sovay: (Otachi: Pacific Rim)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2025-09-23 12:43 pm

One to sing and one to haul and one to heave me when I fall

I got up far too early to talk about far too much of my health, but I have been shot in the shoulder and eaten a bagel with chopped liver, which is at least two things the current administration would not care for. I am cleared to travel at the end of the month.

Now that it's been dislodged into the forefront of my consciousness, the phenomenon of Pirates of the Caribbean feels like the one real time in my life I was part of a megafandom and mostly what happened was the rest of the planet suddenly concurred that tall ships and chanteys and sea-change were cool. I saw Dead Man's Chest (2006) with my family because Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) had been such an unexpected swashbuckling delight, but I saw At World's End (2007) at a packed multiplex with friends who had agreed in common with much of the audience to arrive wearing as much pirate regalia as we could muster from our wardrobes, which at that time in my life meant the one rust-colored eighteenth-century shirt and my hair tied back with a black ribbon, the gold rings in my ears being a fortuitously preexisting condition. Especially since I continued not to interact with the supermassive explosion of fic unless it originated with my friendlist, that may be the most clinically fannish thing I have done in my life. I have never looked forward to a sequel in theaters before or since. I got the salt-green seventeenth-century glass onion bottle out of that first summer, as if it had been conjured off the screen into the traditional antique shop window for me to fall in love with its crusted tide. In the dog days of the second, I finished the novelette its sand-swirled, barnacle-silted draught was part of the pearl-grit for. In the span of that year, my graduate career had conclusively foundered and left me washing around in the wreckage. It had not occurred to me previously, but in their own flawed and splashier, blockbuster fashion, those two films may have been as much of a lifeline as the sea they evoked. I didn't expect to share it with an entire internet, but I am not sure the experience hurt me any, even if it has never repeated since.

From reading about this message in a bottle, I learned not only about John Craighead George whose mother's books I grew up on, but his twin conservationists of uncles whom I had known nothing about, so all things considered it carried a great deal of information in its transit from Point Barrow to Shapinsay.
gullyfoyle: (Default)

[personal profile] gullyfoyle 2025-09-23 10:43 pm (UTC)(link)
that may be the most clinically fannish thing I have done in my life.

I wore Vulcan ears once in public while running a table for the science fiction club at extracurriculars recruiting day in college. No photos exist, alas.

I wonder if the paths of Craig George and my brother ever crossed in Alaska. My brother lived there for over fifty years and spent considerable time on the North Slope, but as he was a heavy equipment operator and Dr. George a wildlife biologist, they may have been at loggerheads. Nonetheless, when it comes to people, Alaska is a small place, or at least it was when I spent the summer there in 1991.
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[personal profile] gullyfoyle 2025-09-24 12:49 am (UTC)(link)
I have never been to Alaska. I see photographs of it from sholio. (I have been to Hawaii.)

Alaska is multidimensional. Here is a photo from when I was there in June 2022. It's from Creamer's Field, a nature area in Fairbanks. Hawaii is still on my to-do list.

sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)

[personal profile] sholio 2025-09-24 12:54 am (UTC)(link)
Haha, I missed the second date on first glance and I was like, "Wow, that hasn't changed at all since 1991!" (I was just there about four days ago and took some pictures from roughly that angle; it was pretty with the fall colors.) Then I saw 2022 ...
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[personal profile] gullyfoyle 2025-09-24 01:53 am (UTC)(link)
This is a nice time of year there, with the fall colors and few or no mosquitos. Fairbanks had changed very little between my 1991 and 2022 visits. Do you live in Fairbanks? How long have you been there? My picture was taken in June of 2022. I should dig out my box of photos from 1991 and see if I have any of Creamer's Field.
sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)

[personal profile] sholio 2025-09-24 02:36 am (UTC)(link)
I would love to see your photos if you can find them! I've lived in Fairbanks since 1995 (and was in Alaska for a lot longer, but that was when I moved here to go to college and never left aside from a couple of years elsewhere while my husband was going to grad school). It really hasn't changed a whole lot since I've been here; the biggest change I can think of is quite a bit of new freeway chain store construction, but the overall vibe of the town is very much the same as it was when I moved here, as is most of the major infrastructure.

(And although I did not know Craighead George in the slightest, or know anyone who knew him as far as I know, you're right about Alaska being kind of a very big small town. There really aren't more than a couple of degrees of separation between anyone who's been here for any significant length of time, even now.)
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[personal profile] gullyfoyle 2025-09-26 02:36 am (UTC)(link)
I dug out the box of photos from my 1991 stay. There's only a few in there of Fairbanks itself, ironic since I was there for about 5 months, but I saved most of my film (remember that?) for when I was in more traditionally scenic areas. I'm looking at getting the whole batch digitized, but I'll see if I can scan and post a few. Technically, I stayed in Ester and was more familiar with the college area; didn't get over to the eastern side very much.
sholio: sun on winter trees (Default)

[personal profile] sholio 2025-09-26 06:51 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, wonderful, I'd definitely love to see any of them that you feel like scanning or sharing! I do remember that too, saving film to take pictures of meaningful things as opposed to all the everyday photography we do now with phones.