librarypunk - 084 - Mushrooms [JOIN THE DECAY]

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Returning guest and fungal host Kayte joins us to talk fungus. Rhizomes, rot, rights, and Roald Dahl. We covered it all. Embrace your future body possibilities.  https://twitter.com/fangspodcast https://twitter.com/kayteterry http://www.kayteterry.com/ https://www.patreon.com/fangspodcast Media mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_(VanderMeer_novel)  https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691220550/the-mushroom-at-the-end-of-the-world https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14549466/  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4547056/  https://feralatlas.org/

This is a lot of podcast drama that you just decided you don't want to be a librarian. I do want to be a librarian. I love my job, actually. I love. No, I know. I'm just kidding. Like, this is not me being ironic. I love being a librarian.

That is so cap, Jack. That's right. I've been skittemarined. Oh, no. Oh, no. They're probably going to do more skinnamarink bullshit. Justin, I have been watching that fucking video like every single day since you sent it to me. Kate, have you seen this?

What is it, the one where Joe Biden gets Ginnomering? Yeah. Get out of my face jack. Oh, great, now I'm upside down. Just what I fucking needed. Not again. Oh, that fucking phone. It better not.

Ah. I fucking hated that. I hated that. That weird little toy did not like him or them. I don't know. I can't get through that movie. I loved it. I got like both bored and too anxious.

Yes. I was like, when it's the same problem I have with the Magnus Archives. Like it just literally the sound of background noise stresses me out as I'm listening to it. And I can't get through the episode, even though the episodes aren't that scary. But like the background noise is constantly like freaking you out. I've vibed with Skinner rink so hard. I just wanted to stare at angles of weird corners. well, like, weird internet archive cartoons played in the background, like, forever.

I was like, yeah, maybe this is this peak horror. I haven't seen it, but my wife did go, oh, hey, do you want to watch this incredibly freaky trailer that just the trailer alone made me go, nope, can't watch this. And then I watched it. I was like, yeah, that's a big fat nope for me, but I'm not a horror movie person, but yeah. My favorite edit was someone took the music video for Wetass Pussy and put in in this house. Oh no.

And like edited clips of Skidaviric trailer into Wap in the WAP music video. I think it should have been either an hour or eight hours. That's my theory. I didn't like when it turned into a haunted house movie. Yeah, same. Like some of like the put the knife in her eye. Yeah. It's a little too obvious.

It's a little too obvious. It's a little too obvious. And like when it gets like Blair Witchy, like with the parents, like in the bedroom, that scene, oh, fucking whips. So good. Yeah, that was scary as hell. It's so scary. When I watched Skinnamarink the first time, I was one of the people who watched it illegally before it was in theaters. And it got picked up in theaters because so many people were watching it illegally. Piracy is a good thing.

And I got so freaked out that I fell asleep on my couch with the lights on. And I am 30 years old. I was 29 when I watched it, but still. And I don't, horror movies don't scare me anymore. Skinnamarink fucking got me. It makes everything terrifying, right? Like, every corner, every... So spooky.

Like, your staircase is scary. Doorways are scary. Like, it turns everything. It's now a Skinnamarin podcast. Yeah. We've been Skinnamarinked. Welcome to Skinnamarinked. Get out of my face, Jack.

I'll kill you. That's right. I'm in the Skinnamarine. house. No doors, no windows, no toilet either. Anyway, hi, Kate. Hi. On time to see. Hello. Hi. I've returned. You have the podcast, you're a burros of who goes on whom's podcast. It's podcast continues.

It's all a micro-araisal network. Oh, look at you. Dropping the theme. It's not like we're professionals at this or anything. I just woke up. Let's go. My name is Justin. I've been skinmerinked. My pronouns are, ah, and get me out of here. I don't know how to follow up with that. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library. That's not very spooky. My pronouns are they then. My name is Jay. I am made out of a micro-rizzle network of Haifi. And my pronouns are, you can't

cannot kill me in a way that matters. He's so scared. He's so scared. He forgot his thing, pronouns. I've been scared of him. We have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes.

Jay, you stole mine. I'm Kate. No. I'm actually a mushroom. My pronouns are mushroom and mushroom. No, my pronouns are... My pronouns are she, her, or they, them, dealersness. It's so weird seeing a very good friend become Twitters, the character of the main character of the day, and onto Tumblr, I got to say.

It was a very weird couple of days. I loved all the check-ins from you and Justin. We're like, are you okay? And Ash, too, we're like, are you doing all right? And I was like, should I be doing? worse. I'm not sure. I think I'm okay. I feel like the worst of it was like people who didn't retweet or quote tweet and who just like took screenshots and said things. And then you don't like get to see those as easily. Yeah. That was all the chuds. Right. So I was saved from like what most of the chuds had to say. Thank goodness. Not that I care that much what they have to say. But on the good hand, And on the good side of things, I made a lot of new friends who love mushrooms.

And like got a little support from Jeff Vandermere. Hell yeah. Yeah, pretty rad. That's like, that's endorsement. Is that a mushroom? Jeff Vandermeer wrote Annihilation. Yeah, Jeff Vandermeer is my favorite mushroom. I was about to say that's the guy who wrote Annihilation, right?

Because like that thematically fits so well. Yeah. I'm so proud of you. It was funny because I called him in. Like, he agreed with me on something. And then, like, I called him in later for an argument, like, a day later and was like, Jeff Vandermere agrees with me. And he, like, came in and, like, backed me up again.

He's a really great. Yeah. He's great on Twitter. I'm glad that he's a fucking Chad. Right? Who will, like, back you up when people are dunking on you for stupid reasons. Exactly. Yeah, this is now a Jeff Van Amir-Stan podcast.

We're going to skinnamarink him. It'll be fun. We've been annihilated. Uh-oh. That is so cap, Jack. So-cap. This is the only good thing AI has ever done is just making Joe Biden say stupid shit. It gets skittem-rinked.

So if you didn't read the tweet, I got a very special guest reader to read your viral tweet for us. This is really silly, but I don't like how anti-fungus the last of us is. It feels reactionary to our future body possibilities. He recorded that on the Skinner Ring telephone. He called a man. He called a mushroom. Or maybe a mushroom answer. Tell me the name of God, you piece of shit.

Right, and that's why he had to hang up. Yeah. Get out of my face, Jack. Thank you, thank you Joe Biden for reading my tweets. The thing that no one, well, you know, It's weird because obviously you don't, you never really prepare to go viral. I have written so many tweets that I thought were like fucking genius and get like five likes. And like here I write this like silly stoner thought.

And then my follow up to it, which should have been in the original tweet, was that I thought it would be like I think David Cronenberg should direct an episode of The Last of Us. And like no one read that. Why would they? Yeah. No, like most of the stuff I saw was people retweeting screenshots of it in the style of this website is free. Oh, yes, I got a lot of those. Of like, people call that Twitter brain.

It's like, no, what they're referring to is the way that people on Tumblr spoke in like 2015 is what they were equating you to. I'm like, that's not what you sound like at all. And the people making fun of it are the people who can't read, right? the people who can't be like, what's the first thing that you say? This is really silly, but this is really silly. I don't like how anti-fungus the last of us. This is really silly, but I don't like how.

Joe Biden, shut the fuck up. I like when Joe Biden is silly. Joe Biden, this is really silly. I went to the silly goose island and it was just Joe Biden. Yeah, it was just a bunch of Joe Biden's. Yeah, it was like a weird, like I just had, okay, so I, I don't know if you, if any of y'all have watched the Last of Us or played the game. I don't know what video games are.

I read the plot synopsis because I was thinking about watching it because I'm like on a mushroom kick. I just ordered a mushroom grow kit, but it's not here in time for the episode. And you are making fun of me for it last year, you piece of shit. Check the tapes on that. Jamie, pull that up. when I was getting into growing mushrooms and reading infinite jest at the same time. Yeah. Yeah, but one of those was fine.

Which one? Oh, okay. The mushrooms. The mushrooms, right. Okay. Yeah, so I was very happy to become the queen of Tumblr for the day. That was fun. And I loved everyone who was like, embrace the DK.

Like, everyone became these, like, amazing, like, fay death metal freaks for mushrooms for the day, which was wonderful. But yeah, I just was watching, I watched two episodes, and I was like, okay, so, you know, like the, like sort of the overarching plot is that there is a event where cordyceps, which normally can't affect humans. But they're the ones that, like, invade, like, ants and stuff. Yeah, they're like the zombie by them. And like, that's a great exploration. You know, it's right there. It's like a thing that happens in nature. And it's so creepy that like a mushroom takes over an ant and like steers the ant towards like, like to go up a tree, get on a branch and then jump or like fall so that the mushroom can like really spores in a more

effective way. Like that is wild that nature does that. So I understand, like, it makes sense that it would be an interesting way to start off like a video game or a show. But I just was like, I guess the way the show handled it. And like I said, I've only seen two episodes. There's like five and I did not keep up. So this is not, this was not a tweet from an expert. It was as Joe Biden said, a silly idea. But yeah, just the way that they set it up is kind of like mushrooms versus us. And they're just like the scary zombie, you know, and you have to find a way to like survive and kill the zombies however you can. And I feel like that makes sense in some zombie

narratives, but like with mushrooms, there's so many more things you could do. And I just got frustrated and I was like, you know what? People are talking about mushrooms all the time. Like, you go on Instagram and someone's trying to sell you mushroom chocolates and like everyone's taking mushrooms again. People are growing mushrooms on logs in their house. And like there is some sort of anti-mushroom like government. like entity that was like, we should make an HBO show and like tell people that mushrooms are scary. And so that's like literally where it came from. It was very, it was deeply silly.

And Justin, why did we want to have K on to talk about this? Since we are not a horror movie podcast. Officially. Was it my idea? Yes. Do I have to explain it? Yes. Well, mushrooms are kind of like.

like a library when you really think about it. Yep. End of episode. And then we go viral again for that. When you really think about it. When you think about it, mushrooms are kind of like a library. But actually, they are. We go fungal.

I've been actually having my student workers go through all the donations I tell people not to give me with a mask and gloves on to check which ones have like fungus. Oh, yeah. And stuff, starting to grow in there. I could scrape the shit out with my fingernails in grad school, getting all the Autobahn shit and just being like, you get their rat shit out of there. Yeah. I told someone else about that and they were like that, you should not have had to do that. Yeah, no, I have them masked up gloves and I'm like to put them in my office.

I'll get rid of them. People stop donating your moldy fungal sheet music in books and whatever material is too long. libraries. It is a literal safety hazard. Not to be anti-cumble. Hey, they might be useful to someone. Our future body possibilities. Yeah, I was fully handling them without a mask and without gloves because I'm like, take over my body mushroom overlords. I welcome you with loving open arms, but I don't want to harm my students. Yeah, maybe you could put them out in the woods and see what happens to them.

I could grow mushrooms on him, like Merlin Sheldryg did on his book. He took, like, the first printing of his book and grew mushrooms on his book and then ate the mushroom so he could eat his own words. That's hot. Yeah. He's a Chad. I told my partner recently that because you can get buried and, like, your body, like, becomes the, like, the mushroom log.

Oh, hell, yes. Yeah. So there's like, like mushrooms will grow on you. And that's like how you're, how you go into the ground. And I was like, I would really love it if when I die, I get mushroomed. And then you guys all make dinner and like eat me. And he was like, absolutely not. I would want my partner to eat my, the me mushrooms. Yeah, same. You know, if you've had your tongue inside people's very, various orpices. I think you can eat them as a mushroom, you know. Yeah, I don't think it's a lot to ask. Yeah. Well, first, this is the second episode we've had you on that skirts around cannibalism.

Oh, Jesus. Me and Kay are just like, all right, let's talk about how hot cannibalism is, baby. I can't close the episode again with Ramstein's mind tile. Kate, we should have a Hannibal podcast, I think. Yeah, do you want to have just a cannibalism podcast? Yes. Just in general. And we can call it like, eat me or something.

Eat me, drink me, something like that. Yes. But can you do human body composting in Pennsylvania? I thought only like three states have legalized it. You probably can't. It's probably not legal. It's probably like California, Colorado. It sounds like a California, Oregon thing.

No, New York, I think it's legal. Oh, well, I could just be transported to New York, I suppose. You could be rolled over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they send Pennsylvania their garbage and you send them your corpses.

My mushrooms. My mushrooms. My corpse mushrooms. Hell yeah. And after all, the... You're my Wonderwall? Yes. This is devolving.

The microarizal network. You know, we don't know where it starts and ends. Right. And what makes a rhizome microarizel? That's a really good question. A microirisle network. I just haven't run into that word. Oh, it's not like...

It's not micro, it's micro-rizzle. Micco-M-Risal. Yeah, myco-rizo. Micco-Rizel, like mycelium. Like mycology. Oh. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's when all of the hyphi and mycelium through the dirt connects to the roots of the plants. And then they send nutrients and they talk. Yeah. That's why it's a network. There's a good horror movie about that. In the Earth? Yeah.

Yeah. It would be whips. I was thinking that actually has a lot to do. with like information and librarianship because it's like thinking about systems not in like an arboreal way, but thinking about them in like rhizomatic ways, you know, where like things are all kind of bouncing off of each other instead of like a hierarchy. Yeah, we talked about that a little bit in I think the second digital garden episode that we did. Oh, cool. Where I explained Dillus and rhizomes probably very badly.

Yeah. It's hard to do without images. Yeah. I talked about the drum machine example from that one video. In a rhizome, things are connected to each other in non-obvious ways and non-hierarchical ways, and the idea is sort of like a tumbleweed. And then the arboreal thing that Kate just mentioned is like a tree, like literally an evolutionary tree where things lead to certain fruits.

So it gives it a deterministic. quality as if like humans and Neanderthals were always going to be separate species. Like you could, this is a real problem people have when they try and think about evolution and why it doesn't come naturally to a lot of people is because the way we talk about speciation is so temporarily flat because like you're always your ancestors, right? So if you go back to Homo erectus, whatever, that's a different species. But there was never a point where they stopped being you. They're always your ancestors, right?

It's just a population that breeds over time. The only way that you're a different species in any way is if you literally had a time machine, went back in time and found you could no longer interbreed, which is not a real problem, right? So we don't think about depth very well and with this hierarchical thinking. And so that's the whole critique is we need to think more messily. And there is something in libraries that's a direct correlation, but we'll bring it up in a bit. Go ahead. And also with arboreal versus rhizomatic,

Another aspect about it, for those of you at home listening who haven't listened to the first episode, is that with an arboreal thing, the root is like the platonic ideal of the thing. And then the further away you get at the tips of the branches from like the trunk of the tree, then the further away from that like platonic ideal you are. Whereas in a rhizome, each sort of node in the rhizome, each potato, each mushroom, each mushroom, each mushroom, right, is its own thing while still being interconnected, but it's not trying to be anything else and it's not away from some sort of ideal. It's its own thing. And so the example is like a drum machine. Instead of a drum machine, trying to use it as a drum, you use it in a way of like a human drum could never do this. And so it's like shitty drum machine music versus like using it in cool punk music to go faster than a human could, letting it sound like a, a machine and why not. So letting it be its own thing versus it being away from this platonic ideal of a thing. And so that is another thing about arboreal versus rhizomatic thinking is like,

are you trying to make something into something? Or are you like letting the sort of womb of potentiality of what something is and can be instead of it being like Justin's sort of deterministic? It's trying to be a thing. That kind of ties in before we talked about last time with letting books describe themselves. Yeah. Letting things be. what they are because the act of naming a thing is particularly, this gets very like goth very quickly. So we're talking about like fungus decay and like the act of a name. Yeah. So part of the fun thing about fungus that's like kind of the starting point for this is that fungus was classified as a plant until like 60 years ago, 50 years ago, like the mid 60s. And then we realized,

oh, right, they're more like kind of animals, not really, but they're way closer to us than plants. They're a secret third thing. Yeah. Which will be revealed to us later. Yes. Tell me the name of God, you fungal piece of shit. I think about that all the time. Yeah, because that's like a very famous like Tumblr post that everyone kind of knows,

which I think is why Tumblr was so well primed to, to be ready for our future body possibilities. Because when I saw it circulating on Tumblr, I was like, immediately like, oh, they must love this. And I went into the nose. And it's like, yeah, they do. Yeah. Like, of course. I didn't think people were being mean to Kate on Tumblr. I was like, nah, they love this shit.

I loved it. I was like, Tumblr alley. Yeah. The reigning fungal queen of Tumblr. Well, there's probably a new one this week, but I was last week for a couple days. I did enjoy that WoJack that was just like a big fungus head. Yes. That someone just replied.

And I was like, that's pretty good, actually. That was beautiful. Yeah. I've been reading this book called The Mushroom at the End of the World. Do you know this book? I've heard of it and I have a sample on my Kindle. And I've been meaning to read it for months now. It's very good.

I would recommend it to everyone who is interested in mushrooms but also like anti-capitalism and just leftism in general. It's written by this woman Anna Singh who I guess like studied with Donna Harris. away. So... Queen! Yeah, major cred. But yeah, like her thesis is

like that we should... We already are in the end of the world but like that might be... Like, it's okay to just sort of recognize that and that mushrooms can kind of show us what the next possibilities are. Both like through stories and also theoretically. Like there's like

material ways that they can show us because they are often the first thing that grows after like a major catastrophe. So like Chernobyl mushrooms were like the first things that came back. There are mushrooms that eat plastic. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so like looking at mushrooms and how they grow and how they like communicate with each other is a really interesting way for us to see like world making other than our own. And then also like her, I guess she's sort of like interested in, yeah, just like how we can envision new futures that are not, like, based on capitalism and, like, what that could look like, even if we do accept that, like, we're in a very

precarious, disastrous situation. So I'm only, I'm, like, two chapters in, but I really like it so far. She's really interesting. If there's already that much in the first two chapters, it sounds like a fucking bang. Yeah. Yeah. It's a banger of a book. It's really good. I didn't save it because this was before we were planning this episode, but it was one of those, I think it went around on Tumblr. And if you don't save a post on Tumblr, it's gone forever because the search doesn't work. I've been trying to find this post about, like, language and color because it had an example of like, to these people, it's these colors are hard to differentiate. And it's like types of blue. And for us, it's like easy.

And it's like, okay, for them, these colors are easy to distinguish. What do you see? and it's just four identical shades of orange. And you look at it and they're like, these people look at this and easily see the difference, but you can't, can you? Like, oh, why didn't I save that? So it's driving me crazy?

Is it Germany that has two shades of blue? Like two, just they consider them different colors? There's hell blue. Dungu blu, blue. The only word I remember from German class, and I would yell it all the time. Amazing. Can that be the library punk like bunny,

mascot can its name be Donkublau. Donkublau Skinimarin is our mascot's name. That's their full name. That's their full name. That's her Christian name. Dunks for short. Justin, I don't see your bunny running around anymore, but it was running around at the beginning.

Oh, there it is. And it's so funny. Like, I used to have a rabbit, and it always cracked me up. Just seeing, like, an animal, like a rabbit, just like running around in a house. There's something very funny and maybe skinnamaranky about it. In this house. They also are rabbit poop is such a great building block for fungus. I've seen mushrooms grow in their litter box before if I've taken too long to change it.

Way to go, bunnies. They're participating in the in the decay. Yeah, so I get all kinds of mushrooms growing in my compost pile. Oh, hell yeah. But yeah, we'll grow in the hay too because it likes, straw and stuff. I was reading how to grow magic mushrooms because me and Jay were talking about it. And I was like, I didn't think you could do that. And he's like, no, you definitely can. I was like, cool. And so growing them, cultivating them, bam, bam, bam, bam, pale, bleh, put, make me sound like an IRA.

You can't make me sound like an IRA person. Legally acquired materials. Yeah. Yeah. So here's the thing. If you are an amateur mycologist and like looking at things through microscopes, you can legally acquire spores. Anything beyond that is illegal, and we are not officially endorsing anything on this podcast. Cough, cool. You don't need grow lamps. Nope. So when the police send the heat detecting drones over your house looking for grow facilities, they won't find you.

Yeah. Good to know. Cough. There was a hot minute where I really thought about getting like a big indoor hydroponic garden. Yeah. Because I have the little one. And I really thought about getting a big one, but I'm like, 100% where I live, they send those fucking heat-seeking drones around the house just looking for grow operations. Bullshit.

Can't you just say that you have a lot of lizards? I have a lizard. See? And legally acquired materials are getting warm on top of his tank right now. Really big legal lizards. Yeah. There's a lot of legal lizards. Coup, are you legal?

Coop is barely legal. He's named after FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. Oh, the only good cop. The only good one. Coop's a cop. I apologize. I have a cop in my house, whom I love very much. I know.

I'm a hypocrite. He's vibing. He's just hanging. I lost my train of thought. Well, yeah, going back to the goth stuff, I mean, like, that shows up a lot, but it's also the difficulty of, like, classifying fungus is actually really interesting for us, because we always talk about difficulty of classifying anything. And the post on Tumblr I was thinking of was someone saying they were in a biology class

and they were like talking to the professor about the impossibility of like doing taxonomy to fungus because it's so difficult. And so much of it, we couldn't really do until we did genetic analysis. And I was interested if there was any kind of like horizontal gene transfer between like fungus. I don't think there is because I think they're too complicated. But it would be fun if there was some mechanism for horizontal gene transfer that could then integrate with the human body in a future and then make us fungus people. It could become fungus among us. I love that.

Well, I know lichens are just fungus plus algae, I think. Fungus plus. Yeah. And they become friends. And there's like, yeah, lichens are very queer. There's a whole chapter in entangled life about how queer lichens are. Really? Well, it's not a whole chapter, but the chapter on Likens talks, gets into queer theory a lot.

Oh, cool. Yeah, that's the other mushroom book, the other fungus book. Yeah. There's a part of Annihilation, The Book, where the biologist is, it's not about mushrooms, but it could be. I love it, annihilation. I need to read the book. Oh, it's so good. It's very different.

Like, they both are great. Because the movie's just stalker. Yeah, but like, awesome. Yeah. It's so beautiful. It's great. Like, yeah, I've taken a lot of screenshots of the movie and like I use it in lectures about art a lot because I think it's so interesting and beautiful. But yeah, and the book, the book is really different.

The like sort of alien kind of like center, you know, where in the movie where she goes into like that kind of lighthouse. And that's where like sort of like the central part of like the energy is coming from in the book. It's all words. Like the creature is like writing these like really long kind of like poems. So it's like yeah, I feel like it would be something you'd be interested in. That is exactly my shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so in the book she has, the biologist has a flashback to she was, she like was really

into studying title pools and there's a starfish that's called Destroyer of Worlds which is like fucking crazy but so the more she looks at she thinks about I know right

I'm like wow what does a starfish do but the more she like looks at the starfish she says that like you know she knows it's been like assigned a place in like the taxonomy but it felt so alien and that like every bit of like her knowing was like completely inadequate.

And I just thought that was really interesting that like there's, it's like we put things in places and categorize them. But then like the act of like actually being there and looking at it and like trying to relate to that thing is a completely different experience. Yeah. Like there's a similar plant. book called Gathering Moss, a natural and cultural history of mosses. And there's a part where she talks about how like moss is one of the things that like we don't normally have cute like vernacular names for. Like mushrooms will have their like scientific name, but then also normally have like a more colloquial name as well. And we don't have that with mosses as much. And you,

and because of that it might think that like, oh, then therefore is it Greek or Latin? The way we do science names. I don't remember. I do both based on vibes. Oh, it's vibes based? Okay. And like you would assume that that would make like the names really inaccessible. But it's like once you actually learn the names of the mosses, how descriptive the names are.

And then like through describing, even if it is through Latin or Greek, then that forms a relationship with that moss. And so it's like naming is almost like as a way of learning about something instead of a Instead of ascribing, I am naming you this because I am a powerful person. It's more, this is what the moss is telling me, and I give it this name to better understand what it is telling me. Yeah, and it creates conceptual space, the same thing. Yeah. That's weird that this circled around.

But the color thing, because you have words for different shades of color, you can distinguish them in your brain. So when you have words for natural phenomenon, you can describe them in their brain. There's an article that just came out. I've been trying to think of a way to work this in, but there was an article came out about like a, like a recent revision to like a general dictionary. And most lay people don't understand dictionaries. They're like, oh, the dictionary. That's where all the words live. Like the library, that's where the books live.

Right. That's why I got to be quiet because they're asleep, right? So. Oh, that's adorable. I was always going to say it's a stupid joke, Justin. Oh, I just imagined all these, like, books snoring, like, gently. Yeah, and the pages are like, they're doing like kankshu. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.

The recent, like, I don't know, most, most recent revision of one of the major dictionaries had removed a bunch of words for describing natural phenomena because we don't use them as much. And people were saying, this is kind of a bad thing because if children don't learn these concepts, the space in their brain that will describe the natural world will actually be less like developed. So if they don't have words for these things, you're going to have like, you know,

before English had a word for orange, we just saw everything as like shades of red, right? And then someone brings along this fruit called an orange. And we go, oh, this looks like that orange thing. And then we, you know, that's where there's a lot of birds called like red-breasted, whatever. But it's like clearly an orange bird. That's a holdover from a time before we had a word for orange.

Oh, don't even get me started on birds. Don't even get me started on birds Don't get me fucking statted Yeah Don't get me started Don't get me People who named birds Good Lord

Orney People who have names That are also names of birds Who are on this podcast Maybe who are named Jay Oh Perhaps Yeah it's like the

One of my Blue Jay I'm a got J Well Blue Jays are part of the Our Corviz Hell yeah So you're the Like the least goss of the goths But goss nonetheless

No you can still be got There's a really funny meme Take it with my gawk crad kate No I'm just kidding There's a funny meme that's like This goth family and then like one normal person And it's like crows, ravens, magpie Is Blue J is the normie

But Blue Jays are really smart and cool Yeah. No, this is I just thought maybe this might be Is this going to be backwards? Oh, a visual. Oh, shit. I sucked and fucked my way along the Great Texas Coastal Birding Trail. Hell, yeah.

Is that a hanky? No, this is a T-shirt. Oh, sweet. That is such a specific t-shirt. It's like those like boomer T-shirt. My wife's name is Shire. Shannon and I love my blue truck and fuck you if you don't like the state of Idaho. Don't start a fight with a lineman's wife on a third who was born on a Thursday.

Those shirts rule. I figured I could wear that when I go like out to the nature trails around here. That's perfect. You're going to make so many friends. I hope so. You'll make cool friends. You could like cruise with that shirt on. Yeah, cruise on the birding trails.

Say you sucked and fucked on it, yeah. They're really famous around here. Sucking and fucking? Yeah. No, our nature trails because they're all under like threat. So everyone's like, ooh, now I have to go see. All the liberals are like, oh, I got to go see it and stick it to Trump. Not so much now because like Trump's not in office so they forget that we exist.

Well, he will be again soon. Yeah. That's a good way. Yeah, that's a good way to. not do any, to not like enact any change to go to a, a natural park to stick it to Trump? Or just like, I guess, Greg Abbott or whatever. Yeah. If you go to, I mean, if you do go to some of them, the Border Patrol will harass you,

like just going to them. So, because it literally is on the border. So the, they like park on the road. And then they'll be like, you can't drive through here. And it's like, the butterfly garden is literally the only thing on this road. And they're like, well, we have extra legal powers and you can't do anything. They're like completely unaccountable cops, right? You can't, you have no rights when the border patrol pulls you over.

Yeah. That's so horrific too because like butterflies are one of the animals that cross over borders. Because like, you know, animals don't know what borders are. Wouldn't that be nice? Yeah. So like you're being told you can't go see an animal that like does not recognize. does not recognize the U.S. government. They're all sovereign citizens.

Yeah, the butterflies do not recognize the U.S. government. God, to live that life. This is my tweet for tomorrow. In Hauruki Murakami's novel, 1Q.84, there's an old lady in it who has butterflies as pets. And so she has like a big like greenhouse place, like where her butterflies can roam around. And she's the head of an organization. where she has women assassins go kill men who have harassed women, and those women get to come live in, like, the butterfly house for safety until, like,

it's safe for them to go elsewhere. It's like one of the one good things Marcomi did was, like, have a cool old lady who has butterflies as pets, like, kill men, have, like, men get assassinated. It's pretty dope. I love that. Yeah. Kind of wanted to go back to the beginning, though, because. Okay.

Rizomes. Well, Kate mentioned two. movies, one of which I've seen a few times, which is Crimes of the Future, and then grow with all the gifts. And so why did you want to bring up those movies and bring them in? Because I know these are some of your favorite movies. They are. Well, yeah. Okay. So Crimes of the Future is definitely one of my favorite movies. That movie's so good. Yeah. I've seen it four times. Not to brag. Not to brag or anything. Cronenberg, if you're listening. We know you're listening, David. Yeah, David. Yeah. So Crimes of the Future.

I think is that's sort of where my like body future body possibilities idea came from Crimes of the Future takes place in a like yeah like near future and people there was like clearly some sort of like ecological disaster but because I love I love Cronenberg because he doesn't like there's no exposition it's just like you're in this world now and people. People are starting to, well, they've lost a feeling of pain, and infection is like mostly not an issue anymore. And people are, some people are able to grow like new organs. And particularly they're, like the main character is a performance artist who has the

ability to grow new organs and uses that as his performance. So like the surgery of. that happens, like, after he, like, he's like, I feel a new one cooking. He, like, cooks a new organ. Movie's so funny. I love it. Yeah. And then his, he and his performance art, like, collaborator, um, have a performance

where, like, she does surgery to get rid of it. So. She fucks him with an autopsy machine. Yes. Thank you. It's so good. It's very hot. So, I mean, I like it because I'm a pervert, but also I think it's really, I also like

because I'm disabled and I have, I wear an insulin pump and it's like on, it's like an organ on the outside of my body, basically. So anything that has anything to do with like the like, you know, Delisian body without organs shit I can totally get down with. But I was thinking about like, so basically like what ends up happening in the movie is there's this group of people who realize like how how like far humanity has gone and that like we're in an incredible state of like disaster precarity and they get these operations so that they can eat like industrial waste. And then a child is born who has the organs who can actually eat it naturally. And the government like has all these kinds of like weird new entities. Like there's like a what is

like what is new vice which is like people who are like cutting themselves up and trying to like do like do all these like weird organ transplants and stuff like that like there's also a bureaucratic instrument where like they're trying to classify

and like catalog all the people who have been able to grow new organs and like what the organs look like and then on the other side yeah and then on the other side there's this like you know sort of leftist group that is like, it's not enough to be like documenting these, classifying them. Like, the government is, is doing something, but it's not enough. And like, artists are making statements,

but it's not enough. Like, we need to actually, like, change our bodies for real so that we can eat industrial waste. And a big part of it is the main character, Vigal Mortensen's character, is like, he's having them removed because it's like, oh, these are basically tumors. They're basically the organs that don't do anything. And then as the movie progresses, it's more like, no, if you were to let nature take its course, this is a threat to the government's power. Because apparently, like, the government's pretty weak at this point.

So that's where there's these plastic eating separatists. But they're trying to convince them, no, your body is building to something new and wonderful. And you need to stop taking it out as if it's a problem. So it's like this removal of a problem and the classification of it that's really like, I think the fun part of the movie for me. Yeah, that book. Because you get creepy pervert, Kristen Stewart. Oh, yes.

As like a weird, like, sniveling bureaucrat. Oh, she's so good. And then that book that they have that they, like, bring in to show her of, like, all the organs. There's, like, this beautiful, like, bound book that they made that, like, is, like, illustrations of all the organs that they've taken out of Saul. And then, like, an overlay of the tattoo that they put. on it and it's like so gorgeous. But you're right, Justin, like, that's the realization that he has is like he thinks these organs, it's like something that's happening to him and he doesn't want it to happen.

So like his art is getting rid of them. But the separatists are like, dude, your body is doing something incredible. Like, aren't you interested in seeing where it takes you? And then, you know, it leads to this like incredible. Passion of Joan of Arc, and where he eats the plastic and, like, has this, like, moment of ecstasy, you know, where he realizes, like, the things he was fighting.

Like, he was always ill, coughing and, like, choking on, on, like, something in his throat. Because, like, the things, the, like, machines that you buy to try and, like, fix the problem aren't actually doing anything for him. That's, like, his body really just wanted. to change and become like a new a new human. And so I guess that's like, that's what I was thinking of. I was thinking of that.

And then Girl with All the Gifts is another fungal zombie movie. And like the interesting part about that is there's the main character is a girl who's a second generation zombie. So like she was, yeah, so she was in her, like she was in her mother's, I think so. She was in her mother's womb. when her mother became a zombie. Oh, cool. And then she basically, like, clawed her way out of her mother.

And so all of the second generation zombies are, like, kids that were basically born of the zombie apocalypse. And they're, like, mostly normal kids, except they want to eat humans. So, like, they're not part of, they're not, like, a swarm, you know? They're, like, sentient and, like, want to just. be kids and they're they're kept in like a- Do they hunger for humans or do they culturally want to eat humans? They hunger for them. Just saw it is based on a book, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, like they very, very much hunger for them. Like, they'll be normal. They'll be like normal, you know, quote unquote, kids. And then suddenly they'll get this like kind of like wild rage where they're like, and they have to eat a human. Yeah.

And they're like, kept in a government facility and like being they're being experimented on as like these like maybe there's an maybe there's information that like could be learned from them but only for like the government you know only for the state and then basically like she the main character decides to there's like when when you get out of the government facility there's this like crazy ass like it looks like a um like a phone tower, like a cell phone tower, that's been like completely overgrown with fungus and like these huge spores. And she's like, she finally decides to just like torch it and just like let the spores all go so that like whoever's still left as a human is like can't live anymore. And like the only people that can still like survive are like the second generation zombies and they have to like make a new world.

basically. So it's like another, I think, really interesting take on not only like zombies, but also just like the whole idea of like fungal infections and that like these kids are infected with it. But like instead of being like, oh, they all turn into these like mindless monsters. Like they're still kids. They're just different. You know? And like they're going to be the next sort of like resilient population because the rest of the earth has to die. Yeah. And it's like, because I know you said like in your tweet that like, you know, about like body possibility and something I like to stress on this podcast a lot and in my, you know,

career in general is that like information and stuff relevant to libraries isn't just like stuff in books or whatnot. Like everything is information including bodies. Like bodies are information. and how bodies interact with each other and with the world around them is also information. Like, information is transferred. Information is stored.

Like, I have started calling, like, my, like, transactual body is a, like, catalog and archive of all the stuff that I've done to it, right? Like, there is... And so it's, like, with body possibility, like, thinking about that from not just, like, oh, if we look at the body possibility and think, oh, how can we translate that

to information science, To me, like, translating doesn't have to happen. Like, what does body possibility? Like, what can that tell us about information within, like, the body and stuff? Yeah. I mean, we all have, yeah, we carry, like, lots of marks on our bodies as, like, history markers, you know, tattoos, piercing, scars. Yeah. Well, did you want to see something about this disaster tourism?

Because I didn't have time to read it. Oh, that was just. a, um, it's a project that Anna Singh did with a bunch of, a bunch of artists and archivists and anthropologists, I think. Let me find the, it's called Farrell. Oh, Farrell Atlas. It's just like an interesting thing to like play around on. But it's like basically about the interactions of like human and animal or like human and plant. And like it's cataloged. as invasion, empire, capital, or acceleration. It's super interesting.

Those are a bunch of discourse words. I know. And you can kind of just like plop around and, oh, there's a coronavirus one. And like you click on things and it gives you like this atlas and then there's stories. It's all very like, it's kind of intuitive. Like it doesn't really, it kind of guides you around intuitively. But yeah, like if you click on the coronavirus, it gives you an Atlas. And then there's all these like articles that pop up.

There's like some things about historical and fantastical landscapes. Like it's just a really interesting art project that I think was it was done with like, which I also think is super cool. I love when artists, because I'm a visual artist. So I love when artists collaborate with like archivists or. anthropologists or scientists and like put together pieces like this. I think it's really interesting. Yeah, I just used Whapelizer on it because I always love to figure out like how these things are built because I work with digital exhibits. Oh, cool. This looks like it's just straight up custom made because the only thing it says is runs on Apache,

which is like way less than any other website. So I think this is all homegrown or something. Oh, wow. Yeah. And like it looks like I think the thing that they were talking about with like the term feral is that these are animals and plants that have sort of grown along with humans and like maybe have grown in ways that like humans weren't expecting or like because of something that humans did now there are these like we have a crazy population of European starlings because a bunch of ding-dongs really wanted Shakespeare birds in New York in the parks. And now we have millions and millions of them. So, you know, I think it's like, I like the idea of, I appreciate things like this because it places us, like, sort of within the, I guess, yeah, like, instead of the arboreal way of thinking of hierarchy, like, we're amongst all the animals and plants.

and like we're affecting them and they're affecting us. Like, we're not separate because I think that's how a lot of people think of humans as like, we're doing our own thing and like the natural world does its own thing. Whenever I think of things like that, I think back, it's very Christian thinking. And it may not be like the source of that sort of thinking, but I was just, it's a very, very Christian point of view that humans are above literally everything else. Yeah, it's that lack of historical depth. It's like humans are more evolved than chimps.

Like, no, we're equally evolved. If you're alive at the same time as another thing, you're equally evolved. We're all in the present. That's a very good point. Yeah. It's the thing is we're really bad at thinking both historically. Like this is when you do a history degree, a big part of it is learning how to think historically. But it's also a big part of like a biology degree teaching people evolution is like teaching people to think with any kind of temporal depth is really difficult.

And we're really bad at doing it because we build these things like hierarchical trees. And that says, like, this goes from point A to point B. And it colors the way that we think about. And it makes us more hierarchical as people, which I think is something you should think about as like a leftist who challenges arbitrary hierarchies. It's a very anarchist point, right? To think about hierarchies and the way we describe things. That is one thing I really like about the homosaurus is that, like, while it does have some elements of a more traditional thesaurus and texturis, Exxonomy where you have like a broader term, narrower terms, which are related terms, and where it's like a family tree style. It does have some aspects of that, but things don't necessarily have to have the same parent term, the same broader term to be related terms. So you can make connections without having the family tree style strictly in force. We encourage that sometimes in our, when we're creating terms just to make the tree look pretty. And it like helps.

when you're seeing what terms are related to what, but we don't have to create those relations in a strict genealogical family tree way. I thought that was, and it took me a while to get used to that when I was creating terms because I was like, but wait a minute, but these terms are related, but then I have to give them the same broader term, but that makes no sense with them. So how do I make this term? And they're like, no, no, no, be free. Be free in the Library of Congress. We don't have to do that here. Yeah, there's no problem when you're describing something abstractly of it being like polyphaletic, being like these are unrelated terms, but we're going to group them together.

In biology, it's a big problem because like we study bones and we accidentally put the wrong animals together as if they're related because we didn't have genetics or we can't do genetic analysis to them. So then we go, oh, crap, we've got to reorganize all this because this is polyphaletic. It's two lineages that we smush together because they look like or they act alike. And we've classified them wrong. But if you're doing something that's not bound by biology, you can do whatever you want. But this non-hierarchical to, like, bring in a little more, like, very specific library stuff. I hear the bunnies chewing on cardboard, but whatever.

Better than the walls. This actually brings us to, like, when we're talking about rhizomes, that the very specific application of rhizomes and libraries is linked data, which is fun because link data is like a dead project. Yeah. We gave up on it. We decided. So for people who might not know, because even though we have a lot of grad students, are you even learning about link data in library school anymore? You probably are because it lags practice.

But like in practice, we're not doing linked data. So the whole idea of Web 3.0, which is why those Bitcoin people can't use the word Web 3.0. They say Web 3.0. Was, OK, Web 2.0 was the hyperlinked web. Web 3.0 will be the semantic web. We will teach machines to actually understand words by manually, teaching them relationships. We will create terms for relationships. We will basically teach machines grammar. So Hamlet would be one term, is a work of. So there would be like a DOI for is a

work of. So a machine can understand it. And then Shakespeare. And you could create through these triples, you can link all the information in the universe, basically. Shakespeare is the author of Macbeth. Macbeth is a book. Like a book is you can create. create these triples and link everything together semantically. We decided not to do that. Instead, what we decide to do is what I call this stupid web, where everything is learned by large language models. And it sort of just guesses it what the words mean.

It doesn't even know what the words mean. And that's why everyone's trying to, you know, right now it's a hot AI debate topic, especially academics who are fucking morons because they don't play with these things before they talk about them. They're like, oh, no, my student's going to plagiarize with chat GPT. I'm like, did you try and use it? Because this model doesn't understand human language because no one's bothered to teach it human language. The whole idea behind the semantic web is we were going to create these non-hierarchical connections in a rhizome.

And it would make discovery easier because everything would actually be linked and machine readable and human readable at the same time. And so we would actually be teaching machines how to actually talk to us. for the first time. Instead of telling a machine, this is a 200 line. A 200 line holds this information. And then the human goes, okay, that's what a 200 line does. Computer only knows what a 200 line is. It doesn't know what the information in it is.

Data that is both semantic and structured. And then it's also queriable. Wikidata is link data. And structured, yeah. I really was going back when I was to like writing papers and stuff. I wanted to do a paper on like using like cyborg theory on link data and editing it and like it being both human readable and machine readable and how those are the same thing because humans create the machines and whatnot.

And then also how link data as a project to me is like a reverse of the confusion of tongues. Like it's returning us to a pre-tower of Babel, divine, perfect language where everyone on the internet would be speaking the quote same language because everything would be through link data that the computer could understand and like reducing human human communication down to link data. I love link data as a concept and a project and I wish we would have stuck with it because I'm a nerd and I think it's cool. But it also, it's like the way that it is structured in the terms we use for everything,

like the internet is in English, right? And the way that we have linked data structured and stuff, it like is for, it would force everything on the internet to be to start to speak the same language and stuff. That's interesting. Link data as a conlang because, like, is author of, obviously I said that in English, but you could translate that sentiment maybe into most languages. And they would have all the same URI though. Yeah, like it would all be the same.

Like parts of speech would have tags that the machine understands and humans understand. That's cool. Yeah, it is a shame we've decided to do the stupid web instead, the lazy version, which is we're going to teach a statistical machine to do this. and then make underpaid workers, make it not say the word. And then that's it. You can't let it turn into a Nazi in two hours. Step two, question mark, step three, profit somehow.

That's always the way. But, yeah, AI discourse is driving me nuts. I can't wait for faculty to start asking me about it so I can tell them to fucking shut up. To read a goddamn book. I don't know. Yeah, I hate it as an artist, too. It's just, you know, it's like there are ways that things, can be done, but I wonder, it's like under capitalism, you're always going to choose the

most awful, just exploitative method of everything. Yeah, it's like my argument this entire time has been that like it in and of itself isn't a problem. It's a capitalist system under which it was developed and under which and in which it is being used. And what that affects, that is the problem. People making huge eight-titty anime girlfriend. it's not a problem. Yeah, that's fine. Go ahead. Yeah.

Enjoy yourself. But don't steal like a bunch of the titties from like someone else's photo, I guess. I don't know. Or someone else's drawing. See, a thing with, I mean, and not to get into like a AI argument for the million time, but like a lot of that is actually like a lot of the arguments that of people have been saying it's like it's actually perfectly like a lot of times like copyright. It's being done in fair use.

and then people are suggesting stricter IP law. Yeah. Like it's getting very reactionary against like very legitimate criticisms against a flawed technology and capitalist system is making people kind of reactionary in a way. I don't think they realize they're becoming reactionary. That is true. Yeah. And I think a lot of it, I mean, this is a completely different episode. But yeah, a lot of it is like artists are so exploited and like underpaid.

and have never been able to really figure out a way to, like, survive under capitalism that I think artists get intense about copyright in ways that are reactionary that, like, we shouldn't be. But it's like one of those things where you're like, this is all I have. Yeah. And, like, that's the whole point of copyright, too. Yeah. Is to, like, support creativity and stuff, quote, end quote. Right. But it's just for Disney.

Yeah. Yeah, it's like that conversation we had where we've conflated art with a thing that should be copyrighted by someone. So if you're doing art that we would consider art, we're conflating that with thus should be copyrighted. And it seems at the moment that the Copyright Office is kind of sticking to its opinion that AI art and LLM generated art, that's large language models, that cannot be copyrighted. And I think part of, I think that's kind of funny because I think the really. the only reason that is is because people have insisted on calling this shit AI as if it's like a little person, as if it's like a little dude. If you had said, I created a statistical model that makes images, you probably could have copyrighted everything that you did as an output. But everyone's like, no, this is a thinking machine. The guy with the with the, uh, fedora who's like, Bing is alive and it's talking to me. And then Google fired him or whatever. But I also wanted to bring up what we're talking about last week with, final versions because as we were recording about final versions, translations, and new editions coming out, all the role doll shit was happening. Like, as we were recording, that that story was

going around. Do you know about this, Kate? Mm-mm. I don't. So they basically Huck Fendom, which is they just took out the estate, because it's all still under copyright, the estate put out a new version and took out, I don't know, racist or sexist stuff. I don't really care. They They made Matilda go, like, read Jane Austen instead of reading, like, Hemingway and made her, like, not go to, like, not read Heart of Darkness. Yeah. Or, like, instead of women being secretaries, women are big business CEOs and stuff like that. Yeah. It's image management for the estate.

But everyone's, like, censorship. Because no one can fucking, like, pay attention to a discourse for five minutes. And they're like, this is just like what Republicans are doing. Like, no, this is a business decision. And the same thing we said last week. The problem is they're not going to reissue the old versions. So now you have to buy an old version. Like libraries mostly buy new books.

So if you need to preserve an older version, you need to do it like now. I mean, Roll doll, there's millions of copies. But that's not going to be a problem. But if it was something smaller and you made a change like this, it might be really, really hard to go back and get the original if it wasn't. And this is like a copyright problem. And this is a, if this was in the public domain, we could have any version we wanted. You know, you could, you could do, like, Pride and Prejudice and Matilda because it's in the public domain and you could just rewrite the book to do that with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Everything was zombies, bringing us back to The Last of Us.

But that was from the zombie golden era, I think. Yeah. The zombie renaissance. That's how I'll call it. Yeah, monsters definitely have, like, eras. We have, like, major vampire times, major zombie times. Mummies are weird though because mummies are always vague about like what powers they have. Yeah.

I always like the old mummy movies like curse the mummy's tomb or whatever. But like what is its power? Like it's super strong. It can kind of like teleport. But then it just does zombie stuff when it gets to you. But it's also magic and it's like sentient. But it can never talk. It can only go, ah.

Yeah. Then it'll like curse you. That's why it's hard. Because yeah, if you can't like, if you don't have a quippy monster these days. If it just goes like, wha! Then it's not very interesting. I'm just so blessed that we live in a world that I got my Sodomy vampires on AMC. Yay!

I love my Sodomy vampires. The show is so fucking good. More Sodomizing vampires. I've been looking for things to watch. Yeah, go watch interview with the vampire show. It's real good. You'd like it. They go to the library in an episode.

Ooh. That's how Claudia learns about other vampires and stuff is by going to the library at like the university. I think she at LSU or no, or what's the one in New Orleans? It's not LSU. LSU's in Baton Rouge. Is it Lafayette then? Maybe. Anyway, she goes to the library and she researches.

That's lovely. I love when like that's all that like reminds me of Buffy. Yeah. In like genre movies and TV, there's a lot of research involved, which I love. You have to open up. Yeah, you have to open up all of your old tomes and find like the, you know, the demon that's going to bring the end of the world in Sunnydale again. Information seeking behavior. Yeah.

We know how I feel about a sexy microfiche montage. Yes. I need a sexy microfiche montage shirt, I think. Yeah. I wonder if that sucking and fucking your way through Texas, whatever, has a sexy... Great, Texas Birding Trail. Thank you. Texas, whatever.

Maybe they have a sexy microfiche shirt, too. Cool. I know the artist that made... Oh, I don't know them personally, but I know which artist made it, so maybe I could do a commission. That'd be great. Yeah. A sexy microfice montage shirt. A library punk commission?

Yeah. I mean, we've commissioned... all the time. Yeah. Yeah. We commissioned our logo thing. We commissioned our music. But yeah, going back to rhizomes, that was what I was saying with the Rode doll thing is this, there's this final versions and arborescent thinking. And that gets conflated with, I think, like, artistic intent. Like, this is the whole thing with like George Lucas and Star Wars. This is my version. So it's my movie. Therefore, I get to determine what the final version is. And rhizomatic thinking and rhizomatic cataloging would be like,

now there's lots of different manifestations of a work. If it's an e-book, an audio book, an edition, a translation, a new translation, it doesn't lead to like an inexorable final version. Like, when is a work done? It isn't, really, unless it gets kind of like forgotten. This is why Ferber Wimmy is good, actually. Everybody, even when I was in grad school, they were shitting on it. I'm like, no, this shit's right, and I like it.

So this is why Ferber Wimmy is good, actually. Well, did people hate Ferber? Did they hate RDA classification rules? I think they hate both, actually. I always heard people shit talking on both of them. And also, I like RDA. Don't tell anyone. I don't like that it's a close standard.

But I really like RDA. I mean, it's what I learned. I didn't learn AAC or two, but I like RDA. I don't see the fuss. I was going to write this whole ass, my erotics of metadata thing was going to talk about how like all of, all of the complaints about RDA have nothing to do with the end patron and it's all to do with the worker who doesn't like working with it.

I mean, that's fair. Yeah, exactly. It's a fair argument. Like, our working conditions matter too with these things. But, yeah. I did look around for library mushroom collections to see if anyone had, like, made a big collection. The only thing I could find was a reference collection named after a guy, which is the, I feel like he had a funny name, but maybe not. John D.

fucksmith. It was very John D. Bucksmith, which is why I was thinking about it. Oh my God, wait. I have to find the name of an artist I saw at the PMA this weekend. Because it's like John D. Nebula. It's spelled

exactly like it sounds. I love it. Knee bone. Yes, knee bone. Incredible. Oh, the painter, his name was John Henry Twattsman. It doesn't mean I'm not a feminist. Plotsman.

And he had a, his painting was called Morning Glory Pool. If you do it right, that's exactly what will happen, baby. You say so. I love to date a Twotsman. Right. Who twots the Twotsman? It twots for thee. It twats for thee.

Oh, God, Twattsman for me and not for thee. But, yeah, I couldn't find any libraries that have a mushroom collection or, like, I thought I found a digital collection, but it was just mushrooms in a digital collection. It wasn't what I was thinking. It was like this huge Omeca. They were using Omeca as a catalog, which is insane, but like, fine, whatever. If it makes it work, fine. A lot of, like, some places will do that, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the problem is it's just.

so not interoperable, but that's a different discussion. It's not very rhizomatic. It's just not integrated into anything else. So if you ever had to migrate, it would be the world's hugest pain in the ass. So you're kind of like stuck with it. I'm going to say that to people now. That's

not very rhizomatic of you. That's super antifungal. That's super antifungal. What are your body possibilities? Yeah. You're being so antifungal right now. We are a pro-fungal podcast, stop treating your athlete's foot, let it take over your body.

Yeah, let it just grow into like cute little toad stools on your toes. Toe stools. Toes stools. Stop wearing shoes. Body is reality. But I wanted to ask Jay, do you think, like, because of the way they spore, could libraries do mushroom grow kits and like keep making new spores in like a maker space. Oh, it was needed.

Yeah. Or like a spore library. Because that is how like as you like get the spore, you just like, you get the cap and you go boop on a thing and you get a spore print. And then you can make syringes out of the spore print for like you can kind of just get like a cycle of like getting more spore prints and then what not. Yeah. Like, you can, for it to look under a microscope, you can buy syringes that have active spores and then that you just look at under the microscope. But you can also buy spore prints where it looks like it's like the gills. Yeah, I've made mushroom prints before.

But I've never made them, yeah, for scientific purposes, just for like artistic purposes. Yeah. Oh, cool. But you can like do a print of those on like a dish kind of thing. And you can use that because it's got the spores in there to make spore syringes to look at under a microscope and not inject into a grain bag or anything like that at all. But like the conditions under which to grow them, like I could see maybe doing like the spore print thing and having microscopes and stuff. I could see that maybe like, and if you're in a state where it is legal to cultivate such things or whatnot, like even like make your own spore print and like having instructions for like, you know, and then having tools there because like if you're getting really serious about it, you need to have one of those rooms that gets the vent with the air because you don't want to, because there's spores of all sorts of fungus in the air all the time that you breathe constantly. And you want as few things. in the air as possible to contaminate

whatever you do if you're going to grow things. And this is true of any type of mushroom, even legal ones. It's like kind of hard to inoculate soil and stuff. You have to be very sterile with it or all smold can happen, all sorts of stuff. So I don't know with how unsanitary public libraries are. Incredibly. Yeah, it would need like its own like special room.

And it would be like, are we talking about growing them, where there's like different phases of like because like if like if you get like the back to the roots mushroom like pearl oyster grow kits basically that's a pre-inoculated bag of dirt and manure and whatever else that you kind of just have to soak in water and then it starts the mycelium starts to work its way through it and starts to form into a fruiting body right and you just have to put it in the sun and let it do its thing and you just have to put it in the sun and let it do its thing and you So you could probably do that at a library, fine, that you don't have to be as fussy about. But if you're actually working from having the spores themselves and growing from there, you have to be fussy.

And I don't know if you get that fussy at a library. Yeah, it sounds kind of labor intensive. Yeah, legally acquired, of course. That's a shame that you couldn't just do it like a seed library. But yeah, I mean, if you're growing fungus, that means other fungus can take root very easily. This is a problem I had when I was growing when I was doing my hydroponics because, like, the bunnies. have like a perfect growing ground for fungus in the next room. So I kept getting like contamination in the water and I couldn't get it out.

It was like so bad. It's like, I don't know if I'm going to eat these anymore. Yeah. Just in case I ate the wrong thing. So I've had it. I've had the whole thing have to be redone twice. I kind of want to go back to hydroponics. It's just like, yeah, the contamination is tough.

But I'm going to try growing mushrooms and see how that goes. And then, yeah, I did look into like growing. getting sylisibocubensis and what you need to do to keep it from getting contaminated. But I also, I've just been thinking about this recently because I've tried to get more into cooking mushrooms. And I learned recently that one of the reasons people aren't very good at cooking mushrooms is they cook them like plants. They cook them like vegetables, meaning you add water and you shouldn't do that. You should cook them kind of like meat.

Yep. So you just oil the pan, you put them in there, and then you let their, their own water start to evaporate and then that'll cook it naturally. Yeah, you're not even really supposed to wash mushrooms. Yeah. You wipe them off. Yeah. I tend to think a lot of butter.

A lot of butter and mushrooms are always a winning combination. Maybe some white wine. Yeah. I literally just wiped the pan to season it with olive oil and then just threw them in there and let them cook slowly. Yeah. And that's kind of all you need to do. But that did make me think are mushrooms vegan?

because, or is that forestalling our future body possibilities? Because they're not, they're not plants. Ash and I have actually talked about this. About how bad we feel eating mushrooms that we've grown especially sometimes because it's like, I know this now. I can't unknow this thing. And so I feel kind of weird eating this thing that I know isn't actually a plant and has so much like cool shit that it can do.

have also grown it. We had existential crises about that one time. Imagine how much worse it's going to be when it's a Kate mushroom. Yeah. Kate, if you're a mushroom, I'd still eat you. But do you still love me if I was a toadstool? Just going to put a picture of a mushroom that says inquisitive girl. friend is the cover of it.

I can't imagine anyone not loving a mushroom girlfriend. I'm gay and I want a mushroom girlfriend. Are you kidding? It transcends sexualities. Where's my mushroom girlfriend? She can hang out with the like shark milf girlfriend from a few episodes ago. Yeah, like Gumbet from Mario. Oh my God.

Yeah. Oh, I've got a boy talking to me. Oh. On what? Hinge, which is the dorkiest fucking dating, say, all the guys on there are just fucking milk toast Disney adults. Ew. And like gay Disney adults are like almost as bad as the straight ones. Terrifying.

Yeah. Yeah. But my mama never showed me how to cook. Okay. Your mama never show you how to suck dick. And you still know how to suck. Pardon me. Points were made.

Points were made. In conclusion, mushrooms are our friends. Yes. Oh, you know what I forgot to say? Yeah, that I thought was hilarious. Someone responded to my tweet that The Last of Us is Hobbs with fungus all the way down, which made me laugh so much.

Yeah. So that's my inconclusive. We're going to start that cannibalism podcast, right? Oh, 1,000 percent. I've been thinking, I'm like in the back of my head, Kate. Think of all the things you could talk about. I've been on my phone because my dad was having some health emergencies the past couple days, so I'd just be like, hello, dad, you know, making sure.

And I was like, what if I just looked at cannibal podcasts to see what ones are out there? There better not be any competition or will eat them. There's a podcast and it's about survival cannibalism and just different stories of survival cannibalism. I just let's say there's got to be Hannibal content or podcasts out there. Not quite the same, but. Yeah. I do love Hannibal. Same.

We'll definitely talk about Hannibal. There was that mushroom episode of Hannibal. Oh, yeah. Crossover. That's the grossest one. That's like the one I can't watch. It freaks me out too much. Celebrity guest fungus.

Celebrity guest fungus. My God. We get... Can you believe we got fungus for this episode? I know, right? Score. I'm going through the responses to Kate's post on the Tumblr post. Oh, God.

It's up to about 30,000 notes now. A lot of people is just like same or let's let them cook or... Let him cook indeed. What the fuck is Mamma Mia Goth talking about future body possibilities? Like fungi aren't going to give us superpowers. What fungal infections do is try to decompose you before you're actually dead. And I think that's closed-minded thinking. Yeah.

Because if you're not dead yet, that's a future body. Yeah, see, that's Hobbs with fungus all the way down. Yeah. I mean, fungal, unfortunately, being anti-funge. as far as your toes are concerned is probably a good thing. So it's hard to say. I realized, like, the word, the word antifungal is, like, already a thing. Like, after I wrote it, I was like, oh, right.

That's, like, a thing people put on their feet. Like, fungal cream. Yeah. I also see a lot of tags that just say kin. So, well done. I think that's a level up. Kin. Does that mean that I have a fungal family?

It's kin. So the kids, yeah, the kids on Tumblr. Oh, they're kind of kinning. Years ago. Oh, okay. And then you would tag a character that you were, that you like kin to that character. And then there were like wars of like,

no one else can kin this character. I get this character and stuff. I like it. I am literally this character. I am this character. Yeah. I am Donnie Homestuck. Yeah.

I've never read Homestuck. I don't fucking. I am anime boy number five. I am fungal mamma meagoth. I'm also seeing a lot of queen wasp, and I don't know if that's a show, or if it's literally like a type of thing that happens to queen wasps, where they get taken over by fungus. Yeah, I think it is.

Is what a show or a thing that happens? I think that happens. A thing that happens, yeah. Oh, that's a thing that happens. Corticep speaking through host corpse, guys, this show is kind of problematic because it limits and it just cuts off. Oh, God. Parasect made. the original post.

Oh, I turned you into a parsec, too. Yeah, that makes tell us sense. Took me a second. So, join the decay. Decay exists as an extant form of life. And Kate, we didn't do your plugs up front. So do you want to do them now? Sure.

So I'm Kate. I'm a mushroom. And I have a Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and now we've expanded to horror, podcast because we kept having so many guests on that didn't like Buffy and I was getting tired of it. Jay. I know. It's my fault.

And I was like, okay, you know what? We like horror too. Let's talk about horror. So it's horror focused specifically on like adolescence. So like ginger snaps, the lost boys, that kind of stuff. We had Jay on for the lost boys as our inaugural horror episode. It was awesome. So you can listen to Fangs for the Memories, wherever you get podcasts.

And we're on Twitter at Fang's Podcast. And then I am on Twitter. What am I on Twitter? Oh, I'm at Kate Terry. At the moment, my name is Mama Mia Gath because I just saw Infinity Pool. And I would like Mia Gauth to destroy me. I had a moment of like, I don't get why everyone's obsessed with Mia Gauth. And then I realized I'm not attracted to women.

Well, there you go. I can see it. Yeah, yeah, I could see that. Yeah, I was like, wow. I watched Infinity Pool with Jake and we were both like, we would both like me a goth to destroy us. I did not like that movie. Oh, I did.

Yeah, I liked it. I want to think about it some more, but I enjoyed it. Yeah, anyway, sorry, interrupted your plugs. Oh, no, it's okay. You're all good. But so, yeah, I'm at Kate Terry on Twitter. and you can go to my Twitter to see my, I'm an artist, which is something that I like don't get to talk about very often. But my website is on my Twitter. It's kaiterry.com.

And I make all sorts of weird, I don't know, creepy art, which you might have guessed already. And that's it. And what's the Patreon too? I can put the Patreon. Oh, God. What is our Patreon? Hold on. Things podcast. Things can. There it is. Got it.

Thank you. Leslie's going to murder me. Hi, Leslie. Hello. What was the other Kronenberg movie that just came out and started with a P? Because I started watching it and I, a possessor. I couldn't. Oh, the younger.

Cronenberg, the younger. Brandon. Well, yeah, that's infinity pool is also Crennberg. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I am not a fan of young Brandon's work. I like that you're like, Brandon. Brandon. I'm sorry.

I'm not a fan of young Brandon's work. Yeah, I haven't seen all of his other movies, but I did like Infinity Pool. I thought it was really interesting. And, like, I definitely want to watch it again. It was fun to watch it in a theater full of Normies who got super scandalized and all the pervers shit in it. Yeah. That's how I had fun at that movie was, like, sitting there in the back way and like, this is tame and, like, laughing. Yeah.

And everyone being like, someone in mine went, Jesus Christ in my theater. I saw it in Brooklyn, so at like Nighthawk, which is like this cute little like theater where they serve you cocktails and stuff. And I was like, oh, that's cute. Yeah. So that was fun. Seeing Scars Guard walked around on a dog collar. That part was pretty hot. Yes, I enjoyed that very much.

And did enjoy the Scars Guard, the naked Scars Guard and a dog collar on leash. And then getting. Pia da. Bia. By Mia Goss. Yeah. Some choice like Titty Pia. in Infinity Pole if you're into that.

Some choice titties. No, I mean, just saying. She does have some choice tities, to be honest. I could be objective here. Anyway, that's a good way for me to end things. So this is a book of our podcast about libraries. Yeah. We talked about libraries a lot.

It's all rhizomes, baby. For having me on. This is a vibes-based rhizome podcast now. And look forward to me and Kate's cannibalism podcast, apparently. Stay tuned for, eat me or something, I don't know. Eat me, don't forget to write. Yeah.

I like that. I'm going to write it down. That's pretty good, actually. Or take me out to dinner first. Oh, my God, I love it. It'd be a good one. Okay. Yeah.

This is a workshopping, our podcast name, podcast now. Stuff is in the works. It's in the fungus. It's growing. It's in the rhizome. Good night.