branching out

so. i have branched out from spoons to hiking sticks.

here's one i made for my brother in law.

spoons

do you not love to say the word "spoon"?

i do. i also like to say "soup".

i think i have mentioned to you that i like to make spoons. i haven't made a lot of them, because it's kind of an outdoor activity and it's a little time consuming, especially the way i do it.

because of course i can't just roll up to some hobby shop and buy carving blanks; i have to work with naturally fallen applewood which naturally contains weird twisty grain and often a lot of rot.

because apple trees.

and sometimes when you're working a piece you get pretty far in before you FIND the patch of rot, and there goes your work.

...which is what happened to me while i was working on a long handled cooking spoon for my mom.

and BOOM i had to start over and i was down to my last appropriate piece of apple and not too much time to go before christmas (or as we like to say, midwinter gift exchanging light festival of your choice) but i got it done, along with a little jam spoon and spreader for party tables or whatnot.

driving a standard

i drive a standard. i love me some shifting.

i don't really understand how it works, though.

i enjoyed this video about it.



i still don't understand it, really.

but i like how they got a woman driver to be in the video, complete with her gloves and all.

oh. and here's a thing i really enjoyed this week:

https://pudding.cool/2018/02/waveforms/

do you like waveforms?

i do.

busy day yesterday

i know, i blew you off again.

i had some early morning equipment drops (#ingressresistance) and an early appointment with my ophthalmologist, who monitors my eyes because while that antimalarial is super effective for lupus, it COULD destroy my eyes, but it's a slow destruction if if happens and monitoring by your ophthalmologist gets out ahead of that.

but then i had some ingress missions to do because i'm straightening up my banners before i go to my first mission day and i needed to pick up a jar of honey and oh by the way some raw wool and cards and a spinning wheel because of course.

mb has taken up crochet, so therefore i am taking up spinning.

it's not that far of a reach, since i have already been making cordage and milkweed is plentiful and it has occurred to me that i should learn to spin because milkweed would make a nice soft plant-based yarn if i knew how to process it, and a friend of mine just HAPPENS to know a guy who was shearing sheep recently, so yeah.

later on, i'm sure, there will be pictures.

luxury living

well, here's a thing i meant to tell you about back in november when it happened, but at least it still applies.

it gets cold at night when you winter camp.

i try to end my out of hammock day before my blubber layer gets too chilly, because while it does a great job keeping me warm, it takes a while to warm up in bed so there's that to consider.

but i like to retire after and early supper, hang out in my hammock and read. this is made much more lovely if i have a warm beverage.

and my morning is improved much if i wake up and have a warm beverage handy without having to get up and make it.

so i make two bottles of nice hot tea: one in a hydroflask that will keep my tea hot for a few hours,and a heavy duty thermos that will keep my tea hot overnight.

that gives me lovely hot tea into the evening, and lovely hot tea in the morning, which makes life pretty cushy.

ice lanterns

they're easy to make, if time consuming.

i think i stumbled across one of the many tutorials on the youtubes and thought that would be a perfect thing to bring a little magic to a girl scout troop's first winter camping.

because if you can create magic, you then have a group of girls who will love winter camping. that first time is important.

and because i am who i am, i took pictures of the process and now you have a nice little set of instructions on how to make ice lanterns.

you freeze the bucket so there's a shell of ice

see the edge between frozen and unfrozen?

either let it sit or run warm water on it until it loosens in the bucket.

flip it over and poke a hole in the thin end.

use a serrated blade to saw the hole to size and shape

drain the water and rinse out the ice bits.

keep making more. clean them up before storing them...

in your large freezer...

before you pack them to travel.

night trail

there's a perpetual dance of balance being done in girl scouting because there's a lot of emphasis on girl planning but at the same time children don't always know what cool things are out there because they simply didn't know they were a thing.

people can't plan for things they don't know exist.

f'rinstance, i was at least thirty years old before i even knew there was such a thing as reflective trail markers.

anyway.

there's a badge our girls have expressed and interest in that has a choice to complete a requirement by going for a night hike.

no ten year old who has not experienced a cool winter night hike would EVER decide to voluntarily leave a warm cabin in winter and march around outside, so i simply went ahead and made a night course.

the fact that there was going to be a night course was not a surprise to the other adults. everything else was surprises for even them.

when we announced the upcoming night hike there were some cries of resistance, but we told them that although it was optional, only people on the night hike would get to have the cool surprises. they girls asked what the surprises were going to be, but you already know the answer to THAT.

they wanted to know if there were going to be any jump scares.

no, i told them. there will be nothing scarier than just being outside in the dark. and i gave them the handout.

so they all decided to go.

it was a short course, but at night things look different and you maybe don't always know where you are. for the first part i took them out on a bushwhack out back of the cabin, away from the lights. i marked the way with stick signs.

about halfway through that portion they were all on board.

and then the stick trail came to an end and they were confused.

and i was all like "oh, look. there seem to be some instructions posted on that tree!"

the instructions said to turn off their headlamps and follow a lead line. i told them that being in the dark can be challenging, so i was going to keep my light on at the back and if anyone felt like they needed to turn theirs on, they could.

so off they went into the darkness.

after some turns and a couple hundred feet, at the end of the ropes they came upon another set of instructions and reflective blazes that indicated start of trail. it took them a minute or two to figure out how to look for the reflectors, but they did just fine.

the reflector trail came out at a trail end sign with a .30 caliber ammo can holding glow sticks and candy. and a picnic table with ice lanterns. the instructions said to turn off their lights and follow the lantern path home.

we stood silent for a couple of minutes to listen. we knew there was a barred owl nearby and one of the other leaders does a very good barred owl call.

i had chosen the widest and smoothest return path for the lantern way, marked all along with ice lanterns returning to the cabin, where there was already a leader with a campfire. the part about the campfire wasn't my idea, but it was magical.

the girls decided to bring the lit lanterns back with them, so we picked them up as we left the woods.

we could not have predicted this, and had we prompted it there might have been some eye rolling, but out front of the cabin with all the lanterns there was an impromptu recitation of the girl scout law.

i may have cried a little.

much fun was had

i am back from my trip with the scouts.

later there will be pictures.

right now there's just going to be a shower and sleep.

short on time.

i'm packing to take my scouts on their first WINTER CAMPING!!!

so i'm short on time.

here's a fun math toy you can play with.

and you should watch this. nina paley is brilliant.


Paroles Paroles from Nina Paley on Vimeo.

and if you have not seen this yet (or even if you have),  this:

they're not calling it terrorism.

a kid in a white supremacist militia shoots up a public school and for some reason they just call him mentally ill (which he is) but they don't call it terrorism.

it's too soon to talk about gun violence. or gun control. it's too soon to talk about somehow making it more difficult for a 17 year old white supremacist who has already raised a lot of red flags to get a semi-automatic weapon.

yanno, because it would have been illegal for him to have bought a handgun.

if he's been brown or muslim we would be calling it terrorism and calling for an immediate stop to immigration.

but he's a white supremacist who belongs to an actual honkin' MILITIA and we're not calling it terrorism. we're just going to "tackle" the difficult problem of mental health.

maybe by cutting services to the mentally ill? that's how we usually solve mental health problems.

and next week when more people are killed, we will all stand around and talk abotu how nothing could have been done.

https://www.massshootingtracker.org/data

i won't dance

yesterday morning i saw this article in which a school attempts to make everybody feel better by having a rule that if you are asked to dance, you MUST dance with the person.

and let's face it, because of where this school is, we are nearly certain that this is the fragility of boys being protected against the consent of girls. yeah, in some places everybody asks everybody else, but usually it's the boys doing the asking.

which sends the terrible message that anybody OWES anybody a dance, or a date, or any social interaction.

and fine. i get that we want kids not to be mean to each other.

a long time ago we used to teach contradance to our students. and we taught contradance manners, which include changing partners after each dance, and being polite in rejection if one does nto wish to dance with the asker.

we told the kids it takes courage sometimes to ask for a dance, because it opens you up to rejection. so we have some little rules of manners so that anybody can ask anybody and nobody's feelings have to be too hurt. there are polite ways to reject that save the asker's dignity and if we all follow these rules, you don't have to dance with people you don't want to dance with, and nobody is mean to you for asking.

so this is what we told them.

you can ask anybody to dance. if they say no, you simply leave them alone after that unless they have told you to ask them again later.

if you are asked to dance and you wish to dance with that person for that dance, good. you're all set.

if you are asked to dance and you don't want to dance with that person, you have some choices:

you can say you have already promised the dance to someone else, which you should only say if in fact you are already planning to dance with someone else. you can say you are going to sit this one out, but then you have to leave the dance floor for at least the beginning of this song. then you go outside, get some punch, sit by the wall, talk to your friends, whatever.

if you really were going to sit this one out but you do want to dance with the person who asked you later, you can ask them to join you at the punchbowl or on the porch or whatever. you can tell them to please ask you again later. or you can ask THEM to dance later.

and this is the important part: these little bits of script allow us graceful ways of asking, accepting or rejecting and also graceful ways of being rejected.

if you ask someone to dance and they say "i'm going to sit this one out", on its face you have not been rejected, and your dignity is intact. it's a little social fiction that helps us all get along.

thoughts while crocheting: a guest post

my friend rapunsell from the old game glitch wrote this little piece yesterday and i said i'd run it here for both of you to enjoy, since she doesn't have a blog or anything. i hope you enjoy it.

THOUGHTS WHILE CROCHETING

1. Okay, I’m gonna follow this slouch beanie hat pattern and just insert a row of mesh filet for every 3 rows of double crochet. Should be pretty easy.

2. God, I hate magic circles.

3. Dammit, the beginning of this row has a single crochet instead of a double crochet. Undo entire row.

4. (3 rows later, check pattern) Wait, how did I end up with 50 stitches?  Undo stitches.

5. (2 rows later, check pattern) I’m supposed to have 68 now? Cram in 4 stitches.

6. (5 rows later) Try on hat. Dammit, it’s too small. I should have used a bigger hook.

7. Frantically cram extra stitches into next two rows.

8. Okay, time for a mesh row. Oh, this is going fast!

9. [Expletive, expletive, particularly colorful expletive] I didn’t realize I’d have to stitch into chains from the mesh filet. This sucks so bad.

10. Try on hat. Argh! Now it’s huge! Frantically drop stitches in next two rows.

11. Try on hat. Whew! At least it fits. This is going to be a horrible hat and I’m going to waste all this gorgeous yarn.

12. Repeat steps 8-11 four times.

13. God, the shape of this is crazy. It’s going to be awful. Why on earth didn’t I just follow a damn pattern? I’m in way over my head.

14. Try on hat.  Wait, this is kinda cute. And the shape seems weirdly familiar…

15. Realize I’ve accidentally created a Tam O’Shanter.

brown water

i am, yes, still doing my annual cleanup of camping gear, which means even though it is halfway through february my living room is still full of gear.

usually when my gear is in the living room it's because it's camping season and i don't want to take it all the way to the basement and stow it properly for a couple of weeks.

i clean everything and look at it carefully and do maintenance if i need to.

a lot of bodies of water have distinctive residue they leave on boats and such. waterbury reservoir has kind of a brown scum that attaches to everything.

it comes off with a little mild soap and elbow grease, but here's one of my paddles before and after:

white water

yesterday stormythunder and i went up stowe pinnacle by way of stow pinnacle meadow, which is a lovely hike. we only went as far as the ingress portal, because, well, a lot of reasons.

i have no great love for the pinnacle trail above the portal (#ingressresistance!), or at least the portion immediately above the portal. it's steep and often crowded and the pinnacle itself is a lovely view and the upper trail is nice but most days it's not worth the whole trip to me and anyway we weren't really there for the walk.

we were there for the ride down.

because that is an AWESOME sled run.

pedestrian crossing

let's go back in time and i'm show you a thing i decided i wanted to tell you about some months ago but for some reason didn't.

because if i do this blog thing correctly, when i have nothing to say off the top of my head, i ought to be able to dig back to where i saved material to show you and use that.

right.

in theory.

anyway, back in the autumn i was out obsessively playing ingress (because of course i was) (#BLUETEAM #IngressResistance) in middlebury and they have this interesting approach to crosswalk safety.

some cities have these fancy flashing lights, and maybe middlebury was going for cost cutting, or maybe just personal responsibility, but they have these buckets with flags and instructions.

the way this works is when you get o the crossing, you take a flag from the bucket and watch the traffic and you step off into the crossing with your caution flag, which is supposed to get attention and make drivers stop for you.

then when you're done crossing you put your flag in the bucket on the other side.

i can't vouch for how well it works overall, but i did not get run over.

wool

apparently for some reason i'm talking with a guy about getting some raw wool to learn spinning.

it's totally logical, because i've been making cordage for a few years, and spinning is a nice next step.

and i know a guy who knows a guys and today is shearing day.

also mb has taken up crochet.

so obviously.

military parade

so the president wants a military parade.

he wants to spend money we don't have on a parade.

because he can, i guess.

he could be spending money on education, or on veteran's healthcare, or salary and benefits for the military, but instead he wants to spend money on a display of tanks. everybody already knows we have tanks and that we're good for marching.

it is not a secret that we have a big freaking military.

other than personal satisfaction, there's NO REASON to have a giant parade.

but he president is a giant toddler and he gets to wast money because he can.

two scoops of ice cream for that one.

speaking of shithole countries...

what do you call it when your citizens have workshops to help them learn how to participate in elections?

democracy?

think again.

minnesota republicans call it "infiltration"



what do you call it when you give huge tax cuts to oil companies but cut educations spending so far that your schools are going on four day weeks?

in oklahoma they call it business as usual.

somebody didn't think this one through: public health edition

my primary insurance is medicare, which means my primary insurer is a very large insurer who covers an awful lot of people.

day before yesterday i got my flu shot.

yes, i know it's late int he season, but better now that not, especially since this year's flu is virulent and deadly. it's not the 1918 flu, but it's more like that flu than we'd like it to be.

and we're about due for a deadly flu pandemic.

so you'd think that public health policy would be to do everything possible to get flu vaccine into people.

but no.

i went early in the season to get the vaccine from my pharmacy and it turns out my insurance doesn't cover it if i get it at the pharmacy. my insurance covers it if i make an appointment with my doctor, which means that i had a two month delay in getting vaccinated.

i wonder how many people simply decided not to bother?

i'm just going to bet that public health policy will shift very strongly toward getting everybody those vaccines free of charge when and only when the body count gets so high that they have to roll dead carts again.

my grandmother remembered living in guttenberg NJ during the 1918 flu and having the dead carts roll the streets every day calling for people to bring out their dead.

that was barely a hundred years ago. there was no vaccine then. part of what made THAT flu so deadly is that it created such a violent immune response in otherwise healthy people that their own immune systems attacked their lungs and killed them, trying to get at the virus. the more robust you were, the more likely it was that your flu would kill you.

and part of what made that flu so deadly was the chronic underreporting of the danger.

this time around we LOVE reporting all the cases but we're not doing so well in making it easy for everyone to get immunized. we're also not good at pressuring companies to make their sick workers stay home.

oh, sure, a lot of companies SAY sick workers should stay home, but i bet you can think of more than one grocery clerk you've seen working sick because they can't afford to stay home.

people who don't have access to healthcare and can't afford to take sick days put us all at risk.

yep.

i had some things in my head and i was all like "hey! that would be awesome about to write on my blog!"


only i can't remember anything about it.

the skiing was nice today, though.

and i went grocery shopping.

watching sports

yeah, so i know there was some kinda american football game on yesterday. i couldn't be arsed to watch it.

i also sort of don't want to reward that whole enterprise for a lot of reasons, so "watching it for the commercials" (which is stylish to say) really doesn't seem to me like an appropriate choice since the people running that gig only really care that you see the advertising in the first place, so congratulations, person who only watches for the commercials. you have now graduated to the stage where they could show you five hours of commercials and you're all set.

don't you have greater aspirations in life?

that said, this morning i had some time to kill before i went out and got this year's flu shot-

yes, i know it's late in the season, but it's not TOO late and yes, i know this year's vaccine is less effective than some years but HOLY SHIT this year's flu is bad news and any protection against it is better than no protection-

and anyway, i had some time to kill and i saw this set of photos from the atlantic about a sport that was totally INVENTED to flog advertising but it is really kind of fantastic to watch, both for the visual images of the venues and the sheer athleticism of the competitors and yeah, BAYbee, i sat right there and watched a whole hour of it.

fun and games

i was going to write to you, but i ended up spending my whole morning making up a card game designed to teach proper clothing for winter camping.

maybe i will tell you about it later.

then i was going to write to you, but i got caught up playing this thing:

https://loc-photo-roulette.glitch.me/

i'm still playing it.

you guys are on your own.

beautiful shitholes

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.

james turrell at Mass MoCA

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....."

so i took a picture for you.

down by lake street

did you see this story in the news?

Drivers Claim That Waze GPS App Instructed Them To Drive Into A Lake

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.

speeding

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.

nervous history

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.

january down

you both know i like to have a project.

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.

the earth was doomed

"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.

i recommend this piece by chuck wendig.

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.

put it on fullscreen and turn up the sound.

you're welcome.

Pow Surf 101 from Kurtis Jackson on Vimeo.

no, that's not love.

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?

not so much. he's not so kind to jews or gays and while we're at it, keith ellison is too black and too muslim.

after wading through that much filth, maybe i just need to have some cinnamon rolls and watch a video.






*praire home, under its new host, chris thile, is lovely.

internet advertising

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.

violin

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.

things to consider

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.

if you live near the marcellus shale, here's a thing to worry about. you're welcome.

maybe you need to know how to hang a bear bag for when you go camping. i do.

here is a deeply worrying documentary.

Harvest from Indevu Films on Vimeo.


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.

ok, enough.

here's your cookie.

seen on snow

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.

cool.

how does the government work?

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.

i'm just a bill (schoolhouse rock) https://youtu.be/tyeJ55o3El0

less good, but classics anyway:

the preamble (schoolhouse rock) https://youtu.be/8_NzZvdsbWI

three branches of government (schoolhouse rock) https://youtu.be/YMY6lOVjQgs

here's pretty good one that explains what the constitution is and what it does.

constitution rap (smart songs) https://youtu.be/UCJ2of4kx5E

and here are a couple of takes on the three branches of government:

branches of government (songs of higher learning) https://youtu.be/mt5K4ZK0ILY

three branches superheroes (griot b) https://youtu.be/Jny_4BBGh_g

three branches of government explained (hip hughes) https://youtu.be/c6ppWf6U_4s

not catchy at all, but a good explainer on the bill of rights: 

a three minute guide to the bill of rights (belinda stutzman) https://youtu.be/yYEfLm5dLMQ

it's a long slide

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."

it was STILL an awesome sled ride.

is your refrigerator running?

mine isn't.

lucky thing for me it's winter and i can just put everything in coolers on the porch.

why cooolers? to insulate everything from freezing, duh.

instead of writing about things and showing you pictures, here are some videos i have enjoyed this past week.

and yay! closed tabs.

here's an arty little number about the textures of new york.

NYC Textures from Ynon Lan on Vimeo.

a little informational vidow about the color blue in nature, which is often structural and not pigmented:





if you like little explainers about letters that used to exist in the english alphabet but don't anymore, you will love this:




here's a sweet little animated short about a puppy:





file this one under educational AND strange:




and this. hooray for old guys!

up mount elmore

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.

local news

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.

now i have to go to the hardware store.

random stuff

hey, hi.

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.

i love local news.

nation building

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.

that's my list.