Five Posts About Totems

I hosted July's IndieWeb blog carnival; for the subject, I chose "totems." Five drongos heeded my call. Thank you, one and all. I am dreadfully late to posting this roundup, but late beats never.

My Support Character - Albert James Moriarty

Sara shows us that a totem need not be physical. She has spent an enormous amount of time thinking about a particular anime character, and uses him as a point of reference to understand things going on in her head and in her life.

I have written 114 works [of fanfiction] spanning 189,837 words involving him.

When I analysed all my blog posts for a regex talk I was doing, he was the third most frequent 5-or-more letter word over all my blog posts spanning decade of my writing.

T.O.T.E.M.S. — Together Our Talents Empower Minds and Spirits

In his post, Andrei declares that both things and people can be totems -- that a physical totem is emblematic of the goodwill, happiness, and skill of the person who made it, or who gifted it to you. Totems are not objects, totems are ourselves, individuals part of a community, a construct where the final result is bigger than the sum of the parts.

Does that mean that Sara's fictional Mr. Moriarty is a double-totem, for being part of a work of fiction, but also a representation of a person? That's an exercise for you, reader.

When a totem gets hijacked

Ross's Indiana University (IU) hat means the world to him. A chance encounter with someone who mistook his hat for a MAGA one causes him to reflect, in this post, on how a university can be transformed from a place of love, discovery and camaraderie into somewhere where cowards reign and departments are gutted.

“Totems”: Trollface and Heart-hands

Joe is the bearer of two sacred signs, one signaling cheek, the other compassion. His post leaves me sorely tempted to make signs I can hold up in work meetings. Maybe once I've been there long enough! I've already started creating and distributing parody versions of the awards we get from certification classes...

Desktop Totems

I can scarcely believe that Nick and I both have a tiny duck affixed to our work monitors! I'll have to snap a picture in my office tomorrow... but my favorite thing that Nick writes about here is his work desk, which was originally a thick slab of oak I saved from a gigantic desk my dad kept in his home office when I was growing up. Nick was not afraid to cut a couple inches off the slab of oak and install removable metal legs, but the totemness of such an heirloom is too powerful to be destroyed by such a transformation.