A Random Collection of Nonsense

you should also never ever unplug the air conditioner and stick a flashlight in the vent that blows air to see if we're in there. it's very bad, that place should not be checked

and whatever you do, if you've already made the mistake of unplugging it, don't remove it from the window for cleaning if possible. and whether it's possible to remove the unit or not, don't carefully disassemble the front panel, document where the screws go and plastic bits go, and open up the vent more to be able to get into it easily

as black mold, i'm an expert on this. you should heed my warnings: now, if you've somehow made the mistake of doing all of the above, you should not use warm water and dish soap to CLEAN the inside of the vent thoroughly. DON'T ever use a bottle brush to get into the hard to reach places. and certainly don't rinse and dry the cleaned area before carefully putting it back together

there's nothing wrong with us, black mold. we don't cause or exacerbate breathing conditions like asthma or other illnesses. it's cool, we're cool

furthermore, if you're capable of removing the window unit, DONT take a hose with the same soapy water and wash the portion of the window unit that sits outside the window and is therefore weatherproofed.

whatever you do, don't allow the air conditioner to dry before plugging it back in and turning it on again

and if you have a central air conditioner, you will definitely never ever consult a manual or sources online to perform a similar cleaning procedure on the cooling unit outside.

It is a lot of elbow grease and definitely not just spraying a can and waiting. Especially do not use the ones that are self rinsing via the natural condensation of water around the coils where all you have to do is let the foam settle a couple hours before turning the unit back on. These foaming cleaners are also terrible to use on the removable air intake vent covers. You definitely do not just have to spray the opposite side of all the trapped shit on the plastic mesh and let the foam push it off. Also that stuff on the cover is great for you and your air conditioner.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]

Doing a final project in my stats class, we have to pick a subject and collect data on it. We need at least 100 data points, and I figured this blog is big enough that a poll on here could get to that pretty easily!

Doing my project on if it’s more likely to be born in certain months :]

layer 2; like a decade ago the ceo of tumblr said they wanted to make it the "next pdf". people made fun of them for this.

layer 4: but recently staff announced they were going to update the site so [explanation of the update]

layer 5: but everyone got so verbally and cohesively upset that within 24 hours staff announced they were going to hold off

This quote has gained a lot of attention in the last ~decade (rough estimate), likely as a result of people relating it to current events. Lots of those events that look like the old world dying, after all, and the new world struggling to be born (or you might seek to actively make implications about such events via this comparison). And there truly is no dearth of monsters to be found.

layer 1.1: In Revolutionary Girl Utena, student council president Touga Kiryuu quotes Hermann Hesse’s 1919 novel Demian in a poem that opens with the line "If the egg's shell does not break, the chick will die without being born." This poem is repeated several times during the Student Council arc of the 1997 anime, and ties in heavily to the show's themes, especially the first arc thereof.

layer 1.2: The poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (written in 1919, in the aftermath of the Great War and on the tail end of a global pandemic) ends with the lines:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(Neither layer 1.1 nor 1.2 were intentional references on the part of the post's original author, but they are undeniably present within the metatext of the post.)

layer 2: in 2016, QZ.com (Quartz) posted an article about Yahoo's 2013 acquisition of tumblr, in which an anonymous tumblr employee reported Yahoo's Simon Khalaf saying that the site was “going to be the new PDF.” This became a sort of user shorthand/injoke for the idea that executives who are trying to direct tumblr's growth or change are out of touch with user desires or even the practical functions of the site.

layer 2.1: the anonymous tumblr staff member who reported Khalaf's words added: “It didn’t make any sense. We’d walk away scratching our heads.”

layer 3: so the way tumblr works is you can either make posts of various types, or reblog other users' posts. the chronological sequence of posts you make and reblog (based on the time you posted or reblogged them, rather than when they were originally made, in the case of reblogs), functions as the "output" or "content" of your blog. the output of however many blogs a given user "follows" is organized, again chronologically, into that user's "dashboard", wherein they can scroll through the accumulation of posts and reblogs from people they follow.

posts have "notes", which are the sum of every comment, reblog, or like that a user has added to the post.

layer 3.1: when you post on tumblr, you can add tags to that post that are a sort of metatext that is not maintained when someone else reblogs a given post. you can also do this when you reblog someone else's post.

layer 3.2: alternatively, when you reblog someone else's post, you can add a comment directly to that post in such a fashion that it becomes "part of the post" for anyone who reblogs it from you, or from someone who reblogged it from you, ad infinitum. this, combined with layer 3.1, combines to create a sort of post ecosystem where individual posts mutate into different versions and are spread around when they have qualities that tumblr users who see them want to perpetuate for some reason.

layer 3.3: the transmission of posts from OP to dashboard to reblog to dashboard can result in a post that is particularly striking, timely, influential, or controversial accumulating thousands or tens of thousands of notes in the course of a day or less. this may even happen to a post that was made months or years ago, under the right circumstances!

layer 3.4: tumblr users fucking love reblogging references they understand, references they think they understand, references they vaguely recognize, and juxtapositions of multiple references

layer 3.5: there's also the for you page. its got an algorithm. if anyone tells you tumblr doesnt have an algorithm they're wrong.

layer 4: recently staff announced that they were updating the site so that each uniquely commented branch of any given post accumulated its own set of comments, likes, and reblogs. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move.

layer 4.1: this change, much like "tumblr will be the next pdf", can be interpreted as the result of upper management being deeply out of touch with the needs and culture of the site, as well not understanding the site's core function.

layer 5: a lot of those unhappy people explained why they thought it was a bad move, at length, in reblogs of the announcement post, comment on the announcement post, and freestanding original posts regarding the change.

layer 5.1: the change was rolled back the next day. there's an announcement about it but i've just about run out of steam on this bit. also they banned a bunch of trans women the same day, which sucks.

So you’ve probably heard of the wulver, if you’re into werewolves on the internet. It’s supposedly a Scottish legend about a wolf-headed guy who left fish on the windowsills of the needy. How kind.

Well, frankly, I’m not at all convinced the wulver was ever really a thing in folklore. Hear me out. This is a tidbit about checking your sources.

I’m a folklorist. That means I professionally study this stuff and have degrees in it. I’ve given lectures and taught classes on subjects in folklore and mythology, especially werewolves. I’ve defended my research and my work from boards wanting to find some kind of hole in my work to prove I was wrong about something.

When it’s your job, it’s very important to check sources for accuracy - and to double-check them for authenticity. If you can, find the primary source. This means find the original documentation or the oldest possible occurrence or recording of the myth. If you can’t find one? It may not actually have been something people believed in.

This is where things get complicated. Lots of folklore and myth came from oral traditions, and as such, we’ve doubtlessly already lost tons of great things. That means people often didn’t write this stuff down, in part because these beliefs were occurring in time periods wherein literacy was hard to come by. When it comes to this, the best you can do is to find secondary proof in artwork or artifacts from the time period, or else a medieval monk’s chronicle of what the locals believe in, just to give a few examples.

All this said, let’s get back to the wulver…

As mentioned, the wulver myth of the kind, fish-giving werewolf supposedly comes from Shetland. It’s caught on on the internet to the point that when I mention werewolves, it often gets brought up by someone at some point. There were even some wacked-out ridiculous spiky silly monsters in the latest God of War game called wulvers (but they are, predictably, brainlessly malevolent and aggressive, so whoever randomly pulled the name “wulver” off the internet for the game’s development couldn’t even be kind enough to respect that supposed legend, either).

But finding “wulvers” mentioned in professional werewolf studies by academics in the field publishing well-researched work is virtually impossible. Wikipedia will claim to you that there are a few articles that mention them, but some of them actually don’t. Do we ever hear the big names in werewolf studies mention wulvers? No, nor do they ever mention anything like them.

Do we have a primary source for wulvers? No.

We have no monk’s account and no ancient piece of writing from the region that indicates any belief in wulvers, nor do we have any kind of illuminations, bestiaries, engravings, woodcuts, paintings - we have nothing. No proof at all.

True, this doesn’t entirely mean that people didn’t believe in them. Maybe they did. But without a source, we can’t responsibly claim in a professional work that wulvers were ever a thing in folklore.

But wait, Mav! There is a source!

Every single article I have ever seen on the internet (because I’ve never come across the wulver in professional werewolf studies) only ever cites just one source for the wulver: Jessie Saxby’s Shetland Traditional Lore, published in 1932.

It’s bordering on impossible to reasonably get a copy of this book. It’s not available digitally. It’s been out of print for years. The only print copies available range around $100 in price and are essentially falling to pieces from mishandling, at least the ones I’ve encountered.

Virtually every other werewolf legend you can name has multiple sources and often at least one primary source - sometimes multiple, especially in the case of Greek and Roman werewolf legends. The wulver doesn’t have even one.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to try to discredit Saxby’s work. If someone out there can offer me some good proof that people in Scotland ever actually believed in the Wulver, then… awesome.

But at this point and after years of trying to find one, I still can’t find any reliable historical source to actually say with confidence that the wulver is a legitimate folkloric belief.

Even if someone were to suddenly present to me a Scottish writing from whatever era that has overt mention of wulvers and prove me wrong, though, the principle of this idea still stands.

You really shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet (haven’t you ever heard the Abe Lincoln quote about that!? Oh wait…), especially about folklore. The internet is a vast and rich source for false information - and that seems to apply even more where folklore (sometimes especially werewolves) is involved. Always check your sources!

(If you like my werewolf blog, be sure to check out my other stuff!

https://www.shetlandmuseumandarchives.org.uk/blog/the-real-story-behind-the-shetland-wulver

-instills a deep sense of fomo

-seasonally-cycled releases

-becomes increasingly financially prohibitive the more you want to expand your list and/or document your encounters