It's the humidity
This one is about silly little facts and the value of them.
It'd been in the triple-digits for about a week, which is not a standard run of temperature out here. I'd taken to not just rinsing my feet in cold water before bed (a great trick for cooling down), but a full rinse, even though it added humidity to the air. During the day I did a lot of cold water face splashing, and as I'd hold my hands under the water I would make sure to also run it over my wrists.
See, in eighth grade our band teacher, tired of kids trying to stick their whole heads under the tap to cool off between talent show performances, told us the best way to cool off was to run water over your wrists and also splash the back of your neck. That's, gosh, almost three decades ago now and here I am remembering it.
I've talked already about how surprising one's impact on others can be, or how fun it is to find things and share things. And guess what I'll talk about it some more. Well, specifically those strange little facts one picks up and carries around for the rest of their life in the junk drawer of their brain. There's the everyday useful ones, like the best ways to cool off I learned from a band teacher, or the best ways to freeze food to cook later, as in this Tumblr post from ms-demeanor. And then there's the not-very-useful stuff.
Specialised knowledge is a common place for snippets of info that aren't useful in the every day. One came up recently on the family discord, as someone shared that the "CGI"/wireframe shot in Escape From New York was actually done with physical models (here's a nice write-up about it over on befores & afters) and I was like "oh didn't everyone know that." No, why would they. At least it did give me a reason to share that the old HBO Feature Presentation intro was also basically fully props as well (here's a behind the scenes video about it). But I've been absorbing facts like that since I saw the Reading Rainbow episode where LeVar Burton visits the Star Trek: TNG set and we learn how the transporter effect is done (a tube of glitter in water, swirled).
Other people's specialised knowledge is very cool! Sure, looking things up is fun, but it's more fun to ask a friend if they're using the right cameras in a period movie featuring photography (they aren't, often btw), or tell somebody you're playing a Zelda game and learn about how a key designer worked on both Mario and Zelda, and that there are characters and themes that connect the two, making a loose shared world where Mario is a farmer in various Zelda games.
Of course, it's easy to love other people's weird niche interests but dismiss your own. Like all things that rely on self-confidence, it's really only practise that helps you learn that the weird, silly stuff you know things about are worth sharing and worth pursuing. Curiosity is such a vital part of living, particularly curiosity for curiosity's sake. Not everything has to have a reason for why you "wasted time" learning it, partly because its never wasted time to learn something, even something silly.
There's a joke about fanfic writers (and writers in general) doing deep-dive research for background details, but part of that desire, to know more about a thing, to have the context for it, goes beyond the justification of "research" and is just straight up curiosity. And how lovely that is!! In archives there is sort of an ongoing philosophical argument around what is "worth" keeping. But what is cool with your own human self is you don't have a limited amount of linear feet you can store inside you.
I sort of stumbled into a selection of three books that really thematically speak to each other, about archives and beloved media and queerness and goo. Links go to the Storygraph entries for each title, a great place to check out content warnings and find ways to read them.
- Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle, all of Chuck Tingle's horror books are good and creepy but this latest one really hits the yikes vibes in several ways. The way certain shows can shape you and give you a place to fantasise from while also being confined in their own limitations and the limitations of our own ideas!
- Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman, speaking of how shows can be vital to growing up, this is (partly) a story about an vampire archivist who is confronted with the archives of the person who wrote a show vital to him. Also fanfiction! The stupid things we say as teens! Queer identity! And very much archives. If you've worked with or been around archives you'll be able to tell this was written by an actual archivist with every mention of rusty staples.
- Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee , full disclosure I haven't read this one yet but my partner has and it's next in my queue. But it 100% continues the archives and goo (I mentioned there's goo in all three of these?) themes, finishing a tidy little trifecta that makes for some nice things for the brain to chew on.
Here's some fun things to see/learn. I don't normally like to add text context to the pics but it makes sense to do so in this one!
Over at Calbg, they focus on native plants but some don't like how relatively cold or wet the area gets so they get blankets.
Image description: A photograph of a clear sunny day lighting up a chaparral-adjacent garden park, with scrub bush on the left and blue palms to the right. In the middle of the image, along the path, are the white-shrouded forms of some sort of bush, with cylinders of other, smaller protected plants in front. A cotton-ball clouded blue sky stretches back to a mountain in the background. End ID.
A blood moon/total lunar eclipse in September 2015.
Image description: A long-exposure photograph from a parking lot of a fully red, partly shadowed moon hanging above the unsettlingly lit trees and overexposed exterior lights of a stereotypical-looking small camp lodge. End ID.
Autumn is different when there are cactus and also none of the trees agree on if it is leaf shedding time (and also anyway you get oranges in January so, what are standard seasons anyway).
Image description: A photograph of a dense bunch of plants that begin in the foreground with cactus that are bunches of short and skinny limbs thickly covered in long spines and transition to bushes that are just sticks due to the season, with an array of trees and palm behind, some still full of green leaves. A dense layer of light brown fallen leaves rest on top of the cactus like a patchy blanket. End ID.
Have some links that are mostly about the silly stuff I know (and also some short stories, as usual).
- Cookie Monster's cookies were once painted rice cakes but are now a wild custom mix of items so they look more believable on modern, higher definition televisions.
- If you like lizards, California Herps is a fave resource for learning about different types of little guys, please enjoy the commonly encountered California lizards page to see the kind of goobers I encounter any time it's sunny out.
- One Man’s Treasure by by Sarah Pinsker in at Uncanny Magazine is a quick look into a magical but mundane world, the power of collective action, and the thoughtlessness of the rich.
- The Busy Beaver Button Museum is not only a very cool online archive of buttons, but has a brick-and-mortar location in Chicago.
- RE: REQUEST FOR PROPHECIES AND QUEST FUNDING APPLICATION GUIDELINES by Sara Ryan over at the mostly-subscription-locked Sunday Morning Transport is in the format of basically a grant application, which I frankly delight in. A nice little twist and setup.
Did you know that there's actually a notable amount of Salvadorans that are also of Palestinian descent? Anyway, I'm donating eSims when I can, this guide was very helpful, though there are also more traditional donation targets like the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, UNRWA, and Doctors Without Borders.