Apparently, Ireland almost had a famine in 1925. I didn't know about this until I tripped over a reference to it today, and it seems that it was kept quiet by the government of the day.

But here's a quote from the Irish Times of May 27, 1925, in an article on taxation on donations: "Some months ago, when the West of Ireland was in the grip of incipient famine, a large firm in England offered to send a ton of chocolate to Connaught to help to keep the children from hunger. We understand, however, that this offer was withdrawn promptly when the firm in question was informed that duty must be paid on the chocolate. This kind of red tape is merely irritating, and steps ought to be take in Committee to put an end to it."

The past is not actually as weird as the present, but it can still be pretty weird.

Weather: Dull, damp, cool. We have a yellow rain warning, but we're on the outer edge of it, so I dont expect a lot to happen.
Breakfast: Hash browns, bacon, eggs, toast coffee.
Wearing: Black jeans, black tshirt. Standard issue Tesco socks.
Things done yesterday: ... I 'unno, time is weird. I know I cooked, and I took the dog for a walk, and I did sleep in, and I set up a new Discord server for the shire, but that doesn't seem like a whole day.
Things to do today: Several job applications and the acquisition of some stuff from Lidl already done. I have the final episode of the final season of Agents of SHIELD on hand, and will watch that at some stage. And later, dog walking and cooking.
Still planned writing: Commonplace issue about stuff from the vIMC, assuming I can get my brain in gear.

Weather: Dull, slightly warm. Supposed to get up to 24C, which means I may need to nap through that bit.
Breakfast: Avocado toast with ham and eggs, coffee.
Wearing: Black jeans, STRAIGHT OUTTA CONTEXT tshirt. Barefoot.
Things done yesterday: Call with a recruiter, and some actual physical work wheelbarrowing soil from where a guy with serious skills was digging post holes for a Viking House recreation. See his website for more.
Things to do today: Food planning, shopping, probably some more sleeping to avoid the heat.
Still planned writing: Commonplace issue about stuff from the vIMC, and trying to shake down Tinyletter to get GD out of newsletter jail. I was already thinking about moving to Substack; this makes it a lot more likely.
Discovery of the day yesterday: Marvel exists in the DC universe (a character in The Flash referenced Spider-man)

I need some writing muscles stretched, so this quiz, stolen from Tumblr, would seem to be suitable.

Lantern - how did you meet your best friend? What were your first impressions of each other? This assumes that everyone has a definitive best friend, and I can't say that I do. Close friends are more like family to me, and I've a fairly large family in that context. But I've met them in all kinds of ways, and I don't remember the first time meeting most of them. The few people with whom I've had very distinctive, very definite first impressions have mostly drifted off. This probably says something meaningful.

Frost - if you could give some advice to your younger self, what would you say? "Patience is your best tool for most things."

Maple - is there a hobby / skill that you’ve always wanted to try but never did? Dry-stone walling. Mind you, I fully intend to learn it yet.

Harvest - what fictional character do you most identify with? Why? Antryg Windrose, from Barbara Hambly's books and short stories, because he was one of the first characters I read whose reasoning made sense to me.

Fireside - if you had your dream wardrobe, what would it look like? A wide variety of colours of jeans, tshirts, shirts, ties, sweater-vests, tweed jackets, hats and boots. Parsonpunk. I probably need to include shorts and things as summers get warmer, but I don't like like them.

Cider - a food that you disliked as a child but now enjoy? Sour tastes in general. Licorice. But to be honest, the foods that I encountered as a child in rural Ireland were so limited compared to the food available now that I've no real idea.

Amber - share an unpopular opinion that you may have. The climate crisis is already past the point of no return. We can and should slow it down, but at this point, we're just along for the ride.

Fog - how well do you think you’d do in a zombie apocalypse scenario? I would do just fine. I have a solid post-apocalyptic skill set, good aim, and I'm a lot fitter than I look.

Jack-o-lantern - if you could look like any celebrity, who would you choose? I'm comfortable enough with my own looks, to be honest. When I was younger, I'd have liked to be taller and more cheek-bone enabled, but the latter would be hard to see under the beard, and tall people hit their heads on things.

Spice - have you ever encountered a house that you believed to be haunted? Absolutely. Several places I've been completely certain there was something else about, mind, but only one in the purest negative, evil sense of haunting. That was Loftus Hall, on the Hook Peninsula, which I visited on a school tour when I was maybe 13 or 14. I could not get out of that building fast enough, and even three decades later, I get a slight cold shudder thinking about it. I've been to the Hook since, and passed within sight of it, and that's plenty; I am definitely not setting foot in there again.

Orchard - share one thing that you’d like to happen this autumn. I would like the sense of living in historical times to deflate to the level of 1995 or so.

Crow - which school subject do you wish you had an aptitude for? Music. I mean, I studied it to the Leaving Cert, and got an Honours C, which is not nothing. But I am also tone deaf, absolutely can't sing, and don't have a great sense of rhythm.

Bonfire - describe your dream house. Extensive, though not necessarily large. Many rooms. Rambling might be a better word. Rural, or at least a good way out from a town centre. Surrounded by trees, covered in ivy and/or wisteria, possessed of a kitchen garden, an orchard, and various outbuildings. Internally, fireplaces, stairs in odd places, a good kitchen, a library and also plenty of bookshelves in other rooms. Room for a couple of dozen people, when desirable or necessary.

Cinnamon - if you had to live in a time period different than the present, which would you choose and where? Because I am a literate white guy, I'd probably do ok in many periods. But I am also short-sighted, which means that any time before the mid-19th century would be uncomfortable. I might have a go at the Edwardian era.

Cobweb - (if you’ve graduated) do you miss high school? So much no. There must be a better way of educating people than confining them with a few hundred other hormonally-charged proto-people for 8 months a year.

Cranberry - what’s one physical feature that you get complimented on? My forearms and my beard. The latter mostly by men, the former mostly by women. When I had long hair, that, from both.

Maize - share the weirdest encounter you’ve had with a stranger on the street. I could write a book of weird encounters I've had with strangers, on streets, in railway stations, and on buses. Trying to pick just one is hard. But I did have a brief conversation with a denim-clad, multiply-pierced punk girl on a train from Dun Laoghaire, who was apparently instantaneously replaced by a very respectable old lady when I glanced away. She grinned at me as she got off the train, taking her Ramones-branded backpack with her.

Quilt - how do you take your tea (or coffee)? Tea, with milk. Coffee, black, as the gods intended it.

Pumpkin - do you think that humans are inherently good or bad? Neither. Humans are inherently stupid. As a species, they're just smart enough to survive by beating up other species, and they think that makes them actually intelligent. I stopped identifying as human a long time ago, and I do my friends the courtesy of assuming they're not, either.

Moonlit - are you a neat or messy person? Is your room / house orderly? I am, at present, vastly messy on a physical level, and very tidy and organised in my notes and writing. I am beginning to see signs that I might be tidier in real life if I could work from home or write for a living.

Cocoa - if you could have any type of hair, what colour and cut would you have? In my youth, straight black hair, worn long. Now, I kind of wish it'd just stop at the 1.5mm length I like.

Ghost - is there someone that you miss having in your life? My mother, I think. I've had a few images of late in dreams and meditations of what she'd be like now. I don't think she'd entirely approve of many aspects of my life, but in the dreams and such, she's amusedly tolerant.

Weather: Rainy, cool. Clearing later. I think there was a lot of rain overnight.
Breakfast: Bacon, black pudding, eggs, toast, coffee.
Wearing: Black jeans, black tshirt. Standard issue Tesco socks.
Things done yesterday: Hiking; Crone Woods and the Maulin summit loop. Mostly rather dull sitka forestry, but some nicer parts as well, and loads of heather on the open summit and some lower slopes. Very pleasant walk, though quite tiring.
Things to do today: Various housekeeping, some repairs and garden maintenance, food planning, shopping.
Still planned writing: Commonplace issue about stuff from the vIMC.
Bits still sore from yesterday: 3; outer tendon, right knee, left heel, and a sort of indeterminate occasional ache in the lower back. The difference between my normal walking in utterly-flat Maynooth and the climb to the more than 550m top of Maulin is very evident.

I've done a fair bit of work with social media over the last decade. Literal paid-for work, experimental work, some artistic/project work, and a great deal of pushing content into social media. I live a lot of my life on broadcast, and have since the very earliest days of being online in the late 90s.

Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher and media critic. He died in 1980, so he never really saw the internet, but he did see the effects of radio and TV on the societies he lived in. There's a lot of his work I don't get - I've tried - but there's one maxim he had that makes sense to me; "the medium is the message". There are a lot of ways to unpack that, but one of the effects is that media, even when they have very small differences in technical terms, can have very big differences in how they're understood and used.

I'm thinking here not in terms of The Internet as a medium, but Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Twitter, Tumblr, Tiktok, and so on. Someone posted a thing about Tumblr a little while ago:

Yahoo bought the sex gifs aggregator "Tumblr," banned all the sex gifs, then sold it for a billion dollar loss, in so doing dumping a bunch of extremely unwell 17 year old sorcerers on us. This in economics is called "externalities"

— Goatstein (@MandelaFace) July 19, 2020

(Personally, I think the 17 year old sorcerers are some of the most balanced, self-aware, sensible people I've encountered, but never mind that.)

It's pretty clear to everyone that different networks have different characteristics. After much thought, I've found that the best way to represent these is as high-school cliques and stereotypes.



The US has much better archetypes here, and they're more widely recognised, so I'm rolling with that.

Facebook is the homeroom, the core class, or whatever your school called it; the central identity from which it's hard to get away. Anyone who declares they're not using it looks a bit like they're homeschooling or unschooling; people can see the merits, but still think it's a bit weird.

Instagram is made up of the popular kids; the ones who rule the social life of the school. There's not a lot of depth to what they do here, though.

Twitter are the smart, sometimes rather mean kids; the ones who can deploy enough sarcasm and wit to get away with stuff, but who aren't popular as such. The activists are here too (my year group had none, as far as I know, or else I was it, and I wasn't much).

Pinterest is where the carefully curated kids live. The ones who are conscious of social positioning, aware they're not at the top, and maintain their carefully curated images so as not to draw attention, unless it's to very socially acceptable achievements. Because teenage girls are sensitive to this stuff, and boys kind of aren't, there's a gender bias.

Tumblr is definitely weird kid central. The baby witches, the goblin kid, the harder-core gamers, and the guy who you're pretty sure has taxidermy as his main hobby are all in here.

Reddit is where the jocks and future frat bros live. /r/AskHistorians is like the guy who, for completely incomprehensible reasons, hangs out with the jocks while effortlessly acing every exam he goes near.

Voat and 4Chan and the like are where the hardcore bullies are, because Reddit doesn't let them be quite unpleasant enough.

Livejournal, as was, and Dreamwidth now to some degree, as well as people who maintain blogs, are the school newspaper and yearbook kids. They know a lot of stuff, and write a lot of stuff, and very little of it gets seen by anyone else, but sometimes something really explodes.

Email newsletters are the poets. There's one or two in every year group; they can be seen scribbling furiously in notebooks, writing letters, and almost certainly wearing black.

Tiktok are the class clowns. YouTube is the theatre group. Soundcloud is the unofficial school band (there's one in every school, sometimes more, mostly rock in my era).

Discord and Slack are the out-of-school friend groups; the ones that have people from different schools. Not everyone has them, but the ones that do tend to consider them a lot more important than the in-school cliques.

Weather: Clear, cool. Really quite nice. Set to bucket rain later, of course.
Breakfast: Bacon, eggs, toast, coffee.
Wearing: Black jeans, Pride 2017 tshirt. Standard issue Tesco socks.
Things done yesterday: Inbox zero, yo. Also an issue of Gentle Decline out.
Things to do today: Edits on That Job App, and sending it in.
Still planned writing: Finished the GD issue, so onward to Commonplace and the other bits.
Hours of continuous sleep last night: 7.5. I usually wake up every hour and a half or three hours - not fully, or anything like it, just briefly surface - so getting five full sleep cycles without waking is really unusual.

Weather: Rainy, cool.
Breakfast: Bacon, eggs, toast, coffee.
Wearing: Black jeans, Drachenwald tshirt. Standard issue Tesco socks.
Things done yesterday: More job app, more writing, harvested potatoes before dog/chickens got them all, dog walked... I'm sure there was something else too.
Things to do today: More writing, housekeeping.
Still planned writing: See yesterday, and last week, etc.
Number of cats asleep in the laundry I was trying to put away: 2

Weather: Sunny, cool. It got down to 7.9C last night, and sleeping was excellent.
Breakfast: Leftover meats in toasted sandwiches, coffee.
Wearing: Black jeans, Celtic tree-of-life tshirt. Standard issue Tesco socks.
Things done yesterday: Various housekeeping, writing, job applications, and making pizzas for fighters.
Things to do today: I am writing a job app for a public service job which requires a key achievements form. I am a decent writer, but I still hate writing this kind of stuff, the more so when it seems to want me to list "achievements" that are as far as I'm concerned just doing the job. There's also a shopping trip this evening, and I need to plan food and make a list.
Still planned writing: Gentle Decline future-fiction piece (now under way); Commonplace on food-related stuff from the vIMC. Possibly also a piece on the different patterns of interaction and personality of Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Weather: Grey, cool-ish, rainy. Forecast says clearer later. Yesterday was not clearer later.
Breakfast: Bagels, cream cheese, smoked salmon, coffee.
Wearing: Black jeans, green tshirt. Barefoot.
Things done yesterday: Some odds and ends of shopping, cookery, some writing, dog-walking, house-keeping.
Things to do today: More house-keeping.
Still planned writing: Gentle Decline future-fiction piece (now under way); Commonplace on food-related stuff from the vIMC. Possibly also a piece on the different patterns of interaction and personality of Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.
New aesthetic discovery: Dark Cottagecore. The crossover of rural and gothic without being all melodramatic. It is something like catnip for my brain at the moment.