Confessions of Atlas

[Crumpets]

I've apparently never posted in this thread, so here are a couple:

- When I was in high school, I did a project which involved writing an original one-act play. I ended up writing a super weird story about a rich brother and sister in Victorian England who are really flirty with each another and eventually get drunk and have sex. I still think it was a funny and well-written story, and I actually submitted it for a local award and got an "honorable mention," so it wasn't just insane ramblings. But also like, what possessed me to write something like that? I'm just glad I'm an only child so nobody got any funny ideas.

- When I was in 1st grade, we did a mock school election the day of the 2000 election, and I voted for Dubya for some godforsaken reason.

- I feel very left out of gaming culture. As someone in my late 20s, it seems like something I should know way more about than I do. I couldn't even tell you what games people are playing today or what people do/watch on Twitch.

- I almost never sit down and read a book. I was assigned so much reading over the course of my life that it just feels like work now and I don't get pleasure out of it. Which is a bit sad, because it's something I used to enjoy a lot. If I have some reason to read some specific book - especially if someone I have a crush on recommends it to me - I have no problem binge reading and getting as much out of it as humanly possible, but I almost always do it because I need to learn something or because I want to be able to talk about it with someone else, and basically never because I'm genuinely interested in what I'm reading. The last book I remember reading and enjoying for its own sake and not because I was reading it for work or for someone else was The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which I'm pretty sure I read in 2016.

[Crumpets]

I have anxiety about talking over the phone, especially with people I don't know well personally. So as a result, my voice gets really high because I'm nervous, and lots of people think I sound like an old woman. I've been addressed as "ma'am" several times over the phone, and I've had people ask me to hand the phone to myself, because they're trying to call me and think I'm someone else, even members of my own family.

[Crumpets]

Back in ye olden days of c. 2004-5, I used to do a summer hiking camp led by one of my teachers at school. He was really into getting us to sing traditional Central European songs like "The Happy Wanderer" while we hiked, and his big thing was teaching us a bunch of polkas. Later, c. 2008, when I had my first "job" doing trail maintenance at a ski club, I stayed at the cabin there and they had all those same sorts of music on cassettes which we'd listen to on the boom box. It was really the only entertainment we had there.

So, the long and the short of it is that I'm really fond of polkas and really all those cheesy European folk songs from polkas to oompah bands to yodeling to whatever other random stuff the YouTube algorithm decides to throw at me when I'm on a roll.

[Crumpets]

On the Wikipedia page for the Pig War, one of the alternate names given is the "Pig and Potato War." This is the result of an edit I made way back in the early days of Wikipedia, based on the source of "that's what they called it on a field trip I went on in 3rd grade, and I'm from Washington, so that's a legit source." And while I think that is a legit source, I have found no evidence that the war was called that in any other source before I made that edit. However, since I made that edit, it seems to have become a very commonly used name for the conflict.

And while that's basically the definition of harmless, it just goes to show how much influence random teens on Wikipedia can have in shaping how actual important things are studied. See also: Random dude who has completely upended all research on Scots by accidentally writing most Scots Wikipedia articles in what he thought was Scots, but that was actually just him trying to write English with a Scottish accent.