally without getting under his fitted sheet with all his stuffed animals and blankets) and he is taking actual naps. A weighted blanket didn’t work for them (and they were fortunate to be able to borrow one), but these are much more economical.
That’s right. 40 bucks compared to the hundred plus I see for most weighted blankets (and those aren’t even adult sized).
Now, we know tumblr doesn’t like to allow linked posts in the search results so if y’all could pass this around that would be great. These sheets have already changed the life of a family I know, I’m sure they’d help others.
40% of Detroiters have no internet access. The Detroit Community Technology Project and similar projects across the city are skipping over the telcos altogether and wiring up their own mesh broadband networks, where gigabit connections are transmitted by line-of-site wireless across neighborhoods from the tops of tall buildings; it’s called the Equitable Internet Initiative.
This is possible in part because of the ubiquitous abandoned dark fiber, which runs under the streets of Detroit, as it does across many US cities, unused and dormant. The project relies on “digital stewards” who undergo a 20-week training program that teaches them to pull fiber, configure routers, and install and service microwave antennas, as well as teaching their communities to use the services delivered over the internet.
Each local mesh is designed to wire together a neighborhood on an intranet that would continue to function even in the event of internet outages, providing a resilient hub for organizing responses to extreme weather, natural disasters, and other crises.
#I feel like this is relevant #the resiliency of the Internet #the more you know #there is probably some warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #(it seemed fitting)
I am getting first-aid certified because I have an anxiety disorder and here is an IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFORMATION:
if you have a medical emergency and you don’t know what to do, CALL 911. The dispatcher will tell you what to do. They do not just send you paramedics. This is probably the single most important thing to remember about medical emergencies.
If you’re in England, and the idea of calling 999 is too scary because you’re not sure whether it’s serious enough, you can also call 111 for non-emergency help. They’ll ask you a bunch of questions, and if it turns out that it is an emergency will (I’ve been told) call an ambulance for you, and if it’s not that serious give you some advice and call back in a few hours to check up on you.
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