Grand Theft Hamlet is a great movie, by the way, or at least it filled a need I didn’t know existed. It’s a documentary where a lot of actors in lockdown try to stage Hamlet in Grand Theft Auto Online, getting other people to read various parts, picking places to perform, scheduling rehearsals, picking up some regular people who watch them rehearse, and all the while dodging every other player in the game shooting at them with rockets. It’s great.
One thing that especially worked for me, though, was the ghost. This is the first time I really felt it when Horatio begs Hamlet not to follow the ghost. Inside GTA Online, the ghost is in all black except for a ski mask with LED lights in a smiley face, standing on a blimp that Hamlet has to jump down onto from a balcony. Don’t follow him, Hamlet!
Another day, another putatively authoritative and well researched thinkpiece about the culture of the first wave of popular webcomics circa 1998–2002 which does not at any point mention the furries.
…The first wave would include Ozy and Millie, right? I’m not in a weird bubble for thinking that was pretty big? Just for context on ‘not mention the furries’ because while I don’t recall Dana Claire Simpson being a furry, the O&M fandom was dominated by furries.
…Come to think of it, was DMFA popular enough to be included in that?
Ozy and Millie is technically pre-first-wave, being a print comic that later made the jump to the web. That’s one of the reasons the first wave is generally identified as beginning around 1998 – most popular webcomics that were around before that made the same print-to-web transition, rather than starting out as webcomics.
I recall, in my high school years, reading a lengthy book on popular webcomics. It was already outdated in terms of what was popular, because it touted stuff like “Argon Zark” and “When I Am King”. It did not mention furries.
Oh, yeah, it’s nothing new; even books and articles that came out while the first wave of popular webcomics was current often conspicuously avoided mentioning the furry stuff. Citing Argon Zark but not Kevin and Kell – which was both contemporary with Argon Zark and much more widely read – is par for the course!
I named her that, not the company. I thought it was a pretty, old-fashioned name, something buoyed by the fact that Charlotte in Charlotte Sometimes is told by her 50-years-ago counterpart's younger sister that it's funny that she has such an old-fashioned name - and that book was written in the 1960s!
As of December 2024, The Cook Islands’ Palmerston Atoll was declared entirely rat free. This was after significant eradication efforts and monitoring to confirm the rats were gone, both of which involved the local community. Removing the rats has helped to improve food security and safety for residents, as well as increasing the prevalence and numbers of native wildlife.
Arthur Neale, the atoll’s Executive Officer, says Palmerston’s rat-free status means the world to him and everyone else who lives on the atoll.
“Rats infested the atoll for over a century. They ate our crops, invaded our homes and harmed local wildlife. We saw the rat problem becoming worse, with the potential to seriously undermine our resilience in the face of climate change impacts.
“Benefits from the rat eradication are already evident. Our food security has improved massively. Fruits like guava, mango and star fruit are now abundant and free from rat damage. Our nu mangaro (a coconut tree variety) are thriving. Vegetables, especially cucumbers, have seen an astonishing increase in yield.
“We’re very excited to see more native species now rats are no longer eating them. Seedlings of tamanu and puka are increasing and we’re seeing and hearing more birds. Wood pigeons and red-tailed tropic birds have returned to Home Islet. Crabs and lizards appear to be more abundant.”
Here’s a cool video from a few years ago covering the work to remove rats and inclusion with the local community (Just a heads up the video does show dead rats a couple of times).
There's a few people in that thread adamantly going up and down asserting that, duh, how could the rest of us be so dumb as to not know that certain types of toilets are specifically designed to be flushed with the foot. None of them have provided any sort of evidence for this claim, which makes me think that their evidence boils down to "Mommy told me when I was a kid" or "Well, I flush with a foot so I just sort of assumed", and - man, I hate when people do that. Fucking back up your claims, or at least qualify them. "I was told by my preschool teacher, but I've never verified it" would be a lot more honest and less annoying.
Anyway, I have emailed the manufacturer most often mentioned in the comments to ask for their opinion. Mostly because that is how things ought to be done, but also because if these flushers are designed to be flushed with the foot, great, but if not then we have to ask if the other contingent, which is equally vociferously asserting that foot flushing increases wear and tear on the mechanism and causes breakdowns, needs to be taken seriously. Because what's really not okay is breaking the toilet for everybody who comes after you - and sure, you'll say that you are not the sole person responsible for breaking the toilet that much faster, but c'mon, everybody says that.
So let's see what we see, and in the meantime, let's also all wash our hands. With soap and water, thanks.
The comet moth, also known as the Madagascan moon moth (Argema mittrei). They’re endangered in the wild due to habitat loss from deforestation and agricultural activities but is bred in captivity
Homosapien Press, publisher of multi-fandom fanzines including Samurai Errant, Homosapien, and Pure Maple Syrup, is importing the zines’ fanworks to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).
Homosapien Press was based in Australia and run by Julie Bozza, publishing various fanzines from 1988 to 2004. Julie is keen to preserve this part of fandom history, with the explicit permission of the creators.
Please contact us if you had works in these zines and would like them to be imported!
The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s AO3 Fanzine Scan Hosting Project (FSHP) is to assist publishers of fanzines to incorporate the fanworks from those fanzines into the Archive of Our Own. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with publishers who want to import their fanzines and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with Homosapien Press to import the fanzines listed above into separate, searchable collections on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the fanzines in their entirety, all art in the fanzines will be hosted on the OTW's servers and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.
We will begin importing works from Homosapien Press’s fanzines to the AO3 after May 2025, where we have explicit permission from the creators. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the task. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collections in the meantime.
We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We'll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.
All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors.
Please contact Open Doors with your creator pseud(s) and email address(es), if:
You’d like us to import your works!
You'd like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than the publisher has a record of.
You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3, or would NOT like your works added to the fanzine collections.
You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
You have any other questions we can help you with.
Please include the name of the publisher or fanzine in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account the publisher has a record of, please contact Open Doors and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's great; if not, we will work with Homosapien Press to confirm your claims.)
We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of Homosapien Press and its fanzines on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.
We're excited to be able to help preserve Homosapien Press’s fanzines!
- The Open Doors team and Julie Bozza
Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.
I’ve read Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron” before, but when I saw that Barbara Cooney had illustrated it, of course I had to pick it up. Sarah Orne Jewett was a writer of the “local color” school famous for her works set in Maine, while Barbara Cooney was an illustrator who spent her childhood summers in Maine and eventually settled there.
The pairing is propitious. Cooney draws out the twilight loveliness of Jewett’s story, Sylvia driving the cow home in the dusk, meeting a young man in the woods who is hunting birds for his collection, rising before dawn to climb the highest tree in the forest to seek out the home of the rare white heron for him… standing near the top of the tree, gazing out over the treetops to the vast sea “with the dawning sun making a golden dazzle over it,” and the birds flying below her. Hawks, sparrows, and the heron itself, which perches on a bough of Sylvia’s own pine tree.
But though the text describes the heron perching, in the pictures it is always shown in flight.
In the illustrator’s note at the back, Cooney notes that she wanted to capture “the superimposed layers of countryside and trees separated by rising mists or incoming fogs… something like an ethereal Japanese screen,” and YES, that is exactly the feeling that her landscape images often give. It’s especially present in this book in the last large picture, four shouting catbirds perched on a branch that spreads across the top of two pages, and in the misty distance below soft gray pines… and a few sharp black pines closer… and the white heron flying past.
I feel that this comment has unlocked something that I’ve responded to in Cooney’s illustrations without ever putting a name to it. I want to revisit some of my favorites now and trace this Japanese influence in her work.
Summary: A Squid like merperson Content Notes: I put some of Diamine's Cosmic Glow into the Conklin to draw this Cecaelian like person. They're modelled on squid. Click to embiggen the image.
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drawesome
