0dense

whew did I need this weekend! Tbh even without pandemic + wildfires I probably would've just stayed in and decompressed anyway. Though, the air is getting better! It got as low as 166 today! For reference, in the entire state of NY, the highest aqi on purpleair is ...30. We're back to the 180s tonight, but earlier today was the first time in a week that our little solar-powered rainbowmaker had enough juice to spin, even if it wasn't bright enough to throw any light. Baby steps, I'll take anything.

Anyway, looking up, I chilled out and:

blocked up Ross and LoA! Still need to work out the whole case situation, but I learned a lot about trimming and I can't wait to read them all the way through.
got to re-read the first chunk of Down Girl for seminar. It's really interesting to come back to Manne in such a different class environment than originally; I'm really looking forward to seeing how we're able to discuss it this time. It's a lot more fun to learn as a small fish in a big pond!
submitted our panel proposal for Fanworks con! Fingers crossed it'll be approved! Strongly considering cleaning up my notes and writing a mini-paper for the con zine - what a way to be published 😂
- sincerely missing campus, though; I'd love to be able to actually shop these ideas around to various departments. I still can find like, office hours, but euugh everything's so much more awkward this way.

also, I just found out about The Cholera Fiend, a pulp novel from 1850, which is obviously on point by content but also apparently, quoting from the link,

We can’t say much with certainty about what kind of book it is, because as far as we know, no original physical copy of the novel exists.
The text of the novel provided here is a PDF made from a hard copy that was printed from a microfilmed version of the novel—a palimpsest of media forms.
The copy that was filmed is presumed lost. Paul Erickson read the novel on microfilm while he was in graduate school and printed out the version that was scanned to create this PDF.
While we don’t know exactly what the original novel looked like, we can make some educated guesses based on other titles published by the Williams firm. It would have been issued with paper covers—maybe yellow, perhaps pink. It might have had an illustration on the front cover; the back cover would probably have advertised other novels for sale by the firm, or perhaps would have promoted The Uncle Sam. The novel would have cost either 12.5 or 25 cents, which were standard prices for cheap fiction in the U.S...

so you're telling me that there's a possibly entirely out of print novel about a plague and here's what it might've looked like and here's the pdf? how cool would that be to resurrect! Unfortunately, the PDF is 1) spread scans and 2) deeply fried through all the data translations, so it would be a massive pain in the ass to fix and I don't have the bandwidth for any more reconstructions right now. I also don't know that it would be particularly enjoyable as anything other than a historical project, but certainly at least it's very exciting when the venn diagram of my interests is a circle. Still, great example of the period aesthetic, might be interesting to set something as collums sometime...