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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • I signed up for a gothic class my frosh year that was described as American gothic-- vampires, werewolves, all that good stuff. I dunno if the prof didn’t write the course description or if it got changed later but it was English gothic, which apart from the origins of the genre (Walpole, which ended up being hilarious because tons of modern tropes originated there, like the maiden in the castle using the subterranean staircase to flee from the mad king when a gust of wind blows her candle out) and some of the more satirical stuff (Austin), it was incredibly boring to read.

    There was one called The Mysteries of Udolpho that’s this meme times 10, where during a wagon trip there are literal 30 page descriptions of tress. I get if we’d been warned that this sort of thing was largely historical and we could pretty much skip the sweeping depictions of scenery that only existed because most people in the 19th century didn’t get to travel much so it was exciting to read about exotic landscapes, but the assignment merely amounted to “Here’s a 650 page novel, go read it for next week.”

    At least we got to do Frankenstein and I think there was one Poe story thrown in as well (despite being American).












  • I used to use a website where you could send a postcard to a randomly assigned address of another site member on there, and in return you’d get a postcard back from a different random member. One time I wrote the address too close to the stamp area so I could only fit one stamp up there, and had to put the remaining stamp postage at the bottom, and then I dropped it in a mailbox in town somewhere.

    Japan Post missed the extra stamps at the bottom and so returned it to my house, despite it being a postcard with no return address to a random country I had no connection to. I lived in the boonies so there weren’t a lot of foreigners in town, but there were definitely at least a few others.