this morning i'm listening to david byrne's playlist the beautiful shitholes, about which he says
I assume I don’t have to explain where the shithole reference came from. Here’s a playlist that gives just the smallest sample of the depth and range of creativity that continues to pour out of the countries in Africa and the Caribbean. It is undeniable.
it makes a nice soundtrack for my morning.
do you think about gerrymandering and redistricting? i do. here is a really great map from five thirty eight that lets you play with redistricting to bring about different ends.
the other night a friend of mine who grew up in latvia shared with us some fantastic soviet era propaganda films. go ahead an watch. it's a little head-splodey, though.
i was interested to see last week all the entertaining reviews for rokblok, a device that not only plays your records badly, but damages them as well. here's my favorite review of it.
ready for some cool science? of course you are. so this:
ready for a beer? maybe a minnow shot? it's bobhouse season.
do you follow the work of nina paley? i do. besides being a brilliant artist, she is a fierce and outspoken free culture activist and i think she is all the awesome. this week the interwebs are loving her latest installment for her film in progress, sedermasochism. You Gotta Believe from Nina Paley on Vimeo.
i know that i told you that back in november barb and i went to see the laurie anderson VR exhibit at MassMoCA. it was amazing, and while we were there we also made reservations for the james turrell exhibit.
i had never heard of james turrell, but yanno. we were there.
amazing, but in a different way.
one is not permitted to photograph his work, because partly it is that he deals in light and form in ways that cannot be translated well into an image, and partly that it is very much experiential.
here's a page from his own website that describes the kinds of pieces he makes. many of these forms are included in the Mass MoCA exhibition and the effect of them on me was to be a little mind-bending. he really toys with you concept of space and surfaces and perception to the point that it's a little trippy.
there weren't lines to get into the dark space even though we'd made reservations. the thing about that is you enter the space through a series of baffles and there are two seats. then you sit there in really, really dark for ten minutes.
and maybe? maybe there's a dim blurry light in the distance? can you make out the shadow of your hand in front of your face? it's a weird feeling, being in that much dark.
then we hung around the gallery and looked at the other light pieces and holograms and models and let them wash over us, which was a pretty good preparation for the light space for which we had reservations in the early afternoon.
we got in line and when it was our turn we were brought into -not the piece itself, but a gallery in front of the piece where we could see the previous group inside the piece.
seriously. because it's one of his ganzfeld works and you pause in that room to put on your shoe covers and receive instructions. the instructions are important because while you're inside it, your perceptions of color and space are being bent pretty severely, and one of the components of the room that creates that disorientation is a rather sudden drop and it would hurt if you fell.
so while they allow you to walk around inside the piece, they want to keep you away from that edge.
it's kind of incredible.
when we got out of there i was feeling kind of punch happy so when we got in the elevator and saw the glowy button i was all like "wow....."
when i heard about it, i thought maybe these amazingly stupid people had driven up to a ferry crossing and decided to just keep driving into the lake because they were busy texting or eating cheeseburgers or something and not noticing the road ending abruptly in the water.
but no.
it turns out that in order to drive into the lake, they had to be working pretty hard at it.
i'm not telling you where this happened, just that it did.
i was driving along thinking to myself that i might get a sandwich or something and i realized that i had somehow left my wallet at home.
and then about a half hour later i was coming into a town and i saw the speed limit 30 sign but i was turning left ad it surprised me a little to have that police car alla sudden pull out behind me.
so NOW i was thinking i had apparently missed a previous speed zone sign and that my wallet being at home in the front hall was suddenly going to be a liability, and not the kind of liability where you can't get a sandwich if you want one.
"good morning officer" i say, keeping my hands where she can see them.
she is young, like this might be her first job right out of college. she is teeny, maybe five feet tall. and there is not a speck of lint on her, not a hair out of place. she looks very businesslike, and yet kind.
she asks me if i am lost and at this point since i'm driving on google navigation i wonder if maybe she knows more about this road than i do and maybe i AM lost, so i say "i don't THINK i'm lost..." but clearly some doubt crosses my face.
she says "well, you slowed down and then sped up and then slowed down so i thought maybe you were lost. anyway, you were doing 40 in a 30."
and i said "really? i thought i hadn't got to the sign yet?" and she told me that i had missed a sign a little ways back and i'm like "oh, sorry"
and then she asks for my license and registration and i have to tell her that i had only a little while ago come to realize that i had left it in the pocket of my other coat at home.
and she said "well, this is awkward."
so she asked my full name and birthdate and stuff and she ran that with my plates and everything matched up with what information she had i guess and apparently she couldn't ticket me for speeding without also ticketing me for driving without my license and it was probably more of a headache than it was worth but also i got a sense that she felt the consequences for me were kind of disproportionate to 40 in a 30 so she let me go.
i told you that i was going to explain why else i was nervous on my trip, and it's related to historical events.
i used to do a lot of camping in the adirondacks on DEC sites, mostly ones where you can car camp. if you know where to find them, they're convenient and cheap, and sometimes in stunningly beautiful locations.
i listen to podcasts while i am falling asleep. i like radiolab.
one night i was listening to a podcast and way too late into the podcast i realized that it was an episode i should not listen to.
one of the things people ask me about when discussing the many, many weeks i spend camping all alone is if i am afraid.
no. usually i am not.
i also do not watch horror movies, or read ghost stories, and i like to be in camp before it's dark. i like to feel safe. for the most part, i explained to some people who really wanted to dwell on the possibility of predators out there, nobody abducts you in the wilderness. i mean, what are the chances? you get abducted somewhere populated and TAKEN to the wilderness, right?
so then i was listening to the buried bodies case episode, which takes an in depth look at the complex legal issues surrounding some terrible crimes.
only some of the crimes happen on campsites in the adirondacks. they don't say where specifically, but if you know the sites well, you all of a sudden may realize exactly where they're talking about and realize that you have camped on those sites.
that's what happened to me.
the crimes, most of them, were committed in 1973 and the killer is long dead, but it's hard to feel as carefree when you're passing the place where a body was buried.
i can't say it's the primary reason, but i hadn't been back to the adirondacks to camp since before i heard the story and in order to get to hurricane mountain i was going to have to pass through nearby mineville and you can't unknow the story.
it's an interesting story, and it has far reach into american jurisprudence and is taught in nearly every legal ethics course but yeah, i was nervous about camping near there.
not because it's reasonable, but because of that emotional resonance.
but saturday when i arrived there was sunshine and clean smelling woods and camp had friendly people in it and i found i could still camp there, even with that darker story hanging out in my head.
because ingress. (blue team, everybody!) i met the challenge because we needed that portal. i got the adirondacks back, although i'll probably avoid that one site on route 8 forever.
i decided recently that this year i would like to go camping in every month, and i was running out of january.
i had been going to just toss up my tarp somewhere in camel's hump state forest not too far from the parking, but my team (#ingressresistance) became aware of a problem portal, so i went there instead.
i was nervous about it, because hurricane mountain, or at least the trail to it and the campsite under it is pretty far out of cell reception so my usual safety protocols just weren't possible.
i worry a lot about safety protocols because i do most of my camping and adventuring alone and although most of the time you'll be just fine, you're an idiot if you don't pay extra attention to your safety gear and your safety plan.
in winter things can go sideways fast.
in winter i bring more gear, and redundant safety gear. if i plan to stay on a summit to farm keys, i bring extra clothes for the summit. if i'm going to take a long time on the down side or am camping, i bring a full change of dry clothes that are not the same as my summit clothes, because your summit clothes may be damp from sweat later when you need them to be dry.
i bring enough food to live on for an extra day, and enough firemaking supplies to be able to survive in case i am hurt and my safety team calls out a rescue but i have to wait a few hours or even overnight for it.
it can make the difference between a rescue and a recovery.
nobody likes a recovery.
there was another reason i was nervous about hurricane mountain, but that was a psychological nervousness based on history that i will tell you about later.
anyway, it was warm and pleasant for a hike.
i went up to the shelter and pitched camp at the already occupied gulf brook leanto. i like my solitude, but often when camping i like to have neighbors. the gentlemen at the leanto were welcoming and polite and offfered to share their beer.
they went on their hike; i went on mine. we all returned to camp at about the same time.
left alone i would have just eaten dinner and gone to bed, but they made a toasty fire.
it was the best night's sleep i'd had in a long time.
in the morning they had made too much delicious hot oatmeal and so gave me a hot breakfast. we all packed up and went home.
"And when they knew the Earth was doomed, they built a ship. "
it's the opening line of a game called seedship, which is a little text based game that's all about terror and hope. you don't know why earth was doomed, only that it was.
these days it's not too hard to imagine that it will be.
gun violence is our normal. we keep shooting each other, and i'm pretty sure this is a problem. i am uncertain of what the solution to this is, but i'm willing to bet that it has complex components and that refusing to discuss it is not helping things. i'm lookin' at YOU, NRA.
racism is flourishing, but it always has been. it's really easy to condemn white supremacist marchers (unless, i guess, you're the president), but it's harder to be active against the everyday racism that black and brown people endure. we should be looking at each other, fellow white people.
net neutrality isn't entirely dead, but it's mostly dead and the rich are set up to colonize the internet. if you thought ready player one was more dystopian, you just really don't understand what's about to happen to us.
because at least in that book, the internet was freely accessible even to the poor.
surprisingly, burger king has taken it upon themselves to explain it.
i'm looking at YOU, congress. and i am looking at anybody who lives in a state where they keep electing hatwipes who vote against net neutrality. do you guys even check your delegation's voting record against their donor list?
are you depressed enough yet?
would you like a cookie?
here. here is a link for some amusingly named minifigs you can buy.
also, you should watch this video, even if you've seen it already.
it makes me sick that we think the world is upside down when a few high profile sexual predators are getting what they deserve instead of the support and complicity of pretty near everybody.
it's maybe a little more appalling that men especially are taking their hurt little feelings about it and whining "but how will we know how to act? do we have to treat all women like our sisters or mothers? how will we KNOWWWWWW?"
the reason i'm not concerned about men's feelings of worry is that the ones who are worried (#notallmen, asshats) are mostly worried because the thing that hurts their feelings is being called out on having not cared what women's feelings have been or even if we had feelings and they are very much afraid their dominion over us may be impinged. (#yesallwomen)
men worry they might have an uncomfortable conversation. women worry we will be killed. followed, stalked. our livelihoods put in jeopardy. we are SO sorry you guys worry we may not welcome your advances. we have bigger things to worry about.
if you consent to sex because it's the least dangerous way to get out of a situation, it's not consent.
i've never been an advocate of book burning, but i have on my shelf a couple of volumes by garrison keillor and let me tell you, i came close yesterday afternoon.
i'd stopped listening to prairie home companion* years ago because it stopped being endearing and funny and became more of a one joke marathon hosted by a cranky old guy for other cranky old guys.
and then a day or two ago i read a piece by pz myers about how the story of keillor's sudden and quiet firing by Minnesota Public Radio is now starting to come out in detail.
i was suddenly in the weird position of thinking what an upstanding guy mario batali is for his "yeah, that totally sounds like me, whoops sorry and here's a recipe for cinnamon rolls", which sounds downright PRINCELY next to garrison keillor's angry whine of betrayal -BETRAYAL!- over his innocent and accidental skin contact with one woman whom he THOUGHT was a friend until he heard from her lawyer.
i used to think it was cute and funny when he said "i believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it", but now it seems more creepy. i used to think it was sweet when he kept returning to the theme of flawed people who behave badly because they love. he keeps returning in his monologues and books to the idea that his protagonist feels love. it's love that makes him behave badly.
it seems less and less sweet as i start looking closer.
remember all those years we thought he was laughing WITH the unitarians?
i get that a lot of the internet works on the money that advertisers pay to get relevant ads to my eyeballs.
the internet is not good at allocating that advertising money effectively.
for example, last week i bought a refrigerator. i did a lot of internet searching for one day and then bought a refrigerator. i am no longer looking to buy a refrigerator. i have one. it will be a long time until i buy another.
but the internet is all "AHA! flask is deeply interested in refrigerators. let's show flask a lot of refrigerator ads, because that will surely pay off."
similarly, i was shown a lot of ads for camping gear i had already acquired.
hey, internet! by the time you show me ads for a thing, i have probably already bought the thing and your ad money is wasted.
ok, so i watch a lot of little animated shorts, because i like them.
i fall right down the youtube or vimeo rabbithole.
so there's this:
the unusual thing about it is that the animator worked with the violinist. yes, many animated shorts have a composed soundtrack, and yes, many little movies have a classical music soundtrack.
this one, however, is a collaboration between a currently active classical artist and the animators, which makes it interesting as well as charming.
have a look at this interactive infographic on the demographics of others. i don't feel i need to draw any conclusions for you; it's just worth seeing.
yeah, DOCUMENTARY. i looked into ReCon, but i hit a dealbreaker in the terms of the research project. but you might want to look at it and consider it.
and yeah, your car spies on you, too. you agree to it in the purchsse contract. what are you going to do? not buy a car? you're trapped. big data OWNS you, and you know you can't count on your government to keep you safe.
recently i was out making things blue (#ingressresistance) and i saw some things in the snow.
you know how we all know jokes about peeing in the snow? i've heard jokes about guys writing things, but i'd never seen it until i was up on mount elmore and i saw this:
i don't know what the guy was trying to spell, but he got as far as PIL before he ran out of fluid.
a few day before that, back on flat ground, i saw an interesting collection of critter tracks. from the look of it a small canid, either a small rabbit or a large squirrel, and some little rodent with teeny tiny feet. so cute.
here are some of those tracks with a car key for scale:
and i do not know what made this print, but it's pretty:
you know, when i first saw it, i thought it might have been a human made print sorta like a snow angel, but now that i think of it, this is almost certainly DEATH FROM ABOVE- a strike on some little critter by a hawk or owl or something.
no, this is not a rant on the current dysfunction of the government.
my scout troop is working on the inside government badge and i spent my morning putting together a list of youtube links with various degrees of goodness that explain (at least on the surface) the three branches of government, the constitution, and the bill of rights.
because it took me most of the morning to review and organize all that, you're getting the list instead of pictures of adventures or a long ramble about my thermos.
yesterday i did not write to you because instead i spent the day marching up camel's hump because it needed to be made blue. i went yesterday because it was warm (37 degrees down in the parking) but even on a warm day it's COLD up at the summit in the wind, so key farming is less pleasant than it could be.
in a lot of places in my life my walrussy physique is not a benefit, but in cold weather it's really handy as an insulation layer.
and REALLY handy for what came next, which is that i got on my sled and rode it down.
no, you can't ride a sled all the way down camel's hump because that would just be stupid but you can ride a lot of the way.
your butt gets really, really cold.
no, i did not take pictures.
sorry.
another thing i did not take pictures of is the bruise around my asshole. no, i'm not talking about that one guy on the other team.
i ran over a root at full speed when i was sliding on my butt (you do that partway because it's too steep for the sled) and let's just say attempted high speed penetration by the local flora is painful.
the first thing i thought was "wow. that's going to leave a mark."
strategically mount elmore is not a big target in the game (#ingressresistance we're the BLUE team!), but it makes a nice anchor in a core area around which i like to play, plus it's a nice walk with a good payout. it's not too hard, not too dangerous in winter, and feels like an achievement, plus you can sled down if a lot of it.
tuesday i marched up it because monday it had been taken, but i had some trail intelligence that post thaw that last tenth of a mile may or may not have been hairy, so i decided to go up by way of the ridgeline trail, which is a mile longer each way, but presents less in the way of ledges you could fall down.
it took me longer than i expected, because snow conditions and also i wanted to make sure as i went up that i cleared all the steps and ladders to make a safe descent for myself and anybody coming after.
also i think i was just slower because i'm either in the middle of or just coming out of a flare-up.
it's hard to tell. a lot of days i have as much pain as i used to before i started taking antimalarials, but i do more stuff before i get to that layer of pain.
anyway, the temperature was challenging in that when it's REALLY cold out you just bundle up and keep moving, but when it's moderately cold out you have to dress for not sweating too much if you're going to stop at the summit for any length of time because then you will freeze.
and when i got to the summit, i was under a green field that hadn't been there in the morning when i left the house, so not as big of a triumph as i'd been hoping, but then because that guy robbed the bank, one of my teammates got called into work early and was available to clean that up for me instead of at home sleeping.
i thought "that's ok. i'll just hang out up here and have a nice hot drink of tea."
and then i opened my bottle to find my tea STILL TOO HOT TO DRINK.
ugh.
anyway, by the time i got down to my car it was well dark, so that was an adventure.
but it was seriously cool waiting at the top of that mountain for the field to come down.
and now we have a link from elmore to spruce, which we had not had the opportunity to do in some time.
yesterday i blew you off because it was my day to walk up a mountain. i did not walk up the mountain i originally planned to walk up, but sometimes the green bastids take back some mountains and it's more fun for me if i take them back next day.
later on i will tell you about that adventure, but it happens kind of in context of some local news that happened while was blithely on my way up a mountain.
on my way home afterward, i heard that a guy had robbed the montpelier branch of the Vermont State Employees Credit Union (which is a credit union any vermont citizen can use) (but not rob. that part bears noting), which is across the street from montpelier high school, the lawn of which being as far as the guy got before he was apprehended and later shot.
i maybe would be more saddened about this loss of life, but the guy had a long string of convictions including one for BANK ROBBERY so clearly he was not a good fit with the rest of society. i'm not saying he necessarily deserved death, but when you're waving a gun around on the lawn of a high school after having robbed a bank you're about as much asking for it as you can get.
in other news, the state of vermont is about to offer a nonbinary option to people for their driver's licenses. i was reading that linked article there to learn about the proposal because the story gets weird after that and i noticed that one of the very sane explanations about why such an option is needed comes from the interim executive director of the pride center of vermont, a man named Rex Butt.
the cheap joke center of my brain is going into overdrive. that doesn't even sound like a real name; it sounds like a pornstar name.
anyway, for some reason the editor of the burlington free press (which used to be a moderately respected local paper) decided to have some personal opinions on gender nonconforming on teh twitterz and when called out on it he doubled down. monday night he was fired.
here's some stuff i've been keeping on my desktop because it may be interesting to you.
of course, we're all following the story in which the president calls various nations of the world "shithole countries", but you may not be following the reaction by linguists.
the world is a risky place. maybe you like to live dangerously. or maybe, like me, you have menu fatigue and are paralyzed by choice. either way, maybe you want to play pizza roulette with your local domino's.
if you have randomly ordered your pizza, perhaps you would like to allow a neural network to say grace. "and he brought forth his praise to pants"
in local news, recently i was in the town of plainfield, vermont (#ingressRESISTANCE) and i saw an official looking sign on a post in the middle of downtown. it said
NO LOVE SIGNS
TOWN OF PLAINFIELD
and i thought that was weird, so i went around the block to have another look and there was also another handmade sign that said
L'OVEN
and below it was a small toy stove. do NOT ask me how i missed that the first time, and i thought i might get out of my car and take a picture to show you, but it was well below zero and i was just warming up from my hike up spruce mountain and didn't feel like it.
you're in luck, though, because i thought "there HAS to be a story behind that" and it turns out there is a story and it has been duly reported on in the news AND there are pictures.
my scout troop is working on a merit badge about government.
one of the requirements involves solving government problems in an imaginary scenario and as i was thinking about what activities to offer the girls, i realized that the requirement would be satisfied easily by playing nationstates.
and why reinvent the wheel?
nationstates even has an educational setting that will insulate your class group from the other players and do other things that make it suitable for group study with children but it turns out you need to be a legit school to get that kind of region set up for you on account of there are people out there who will call themselves schools just to gain political advantage.
ok, not how i was hoping that would turn out, but the nationstates moderator who splained it to me was very knowledgeable and nice.
so yesterday i went on a research bender looking for online government simulation games.
i found republic of you, which seems to be little more than a thinly disguised argument for democratic socialism, which i'm not against, but it has only fourteen issues to solve and there aren't really any consequences for your decisions. if you solve your poverty problem by simply giving everyone living wage ( a thing i support by the way) the only consequence you get is an angry text from a corporate CEO, which in no way illustrates how anything works. it will, however, tell you what percentage of other players thing that's awesome too, and that's kind of a no-brainer, because people who are interested in playing oxfam games have self-selected to look at things that way.
there's filteries, a wonky little simulator that more or less shows you alignments and costs. it has a pretty graphic, but exciting it isn't. fun for me to play with, but probably a snoozefest for kids.
cybernations is text rich and slow playing (nation simulators all tend to be slow) it's low on social policy content and high on resource management and empire building. it has the option to let you play it in peace mode, which lets you concentrate on building an economy rather than defending yourself from the other countries.
nations has a pretty graphic interface that i am finding difficult to learn but easy to use once you figure it out. it's less about policy than it is about resource management, and its quest chain requires you to use combat to succeed. i STILL can't figure out how to get more cows. i like that it has sports teams, but i REALLY don't like that all the terrorist groups have vaguely islamic sounding names. there's also no pacifist mode; if some other country wants to have a war with you, i don't think you have any protection from it, which is pretty realistic, i guess.
ars regendi seems to be the most realistic of the lot. you can really get into the weeds here with budgeting and policy and it has the interesting feature of assuming that your country WILL eventually fail. the trick is to make is as good as possible for as long as possible. it has the added benefit of letting you play two countries at once in the free version. it is also slow. there are a limited number of actions you can take per game day.
last week i went up mount hunger because ingress portal. (join the BLUE team, everybody! we're the RESISTANCE!)
i have been up mount hunger, but never by the waterbury trail, which is uh, steep. i was not at all sure i could actually succeed in getting to the summit, but no knowledge about that is gained by sitting at home, so i packed up my gear and marched up it figuring that i would either succeed or i would know it is not possible for me to do in winter conditions.
i'm a level 16. i don't need AP. nothing is lost by trying.
anyway, it was about 30 degrees at the trailhead, which means colder farther up the mountain, but the trail mostly goes up in a crease between two mountains and is out of the wind. most of the way up i went bare-booted. i would have preferred spikes for traction, but the snow was soft and clumpy underfoot and that was more trouble than it was worth.
snowshoes may have been a good option, but unless i really need them i do without because the wider stance required is hard on my hips and back.
about two thirds of the way up i changed over to ten point crampons, which was awesome because all the way so far i'd had to kick in a lot of my steps and that really wears on your feet and knees.
near the top it becomes VERY steep, and although it's steeper on average than the firetower trail on mount elmore, it's less frightening because the stakes for a missed step are lower.
i don't know if either of you does a lot of winter hiking, but if the trail is wide and the footing is good you can just creep up things surprisingly close to vertical and as long as there's a periodic soft landing you can aim for if you miss, it feels pretty safe.
sometimes you might only have a little ledge to get over, but you're painfully aware that if you miss that one step, it will be a long way down before you stop falling.
so. up the trail. i passed out of mixed forest and into boreal forest, and then up to the treeline. the worcester range has pretty spectacular views, but up near the summit in a twenty mile an hour wind you don't really stop to admire it.
in fact, i could reach the portal from just below the summit, so i found a place in range where i was sheltered from the full wind, but it was still frostbite zone. not so bad with my back to the wind, but i did turn into the wind for a few seconds to take a picture of the view. you will excuse me i hope for not taking the time to frame a really good shot.
here's a picture of the trail on the way down. the image does not do justice to the steepness of it, but you do get to see the pretty mountain ash berries in their snowy hats.
you know how it goes: a local scout troop calls you up to ask if you can help them with a merit badge that happens to fall in an area of your interest.
you go camping with them to finish up that activity and while all the adults are sitting around a fire, the leader talks about the challenges of the upcoming year and warmly includes you with some well placed "we" pronouns and next thing you know, you're a scout leader.
then the girls are looking for a service project that has to do with animal conservation and you've been thinking about whether the loon conservation project doesn't appear to be active at the place where you camp because they don't have an interest or because they don't have the manpower and you call them up to see what the deal is and whether there's an opportunity for your scouts to do a service project with loon conservation and the next thing you know, you are a loon conservation volunteer.
i came home from a little drive today and i accidentally left my thermos in the car. my feet hurt from yesterday, so it took me a few minutes to decide whether or not to go back and get it.
and i decided i wanted my thermos, so i trudged back there.
and i had been thinking about how pinpad coded can get cracked because it's easy to see what numbers people use so i entered a random bunch of numbers just because.
and then when i entered my code, IT WOULD NOT OPEN.
nothing seemed to work.
i was out there a long time.
and then my neighbor came out and asked if i was at the right garage.
and then she asked if i needed her to drive me somewhere.
i had a birthday last month, which means that when i opened up teh googles to look something up, i got the birthday doodle.
it has a cute little animation and stuff but i couldn't remember telling google my birthday, so it felt weird.
then again, i use a variety of google products and i cannot imagine it's all that hard for the internet to find out when my birthday is.
and speaking of personal identifiers, have either of you used paypal recently? they're now asking you if you want to provide them with YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER!
yanno, just in case you want to provide one stop shopping for identity thieves.
then again, paypal is probably more secure than, say, your doctor or your bank.
this year i got rid of dish, which saves me about 1200 dollars a year. i got sick of those sumguns showing me ads for how MUCH I COULD SAVE as a new customer and asking them if they could give me maybe the same price they give to new customers, which they were only prepared to do when i said "yanno, i think i can do ok without dish entirely. i have now made other arrangements."
basically i was paying a hundred dollars a month for the privilege of watching a lot of law & order reruns and i am actually happier watching youtube.
tangentially related, for some reason this year's fist night burlington program sis not include my favorite thing, the animated film festival.
so we're on our own.
i have assembled a collection of videos for you to watch or not as it amuses you.
the one thing i know for sure is that i really need to close some tabs.
duuuude.
so.
a camping vid, because i can watch hours and hours of people setting up tarps and making fires.
ok, if you're done falling down that video hole, let's talk about art:
and dance:
and maybe the intersection of the two, william forsythe's choreographic objects:
today i marched up the pinnacle meadow trail at stowe pinnacle as far as the trail junction, which is about a half mile.
that in itself is barely worth noticing.
what was AWSOME about it is that you can sled down a little more than half of that, and i discovered that you can hold your poles sideways like a kayak paddle, which gives you steering and speed control.
today i hit the last of my big ingress playing goals for my rookie year.
today, at the summit of mount elmore, in white snow and blue sky, i made the hack that gave me my black sojourner badge.
so.
my first year isn't over yet, but i have a black sojourner and i'm a level 16.
i was worried today that i would feel sad and lonely making the trip up there for the second time in as many days, so i brought along podcasts to listen to, but it wasn't necessary. the time passed quickly and easily, and every time i do it, it gets easier.
there were a couple of inches of freshies on top on a good hardpacked trail, and while it was squeaky loud snow yesterday because it was seventeen below zero, today it was thirty degrees warmer (still cold) but the new snow absorbed all the sound and it was bright and lovely and silent.
and the trip down was made in record time since this time i remembered to bring my sled.
yeah. here we are at the last day of 2017, and wasn't THAT a kick in the teeth? it's still effing cold out. not just cold, but EFFING cold. yesterday for a few hours the temperatures peeked above zero but apparently they didn't like it out here and ducked safely below zero where they will be staying for a couple of days.
i'm preferring to think of degrees as shy little animals that have to be coaxed out of their burrows instead of what is really happening, which is plain and simple brutal bone freezing cold.
so of course i am preparing to go out for first night in burlington, because it's YEAR 35 and my scarf is bedecked with all the festive buttons and i have light up gloves and of course that hat. i do not know how long i will last in the cold. we'll see.
i have a few hours to think about it.
i also have a few hours to think about what i will say in case i am asked for a few words by a reporter which sounds a little self important but it's kind of reality based because more often than not i AM asked by a reporter to say a few words not because i'm any more special than anyone else, but because i am wearing that hat and scarf.
people also assume that i will be able to tell them where to buy buttons and tickets, where all the performance venues are, and where to eat.
2017 wasn't so catastrophically bad as it could have been; there were some good times hidden in the shitpile.
don't be so busy shoveling shit that you forget to sing and dance. be kind to yourself and be kind to each other. and don't forget to vote.
i blew you off totally yesterday but i got up in the morning early and decided to go hike spruce mountain because if we factor in wind chill it was a tiny bit warmer yesterday than the day before. plus just in terms of exertion and rest days it was time to go for a walk.
it was fifteen degrees below zero when i arrived at the trailhead and maybe you're saying "but flask! that is way too cold" but it wasn't windy. the real problem was moving fast enough to stay toasty warm but not fast enough to seat and cause evaporation cooling. for me that's difficult in extreme cold because i have to keep my face covered and if my nose is warm, the rest of my body assumes IT'S REALLY HOT OUT and that can get dangerous.
almost to the top i ran into a stylishly dressed gentleman without a hat. apparently he walks up and down spruce mountain daily as part of his spiritual practice.
anyway.
it was a nice if chilly walk.
and i felt really badass, because the condensation of my breath kept forming icicles on my hood.
it's not snowing here like it is in erie. i have to confess we're a little jealous of that. i mean, most of us can survive pretty well snowed in for a few days because a) that happens sometimes and b) we have a lot more places to put snow.
and a lot more things we need snow for.
dude. a snow like that would keep the ski industry afloat for another year based on a late season alone.
uh, anyway. it's cold here. like 12 below zero in full sun cold. and this morning as i was lying in bed i was thinking about heating oil.
true fact: in some cold months i pay more for heating oil than i do for my mortgage.
this year my HOA switched from our old heating oil provider. this made me happy, because those guys were kings of mismanagement, if not malfeasance or downright embezzlement.
they used to do things like send a delivery truck to fill a tank for one building at a time, and you'd better bet all that extra milage was part of the rate.
plus they'd do things like not bother to read your meter for four months and then send you a bill all at once for the four months RIGHT NOW which included late fees for the three months you hadn't been billed.
skip forward. we no do our business with bourne, who is a vermont company and they treat us like neighbors. plus the oil is cheaper.
this morning i was lying in bed thinking about how much heating oil we're burning out here and trying to remember the last time our tanks were filled and how much it would suck to run out and so it's making me happy to hear the sound of the truck in the driveway right now.
happier still, the truck is filling multiple tanks all in one trip instead of filling one and then coming again tomorrow to do another.
i love the oil man so much right now, standing out in below zero cold with his filling hose, making sure we have heat.
i am really hoping that the trump presidency survives until after midterms.
it's not because i approve of the president in any way, although i do kind of enjoy the comedic effect of being able to say to myself "let's see what asinine thing the president has said today" at any particular time, turn on a radio and get to hear that the president has, in fact, said some outrageously asinine thing.
why, you may ask, do i hope that a malignant narcissist giant toddler retains the presidency for at least a year?
because mike pence is fully as evil, only not as stupid, much more organized, and he understands how government works. i'm pretty sure that if mike pence becomes president we will all long for the days when things were still good back in the trump presidency.
because while president trump is eroding the rights and benefits we've struggled so hard for, a pence presidency would mean an organized and streamlined stripping of rights and benefits from everyone who isn't a rich white christian man associated with one or more large corporations offshoring profits. president trump is an uncontrollable, unpredictable disaster.
a president pence, at least while there is a fully republican congress, would be a rail ride straight to hell.
the bright side to the trump presidency is that he is outrageous enough to bring otherwise complacent people out to vote, and in large numbers. if the president continues to be horrible, say horrible things, do horrible things, and tweet idiocy, democrats and independents are going to continue win seats in congress and state legislatures formerly thought to be safely locked away under republican gerrymandering until the end of time.
so let's work on those midterms, eh?
meantime, i was tooling around on the web (as one does) and i found this interesting little quiz from the french group discord la commune. it has some thought provoking questions to help you place your political ideas in a larger context.
their test (which i took on two different days and got two slightly different scores) is based on the work of 8 values, so i went and took that test as well. i find the results less important than the explanations.
in case you are wondering, each time i take one of these tests, my result indicates that i care about justice, humanity, and some other quality that seems to change from test to test.
i have nothing special planned for today, other than playing a little ingress (blue team, everybody!) and going to the grocery store.
well, that and i have some little craft projects going because i'm making some presents for my fam for Midwinter Gift Exchange Light Festival of Your Choice. we call it "christmas", but we're nearly all atheists and it's hard to explain to people that we like holidays and lights and presents and holiday meals and having people over and it would be weird if we just celebrated some other people's holidays that we also don't believe in because cultural appropriation.
oh! and here's a fun video for you to watch, for no particular reason.
uh, anyway.
after today the days will all start getting a little longer and i'm excited by that.
i'm getting a crown today, which means i'm going to be the queen, right?
oh, it's just something they do at the dentist? a little hardhat for my tooth?
that's vaguely disappointing.
anyway, after a lifetime of perfect teeth and several decades of dental neglect, i ended up with some cavities this year. and that one tooth needed a root canal. and it needs a crown, which i decided to put off until after camping season.
camping season is more or less over (barring some possible short trips), so yeah. time to finish up that dental work.
yay, i guess.
just call me "your majesty." just a little. humor me.
there are two projects trying to bring it back, one of which is only open to a special clique of elite people (seriously. to get in you had to audition and make yourself shiny in some forums to prove how much fun you'd be.) and the other is open to anybody regardless of whether or not you played the original.
it has a lot of the game's original functionality, but not all. subways don't work at all, and there are no houses. some of the items work, but differently.
still, you can go back into a pretty good facsimile of Ur, and wander around on the landscape petting trees and squeezing chickens and enjoy the lovely soundscape.
if you never knew the original, you would hardly notice anything missing. it feels pretty close to being home.
i'm mentioning it now because some of you out there might enjoy wandering around for a while in an alternate world where there's pretty scenery and nice music and the best way to get ahead is by being kind.
i'm kind of in love with vermont highway 108. if you want to read what i've posted about it previously, here's a post about it from summer that includes a video of the drive from gate to gate, and here's a post about a walk up the notch after it closed for the winter.
the last time i walked up there i thought: WHY did i not bring a sled?
ok, so back up, back up.
there's a portal up there, in addition to all the other reasons to go, and this year when they announced they were closing the road on november 9 at four in the afternoon, it was green. many of us on team blue (the RESISTANCE, boys and girls and everybody along the gender continuum!) thought that it would be good to take it and slide in under the wire.
one of our guys went and took it in the morning. i wanted to go by as close to four as possible, but i had to be home by five and that's not a short drive. i went by at about two-thirty thinking it would be good enough.
and at nearly four o'clock on the dot i was on my way home and got a notification that the portal was being taken.
well played, whytie.
i hoped briefly that he got stuck behind the gate and shrugged my shoulders and moved on.
so it's been on my list of things to do when i'm going for a walk this winter.
yesterday it was cold but sunny and i suited up and went up there.
it's cold out. i haven't adjusted well to being indoors. it seems too hard to organize my thoughts about the pictures i took about things that for sure were going to be great blog entries.
it's nine o'clock in the morning and because of where i live, the sun has just come up.
yeah, i live right up close to the western side of a mountain, so that lovely predawn sky lingers until the day is half over in winter.
i am having more pain than usual these days but less pain than i used to have all the time, so i guess that's a win.
i still dream about camping every night.
only my dreams are weird and dense and sometimes when i wake exhausted from them, i think i should write them down or something for later entertainment but then i'm too warm in the bed to want to get a pen and paper.
politics continues to be terrible. my keyboard continues to need cleaning. this week a pen exploded in my dryer.
it was back in the early '80s. i walked into a little thrift store looking for something funky to wear to a party and i was stopped in my tracks by the music playing on the store speakers. it was, i was to learn later, o superman.
"what is that music?" i asked. the young and trendy clerks who could not have been more than a year or two younger than me and yet WAY younger and hipper than me rolled their eyes and made that little clicking sound young hip people make when someone who will never "get it" ask questions.
"it's laurie anderson", one of them said as if i was the last person on earth to have heard of this.
"what album is this?" i asked, because back then we still bought albums.
"big science", they said, as if telling me this information actually caused them pain.
"i have to go buy it now."
and i turned immediately and ten minutes later i was on the other side of town buying it in a record store. you can watch this video, but i recommend just listening to it before you watch the images. or don't. your choice.
so yeah, i'm a fan.
they have her new VR pieces chalkroom and aloft. so my friend barb (who is a good sport about a lot of these adventures) and i made reservations and packed up the car to go november camping. maybe i will tell you more about that later. i fully intend to tell you a lot about the trip but you know, sometimes i forget.
it was amazing and awesome.
when you're in the VR environment you are IN that environment. i won't say it feels real, because what happens is mostly unreal. it's cool to watch other people in it, because if you have been in there, you can guess by their movements what they are seeing.
here's barb in aloft:
i know from just having done it myself that she is in a chair that's flying. and a thing has drifted near her, which she has caught. it's a book, and she has to turn the pages to interact with it.
1) the turkish national sport
2) fun home, the musical
3) some guys i saw on church street.
1) the turkish national sport
turkey is one of the most homophobicnations on the planet, which is why their national sport makes me laugh.
let's step right over the concept that men should be able to touch each other and still be manly. i'm a supporter. the less time men spend worrying about what will make them look gay the better off we'll all be.
but seriously. turkish oil wrestling. it is a sport in which the preferred strategy is to get your whole arm down into your opponent's oil-soaked leather pants. any sport for which the official rules need to explicitly forbid squeezing your opponent's penis or inserting a finger into his rectum is a pretty gay sport to start off with.
even men's doubles ice dancing is not that gay.
2) fun home, the musical
in october i went to see the vermont stage production of fun home. it was beautiful and breathtaking and it played in a small house that holds maybe a hundred and twenty people, which made it an extremely intimate piece of theater.
live theater is kind of amazing anyway, not so much for what goes on on the stage, but for that thing that hangs between the performers and the audience. art reaches into that little place where people keep their hearts and gives it a little jiggle.
really and truly it's a show about relationships and family, but the central characters are gay, so while there are universal themes, there are things about it that cut weirdly close for everybody who came of age gay. it's also really stunning to see representations of gay characters who are not there for titillation or to be edgy or to signal liberal acceptance.
i looked around me in that audience and it was full of regular theater-going people who were there to see an awesome show. not because it was a gay show; because it's a good show. a thing like that would not have happened not so long ago.
the show is based on alison bechdel's graphic memoir fun home, and it's a fantastic bit of nonlinear storytelling.
3) some guys i saw on church street
later that night, i was wandering up church street playing ingress because it wasn't that late and i was parked up in the cherry street garage and i looked up from my phone to see that two men walking ahead of me were holding hands. two regular looking guys, large and square in that manly way, one black and one white and the only thing that tipped me off to their gayness was that they were holding hands, and at one point they kissed.
it really is a different world now.
i can remember a time not so long ago when such a thing would never have happened on church street. it would not even have happened that way outside of the old bar on pearl street. men may have kissed or held hands, but there would have been a hint of danger. it would have been a wary political act. a rebellion.
october, 2017: two men walk up church street holding hands. nobody seems to notice or care.
yesterday was the centenary of the halifax explosion. you know how when you're a kid you sometimes latch onto a story or a historical event and it looms large over your landscape? yea, the Imo and the Mont Blanc were that for me.
today i'm watching the california wildfire map. i have some friends who live in the middle, kind of too near the dots.
also today i fell on the ice on a trail and smacked my head. it took me a few minutes of lying there before i could get up.
also, before that on the same trail i had an out of control dog bark and snarl and bare teeth at me and i was ever so subtly repositioning my hiking stick to crack its skull and save myself when the owner came along and told me SHE'S FRIENDLY.
yeah? because i was legit askeert of this one, thinking i was only going to get in one good shot with the stick and if i missed, i was going to get messed up bad.
also today i had to google "how old am i?", which yielded mixed results.
i sort of think i'm going to have a lot of things to tell you and probably i will at some point. meanwhile it's still pretty quiet over here in my head and i am deep into the process of cleaning and packing away my camping gear for the winter. (this means i actually put it away where it GOES instead of leaving it in a heap in my living room. at least until april, when i may go camping. or the odd one night trip to somewhere. you never know.)
MB introduced me to a new comic strip and i like it enough to have read the WHOLE THING. you can find it here.
i came home from the res yesterday. it was sunny and warm (read over 30 degrees) and a good day to pack up, especially since there's some weather coming and gonna keep coming. good time to be indoors.
anyway, i was looking at things on the interwebs this morning and i found this little movie.
