ceci n'est pas un journal

I thought I’d live my life without having to deal with this session of busing. The opera scones (I’ll explain this in due time) thing came up unexpectedly. I had to pay to get back on the train at Government Center (for reasons having to do with traffic patterns, the Kendall-bound buses weren’t stopping at Park and the Broadway-bound buses weren’t stopping at Downtown Crossing) but they let us walk through at Broadway. It was unusually cold for mid-November.
An androgynous-looking person with a masculine voice had amplified moss green hair and shining earrings with hanging chains, a necklace with three rings. Sophie has black hair and big eyes and a mustard-yellow scarf.
Trina plays the harp and has bright green and pale thistle hair with subtle hints of blue and a septum piercing, Alicia plays drums and has her hair in braids and three ring earrings and a leaf-shaped stud. Gabe is a visual artist.
A woman getting on the Green Line as i was getting off had pink hair.

I got a pita wrap with chopped kale, spring mix, roasted broccoli, corn, scallion, peanuts, lime juice, tofu, and Thai cashew dressing. The place had walls of pale green bedight with cobwebs and black spiders ranging from cat paw sized to st. bernard sized. Jack Skellington would be proud.

Unlike last time, we got mostly familiar stuff.
We all know The Magic Flute, well, Brian doesn’t. I think Gabriella mentioned introducing him to it via a Kenneth Branagh movie set in World War I, and I thought of Richard III in an alternate universe fascist Britain and Romeo and Juliet in the 90s where all the guns have th. In their case, Tamino and the Queen of the Night’s ladies in waiting are all dressed like farmers, and the serpentine monster Tamino was grappling with was a garden hose. The scene in Die Fledermaus involves Gabriel von Eisenstein flirting with a mysterious masked woman at a ball, who claims to be a Hungarian countess, turns out to be his wife, who is like “aha! So you are cheating on me!” In the scene from Dialogue of the Carmelites, a man tries to convince his sister, a nun in the Carmelite order to flee Paris during the Revolution. Spoiler alert, she doesn't. And it doesn't end well. In the King and I, Tuptim, a slave, and Lun Tha, a scholar, sing about how they must love each other in secrets, In Carmen, the smugglers wear leather jackets and they used playing cards in lieu of tarot cards.

Brian now wants to write Opera Scones, an opera about a prince who hallucinates a scone that he falls in love with and some cupcakes and I said that it should end with the revelation that they are all characters in an opera. See, in what I assume is his hunger because he forgot to eat, he misread the word scenes and thought it would be awesome if there were scones there.
He's not quite acclimated to Boston even though we went to the same high school. He's been in LA for the last nine years, see, and now he's back, teaching music technology.
My impression of LA is that it’s like Boston if Berlin was part of the city proper. There’s public transit and then you have to drive 20 minutes afterward to get anywhere.
Elon Musk wants to build a thing where you drive your car onto an underground sled. it’s like the hyperloop, because all these people will never understand that the most efficient way to move people around is a high capacity train. Or maybe a bus if it’s like 4 AM and nobody’s on the road.
When we were 20 years younger, in high school, Gabriella took him to see an opera called Resurrection and broke the heel of her shoe and the ground was icy.

burning question: So, recently, they fed an AI all the Beatles songs and had it compose a song. What would happen if they instead fed the AI an ecletic mix of radically different songs, say, the soundtracks to the Final Fantasy XIII games?

I don't know if the original Sword Dream won't load saved games because of an issue with Sheepshaver or an issue with PPC compatability and it takes a really long time to even gain one level as far as I can tell, so I wasn't getting far.
So instead I played through a Marathon 1 total conversion called Trojan, which works pretty well aside from crashing if you try to overwrite a save file, and then I had a dream about waking up alone aboard an interstellar voyage. Not all the ship was of human design, and there was something odd about the curvature of the walls, the colors, the inset rainbow lights leading to my suite. The suite that I took over in the absence of everyone else was of human design, though, and the walls were black and reflective.
The level design in Trojan is mostly good, aside from Death of Drummand, which is essentially an entire level worth of Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap platform jumping, sometimes over lava. Not M∞ sized, thankfully. Someone who is not James Hastings-Trew and is most likely Borzz, said that James went for “they’re aliens and we have no clue what they’re thinking, so build whatever you want” and the other guy who may or may not be Borzz was like “we may not know what they’re thinking but we know what they’re doing and the design should reflect some sort of function.” Most of the time, I can say this about the alien ship levels in Trojan. Aside from jumping from a platform over glowing goop into teleport booths to get to the reactor room. Like, okay, the goop doesn't affect their biochemistry and the shipbuilders have superstitions about right angles, I can buy that.

If there are level credts for Tempus Irae aside from JHT writing his name on his maps, I can’t find them. I do know that everyone contributed at least one level.

Abby has a green opalescent pendant.
Sarah has a patch depicting UFO Kirby flying above a boreal forest with the message “I want to believe” and “my third wish has always been three more,” which is apparently a song lyric, and a patch with flowers. She studied graphic design.
Ellie is a poet.


I don't think I posted this. The colors are even more vivid and neon in real life.


Yoshitomo Nara - Your Dog
It’s six feet tall and weighs 600 pounds.
I thought that was the Balloon Dog artist. Apparently not.
On the train, I met a 5 month old Australian shepherd named Foster.

The gallery is split into five thematic sections: color field, imaginary beings, sculpture, material, and utopia.
In high school, I had a teacher who really liked colorfield. The ones I did aren't on a large scale.
Google doesn’t acknowledge Dancing With Rain and Fire’s existence. I may be confused about the title.
Speaking of titles, if I don't give a title, chances are the painting doesn't have one.


Frank Bowling - Suncrush - evokes the flag of Guyana, the tropical light and flora and climate.


Friedel Dzubas.


Jack Goldstein


Tillmans - Silver 180
This is a photograph.


Vivian Springford


Lucy Dodd, “Ié,” 2019, Atlantic sea water from Cape Cod, squid ink, Agua de Florida, Wakame, spirulina, chlorella, indigo, herb water, fish silver powder, peony petal water, lapis lazuli, malachite, cavasanite, mica, cochineal, phosphorescence, hematite, selenite, tulip petal water, daffodils, peony, tyrian purple, and pigment on canvas, 182 x 384 inches, 462.3 x 975.4 cm, LD977
The typeface the MFA uses makes the lowercase l and uppercase I look alike.


Sandi Sloan - Owl Light
She used a pushbroom to paint this.


Judith Linhares - Sphinx


Grey Cat with Madrone and Birch Trees
I know that I petted a cat last week. Either cats are not in fact mythological creatures or these artificial memories are getting out of hand.


Ceci... Ahem. I'm sure I could do better than this.


Ok, here we go.
Cecilia Vicuña - la vicuña
A vicuña is a wild alpaca. A guanaco is a wild llama. Neither are mythical creatures. I don't really have confirmation on this, after all, I can't even trust my memories about cats anymore. One part of it depicts her childhood, while one part of it depicts the Pinochet dictatorship and the oppression of indigenous people and the reality on the other side of the Andes.


Carol Rama - Perdonami le conguinzioni
A taxidermy eye embedded in a viscera of aerosol paint and glue, referencing napalm and its victims.


Georg Baselitz - Lazarus
He'd paint things upside down in order to distance himself from them.


Alice Neel - Doll and Apple
It contrasts the symbols of fertility with the artificial, lifeless, androgynous figure.


Campoli Presti - Objectifier I, slighty used.


Rosemarie Trockel



Monument for V. Tatlin
That photo is from 2014.
Tatlin’s Tower is a never-built 400 meter tall monument to the Russian Revolution and between the lack of steel after war and revolution and the conservatism of Stalinism and the housing shortages and the fact that it was only slightly more structurally sound than Taejin’s Tower, it was doomed from the start.


I got a sandwich with beef brisket, black beans, red onion and pickled jalapeño relish, on a bulkie roll.

I swear that every year the polar vortex arrives earlier and earier.

burning question: what do you think the last country to have an elected or appointed and not hereditary leader or co-leader will be? I say either the Vatican because tradition or North Korea because it has a fairly young president for life.

I listened to Closed On Sunday, and by that, I mean, listened to five seconds, jumped ahead thirty seconds, listened to five more seconds, jumped ahead a minute, listened to seven more seconds, and then stopped listening and went back to Symphony of the Night because I couldn't take the pain. What I expected was music that plays during a sex scene in The Room, except with sad pathetic lyrics about Chick Fil A instead of triumphant lyrics about running through a forest of flames. What I got was much worse.
Michael asked the real hard-hitting question. And to answer, I can't really compare that NPC song with the lyric TOO MANY NPCS AND THEY'RE WALKING IN THE STREETS because they're two different genres of music, but I can safely say that they are both terrible. However, Closed on Sunday is better than the NPC song that consists of fart noises and vocoded slogans because at least it tries to have melody and wasn't just created by a cat running across a Casio keyboard set to "fart."
Speaking of cats, Christabel had Levi with her again. Levi wasn't a mess but he did have a minor eye infection because he got poop in it.
It's just Olivia now. Olivia was eating oats in a mason jar.

A woman brought in a marginated tortoise.

There were drawings on the whiteboard and someone wrote "not biologically correct" next to a bat, as bats are not in fact faces with wings and legs and ears, "dropped my snowcone" next to a witch's hat, and "too thin" next a brom.

Apparnently measles can damage the immune system and the only reason it's making a comeback is due to the anti-vax movement. May Jenny McCarthy be remembered as the greatest mass murderer in human history.

burning question: Brad Torgersen said that the left took over Star Trek? Like, uh, has he ever actually watched Star Trek? Star Wars I can kind of understand if I turn my brain off. Also, the guy in the comments is too stupid to realize that the other guy is saying the left took over Christian sects and for reasons known only to himself, thinks the other guy is accusing Christian sects of taking over respected institutions like Star Wars and Star Trek and turning them left-wing.

I'm most bewildered the fact that Puff the Bearded Dragon was 9 years old and we got her a little over 5 years ago. Rebecca was talking about a graveyard for dead animals and Jacob and Christabel both agree that it would be way too big, but if she wants to set up a monument to our educational animals, she can by all means go for it.
She won't be setting one up for Salvadora, most likely.

I met rats named Lucky and Lotus, both female.
Meanwhile, Bling was wandering around like the Kool-Aid Man.

Christabel has a new kitty cat named Levi, who is four weeks old and weighs around 400 grams and I'd say he eats like a pig, but pigs tend to chew, so I guess he eats more like a duck. Cat milk, Christabel says, is something we do not feed to rabbits.
Michael says he puts our squirrels to shame and they're pretty messy.

We had a Virginia rail for a few days and released him in a swampy area.
Don't feed it bread, Rebecca says.
Rebecca brought up a woman who was keeping two sugar gliders and found out that one died because the other one was eating its eyes. Yum. Jacob had some things to say about sugar gliders: they're nocturnal so you can't play with them but they're neurotic so you have to. They make noises that sound like TV static. They are cute and that's their only redeeming quality, says Jacob. And there are many other things that are cute.

3/5 of an octopus neurons are outside their brain.

Olivia ate a cranberry and liked it. She's from New York City, where she says they harvest garbage and rats and very aggressive rodos.

They were ladling blood and poop and liquified guinea pig out of the freezer and prying off all the floor tiles in the laundry room because it's so much easier to mop concrete.

After lunch, Jacob opened up the box of donuts and said "damnit, the jelly donut is still laughing at me. Eat me, Jacob. I'll make you feel goooood."
I laughed so hard I keeled over and my face was covered in tears.

Drow is such a doctrinaire conservative that she's against public transit. Because fucking Raz0rfist is against it. Raz0rfist is a) an abusive piece of shit and b) sounds like the name of a raider leader in the early stages of Fallout and c) is saying that because the turnout was low, they should prohibit Phoenix from spending money on development, construction, expansion, or improvement of light rail until the sun turns red and bloated.

Meanwhile, Gamingforce had the closest thing to a conversation they’ve had in years, taking place over the course of a week.
Not
.much
..of
...one
....but a conversation nonetheless.

There are 47 active members. Every time I see it, I think it’s bottomed out to the point where they can sustain those numbers with just the five people who still post and the constant influx of spambot registrations.

burning question: why would anyone write a song about Chick Fil A?

I got a candy from Colombia called Max Frutacidas Limonácido and a Magic Pop which changes color from pink to orange to yellow and changes flavor and a green candy without a label that looks like a root beer barrel and tastes like lime or sour apple.

I was on Team Zach this time and Team Greg didn’t catch up to us. We’re that much better, Zach said. Team Greg included Althea along with an Ashley and an Emily whom I have never met.
One of the pumpkins needed two candles. Zach says that one of them flies in and snuffs the candle out while the other one burns for a few hours.
Harry picked up Olivia and I told her not to sneeze and Jacob said “right on cue!” She didn’t sneeze.

Kim had subtle blue in her hair and her friend had a t-shirt with various dinosaurs, none of which were depicted with feathers.
She says that tegus are more like cats than dogs because they have tantrums. The male has blue skin covering his eyelids that looks a bit like a closed nictitating membrane and that might be the idea, Kim says.
She suggested making jewelry out of the skin because that’s what people do and she said she could probably make a ball pit except with tegu skin.

Maggie was around. I let her take a picture with Itsy but I didn't let anyone else hold her because she's a really skilled escape artist.

There was a Simpsons comic parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with no awkward social commentary about myPods, just bodynatchers who prefer tepid water to beer and don't get excited over anything. I have it somewhere, probably buried under a pile of sketchbooks or in a drawer.
It ends with [spoiler]Homer in an asylum and Sideshow Bob revealing that they are all, in fact, characters in a comic book

Michael has a Simpsons comic where Cecil Terwilliger tries to get out of Sideshow Bob's shadow by murdering Lisa.

burning question: If I don’t exist… does this mean I can’t eat donuts?

It was more like the night of 1200 faces, says Zach. And a few years ago, it was more like the night of 700 faces.

We don’t have a whole lot of animals. We have a gannet with cataracts, which are usually caused by the course of aging in humans, exacerbated by smoking or vitamin C deficiencies or medications, but in other animals is likely to be caused by trauma or disease.

Rebeeca said “can I have a water?”
Jacob responded “not if you’re leaving.”
“I’m staying tomorrow,” Rebecca said.
“Then you can have one tomorrow,” Jacob said.

Jill was eating an antipasto salad. She says she eats better standing up.

Katrina was having too much fun with the megaphone. In Canada, they’re called loudhorns, says Jacob. I really hope she didn’t watch that Simpsons episode. Although if you really line up 15 megaphones, you just get an ear-splittingly obnoxious shriek. They can only make it so loud.

X. What a fantastic name, Olivia said. He'd probably drop an anvil on her if he heard that.

I noticed that the Roku screensaver looks a lot like the Good Future in a Sonic CD level.

People from the Herpetological Society brought a young Burmese python, which are legal to own here because if they escape, they’ll die come winter. They taste good, apparently. So do lionfish. He had a rosy boa and something else and a leucistic ball python.
Kaa was shedding.
Downstairs, they had a tegu, a fully grown Burmese python that was yellow and white, a few boids.

Someone carved a shark from a template but gave it a longer fin so I think it looked like a more basal shark from the Carboniferous or even Silurian, which looked roughly like our Holocene sharks, aside from Helicoprion sp, which had a tooth-whorl. We’re not really sure how that tooth-whorl worked but in 1899, they imagined it sticked out of the snout, while in 1984, they were at the front of the jaw.
And they’re closer to chimaeras than sharks anyway.
There was a ninja turtle, there was a three-eyed alien from Toy Story, there was Jason, there was a pumpkin with a Dali mustache, there was a guy on a desert island with a palm tree, there was a pumpkin π, there was a pumpkin eating another pumpkin, there was Spiderman, there was a spider in its web, there was a Day of the Dead skull with flowereyes, there was a raven or two or five, there was some kind of Lovecraftian mutated frog, there was Oogie Boogie on a white pumpkin, there was Groot, there was Godzilla and a nearby tyrannosaurus, there was one with storm clouds, there was a butterfly, there was Jack Skellington on that coil hill, there was Boba Fett and E.T. I’d have carved Vault Boy but I wasn’t able to come to pumpkin carving this year. Tyler carved a really ornate owl. The moon was full and surrounded by ripples of clouds.
I carved Tribore. Ellie’s pumpkin is foul, says Rebecca.
Rebecca, who is of the sign of the Darkening Cloud, was having dreams about carving pumpkins but the tops kept falling off. Rebecca went to Sri Lanka before the tsunami and after the civil war, though they still had to take care not to make asses of themselves around the Tamil Tigers. I thought she was talking about actual tigers. She said the medication she took for malaria made her feel really sick.
Jacob wasn’t sure whether to call the tops of the pumpkins the head or the hat. I think it should be the hat because the whole thing is the head but then I called it a head so yeah.

“We could set the whole forest on fire” said Olivia or maybe Kydada or I don’t even know. Jacob said that would be a whole different kind of [spectacle?]

On the upstairs blackboard was a blue fish with blue and yellow spinities and a fox with blue eyes and blue ears.
A woman showing her kids the place once had a biology teacher who was a young earth creationist and she can’t reconcile those. She was impressed by the fanky microscopes with the screens and zoom.

I was hearing wood frogs and Olivia thought I was talking about the Headless Horseman because they apparently didn’t notice them. Maybe they just tuned them out after hanging out in the cemetery all night. He’s wearing a gray coat and holding a Jack-o’-Lantern in his gauntleted hand, riding a horse who is just skin stretched over bones, and he says things about the dead rising or whatever. The eyes of the horse glow a venomous pale green. He reminds me of those Valhalla Knight enemies from Symphony of the Night except with a full horse and not just half of one. Also, the knight is wearing plate armor and wielding a glaive. And he has his head. In Order of Ecclesia and Dawn of Sorrow, there are Nightmares, who are half armored horse, half skeleton horses.
Final Fantasy XII has cool horse enemies too.
Olivia, or was it Nicole, doesn’t like Jack Skellington. I mix them up all the time even in more adequate lighting conditions. They bailed out halfway along with through for whatever reason. Olivia says that Zach and Harry have similar voices. I agree but I can tell the diffference.
There was a car with a pile of pumpkin goop in front of it, driven by a skeleton with a hat and wig. A sign on the side said “I brake for wildlife.”
A tractor driven by a skeleton with a sailor hat.
A neon green glow in the dark skeleton which Michael said was the most 90s thing ever.

Harry’s surprised the taxidermied opossum didn’t catch fire.

A girl carved Trogdor and I’m impressed that she knows who Trogdor is because Homestarrunner had a cult following at the end of highschool and the beginning of college.

Kanye wrote a song with the lyric "Closed On Sunday, you're my Chick-Fil-A." I kind of imagine it sounds a lot lot lot like the Megaupload Song, which incidentally, he contributed to.
I think marrying Kim il Kardashian was a manifestation of his unhingedness and not the start of it.

burning question: If Zuckerberg sees himself as Augustus Caesar, would that mean Tom is Mark Antony?

A third of Lebanon is protesting. It's just too bad Lebanon is dysfunctional by design and there's a great deal invested in keeping Lebanon dysfunctional. I'd say best case scenario but really, the only good thing to happen to Lebanon would be if they can get rid of their armed political parties and the thing where their political party and their ethnic and religious identity are one in the same (Shi'ites vote for Amal or Hezbollah, Maronites vote for the Free Patriotic Movement or Phalangists, Armenians vote for the Dashnaks, Orthodox Christians vote SSNP) and also, certain religious groups are given certain political positions. The President is always a Maronite. The Prime Minister, who seems quite irrelevant, is a Sunni Muslim. Christians get favorable ratios in the Parliament despite their dwindling percentages. The country banned Mein Kampf for being too sympathetic to Jews. On the other hand, I think that people should read Mein Kampf so that they know what a wannabe dictator sounds like. If Mein Kampf is any indication, they sound like babbling lunatics.
Michael says the right wants to turn the US into a Christian Iran. I say Lebanon is a stepping stone to that.
ninja edit: the coalitions in Lebanon are based on whether they support Syria or not, for reasons that are shit but technically true (Syria is ruled by a rabidly anti-Jewish Shi'ite government) or reasons that are complete bullshit (no, Syria, you're not anti-Imperialist, you just support different kinds of imperialism).

There was some very expired diet Mountain Dew.

Rebecca brought up Girl, Interrupted and the chickens Daisy hid under her bed. Harry was eating a rotisserie chicken. Rebecca was eating coconut noodles and celery and other veggies that she got at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant.
Harry said “if I put this chicken under my bed, the Chicken Fairy will come and give me a new chicken.”
And Jacob responded with “if you do that, a voodoo warlock will curse you.”

A man had tattoos of Princess Toadstool on his hand and of a horse egg, a feather, a question block, a fire flower on his fingers.

burning question: why would you use a term like baizuo, which originates on an online community so toxic it makes Tool or Rick and Morty fans look like Batman or Simpsons fans? Baizuo translates roughly to “lefitst with ethics” or possibly “leftist who criticizes Fascist China.”

I haven't been to the aquarium since I was in elementary school. Because I have the spatial memory of a tit, I remember the place well. There are now some harbor seals living outside and a new Science of Sharks exhibit where you can touch a ray and see some smaller sharks like pajama sharks. They feel like squooshy sandpaper.

I think some of those penguins might be the same ones I saw when I went there back in elementary school. The lifespan of a penguin in the wild is 20 years-ish, but in captivity, they can live 30 or even 40. Mostly because they don’t have to worry about evading seals or catching enough fish or breaking a limb and dying from exposure.
Myrtle the green sea turtle is approximately 95 years old.
The giant pacific octopus is most definitely new, as octopuses only live about 5 years at most. Octopuses mate once and then die. I assume that if they don’t mate, they die after a few years anyway.
The Indo-Pacific reef exhibit is totally new.

There are leafy and weedy sea dragons. There are piranhas which are usually opportunistic scavengers in the wild. It’s not like the movies, where they send a nuclear submarine to fight the piranhas and one of them swims right down the periscope and bites the guy in the eye and he’s like AAAHHHHH! AAAHHHHH AAAHHHHH and the old lady told him it would happen.
Gobbleguts are from Australia and you can tell becaue they’re called gobbleguts.

Seals are basically dogs with flippers.
Eared seals can stand up with their fins and rotate their back flippers, which are fused legs. Not very well, but better than true seals, who just crawl around on land.

Anaconda is a Sinhala word. What happened is that there’s a species of python in Sri Lanka called the anaconda and then when Europeans first encountered the boid from South America, they gave it the name anaconda because they thought they were the same thing. The Tupi and Portuguese name is sucuri or sucuriju or sucuriuba.
Anna gave birth. They can do that. They’re not quite whiptail lizards, where the females give birth to clonal females and will eventually go extinct. Nay, the males, once they grow up, mate with the females.
They can stay underwater for ten minutes.

A woman had blue hair and a hat and the word serendipity tattooed on her shoulder.

A man was playing the saxophone outside.

On a T map put their drawing of Superman punching a grey monster with the statement "We must never lose infinite hope even if it's doomsday." I see them a lot. One of them has Animal. One of them has Gollum's hand with "you are most precious to me"

Harp had a hat with an owl on it. I'm pretty sure it's not the letter M. Her friend Ava said she thinks I drew her friend once, which is entirely possible.
Trinity’s friend is an artist. Trinity plays flute and has pink hair and a piercing below her lip.
Kelsey played piano but then real life took over.

burning question: was Kanye not able to get a place in Guyana?

So now Instagram wants me to log in whenever I wan to look at someone's profile. Someone compared it to Pinterest except Pinterest stops pressuring you to make an account eventually.
I can still do tag searches. I'm not sure how long I'll be able to do that, or if the login thing is just a glitch that will be fixed by the next full moon.

Thankfully, some times I don't have to rely on Instagram at all.

The MFA was celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day and so they had some Native musicians and dancers, including a Hopi hoop dancer and an Ojibwe hoop dancer. I’m not sure if they were accompanied by singing in Hopi and Ojibwe or if he was just doing that wordless vowel thing that shows up a lot. A woman watching had nacreous hair.
A woman had a pendant with a metal butterfly and a chunk of orangey nacre.
Jennifer said that she noticed that the music of desert peoples sounds like deserts and the music of woodlands people has a lot of harmonies like the sounds of nature. She sang a deer song and a lulaby in Muskogee, and an improvized song, and an English song about boarding schools.
She may or may not sing in Skarò·rə̨ʼ which is an Iroquoian language. I definitely noticed consonants in there.

Sparrow Plainbull, a Haliwa-Saponi artist, showed off her beadwork. They're made of glass today but before glass, would be made from shell or stone.

The Kingfisher Troupe did a dance to welcome the robins in spring and say farewell to them in fall, a dance of silly walks, a wedding or communal dance about a crocodile that was brought to them long ago.

Maybe slightly NSFW?
[Click for art]

...


...


Shiela Hicks - Bamiyan


Polly Thayer - Cabbages

Soldevilla - Día y noche
I like this one but the rest of the interbutt doesn't so sorry.


I. Rice Pereira - Seven Red Squares


Grace Hartigan - Masquerade


Lee Krasner - Sunspots


Joan Mitchell


Loren MacIver - Morning Cart


A crown fashioned from silver and diamond.


Ruth Asawa and Kay Sekimachi


I didn't write too much down because I wanted to see all the performances and because I wasn't prepared for instagram to be so perfidious as to make Kobanê vomit with rage.


Haraszty is a hard name to say in a way that is both deceptive so and yet obvious. Ty is pronounced kind of like the t when Jimmy Jr. says "Tina." Sz is just "s."



You could write your thoughts. Someone wrote something in French, someone wrote greetings from Indonesia and the message "yangkray santuy brader." or "my silence is rebellion. calm waters before the storm." Someone drew a cat with a scarf saying "you go girl." Playdoh supports intersectional feminism. Say my name and I meow. Call me out and I yowl.
Playdoh respects women.
Mrrow.

"I'll never look at another canteloupe the same way," someone said.


Both the Nubian collection and Women Take The Floor are of the MFA's collection.

Women Take The Floor is a response to the world changing and everyone realizing, hey, museum collections are overwhelmingly white males because there were so many barriers to entry until very recently.
Naming five woman artists is easy. Naming five woman artists who died before 1901, not so much.

Sudan is currently where I thought Syria would be now and Syria is where I thought Sudan would be now. I guess I didn't count on Assad having a cult of personality amongst the entire political spectrum and across the entire world, while Bashir is a pariah dictator whose brutality and ineptitude reached a breaking point when his army refused to fight for him and instead threw his carcass in jail.
Meanwhile, in Syria, Trump not only cut ties with the Kurds, he cut ties with the Kurds in such a way that we're never getting them back on our side. And then he gave Turkey a greenlight EXCEPT it wasn't really a greenlight at all and now the rest of the world wants to sanction Turkey. Because, I swear, either Trump is having his Kuja moment and wants to make a giant mess for his successor to clean up, or he's helping his pal Vlad the Poloniumer.

The bed there is a replica. For all their Egyptian influences, instead of mummifying their dead, the Nubians would place them on a bed of rawhide lacing with inlays of hippopotamus ivory hyenas and ibexes. I think I saw it a long time ago. I swear there was an exhibit on Egyptian furniture back in the early 90s or maybe I saw something like that when I was at the Smithsonian in 2000.

On the other hand, they really really really liked making shawabti.

They made ornate coffins but the dampness and insects rotted them away and all that remains is the eyes.

Faience.

Later on, they switched from heiroglyphs to the Meroitic script. We know what the letters are but we have no idea what the words mean because we're not sure how they relate to other languages.

Emma is from Albany, where they steam a good ham, not that I’d know because I had Portuguese paella the last time I was in upstate New York. Emma likes to write fantasy stories and started out writing fanfiction and she also likes to take pictures.

Asia does not lend her name to the continent. The continent most likely got its name from a Hittite or Akkadian word.

Hannah has pink hair and Matthew has gauge earrings. Matthew said I really captured his essence.
There was a woman with a gearwork raven t-shirt.

burning question: why did the radscorpion cross the road?

I realized that Lady Bird came out in 2017 and I was thinking it came out in the distant past. Trump is having his Kuja moment, which makes sense, because they're both sociopathic narcissists.

Gray, who has a tattoo of some black gems, of a feather, of a newt trapped in amber being pierced by a dagger, the skull of a Jackson’s chameleon, was back with the beardie.
Tyler has tattoos of a grackle perched on a skull and spiderwebs on one arm, on her other arm, more skulls and Lego Catwoman. She has a corn snake named Fred.
Someone had a hedgehog but I didn’t see it.

Rebecca is new. For lunch, she had tortellini and pesto. Christabel had what looks like minestrone. Christabel fried some apple slices with what I think is cinnamon and sugar.

We were talking about her ideal temperatures. I like mid-70s to low-90s and hate when a) it’s sunny but cold, especially in april or may when the sun is really bright but the air is still stupidly cold or b) when it’s cool and humid.
Michael told of a professor he had who said that visiting Vietnam was like visiting another planet because of how different the climate was there. Rebecca was in the Amazon rain forest and said it was so hot and humid there.

I found out about an rpg called deadEarth and it’s a bog standard post-apocalyptic setting with a few cool ideas like a mutagenic lake surrounded by weird trees, that is made amazing in an Ed Wood way by rolling for mutations. One of them is "You are a mad whack voodoo ninja." One of them allows you to challenge Moloch, the Keeper of Death, when he emerges from the Netherworld to harvest the souls of the recently dead. Some are mundane things like "apparently everyone you meets thinks you'll make a great butler". Many of them cause the character to die during character creation. One makes you die the moment you encounter water. There was a jungle guide that never came to be, which is too bad, because that's actually an interesting premise.
The creator of this game made a post saying he didn't know what he was doing and he was 19 at the time and that he takes solace knowing that people enjoyed it.
(Someone theorized that this was in fact written by a group of four or five people who each write something without knowing what anyone else has written)
What’s so bad it’s horrible is finding these things online. It was released for free once upon a time, but the site has vanished into the aether. What you find instead of fans circulating this is junk sites.

Pam Uphoff just released the 46th book of Wine of the Gods. Jeez, Goosebumps had 62, once a month, and there’s a reason not all of them are The Ghost Next Door, and Goosebumps books are constrained only by their own internal logic and not a series-wide logic. Unless they’re sequels. And those are usually the worst ones. Unless we’re talking about Night of the Living Dummy II.
Michael thinks that Monster Blood IV was never actually released.
Gor has 38 books. There was a huge gap between 25 and 26 because DAW stopped publishing them. John Norman blames feminism and I blame Wharfinger’s Law of Diminishing Sci Fi Sequels.

In my headcanon, Dolph is of age to legally buy alcohol but he uses a fake ID because he doesn't want Apu to know he's still in elementary school at 21.

burning question: Radscorpions: What's so rad about them? Who are these people that think mutated scorpions are so rad?

Gray is an art student who had an assignment to combine two animals into one and make a sculpture of it and picked the honey possum and the pangolin, which is essentially an armored honey possum. Gray once saw a sea otter and was amazed at how much bigger it was compared to a river otter. Gray once heard that human milk tastes like the milk in your bowl of corn flakes. I read a similar description in a book once.
The idea of giant sloths terrify Gray, although they were most likely herbivores or opportunistic scavengers who probably could flip a glyptodont (think a mammalian tortoise the size of a VW beetle) and eat it but probably wouldn’t. Gray’s friend works with cancer and limb regeneration research and is always showing Gray photographs of axolotls with six legs.
Gray thinks that the coolest shark is the goblin shark or the cookie cutter shark and Michael agrees.
Jared has a tattoo of the Shiekah symbol among other things. Jared has a collection of spiders, snakes, lizards, and centipedes. Jared has a pin with a cuttlefish on it. Jared works at the aquarium and I learned that Anna eats mostly rats and rabbits with the occasional guinea pig, and they usually eat peccaries, tapirs, capybaras, and even caimans in the wild. They had a bearded dragon named Dova with them so I had to introduce them to our Dova.

I think that if we saw hallucigenia, opabina, and anomalocaris in our daily lives, we’d think goats were weird. I said this because I noticed Ellie.
Ellie is a unicorn. I say this because I'm pretty sure the actual unicorn legend originates from oryxes (oryges?) and gazelles with missing horns.

A woman brought in what we think is a young red squirrel. She (not the squirrel, kupo) has tattoos of flowers and a sun with spokes and a face and a crescent moon with a face.

Once Christabel served on a jury involving a love triangle, two guys who each had children with a woman, and one stabbing the other's guts out.

Oh yeah, since Dan Simmons said something stupid about Greta Thunberg on Facebook although he’s had shit views this entire century and somehow Hyperion is selling a lot of copies. I guess it's because they trend older and have more income to throw away on that second and third copy.
I read Hyperion in freshman year of high school, that is to say, winter of 2000, and reread it in sophomore year, that is to say, the spring of 2001.
Hyperion’s framing story was bleh but I thought the Priest’s tale was really good, the Soldier’s Tale and the Poet’s tale were pretty good, the Scholar’s tale was rather dull, the Detective’s tale was ok, and I didn't like the Consul's tale.
Fall of Hyperion was a mess with the occasional good part. Also, a lot of things that happen are completly retconned in the Endymion duology.
Endymion had a great presence, that is to say, a road trip through various worlds after the farcaster network that linked them fell apart, all while being chased by space Catholics who, spoiler alert, were really just pawns of evil artificial intelligences. Rise of Endymion took that and ground to a complete fucking halt so Aenea could spout philosophy. All the mysteries from Hyperion, about the Shrike, the Labyrinths, the Cruciforms, are all explained, but it does so in a really unsatisfactory way.

Larry Correia is the only person in the known universe who liked Olympos, I think. My opinion towards Ilium can be summed up with: I lost the book when I was halfway through and couldn’t be fucked to replace it.
They really did take their sweet time with a paperback release.
The premise of “Trojan War on Mars” would’ve been done better by either Glen Cook or Paul McAuley, depending on what you want out of it.

Still, you'd think that Simmons was everything they hate about science fiction. It's almost as if it's about politics before anything else.

John C. Wright is saying that Trump needs to remove the 2 term limit. I wonder why he doesn't just ask him to extend the presidential term by a couple of years or hold an election where he wins 95% of the vote by running unopposed.
It won't happen. While the Democrats are quite skilled at shooting themselves in the foot, this is a bit too dramatic.

burning question: when's the last time you saw a super mutant... get a cat out of tree? Never! Know why? Uhhh... because super mutants don't rescue cats... They kill mercilessly!

It was a beautiful day and it didn’t really feel like the last of the concerts this year.

I didn't find anything interesting at Brattle Books. I also needed to use the bathroom.

There was a booth for the Boston 8-Bit collective, manned by a guy with faded cerulean hair and tattoos of Gir from Invader Zim and a Gundam.
One of the posters had Jason Voorhees ripping off Mario's head. The other one, for Mei Ohara, has Zombie Scarlett O'Hara from Uninvited wearing a slightly different playing the violin and holding a haunted Game Boy. The ghost slithering out of the ajar doorway is trying to grab the Game Boy.
"The Unicorn Princess creates low-fi music by combining drum machines and vintage syntheziers with loop machines, guitar and flute." Sounds intriguing.

Lockette are Brigitte, Gabby, Tracy, and Ashley. One of them, I want to say Tracy, has a tattoo of the great owl from The Secret of NIMH on one arm, and tattoos of stars and lily flowers, a penguin and a squid, a peach in color on her other arm, a two-headed dog on her leg. She said it was the earliest show they’ve played by many hours.

Opposite People play a hybrid of Bollywood music, afrobeat, Ethiopian jazz, and funk. It's a reference to a Fela Kuti song about his aggravation with mindless nonconformity, and if The Mad Genius Club and Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis has taught me anything, it's that mindless nonconformity is a lot like mindless conformity.

Wrought Iron Hex plays heavy rock.

Coffin Salesman played at the Rock City Stage. They had guitar and accordion and call themselves punk folk but on their recordings, they have fiddle and drums and organ. There were problems with the Tiny Oak stage acoustically so they moved it under a maple tree. This really didn't work out. While there are ways to have three songs playing at once sound good, please refer to that time I went to the Davis Museum and Jenny Olivia Johnson had her work there, it didn't really work here. At least they didn't put the stage in the beer garden like I thought they'd do.
I don't know if Jeanette played.

Set Fire was the band with Jim, AKA Beardsley McSkullshirt and Joshua whom I thought were in Coffin Salesman and so I crammed them in that page, and Jess, who has tattoos of daisies.

Analog Heart has a new-ish EP out.

Vanessa and Diane of Vintage String had matching pendants of gold covered in verdigris-green floral swirls. I drew them before they played various covers from Beethoven to Beyoncé on violin and viola. They finished off with a cover of Smooth Criminal.

The Cast Irons describe themselves as alt-americana/alt-pop/alt-indie/alt-alt.

Blindspot is alt-rock.

Tracy has purple and teal and black hair has tattoos of a face in profile with a necklace of triangles on her arm, a faery with her wings spread against the moon, which looks more like a gas giant or an ocean planet, and long legs. On the nape of her neck is a bejeweled moth and some flowers which she said hurt.

The woman at KCUF's table had a dog and a pendant of the sun and moon with faces and with Mayan glyphs in gold that her mother got while in Mexico.

Kate Girardi played a coever of Uh huh. Jade Bird, not Imogen Heap. It was really good and I can’t find it anywhere. No Control is a song about a crappy relationship, for lack of better words, she was in a few years back. Her songs are written about her life experiences.

A woman had dark brown hair, an octopus ring, a horseshoe pendant, a rainbow bracelet and a green bracelet.


Three At Home was described by the Only Humans as stuffing Mumford and Sons into a nuclear bomb.
Mary has an Atlas Lab sticker on her keyboard bag.

There was a woman with green and black hair and a shirt that had poofy sleeves and prints of cherubs, that is to say, angel babies and not Final Fantasy chimeras. Her friend had her dark hair in braids.

Baluchitherium was described as the hairiest band in Boston.
A paraceratherium is essentially a giant rhinoceros without any horns and legs that are longer proportionate to their body. Indricotherium and Baluchitherium may or may not be distinct genera but there aren’t any complete skeletons. They lived in temperate latitude Eurasia and also Baluchistan. We know they’re the largest land mammal but we don’t know exactly how large they are.
Rhinoceros horns aren't medicine and they aren't even real horns. Horns have a bony core.

Bird Language is ambient pop-rock.

Michelle has an astronaut (she said that should be obvious, but I wasn’t sure if he was an astronaut or an old fashioned diver) with a shattered helmet holding a carnation in his hand.
A man had a tattoo of a woman with blue hair in an old fashioned diving helmet and a rose and a woman in a Raygun Gothic space helmet surrounded by stars. and lower down, the Rebel Alliance crest.
A man had a tattoo of a skeletal hand writing XIII with a quill pen, a coffin with Home Sweet Home, a stick figure with an oversized witch’s hat.

A woman had “so it goes” written on her arm.

Carissa Johnson played acoustic guitar, flying solo this time. But that’s how these songs start out. She has tattoos that I didn’t see last time because they were covered by her jacket sleeve: an ornate design of spiderwebs and flora that I rendered as abstract swirls, a face, a raven’s feather.
She played Badlands, which is probably my favorite song from the album. She played a few new songs, one that she’s never performed before that I really like. She played a song that isn’t really a love song at all but people think it is. That might be I Always Will.

Radio Compass describes themselves as dreampunk. Angela has a tattoo of lunar phases on one arm and a trefoil and Ultima’s sigil and a tidal wave and swirls of wind on the other arm. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s Ultima. Jill, the drummer, has a tattoo of a snail and a green frog and a wolf’s head. Myra Kerry didn’t have any noticeable tattoos.
Sadie has a tattoo of a frog in a pink tutu juggling daggers and red balls and hair bright and pink enough to be seen from space.
the guitarist was wearing a shirt that said 1 million women can’t be wrong.

For whatever reason, Singh's Roti did not deign to show up.
I got an Indian salad from Spyce with a Y. They want to be different from Spice in Cambridge, which I believe changed their name more distinctive. There were potatoes and peas in a sauce, tamarind chutney, yogurt, and what I think is rajhbog mix with puffed rice and raisins.

Maddie has long dark eyelashes and those face earrings that I saw someone else wearing and her bag depicts Quentin Blake’s drawing of Matilda. While some people have compared my art to Quentin Blake, she didn't.
There was a small kid wearing a shirt with a cake and a message saying that it’s her birthday even though she said it wasn’t, so either she wants cake but has no money or doesn’t want to pay for it, or that’s the only clean thing in the house. I’ve been there.
Her mom has a cat tattoo and a cat bag and has both cats and dogs. She says that pugs are a lot like cats.

burning question: speaking of beer, did TwitchCon really think it was a good idea to pre-pour a bunch of cups of beer and leave them out in the open?

You want to know what bewilders me more than Gamingforce still being around? Spambots with “biography: Man” in their profile still being a thing. I remember dealing with a plague of them in 2008.

As a followup to something i said last week, I think if Trump wins or at least loses narrowly, the Republicans will field Bannon or Miller in 2024. If Trump loses decisively, they’ll probably pick a racist populist unassociated with Trump’s administration.

The Free Speech brigade is threatening to defund Duke University and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill because they have deemed them insufficiently anti-Muslim.
That is such a Houthi tactic.

Ellie has green hair and a fat skink named Bob. Meghan has a ferret named Odie. Jess has a boa constrictor.
Jonathan had a new Russian Blue tabby hybrid named Kiki.
Bush the Younger is like Harry the Super Mutant. Bush the Elder was fairly intelligent but not as much as Nixon, but had a tendency of going off on weird tangents. His vice president, Dan Quayle, did not have the excuse of being exposed to FEV. As far as we know.
Olivia (I actually forget who’s who. I think Nicole has tan skin and dark hair while Olivia is blonde and freckled) was just eating pasta sauce with a fork. She was going to make actual pasta but didn’t have the time so now it’s just stew. She also had mangoes and blueberries. She said the mangoes weren’t ripe enough.
Jacob once ate crepes at a sushi place. And they weren’t fish crepes.
She was wondering if Harry was really eating cat food. She has a friend who likes tuna so his mother got him a tin and it had a picture of a cat on it.
One time Jacob had lunch at 6:30 in the evening, and at that point, its basically dinner.
Michael says that Morrowind has an extremely dated combat system but some excellent worldbuilding. On the other hand, Oblivion isn’t that good. Jacob hates the way enemy levels scale. Michael says level scaling enemies rarely works out. The only one I like is Lightning Returns, where enemies level up as time goes on.
I think Xenoblade had the worst system of enemy levels. Basically, you get a severe penalty to evade and to your chance to hit when your level is lower than the enemy's. And the enemies get that same penalty and you get a pretty severe hit to your experience.

Harry said it feels cold and I agree with him. On the other hand, Nicole thinks it's warmer than it's been and maybe she's acclimated to it. Or I don't know, maybe she isn't there on weekends. For the last few days of summer and the first day of autumn, it's been very warm. I think today it peaked at 91 or even 92. Maybe the air conditioning is compensating for that.

I am so surprised Fallout 2 got away with the Hubologists. And then threw in a reference to A Canticle For Leibowitz for good measure.
burning question: Who cares if CELEBRITIES endorse Hubology? Shouldn't I make my own choices?

I've been having recurring dreams about the end of the world.

It was Hempfest so the train was crowded. I'm not sure if Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is still attorney general and the answer is apparently not. But Barr is just as terrible. There was a protest about climate change yesterday.
Lyn wanted to toss the ice from her drink in the trash but the train doors closed on her.
Lyn didn’t want to get back off the train to throw it out but reconsidered with the luck she was having.
Anna used to do art a lot and wants to get back in it. She has a pendant of four crescents around an opal or some other opalescent gem. Anna has brunette hair fading to blonde while Lyn has a mop of black.

Jess knew I was drawing her. Along with Emma, Sara, and Hayley. Jess has a helix of hair in front.

Becca has a tattoo of a gearwork bird on her leg and flowers on her arm.
She studied art in school but now she's in school for opthamology. She showed me some portraits she did of pop cultural figures.

I found Icarus Descending, the third and final book in the Winterlong sequence. I’m sure I’ll find Aestival Tide eventually. I feel like their SF/F section is smaller than it was.
I also found Armistice but I already have that.

I learned that it's faster to copy every image I want to my hard drive and then upload them en masse.

The museum cafe had Thai beef wraps with marinated flank steak, mango, carrot, cabbage slaw, mesclun, cilantro, mint, spicecd mango aioli, in a garlic herb tortilla, and grilled chicken with a sauce of eggplant, tomato, capers, green olives, onions, golden raisins, and romaine. Yum.

[Click For Art]

They got a new Nam June Paik sculpture, depicting George Mačiūnas with a television at his heart, which you can't really see in the picture, and a toy robot at his feet. It's just "untitled."


Fluxus Express
This is Paik too. He didn’t just use neon lights and crt televisions. Weisbaden is a city in Germany, site of the first Fluxus festival, and Ulan Bator is the capital of Mongolia.


Otto Piene - Light Drum and Electric Anaconda.
The lights are illuminated in purple. The light drum projects light on the ceiling.


Kara Walker - USA Idioms

Freedom: A Fable

Cotton Hoards In A Southern Swamp

There is an exhibit on migration and displacement.


Dos XX. Danh Vō (Danh is his given name and I am unsure what if any diacritics to put on it, Võ is his family name.) lived in Denmark for most of his life. He gathers up discarded cardboard boxes and sends them to Thailand where they are retraced with gold leaf. He picks brands associated with he conquest of foreign markets. Dos Equis, a Mexican beer company, was sold to a Dutch corporation in 2011.


Bosco Sodi constructed a brick wall and invited passersby (really? The plural of passerby is passersby? I just can’t. English is the Microsoft Windows of languages.) to dismantle it as a response to the heightened rhetoric of building a wall on the border and making Mexico pay for it and now making deals with El Salvador to force people to live there when I thought El Salvador is a country where everyone’s leaving. also, Trump, you big dumb idiot, they can completely bypass El Salvador and go through Honduras.
Also, yes, I know things can go south and I know it's only been 30 years since Noriega, but last I checked, people aren’t desperate to flee Costa Rica and Panama on foot.
These bricks were made using traditional techniques in Oaxaca, Mexico.
It's called Muro, which is Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian for wall.

Do Hu Suh made a basement corridor from polyester fabric on pipes. It’s rather flimsy but it has some real attention to every detail. It asks whether it is possible to reconstruct a place from memories.

Remains by Willie Doherty depicts a burning car. He grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and wonders what Brexit will bring.


Eugenio Dittburn - 2nd History of the Human Face
He began his career during the Pinochet dictatorship. And so he’d send his paintings elsewhere via airmail
It depicts photographs of criminals and indigenouos people and faces drawn by his young daughter. i’m not sure what these people did to be criminals. Probably had the wrong politics.
Also, I found the sound clip of Ralph Wiggum shouting Helicopter! Helicopter! It's pretty much the current state of the far right. Latin American dictators are not people to admire, unless your name is Ronald Reagan or Tulsi Gabbard.


Emily Jacir gathered cobblestones from streets in Italy and cast them in synthetic gypsum. In times of unrest, people would throw them and pile them into barricades.


Zarina - Home is a Foreign Place


Clarissa Tossin - spent (gasto)
trash from her bathroom dipped in porcelain and then fired in a kiln.

Vija Celmiņš is not related to the Pērkonkrusts guy as far as I can tell.



At the nearby Carpenter Center, there was an exhibit of Anna Oppermann works. I don't speak German but I think this big altar thing is about the banality of being a housewife.


A man on the train had a tattoo of Vault Boy on his leg. I just beat Fallout 2 a few days ago. Fallout 1 starts out rather easy, while Fallout 2 starts out rather hard. A woman had tattoos of leaves and lilies. A man had a rodo in a space helmet.
John Mulaney and Pete Davidson are not superheroes, they are comedians. Also, I can not read my own handwriting sometimes. Morgan was noshing on a pita sandwich and some french fries that she got from her school cafeteria.

oh… oh wow… Lady Pills has a new album. And it’s really fucking good. It’s different. It’s definitely more abstract.

burning question: Blood is red, how can I make it run red? I can't very well do that. Hmmm. I need to think about this. Go away!

I read Alice Walker's poem about Jews and the only difference between her poetry and the D- Poems of Jeremy Bloom is that the D- Poems of Jeremy Bloom are meant to be funny. It's one of the few examples of trying to write something that's so bad it's good and actually succeeding. I don't know if I brought up a Bad Fanfiction Contest but let it be said that none of the submissions were funny. I can't find it any more.
I have a friend who read David Icke but in the "ha ha ha, look at this guy, he really believes in this shit. He's nuttier than a bag of pistachios" way.

Michael is reading The Iron Dream. The premise of the novel is that Hitler became a pulpy science fiction author rather than a dictator and it's a commentary on actual views by people like Campbell and Niven-Pournelle. The American Nazi Party has endorsed it because they don't understand satire.

It's.... sigh... September 11th retrospective time.

Mike M, a Hoyt’s, biggest gripe with Bush the Younger is that he wasn’t sufficiently authoritarian for a war on Islam. And by that, I mean censorship of the press and the pre-emptive jailing of anyone not sufficiently loyal. That kind of fits into their whole schtick of “Freedom of Speech is for us, not you.” And then one person, probably C P S Hofield, thinks bush should have responded by picking four majority-muslim cities at random. I think they would be rigged, but it really depends on whether CPS Hofield wants to punish traditional enemies of Bush (read: Tehran, Baghdad, Khartoum, and I dunno, maybe Tripoli) or just kill as many people as possible (Jakarta, Karachi, Dhaka, and Cairo). Someone else said that a republic needs enemies.

Neocons want to expand the empire. Paleocons want to sporadically bomb other countries to keep them from gettin too uppity but refrain from foreign entanglements. I think if Gothelittle’s proposal to make everyone live on an acre and a half of land ever gets off the ground and doesn’t result in massive starvation and death, we’ll need to annex parts of Canada and Mexico. They’ll have to loot and pluder, Michael says, but it’s a consequence rather than a feature.

Michael says that he thinks the next presidential candidate the Republicans field will be a neoconservative and there’s a cycle of principled conservatives, racist quasi-populists, and neo-cons. I think we’re going to get another racist quasi-populist partially because a) Trump's personality cult is so strong and partially because b) neoconservatism has been thoroughly discredited but it’s been discredited from a perspective of “we can’t force the Arabs to adopt a socially conservative free-market quasi-republic because they’re too stupid for that.”

One of the Fallout vaults has all entertainment tapes removed except for those of a particuarly unfunny comedian. Michael's imagining Gallagher with a super sledge.

Once I watched a Let's Play of Fallout 2 and she told Lynette about the power plant and got banned from Vault City because Lynette is Alice Walker, and then got addicted to Jet. That's a permanent hit to your action points.

Amanda has a ball python and Kelsey has a hedgehog and Jess has three ferrets.

Olivia's new. Olivia was eating what I think are sweet potatoes and brussels sprouts sauteed in what she thinks is butter and lemon zest. Yum!

We did a skunk procedure outside. Apparently, the skunk's femur was completely and utterly fucked up and he got his scent glands removed so he can live out the rest of his life in captivity.

Tilly & Cleo were around and they were screaming. It might mean "we're bored" and it might mean "we're single." The tropics are very noisy.
There was an African Grey in boarding as well.
Greg told me that parrots and ravens can pronounce sounds like b and p despite their lack of lips because they don't vocalize with their mouth, they vocalize with their syrinx. The syrinx has labia (phrasing) closing it off.

Kanye West and Kenny G are collaborating on some music and I'm kinda hoping for World War III. I just hope that the Houthis don't make it through.

burning question: I'm busy. I almost have the solution to the environmental problems fucking this world over, but I can't stop thinking about purple dinosaurs. Is this a problem?

Someone wrote “beef” next to Wellington at an orange line map.

I met a pomeranian described as a cottonball with legs, an Afghan named Pete, a few more Pomeranians, a pug, a long-haired Akita named Gabby with glo-sticks around her legs who shrinks down to half-size when she gets wet, a gray and white shih-tzu named Tesla, a dog from Aruba, an Australian shepherd, a collie and a yellow lab, and Luna, a newfie who is not quite the tallest dog I've ever seen but at 200 pounds, may be the heaviest.

It rained from 1:30 to 2:30 so everyone played a truncated set and rushed through everything instead of talking about their songs and bantering. Rain twice a week in September of all months. I thought it was going to be a Mayfair-style fiasco and they even had a giant fucking beer garden instead of the vendor stalls they had last year. I'd say something about beer being fit for swine and Brett Kavanaugh but I can't figure out if I'm being redundant or just an asshole. There was still an evil smell on the east side of the amphitheater but it was less marker and more mulch. I hate mulch. So painfully.
Bleach The Sky played Machine Head, one of the few Bush songs I like. I like Glycerine and Letting The Cables Sleep as well. They played Cherub Rock. They played Even Flow. They played Under the Bridge by The Red Hot Chili Peppers. I like the song but it has a very slow start to it and I only have Californication. They played a few originals and I can’t place who they sound like to me. From their sound test, I think they were planning a cover of a song from Jar of Flies.

Cook Bag plays power-pop.

Carissa Johnson plays pop-punk on overdrive. Not what I expected. I don’t know how I’ve heard of her. Probably Vanylanad or Allston Pudding or something. I don't know why I'm saying Carissa Johnson because she has a band and they're called the Cure-Alls.


The Somerville Symphony Orchestar is neither an orchestra nor is symphonic and they’re probably from Malden. Nay, they’re a klezmer band with a jazz ensemble, that is to say, guitar, bass, drums, saxophone, and trombone. I’m assuming Jewish because of the saxophonist’s Jew-fro and the fact that they had a song called Borscht on the Rocks, which transmogrified into surf-rock reggae halfway through. The website says Balkans. Although sometimes they sound Romany or middle eastern or Ethiopian, and the first two make sense. The last makes sense if you assume one of them went through a Mulatu Astatke phase. They covered System of a Down’s Chop Suey.

Grooversity was back. It spit a little rain but that stopped by the time the fireworks happened. There were three boats with Trump 2020 flags on them and I was hoping a spark would cause them to catch fire.

I met two women, a vocalist and a violinist, who were from Italy and were here studying music at Berklee. On the train was a conversation in what I think was Russian. Thing is, I’m good with telling what language something is when it’s written but when it’s spoken, the only ones I can immediately identify are Nuxalk and English. Mostly because of xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓, Eventually they start throwing around words like nyet or privyet or spasibo or dobry den. And I know that Mir means either peace or world depending on the context. Fallout has a cult following in Russia, apparently. Michael finds that unsurprising, as post-Communist Russia is basically a lot of wasteland and a lot of places that are like mashups of the Den, New Reno, and the Enclave.

burning question: but seriously, how the hell are there so many rankings of the songs of Californication that are completely wrong? This Velvet Glove is the best song on that album.

We have one intern right now, Nicole. Nicole has a pet minpin and was eating mozzarella and basil flavored crackers. Christabel was eating vegetable delight from a Thai place and Jacob was eating an apple. He says that everything tastes better when it's free.
We got eight admissions Monday. Several baby squirrels who seem to be doing well, a skunk who is DOA and needs to be tested for rabies, a modo with neurological issues and a gull with spine damage of some sort, both who were euthanized, a chipmunk with neurological issues.

I've got nothing else and I'm hoping things will pick up again. I'm amazed at how short the original Fallout is. I did not, however, forget that in the early parts of Fallout 2, there isn't much combat at all, but the fights you do have to go through are really bad, and that corrupted save file did not let me forget that. Fuck golden geckos always and forever. But this time I'm good. I've not only saved in multiple slots, I've copied the files outside of the Windows virtual drive where you can't touch them. Mwa ha ha. I'm playing both games as a female character this time, mostly for the dialogue changes, as Fallout 2 doesn't have a perk that allows you to deal extra damage to opposite sex opponents in a game where a large majority of your human enemies are men.

I dreamt that I was in a post-apocalyptic world and one of the locales was a university town before the war, with stately buildings and great green trees and blue skies, unlike the rest of the world. There was an airship that would take animal keepers or travelers to other settlements, and an underground base.

As always, it looks like it's going to rain.

burning question: in what fucking reality are these terfs living in where Sharon, not Katelyn, is a typical name for a 35 year old woman?

Allisandra remembers me from the last time and she still has a picture so she knows exactly what day it’s on. She sings but she doesn’t sing in a band or have any music out there but maybe someday & somewhere. She has a tattoo of flowers on her ankle. She was born in Messina and has recently traveled to Sicily, where she ate pizza with broccoli on it and I’m reminded of Inside Out and pasta with pistachios and isn’t sure about pronunciation of the second vowel, which I’d IPA for you if I understood it, but I think it depends on the region, and swordfish and eggplant. Brittany is most impressed with a church in which someone sat on his back painting scenes and she can barely do that upright. She took a video of a jellyfish and I wondered if it was an Aurelia aurita or moon jelly, which has that distinctive four leaf clover of gonads. She wasn’t sure but what she does know is that they hurt when you get stung by one. Salvini’s coup stunt boomeranged on him and Italy really dodged a bullet.
Brittany has a scarf printed with strawberries. She’s Armenian. She doesn’t want to visit Armenia because she expects to be imprisoned and never make it back home again. She’s been to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and pointed out that Germans like their beer warm. On The Simpsons, I think Homer offers a beer to the Germans who buy the power plant and they’re like “my English is not perfect, but I have to tell you your beer is like swill to us. Only a swine would drink this beer”
I feel the same way about Georgia. I’d love to visit but with my luck, Russia will pick that time to annex the country.
Jamie has a tattoo of a five-petaled flower on one shoulder and a tattoo of an abstract paisley swirl and a flower bumblebee obscured by the sleeve of her shirt. On her leg, she has a sunflower and the outline of a dove, on her foot is a heart, on her other foot is the peace symbol, which various crazies will say is a broken cross but is actually the semaphore letters N and D for nuclear disarmament. Her ring is turquoise and her earrings are gold.
Emma has a tattoo on her foot that says “the other side of fear” which Google tells me is "El otro lado del miedo.” I did this backwards; her tattoo is in Spanish.

A woman had ὣς οἵ γ᾽ ἀμφίεπον τάφον Ἕκτορος ἱπποδάμοιο tattooed around her arm. It's the last line of the Iliad and is something like "and so they buried Hector." It's Ancient Greek so Google Translate is no help here. "As the Hippodrome Hippodrome Tomb" is not a real sentence unless you're concussed.
My ability to read Greek is the biggest thing that's stuck with me from college.

April has a tattoo of the eight planets and the moon near Earth amongst constellations of freckles, a tattoo that looks like a flying saucer and arrow fused together, a tattoo of a flower. She has a vesica piscis shaped pendant with swirls.
Elizabeth, which I misheard as Eliste of all things, has giant flower earrings made of thin wire that look like tattoos because the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows.
Maeve has a shirt from the Fuzztival.

I had a blue raspberry soda from Harmony Springs.

Pagliacci has a sung introduction that summarizes the plot.
In Casta Diva, sung in Italian because this isn't a John Cage opera and there aren't enough texts in Gaulish to make an entire libretto, Norma offers a sprig of mistletoe to the moon goddess asking for peace between the Gauls and the Romans because she's in love with a Roman proconsul.
They also did a duet from Norma but I can't quite remember the context
Händel’s Giulio Cesare has fuck all to do with William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It’s a scene with Sesto, stepson of Pompey and Cornelia.
While Julius Caesar himself was played by a castrato, Sesto was played by a soprano.
In L'elisir d'amore, Belcore convinces Nemorino to join the army so he can get the money he needs to buy the love potion he needs and then gloats about how smart he is and how brilliant his plan to get rid of his rival is.
The Bear is an opera by William Walton and has only three sung roles. Yelena Ivanova Popova sings about her dead husband, who cheated on her.
They finished with a quintet by the smugglers of Carmen.

There's a collection of recently acquired photographs at the MFA, some of them iconic, most of them the first or only or highest quaity print made.

According to the pins on Theodora's bag, she’s Bulgarian and loves baroque music. She’s studying vocals at the New England conservatory. Her shirt also depict Bulgaria, as does her pendant, with a heart around Kazanluk or Stara Zagora.

Kendra was reading The Outsiders so I asked her what year she was born in and I was prepared to be sad because she was born after I read it but turns out she was born in 1996, the year I believe I read The Outsiders. And also That Was Then, This Is Now, for a class in middle school. I forget what else we read but I want to say Tuck Everlasting and A Study In Scarlet. I think we also watched the movie, which was not directed by Francis Ford Coppola and it shows. And it doesn't even try to be a period piece. No, they just shifted it to the 1980s because they had no budget.
She has a tattoo of a skull and a rose on her leg.
I know someone with a cat named Sodapop. I don't know if that's a reference to The Outsiders or not.

According to a man's shirt, his spirit animal was a white bunny wielding chainsaws. Looks like the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog updated his arsenal.
Someone had a bag from a place called Mooncake and all I can think is chookity pok.

The Straight Pride parade was today. I don't think pride is an emotion these people should be feeling. I'd have probably gone there to heckle and/or protest but I kinda forgot about it.
burning question: what is this feeling I'm feeling right now? It's like I'm sad for another person. Is that a thing? Am I going crazy?

The trees around the museum were the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
I like how they painted one of the stumps.
The original forests of Cape Cod weren’t the pine barrens we see today, the pitch pines, the red cedar, and the scrub oak merely filled in after settlers and a series of forest fires left the land barren.


[Click for art. If you are here about Fallout, you can ignore this.]

The stories say that sailors constructed sailor’s valentines on long journeys when they had nothing to do. But then some historians and collectors wondered where they got all the materials to make them and why all of the seashells used are from the West Indies, specifically Barbados (wentletraps, tellin, keyhole limpet, mussel, cowrie, chiton, mitre, olive, dove, emerald nerite snail, strigilla), and not, say, Australia or the South Pacific or the Philippines. And it turns out locals made these in workshops and sold them to sailors. You can learn to make your own! All you need is 875 dollars and a time machine that can take you back to mid-August 2019. And if you have a time machine, it won’t be difficult to obtain 875 dollars.

Sea whips are an order of coral that don’t produce calcium carbonate skeletons.
Squilla is a genus of mantis shrimp and those antler-looking things are their claws.
It used to be an inn so one of the walls can detach and raise up for use as a ballroom. The ceilings are rather low and the floor is uneven although that might just be age.


I’m impressed that she could carve an urchin’s test like that. Test coming from a word meaning amphora, not from a word meaning testimony (to virility)


these are the internal shells of a spirula, a ten-legged deep ocean cephalopod with an internal shell that will occasionally wash up on the beach.


this conch is made from clay by the artist Valerie Hegarty.


if you can’t tell, Bradford’s Iceberg (actually by Hegarty) is warped, melting into the oil-dark sea.


it’s based on this painting by William Bradford


the daguerrotype indicates that this obelisk was made in honor of a deceased family member, probably in the middle of the 19th century.


Peter Gabel - Mermaid’s Dollhouse - a 9-inch tall house with urchin test domes and spinity light fixtures and a gastropod shell mirror, upon a bed of Bahamas sand. Or maybe it was Bermuda. Same thing, right? No. Not at all.


sorry about the watermark.


There's a bookstore nearby with an impressive collection of old sci-fi magazines but I had neither the time to browse nor the money to buy anything.

Delvina has candy-colored pink hair and I think she said something about mixing all the dyes together and that was the result.

Here's my experience with getting Fallout 2 to run on VirtualBox:
Windows 98 runs Fallout but it’s a) slow and b) has no music. Fuck that. I’m not sure if I can get it to run with a lot more tweaking. NINJA EDIT: The music doesn't work (and doesn't work on other versions of Windows either) because the installer is an idiot and puts the music files in the wrong folder. This game is the Final Fantasy VI of western RPGs, in that somehow a buggy mess results in a really good game.
Windows 95 refuses all efforts to run on both VirtualBox and DOSBox. Windows 95 bewilders me. In fact, Windows itself bewilders me. Some of it is just a case of “damn you, muscle memory,” aka my Super Mario World memory of dying to the first enemy because THEY SWITCHED THE JUMP AND ACTION BUTTON ON THE SNES FOR NO GOOD REASON or every time I play Xenosaga. My theory is that Windows is a feedback loop of “people use it because it’s successful and it’s successful because people use it.”
Good Old Games used to have a Mac port of Fallout that I think used a modified DosBox. I can't get it anymore.
Windows XP, upon installing Fallout, shows the introductory video, it’s amazing, and then you get either a green screen or a smear of psychedelic color. And trust me, if I want a game that looks like Vasily Kandinsky vomited on the screen, I’d play Moraff’s Dungeons of the Unforgiven. Anyway, I don’t know what I did but even with the vanilla version I have no problems with the color but the cursor is somehow both jittery and sluggish. Think Sonic the Hedgehog getting in a fight with Flash Man. What I tried then was the unofficial patch, setting the sensitivity to 1, and then increasing the mouse sensitivity to maximum on Windows to compensate for it. Nope. I've read that Fallout ignores Windows' mouse settings. A worst-case scenario would involve somewhat janky mouse controls, not turning off sound and playing Desert Vineyards by The Moon Seven Times on repeat.
OKAY. Turning off mouse integration helps. It will require some tweaking but it works pretty well. I’ll just have to find that magic number. That's it. It's a really obvious solution and nobody's pointed it out. Everyone complains that the mouse sensitivity of 100 is way too high. And 1 moves like Mitch McConnell on valium.
I'm not sure if I need the unofficial patch.

NINJA EDIT: if you're using a retina display and a Macintosh like I am, go to diplays in the preferences and set the screen size to larger text. Bada climp. Bada clamp.

Incidentally, the last Windows OS I used was XP. I dunno, Vista came out in 2007. But Vista was only a few steps above Windows Millenium Edition.
Things that have "millennium" but not "falcon" in their name are usually terrible. The Dream Millennium sounds good.

burning question: who the fuck presses B to jump?

The Internet Archive has what I can only assume translates to several tons of out of print books. Horray! They don't have everything from my childhood (The Book of Nightmares is conspicuously absent) or everything I want to read (Book two of Lisa Mason's Pangaea, Saraband of Lost Time, Caves of Karst, Daybreak on a Different Mountain). But hope springs eternal. After all, There And Back Again by Pat Murphy is there.

A Mask For The General does have that same mood to it that The City, Not Long After does.
It’s a paean to a San Francisco that is no longer, set in an all-too-real future for America. It opens around the end of July, 2021. Brazil, interestingly, isn’t fascist in this setting. I checked, and in 1987, Brazil was ruled by a man who admired the military dictatorship of the 1960s. And in real life, Japan is content to cut itself and its pop culture off from the world. Also, there’s a moon colony.

We released the raccoons Sunday. Right now, it’s mostly Christabel, Jacob, and Primrose keeping the place (along with laundry) running until the new interns show up.

Christabel regaled us with a story of the time someone tried to microwave cookie dough. It didn’t work but it did melt and warp part of the microwave door.

Michael says the best character in all of the Lord of the Rings is the Olympics Orc at Helm's Deep.

Michael asked this about Trump's plan to nuke hurricanes.
burning question: Did Trump get his knowledge of weather from Sharknado? Because they nuked the sharknado in that. I’m not sure what it would do. It would kill the sharks but they were going to die eventually anyway and it would still be like being whipped in the face with a mop made of sandpaper. Without the sharks, it would probably just spread fallout around.