Scribbles and Bits

Mori: Last night, for Biff's birthday (it was not, he hates TV, he hates sci-fi, he's very "we got weirdshit at home,") we watched the mysterious DVD of unknown provenance from the sci-fi library that nobody knew what to do with.

( A fanmade Matrix/Star Trek/Firefly crossover thingy that never got completed and disappeared into the Internet ether? )

...does anyone want this? It is wasted on us.

There are a bunch of plural glossaries out there, but they tend to be lacking in context as to who created a term, where it came from, and how it spread. So, a few days ago, we decided to amass all the many-selved terms we could recall if not who coined it, at least a decent idea as to WHERE and WHEN it came from, with the idea of making an etymological glossary, both textual and visual (in the style of this chart of musical genres/musicians of the 1950s-1970s from Edward Tufte's Visual Explanations).

( 200 years of undignified slapfighting. God I love my job! )

But I quickly realized there was a big, glaring hole in my research: the Many Voices newsletter archives, which ranges from 1989-2012 (and also I guess that one orphaned 1986 issue of Speaking For Our Selves). 142 newsletters, none searchable or screenreadable. The thought of manually reading through, one by one, made me shudder.

But then I went, "Hey... isn't Orion Scribner unemployed right now?" So I hired them and they went and OCRed the whole kit and kaboodle! What a public service! What a mensch!

Right now, I am completely exhausted and working on my taxes, but when that's out of the way, I plan to upload all of these files to archive.org so everyone can use them. Three cheers for Orion Scribner!

For context, I didn't write this. This is a textual transcription of a 1983 Kirk/Spock/McCoy fanfiction by Leslie Fish, which I found in the Star Trek fanzine It Takes Time on Impulse, Vol. II, which I found in a dusty box just now in the Sci-Fi library. I transcribed it for posterity, making a couple minor corrections of typos. It dates to after Spock’s death in Wrath of Khan, before the release of Search for Spock.

THE UNDEPARTED

copyright by L. [Leslie] Fish

/// take care, take care how you lift this body, for it was once loved. ///

( He's here he's here two ends of the circuit he's here migod we're holding him between us!!! )

Rogan: Hey, so, a friend was asking for recommendations on erotic work to stockpile and activated my amateur semi-library tendencies. And I wrote off so many I thought I should make a post about it. All of these are available in hard copy, or at least WERE. (Making this list made me realize how many had gone out of print... lament.)

Feel free to ask if you want specific kinks or themes! Leave your own recommendations in the comments! Anon comments are turned on!
( Hey kid, wanna buy a horny comic? *opens trenchcoat, displaying countless pockets filled with books* )

More adventures in library cataloging, and I ran across a 2006 copy of Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Chapter titles include: "My Life is a WIP on My LJ: Slashing the Slasher and the Reality of Celebrity and Internet Performance" and "Keeping Promises to Queer Children: Making Space (for Mary Sue) at Hogwarts."

Talk about a blast from Internet nostalgia past. This was before the existence of Ao3, before the fandom downfall of Livejournal (but AFTER Fanfiction.net, which far as I know was the only site of its kind, at least with any traction). When this book came out, Facebook had existed for less than two years and its biggest competitor was MySpace. Twitter, tumblr, TikTok, and goodreads didn't exist.

This book is way too academically dense for me to want to read. But if I ever do, it exists in my friendly neighborhood science fiction library.

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

Mac: When we went to the Brattle Bookstore with nevanna, we found a gem: The Playbook for Men - About Sex by Joani Blank (AKA the founder of Good Vibrations). It's a little 23 page sex-ed workbook/pamphlet/zine thing that's almost fifty years old and really good! Definitely making me feel inspired for Multi Orgasmic 2! (AKA Multi Moregasmic!)

Joani Blank made three of these workbooks: one for women, one for men, and one for children. Only the one for children has ever been digitized, and she did it herself after Down There Press, which she founded, got sold off to someone else who took all her stuff out of print. Now you can only get them secondhand for like $45 on Amazon.

Our own copy is this beautifully handlettered work of art, and still holds its own today. Basically every sex ed manual we've encountered since owes a debt to these. We feel like a lot of people would find it handy today, so we digitized it. (It's not screenreadable. That's a problem for Future LB.)

Ms. Blank died a few years back, and these zines look to be impossible to find, so we hope this means you can print out copies for yourself to use! Keep her memory alive!

 Ten of our works are now available in the Boston Public Library system! In the small press/zine section:

• The Homeless Year
• LB Goes to Alaska
• Multi, Orgasmic
• Rogan's Aphasia
• Quick'n'Dirty Plural History

In the graphic novel section (nonfiction):

• All in the Family

In the plain ol' nonfiction section:

• Alter Boys in Love (the final copy--it is now officially out of print!)

And in the plain ol' fiction section:

• Rumbleghost
• Infinity Smashed: Found Wanting
• Flights of Reality

When we were kids, we fantasized about going into the library and seeing our books on the shelf. Now that dream has come true! Eeeeee!

Also sorry we are still massively behind on Dreamwidth, trying to clear our plate from Arisia backlog.

Sneak: I added language tags to all the pluralstories catalog entries that originally came in a non-English language, and I have saved local copies of all the self-published ebooks, short stories, and manageable webcomics. X_X I am bushed, but ARCHIVEROT SHALL NOT DEFEAT ME! I SHALL MAINTAIN!

We now have 155 entries in the catalog! The old Multiple Personality and Dissociation Booklist had 161 entries; pluralstories is so close to reaching it! And I now have entries in the alphabetical index under every letter of the alphabet except Q! Those are my two remaining goals for the catalog. So close... so close...

Three ordinary plebian objects that I will never choose to live without again:

1. Left-handed scissors
2. Long-arm stapler
3. A bone folder

Why did I live so long without these objects? Being able to easily fold and staple zines out of any damn thing I desire (thanks to roomie's printer) has spared my shoulder so much pain.

Insightful decade-old blog posts from someone who's since disappeared off the Internet? Print, staple, fold. Academic articles on fiction-based religion that are murder to read in fifteen-minute increments on my desktop? Print, staple, fold. Some short comic that went out of print fifteen years ago, cannot be bought anymore, but got reposted online in a horribly inaccessible (yet high-res) way? Print, staple, fold! Need to go over my own work and edit multiple times? PRINT, STAPLE, FOLD! PRINT, STAPLE, FOLD!

My life is forever changed and improved. I live a life of riches and abundance, all thanks to maybe $30 and ransacking the closed-down Theology School for office supplies.

...oh shit I just realized I could print out a bunch of the old SBing experience database from twenty years ago and read and annotate at leisure! I could just print and bind all my stupid plural sources, organize them properly, and NEVER LOSE THEM AGAIN. I AM DRUNK WITH POWER.

Biff is sick of us complaining about having to do workarounds for anything longer than fifty pages, so he's considering learning how to stitch together book covers using scrap cardboard, rubber cement, and/or needle and thread. If he does indeed end up doing this, move over Elon Musk, because we are now the richest.