Shirty Blackwell

You can win a copy of Elyssa Warkentin’s debut novel, A Land So Wild!

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We will choose a winner at random on December 31. The winner will receive one paperback copy of this gorgeous book. 

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When a WIP ends on an angsty cliffhanger:

When you didn’t realize you were reading deathfic:

When you keep reading even after realizing it’s deathfic:

When you remember that embarrassing thing you said 12 years ago:

When there’s something that everyone else loves that squicks you out:

When Tumblr is full of fanwank and you have no idea what’s going on:

When someone leaves a bitchy comment on your fic:

When someone leaves a lovely comment on your fic:

When AO3 won’t let you leave more kudos:

When your favorite author posts a new fic:

When it’s 3am and your favorite author posts a new fic:

When you post the latest chapter of your WIP and realize you’ve written yourself into a corner:

When you find a solution for that problem in your WIP:

When you suspect canon fuckery is incoming:

When you’re surprised by canon fuckery:

When someone tells you to cheer up after the latest canon fuckery:

Book clasps whooooooo

From top to bottom: xGT509 V4 1664 Springer 332.6 H77s Ranny fB C726S xfPA6519 A3 1480 xN7433.4 C655 U55 1995 xBX2079 G4 1610

All from the University of Iowa Special Collections.

Researchers at King’s College London found that the drug Tideglusib stimulates the stem cells contained in the pulp of teeth so that they generate new dentine – the mineralised material under the enamel.

Teeth already have the capability of regenerating dentine if the pulp inside the tooth becomes exposed through a trauma or infection, but can only naturally make a very thin layer, and not enough to fill the deep cavities caused by tooth decay.

But Tideglusib switches off an enzyme called GSK-3 which prevents dentine from carrying on forming.

Scientists showed it is possible to soak a small biodegradable sponge with the drug and insert it into a cavity, where it triggers the growth of dentine and repairs the damage within six weeks.

1800s Week!

Sailors and Daughters: Early Photography and the Indian Ocean

This zine, called Choose Your Own Moral Code: A Coloring Book, is from our Zine Machine Collection. This collection is comprised of zines from a vending machine that was at the University of Iowa Main Library for more than 10 years that was set up by Jessica White, the creator of this zine. A vending machine was repurposed to sell zines instead of candy bars and energy drinks. This zine acts as a coloring book, allowing the reader to color in and choose what they believe is good or evil. Rabbits and squirrels seem to be the main subjects of these moral dilemmas. 

The last page is blank, leaving the reader to create their “own conclusions.”

So I decided to draw my very own:

Don’t worry. The zine was not actually drawn in during the sketching of this pupper. Yay modern technology.

- Hannah

Choose Your Own Moral Code: A Coloring Book [Jessica White, 2006]

This zine, and many others from Jessica White can be found in the 

The Chinese Garden (1962) by Rosemary Manning

“In a girls’ boarding school in the late 1920s, a world of iron-willed authority, frigid rooms, and forbidden friendships, sixteen-year-old Rachel struggles to find a place for herself. When a rebellious student introduces her to a mystical, secret part of the grounds, the ‘Chinese garden,’ Rachel becomes torn between this hidden world of sensuality and pleasure and the formidable, controlling headmistress who inspires Rachel’s intellectual growth.”

Miss Pym Disposes (1948) by Josephine Tey

“Miss Lucy Pym, a popular English psychologist, is guest lecturer at a physical training college. The year’s term is nearly over, and Miss Pym–inquisitive and observant–detects a furtiveness in the behavior of one student during a final exam. She prevents the girl from cheating by destroying her crib notes. But Miss Pym’s cover-up of one crime precipitates another–a fatal ‘accident’ that only her psychological theories can prove was really murder.”

Olivia (1949) by Olivia (aka Dorothy Strachey)

“Olivia is sixteen years old when she goes to Les Avons, a finishing school near Paris, run by two Mademoiselles. It is a place of few rules, of laughter and lively conversation–a welcome surprise for a reserved young English girl. But the gaiety and freedom of Les Avons is only surface deep and emotional liaisons and jealousies form the hidden curriculum. Very quickly Olivia too is caught up in its spell, overwhelmed by her increasing infatuation with Mademoiselle Julie. Here she describes the powerful allegiances and repressed desires which smoulder at this secluded school, and the intensity and desperation of adolescent love.”

Regiment of Women (1917) by Clemence Dane

“In a small English town, just before the Great War, battle rages over Alwynne Durand, an appealing but dangerously inexperienced young teacher. Two women struggle to win her love and loyalty: Elsbeth, her fiercely protective aunt, and the formidable Clare Hartill. A brilliantly charismatic teacher, feverishly adored, Clare’s power is great–her abuse of it greater. Greedy for love, but incapable of returning it, she compulsively destroys the affections of those she most needs.”

The Small Room (1961) by May Sarton

“Anxiously embarking on her first teaching job, Lucy Winter arrives at a New England women’s college and shortly finds herself in the thick of a crisis: she has discovered a dishonest act committed by a brilliant student who is the protegée of a powerful faculty member. How the central characters–students and teachers–react to the crisis, and what effect the scandal has on their personal and professional lives, are the central motifs of May Sarton’s sensitive, probing novel.”

Frost in May (1933) by Antonia White

“The Convent of the Five Wounds, where Nanda Grey is sent when she is nine, is on the edge of London–but in 1908 it is a world unto itself. For the young girls receiving a Catholic education behind its walls, religion is a nationality, conformity an entire way of life. In this intense, troubled atmosphere, passionate friendships are the only deviation. Nanda is thirteen, a normal, quick-witted, spirited girl, when, catastrophically, she breaks the rules and pays too large a price for her transgression.”

The Getting of Wisdom (1910) by Henry Handel Richardson (aka Ethel Richardson)

Recent works I’ve read that fit this bill are:

Carol Goodman, The Lake of Dead Languages

OH BOY AND HOW. So I am not So Much Of An Old that I was around when print zines were the thing. I got into fanfic-type fandom through the internet. But here are some changes from the late 90s to today:

- In slash fandom, there were a lot fewer main characters written as expressly queer. There was a lot of (in retrospect) very teeth grindingly annoying “We’re not gay we just love each other” type romances. 

- Fic was mostly distributed via mailing lists (email), not by web archives, although some mailing lists also would web archive their stuff. People tended to be more monofannish because you would just participate in the list — people are more multifannish now because we follow specific people through their blogs and get introduced to their other interests, but this didn’t happen as much back in the day. People were definitely still multifannish, though. I’ve always fandom hopped.

- The aesthetic was very different. A lot of older fanfic reads in ways that were more influenced by profic romance novels, whereas modern fanfic has sort of its own, more realist style. (TBH there are also a lot more realistic/pomo style romance novels these days as well.) The stuff from the early 2000s, in comparison to 90s and earlier fic, and in comparison to modern fic, tended to be more experimental stylistically. Overall, fic tended to be longer, but also more uniformly long. There weren’t really many of those 200k monsters either.

- Not a lot of postmodern type fic conceits (i.e. stuff like the one where steve and bucky watch all the movies made about captain america while steve was in the ice, or SGA fic told through excerpts from academic papers, etc.) Early 2000s fandom went through this weird magical realism phase, also.

- In our headers, we used to measure story length in file-size, not in word length. I think this change came about in the early 2000s.

oh and then along the same lines you had guys running out to try and have sex with women and fail, or have sex with women but find it so unsatisfying, before ultimately admitting that they wanted this particular dick. also, considering the prevalence of WNGWJLEO, it was oddly mandatory to point out at great length how much each character never really loved his previous female partners.

basically fandom now, at least the well-written part of it, is a million times less homophobic and biphobic and, believe it or not, misogynist. obviously there were always exceptions, especially with the really good writers, and especially as you move into the late nineties. but as a rule, so much improvement.

oh, and every love confession required a full name. Firstname Middlename Lastname, I love you. where does that even come from, seriously?

i will give them this—there was a lot less badfic that was technically bad, like, unreadable and full of errors. shit got edited back in the day. someone was gonna pay money to print five hundred copies of that and they did not want your terrible spelling to fuck it up.

- elaborate ascii headers/footers/dividers on fic, which were mostly txt files (or bare-bones text-only pages to save archive space) I think?

- faking ages to get access to the adult stuff (which could get complicated depending on what country you were from and what country the admin(s) were from). This sometimes involved emailing an age statement to the owner of a mailing list and them deciding whether or not to trust you (or how much they actually gave a fuck) before giving you the password to an archive or authenticating your whatever to access the whosit, I wasn’t entirely sure how it worked.  Because I was fifteen at the time. Of course.

- There were people who were very adamantly ‘gay stuff is okay in fanfic but immoral IRL.’  Don’t ask me how that worked out logically, but it was a thing.

- DO NOT FORGET THE BEFORE-TIMES when there was no google and there were scattered archives everywhere, from ‘archive of [specific mailing list]’ to authors’ personal archives to pairing- or fandom-specific archives and the way you found a lot of them was like hoping aol or yahoo search would turn up something new?  But on the other hand you had a fair number of folks who were twitchy about having webcrawlies being able to find their porn because fanfic was already kind of side-eyed and porny stuff even moreso.

- there were archivists who actively trawled mailing lists and authors archives and such to compile their own interest-specific archives, sometimes asking the authors if they could host a fic… and sometimes NOT asking.  Cue: wank.

- OR you navigated WEBRINGS (which are like tumblr ‘networks’ I think? I don’t grok tumblr networks but ya’ll have fun with them, I’ll be over here in my rocking chair mmk) where there was essentially a master list of websites catering to a specific interest, sometimes with details but sometimes it was just a name and a link so you had no idea what you were clicking on half the time, you just knew it fell under category [thing the webring was about].

(…tbh, this was probably how I found out about slash, because of some X-Files or Pretender or maybe early SG1 webring, I don’t even know. I just saw “[fandomname] slash archive” and was desperate for new fic in [fandom] and hey presto “boys?? kissing?? GIRLS? KISSING?!! YOU CAN DO THAT? Ship things that don’t match what canon would expect you to ship?? oops now I have an exponentially greater amount of ships than I did before”)(given that description, it was probably stargate because there was a LOT of pretty to go around okay)

- let me TELL you about the recurring firestorm of wank that would rush through every goddamned fandom for at least a 5- to 10-year period there where someone would be like “all same-gender shippy stuff needs an NC-17 warning because that stuff is not okay for kids” and other folks would be like “can we not equate handholding to explicit PIV intercourse solely based on the genders of the participants” and holy jesus it was the EXACT same ugly nausea-inducing merry-go-round in at least six of my fandoms, which is why I am zero percent impressed with ‘family’ networks caving to that bullpockey because My People already hashed that out, get with the times, thanks.

- fanfic archives without search functions, where everything was just listed by date posted and sorted by pairing IF YOU WERE LUCKY.  One sentence summaries with no tags, no warnings, sometimes no ratings.  Sometimes no lengths (see above regarding length measured by filesize).  Because everything was coded in early html and some folks just didn’t want to (or knew how to) code all that.  This is why I give money to ao3, people.  I REMEMBER THE BEFORETIMES.

- oh, and finding That Reccer whose tastes ran similar to your own and posted like 10+ recs a week?  Like Santa and Baby Jesus came down from on high and showered glitter all over you before kissing you gently on the forehead and then disappearing in a double rainbow.  (You think recs help you filter wheat from chaff NOW, it was all the moreso when you had to do all this hunting just to find stuff TO sort though)

- yes this was also before lj and wordpress and basically any kind of rich text editor-enabled blogging platform.  Hand-coded html pages hosted on geocities with terrible font color choices and pixellated blinky tiled gif backgrounds, aw yus.

Your super elaborate headers usually stated that you did not own anything having to do with your canon and that you made no money off your fan fiction etc etc.

this Thanksgiving, you should all be thankful for having the internet the way that you do, and not like this.

however, if you don’t vote, this is the future that’s in store for you.

battleforthenet.com

savetheinternet.com

contactingcongress.org

So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:

Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?

This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.

Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?

This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.

Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:

This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.

How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.

Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.

Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.

But we’re not done yet.

The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?

Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.

The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.

And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.

If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.

But we’re not done yet.

Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.

This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.

In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.