iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

gochenourabout @sjgochenour.bsky.social · 2h

I have not read those! should I look them up?

gochenourabout @sjgochenour.bsky.social · 3h

obviously easier than the washboard method of previous methods but!!! SO MUCH TIME AND EFFORT also i’m not sure the agitator was timed; i think you just turned it on and turned it off when you thought it should be done.

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gochenourabout @sjgochenour.bsky.social · 3h

the rinse cycle happened manually in a galvanized steel tub on legs which lived on her porch my whole childhood, and then you moved the tub, put a clothes basket in its place, and fed the clothes through the wringer again, before hanging them outside

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gochenourabout @sjgochenour.bsky.social · 3h

FUN FACT I JUST LEARNED my grandmother did all the family laundry with an (electric, thank goodness) agitator and a wringer you had to feed the clothing through one piece at a time until my mom was a teen

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I think there are still huge sardine fisheries off the coast of Brittany though -- I walked by a 19th-century sardine-tinning factory in Douarnenez as well.

the one outside Douarnenez was HUGE, with a row of giant fermentation tanks, while the one in the city museum of Barcelona (which is underneath the Pl. del Rei) was more of a mom-and-pop operation.

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I assume that if the Romans wore t-shirts GARUM IS LYFE would have been a popular one.

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gochenourabout @sjgochenour.bsky.social · 13h

I am pretty sure garum overlaps with Vietnamese fish sauce in flavor profile, though not entirely sure? I have had the great good fortune to visit the ruins of more than one garum factory, a big one outside Douarnenez, and one underneath Barcelona.

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instagram is of course evil but my algo is bringing me drag queens arguing passionately for pro-Palestinian queer liberation in Italian, so, well, that could be worse

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gochenourabout @sjgochenour.bsky.social · 13h

heh that is an excellent metaphor i think my family tree only folds back on itself once — one great-grandmother married her dad’s first cousin.

Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 14h

I want to get everything I know typed up so my nieces or nephew can reference it easily if they develop an interest later! it’s really hard to guess what they might care about.

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Reposted by gochenourabout

Just to clarify: we send out quantities between 100 - 3000. If you need a single whistle we really can't help with that.

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Reposted by gochenourabout

Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 15h

People in California who are facing a terrible ICE surge: remember that if you need whistles, we are still sending them out for free. In fact, we just passed 1.7 million whistles sent out. linktr.ee/3Dwhistles

linktr.ee

3D Printed Whistles | Linktree

We ship community protection whistles for free. Need some? Click the email link below & tell us how many you need (between 100 - 3000) & where to send them.

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not everyone cares! but I would guess worrying and wondering about what your ancestors’ lives were like is at least as common as liking cilantro or beer.

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but/and/also, I think it’s actually a pretty normal human thing to want to know your people. (and indeed, maybe folks in a country where erasure of the past is foundational are a bit more rabid about it.)

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I know it’s a stereotype about U.S. white people that we are obsessed with our origins, and I think it’s true that it’s often a way to avoid identifying with the evils of whiteness in this country.

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(This is possibly because my beloved grandmother is the person who this language —Czech — was taken from, in the name of assimilation.)

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The branch I do not know very much about and can’t research due to a language barrier, I experience as a personal loss.

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I have photos, postcards, newspaper articles, books, and other documents going back at least 140 years for all branches of my family, and documentation of their lives going back hundreds of years before that.

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This thought was brought to by some newspaper clippings from the 1880s which my great-great grandmother saved about a teacher symposium she attended for three years. I also have her farm journal and my grandmother’s personal reminisces about her (she was not a fun old person.)

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I dug out my family history folder, which I compiled age 11-14, to identify the names in that branch of the family, and identified another complex knot of feelings: the unjust privilege of land ownership allowed my family to have a just privilege, which is a ream of documents about our history.

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to be fair, I only ever look at the timeline which is my mutual followers, and not the timeline which is all thousand people I follow, so this may be even more aggressively subjective.

gochenourabout @sjgochenour.bsky.social · 16h

my timeline has surfaced the latter fact 3-4 times?

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gochenourabout @sjgochenour.bsky.social · 17h

i read an amazing article once about what it was like to care for a baby walrus, and iirc a lot of it is letting this very lorge baby climb on top of you and snooze.

but, I do also believe my deep respect for farm workers, meatpacking plant workers, and other people who work in food production is my inheritance.

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it also depended on that land, which, well. my great-great grandfather might have met the people it was stolen from; I don’t know.

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I feel extremely complicated about this legacy. it relied on a huge amount of unpaid labor by my grandmother, and tbh probably also the fact that she grew up with traumatizing food insecurity and so was always driven to do that work.

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when my mom was a kid, the family did not buy in any fruit, vegetables, eggs, or meat, only dry goods and dairy. my grandmother grew and canned enough for five people every year and they butchered their own chickens and hogs.

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there were also two barns, a horse barn, a chicken house, and a summer kitchen. (this side of the family was Scottish and immigrated in the 1850s. obviously not cool Scots: grim, lowland presbyterian Scots.)

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i would rather be chased by a goose with murder in her heart than receive an email from the word toaster

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. . . this family history probably explains something about the fixation on decrepit old farms which shows up in A Bloomy Head

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it’s history! i’m interested! i feel a little wistful that i didn’t ever get to see the smokehouse and the outdoor cold storage (basically a set of shelves on a pulley which lowered into a brick-lined chute in the ground; they put butter and so on in crocks on the shelves)!

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spent an hour on the phone with my aunt while she carefully explained the layout of the old family farm, after spending an hour talking to my mom yesterday while she explained the timeline of my uncle destroying said farm

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(as an iowan who couldn’t hack it, I am grateful for any little bit of news of pushback)

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this very much concords with my experience of Wales, yes.

Chace Verity @chaceverity.com · 08/10/2026

hats off to southern Iowa residents fighting the good fight with humor!!!

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Reposted by gochenourabout

icymi! new book from me this week 🎉 it's got sad old men who want to be less sad but don't think they deserve it--until they start writing together again and realize their home is with each other

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A.Z. Louise | T.O. Tate @azlouise.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

SO composure, *very* dignity

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Reposted by gochenourabout

I'm having a launch party for SHARDFALL: TRAGEDY REIMAGINED! It's going to be virtual so more people can be there to watch me and @authorizedmusings.bsky.social talk Shakespeare! Event discord link: discord.gg/XJMrfMn8MC

A red and black graphic with photos and text:

VIRTUAL LAUNCH PARTY

Photo 1: a black and white picture of a light skinned black person wearing glasses
Photo 2: the book cover of SHARDFALL: TRAGEDY REIMAGINED by T.O. Tate
Photo 3: a dark haired person's face partially obscured by a dog who appears to be smiling

T.O. Tate in conversation with Jennifer R. Donohue

Join us on Discord to celebrate the release of Shardfall: Tragedy Reimagined! October 27 at 7:30 eastern https://discord.gg/XJMrfMn8MC

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toddler has excellent taste in fungus

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