The Stitchpunks

Oh right, forgot one more book for giveaway: A Novel Love Story, by Ashley Poston. Woman’s car breaks down in her favorite romance series, but the author died suddenly and now the series is in stasis. For the romance-loving fictioneers among you!

Same rules as others: free in the States, you pay shipping if you’re internationally.

Rogan: We dropped into the sci-fi library briefly because there were a few books we wanted to add to the system... and found a big stack of comics on the cart labeled with our name. Turns out someone had donated the entire series of Transmetropolitan in trade paperback and we are the Person Who Knows Comics, so everyone decided to leave it for us. (Far as I know, there's one guy who knows manga and that's about it.)

We don't much care for Warren Ellis or his work (and this was not for lack of trying, back before we decided that our reading for fun is FOR FUN, plus Elli's reputation nose-dived), but Transmetropolitan is one of those series that are huge for a lot of people and critically acclaimed, so we are relieved to have the whole series just horked up in bulk in one go, sparing us the work. Thanks, mysterious donor!

We added it to the catalog, stickered and shelved it, and made a note on the mailing list so folks would know what we did.

The senior librarian responded with a bemused remark along the lines of, "I have no idea what Transmet is or why it matters, but yay, thanks for taking care of it!"

To which someone else responded, more or less, "yes, that is why we made it LB's problem."

Well, we've achieved our goal of becoming the head person for the comics section, I guess! (Seriously, though, we're glad about this. If we're the only person in that library who knows what Transmetropolitan is, we should be the one who handles comics.)

( comics library stuff )

This is a silly post of a silly photo and also Rawlin's new hair style.

Rawlin enjoyed having hair that read as feminine to humans, but discovered she REALLY cannot stand the sensation of hair on the back of her neck in summer. She mostly wore it in a topknot, but then she could not be petted, which is a tragedy, so she asked Mori to cut her hair in something short but femme, so now she's not too far off from where she was at in the start.


Telling you the context for this photo will not help or improve anything, so we just aren't going to tell you what it is, just that no Tiptoes were harmed in the making of this photograph.
( Dog catches cat. Cat wins. )

(Post title is a lie; only one of these programs is by a guy named Dan.)

Nowadays, it is expected that every program you need will come from a centralized depository, or “the app store,” guaranteed to be functional and trusted. But crusty garage salers we, we sometimes enjoy using third-party software gotten from websites that look like they haven’t had a style update in twenty years, run by a random guy named Dan. Blessings upon the Dans of the world, who have made our computing experience infinitely better! And what is a blog for if not to advertise these random programmers?

(All of these programs are for Windows. Linux had all these things either built in or easy to get.)

( wonderful mostly-free programs by randos sometimes named Dan )

EDIT: BuildBooklet by our friend Leaf. She made this so we could make print-order PDFs of our comics using DrRacket (a bigger project she worked on). Doesn't work on Windows XP, but it works on Linux and Windows 7 and later! It does exactly what it's supposed to do! A+ work helper that freed me from having to rely on Adobe!

So here’s to the Dans. Cheers! Do you have any “guy named Dan” programs that you swear by?

Rogan: This post is brought to you by Phosphor of hungryghosts nerd-sniping me again. He knows my weaknesses and he asked, "someone in Otherconnect was wondering - when did the concept of system names become a thing?"

I plunged into my records and here's what I found! (With the gracious help of erinptah!)

The first time I've found what we might call a "system name"--that is, a name for the whole kit and kaboodle of body tenants that isn't just the body's legal name and/or individual names--is in 1905, in Morton Prince's Dissociation of a Personality. erinptah dug through their copy and quoted this bit:

With this hypothesis in mind, all three members of "the family," as Sally used to speak of them, were interrogated, in search of some accident or emotional shock which might have caused a split in consciousness. (213-214)

Sally was a personality of "Mrs. Beauchamp," not considered the "real one," and not treated well by Morton Prince, so I think it's important that he notes that it's specifically HER who used this name, "the family," for the group. And it was not a one-off! Over a decade later, German philosopher Schiller mentions not just "the Beauchamp family" (396) but also comments on the Doris Fischer case by calling them "the 'Doris' Family" (391). Clearly he found the idea useful!

After that, though, I have a big gap in my records. (System names probably exist; I just haven't been able to FIND any for easy reference.) Headmates are generally referred to by their individual names/psuedonyms or, for the whole of them, by their legal name or psuedonym--Billy Milligan, Sybil, Eve, etc. There is this sort of unwritten assumption that the legal name is the real person that encompasses everyone within. There isn't the group names we see so often now--the Flock, Zyfron System, Loony-Brain, etc. Where did these come from?

The first record I have (after Sally in 1905) is "Cafe D'Air" from the June 1986 issue of Speaking for Our Selves, #4. There are also people going by things like "S. Jeremy," "CW of Bonnie," "Bogie and Scarlet," the usual chaining together of names.

In 1987, the Troops for Truddi Chase broke ground in insisting on having their book, When Rabbit Howls attributed to them under that name, rather than just Truddi Chase. Thanks to S4OS (the first multi community record I have), it's clear that the Troops didn't originate this idea, but they certainly helped popularize it, and the idea of a group name became pretty common afterward--it's all over the place in the Many Voices newsletter, alt.support.dissociation, and books like The Flock, by Joan Frances Casey.

So as best we can tell, the idea of group names seems to be multi-originated, possibly to get away from the medical thing of just calling us by individual names or the "real person's" name, maybe around the '80s when multis actually started talking to each other and leaving records behind that I can actually find? I'll have to reread "B. C. A."'s "My Life as a Dissociated Personality" to see if any group name gets mentioned there.