Inside the Little Plastic Castle

Thanks, pauraque for giving me S for this six-question meme.

Something I hate

scented shampoo, soap, or similar substances. Fragrances like these trigger coughing fits and sometimes migraines. Weirdly, I developed this sensitivity after I quit smoking 10-15 cigarettes/day.

Something I love

sencha green tea, in particular Telsaan Sencha Spring Shizuoka, tragically out of stock

Somewhere I have been

Skópun, Sandoy, Føroyar (Faroe Islands).

more about that trip

In 1971, I visited my sister & her husband for two weeks. He was studying Skópun and its people for his PhD in anthropology. She was studying everything in sight. My sister wrote a novel about it and my former-brother-in-law wrote several scholarly books. I took many wild ferry rides, snacked on skerpikjøt (fermented lamb) and turranfisk (fermented fish), and admired the beauty and strangeness of these tiny islands in the middle of the Atlantic. This was decades before the first undersea roundabout connected most of the Faroe Islands with roads.

Somewhere I would like to go

Shetland Islands, Scotland or Svalbard, Norway, especially during midnight sun season.

Someone I know

sasha_feather! I introduced her to a disability rights framework at WisCon. She enthusiastically joined in and succeeded me as WisCon Access Chair. She introduced me to Stargate Atlantis thence LJ thence DW fandom. We’ve had weekly lunches almost continuously for more than a decade.

Favorite movie

I'm drawing a complete blank. I loved Miyazaki's Spirited Away when it first came out--I should rewatch and see if still shines.

Want to play? Raise your hand for a letter.

Thanks to goss, here’s a meme

Introduce yourself with some jobs you have done apart from what you do now

I retired from paid employment in 1990, and since then I’ve been a disability rights advocate, helped herd SF con cats, and typed & read many many things on the internet.

Before that, I was…

1. Photocopy clerk & summer gofer at ETS which runs high stakes educational testing like GREs, TOEFL, and SATs
2. Data tape librarian, keypunching the journeys of 9-inch tape reels between their storage cabinets and the tape drives where student loan data was read and written
3. Ten-speed bike assembler and mechanic
4. Civil engineering drafter who insisted that fire stations needed both men’s and women’s bathrooms
5. Phototypesetter, stat camera operator, pasteup artist, and staff designer

There are hundreds of folks posting about their lives, their likes, their dreams, their fandoms thanks to the low-key snowflake_challenge. It's a no-pressure event: participating at their own rates, in their own journals, the challengers (or is that the snowflakes) link back to the comm so you can roll around in lovely fannish feelings!

The Master Post summarizes the challenges and links to all players.

Thanks to pauraque for prompting me to explain three of my icons. I think Dreamwidth's icons are the crucial thing keeping me here. I have altogether too many of them, and picking the right one for each post is a big thrill.

If you wanna play along, ask me to pick three of yours.

"Be aware of invisibility" in red Futura Bold Condensed
(At least half my icons are from the inimitable jackshoegazer, including this one.)

I use this for topics that may not be perceivable and are nonetheless very important: queerness, disability, dysfunctional dynamics in work or home.

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I convinced sasha_feather to come over and take pictures of me in hats. I’ve cropped out the lively gray green tweed flat cap, and you can still see I’m about to insert a USB drive in my left ear.

This icon shows up on the rare occasion that I have technical skills to share.

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David Hewlett playing Jimmy, the prankster younger brother in 1990’s Where The Heart Is. His brilliant sister does full body makeup as an art form, and for Reasons turns Jimmy into a pink-cheeked cherubim. At 18, Hewlettt was quite the lean pretty boy. Naked, adorned with a halo, wings, a mean sneer and an extended middle finger (towards his dad, if I recall correctly)

I found that image on a still-extant site! Many thanks to tarlanx for maintaining it: https://www.davidhewlett.co.uk/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=3&page=2

This huge mural combines a languid naked woman and Jimmy’s cherub with an arrow ready to let fly.

I’ve got two other "FUCK THIS!" icons, because I like my rage to be artistic.

Callum Keith Rennie in a suit screaming fuck no!

More subdued WTF in ASL fingerspelling.

Thanks to sasha_feather for these prompts

Happy to carry the meme along -- let me know you want prompts and I'll trawl your interests and offer you three to discourse upon.

Shortwave

I spent a long time in bed between 1988 and 1991, with limited attention span and no assistive technology to help me read. My favorite companion was the Sony compact shortwave radio on my bedside table. ( such voices )

Office supplies

My father sometimes let me play in his study where I could bang on the manual typewriter. ( so many tools )

Primo Levi

Introduced me to the lived experience of the Holocaust. ( Read more... )

Thanks to GuyZero at MetaFilter, here's a grand visual toy. You too can while away a couple hours clicking and giggling.

Need a safety sign? August 18, 2020

Need an ANSI Z535-compliant safety sign? Sure you do. Here's a convenient sign generator in case you need to let people know that something is dangerous.

https://www.metafilter.com/188296/Need-a-safety-sign

At MeFi you’ll find more than 200 hundred meme attempts. The MeFi posts are the punchlines — you click through to see the image.

Here’s mandolin_orange's contribution. The post contains exactly the words "BUCKLE UP." This links to a generated Warning! sign with icon of closing seat belt + icon of person trapped under wheeled machine with text reading "Buckle up. I'm a fucking awful driver."

( click for pic )

Damon Burke, of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, made this tool to generate safety signs for labs, machine shops, and the insides of our overtaxed brains. To go directly to the generator, visit https://observatory.db.erau.edu/generators/signs/. Scroll down to "New to safety signs" for instructions.

Many thanks to chanter_greenie, who posted

I would like my DW friends to comment about how you got to know me. But I want you to LIE. That's right. Just make it up. If you'd like, copy this to your journal so others can do the same.

Many cheery nonsense samples at her journal.

Let it all out! Tell me about the day we met in a different time line.

( goofiness within )

Thanks to angelictroublemaker for linking me to this video: a baby seal hesitating about slipping into the frozen ocean, and making "cry baby" noises about it. That's wonderful enough, but the captions are hysterical.

I've always been a big cheese fan, and moving to Wisconsin only improved this.

( five questions and nine answers )

Thanks to brithistorian, who’s bringing back a meme I’ve never seen before. It’s five questions, but the Qs are personalized to your interests. I learned a lot about brithistorian from the answers!

If you want 5 questions from me, comment below saying so.

( Here’s my answers )