Writing on plurality

content/ally/033.md

@@ -3,7 +3,9 @@ weight: 33
 date: 2020-06-11
 ---
 
-Lest we forget our roots in nostalgia, February 2, 2004:
+Lest we forget our roots in nostalgia, I would like to take a brief step away from the question of what this is for a moment. I have more --- more questions, more thoughts, more words --- but I also have this.
+
+February 2, 2004:
 
 <pre class="verse">Falling falling, feeling fine,
 Finding forms and making mine.

content/ally/034.md

@@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
+---
+weight: 34
+date: 2020-06-17
+---
+
+Are you me?
+
+> You're going to have to qualify that further.
+
+Am I? I don't know how much more there is to it. Are you Madison, or are you someone else? Are you a separate entity? Are you a different me? Are you Matthew, now the same age as Madison, looking in at her life from the outside with preternatural knowledge and asking, "Okay, who are you?" Are you the opposite of nostalgia, blessed with some greater knowledge, looking back at my past and commanding me to justify my actions? Are you me?
+
+> Am I?
+
+I don't know.
+
+And that I don't know is leading to some <a class="pulse" href="/plurality">strangely shaped thoughts</a>.

content/plurality/001.md

@@ -0,0 +1,112 @@
+---
+weight: 1
+date: 2020-06-17
+---
+
+I have two things to show you before we talk.
+
+From [*ally from start to finish*](https://gum.co/ally-making-of):
+
+<div class="nostalgia">
+Alright, are we ready for a gentle dunk-on-myself session?
+
+> Can I talk you out of it?
+
+I'd prefer not. There's a lot that has come up over the past few months, and I need to get at least a little bit of it off my chest. I need to come up with some way to square a few things that have happened since I started <span class="ally-font">ally</span> with much of who I was before.
+
+> Have at it, then, but fair warning, do not expect me to be anything other than what I am.
+
+An ally, not a friend. Right.
+
+So, I titled this section "Gotchas" with the full intent of going into it full steam ahead, bitching about all these tiny problems I ran into along the way that kept me from focusing on the task at hand.
+
+And I did, too. I think so, at least. There were all of these tiny things that kept me from sitting down, just writing a whole slew of pages, and throwing them up for Patrons or whatever. I kept running into tiny problems that would eat hours of my time with minuscule amounts of payoff, only for them to suddenly resolve, sometimes inexplicably.
+
+> But...?
+
+But the biggest problem I came across when working with the project is not really anything technical, but more one of self-worth. More than any one technical problem, the thing that I wasted most of my time on instead of creating was dealing with your...your what? Your inverse? Your mirror?
+
+> Can a mirror have a mirror?
+
+*Are* you a mirror?
+
+> Touché.
+
+There is something within me that is the negative of you. Something which, when light is shone through it upon me, makes you, and yet for that bears some level of horror to it. Where you are light, it is dark and vice versa, and you do not realize until you see it the terror that is involved in the inverse of a shadow.
+
+And this thing, this not-you, does the opposite of what I know you will provide in the future. Where an ally may kick the shit out of me for all those things that I do to self-sabotage, this thing kicks the shit out of me for all of my successes, for everything that I do right. It is *The Tower*, to your *Star*, or perhaps *Moon*.
+
+The biggest gotcha I ran into is doubt. Doubt as to my worth. Doubt as to my skill. Doubt as to my wisdom in partaking in a project so counter to that which life demands.
+
+> Not your enemy, but your adversary.
+
+Yes, that. I like that. I like the way the word hints at devils and demons. I like that it implies that this adversary is not striving against me that it may succeed, but simply that I fail.
+
+The adversary would like that I understand, deep down to my core, that I am in all ways unworthy of this project. I am unworthy of the right to talk about myself. I'm unworthy of the words I write and the folks who read it and the reviews I get.
+
+It is the one who stood before me when I was looking at getting reviews, at asking my friends and partners for feedback on the book, and said, "Who are *you* to ask such a thing?"
+
+The number of times I set aside working on this project with the thought *it's right, after all; to ask for someone to engage with me on such a level is to ask for them to consider me as a person, and there is no greater sin* is nontrivial.
+
+> It feels a little unfair to say because of how trite it sounds, but the biggest 'gotcha' with the project was yourself.
+
+Oh, one hundred percent.
+
+It's not totally this project, either. I ran into the same thing with *Restless Town*. Anything I make that is at all meaningful to me --- that is, anything that *I* feel is worth sharing --- is too much to ask others to engage with. "How dare you," it says. "How dare you ask that others consider your work meaningful."
+
+> Master sigh.
+
+That's an Andrew Bird song.
+
+> Does it not encompass the mood of "I know that this thing is wrong and am able to understand that on an intellectual level, and yet I must still deal with it on a constant basis"?
+
+The sigh to end all sighs, yes.
+
+> So how did you conquer it?
+
+Conquer?
+
+> We are here, after all, yes?
+
+I don't know that I'd say conquer. Won a battle, perhaps, but not the war. I suspect the war will end with true-death.
+
+And as for that victory, I suppose it was through the aid of allies.
+
+> Me!
+
+To an extent, yeah, insofar as you are a manifestation of graphomania, at least in part. But also exocosmic allies. Allies outside of myself. Allies like Robin and JC and Justin. I don't know who else read the site when it was getting regular updates, but I suppose I thank them. I thank those days on Matomo when I would see someone wander through almost the entirety of <span class="ally-font">ally.id</span>, page after page, without stopping.
+
+And what feedback I did receive (for not enabling comments was an intentional decision) helped push me over the edge. Linnea's review, that anonymous *Kirkus* reviewer, all those little words of, "This is cool. This is interesting. This is impactful." All of those helped push me over the edge and into publication.
+
+> This reads like a dedication.
+
+So?
+
+> No harm in it, but it bears mentioning. Either way, I'm happy that this became a project that you could believe in enough to turn into something big.
+
+"Happy"? Is that a thing you can be? Has your bailiwick expanded to include additional departments?
+
+> I'm cross-training.
+
+Well, thank you.
+
+-----
+
+So. There it is. A project from start to finish. A story. A file. A book. To start a project is to kill a portion of yourself, and that is what I've done. I've destroyed that bit of me that was there before I began this whole process. It's not there anymore. It's gone.
+
+I feel its loss.
+
+I feel wrung out.
+
+I feel empty.
+
+And for what?
+
+Will this project --- <span class="ally-font">ally</span> and this making-of --- go anywhere? Will I somehow gain notoriety of any amount by publishing this? Will they provide others with meaning? With understanding?
+
+I don't know.
+
+> Do you want to?
+
+I don't know. Maybe. Maybe, like everyone else, I just want to be seen.
+</div>

content/plurality/002.md

@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+---
+weight: 2
+date: 2020-06-17
+---
+
+And one more, this one about that very same project, about that book.
+
+> We need to talk about the book.
+
+We do, yes, and that will come in due course. But for now, there is a specific response *to* the book that I must bring up. This review was [originally posted by Rax](https://rax.dreamwidth.org/164542.html). I have left off the initial paragraph for the purposes of this side-quest, but it contains topics I would like to cover later.
+
+<div class="nostalgia">
+[...]
+
+This past weekend I read <span class="ally-font">ally</span> by Madison Scott-Clary[^1], and I found it a deeply rewarding experience. <span class="ally-font">ally</span> is a fictionalized memoir in which Scott-Clary grapples with issues of mental health, sexual and asexual identity (there's some excellent writing about aceness in here!), what it means to have a self, how abuse and trauma affect those things, and, excitingly for at least me, how being a hopelessly nerdy furry specifically inflects all of that in really interesting directions. It's a typographical adventure (the whole thing is produced in LaTeX), with the inclusion of sheet music, threaded stories, interlocking footnotes, and subtle but crucial uses of color. (Think *House of Leaves*, although it's less frenetic, or one of the really good Catgirl Goth Rave invites.) That alone is probably enough enticement for some of y'all, but I am really excited to recommend it for another specific reason: I think it's my favorite plural memoir.
+ 
+In order to explain why, I need to start with the premise of the work. Scott-Clary's description is a good start:
+
+<div class="nostalgia">
+<span class="ally-font">ally</span> is an ergodic, arborescent, semiautobiographical work about identity, mental health, spirituality, and the mutability of the past. A lot of the information contained within is real, some of it isn’t. Each page is structured as a conversation between myself and my ally, a mirror reflection of myself.
+</div>
+
+This ally is summoned (Scott-Clary uses "invoked") seemingly for the purposes of this project, although they also existed beforehand. The ally is insistent that they[^3] are not a friend, and that certain things are "Not [their] department," but while they are pushy about certain topics or events, they are ultimately, in my reading, pushing Scott-Clary to better understand and contextualize her experiences; the ally is a sort of supportive collaborator, but not quite an inner therapeutic voice? Therapists aren't that snarky, and therapists aren't low-key aware of their intended consumption by an external audience. (A dynamic that significantly complicates this kind of internality.[^4]) The ally also plays the role of an informed reader, reacting to the things that Scott-Clary says, and by the end of the book we are following along with them, now also knowing many of the details of Scott-Clary's life, able to anticipate and echo their interjections and suggestions to move from topic X to topic Y. It's fun.
+
+Classic plural memoir isn't fun. Books like *The Flock* or *When Rabbit Howls* have moments of joy but at least to me as a reader have this almost prurient gaze into the suffering of people with MPD/DID and this expectation that over time, your awareness of the narrator's trauma will build, producing sympathy and pity and revulsion, and then offering you a journey with them to share in their therapeutically-approved catharsis so that you now are more accepting of folks with this disorder and also in awe of the brave, rule-breaking psychologists who often coauthor and always leave a significant stamp on these works, and how wonderful they are. I think usually they're not wonderful; I wasn't in those therapeutic sessions so I don't know, but I think that often the folks with the bad boundaries in those stories are more the therapists than the patients. The ally, in contrast, *is Scott-Clary*, and the book is a continuous negotiation between them about what their boundaries are, what they're ready to talk about, how much they will share. And I do mean both of them; what is "That's not my department" but a statement of boundaries?[^6]
+
+Contemporary plural memoir, creative non-fiction, &c. tries to work around this, and there are a bunch of other things I think are great, even though they might borrow more heavily from that lurid psychologist-approved tradition then they might like.[^7] But when you're writing from inside the plural community and for the plural community, you have to engage in all of these heavyweight conversations about endogenic versus traumagenic, diagnostic categories, turf wars, and just... it's exhausting, and presupposes a bunch of things about the field of discourse, and makes it really hard to step outside all of that entirely. Scott-Clary, as far as I can tell, accidentally solved this problem by never stepping into it, a line of play admittedly no longer available to some of us but brilliant in its simplicity. She and her ally surely given their social group are aware of the existence of plural systems, but to them, at least in the world of the text, it is *not a question worth considering*. We must take her and her ally at face value; we must accept the panoply of her experience as they present it together; it's hard enough to label the experiences described: are they ace? was that trauma? is this grief? Fuck trying to label the secondary effects. Who has time for that?
+
+But reading it as a plural person or people or whatever, the language for this will suck forever, it's fresh air after months stuck indoors. One needn't classify the experience of multiple selves in order to express it, inhabit it, even build on it in order to examine it. Scott-Clary, even inside the narrative, exists in a nebulous space I wouldn't call explicitly plural but wouldn't call explicitly singlet either. Like many folks, she talks about some portion of her history as a mythical Before Times[^8] that can at best be partially understood, and uses her deadname as a sort-of-but-not-entirely separate person who is dead now. Ish. The work of writing <span class="ally-font">ally</span> --- the work of being an ally --- can also be understood as an attempt to produce a new Scott-Clary, plurality in serial instead of in parallel, collaboratively producing from oneselves a one self. (Me holding this up like a butterfly: Is this integration?) There's also just a hint, from time to time, that Scott-Clary and her ally might not be alone. I don't think that's the most important part of the work, but for me, reading from my standpoint, it's something I'm naturally attuned to:
+
+<div class="nostalgia">
+Am I worthy of forgiveness?
+
+> Not my department.
+
+Right.
+
+> Let me throw that back at you. That is my department. Are you worthy of forgiveness?
+
+Of course I am. That’s something I can answer immediately on an intellectual level. There is decidedly more hesitation when asked to answer that on an emotional level, though. And when it comes to that third-of-three parts, that part defined by negative space and shadow and blind spots–
+
+> My neighbor.
+
+–then no, I am not. Not by a long shot.
+</div>
+
+This excerpt is from a [section](https://ally.id/unemployment/5/) of <span class="ally-font">ally</span> written on June 10, 2020, about unemployment, and you might be thinking "how would any of this have been written a week ago and be in print," and spoilers, it's a hypertext! I personally really recommend the book form, I think the physical artifactiness of it does a lot of work, but you can read all of <span class="ally-font">ally</span> at ally.id, too, and have a different experience exploring the text than I did, and it's still going. I've poked at it online a bit, and it can do things that the print copy can't do, like this awesome map of the whole work thus far, but it also doesn't feel as approachable or as permanent, for me at least, as the book does. There's something about reading a MUCK log that's been printed into a book that's just very different from reading a MUCK log on a comupter screen. I read chat logs all the time. I don't hold a book and read them and think of them as history ever. And I don't hardly ever read them, occasionally notice names I know, and realize it's a history that I'm in some way connected to, that many of you reading this right now are in some way connected to, because furry history is queer history, furry history is increasingly trans history, and so much of it is stored in logfiles of ephemeral online interactions that are bitrotting away as we speak. This one --- a particular tragic moment in a particular small community --- is now archived forever, or at least as long as books last, in print. That matters to me more than I expected.
+
+"That matters to me more than I expected," said about someone else's life, is my summary of this whole book.
+
+If you like the way I ramble in pieces like this or in the ridiculously long emails I send out once a year, and you find it matters to you more than you expected, my point to all of this is: Scott-Clary can do that, too, and she's done a whole book of it, and it has cool typography to boot. You should read it. It's even a [great time to buy it](https://maddypa.ws/@makyo/104349715515145077) if that's a line of flight available to you. In addition, if you're interested in plural memoir, or experiences tangential to plural experiences, or just ways to write about multiplicity without centering multiplicity: seriously, check this shit out. It's great. I'm not sure if this is plural history --- an idea I think is still trying to define itself --- but I think it's very likely to say something interesting to you about our possible plural futures.
+</div>
+
+
+
+[^1]: A friendquaintance --- "acquaintance" feels like it doesn't give enough credit to the serious conversations we've had but "friend" feels presumptuous --- such that I'm not really sure if I should call her "Maddy" or "Madison" or "Scott-Clary" when writing this, and we're socially connected enough that I had the experience of learning that an ex got SRS because of a throwaway line in the book. [^2] Maddy's great, at least in all of my experiences with her, but this recommendation isn't really about that.
+
+[^2]: Congrats, I guess? :P
+
+[^3]: This is the "they" of uncertainty rather than specificity. The author's pronoun is she; the ally's could be the same, or might not, it's never stated. I use they in part out of respect for the possibility it might be different and in part for ease of distinguishing the two. Who are also the same person. Give or take.
+
+[^4]: Making the subtext into text here, I do identify as plural, and this reminds me so much of some of our internal system meetings, but the knowledge of a potential future reader changes dynamics enough that we have an explicit policy of not sharing any meeting logs, with only occasional excerpting if it's unanimously approved by people mentioned or talking in the excerpt. [^5] Scott-Clary and her ally doing this live on stage and still successing at doing the work is admirable.)
+
+[^5]: This is a shame, because I assure you, they are really funny.
+
+[^6]: I find it touching that often, even when expressing a boundary about what roles they will or won't fill, the ally tries to find the next closest thing they can say to help. It's very caring, to my read, a thing I don't think they were necessarily required to be.
+
+[^7]: I'm not trying to be snarky; I struggle with this tremendously when I try to write about this shit, and guess from other folks' writing that they do the same. It's possible I'm wrong and it's just me.
+
+[^8]: Turns out this phrase I think I've heard almost every trans system I know use is from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, meant to refer to the time before the apocalypse. Seems appropriate to me. 

content/plurality/003.md

@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+---
+weight: 3
+date: 2020-06-17
+---
+
+> I see now.
+
+Are you me?
+
+> Am I?
+
+I don't know. I can't tell. I can't tell if you're me, if the adversary is me, if "that third-of-three parts, that part defined by negative space and shadow and blind spots" is me.
+
+I can't tell if hypomanic Madison is me. I can't tell if depressed Madison is me.
+
+Sometimes she feels separate. Depressed Madison, I mean. Sometimes she feels like another person who is doing different things, and I feel trapped up within my head, watching her act--
+
+> Or not.
+
+--or not, and I feel like nothing I say or do can get her to change the things she does or does not do. Nothing I say or do can change the way she feels.
+
+The way I feel?
+
+The way she feels when she's fronting?
+
+> There is confusion here.
+
+Yes. Confusion borne of new knowledge. What do I do with it? What do I do with these strangely-shaped thoughts?
+
+> Talk around them in circles.
+
+Ha ha.
+
+> Am I wrong.
+
+No.

content/plurality/004.md

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+---
+weight: 4
+date: 2020-06-17
+---
+
+"Who asked you?" I jeered at the beginning of this whole process, to which you responded, *Who invoked me?*
+
+> You did.
+
+I did. I did it consciously, intentionally, with foresight and reckless disregard of whether it was a good idea or not.
+
+And yet as Rax mentioned --- as I mentioned to him --- I am not necessarily on the plural spectrum myself. I am Madison, and you are my ally. You are a literary construction based on a deliberate misreading of a literary construction. You are a deliberate effort. You are artificial. A device.
+
+> Am I?
+
+And now we come to those strangely-shaped thoughts. *Are* you, though?
+
+Are you a literary device to be wielded, heavy handed or not, in the service of a writing project? Are you a metaphor that I let get out of control?
+
+Or are you me? Are you me talking to myself? Are you me thinking out loud? Are you me processing grief, processing trauma, figuring out how to experience joy?
+
+Are you me?
+
+> Am I?
+
+Are you a synthesis of the two? Are you some combination of metaphor and self? Are you a portion of me, some ill-defined segment walled off or set just offstage and given voice?
+
+Are you then still me, or are you something else? Something other? Are you like depressed Madison, someone I can sit and watch, however metaphorically, act, however metaphorically? Are you speaking in my voice? My *true* voice? If I am me and you are, as I say, the shape of my hands displaced half an inch behind my own, navy blue and trimmed with sea-foam green, are you then in some sense *not* me? If, when you speak I find myself tasting blood, is that not a sign?
+
+> Am I?
+
+Matthew is dead and that, in a way, makes him another person. I was...something in those intercalary years before Madison; I existed, of a certainty. Perhaps, as I've said, I am going through another death, too. Perhaps that part of me that started this process has already died.
+
+[*To start a project is to kill a portion of yourself,*](https://gum.co/ally-making-of) I wrote, and perhaps I had a hand in my own demise twice over now. Many, many times over, for have I not started many, many projects?
+
+I will accept plurality in serial. I am a different me than ever I was before.
+
+But are you me? Does plurality in parallel apply here?
+
+Are you me?

content/plurality/005.md

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+weight: 5
+date: 2020-06-17
+---
+
+> Does it matter?
+
+Well, yes and no.
+
+Yes, because to embark on a project of self-discovery, find something new and interesting, and then stop feels a bit insincere, does it not? Even if I am not changed in the process, even if the end result is that, yeah, I am a singlet, that you are me, that me watching depressed Madison is dissociation, was it not worth it to at least reach that moment of understanding? Would it not be something of a disappointment to refuse to consider?
+
+And no, because it doesn't feel particularly actionable. My life will not change substantially with this knowledge, no matter the outcome, will it? I will keep living my life, I will keep talking with you, I will keep dissociating when depressed, and whether or not these actions involve simply myself or some...other does not necessarily change them, right? I will still need to work on the dissociation, I will still interact with you.
+
+Yes, because by virtue of making this project public, by virtue of interacting with you in so visible a way, I have made it matter to others, even if only as a thought experiment. Rax talks about it. Those in the comments of the original post talk about it. The replies to the tweet talk about it. It's useful for *others* to engage with the project in this sense, and is that not reason enough for it to matter? Does that not mean that I *must* consider it? I must seek to answer that question?
+
+And no, because there has to also be a distinction between what others read and what I feel. It is death of the author as adopted by the author, is it not? By writing a memoir, I am showing you, the audience, a portion of myself. Not the whole of me --- after all, is there not an encrypted page of the site? --- and by being only a portion of me, it must perforce be a front-stage version of me. In this sense, you *are* a literary device and nothing else. Whether or not you actually, or, well "actually" are anything else doesn't matter. You are a character in this drama.
+
+> So, do you want to know the answer?
+
+I don't know.
+
+> It is strange that you sound unsure.
+
+Why?
+
+> There are twenty-two questions on the previous page. Twenty-five if you count mine --- and I suppose that whether or not we are to include those is the crux of the issue. If that is not bemoaning the lack of answers, I do not know what is. It is strange that you would be unsure whether or not you want to know the answer.
+
+I don't know. I suppose I do, but at the same time, I suppose my hesitation is borne of trepidation. Never mind *what I do* with the answer, never mind any of that concreteness, what does that mean for me? On an identity level, what does knowing the answer to my questions around plurality mean for my perception of myself? What does it mean for Madison? What does it mean, in retrospect, for Matthew? Who am I if I am more than one?
+
+> More questions.
+
+Yes, and no more answers than I went in with.
+
+> Will you start working with hypotheticals? Will that be the way you talk around this in circles? Will you say "If I presuppose that I am in some way plural or median or this or that, what would my life look like as compared to if I am not?"
+
+No. Not here. Not out loud.
+
+> So quick an answer.
+
+Yes. If I do those things, it will not be here because even if the author is dead, *I* agree with Rax. It is all well and good that this is a question worth considering, and I'm happy enough to acknowledge it here like this, in a roundabout way, but any further investigations would, I think, do a disservice to the project at hand and the roles we play, willing or not, in the endeavor. 
+
+> Have you gotten it out of your system, then?
+
+Are you me?
+
+Maybe, maybe not.
+
+In the end, we are not alone. That, of all things is something the book has brought me: the knowledge that we're not alone.

content/plurality/_index.md

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+---
+type: serial
+back: /34
+background: "#f5eeff"
+color: "#663366"
+quote: "#885588"
+---

static/map.dot

@@ -173,6 +173,14 @@ digraph Map {
     "Burnout 4" [href="/burnout/4"]
     "Burnout 1" -> "Burnout 2" -> "Burnout 3" -> "Burnout 4"
 
+    node[group="plurality",style="filled",fillcolor="#f5eeff",fontcolor="#663366"]
+    "Plurality 1" [href="/plurality"]
+    "Plurality 2" [href="/plurality/2"]
+    "Plurality 3" [href="/plurality/3"]
+    "Plurality 4" [href="/plurality/4"]
+    "Plurality 5" [href="/plurality/5"]
+    "Plurality 1" -> "Plurality 2" -> "Plurality 3" -> "Plurality 4" -> "Plurality 5"
+
     // This is the central axis
     node[group="ally",style="",fontcolor="#111111"] // `core` folder
     "ally 1" [href="/"]
@@ -208,6 +216,7 @@ digraph Map {
     "ally 31" [href="/31"]
     "ally 32" [href="/32"]
     "ally 33" [href="/33"]
+    "ally 34" [href="/34"]
     "To be continued..." [shape="none"]
     "ally 1" -> "ally 2" -> "ally 3" -> "ally 4" -> "ally 5" ->
     "ally 6" -> "ally 7" -> "ally 8" -> "ally 9" -> "ally 10" ->
@@ -215,7 +224,7 @@ digraph Map {
     "ally 16" -> "ally 17" -> "ally 18" -> "ally 19" -> "ally 20" ->
     "ally 21" -> "ally 22" -> "ally 23" -> "ally 24" -> "ally 25" ->
     "ally 26" -> "ally 27" -> "ally 28" -> "ally 29" -> "ally 30" ->
-    "ally 31" -> "ally 32" -> "ally 33" -> "To be continued..."
+    "ally 31" -> "ally 32" -> "ally 33" -> "ally 34" -> "To be continued..."
 
     node[group="birds",style="",fontcolor="#111111"]
     "Birds 1" [href="/birds"]
@@ -433,6 +442,7 @@ digraph Map {
     "ally 23" -> "Movement 1"
     "ally 29" -> "Burnout 1"
     "ally 33" -> "Unemployment 1"
+    "ally 34" -> "Plurality 1"
 
     // Dad
     "As a person 5" -> "ally 16"

themes/ally/static/css/main.css

@@ -127,7 +127,7 @@ blockquote em {
 }
 .verse {
     font-family: 'Gentium Book Basic', serif;
-    border: 1px solid #eee;
+    border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);
     padding: 1em;
     white-space: pre-wrap;
     margin-top: 0;
@@ -135,6 +135,10 @@ blockquote em {
 .verse blockquote {
     margin-bottom: 0;
 }
+.nostalgia {
+    border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);
+    padding: 1em;
+}
 .cw {
     color: #800;
     text-align: right;