Friday Tchotchke #17: Look at this photograph

Some gosh darned spensive daguerreotypes!!!!!

I am 3,000 words into my book! This is less exciting than it sounds given most of those words are scattered throughout my outline document in the form of unfinished sentences — but I’m certainly getting somewhere with it. I landed on a fakakte combination of Zotero, Notion, and Scrivener for my workflow and we’ll see how long it takes before it all completely collapses…

This week in fandom

Yeah, yeah, the rollercoaster fucker thread, we’ve all seen it. In case you haven’t, it’s been archived here, but a quick summary if you don’t want to put yourself through it: rollercoaster fan calls out fellow fan for fucking (yes, physically and in person, bringing her genitals into contact with parts of the ride) various coasters, specifically the one which the OP wants to fuck — although OP claimed that it’s only their humanized OC version of the coaster that gets them going, not the actual coaster.

Theme park fandom is a corner of the fandom universe I have strikingly little familiarity with, probably for the reason that I personally don’t really enjoy theme parks and have a particular dislike for rollercoasters. But it’s obviously out there in force— “Disney Adults” with annual passes being the most visible tip of the iceberg, and people who like to fuck rollercoasters (physically or metaphorically) all the way at the bottom.

There is much to be said about the perfect setup-punchline format of the thread — A) calling someone out for perversion using harsh puritan language, B) reveal that the caller-out has much of the same inclination as the call-outee — and how the use of screencaps and outraged description amps up the obvious drama while still managing to make the reader actively work to figure out what’s going on.

But what I think it demonstrates most importantly is how the sociocultural structures which make up fandom as we know it — in this case, deep emotional attachment, in-person pilgrimages, self-insertion, serious, involved infighting over the “appropriateness” of expressions of affective states — are mobile, and can and will be applied to quite literally anything. See also this amazing Tumblr compilation of fandom posts about sports.

To be fair to OP this post literally does describe Fernando Alonso.

This week in polar exploration

The Franklin Expedition daguerreotypes sold this week at Sotheby’s for the staggering hammer price of £444,500, over $530,000.

Franklin experts have written extensively about the photographs, their provenance, and their history, so I won’t go into it in too much detail — I recommend Russell Potter’s post and Fabiënne Tetteroo’s post which both discuss the minutiae of the pictures which I still can’t really wrap my head around, re: the orientation of the pictures, if they are the originals taken on board the ship or copies of those originals, etc.

A lot of people I know from the polar community (but not me, because I missed it by ONE DAY) went to visit the daguerreotypes during the few days they were on display at Sotheby’s in London — some flying in from other countries to do so! Of course, that was because we knew there was a high chance they’d disappear into the storage unit of some rich collector after the auction, but I also think it speaks to the enthusiasm to witness and connect to the most personal, human relics of the expedition that exist — to come face to face with the faces of those who were lost, with not even a pane of glass separating the viewer from the artifact.

Logan Zachary of Illuminator also pointed out on social media that Sotheby’s, by making high-resolution scans of the daguerreotypes available for free, has already done more for scholars than some august institution might do if they do manage to acquire it. It highlights the push and pull between the forces of commerce and the curatorial interests of museums: Sotheby’s just wanted to get the dang things sold for as much money as possible, so they made sure everyone could see how great they are. A museum would be able to assume that everyone who wanted to come look at the photos would already know how great they were, so they wouldn’t need to put in extra work advertising that fact.

Banger of the week