in·fo·dump·ing
/ˈinfōdəmpiNG/
noun
1. The act of providing highly detailed, passionate summary of a topic or subject of interest.
2. Something most neurotypicals, or anyone short on patience or equal interest in the topic that is being shared, tend to dislike.
Hey, everyone. I'm back. Today's topic is infodumping, which is a primarily autistic thing, but not completely out of the realm of neurotypicality. When we get excited about a topic, or we find a new special interest, what do we tend to want? We want to share about it, right? Tell the world! Inform the masses! It's a human tendency to want to share about the things we find interesting or fascinating.
My two big interests for today are Mount Everest and a podcast about the early 1900s.
The first is really random, actually. Kind of, well, pretty morbid, if I'm being honest. I was watching a vegan YouTuber, and she briefly mentioned a vegan hiker dying on Mount Everest. Apparently some news sources were pinning the blame for her death on her vegan lifestyle. So, being curious about how veganism could have pertained to her unfortunate death, I did some googling and found that the actual reason was pulmonary edema. According to mayoclinic, it's "a condition caused by excess fluid in the lungs. This fluid collects in the numerous air sacs in the lungs, making it difficult to breathe." Basically, it's a severe form of altitude sickness, which is one of the common causes of death on Everest.
It's so difficult to discuss stuff like this when it's such a touchy subject, you know? Because on one hand, it's very interesting - like, why do so many people die on the descent? How do some hikers summit so many times, then the mountain takes them on their final summit, like Rob Hall? Like, I find this stuff so interesting because there's the potential to find a safer way, a foolproof way, to make it to the summit and back down again. There's a key we're missing, right? And there is a reason people risk their lives to summit Mount Everest. Perhaps it's that their desire to reach the top and come back to tell the story outweighs their fear of death.
At any rate, it's a fascinating thing. But on the other hand, it's very morbid, and many people wouldn't want to say something like that is interesting at all. Why would you want to look into the common causes of death on Everest? I think it's mainly because I want to figure out all the variables and maybe, just maybe, discover how to eliminate further deaths. Maybe it sounds heroic, but I see it as a puzzle. Even if I never attempt the climb the mountain (and with the combination of my lack of climbing skills and my non-desire to ever attempt Mount Everest, never trying is highly likely), it's a puzzle I really want to solve. So...yeah...that's infodump #1, condensed as much as possible.
Am I secretly using this chapter as a way to infodump under the guise of explaining what infodumping is after realizing my best friend didn't currently feel like listening to random things about Mount Everest and the early 1900s?
No.
...
Maybe.
...
Yes.
Anyway, thank you for reading this. I really appreciate it. The fact that you're reading through this pile of information that you will probably never use (welcome to my world) makes me very happy. (Also, no shade to my friend - he's had a long day, and I doubt I'd want to hear about random stuff either after such a long day, haha.)
On to the next interest!
So, the 1900s podcast...This one felt like an absolute bunny trail of a podcast (yes, more so than going from watching a video about veganism to trying to come up with a foolproof way of safely conquering Mount Everest...well, maybe...you can be the judge of that). They went from talking about COVID and the 1918 pandemic to la Conférence de paix de Paris to artists and philosophy to how playing music on the radio got its start to science...and I'm still not done with the podcast! That's how absurdly interesting it is! Once the podcast people started talking about RNA and proteins and gene-swapping, I was a goner. I love biology. It was one of my favorite classes last semester. So, listening to them talk about all those things and how the virus swapped genes and mutated was so fascinating.
I'd talk more on this one, but finding out that my friend didn't feel up to listening to me ramble about the podcast sort of took it out of me, haha (that tends to happen - without an audience, I sort of regress back into myself...or I take to the internet to ramble to an invisible, potentially non-existent audience! It's like Schrödinger's cat...as long as I don't know if anyone is listening, someone is listening). Not to mention I still want to finish listening to that podcast...guess it was a subthreshold infodump, eh?
Anyway, thanks for reading! If you want to infodump about something, feel free to do so in the comments!!
