I bought my Macbook in 2019, and the battery has been failing for at least the past 9 months. When it reached the point where it couldn’t function unless it was plugged in, I finally grit my teeth and brought it into the Apple Store, where a very nice man named either Kevin or Gavin told me that replacing it would take Approximately Three To Five Business Days—which includes weekends because apparently they “don’t stop working” at the Apple Store.
He also informed me that in my model of Macbook, the battery is connected to the keyboard, so when I got my computer back with a brand-spanking-new battery it would also have a new keyboard. This would be free, due to the fact that the 2019’s “butterfly” keyboard has a tendency to be shit.
But I didn’t want a new keyboard! I was proud of my current keyboard—which was so unbelievably fucked up that the employees all crowded around me in the store to murmur in awe, “I’ve never seen anything like that before…”
I told them that I’m a writer, that I write a lot for work and that’s how the keyboard got that way. Which was, I have to admit, a half-truth. Yes, I write for work now. But really, the fact is that I got the computer right around when I began writing fanfiction in massive quantities for the first time.
According to my AO3 statistics I published 230,000 words of fanfiction in 2019 and 274,000 words in 2020. I was paid for none of it, of course, but the process of learning how to not only write but finish a story (something I’d always struggled with when I dabbled in the genre before) was massively fulfilling, as were the transformative friendships I made through the creative communities I participated in. Regularly publishing to positive feedback, I think, gave me the confidence I needed to pursue writing for a broad audience on a regular basis. The trashed keyboard was a reminder of that. I hit the keys hard because I cared—about the characters, and about the readers, and about my own ability to improve.
Alas, I had to bid farewell. Equivalent exchange, in order to receive a new battery that would continue me to plug away at the bounty of freelance assignments that have been piling up.
But, happily, an employee was able to quickly pop off two of the most damaged keys for me to keep and make into earrings—on the condition, she told me, that I come back wearing them when I picked my laptop up and showed them off to everyone.
This week in fandom
My TikTok feed, because I have taste, is filled with videos of The 1975; this week in particular, videos of The 1975 performing at a charity gig at Gorilla in their home town of Manchester, a venue with a capacity of about 550. (Compare to the capacity of 21,000 at the arena where they performed their main tour date in the city.)
Listen, I fucking love The 1975. Their music is excellently written and produced; they are smart, good people with intelligent things to say about culture and masculinity; they’re polished performers who put on a well-practiced show that has a lot of thought put into it.
And also, they make me feel insane. The videos from the Gorilla show, where they played their 2013 self-titled debut album in full before launching into more recent hits, are like hit after hit of an exquisite drug. The intimacy! The cuteness!
Part of the joy of reckless, full-throated boybandery is always, for me, the feeling that I’m connected to a long history of shriekers and fangirls who felt the same way I do. Nothing demonstrates this link better than the picture posted today by Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn:
Yes! Yes!!!!!!! That’s exactly what it’s like: then, and now, and forever.
This week in polar exploration
According to a report from Reuters, this week an Italian icebreaker made it further south than any ship has ever gone before—all the way to 78º44.280’S in the Ross Sea. That’s about here:
This was made possible, of course, by global warming, which prevented the ice in the area from being as impenetrable as it has historically been. In this region, pack ice prevented Shackleton from landing in King Edward VII Land in 1907, forcing him back to McMurdo Sound and Ross Island in defiance of the agreement he was forced to sign that McMurdo “belonged” rightfully to Scott. This is also the area that Lt. Victor Campbell’s Eastern Party was meant to explore as part of the Terra Nova expedition in 1911, but Amundsen’s presence in the area (as well as pack ice) forced them back across the Ross Sea to Cape Adare in Victoria Land, where they became the ill-fated Northern Party.
The nomenclature the Reuters report uses is interesting, because as far as I was aware, the Bay of Whales itself—an inlet in the Ross Ice Shelf which developed out of the former Balloon Bight at some point between 1902 and 1908, and went on to be used as a base for Roald Amundsen and Richard Byrd—was erased by movement of the ice shelf in 1987, when the nearly 100-mile-long Iceberg B-9 broke off and floated away.
I assume the “Bay of Whales” is merely a colloquial usage to refer to the part of the Ross Sea where that location used to be, as a way to connect the Laura Bassi’s environmentally concerning accomplishment with the much more straightforwardly sexy feats of Amundsen and Byrd. This is definitely something Italy would do.
An Italian history of polar exploration does in fact exist, and it’s fascinating—notably, Amundsen reached the North Pole with Mussolini’s homie Umberto Nobile in 1926. Fun fact: Nobile’s dog Titina was also there, as depicted in a recent animated movie which I really want to find a way to watch!