Dolphins Talking

We got the opportunity to go to Hawaii for a friend's wedding recently. Unfortunately, the timing was truly, truly bad brain-wise, so we rarely left the vicinity of the hotel (sad side effect of braincrash: we get lost extremely easily and should not wander), but we did take a nice bracing walk every dawn (we didn't even try to reset our body clock, not worth it), got to see the sun rise damn near every day, ate a lot of good food, and saw a rainbow. (Biff snapped a photo of it. He took many photos. He's the group shutterbug.)

The coolest part though was a snorkeling trip we went with our friend. (We bought a mask and snorkel for the occasion. ...I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with it.) Biff, we learned, cannot swim and was wigged out even with the life jacket. (Mori: "It's FINE, dudema, we couldn't sink even if we WANTED to!") Rawlin, conversely, chilled the fuck out in the water the way he never does around people. And we all got lucky, because the sea life came out to say hi! There were giant green turtles! They were so old! They had barnacles on them! They were like two and a half feet long!

And there were dolphins, corkscrewing and flipping through the water around us. At one point, they got close enough that we could hear them talking through the water.

That was the part that was most amazing. We were hearing a language no human understood or could reproduce, in real time, and the beings making it were right there. What were they saying? What were they thinking? Were they talking to each other about us humans? Were they trying to talk to us humans??? They were loud! I rarely hear ANYTHING in water, so being able to hear dolphins talking was just... indescribable. Somehow, that was even cooler than SEEING them. Something about the surreal feeling of crystal clear clicking in our ear, instead of just mushy sploosh woosh sounds, made the experience more real.

I regret that the intense brainload meant we didn't get to do very much; I doubt we'll ever get to go to Hawaii again. But that's okay. What matters is, we got through the whole intense trip without a meltdown or dropping any balls. (Or getting lost on Oahu.)

Pluralstories Progress

Sneak: pluralstories has been a humble success! I've succeeded at all my goals: I have a creator name under each letter of the alphabet, and I have more stories cataloged than the old Multiple Personality and Dissociation Booklist! (We have about 180 stories in it now!) I've also managed to make local copies of most of the work that's feasible to. There has been a quiet but steady little trickle of people submitting really cool things that I never would've known about myself, stuff that delightfully pushes the boundaries of what a "plural story" can be, and nobody has tried to use it to be mean!

I need to do some tag trimming, I know. I'm planning on axing the format tags completely, since I doubt anyone really uses or needs them, and I also plan to rename the whole plural tag family as >1 or 1+ so they'll be at the top of the tag list, since I bet that's what people care about most! Those 1+ tags need streamlining as well, they're a bit overgrown.

Still, I feel really proud of how my little project has grown over two years! I know it's gotten me to learn about fun multi media that I never would've known about otherwise, and I hope it helps other people find fun things too! Linkrot is a shame, but it's my hope that my archiving work will keep them from completely disappearing, as so many tiny subcultural self-published works tend to do! So far, we have only lost one story to linkrot, as far as I know!

Also oh my gosh I am so glad I lifted the "must be submitted by a plural" rule, singlets have contributed some really amazing works to the catalog! :D