ceci n'est pas un journal

I've already done that whole spiel about the plot of Twelfth Night and I'm not going to do it again. That's fine, right? Okay, good. The director made a comparison of Viola struggling to find her way in a foreign land and adopting a male identity with the plight of real life immigrants.
In real life, it turns out that Julian Assange pulled the entire Seth Rich mythos out of his ass.
She described the play as a comedy, yes, but a bittersweet and somewhat wistful and melancholy comedy.
They went with a Jazz Age New Orleans theme of wrought iron and stucco and gauze the color of seaglass in the opening. Feste, and, at the end, the rest of the cast, sung to old jazz songs. After the intermission, they came in masked, shaking noisemakers and banging cymbals. There was a boxing match and Toby Belch said "Art thou ready to ruuuuumble?"
Malvolio wore yellow leggings with black wrapped around and yellow shorts. It'd be even funnier if he kept his tailcoat on.
Toby Belch was a woman with a fake mustache. Antonio was dressed as a hobo in a trenchcoat.

It’s one thing if Chick Fil A builds in a formerly empty lot. That’s fine. Couldn’t get me to eat there if they started serving Jamaican patties. But when they try to take over a Boloco, no, they can fuck right off.

The people at CVS were named Shpëtim, which is Albanian, and Brikena, which is also Albanian but possibly of Greek origin. I say this because I wrote the names down wanting to look them up.
One of the theater people was named Pádraig.

There was a painting by Susanne Hodes that I can't find online but look up the rest of her stuff and you shan't be disappointed. I think it's because the painting is from 1996 or so.

For whatever reason, Noon's Mediterranean, which I have heard changed thier name to Daphne's because quite frankly Noon is a fucking terrible name, looks like it had just closed shop for the weekend. I have no idea why.

Sara[h] has green hair and lots of rings and earrings of wavering chains of green and white glass beads.
I asked Kendall if she ever thinks that someone is calling out to her from far away when she rides the train. Not on the "new" trains where it's obviously the operator, but the old ones where the driver makes the announcements. She said no, that she's gotten used to it.
Kate says that [Siobhán/something else] has wild hair and I told her that I find long hair easier than short hair because short hair is a lot of tiny tiny strokes all going in different directions and long hair is mostly just strokes. They were impressed with how fast I drew them but I sometimes ignored details because I didn't know if they were getting off.

burning question: So, about that Trump Tower meeting, ignorantia juris non excusat doesn't apply?

In Julia's words, we have everything under the sun in boarding. This means a blue and yellow macaw whom I strongly suspect is not Crackers because he/she will not talk to me, a couple of rats, a bunch of bunnies, a bunch of beardies, a chameleon, two ferrets, and maybe a gerbil or something. Also the mealworms, which were especially annoying to gather for the starling upstairs. Veronica was in there too but I wasn't saying hi to her. In fact, I didn't even notice her.
Rob talked about starlings and how there are places that euthanize them but also that doing so will not make a dent in their populations.
Later on, Brooke and Veronica and Julia or maybe just two of them had the ferrets out on a walk and I showed two visitors, one with R2-D2 socks and one with hairpieces of orchid and thistle and lavender.
Ellie learns something new every day she volunteers at the wildlife center.
Gallop tried to eat Zoë’s hair, which had streaks of neon pink in it, although I doubt very much Gallop noticed that.
I read something about rubbing potatoes after getting a shot to suck the toxins out. Jenny McCarthy won't buy it but maybe we could infiltrate the movement by pretending to be middle aged white women on social media.

The fascists and the radical centrists and the religious and the free market capitalists with authoritarian tendencies and troubling views on Romany and the religious conservatives are are trying their damnedest to turn the Notre Dame fire into the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. I have no idea what their French equivalents are saying.
The problem with their mindset is that their first reaction is to blame Muslims and when it is revealed that it was in fact an electrical fire, their reaction to that is to say there a conspiracy and continue clamoring for a pogrom. Even if it was a Gilet Jaune (disclaimer: my French pronounciation is somehow worse than Akiko Shikata's) that did it, they're going to blame a Muslim disguised as a Gilet Jaune.

I said that I want to live in that alternate 2019 in which Tokyo is obliterated by some kind of natural or unnatural disaster, giant robot, or giant monster, or some combination of the three, but every musical group has a gamelan ensemble.
At least we have Christine Southworth. Some kind of leakage from the other reality.

I also said that if I have to live in a cyberpunk dystopia, I at least want bionic limbs.

We got some good news, though. Seven right whales were born recently, three of them off the coast of New England.

burning question: Was Julian Assange wearing tissue boxes on his feet when they arrested him?

Emily recognized herself from the freckles.
Emily studied math in school but took a bunch of art classes, one in which the teacher took them places and they just sketched people. She likes to work with wire but not with clay. She showed me some watercolor paintings she did of a fox and of her dog, whose name is Maggie.
She was engaged in a half-heard conversation about a zodiac compatibility. I dunno, I have my rankings and nothing else and they're completely arbitrary. For instance, Ultima outranks Mateus because Ashley's zodiac sign is Mateus. However, Mateus outranks most of the other signs.
I think someone in the group was The Whisperer and maybe there was a Gigas or Death Seraph.

A woman with two gold pendants and big eyes and a bag with Female Gaze on it smiled at the prospect of being drawn. I wasn’t sure if the guy near her was with her so I didn’t really know how to react. The drawing of her was rushed but that’s because the last two people I tried to draw both got off unexpectedly. One of them wore a dress with sunflowers on it and a pin of either a fox or some kind of Asian folkloric fox spirit, most likely a kitsune or a húli jīng, because kumiho are always malevolent and cheonho are relatively unknown, was on her jacket. The other had five-petaled flower earrings made from something silvery.

The theatre is clad in cerulean and gold and the chairs are upholstered in deep green. The lights are the shape of stars, or have beads hanging from them. Above the stage are the words "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature," which is a quote from Hamlet.
Behind me, a conversation in Italian.

On the lamppost in front of the theatre was a poster about a lecture about the rise of fascism in the 21st century, specifically about the German AfD party.

Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi premiered in 1918, along with Il tabarro, an opera for which I can not find a satisfactory one sentence summary.
Suor Angelica is sent to a convent for seven years, where she does gardening and makes herbal medicines, which is important, by the way. They discuss their desires and Angelica declines to mention hers. Her aunt shows up, it is revealed that she was sent to the convent for having an illegitimate son, her aunt asks her to sign her share of inheritance over to her, when pressured about Angelica's son, she reveals that he died of an illness two years before. She leaves.
Angelica makes poison from some of the plants in the garden and drinks it, realizing too late that suicide gets you sent to Hell. She asks forgiveness and sees a vision of her son standing in a cross of light.
It's hard to tell who's who because they all wore habits. The cast is all women.
Usually, if they perform two out of three operas, it’s Suor Angelica that gets the axe.
Gianni Schicchi has O mio babbino caro, one of the most famous arias of Puccini’s, despite the opera being all about wacky hijinks and not sadness and murder. The elderly Buoso Donati dies and the rest of the family schemes to get it back. They have Gianni Schicchi disguise himself as Buoso, because the family are the only people who know that he died, and reads out a new will to the notary, and Gianni Schicchi leaves all the good stuff, the manor, the mule, and the mills, to himself. Before they can protest, Gianni reminds them what the punishment for fraud is. The family tries to take as much as they can from the house. Lauretta and Rinuccio marry and Gianni Schicchi asks the audience to forgive him.
Schicchi was a real person and Gemma, Dante’s wife, was of the Donati family. He ended up in the Eighth Circle, for the fraudulent.
Instead of making it look like 13th century Florence, the set was black and white and everyone wore 1950s clothing.

burning question: Do you think maybe we should just sacrifice Syria to the authoritarians and then have a population exchange of their democracy activists for our wannabe genocidaires and other assorted far-right nutbags? We can’t send them to Antarctica because dumping garbage is illegal. We can’t have them here because once they die off to the point they won’t have any political power, they’re going to start killing.

Good news, everybody! Assange was arrested, looking like either a deranged Santa Claus or like Mr. Burns in $pringfield (or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legalized Gambling, and Omar Bashir was ousted.

I finally played through Mithril Vault and the only reason I scraped by is because of the hilariously stupid AI. The optimal levels are 28-29. My characters were between 16 and 21.
Seriously, the only AI the monster has is "% to cast spell," "% to use missile weapon" "% to run away" and "% to surrender, which is usually zero except in special fights."

[Spoiler alert!]
So, the plot is this: Winter Haven gets raw mithril and forges it into stuff but their shipment dried up, so you go to see the dwarves about that and we're like "oh, yeah, we need to build a vault made from mithril because our court wizard was cursed to turn into a lich when he dies" and you go through Morbius the Lich's castle to get a stone called the Geyser, which "produces a lot of heat energy when placed in water" and a diary entry mentions beings from the stars." They show up to take the Geyser back and then you go to their base where space marines and their battle robots help you and explain that the planet's core is made from magic. In the last real fight, you fight some of your own mechas that were reprogrammed by the aliens and if you don't defeat them within one turn, some aliens and their spider mech show up. Repeat if you don't defeat them within one turn. I have no idea how anyone pulled this off. Nobody complained about it on the newsgroup, though. Maybe it's a problem that came up in a later version of Realmz or maybe Realmz' following had already dispersed.
It's ironically harder on lower difficulties because difficulty levels affect how much HP the monsters have and not how much damage their attacks do, and this affects your allies as well so say goodbye if you don't get good initiative. The battle's over quicker and you ge less experience but this doesn't matter because I don't even think Tim Phillips knows what Siege at Natari and Blood Ties are. Tim had moved on to New Centurions, which is, alas, unfinished and I'm not sure if it's possible to register it.
(the New Centurions manual says that each difficulty level has a minimum chance to hit and a minimum chance to miss" and I'm not sure if it applies to Realmz or not. It also has things like equipment modification and better drops on higher difficulties that isn't in Realmz.)
The aliens show up earlier. There's a cave with a dead body, and there's a small base where you fight some aliens. It wouldn't be a hard fight except you have to beat them in one turn of they open the gate and release about seven or so big melee alien vusks and it continues to happen even once all the aliens are dead which once again, I don't think is supposed to happen that way.
Wow, Zelazny out of nowhere.
I assume that the monster limit is the last 2 digit number: 255.

There's a boat with some power cores. There are some broken alien robots and you can use the power cores to take control of them. Please don't do this until you're finished with Morbius' castle because you have to lose a fight to get them and there are no major fights between the Dwarven warrens and Morbius' castle.


We got our first raccoons on April 4th and a batch on April 8th. We have a lot of squirrels, most of whom have fur on their tails. The great horned owl's eye is looking better, says Julia. Otherwise, a quiet day. Lindy brought a guinea pig with no name.
Someone brought her blue and yellow macaw, Layla, who makes a strangely human scream. I read the 2019 Dystopia Logbook on Hipinion and have come to the conclusion that the United Kingdom is soft fascism and Michael wonders if there's a way that Scotland can remain part of the EU because they didn't ask for Brexit and the only reason they stayed in the UK is so they could keep all the EU benefits.

Venti means wind in Latin, Julia points out. It also means 20 in Spanish and Italian, coming from the Latin viginti, not to be confused with vigintillion, which is 10^63 and is smaller than almost every number. Grande means big, so they think it should be the largest. They should just make it parva, medium, and magna. For whatever reason, a venti is 24 ounces in Canada. In China, they used 小,中,大. and got rid of 小 and made a new one meaning “especially big."

Primrose had a bag of Taki’s and someone, I want to say Elissa, said that they’re easy to get in Brockton.
I don’t know if I said it before but I’m noticing that even as the country gets more and more diverse, cuisine is getting less diverse. I can't even blame Trump for this because it's been a problem for much longer.

burning question: so remember last week when I said Google does plenty of evil things and we don’t have to make shit up? Why would Google even entertain the thought of having the Heritage Foundation president on their board of artificial intelligence ethics? I don't know that much about the Heritage Foundation but something tells me they have fuck-all to do with artificial intelligence R&D.

Veronica brought up some incident in which someone blamed Google for something and I’m like there’s plenty of bad stuff that google actually does that you can go after. Michael said it’s like saying Donald Trump comes from Mars and that’s why he’s a bad president.
She told me about how people are saying that vaccines are made from aborted fetuses.
I can believe that. That the anti-vaxxers and the anti-abortionists are suckling at the same whackadoodle conspiracy teat, I mean.

Hannah, Julia, and Sam were there learning about human interactions with animals. All of them have at least one dog of some sort. I think Julia has a black lab and Sam has a French mastiff.
Annalise says of turtles that they thought they could get a ninja turtle by dumping green slime.
Annalise has a black bunny and a rat terrier Jack Russell mix dog who was demanding food from everyone around her, even me, and I was eating a chocolate chip cookie and Christabel was eating kale with some kind of poppy seed dressing and I think cranberries. She says that her opinion of Twilight Princess is an unpopular one: she hated it. She thinks the wolf transformation mechanic was pointless. I said it was in the game becaue Majora's Mask had the transforming mechanic and that was cool.
I’m watching Brain Scratch Comms’ playthrough of Twilight Princess and I realize I don’t remember shit about that game aside from the dungeons. Michael remembers the fishing and the escort mission.


There was an oscar hanging out in reptile boarding. The ray-finned fish, not the Grouch. The Grouch would rather hang out in our trash can. We have a severely emaciated great horned owl with nasty conjunctivitis, a swan who hit a power line and knocked out power in half of Weymouth, and some baby squirrels, one found in an exhaust pipe. The grackle is doing poorly.

Polish nationalists held a protest against Jews in New York City and a book (along with cat and elephant figure and Hello Kitty paraphernalia) burning in Gdánsk. Alessandra Mussolini got in a twitter fight with Jim Carrey over the death of Benito Mussolini. I wish I could say this is an April Fools joke.

burning question: is this about a) pushing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras towards Russia and China (China is preferable because, why yes, China is a horrible dystopia, but at least it's a dystopia that is perfectly content with staying within its own borders) and therefore b) justifying a ban on immigration to those countries and creating a refugee crisis c) pushing right-wingers further right because he saw how racist Europe got, or am I giving Trump and his Federalist Society puppetmasters too much credit?

I had a Thai chicken salad with peanuts, peanut dressing, carrot shavings, peapods, green and red peppers. Near me sat a man with a clock face tattoo and elsewhere a woman with blue hair and tattoos on her arm that I couldn't see too well. I also learned that there is a TV station devoted entirely to golf.

Memorial Hall looks like it was a gym at one point. Nearby, there's a place called the Spire which looks like a converted church. I thought that the New Pornographers should play there.
At Pilgrim Hall, there is an exhibit of depictions of the Pilgrims over time, including a painting by Henry Sargent, a painting of the first Thanksgiving with a Wompanoag wearing a Lakota war bonnet and in the background, a log cabin, a sword of Damascus steel with the number 1149 (if it's 1149 A.H., it did not belong to Myles Standish), and a buckled hat. Buckled hats were the height of style in the 1670s and were used in the 19th century to illustrate outmoded fashions, and an exhibit of Wompanoag artifacts and several photographs of living Wompanoag people with the message "We are still here."

Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps is a paean to spring, appropriate for a pretty nice day by the low standards of early spring. You can hear echoes of Debussy, Ravel, and Dukas.

L’Arsenniene Suite: Yeah, yeah, we all know this one… wait a minute, this is different... Okay, there are two suites and they both open with that March of the Magi motif, and, damnit, they’re magi, not kings. Or maybe they’re both. But they’re definitely Magi. Anyways, this is the first suite, which consists of the March of the Magi and variations including a duet of clarinet and saxophone, a minuet featuring harp and flute, an adagietto, and horns that mimic carillon bells.

I don’t really have too much to say about Mahler’s first symphony that I haven't already said except for this: the conductor, in his pre-concert talk, talked about a wood engraving with a coffin and a procession of forest animals, stoats and minks, roe deer and European rabbits raising their banners high, some Eurasian eagle-owls and unidentifiable passerines, called Wie die Thiere den Jäger bergraben, and how the 3rd movement is half-rejoicing in the hunter’s death (klezmer) and half, well, we should be sad because it’s a death but really, we’re quite happy about this (Frère Jacques in a minor key) played on a double bass, which never happens in a symphony (I looked this up and it said Mahler may have been giving solos to Jewish musicians who had been pushed to the background).
the program brings up an incident in which young Gustav heard his parents arguing and ran outside and a man with a hurdy-gurdy was playing in the streets.
Mahler even put directions on raising trumpets. He was a conductor first, after all. The score called for seven trumpets but they used eight.

He told a story that sounded like something out of the Simpsons, about the time he played in Memorial Hall before the renovation and it was cold enough that he could see his breath and there were a couple of buckets of water.

Kate, a double-bassist, has a quasi-mohawk of lavender-colored hair, and the glimpse of a tattoo.

My seat was on the floor level. It has its advantages, like how the acoustics aren't as good as Symphony Hall, and it has its disadvantages: it's still kind of cramped and all the chairs are at the same height.

burning question: who would win in a golf tournament between Kim Jong Il and Charles Montgomery Burns?

Marcia Ballou talked about her paintings, the time she took a watercolor class and was so dissatisfied that she tore up her works but then pieced them together to make a collage, the process of making them, starting with a smear of color and then cutting up scraps of quilt fabric and matting them on. Sometimes, when she paints animals, she paints them first.

Some color for a dull season.
[Click for art]





























So, uh, Shadowdancer Duskstar is saying that the deep state faked the attack in New Zealand using face-replacing technology so that they can take their guns and shitty websites away from them, and that's why they aren't letting anybody plaster the video all over social media, because it's obviously fake and they're all crisis actors and the guns are really bad CGI and if you could see the video, you could see for yourself how the shell casings are clipping through the scenery.

While HerbN has a solution to Islam. Kill all children under 13 and women of child-bearing age. Then tell the men that if they complain or try to reproduce, they too will die.
Michael says that's supervillainy.

Someone brings up surgical depicatation fo the leftist elite, removing any possibility of influencing the country and hoping the rest of us stand down after that. I assume he means about 50,000 deaths each in a couple of swing states.

Huckabee Sanders said that accusing Trump of treason is a capital crime. Okay, she said "the president" but you know she doesn't actually mean Obama.

Shadowdancer Duskstar is attacking Rand Paul for insuffient loyalty to Trump. And has also posted a boomer meme. "My curfew is lightening bugs" doesn't make any sense and it's "lightning."

Google is Kafkaesque, says Michael, in that you can’t find what you’re looking for. I was trying to find Amazon’s cover of The Children Star by Joan Slonczewski, although I realized a) it’s not on Goodshowsir because it’s an e-book, and b) I’m pretty sure Lousy Book Covers is tumblr based and Google and Tumblr get along as well as chalk and cheese.
I’m not sure how much of it falls under the category of “being evil” and how much falls under the category of “staggering ineptitude.”

I can’t blame Trump or the alt-right or the European populists for what happened in Mali. I can blame their policy on climate change and immigration for making things worse for the Fulɓe. I'll blame the conflict on a combination of climate change making the Sahara bigger and on the British and French empires for not really caring about what country gets what piece of territory and who has to live in said country no matter how horrid they are. Although Mali was one of the better countries in Africa until the coup in 2011.

Incidentally, waiting for the far-right’s main demographic is like waiting for the Sun to die. It will take a long time and we won’t be in a great situation when it finally happens. We need immigration to counter people like HerbN.

Every supermarket sells sumac now. If it's anything like our love affair with kimchi, I guarantee you won't see them in 2021.

A woman with pale green hair and gauge earrings showed up. She has four types of snake and a bearded dragon.
Kelcie is always shocked when people guess that she's Croatian. She's not that Croatian, in fact, she's mostly British and French Canadian. She has an orchid tattoo and a pendant of a sphere held in a three-taloned foot.
Veronica told a tale of someone who was sold a fox kit as a puppy, while on the other hand, Julia mentioned mistaking a yellow lab for a coyote.

If you can fly with wing wrap on, you're obviously good to go.

We are in dire need of good news so here is some: we found out that tapirs in South America and presumably Malaya and formerly Indochina (they surived in Sumatra because Muslims won't eat them) can help regrow wrecked rainforests by pooping out seeds.

burning question: So I guess we are back to heavily leaning on the Big Mac Heart Attack?

1 day until the vernal equinox

I was at a concert of Irish music (one guy on guitar and vocals and one guy on fiddle and occasional vocals) and a lot of the songs are songs about leaving Ireland.

I also learned that every song on Myspace is lost to the aether forever, so I'll never be able to describe Venus In Pisces to you. I should probably mention that Venus in Pisces is by Intelligent Light, so that the two or three people who care can find this. I mean, there are people out there who have seen Batman Fights Dracula. Sorry. It also means there's no point in buying Myspace. That's what happens when you let people who aren't Mithridates the Lone handle Mypace. Apparently, it ended up in the hands of a data-mining company. Shows what I know. I thought they were still trying to remold it into another Soundcloud with the help of Justin Timberlake and they were just staggeringly inept at it.

If you want to get a boomer riled up, say that there was good music made after 1985. Sometimes even 1980. Point out that 1969 was a relatively weak year in music, as people were moving away from psychedelia and towards Clasic Rock and arena rock (hippies were the intersection of the counterculture, which Nixon was cracking down on, and the anti-war movement, which was winding down as the war was winding down, and then include the Manson Family and the Hells Angels).

Daniela gave me a recipe for gumbo, courtesy of Alton Brown and the Food Network. She told me to take the towels that were in the bowls directly to laundry without passing go. Or maybe Julia said that.

We have a baby musk turtle because one of our techs found one dead and was able to scoop out some eggs. The people we were showing them to thought it looked like a rock. That ability works even better when they're against a backdrop of more rocks and mud and not against the glass of the tank and the white of the heating pad.
We had a cooper's hawk with a comminuted fracture, that is to say, it was crushed and there were bits of bone in there, who was severely emaciated. We were probably going to euthanize it if it didn't die on us.
We had a baby bat.
We released one of the barred owls and one of the red-tailed hawks.

Christabel was eating what looked like three bean salad with lentils and apple chunks. Marlie was eating shrimp scampi.
Daniela feels bad for the microwave, because it gets as much use as the dryer, but, as she said, there is no rest for the wicked.

Veronica likes to draw things in pencil, scan them, and then color them with a computer.

That's probably exactly what they're saying. "all right, we condemned this. Your move, libtards." Call me when that happens.
It doesn't quite work because their main concern is how it makes the far right look.

I think this makes Celia Hayes the worst of the Mad Geniuses for a long long time and I think had I any desire to read her books, I wouldn't now. Peter Grant's response was surprisingly decent, in that his going concern is now Muslims will feel justified to bomb the shit out of a bunch of Gilets Jaunes or Skrajojantis Boys, and not that it makes Hotwheels, Pewdiepie, and Joshua Moon look bad (Torgersen, Drow) or that it's simply a false flag (V MOTHERFUCKIN D). A lot of them stayed silent. I said Hoyt herself but Hoyt went on a rant about... Saint Patrick's Day and integration and how Arabs have nothing to fear from white supremacists, and integrations means fearing what we fear, eating what we eat, hating who we hate on our terms. And there's just so much wrong with it. I had a thought about the cuckoo clock in hell and people who have a coherent train of thought for a while before jumping off to absurd conclusions, and this isn't it. This is more like the book IQ And The Wealth Of Nations. For instance, Hoyt says that most Muslims are "part of the Mediterranean subrace of the white race" and that's not true. 20-25 percent of Muslims are Arab. That was a guess. I can't say exactly because there are Arabs outside the Arab countries and there are non-Arabs in the Arab countries.
People like Tim Pool and Brad Torgersen are saying that if we condemn the far right or go after the chans or Kiwi Farms or Cringe Anarchy for encouraging terrorism, the we're just playing into his hands. No, what we really need to do is hold hands with our friendly neighborhood Nazis, sing "tra la la la la" and subscribe to Pewdiepie.
burning question: and even if we are playing into his hands by condemning the chans and Pewdiepie, so? We're still making a better world.

6 days until the vernal equinox

I kind of like what pre-coup Mali did with its political parties: no parties built around ethnic, religious, regional, or gender lines. It would be a blessing and a curse, depending on how you look at it. On one hand, we'd be rid of the Republican party, but on the other hand, groups with legitimate grievances would have no way of dealing with those.

I asked Greg about the bones, he says that those parts look really similar in various animals, so he probably wouldn't be able to tell what it was without a skull. Maybe I should ask a paleontologist.

Julia’s solution was to first ask the turtles if they’ve seen the snake, and they had no response to the question “turtle, do you know anything?,” and when that failed, to prod at the ceiling tiles with a stick to see if any of them felt heavier than the others. She thinks that maybe Itsy Bitsy assassinated the others and disposed of their bodies somehow, possibly by swallowing them whole.

Daniela wants nothing to do with sour candy unless they make her face turn into this:


Brooke says it tastes like froot loops with sugar on them. I think she means Fruit by the Foot, kupo.

Jen discovered that a good way to clean owl feathers and make their wings silent again is to simply steam them.

Julia doesn't know if this is a stray cat thing but hers eats and eats and eats and eats like it's still starving.

burning question: Jacob Wohl created a Hispanic sock puppet and named it Drake Holmes? Did he spend the last twenty years of his life in a cave in Maine or something?

9 days until the vernal equinox

For most of the ride in, I was too distracted by thoughts of "I wish I wish I wish I hadn't had that cup of tea earlier." There was a woman with blue hair but she was taking the C train, not the E train.

I saw Faith, who is of ambiguous descent but looks somewhat Asian, I’d have guessed Indochinese but I thought someone mentioned Bali, at Amelia's, where I got a spicy chicken burrito.

Basically, the plot of L'incoronazione di Poppea is "Love tries to prove his superiority over Virtue and Fortune and makes a mess out of everyone's lives." The long story is: Otto comes back to Rome and learns that his ex-wife Poppea is with the emperor Nero instead. Nero's guards complain about Nero not caring about uprisings in Armenia and Pannonia. Arnalta tells Poppea that these things are fleeting and oh yeah, he's already married to Octavia. Octavia asks the teacher Seneca to see if he can get Nero to come to his senses. He has a vision of Pallas Athena of his imminent death. Nero's like "Yeah, I'm gonna dump Octavia and marry Poppea" and Seneca asks him to reconsider, and Nero orders his death. Otto's love for Poppea goes unrequited and his friend Drusilla consoles him. Liberto, a guard, tells Seneca to kill himself under Nero's orders, and he says farewell to his colleagues, kills himself in the bath, believing the warm water will speed up his blood flow.
A valet and a servant named Damigella sing aobut falling in love. Nero invites Lucan to revel with him. Meanwhile, Octavia tells Otto to kill Poppea and he does it under penalty of death for refusing. Drusilla lets him borrow her clothes for the murder. Love stays his knife and he runs away, and Poppea thinks her would-be assassin is Drusilla. Drusilla confesses but then Otto does, and Nero sends him into exile and Drusilla goes with him. He sends Octavia into exile as well. Poppea is Empress.
It’s not the oldest opera ever but it’s the oldest opera I’ve seen performed. Here, the music was done on a solo piano.
Fortune wore a gold dress and gloves and a lot of jewelry, while Virtue looked like a cross between a schoolmarm and a nun. Love wore a red t-shirt and jeans and carried a bow. For good reasons, she wasn't blindfolded.

Nero did have an affair with Poppaea and she did become Empress, and Poppaea was future Emperor Otho's old flame (after becoming Emperor, he killed himself after losing pretty badly against Vitellius and not wanting to plunge Rome into a civil war. Drusilla never existed. Seneca killed himself but I read that it was due to being under a lot of scrutiny by the Praetorian Guard and being accused of wanting to overthrow Nero. Nero sent Octavia into exile because she was well-liked, but later he had her killed.
Historians of the time blame Poppea for Nero's misrule but it seems to me like that was bias and what really happened is Nero wanted to take the reins despite being woefully unfit for it.
Nero was a lot more cultured than Donald Trump, otherwise, yeah, the main difference is that Donald made it his mission to surround himself with people less competent than he was.
Nero is played by a woman here but by a castrato in the original performance. Amore was also played by a castrato. Alnarta was played by a man in a wig here. Apparently in the original performance, Fortuna and Poppea are played by the same person and Virtu, Ottavia, and Drucilla are played by the same person.

You could probably get a three parter with Händel’s Agrippina and Vivaldi’s Ottone in villa. Or Nerone fatto Cesare, but good luck finding that one.

I didn't tell Gabriella about it but she was there. The only reason I didn't tell her is because I was like "oh, shit, it's this weekend" on Wednesday or so.
The displays that tell you when the next train was coming were all out of joint and I'm going to blame some work at Harvard. They didn't even bother at Park Street, they just told us that trains come every 10 minutes at this time. At Symphony, it said that the train was 13 stops away, and that's not possible unless a paradox effect brought back the E branch to Forest Hills, and with self-driving cars, I think not only is that never coming back, although I heard they might extend the E line in another direction, but it's probably the end to a lot of major public transit improvements.
I read that self-driving cars have problems with dark skin and some people are treating this as a feature, not a bug.

burning question: A bitcoin music festival? Is it all terrible bands that put out stuff on The What.CD complations?

11 days until the vernal equinox
Back when I was in high school, I found some bones half-buried. Unfortunately, the skull wasn't there. If it was, I probably wouldn't have to ask about them. Jen gave me a Bones 101 primer, that is to say, bones are typically found inside the body and are made from calcium, and told me that maybe if she knew the sizes and had some pictures instead of just drawings, she might be able to tell me. Lisa told me that most lumbar vertebrae have those fin things called transverse processes, and those transverse processes are good-sized on most animals.

I think if they ever do a second Lego Batman movie, Batman and Mr. Freeze should have an argument about the K-T extinction.

I found out only that the gumbo was pure Malaysian-style "throw everything in the spice cabinet and refrigerator in some roux" and the important things to know is "make roux, because that's the base of the soup" and "bay leaves, cumin, turmeric, and a bunch of other things." It looked like shrimp and rice and andouille sausage, although I see no reason I can't use chorizo like in that jambalaya I had.

In my absence, we got and released a loon. We got a barred owl who was hit by a car. We have a couple of swans, geese, hawks, and a modo. A typical day, in other words. Someone brought a degu, not to be confused with a tegu.

Julia says we have a bazillion knives, two spoons, and no forks. So she settled on eating her food with a spoon.
Laura thought she was putting cool whip on a lasagna roll.

Tilly and Cleo were hanging out in Quiet Baby. She's not going to eat what I want her to, that is, a dried banana that was on the table; she wanted the pretzels I was eating. Too bad she can't get through glass.

TJ wants to make prison wine because we got some bread along with two cakes for us. Someone described the taste as this: Brush your teeth and down a glass of orange juice. It tastes the way that would coming back up.

Human moderators result in asymmetrical enforcement. People interpret things differently. We need peer review. Something gets flagged, then the system asks a random sampling of 100,000 peers to weigh in on it. Removes, deranks, censors, based on active community
This is how we ended up with Democratic Underground and their shitty-ass jury system, Tim.

My fight against the Dark Magus Sisters in FFX was truly one for the ages.
1. They're not always going to use Delta Attack as their first move, so you can't have just any aeon tank it.
2. My Magus Sisters decided they didn't want to use Delta Attack.
3. Your first step is to deal with Cindy. Obviously. I mostly used Quick Hit but threw an Oblivion at them for good measure. I would have used Delta Attack but..
4. Oh, apparently Sandy's regular attack can shatter characters. So no more Yuna. Good thing Cindy was gone by that time.
5. Thankfully every attack kills you in one hit and auto-phoenix brings you back with enough HP to survive Mega-Graviton. So it really is just trading blows back and forth.
6. And once Mindy's alone, all it takes is a few attack reels.

burning question: Who could have possibly guessed that the money only used by criminals for crime would be plagued by crime?

22 days until the vernal equinox

Julia told me that we have one barred owl hanging out outside and the others have been released. We didn’t have a whole lot of things going on because none of the vets were around, so instead, we cleaned and Christabel regaled us with tales of raccoon roundups. So, this one time, one of the interns gave an ice cube to a raccoon and it looked her in the eyes while moving the ice cube back and forth. Last year, we got a bunch of eggs from our Cape affiliate in exchange for veggies, and so we gave them deviled eggs with panicure instead of paprika. Panicure makes them make a cute disgusted expression. Christabel tried that with lemons and they weren't interested. JT called kicking them their enrichment and a way of making them hate us instead of trying to swarm us for food.

7-11 had some gochujang snacks by Cosmos. They’re a lot less hot than I was expecting and a lot sweeter. Daniela was uninterested because she likes her tongue to not burn off, thank you very much, but they’re more spicy-sweet because, you know, gochujang. An older bag calls them tteokbokki, which means stir-fried rice cakes.
She was eating gumbo and she told me she’d get me the recipe but it won’t be the exact same thing she was eating. I asked if her boyfriend was Malaysian.
Meanwhile, Brooke was eating quinoa and vegetables.

Michael says that the best thing about Bernie running is that Gabbard has about as much chance of winning the presidental nomination as we have the chance to get some Indonesian cuisine.
If you're wondering about Indonesian cuisine.
1. things have to go exactly right and we have to do everything exactly right. Basically, not only do we have to win every election but all of the truly godawful republicans with no chance of losing die of racism poisoning (Steve King) or shell rot (Mich McConnell). This is the hardest thing to accomplish.
2. things have to go wrong in the Netherlands. Feasible. I'm not sure if the far right is as prominent as Hungary or Poland. I've heard it doubled in the last two years. At the very least, if we play our cards right, we'll get an influx of people leaving Europe.
3. things have to go wrong in Indonesia but not so wrong that they become refugees and end up in Utqiaġvik instead. Or Deadhorse, a place that sounds about as appealing as its name. Or maybe just some old mining towns in Nevada.

I played a bit of Half Truth in Realmz, but I think I screwed myself somehow because I can neither get on the ferry nor access the top level of the Orc stronghold. Since they're both items, maybe I can use the editor to fix it. It's really interesting because it eschews D&D with the serial numbers filed off in favor of a blend of Cornish (and other Celtic) folklore, Roman Britain, and Lovecraftian horror.
I also figured out what was going on in Assault on Giant Mountain. Apparently, getting in a fight on the eastern edge of the map is what causes the game to crash. It's weird because despite the glitchy Beyond, the game doesn't actually crash until the battle is over and you got the loot from it.

My advice to anyone thinking of updating Realmz: just rebuild the engine from scratch and do your best to have the scenarios be compatible with the new engine.

burning question: why do so many medieval european fantasies have potatoes? Especially a fantasy that's blatantly written as an Anglo-Saxon mythology.

23 days until the vernal equinox

I was at the Gardner Museum because the Botticelli paintings won't be there in July. Well, the Tragedy of Lucretia will be. It's paired with Storie de Virginia, which depicts a woman Virginia pressed into slavery by a corrupt judge and her father killing her to preserve the family honor.
Geez, Rome. They weren't as bad as some of the Greek city-states or the Empire of Japan.

Michael said it was amazing that people in those days had more standards than we do. Actually, he said it about the kidnapping, rape, and murder of Madge Oberholtzer by the KKK Grand Draegos David Curtiss Stephenson.

There are three paintings depicting St. Zenobius, on loan from the National Gallery, London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and one painting depicting a magus and the infant Jesus.

There was a woman with amplified hadeopelagic black hair.

40 million feet (slightly less than two radians) is the distance from Boston to Kathmandu. 40 Million Feet is two musicians who started out when Shyam came upon Charlie playing his guitar and Shyam got his sarangi for a jam. A sarangi shows up up in the Lothlorien sequence in Fellowship of the Ring. I didn’t get to hear this because it was late and I think it may have required a separate admission.

Someone was like "imagine dramatically falling down these stairs."



Joan Jonas is the current artist-in-residence.
On one wall were drawings based on the animals found in stone sculptures. On the opposite wall were drawings based on animals found in paintings and textiles. One of them, set aside, depicted two rabbits humping. I wondered what painting that was in. Between them was animal folk art: a bird on glass from the Great Satan, a kite from Japan, sculptures from Canada, Costa Rica, and Jamaica, a dog mask.


This looks like a fish to me.

Emma has purple hair, a bat earring, and no visible tattoos.
There was a man on the train with a willow tree tattoo.
Alicia is not an artist but since she teaches pre-schoolers, she does a lot of artsy craftsy stuff with them, and if you gave her some instructions or a youtube video, she could follow along.
Christina, Leah, and Jackie and what may or may not be Betty or Becky are nursing students.

I saw this.
The problem, of course, is that the Republican Party is actively resisting embracing what logic, game theory, and simple arithmetic dictate is the correct strategy: become the White Party, stop trying to win diversity votes, and focus solely on advancing white interests
burning question: so, I do have to ask because erenow I have not been east of Bath, Maine. Is there some kind of paradox effect dividing the hemispheres? I say this because the Republican Party is doing exactly this thing.
Although this could just be a false statement meant to stir the blood of fellow Breivik-worshippers.

27 days until the vernal equinox
I don't know where the owls are. Maybe I just didn't notice them, after all, I was showing people around for most of the day. We have some hawks and some waterfowl and some rodos and modos. A typical day, in other words.

We have a new collection of preserved echinoderms (which are basically what happens when you split off from the same ancestors as chordates and evolve in a completly different direction, eschewing things like intelligence and senses in favor of regenerative powers Wolverine could only dream of), specifically, some kind of starfish (To me, it looks like an Asterias rubens), a sea cucumber, a sand dollar, and a sea urchin, along with a pickle jar filled with squid eggs.

Kelly has two guinea pigs named Rick and Morty. Ironically, Rick is shy and Morty is gregarious and adventurous.
A guy has rats named Sylvie, Edie, and something I've forgotten. One of them climbed up my arm and my back.
A man had the biggest boa constrictor I've ever seen. Not the biggest snakes; I've seen someone's Burmese python and the aquarium has an anaconda.
A woman had a plated lizard that she found in her garden.

Bernie's running for president because of course he is. It's going to be a long two years.

burning question: someone said of the sitcom Heil Honey, I’m Home, “Anything that trivialises Hitler is to be deplored. Someone who caused so much human misery and grief is not really a fit subject for humour and trivialisation.” But on the other hand, Mel Brooks wanted to make Hitler an object of ridicule so that nobody would ever take his ideas seriously ever again. On the other other hand, Trump is a buffoon and people take him seriously. Who do you agree with?

28 days until the vernal equinox
Apparently they can't predict snow more than a day in advance.
Winter, I once thought, could be broken down into three phases.
1. it's cold.
2. it's still cold, but I'm too sick to care.
3. winter's almost over so why the fuck doesn't it feel like it?

Either I'm wrong or things have changed.
1. maybe it won't be so bad.
2. nope, it is bad.
3. winter's almost over so why is it still freezing? If it was summer, I'd be able to tell that summer is almost over.

Somebody archived part of What.CD. I have some thoughts on this.
1. Wow, they were anal-retentive.
2. The search feature is defective because I looked up Beatles and found nothing. In lieu of a search system, I have found out that I can add a similar artist, if they have anything by them, it will show up on a list, and you can click on that and see what they have. It’s like vandalizing the Gamingforce wiki: nobody will care or even notice.
3. A lot of people made what.cd out to be the most comprehensive musical archive in the universe. They didn't have the Curtain Society's cassettes or even all of their CDs. They don’t have house music from 1973 Congo. House music didn’t exist until the early 80s and didn’t exist outside Chicago until the early 90s. They have The Reflecting Skin, which is not Reflecting Skin, it’s not Visigothic at all, it’s “dub techno” and they only have stuff on compilations. They don't have Chelsea on Fire or Big Monster Fish Hook. They have Angry Aryans, Brutal Attack, Bound For Glory, Saga, Ethnic Cleansing, Jeunesses Patriotes. They have the Dracula 2000 soundtrack. I think the site was populated mostly by 14 year old boys.
4. None of the curated album lists have commentary.
5. They have Turning by Light but not Paperboat. I am not shocked that Eyeless in Gaza was on there but I am surprised that they had most of their discography.
6. They ban entire countries from going through the interview process, which is not good because they basically want everyone to go through the interview process so they punish people who invite someone who gets banned. What you get from this is apparently a site populated by people who don't even realize that there are music scenes outside of the United States and Europe. The unofficial country ban list is as follows: Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, Georgia, Hungary, India, Israel, Morocco, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Slovenia, Thailand, Taiwan, and Ukraine. I’m surprised that Indonesia and Philippines aren’t on this list. Georgia and Palestine had about 3 users each.
7. I learned that there's a dubstep group called Goli. Someone once described dubstep as the sound of two fax machines fucking. In fact, a lot of it has
8. My knowledge of electronic music is as follows.
a. I have a few electronic albums. I really like Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, Future Sound of London, Neo, Lusine, Massive Attack, Delerium, Seefeel, and the Flashbulb but have no idea what genres they fall under.
b. I'd say something about Music for Airports but the one I listened to is in fact a cover by a small orchestra.
c. I have a friend from college who was way into trance. AIM is dead, alas.
d. Xpander likes electronic music. With some (great amount of) effort, I could probably track him down and ask him about it, although I doubt he'd be very friendly. I'm better off asking Ashley and by that, I mean Ask Ashley.
e. I've read Ishkur's guide to electronic music.

***

So the mad genius club has a lengthy post, but not lengthy by Hoyt standards, which is to say, it’s less than 1500 words, about how men and women are different. Because it’s long and incredibly dumb, I’m not going to bother quoting it.
1. I love the disclaimer that she’s not ragging on women.
2. But the rest of it says otherwise, because the whole thing is like “well, men actually hurt and or kill but that’s ok because your wounds will heal while women start campaigns of lies, rumors, innuendo, and mind games. and when they do use physical violence, they aim to disfigure”
3. Apparently Hoyt has never been on Kiwi Farms or the chan or Gamingforce. Or asked Zoe Quinn. Also, when men are toxic, it’s because of the influence of women.
4. If you pardon the obscure analogy, Kiwi Farms is Billsville. According To Hoyt is Fredsville and Joesville. Or “conform or else.” and “we’re Odd and we’ll accept all Odds as long as they fit our definition of Odd. Don’t deviate from that, or else.”
5. drow says that poison has always been seen as a woman’s weapon although I’m pretty sure Game of Thrones is fiction. i read somewhere that poisoning cases were actually rare, especially before the 1500s, and most cases of people being poisoned were actually lead toxicity or food-borne illnesses. In modern times, well, Putin is a man. If he identifies as anything else, it's probably some kind of attack helicopter as a jayus.
6. There’s a reason most of my friends starting 10th grade were women. Although it was more or less evenly split in college. Except on Gamingforce. Or maybe it was evenly split there. And nowadays, it's the circumstances I'm in more than anything.
7. The Phantom says that women have no honor and no shame either. Someone who may or may not be Bob K. Mando or Bob The Regissterd (demi-sic*) Fool says that there is a study done saying that men cluster at the ends of the intelligence spectrum, it follows that women must cluster at the ends of the morality spectrum. I have no idea who pulled this idea out of his ass or how far he had to reach. That same Bob also says that women tend to be in favor of their own families and households but are also prejudiced in favor of the Other. I refuse to dignify his use of the word oikophobia.
*by this, I mean that I know the word registered is misspelt but fuck if I know how or care enough to find out.

***


This sculpture is at the Kennedy Institute. Interestingly, it wasn’t in Ted Kennedy’s office. It responds to the proceedings taking place on the senate floor. I didn't hear much of Eileen's explanation of this but I'm sure she explained how they obtained it.


These pictures appear to be taken in 1980. Alas, the rest of the internet didn't notice it. And any update made to this website in the last decade involved making it uncooperative with imgur. It inflates when there are senators present and when it does, it first lifts two pearls out of a bag followed by a lump of bullshit obtained from a genuine uncastrated male Bos taurus.

Unfortunately, their senate rosters were in alphabetical order by state rather than grouped geographically.
1. The Readjuster party wanted to break the hold the former confederate and antebellum elites had on Virginia.
2. The silver party was just about currency backing. They're kind of irrelevant otherwise. I think that we should back our currency with prometheum, because it’s more or less useless, but I’m sure we’d find a use for it if there was more of it.
3. The American Party AKA the Know-Nothings were probably the most famous of these short-lived parties and existed on a platform of absolute xenophobia.
4. There was a party that was founded to maintain the position of power Virginia had before the civil war.
5. Free Soil was pretty obvious. If it isn't, they had a platform of all new states must be free states, not slave states, and that includes the newly annexed portion of Mexico.

burning question: what fictional or satirical party would you want to see in power?

32 days until the vernal equinox

The latest Freedom In The World Report came out so it's time again for my annual Freedom House rant.
So, I’m glad that even Freedom House recognizes that there are problems in certain post-Soviet Bloc states and I’m glad they finally demoted Hungary to Partially Free.
I didn’t understand why Brazil is free but I guess Jair Bolsonaro didn’t assume office until 2019 and we’ll have to see how things go. On the bright side, Democratic Republic of the Congo is finally living up to its name and Ethiopia is going democratic as well.
I don’t understand why Italy is considered free. I don't know when they hand out the surveys. Or the Czech Republic. Or Austria. Or Poland. It's nice that they point this stuff out in their report but the rankings don't reflect this. They’ve kind of noticed that civil liberties are on the decline in France. I don't understand how Japan has the best rankings. I guess Freedom House has a bias towards right-wing secular states. Or I guess apathy is a way of life in Japan and if Japan became a dictatorship overnight, nobody would really notice or care.

Julia also has cats named Midnight and Comet and had Orion. She told me that Comet and Orion are black and I didn’t have to ask about Midnight. Unless he’s the anti-Snowball II. There may be a fifth cat but I didn’t hear it. Hell, I thought she said the cat’s name was Ryan, which isn’t unusual. It might be a reference to Men In Black but I didn’t think to ask.
Of Fizz, she said "look at him prance!"
She was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with some kind of cheese roll. Or would have, had the roll not had mold on it. Still, it sounds like a horrid combination.
Meanwhile, Dominique was eating some kind of noodle salad with tofu.

Michael said the mask he was wearing made him look like the world's worst Sub-Zero cosplayer.

We have two barred owls at this time. I think this means five have graced medward in 2019. We also got a fox and yet another swan and/or goose but they died.
The barred owl grabbed the mouse and then tried to murder the camera. We only do two laps with them as opposed to 5 with hawks because owls just sit around until they hear something and then they go after it. One of the barred owls has some vet wrap around his wing and we stick bits of wrap on them so they waste their time pulling that off instead. He made his injuries worse by bouncing around like a maniac.


We have another saw-whet owl.

burning question: is it just my imagination or is fanservice getting worse? Compare Star Ocean 3 with 4 (mostly good aside from one character who seems to have escaped from Lineage II. It definitely makes me long for Star Ocean 3 and your ability to choose a character’s outfit) (also one character who sounds like Tina Belcher with a lobotomy and a high dose of valium and there’s a reason for it I know. Doesn’t change the fact that she can be kind of grating) or Xenosaga or even Xenoblade Chronicles (there are many flaws with this game. Fanservice is not one of them) to Xenoblade 2, or Fire Emblem (I’ve only played The Sacred Stones) and its 1000 year old dragon who looks like a 12 year old girl and wears a skimpy outit, and, why, yes, I am aware that skimpy and tasteless aren’t necessarily synonymous. Michael says that they’ll cry censorship if they change Fiore’s outfit design.

I do not for one second believe that these people are interested in Japan for its gardens and sumo wrestling.

37 days until the vernal equinox

The booklet mentioned The Marriage of Figaro being a depiction of Enlightenment society unraveling but they wanted to make it resonate with our age, and so it began with all the characters dressed in period clothing, which they removed to reveal 1950s style outfits in burgundy, deep sepia, granite gray, white, and touches of gold, and placed on the mannequins. When disguised as a boy, Cherubino, played by a tall skinny woman with short abyssopelagic hair, dressed in a black jacket and tie and white shirt and black pants and combat boots, wore a hat with a flower in it to disguise herself as a girl.
On the other hand, Barbarina is played by a really short woman.
I already summed up the plot earlier.
At its heart, it’s (thank you, Strong Bad) a Shakespearian comedy. And I think the overly convoluted plot is part of that humor. I mean, the tragedies don't have complicated plots: Romeo and Juliet fall in love but their families hate each other, Hamlet's father is murdered most foully and Hamlet plots revenge, Othello is tricked into thinking his wife is cheating on him, Richard III manipulates and murders his way to the throne.

On the trip in, the sky looked like the cover of Rural Psychedelia. Only colder, somehow.

Jessica has short hair and earrings that depict faces.

A woman had purple hair. A woman had pale red in her blonde hair.

Laura, pronounced in the Spanish way, asked me if she really looked that tired.
When she left, I regretted not having Lush on my iPod.

Unlike with Cendrillon, they didn’t promise we’d be home before midnight because Classical operas are, with a few exceptions, such as Wagner and Glass, longer than Romantic or Modern or post-modern ones.

burning question: is Virginia’s state bird Jim Crow?

42 days until the vernal equinox

We released two of the barred owls. On the other hand, the goose who ate the shotgun shell died but not before we learned that we can, in fact, with much effort, purge their system via gavage. A swan died. Julia described as "neurotic" because of the way its head hung and Rob was like "you mean neurological, right? Well, swans are neurotic too."
There were a lot of mice so I'd imagine a couple of raptors replaced them, along with a cottontail that was attacked by a cat. You may be thinking that with the lack of pictures, Erica is turning into Jack, but that's not true. We just don't have anything worth photographing. Well, barred owls are worth photographing.
Michael believes that geese are capable of pooping out more than they eat and doesn't quite understand the physics of it.
Primrose was eating pork rinds and was proud of it. Her hair was the color of dry thistle.

Meanwhile, I don't fucking know.
Someone on John C. Wright's blog, a blog at which I have been banned for using Beijing and not Peking, by a writer who tries to be a cut-rate Jack Vance, is saying that antebellum southern slavery was relatively benign. I really really hope the right wing's efforts to love bomb Amélie Zhào backfires for them because you'd have to be dumber than a screech owl to fall for it. Especially with all the 4chan racism.
I don't know. I find it hard to see eye to eye with people who consider tens of millions of deaths to be a best case scenario.
I was trying to look up a quote by Larry Correia, who lives in rural Utah by choice, saying that anyone who prefers public transit over the freedom of a privately owned vehicle has stockholm syndrome.
Michael thinks that the mobile version of Google somehow gives worse results than the desktop version and I can believe it. I'm equally inclined to believe that Google is giving worse results on any browser that isn't Chrome. I refuse to believe that there are only 80 results for "Jack Vance" "Planet of Adventure." I think that complaining about the internet is like complaining about the weather, or complaining about Asian politics: it's cathartic but accomplishes fuck all.

Michael wonders who the three greatest traitors in a modern-day Inferno would be.

burning question: is Mark Zuckerberg an android?

49 days until the Vernal Equinox

Annabelle has the piercing and Marlie has silver hair. I was close. Kinda. Sorta. Not really. Marlie at least starts with M. Annabelle makes me think of Hannibal because I have Carthage on my mind although Wikipedia is telling me that it's a portmanteau of the names Anna and Belle.
I mistook Brooke for someone new.

Julia has enough bread to last her lifetime because people donate bread to the wildlife center. Their logic is “ducks like bread, right? Bread's cheap.” Julia used a hamburger roll to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
We have a mute swan condo system, in which one swan was moved to the top cage because he weighs less. We have four of them now, I've heard. I dunno, I missed rounds. We got rid of the last of the guinea pigs, which is good because I've never smelt anything so vile. Like, imagine the worst smell you've ever smelled and then imagine that took a crap. And then dropped dead. Barred owls have a rather nonexistent sense of smell.

Greg and Katrina have a new pupper named Fizz. He's a goldendoodle.

I've noticed that the republicans are getting more and more unhinged. Kamas716 is saying that they need to start executing leftists because he doesn't think they'll truly understand until their blood is flowing in the streets. Ideally, the killing will be over in one to three years of "actual hostilities" and they'll only need to kill tens of millions.
Add some comments about starving out the cities. And they'll justify themselves by saying the left would do it to them if they let them.
Michael compared them to Pol Pot. I think we're living in that alternate reality in which Sarah Hoyt, Larry Correia, and Brad Torgersen became cut-rate science fiction authors instead of murderous dictators. Although Rwanda happened because of talk radio whipping people into a frenzy and lasted 100 days. I wish I could say that a democide by cut-rate authors is far-fetched but alas, it is not so.
It's like with Pizzagate. They say ridiculous things in the hopes that someone will act on it and then they can dissociate from them.

Burning Question: there is a place called Dys in Poland. Who would want to live there? The answer is me every time I hear the words "polar vortex."

53 days until the vernal equinox

I was going to go to the MFA but it was a horrible icy mess. What we got was some snow and the rain to turn it into a morass and then a deep freeze to turn that into a mirrored morass. Then it rained and I’m sure that any snow piles that survived this are going to be with us until Saint Iocus’ Day. We used this as an opportunity to release a gull. Honestly, I'd rather see the owls leave. Leah would be happy to see that they're in the wild and the guinea pigs they eat reek of fermentation and death.

We have a goose who apparently ate an entire shotgun shell. We don’t want to go through surgery because getting around their air sacs is a pain and going through their air sacs just means they’ll be staying with us for some time more, so we thought we’d tilt the surgery table forward and pour water into their ventriculus via funnel and tube, and all that crud would just fall out of his mouth and into a bucket and make the room reek of the sea and death. It didn’t work as well as we thought, but at least I learned that geese can honk even when unconscious.

We have a new red-tailed hawk with a broken wing.


Skyla had a chameleon and a true fire skink, the “fire” I can understand because it has red and black and orange markings and white spots, but the true I don’t understand. I think it’s because there are similar skinks in southeast Asia. They aren't her pets; she just has three dogs.

I learned that if you are extremely unethical, a baby chimp can be bought on the black market for $12,500. No matter what kind of good you think you can do, do not encourage them.

Ashley has rats. I’d like to point out two things: I’ve been listening to Helium a lot lately and I should point out right now that anyone I mention named Ashley in the foreseeable future is not that Ashley unless I say otherwise. Ashley has dark hair and glasses.
Kerri has three ferrets. Ringo, Paul, and Sammy!? Why Sammy? Because that was the name he had when they got him.


We have three barred owls. One of them was in an owl burrito, says one of the two new (one is completely new and has silver hair, one of them is new to me and has a pierced philtrum (I had to look that up). I'm blanking on their names but I want to say Marissa) interns.

Someone on 4chan decided they’d try to correlate a women’s weight to their taste in music. Although the only thing I can find is that someone on 4chan decided to correlate a women’s weight to their taste in music. I have no idea what their sample size was or methodology, nor do I have any idea why anyone would want to do this.
That’s a lie. I did learn that Google Image Search is fucking useless. Also, there's a site out there that seems to just aggregate discusions from other sites and forces you to turn off ad blockers if you want to browse it, and while, yes, there are a few legitimate sites that do that, that comes off as really sketchy to me.

burning question: who do you think would win in a fight between Plantman and Spoonman?