A confession: I am not terribly good at blogging.

I’ve tried starting up a couple in the past; I had a short-lived blog created for a class while I was doing my master’s degree and an even shorter-lived blog about books that had a grand total of two entries before I abandoned it.  This probably stems from two related reasons:

1) There are two strong societal influences that tell me to avoid taking up too much of people’s attention, to be humble, to accept compliments with a “oh, no, not really, but thank you,” and to not presume that my thoughts will be of importance to anyone else.  I’m female, and I was born and raised in Minnesota.  I’m pretty much engineered to not talk myself up too much.

2) In a blog format, I often find myself struggling to figure out what to write about.  I have no trouble with that when it comes to fiction or game design ideas, but a blog is another story, for whatever reason.  A lot of people seem to write about their lives, but mine never feels that interesting.  I currently work from home, which means that I can go multiple days without even leaving my apartment.  I’m not secure enough in a career yet to feel I can blog about social/political issues without a potential employer coming across it and deciding not to hire me because they disagree with a particular view.  I have a lot of interests, but usually my commentary on those isn’t extended enough to warrant a full blog post.  And I’m always concerned about striking the right balance between personal and professional.

But I’ll try to find interesting things to say for this one.  I’m planning on doing a sort of weekly review short post about things I’m currently interested in or doing.

And if nothing else?  You all will be getting cat photos.  I have cat photos galore.

This Week I’m…

Reading Updraft by Fran Wilde, Darklands Revisited (Pathfinder Campaign Setting) by Thurston Hillman

Listening To Autoheart

Playing Dragon Age 2 and Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright (and multiple Pathfinder campaigns)

Today’s Miscellaneous Historical Fact I’m starting this off with one of my favorite pieces of historical trivia of all time, learned from a footnote in the back of Erik Larson’s Thunderstruck.  In 1850, this French guy decided that a REALLY RAD EXPERIMENT would be to let a couple snails get to know each other and then mailed one off to New York to a friend of his “to test the widely held belief that physical contact between snails set up within them an invisible connection that allowed them to communicate with each other regardless of distance.”  They tested this by putting the snails in two bowls marked with letters and claimed that when one snails touched a letter, the other snail, across the ocean, would also touch that letter.  The intrepid researchers believed that the snails were transmitting signals to each other through “an etherlike realm that they called ‘escargotic fluid’ (Larson, Thunderstruck, 403).

This raises a lot of questions, but my main one is:

widely held belief?

widely

held

belief?

Larson doesn’t expand on this, and so far I’ve been unable to determine why the nineteenth century had such strong and widespread opinions on ethereal snail communication.  If anyone knows the answer, feel free to elaborate in the comments.  I’ve been wondering about this for years.