Opinionated Fandom Old

“When you are not fed love on a silver spoon you learn to lick it off knives”.

Anyway, the guy from my class was really nice about it--he apologized for having to tell me bad news, and gave me the contact info for the guy who posted it so I could ask for it to be taken down.

Now, the tattoo in question? It's a bird. It's not actually a fandom tattoo, it just coincidentally looks vaguely like a bit of symbolism from a fandom that was popular at the time I got it. But it was enough to unleash a firestorm of "look at this stupid girl with her stupid cringe tattoo" comments.

(Even if it WAS a fandom tattoo...who gives a shit??? It's my body and my tattoo and I don't really give a shit what strangers think.)

The misogyny of my body being put online and circulated for mockery without my consent really fucked me up at the time. I felt awful. I was mortified. I was scared more people would recognize me from the post and give me shit. It sucked so bad.

So I just kinda think you're a fucking douchebag if you participate in tattoo shaming for anything that isn't, like, a blatant hate symbol. I don't really care if you think it's tasteless, or cringe, or badly done, or whatever other justification.

The US National Archives (and this may certainly apply to other countries but this post is about this specific institution) has a lot of material. And that may seem like an obvious statement, but what I mean to say here is that it has a lot of unprocessed material.

“Processing”, in the archive world, is the word we use to mean “organizing the collection materials in a way that makes sense and describing the collection so people know what’s there”. Essentially, processing a collection or material is what makes it accessible to researchers. Think about how you organize yourself or your space. Most of the time when we acquire material we get it exactly how the creator kept it, which is ranges from neat as a pin to literal garbage dump, but mostly falls into the middle area of somewhat organized but also not really. Processing gives the archivist “intellectual control” (we go through everything so we now know exactly what’s in the collection) and gives researchers something to look at that’s a lot more manageable.

But, like I said, the National Archives has a lot of material. Which at this point includes a massive backlog. So what they have done, with the advent of the internet, is turned to crowdsourcing. (Using a large group of volunteers over the internet to accomplish more than the few people who work for the archive can do, and/or using group knowledge and skills that they don’t have to their advantage. Wikipedia or any fandom wiki is an example of crowdsourcing.) This is a long process, because anything they put up has to be digitized first, and that is not as easy as it sounds. I won’t rant here, but it’s time consuming, labor intensive, and in some cases not even feasible with the material.

Anyway, the National Archives crowdsources through a program that they call “citizen archivists”. It’s something that’s free and obligationless, it’s totally voluntary and you do things like add tags to pictures, transcribe documents that are handwritten or otherwise not word-searchable, and add comments about things that are missing information or context.

The reason I bring this up is because they have divided the work into what they call “missions”, basically just categories of material to work on. They have a new one that’s just been made public (likely because they finally got the digitization completed) that is a large collection of pictures consisting of Native subjects, and they need help tagging them.

the Library of Congress has something similar- I’ve been transcribing Spanish legal documents for them

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

put your TV on channel 2 so the VCR will work

open up the clamp shell case that held the VHS that has that satisfying crrlikkkkkk

put in the movie

gdi it has to be rewound

press STOP and then rewind because its so much faster that way

start the movie and it takes a few seconds for the movie to actually start cause you rewound to the VERY beginning

FBI will get you if you illegally distribute or exhibit this movie

and then. because you forgot that movies are always so much louder than TV

COMING SOON TO OWN ON VIDEO AND DVD

QUICK LOWER THE VOLUME LOWER THE VOLUME LOWER THE VOLUME OH FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay crisis averted.

although. these ads are kind of quiet. a little hard to hear.....

better turn up the volume...

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.

Bedannibal + texts from last night - part 2 [pt 1 here]

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

Behold, Dorothea

He turned to me, sighed, and said in a very deadpan tone-- "Plants don't have covenants, Joy,"