ceci n'est pas un journal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HarStxOWVcs
Post-rock can exist in the worst of places. The worst of places being Sri Lanka, the Nazi Germany of the post-Soviet era, the place that produced the Fonz, who was put in jail on corruption charges because they can't jail anyone for war crimes or crimes against humanity unless they really fuck up, and after Nuremberg nobody's heedless enough to invade anyone else anymore, they all just form nice little dictator clubs. This was the only thing I could find, but it's actually quite good.

I'm wondering what Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Japan, Cambodia, South Korea, and China have in common that Laos, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, Nepal, North Korea, the Philippines, and Afghanistan do not. Maybe I should check back in 2020.

The barely literate troglodytes who post on THEBLAZE would hate it if you started a post-rock band with a sitarist and a kora player.

***

If I brought the camera this week instead of last week, I'd have a better picture of a smaller opossum and some raccoon pictures instead of the macaw and the iguana who isn't Yolanda. But I didn't.

***

It's nice to know that what I do is appreciated when I actually go out of my way to show things to people. Hee, maybe I could use a copyrighted photo of a flower mantis head (or something) and nobody would ever know. I'm sure it's fair use, but I swear fair use was meant to be understood by lawyers, not everyone else. Imagine a world without lawyers.


Now imagine I have the talent to replace the peoples' heads with mantis heads.

*shudders*

***
just one more thing:
I'm reading some Roger Zelazny short stories. The Keys to December left a huge impact on me. The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth was cool, but I find it funny that it's 2010, Venus has been colonized by extreme fishermen and therefore has oceans (this was before Venera 4 landed and nobody had any idea what was on Venus, so I'm going to let that one slide) and they're still using slide rules.

***

burning question: why does Iago have teeth? Zazu doesn't; I was hoping he did so I can shove it in peoples' faces and say "Look, the Lion King is set during the Pliocene!"

I did not know this is a thing and therefore has probably been written on every WorldDryer hand dryer in the habited universe.
***
when I thought Dan Simmons couldn't sink any lower by endorsing Charles Murray, he endorses Geert Wilders.
***
I'd take a Bahasa Indonesia or Malay radio station if it meant we'd get this.

***
I was looking up a specific review on a book I bought from the Wildlife Center because it (the review, not the book) was so hilariously terrible. Basically, his point is that he couldn't handle a black character who wasn't dumber than a klansman's dirty laundry. I didn't find it. But I found several complains about the e-book's quality. Why pay when you can get a bootlegged edition that's better-formatted and has fewer typos? I mean, assuming you didn't have access to a physical book/wanted something you could search for a specific passage in.

***
ANIMAL PICTURES!!!!!!

Opossums came to North America when the continents connected 3 million years ago, along with monkeys (monkeys themselves immigrants from Africa), terror birds, giant sloths, armadillos, and porcupines. South America got camelids, canids, horses, felids, rabbits, coatis, deer, squirrels, trogons, elephant relatives, and tapirs. That's recent. Marsupials actually came to Australia by way of Antarctica. There were marsupials in Laurasia, but the placental mammals outcompeted them.


This guy's a rainbow macaw, a hybrid of a Blue & Gold Macaw and a Scarlet Macaw.


Iguanas are diverse.


This bowl was left outside and there was a slug living in it.


I think this is a question mark.


Someone's uneaten lunch.




I don't know what this is all about.



There was netting above the room, I guess so they can't fly up really high, but there's a window you can look into the Quiet Baby Ward from. Unfortunately, the netting gets in the way and screws with the camera's focus. Solution: Zoom past the netting.


rabbits' pus is like cottage cheese; they don't have the enzyme that breaks mucus down into a liquid, reptiles don't either, I don't know if the enzyme was lost or just never evolved in rabbits. I suspect the former.

their heartbeats sound like
thumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthump
THUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMP
thumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthump
THUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMPthumpTHUMP
it's 150 when they're calm, up to 350 when they get scared.

120 at rest is dangerously high for an adult human. 30 is normal for an elephant. 5 is on the threshold of low for a blue whale. Hummingbirds can reach 1200.

there are four stages of anesthesia. The fifth one is death. The second one shuts off inhibition and they spasm.

Rabbits can't have penicillin. It kills too many of the beneficial bacteria in their GI tract and they die.

parasites are the worst, since you just end up breeding a super-parasite.

(the picture at 0x0f45df5a referenced memory at 0x000000000. Press cancel to debug, which you probably won't do.)
I was going to take raccoon pictures every two weeks but I missed feeding time to watch a surgery and learn about rabbits.

There are spiderhunters in Laos. They're birds, despite the "thera" in their genus name. Spider hunting in Laos seems a fool's errand when the spiders are bigger than your wingspan.

***

burning question: if you could have any extinct animal as a pet, what kind would you have?

This is an actual junk search result on Google. Leave it to Google to come up with the most useless search results for something someone might actually want to look up (no, this actually came up when I searched for Sarah Brightman and Mega Man in the same string, I didn't actually look for Paris Hilton vs Mega Man, I don't know why it's there, I don't know why any of these sites are there, and I don't know why this isn't a real thing and not just a junk search result). Also, in The Passive Voice's quest to be wrong about everything ever, he defended Google's right to choose who or what to put in their search rankings. I say no. I say they should do a better job of filtering out junk and outright malicious results. With force, if necessary. And, no, advertisement, you can't arrest a genre of music. No, there is no PDF of Helliconia Autumn* out there.

Did I mention Noble Vision yet? It's Atlas Shrugged, except shorter (shorter by how much, I don't know, because despite being a Kindle novel, Amazon does not see fit to tell me how many words in this) and about health care or something. I really don't care. The point is: the way publishing is going results in the choice between a thousand thousand novels that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for self-publishing and a few already established bestsellers.

*I found this story while searching for Helliconia Autumn: this guy met Brian Aldiss at a convention once and asked him about Helliconia Autumn. He said that the Christian (I wrote Christina again. No, that would involve a fourth book in The Starbridge Chronicles. You see, a long long time ago, I made an entry about some erotic poetry my friend photographed and I said I'd tape it to a bathroom ceiling in Pyongyang or somewhere and help start a religion based on it. I have to reupload it to a site that works properly)... oh, back to Aldiss, sorry. Anyway, he said that the Christian right would be up in arms against a novel called Helliconia Fall and nobody would have any clue what Helliconia Autumn was about. He was at Texas A&M when he said that.


(ha, success! Feel free to print out as many copies as you possibly can and plaster the Raleigh state house with them)

Brought to you by the letters Ч and ل and the number 6.67300 × 10^(-11)

Um, um, um.
Other Mega Man things: If you have a Game Genie and Mega Man 2, the music sounds odd.
I didn't notice this, though I remember Air Man's theme being slower and deeper when I had a game genie on. You can also get the dragon to fart chlorine gas.

And where was I?
Ah, nothing like May weather and sore throats to really drain your will to live.

I don't really have anything exciting to report on, aside from: baby opossums are cute (baby animals usually are, after all), baby birds are difficult to identify, and I found a disembowled mouse while doing the laundry. Apparently, a bird or an opossum (they're omnivores) removed the innards from the mouse while eating, but didn't bother to actually eat it. It was rather gross, but cool in a rather gross way, and part of me is disappointed I didn't bring the camera and take a picture of mouse organs. Maybe post it on Vox Populi and say it's the rotting corpse of that shitty Hypergamouse comic.

North Carolina sucks.

Burning Question: Does anyone else want to hear Sarah BrightMan cover Air Man Ga Taosenai? Or Don't Fuck With Magnet Man? Or an entire Megas cover album?

*
I think Hypergamouse is over.
**
To the guy who runs Season of the Red Wolf, no, you're not that relevant. I'm the second, third, and fourth result for "season of the red wolf" on Google. And since Google hates Livejournal with the passion of a thousand suns, that means I'm more relevant than you are.

***
I expect to see that latest (well, not latest, but you know what I mean. Well, you don't. But it's the one from season 22) at least once a month. I remember last time they played it, it actually made sense in my head, since it was cold after a really warm period and it actually felt like the beginning of December rather than the end of March.

****
This is what you came here for. Animals, primers on animals, pictures of animals, and the oddities you find when looking up things on Wikipedia and TVTropes.

There were cat bombs in the second world war II. Since cats have an aversion to water and will always land on their feet, they might be able to deliver a bomb to the nearest ship. I don't know if this is before or after the other failed attempts at weaponizing animals, and if it was after the bat bomb, I'd like to know who thought this one was a good idea. The bat bomb at least makes sense.

The fisher cat isn't around, he's on Cape Cod, where they have the facilities to raise one to adulthood. What was around was ducklings and a murder mystery of sorts. See, what happened is the environmental police brought in a dead hawk someone found and they're wondering just why it's dead.

Fisher cats are not fishing cats.

this is a fisher cat. They're mustelids, and therefore closer to dogs. That makes them the inverse of the aardwolf, a feliform. They live in Canada and in the northern United States. Their range has been expanding lately.


this is a fishing cat. They are felids, they live in southeast Asia along with Laotian rock rats (think of a missing link between a rat and a squirrel), neon pink millipedes, and spiders the size of dinner plates.

There are leopard cats there too, and their range extends as far as the Koreas and even Russia, to Indonesia, and to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their range is breaking into pieces because of development.

Margays look kind of like leopards too. They're South American.


adult male mallard. During the summer, they lose their distinctive coloring. Both sexes have the distinct indigo speculum.


baby mallards. Yes, there are four of them sitting in the water and floating bits of lettuce dish.


I took twenty pictures of these guys because they're just so adorable.


He's growing up. Still not old enough to run around in the room.

how to tell if a snake is shedding: their eyes are glazed over and the skin on their underside is milky.

Burning question: So, I read the first few chapters of this story, and the capital was called New City. Did the writer fire up Sim City 2000 and realize it didn't have a random name generator after getting New City for the 20th time?

*dramatically low and slow voice, raising fists in air and shaking them*
TURTLE* KOMBAAAAAAAAT!
*I mean tortoise, kupo.
"It's like watching a joust in slow motion"
When they spar, they try to position themselves under the other one, leap as hard as they can, and topple the other one over.

There was a baby duck (no pictures, sorry, I heard that they're at capacity with mammals and wouldn't have any more, so I neglected to bring the camera, and it was a quiet day aside from *dramatically low and slow voice, raising fists in air and shaking them* TURTLE KOMBAAAAAAT!) and a male mallard with the green head.

There were two angora bunnies and a parakeet boarding. The parakeet was squawking at the bunnies.

I had no idea: Sudafed's harder to obtain now that someone figured out how to use it to make crystal meth. In fact, according to io9, it's easier to obtain a batch of meth and reverse the process.

Oh yeah, I forgot, but the powers that be set fire to a server and you never noticed that. It's slow now, slow as fuck, but at least it works most of the time.
burning question: Can we just declare Liberté, égalité, fraternité dead, given the results of the French election? 1 in 5 voted for the fascist and the only reason it's that low is because Sarkozy was sucking off the far right.

I think I'm in love

Probably just hungry

I think I'm your friend

Probably just lonely

I think you got me in a spin now

Probably just turning

I think I'm a fool for you babe

Probably just yearning

I think I can rock and roll

Probably just twisting

I think I wanna tell the world

Probably ain't listening

Come on


I think I can fly

Probably just falling

I think I'm the life and soul

Probably just snorting

I think I can hit the mark

Probably just aiming

I think my name is on your lips

Probably complaining

I think I have caught it bad

Probably contagious

I think I'm a winner baby

Probably Las Vegas

Come on


I think I'm alive

Probably just breathing

I think you stole my heart now baby

Probably just thieving

I think I'm on fire

Probably just smoking

I think that you're my dream girl

Probably just dreaming

I think I'm the best babe

Probably like all the rest

I think that I could be your man

Probably just think you can

Come on
-Spiritualized

I'm totally not posting these lyrics because my Burning Question queue is filling up and I have nothing else to talk about (I bought The Grand Ellipse, The White Tribunal, The Doors of His Face The Lamps of His Mouth, and Embassytown, I did not buy Deathless, I'm assuming it's because it either wasn't out yet or someone else bought it. Amazon tells me it's out but Amazon told me The Dream of Perpetual Motion was out months before it was available in bookstores, and it wouldn't surprise me if Deathless doesn't come out until Stalin's birthday)
So.

How to write a dystopia: ask people on city-data what their idea of an ideal world is.

I got the idea from a post on gamespite.
Burning Question: Had we evolved from birds, would we be a race of dancers and artists, and not warriors?

Google thinks when I search for lifestream, I want something in New Bedford that most definitely has nothing to do with Final Fantasy whatsoever.

It was 91 degrees today. Not is, because I was tired and didn't feel like updating until now. The tortoises liked it, though, I bet. They're from the Sahel, you know. I liked it too, it just made me languorous and lassitudinous. That is a word.

I had to lure Bling out with a trail of dandelion leaves because he's just too heavy for me to pick out. Two trails, actually, because I went out to check on Valley in the hopes he'd be somewhere down the trail, and instead he went in the opposite direction. So I picked up the old trail and sprinkled it all the way to the door.

Also, no fox but there were bunnies and the raccoons most definitely look like raccoons. The reason there aren't usually foxes is because they're high-risk for rabies, and that's incurable and fatal and there's no way to test for rabies outside of actually picking the brain apart, so, yeah.

Eastern Cottontails:



Squirrels:



Raccoons:



I also updated the bracelet hanging from the ceiling again, because I didn't remove it from the upload folder.

If you're wondering what that mark is on their forehead, it's so we can tell them apart.

Burning Question: How long did it take you to realize Miles Prower was a pun?

Wow, Pamela Geller would lose her shit over this: one of the blankets Gallop and Penelope sleep on/piss on is an American flag. Penelope's a Nubian. New England? More like the Islamist Emirate of Goatistan.
I'd pay to see that (and, by that, I mean the blogosphere collectively losing their shit). Honestly.

The raccoons look more like raccoons now, the squirrels are getting more numerous (there are ones that have open eyes, there's one that is pink-skinned and hairless because it was only just born), and there are still no birds. There is a mouse. And two rats, but they're pets. A fox may arrive soon.

We all look the same in the beginning and the end (I guess when we're all dust)

Life Reduction by Lorelei is what bliss sounds like.

My cousin won't go to Florida. Neither will I. Tulsa's gone crazy too. I was actually checking Bigotboards to see if at least one of the members was involved in the shooting; I wouldn't be surprised if he was a member. And somebody stabbed three Yemeni guys to death, and I'm sure the blogosphere is to blame. There's a word for people like them in Norwegian: Quisling.

On writing:
I find myself consciously writing a character who's like Rachel Corrie after being told one of my characters was like Rachel Corrie. And I'm trying to dig up those choice quotes he posted, but damned if I can find them.

... no, wait.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/mar/02/shopping.extract
I wonder if this is still in print.

For one thing, I write a plot and write the characters around it. For the other, I write characters and try to write a plot around them.

Burning question: My cousin was drawing a dinosaur for that draw something game and it was a sauropod, which made me think to ask this: what kind of dinosaur comes to mind when you hear the word dinosaur?

And there were baby pictures.

Raccoons.



And squirrels.



And the international robot conspiracy gets me once again: one of the interns showed the raccoon baby to me so I could get a decent closeup, but for some reason, my camera wanted to focus on the intern behind her.

Most of them came out horrible. I wasn't expecting them to be good, since baby squirrels tend to squirm around a lot, and so do baby raccoons. They're also very loud. Like, I could hear them from outside the Quiet Baby Ward.

That wasn't really a chair race, we were just moving chairs.

Someone said The Fast Supper was sacrilegious or maybe sacrilicious, but hilarious too.

Yep, HypergaMouse gets worse every week. The first few weeks had shading.

This isn't a burning question: How many episodes of the Simpsons are there? The answer is 503, not 10. The episode where Lisa goes to the prep school is the foreclosure episode of 2012/2011.

this is a
burning question: agree or disagree: people who uses terms like big government and big hollywood unironically should be thrown in a giant gulag and forced to listen to a techno version of the Soviet national anthem.

I'd love to write something like Night of the Blood Jihad, except with drow elves, but I don't think I have the talent to write something terrible without coming off as deliberately so. Even for the sake of an April Fools joke.

I was at the MFA with my cousin and there was a neon sign that said all art has been contemporary. There was also a modern or rather post-modern take on buddhist art called Seeking Shambhala, a bodhisattva (my spell check recognizes bodhisattva, but it doesn't list it in the corrections for boddhisatva), one covered in stickers and corporate logos and a newspaper clipping about John Demjanjuk of all people, and there's this one. You can't see it, but it's radiating out lots and lots of corporate logos, sort of the buddhist equivalent of the Fast Supper. I think the writing is a cross between Tibetan syllables and Chinese logographs.

Aside: The star is from Hardee's. It's not quite as sadistic-looking on the actual logo.

The walls on the bottom floor are partially covered in tiles, and there's a sculpture made out of unfired clay. I kind of miss the sloganeering with things like "slime is thicker than water" and "who farted?" but I guess they can't display everything.

Someone used her hair as a fake mustache.

I think there's an international robot conspiracy involved in our GPS systems, because we ended up in Roslindale of all places. Somehow. There's another Huntington Avenue in Boston. That's why I take the T. That's part of why I take the T rather. Random people = artistic and/or literary inspiration.

There was some graffiti that said "choose love" or something.

****
another aside, since this happened while playing Baten Kaitos Origins, it crashed, and I'm blaming someone's thread about Rand Paul:
FUCK RAND PAUL! Fucking Rand Paul fucking making me fucking go through fucking Hughes and the fucking hard-as-fucking-nails fucking afterling fuck. I bet he's fucking named after fucking Ayn Rand too. Well, Atlas Shrugged fucking sucked. Sucked so bad Atlas was so embarrassed by a fucking piece of shit novel he just let Serah and Noel kill him. That's what happens when you mess with the controls. It uploads the collected works of Ayn Rand into its mind.

oh.

what a relief.

I saved in Cujam.

And it's Cu-jam with a juhhhh. It's Arabic, not Slovenian.

****

Burning Question: What songs do you like by bands you don't?

So much for that, and I don't see respite in the near future.

AND THERE WERE BABIES!
Squirrels, specifically. I think there's a mouse there too. They're in boxes to keep them from getting too much light. No pictures yet, sorry. I wasn't expecting babies, so I didn't bring the camera, but I will next week. On the bright side, the turtles were dry-docked when I didn't have the camera. Yeah, they weren't in their pond, it prevents fungal infections and such, I guess.

There's a town/city called Bender in Moldova. Rivals Batman, Turkey for awesomeness.

Indonesia Fuck Yeah!
Five compilations! It's a diverse mixture of stuff, ranging from nintendocore to punk to post-rock to remixed gamelan madness to noise-rock to thrash to indie to shoegaze to indescribable.

Burning Question: I think the Hypergamouse (look it up if you want, warning, involves Vox Day) artist gets less talented every week. So, if this is true, how long until the art rivals that of a supremely untalented five year old? If you think it already does, say so.

I thought there'd be babies, but I was wrong. It was still winter on Monday, after all, and it's not like animals can just have sex and have a baby magically appear out of nowhere.

What I did get was a really excellent shot of Falco the red-tailed hawk, a bunch of Penelope and Gallop, and some reptiles. Here. I'll post a few right now. Imageshack wasn't being cooperative, because I guess it thought it was getting more satire of the terrible variety.


Falco's tail.


It's still there. It's been there since Fishy Dreams, and the story about it is there. I swear it will be there when I post entries called The Wonder Show of the Universe or Verdant Praise. So, yeah, if it's 2016 and you're cruising around on your hoverboard and graze yourself on it, now you know.


Penelope has cool eyes.


And so does Gallop.

The great thing about digital cameras is not having to waste film on failed shots of animals that know what cameras are and do their best to duck out of the way as soon as you take a picture.
I saw a red-winged blackbird when walking the dog, but I didn't have the camera with me.
***
The great thing about robots.txt is that the Internet Archive still has the stuff it collected before that (so I can get on Toast For Morons again), you just have to wait until the offending squatter disappears. I'm kind of concerned that FOX or the Writers' Guild is going to force the Simpsons Fanworks Central to use robots.txt on their site to keep the scandal away from the Internet Archive savvy public in the future.
***
I'm obsessed with A Sunny Day In Glasgow.
Also, I think Asakiyume would like this band: Language of Light

Burning question: What kind of music defines spring for you? For me, it's either really noisy, or really twee, or both.

First day above 70°F. 74, specifically.
I'd like to say that means babies, but it doesn't, however, there's a red-and-green macaw. I mean, it's red and green, anyway. And it has blue on its wings, which kind of rules out the scarlet macaque. It goes from red to green to blue, and his tail feathers are red. At least, I think it's a red and green macaw. Some kind of macaw, anyway. Not to be confused with Macao, a SAR of China, or Macaque, a monkey.

I had a dream where I was talking to two people from my past, everything was normal, except she was listening to this really awesome music, and I can't remember if it's anything I've heard before, it was this shoegazy sviib type song. Maybe it was sviib. Denali isn't shoegaze in real life either. FUCK.

It's too nice to rage over the lack of any attempt to weed out "I'm going to go to Afghanistan and shoot some of them towel heads" types from the military or even polite society or the Cenozoic. Or their sympathizers. Or the fact that they even have sympathizers at all.

(I added a burning question because I remembered Iago was a macaw with teeth and I didn't know about those AYAOTD summaries when I mentioned toothed birds in real life earlier)

Burning Question: Does Gilbert Gottfried ever not yell?
Burning Question 2: Does Homeland Security really think terrorists are capable of causing earthquakes?

We have a golden pheasant at the wildlife center, we think she was someone's pet that escaped this time, we're just waiting for him to have a home. They're not indigenous to New England, nay, the Americas, they're actually Chinese. (EDIT: there's a picture of him on the website, and it's just the lighting and the fact that I only got a brief glimpse of the tail that made me think he was female)


This is a male.

The females are nowhere near as brightly-colored.

Today is the first perfect day of the year, except maybe it's too windy, and maybe one of those days in January qualified.

Around 33 years ago, there was a band called Human Sexual Response. Before that, one of the members had an all-kazoo band called Kazoondheit. I wonder if there are some recordings of this out there. I thought I had more to talk about, but I don't. Mostly, I just wanted an excuse to post this

burning question: do you ever wake up with the feeling that someone or something is trying to communicate with you via dreams?

What's this? Breitbart is dead? Celebration For The Grey Days indeed. I hope bad things come in threes too, and that means we can bid a fond farewell to Ron Paul and Bashar al-Assad. hehehe, someone called James O'Keefe the Salacious B. Crumb to Breitbart's Jabba. I think Rush is more like Jabba, but that's just me.
****
Until Michigan (or Michigan might just be another fluke), here's how I thought the primaries would end up: Romney in the NE and Mormon-dominated states, Santorum in the midwest, and Gingrich in the former Confederacy minus Florida.

I'm probably wrong, but I'm leaving this up for posterity and because it leads into the Burning Question.

****
One of my coworkers thinks there's a secret cabal of flying squirrel smugglers. Wikipedia tells me that they do in fact live in the northern United States and southern Canada, but they might be in on the conspiracy.

I don't think I told the story of the flying squirrel yet, so here it is: someone found him in her house and the wildlife center is keeping him around until winter ends and they can release him into the wild. The end. I think it's a male, anyway. I've never actually seen him, but it's easy to tell, unlike with reptiles (hint: look between the hind legs)
****
I think I'll read Breakfast of Champions. I need something like that after Illusion (Heart of Veridon, not so much, but it pissed me off that there's a sequel now that bookstores are more or less dead, maybe I can order it directly from Solaris Books). Great book, but it's just so damned depressing.
*****
Instead of having dreams of existential angst or being a butterfly dreaming of being a giant moth destroying Tokyo, I dream of Baten Kaitos. I was probably looking at Shootingstar's doodles of girls fishing for celestial sea creatures. I'm going to play Origins soon, soon. I then dream of the pit of the wyrm and Carboniferous Park/Carboniferous Disney World with perpetual monsoons and Gestapo security guards. And carboniferous trees that were in stasis for three hundred million years. And one I kind of forgot.

http://www.floatingrunner.net/Artwork.html
These.
*****
I swear she says swannerbee in Heart Is Strange, and I think "oh, cool, a Veniss Underground reference, no, wait."
*****
I forgot just how unlikeable Homer is in Ice Cream Of Margie With The Bright Blue Hair.
*******
Burning Question: Who wins in Wild 'n Krazy Kids: Sarah Palin, W. or Kevin James?

I thought I used this already, it is a chapter in Light, after all, but it turns out I didn't. I did use misprision of dreams twice. Oh, well, fate decided to give me a demonstration about how it is a fickle bitch.

I can't decide if this is awesome or just creepy. Sarah says it's just creepy. And the proportions and perspective and poses are kind of weird. I tried imitating the pose of that guy who's talking to the Hamburglar and it kind of hurts. I'm too close to the computer to give an adequate demonstration, so take my word for it.

Make sure you listen to this while you look at it. Don't stop looking at it until the song finishes.

I want to say they have the same mascots there that they do, but you know what, I was in Maryland once (I don't remember anything about Florida except for the Haunted Mansion at Disney World, that was back in the days of Ceausescu, after all) and while there were all sorts of fast food places I've never heard of (and a few I have, like Bob's Big Boy. I don't think I've ever actually seen one in person, but I did see the mascot's head decapitated and placed on a chicken), none of them had mascots that I remembered. I think someone I knew knew someone who had the mascot on his lawn too, but I could be making that up.

There might be a Lenin's Fried Chicken to compete with Ho and Mao.

I'm surprised at how much I like the new SVIIB album, even without Claudia.

Ok, you're done, right? You can resume listening to Language of Light and My Violaine Morning now. No, really, listen to them, they're awesomeness incarnate. Let's look at some other versions of the Fast Supper.




These two are much less Romanian.

And at least they're not as creepy as this.

...shudder.

There are flying squirrels in Massachusetts, who knew? Not me, that's who.
And possums have surprisingly short lifespans considering their size. That's your animal fact for the week.
Gallop is taking advantage of Penelope's hurt leg and trying to steal her carrots and stuff.

Some piece of anti-Arab claptrap said that 1000 books are translated for every million people in the industrialized world. There's no way that's accurate. Not even for Germany and France, and most definitely not for English. How else would they maintain their cultural hegemony?

burning question: What's your favorite zone in a Sonic game? Your least favorite?

This entry has been on the back-burner for over a week and is a bit anachronistic. I was going to post it earlier, but stuff happened and I wanted to comb over these song lists because I didn't want to miss something I was into back then and have to go through this spiel for a third time. I didn't actually just watch A Fish Called Wanda, I watched it last Saturday.

I just watched A Fish Called Wanda. Someone died watching that because he was laughing so hard. That would make a good tagline: a movie so funny you'll die.

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Didn't I already admit that my taste in music wasn't so great in retrospect, although to be fair, there wasn't really any avenues of finding new music aside from the radio, and all our friends were the same way? Wasn't that what a series of entries back in the early spring of 2010 was all about? Well, sort of. I forgot a few for various reasons.


from 1996-1997
Tracy Bonham… I don't think I mentioned her. Yeah, I heard her on the radio. I don't know if it was on the Hill Man Morning Show, but I doubt it. Mantown was around back then too and it was as uncomfortable to listen to as ever.

Same with Veruca Salt. No, I don't know. Maybe the Brain Eater took over WAAF some time before I entered high school and started a crusade on female vocalists.

Gravity Kills - Guilty
I remember something by Failure, or just the name, but damned if I could remember what it is.
Our Lady Peace - Superman's Dead - I'll always associate this with One More Astronaut. Similar names, similar Rush-wannabe vocals I just can't get into, similar style, both from Canada.
Blur - Song #2 - waa-hooo!
The Folk Implosion - Natural One - it sounds familiar. I like it now. I actually looked it up on Youtube because Lou Barlow was in the band and realized I know this song.

from 1997-1998
(this space intentionally left blank)

from 1998-1999:
Fuel - Shimmer. Reminds me of spring. I didn't deliberately neglect this, I just kind of forgot about it.

from 1999-2000
Coal Chamber - Shock The Monkey
Powerman 5000 - When Worlds Collide - I swear they had a second single…
but maybe I was just thinking of Monster Magnet.
I'm not posting them out of order. Just imagine it loops back to 1998-1999 in music.


from 2000-2001
I actually listened to a few of these songs instead of just skipping them over, so I can articulate what it is I really think about them.
The Deadlights - I actually think this song wouldn't be so bad if the vocals weren't absolutely horrendous. I don't think I liked it much when I taped it either, in fact, there are points at which I thought it was Pitchshifter, and I guess I taped it because Armored Core or whatever his name is says it is soooooooo gooooooooooooooooood and um

But you say: but wait, that doesn't prove anything.
Well, yeah. I can't say I've really sought out Evanescence and the radio station I listened to at the time had something against female vocals for some reason. I enjoyed Linkin Park in that 'hey, this is different' way before I heard it for the 50th time.

I taped Drift and Die by Puddle of Mudd. I don't like his voice, but I still dig the acoustic guitar with bowed string instruments, a la Shakedown or Chrome Waves, except not as good. In other words, this is one of those songs that would sound good if they kicked out Wes Scantlin and replaced him with Jeremy Wrenn. Blurry kind of sucks in retrospect.

It all goes back to my theorem that record labels release a really shitty song or a mediocre song that gets old fast and the radio stations play the hell out if, and then they pick a tolerable single, or even a good one.

Union Underground did it, Nickelback did it, Puddle of Mudd did it, Godsmack did it.

But, yeah, now we're even.

From 2001-2002
Foo Fighters - Times Like This - one of their few songs I liked. Ok, I don't think it's so great now. But consider: right now I'm comparing it with bands like My Violainé Morning and Under The Big Bright Yellow Sun, and it's nowhere near as awesome as those bands. Back then, I had Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit to compare it with.

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ideas, either I neglected to post about them in White Magick's Embrace or because I thought of them afterwards:
Penelope hurt her leg.
There's a new snake, a boa constrictor, he's about 7 feet long. He's not really a new snake, he's a snake that someone adopted and then brought back because I guess they didn't have enough space for him or something.
Falco (a red-tailed hawk) saw Valley, and probably thought something like "yummy tortoise! For Falco eat?" and Valley thought "Perish the thought, sir."

And, no, they aren't fed live animals. I know pets aren't fed them, but I was wondering if they had to adjust wild animals from being fed dead animals to having to kill their own, but she said they just rely on instinct.

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I was going to say something about how hard science fiction doesn't have to mean two-dimensional at best characters, read Stanislaw Lem. But friends only. Sigh.

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Al Qaeda is a band, much like the Zebra Project. As a band, they need to be promoted so much that the first result for Al Qaeda is the band. Imagine being a member of Al Qaeda and getting pulled over or going on tour and having your instruments go through security.

****

this isn't an idea I forgot either, it's a new idea: Flashback is a wholesale ripoff of a self-published pile of logorrhea called The Gods of Color. Mostly. I don't know if the latter has evil Japanese overlords, and it's more blatant in its racism.

I meant "new" sometime last week, but stuff happened.

*****

Also, archive.org is awesome, and happypantshappypants, I think I got a brain hemorrhage from twee poisoning.

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Witch-hazel, from wice meaning pliant, not to be confused with witches and their rituals, is the first sign of change.

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Burning Question: Could Indonesians make Muse good if they read the same descriptions of them I did?

Even if you don't need all of divertimento to spell funerale.
... funerale is underlined and divertimento is not. Passing strange.

"We put the fun in funeral." is both a band name and a song name. I had no idea. Someone should list all the bands with Simpsons references in their names. Fallout Boy is famous. Rancho Relaxo isn't, but it is still a band.

That was probably the only eulogy anyone would hear a Back to the Future reference in. Also, I bet that guy who wanted to hook up a car battery to his corpse that would make him pop out of the coffin whenever someone kneeled next to it is Italian.

Samantha asks: Who vacuums this place?
I'm sure that they're used to it. Eventually, they realize: It's just a corpse. Keep jumping at every little thing and you'll wear yourself out. Either that, or they're like that kid from that Are You Afraid of the Dark episode who sleeps in a casket and buries shrimp in mashed potatoes and really actually kind of enjoys being around dead people.

Emily hates Nickelback. She also says nobody really likes Nickelback and Daughtry sounds exactly like Nickelback. I wonder if she's heard Hinder. It's like Nickelback except more so, and they're also a lot sleazier.

Lauren was mixing together the frosting (green-yellow-pink) from an eclair (dark brown and beige) to get a rather nice orange color.

Anti-art's been around since World War I, though maybe taking distorted screencaps of the Simpsons is a new thing.
Carolyn (like fingers, not spine, and don't you forget it) thinks it would be a good idea to take lots of glitched-out or defocused or motion-blurred Simpsons pictures and give them all Simpsons-related parodic names of modern art. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Homer Simpson. Beautiful revolving bart, oops brown painting. A distorted photograph of the Simpsons isn't art. Her favorite was a nude tattooed woman with the head and hands of a praying mantis. Emily thinks Veridiana looks like a punk rocker.

No, you don't want to be a movie critic. You may think it's cushy until you watched the third shitty parody/gross out comedy in a row. Same goes for food critic and video game tester. Do you want to watch the latest parody movie from Seltzer and Freidberg? DO YOU? I didn't think so.

death lily: the lily that eats people
My uncle was imagining that. Lilies like pitcher plants or venus fly traps. Well, there are things called cobra lilies, and if you're like me, you're thinking that would make a good band name, provided they don't call themselves the Cobra Lillies instead. And they exist. I'm assuming they sound like Espers, but Myspace hates you now and doesn't work properly. I know Bandcamp and Soundcloud exist and I've finally heard Language of Light because of them.
Hey, how do venus fly traps pollinate? Well, they have flowers. Maybe they don't lay out bait when they need to reproduce.

burning question: if you could make a golem out of any material, what would it be?

Saturday was the closest thing I'll get this year to White Magick's Embrace, today isn't anything like it, blue skied an' clear and seasonably warm, but I'm using it anyway. Or it was. It's night now, when I last checked, it was starry and night-cold. The winter constellations, Orion and Gemini and Taurus and Auriga, have always felt more familiar than the summer skies. If I write any slower, that would be about yesterday.

I think I need to read Breakfast of Champions and Ubik and Childhood's End. I have the first one.

Maybe after Illusion and Heart of Veridon and At Winter's End and The New Springtime and Two Hundred Billion Stars and Red Dust and The City Trilogy and Jack of Shadows and Engine Summer and Beasts and The Deep and Deathless and...

Fahrenheit 451 isn't a metaphor for censorship, it's a metaphor for the death of literature. I can see where they're coming from, I read a preview of some self-published novel on Amazon, and let's just say it's worse than Flashback and Caliphate. I can say what I will about them, someone thought they were good enough to publish, even if it's partly because both of them were by established authors. This wasn't. This opens with pointless exposition.

I'm struggling to remember when The Golden Compass came out and just when I read it. 7th grade, I think.

And on the subject of childhood stories, I made a post about Drawing the Moon, and how it (it helps that I share my name with a character) and The Fat Man stuck with me, and she said she was never able to trust moonlight after writing it. I could imagine.

But this is what you've been waiting for. Actually, you haven't, because nobody gives a shit about Season of the Red Wolf. It's about how China Mieville apparently won't let his books be translated into Hebrew, and how I can't find anything about that prohibition outside of Season of the Red Wolf and a comment in Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, with no link to any source of it. Even he doubts it, so he just spends about twenty paragraphs talking about how English is utterly dependent on Hebrew, even though saying that the Greek and Latin alphabet are derived from Hebrew is like saying that mammals evolved from birds, instead of talking about China Mieville. I don't even think English absorbed that many Hebrew words, or, at least, compared to American languages. When I say American, I mean everything from Ellesmere Island to Tierra del Fuego, by the way. Oh, and he also hates Muslims. Him and half the blogosphere. Color me impressed, you sad sad sad sad sad sad sad sad sad cockwoggle.

burning question: How do you deal with bad advice, not maliciously so but misconceptions like time heals all wounds and you can solve all your problems by just running away from them?

So, I was dreaming that the world was entirely covered with water, or maybe it was another planet, and all the people of it lived in floating villages with their dairy goats covered in beads and garland and helper monkeys. I wasn't one of them, I was granted the ability to transform into a fish. And I was telling the village chief that the powers that be were keeping the technology level artificially low, and I didn't agree with what they were doing.

It was like Stations of the Tide meets The Adjustment Bureau.

And back in real life, I think her name was Lauren was talking about this movie called Black Sheep and other bad movies. I swear there's a Chris Farley movie with that name and Wikipedia agrees with me, so you know I'm right, but this isn't it. It's about zombie sheep that are evil and kill people.

So, yeah, Great! Cake! Adventure! I swear there was something with a similar name, but damned if I remember what it is. Don't try watching it without interspersing it with things like Death Bed or Leprechaun In Space or else you will die of glucose poisoning.

And they got a tack and a bracelet-thing with a pendant that said Love on it and stuck it to the kitchen ceiling.

Amon Tobin samples an insect's beating wings and a motorcycle and it sounds like one of those insects from Pan's Labyrinth that I don't remember.

Burning Question: If nuclear war was inevitable, would you wear a suit made of twinkies or a suit made of cockroaches when the bombs fall?