bear

I was talking with a friend about fairs yesterday, and now I'm both sad I'll be missing out on the Big E (because even though I'll be in New England next week, I'm flying home the day it starts), and enthusiastically making grandiose plans with said friend to go to the Minnesota State Fair Great Minnesota Get-Together next year, despite neither of us living in the Midwest.

I didn't grow up going to fairs; they were the province of children's fiction to me. All I knew about fairs was that there would be fried foods and thrill rides of questionable safety and contests ranging from biggest pumpkin to fattest pig to who could eat a whole pie the fastest; thanks, EB White. So when Scott basically dragged half our dorm to the Eastern States Exposition my freshman year, well, I fell in love.

Every time I went, we'd spend the majority of our time eating our way through the State Houses. Comparing clam chowders between Massachusetts and Rhode Island, comparing lobster rolls between Maine and Connecticut, eating all the maple sugar candy from Vermont, blueberry everything and loaded baked potatoes from Maine, the Finnish pancakes from Massachusetts, frozen lemonade from Rhode Island to wash it all down, along with cider and cider donuts and fried dough and kettle corn and fudge everywhere. (And of course, apple pie with cheese!) I don't think I could do a full 12 hour day there anymore, but when we went back in college and postgrad, we spread all of that eating across the entire day, and that gave us time to digest enough to go on spinny rides and not barf :)

Fast forward more than a decade since the last time I managed to make it out to Western Mass during the Big E, and the algorithm keeps showing me fair food from the Minnesota State Fair, the most recent post from Molly Yeh included. Even though my phone hasn't left the state of California since May, and the last time it was in Minnesota was over five years ago when we visited the SPAM Museum on our way across the country.

I strongly suspect it's because there was a week in August where everybody was talking ALL HOTDISHES ALL THE TIME. I knew about hotdish before that; I did date a Minnesotan, after all, and then Molly Yeh brought them into the broader cultural consciousness (at least in my foodie circles). There's even the Hot Dash in March every year where there's a hotdish festival at the finish line!

So now there's been an even more mainstream Hotdish Revival, thanks Tim Walz. Even if the ones I'm finding more intriguing are, like, Samosa Chaatdish. Or Little Moga-Hot-Dishu. Or Molly's Chinese Hotdish. Or this Tater Tot Hotdish Bowl with kimchi and bossam, though of course if I were going to turn it back into a proper hotdish of course there would be rice involved. Or Hot Tot Berbere Tater Dishinator (scroll down to Keith Ellison's contribution). Though I am not yet seeing a Filipino-inspired hotdish, peeps, does this mean I have to figure one out myself? Or a Hmong Hotdish, from Yia Vang of Union Hmong Kitchen and Vinai.

Which brings me back to drooling over the New Foods List for the fair, burnishing its reputation every year, best known for how over-the-top chefs go to make the most delicious, talked-about fair food item. I'm looking at you, "smoked sausage slices wrapped in bacon, filled with cream cheese and drizzled with barbecue sauce," the kettle-chip ice cream sandwich, the sweet corn cola float. But I'm also delighted to see:

• Union Hmong Kitchen's mov nplaum ntshaav (Hmong grilled purple rice) with nqaj nyuj qhaa (traditional shredded beef) on a stick (the real spirit of fair food) from the aforementioned Yia Vang


• the native fusion manoomin and nixtamal with wóžapi and bison meatballs (you've got Ojibwe, Lakota, and Mesoamerican influences in one dish)


• the bánh mi and lobster roll éclairs (I'm wondering how well choux pastry stands up to the heft I usually associate with their respective sandwiches)

And lutefisk bao?! I will bring my empty stomach and a Game Plan next year, Minnesota!

I've been thinking about danah boyd's recent post on the current state of Twitter alternatives, along with the context of being a relative Internet Old.

( my early internet participant context: .plans and fingering and retroactively understanding it as a social network )

What struck me most in boyd's analysis is the idea that the slow internal growth of networks was also one of the most significant stabilizing factors. It's paralleled my overall internet experience; many of my LJ friends simply never made the transition over to Dreamwidth, for example, despite whatever logical and emotional reasons to move were provided, illustrated in stories. At the time, we wrote off most of this to "network lock-in;" hanging out on the internet where the largest pure number of "my people" were as a way to optimize ROI on staying in touch with as many people as possible. Which illustrates how the majority of us ended up on Facebook, and slowly, the rich sharing we enjoyed on earlier networks atrophied, bowdlerized into pablum for audiences that now included people with even less of an understanding of the norms of the Internet and its communities that came before. >_>

And then of course, how you found your friends on social media in the 2010s was by uploading your contact lists. Trying to find my friends on 2023 social media like Bluesky and Mastodon has involved third parties that, to the average person, feel like their functionality and respect for data privacy is just as opaque as the more convenient if dangerous method of uploading a contact list.

Among my friends that remain active here on Dreamwidth, it seems like it's been primarily the geeks and the fen, both communities with at least a baseline commonality of norms not true of the broader Internet, long-accustomed to needing to move internet homes every so often, whether seeking novelty or security, and bringing their people along with, most of whom were used to coping with some level of inconvenience and inaccessibility.

But on a more personal level, it makes my recent archival project of centralizing and preserving my own broader internet archives on Dreamwidth feel like the ultimate "context collapse." For the me of 20 years ago, I posted on Planworld to keep in touch with primarily college friends, and I posted to LiveJournal to keep in touch with my online friends, most of whom at that time I'd met through X-Files fandom, or through volunteering for LiveJournal Support. Noting the differences in how I talked about my life; who knew what of me at the time. As the years passed, I built up my post-grad friends circles both in Boston and online, some of whom overlapped in fandom or geekdom, but many of whom didn't. But LiveJournal (and fandom) had gotten mainstream ~enough~, and my circles melded enough, that I grew into feeling comfortable writing for this blended audience, all of whom I counted as friends.

But for newer friends whom I might want to share older posts with, the context feels odd. Like, to give a recent example, trying to explain to the newer Planworld members currently in their early 20s that I was among the first of my college friends to date somebody I'd met on the Internet, even kind of? That almost nobody was on Match.com, that Tinder et al didn't exist? While at the same time, many of my online friends had been in relationships that started on the internet years prior to geebee_x dragging me and a law school friend of hers into an AIM chatroom one night in October 2001 to “secretly yet blatantly” set us up (🔒). But also, that most of the people with whom I was sharing these musings back then were people I had ongoing pre-existing relationships with, whether that was years in the same classrooms and clubs or years in the same chatrooms and mailing lists; that even in bringing new friends into the fold, my networks were mostly growing pretty slowly with specific contexts intact?

I feel a similar awkward butterfly-shedding-its-chrysalis around opening up here again, too - I've been away for so long, and I know I haven't kept up with many of you even elsewhere in recent years. But it still feels like part of how I want to be on the internet; be the change you want to see, be a person talking with other people in an otherwise transactional, influencer-capitalist society.

And I'm only up to summer 2003*! I wonder how I'm going to feel once I really start pulling in tweet threads and Facebook updates and Instagram pictures that stopped getting automatically backed up on Flickr and here.

• Granted, summer 2003 and the people I met because of it were far more pivotal to my life than I could recognize at the time I was living it!

Who's ready for #independentbookstoreday2016? MEEEEE.

Home from 1-day western New England extravaganza. hyounpark and I had a Rein's picnic, nolrak is married, I finally met gordynate, and with belladonna we all boogied down on the dance floor.

H and I didn't get to Amherst until after 8:00, I was sad about missing Atkins Farm, then hyounpark won a box of Atkins Farm fudge in the raffle, we threw candy at this year's Nuno, I saw friends old and new, I got Atkins Farms cider on top of it all at the reception afterwards, we sang college songs galore both onstage and then impromptu afterwards, generations of Jeffs harmonizing together, and we are now home with four slices of Antonio's in the fridge for brunch tomorrow. :)

slwands and eevieivy, sorry we missed you; we didn't get to Amherst until 8:15, and it sounds like you both were already on your way home then!

happy birthday, cretak and kazulrw!

tonight at summersings: mozart's requiem! $4 to listen, $8 to sing along, bring a fan and a water bottle. i didn't have time to bake this weekend, but there will be snackies, regardless. old south church, 645 boylston st, doors at 7. bitty and bubblebabble and hyounpark and perhaps luminaepona will be there - will you? :)

object lesson of the weekend #1: oh dear GOD, i'd missed kayaking. this is something i need to be doing far, far more often. (even on the rumored pollution of the charles? maybe some of the lakes around here do boating and rent kayaks?)

object lesson of the weekend #2: yours truly is out of shape. like, limp-as-udon arm muscles out of shape. this is not helpful when one is moving this month. this is not helpful in general. you have 5lb weights sitting in your living room. it's time you use them. (any of you ladies who do free weights recommend any particular routine or series of exercises for strengthening arms in particular? time to put the humiliation to work so i can be paddling up in front next year - after eleven years of doing it every summer, i certainly have the knowledge of how to do so, just not the endurance to do it for four hours, which is the humiliating part.)

before that, zuania had her graduation party friday; hooray for yummy indian food! and salsa dancing afterwards. introvert h seems to be holding up okay as i run him through the social gauntlets of my friends :) sorry honey, they haze because they love!

question of all y'all: updating my calendar for the remainder of the summer and the fall, and: is there anything i need to be saving the date for? birthday parties, housewarmings, concerts, the like?

and finally, goodbye, dancing apple. you were the face of news for many, but my favorite memory of you will always be you bopping around onstage in a gigantic apple costume at the zumbyes concert.

( wedding babbling, as if you couldn't guess. :) )

i have awesome friends, and i am so very lucky to have them.

sticky, peeling-off dresses; wet sand underneath our feet slapping towards the sea; mingling aromas of salt air and bonfires. the satin-black sky shimmers as the occasional firework streaks up and out.

we've just come from an elegant dinner: clean-cut genteel young waiters we could probably set up our baby sisters with, candlelight and picture-window views of york harbor, creamy lobster bisque and blueberry pie that melts in your mouth.

now, casting off any semblance of demure behavior, we run playfully towards the cool atlantic waters in the twilight, skirts hiked up, sandals cast aside.

it's not a waltz as recognized by our chichi fellow diners, but we dance anyway.



later, we will get lost in rural northeastern massachusetts, on a road that could only be transplanted from rural northwestern america. the walls of trees stretch infinitely upward, tall and black, bowing slightly inward to hide the sky beyond. the road curves darkly, desolately, with no turnoff for miles and miles.

(and we got lost because? we were distracted enough talking about harry potter that we failed to notice the swiftly-dipping gas needle. hee!)

eventually, we turn around, and after a series of rotaries and multiple right-turns, we find civilization in the form of a service station for our nearly-empty gas tank. and it's there that we have an Idea: what better way to cap off a night about america than to introduce one of my friends to the ultimate in pop-culture indulgence? a glance at the map, a quick calculation of exit numbers and one-ways, and we're in motion again.

gooey fingers as we pinch off bits of a krispy kreme fresh off the line. white creme daubs on unwary cheeks and giggling like middle school students. milk moustaches just like the ones in the commercials.

@--<--

happy birthday, laurel!