Scribbles and Bits

(EDIT: Sneak: I have updated healthymultiplicity.com with our new email address and also fixed the homepage redirect error. Tomorrow, I will focus on cross-posting all our public DW posts to make them publicly accessible again, and maybe update hm.com with back-up links.)

Rogan: Okay, thank fuck, there were a few snowballing complications, but I finally have a working public-facing email again.

I am using the Dreamwidth forwarding address feature, so in case my new public email gets killed, I can just keep the same address and avoid this kinda chaos again. (I should've done this earlier, but this is one of the many features of Dreamwidth that I never paid attention to, because up until this moment, I never needed or wanted such a thing.)

If you need to get ahold of us, you can now drop us a line at lb_lee at dreamwidth.org. For as long as this site or us are still around, and as long as this feature is part of a Paid account, it should hold.

Working on updating healthymultiplicity.com to update our new address, and then finally getting around the Mississippi blog ban that I've needed to take care of for months. Stay tuned!

Rogan: We stopped being able to access our desktop computer yesterday. Working on fixing it, but between this and email problems, getting a hold of us online will be difficult until we sort this out. I know this blog is blocked to Mississippi folks but right now it’s the easiest thing for is to access; the broken old smartphone we are using can’t access ANY of our emails.

Once again, BSOD lumbers out of its case, grizzled and twenty years old, to bail my ass out, because at least it can do all my offline stuff.

Those of you with our phone, please use it.


EDIT: desktop and online stuff restored! Still working on email.

Guys! The Russian government is really cracking down on Livejournal. If you haven’t imported or downloaded LJ stuff, now is a good time!

We cannot do it today, because we have our month-start work and inventory/tax-prep to do, but we plan to go make local back-ups of the long-defunct plural communities we were (and technically still are) members of, though it’ll have to be done manually. We already lost the soulbonding comm, and the only reason our LJ account still exists is because of these comms.

If there are others you think of archival note, please let me know if you plan to archive them! Let’s pool info so we don’t redo each other’s work!

An anonymous reader sent us this cool thing:

I found a historic Brazilian example of plurality and wanted to share it with you. In the nonfiction book "Samba" by Alma Guillermoprieto, she describes Seu Malandrino, a dead man who sometimes possessed a favela-dwelling woman. Here's an excerpt from pp. 110 — 111:

-
On Mondays, Celina’s body was often on loan to a scoundrel by the name of Seu Malandrino, who wore her chunky, comfortable flesh with a menacing swagger, spit obscene words out of the corner of his mouth, straddled her only chair horseback-style, and kept his face wreathed in a halo of cigarette smoke.

The first time I saw him, while poking my head in Celina’s door and running directly into the stare from his dirty yellow eyes, I found him very frightening indeed. It took a couple of seconds before I recognized a face under the white boater hat with red trim and babbled an apology for the intrusion. “I’m sorry, Celina,” I began, and was cut short. “Celina isn’t here. My name is Seu Malandrino.” The voice was gravelly and sinuous… “Let the gringa come in!” he said to a frightened young couple sitting on the sofa, and to me, “Sit in that corner and shut up!”

Due to switching webhosts for healthymultiplicity.com, our email is down and probably has been since Christmas. We are working on getting it up and going again.

Until then, if you have our phone number or the old email for the Greenough Hall MSTers Club, you can contact us through those. Sorry for the inconvenience; among its many failings, the old webhost has given me no sign of whether the emails I sent in the past week went out or not; on my end, it’s been acting buggily normal, and I’m having to guess it no longer works purely because nothing has come in for so long.

Sneak: I have discovered ultimate power!

Now that I have FoxitReader working on the new computer, I have regained the ability to print insta-zines out of any fancy academic articles I want! (Just as long as they're ~52 pages or less.) We have been sorting the periodicals at the sci-fi library, and we decided to snag an empty box because it was the perfect size for our bookshelf, and also many of those boxes are empty, dusty, sad, and unloved.

And then I had a great idea. @_@ What if it became our multi library box?

A bunch of the very old multi articles we have (and some of the new ones) are from magazines or 600+ page tomes with names like Transactions of the Royal Edinburgh Society, which include a gazillion articles by a gazillion people on all sorts of topics. (The Royal Edinburgh Society one not only has an early 1823 "dual personality" case, but articles on a plant fossil found in a quarry, milk of magnesia, and math.) Obviously, we aren't interested in, like, 580+ of those pages. But thanks to my trusty printer and FoxitReader, I can print out just the articles that matter to us, date them, annotate them, and put them in the periodicals box in chronological order for easy reference!

I now have seven historical articles printed:

• Papierfliegerfalter's translation of a 1791 German medical multi case: Gmelin, E. (1791). Materialen fur die anthropologie (pp. 3-89). Tubingen, Germany: Cotta. (The original German case is already online and screenreadable at GoogleBooks.)
  
  • Maybe now that we have it on paper, we will FINALLY read this!
• Plumer, W. (1859). Mary Reynolds: A Case of Double Consciousness. Harper Magazine No. CXX, Vol. XX (May 1860).
  • A case about the lady often credited as "the first multiple," even though there's no such thing. She switched between two folks for years, and settled into one permanently after a while.
• Dewar, H. (1822). Report on a Communication from Dr [sic] Dyce of Aberdeen, to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, "Oh Uterine Irritation, and its Effects on the Female Constitution." Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. XI. Edinburgh: William & Charles Tait.
  • Early "double personality" case involving a teenage girl who'd sleepwalk/sleeptalk/go into trance and whose "sleep" memory and "waking" memories were kept completely separate from each other. This paper was listed under the mistaken titles of "Double Personality," and "Report on a Communication from Dr. Dyce of Aberdeen" in Goettman and Greaves' gigantic 1991 multi bibilography.
• Carlson, N. (2011). Searching for Catherine Auger: The Forgotten Wife of the Wîhtikôw (Windigo). in Sarah Carter (Ed.) Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands. Edmonton: AU Press.
  • The story of the wife of Napanin/Felix Augur witiko, who in Alberta in 1897 "went witiko," became overwhelmingly compelled to devour his wife and children, and begged to be killed so he wouldn't do so. The local medicine man did so.
• Schmidt, L. E. (2010) Chapter Six: One Religio-Sexual Maniac. Heaven's Bride: the Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman. New York: Basic Books.
  
  • Ida Craddock married an angel in the 1890s and got harrased to death for it in 1902. The chapter title comes from Schmidt tearing down...
• Schroder, T. (1936). One Religio-Sexual Maniac. The Psychoanalytic Review, 23(1).
  • More of Craddock.
• B.C.A./Nellie Parson Bean. (1909). My Life as a Dissociated Personality. Boston: Gorham Press.
  • earliest medical multi autobiography we know about.
• Also Fox and Ara of Team Meg-John Barker's Plural Tarot Companion from 2025 because I think it's neat. :) (Their Plural Tarot is here!)

I had to stop because I ran out of toner (we were already low) but they all make for very small little zines! Still plenty of room in that box.

I had to stop because I ran out of toner (we were already low) but they all make for very small little zines! Still plenty of room in that box.
Still to-print:

• Mitchell, S. W. (1889). Mary Reynolds: A Case of Double Consciousness. Philadelphia: Wm. J. Dornan. Not to be confused with the Plumer article with the same title!
• the Anna Winsor/Old Stump case from 1889 (because that case was so hard to find, I never want to lose it again, augh)
• This article on Alma Z. from 1893!
• Cutten's two 1903 articles on John Kinsel, the guy who his whole college dorm knew about and they took to spanking him with textbooks to make him switch.
• The Doris Fischer case from 1916 (turns out we had it buried in our bummer files!)
• Brandsma's 1974 article about Jonah, just because finding ANY record of black male medical multiples is rare and terrible!
• Everything else I can find that we keep having reference!

We can annotate terms in use... ideas of personhood... theories of cause... so many opportunities, guys! @_@

Rogan: seven years ago, armaina wrote about how someone’s artistic goal may not be “getting good,” and it’s been living rent free in my head ever since, because it was such a radical concept to me.

( on the power of sucking exuberantly )

Rogan: after that household respiratory sickness in November, running again was harder. I was still doing it, but normally my breath-cycle is two steps inhale, two steps exhale, and now it was three for each. It sure wasn’t because I’d gotten BETTER at running; I would wheeze like a busted accordion around the half mile mark, it’d last for an hour or two, and it sounded bad enough that my asthmatic roommate told me I needed to go to the doctor.

( Read more... )

In summary: hey, if you are wheezing and short-winded a month after recovering from a respiratory illness, maybe go to your doctor and get it checked out!

Comics we got at MICE! All are great!

• BE NOT AFRAID, by LSJM(?) Black, white, and red one-pager that’s like if the angel from Pet was giving you a Trump-era pep talk.
• Secret Black Woman, by Ingrid Pierre. Autobio about anti-black racism, anti-Asian racism, passing, and being biracial.
• Default, by JCJB. Poetry essay watercolor about fighting empire and suffering. We think Phosphor of hungryghosts would like this!
• Prompted: an educator’s response to generative AI in the classroom, by Caroline Hu. Science, chatbots, and college. We think erinptah would like this!
• Cannon Fodder, by Eric Alexander Arroyo. Queer mecha pilots in love during wartime. Got it for the sci-fi library; we have now purchased all three printings of this, haha.
• Maintenance, by Cryptozoology. “What if a robot liked it when their creator performed upkeep on them (in a sexual way) and they were both girls???” Grabbed for sci-fi library.
• Silhouette, by L/V. Navy blue Riso robot porn. May also end up in sci-fi library because the art is so gorgeous.

On Saturday December 6, 10:30-2 and 4-6 PM, Sunday December 7, 11-2, we are tabling with the Boston comics Roundtable at table 32 at MICE! Sorry for the double post, but we got an extra shift!