#record attempt

DONHOU BICYCLES | EXPERIMENTS IN SPEED

So there’s this Dutch guy Maarten van der Weijden who won gold at the 2008 olympics for open water swimming. Now the amazing thing about that is that in 2001 he got diagnosed with acute lymphatic leukemia and underwent treatment for years to beat it, before making his comeback to swimming. He retired from racing in 2008 and now mainly does record attempts (he currently holds the 24 hour swimming distance record, he also swam from England to France and back in under 20 hours, as well as several other things) to raise money for cancer research. He has his own foundation which currently supports 11 different researches into cancer treatment, detection, and increasing quality of life for (ex)cancer patients. 

This weekend, he started this morning at 4.30am local time and is expected to finish Monday 7.30pm, he is attempting to swim 200km through the waters of Friesland, one of our provinces. Hypothermia is the real risk because he’s swimming through the night and his body temperature may drop, so they’re monitoring him very closely. Oh and also swimming is currently not advised there because they found E. coli in the water, so amateur swimmers shouldn’t do what they planned which was swim parts of the routes with him to raise money too. He himself is disregarding the safety warning because “he would rather have the stomach flu than let down cancer patients”. 

Our national news channel is doing a youtube livestream all the way along the route, so if you want to watch someone be a real hero and attempt to swim 200km, or you just want to look at our pretty nature, you should totally watch this livestream! Now this is a 360° stream so you may have to turn the camera around a bit to find him, he’s at the time I’m writing this in a wetsuit with orange sleeves. 

You can donate at https://www.11stedenzwemtocht.nl/, you can use paypal to donate as well as iDeal (a Dutch banking service so probably not useful to most of you). Let me know if you need help figuring out the Dutch!

Please schedule reminders for our trend event on tumblr or on future tweets.com/twuffer! 

Reminders are an essential part of any twitter event, therefore we need to show Guinness that we’ve got this part covered as well.

Please schedule a few little reminders for July and the first days of August 2017 to remind yourselves and others of our long planned trend event either here on Tumblr or on FutureTweets.com / Twuffer.com. Take screenshots of your scheduled reminders and post them on twitter using the hashtag #TheFeastPresentedItself. 

Please make sure to include your timezone in your tweet :) As this is a trend event, please don’t use the #22MonthsAreOver hashtag in your reminder tweets or when you post your screenshots. Thanks :) 

Let’s prove that we’re indeed able to organise a trend event this far in advance!

We’ve included some wonderful templates you can use here on Tumblr to set up reminders. Many thanks to @Nooey for making them <3

Entrée - Writing and Editing the Application! 

We wanted to share our writing process with you, dear Fannibals :) 

Last Friday, after meeting up in a lovely café in true Fannibal style (check out our dashing Funkos!), we had lunch at @sunnyblondangel’s home and spent the rest of the day neck-deep in application wonderland. We’d put together a draft ahead of our get-together to have a baseline off which to work, but there was still plenty to do--@HannisElephants had a list of questions numbering nearly 20, and that was BEFORE we got to chatting! 

In the hours that followed, we discussed everything from word choice to the technical aspects of setting this record to the rationale behind our actions. It was this last section that proved the most crucial, provoking the most discourse: the application demands that you explain “why you want to set or break a record,” why you’re doing what you’re doing, in short why anyone should care. The answer may be obvious to us--because Hannibal is something truly special and worthy of promotion, especially in light of its cancellation--but it’s another thing entirely to get it down on paper in a way that’s comprehensible to those who have never been exposed to the show or to its fandom. This proves particularly challenging if the tone required is one of near-clinical observation. It took us all afternoon, but we’re confident that we’ve found a balance between articulating our passion for the show and maintaining the professionalism required for Guinness to take our application seriously. We’ve tried our very best to leave Guinness without any doubts or questions that could keep them from seeing our efforts as genuine (and admissible). We’ve tried to anticipate potential scrutiny based on the questions they’ve asked in the application, incorporating each every necessary detail in the description of our record attempt. And there are many! :) 

The application is currently in the hands of the very helpful @NatalehB and @AvenidaMK, two sharp-eyed Fannibals who have kindly agreed to cross-check the text for any oversights or mistakes on our part. Also key are clarity and flow: whether the application a) lays out the case for the record in a logical fashion and b) reads smoothly. Getting this application together has been a lengthy process--and we’re not going to be satisfied until every last question has been answered--but we’re looking forward to sharing it with you once it’s ready <3 

Thank you for your patience and your continued support--this project would be nothing if not for the Fannibals participating and giving it their love. Our fandom is truly beautiful xx

Have our beautiful, updated template, dear Fannibals <3

We received questions from many who heard about CallingAllFannibals for the first time, when they saw the template in our last post. This prompted us to make a new one, which allows a little peek at the story behind the list we are promoting.

Last chance to join the record attempt!

We recognize that a lot of people only heard of the Hannibal record attempt very late and could not participate due to that. As we intend to stick to our final deadline we’d like to offer you the chance to let Guinness know about your interest. We can't accept screenshots at this time, but by asking to be added to the list, you can add your support to the campaign and let Guinness know that there are still more Fannibals interested in participating.

Thank you for your continued interest in the Fannibal record attempt!