what i MEANT

i MEANT to go up to the mountain today and ski just a little because it's the official closing weekend nevermind next weekend's bonus days, but they won't be open during the week and i never do know if they will spin the number one chair, so saturday or not i went up to say my farewell to peggy dow's and my favorite lift op down at the bottom says as far as she knows they're not planning to spin the number one chair next week.

i MEANT to stay an hour or two or maybe three but it was stunningly beautiful and there was a little party kind of going on all day up in the tower if you count a half dozen people admiring the view a party and i sort of do, because usually it's pretty solitary up there.

i MEANT to go home early and have lunch and do my grocery shopping, but all of a sudden it was one in the afternoon and the pond skimming was starting.

bonus.

i had not realized that the pond skimming had been moved from last week on account of weather.

fantastic.

so i skied too long and then stood in my ski boots on the hill next to the pond to observe a ski country rite of spring at its finest.

i have some nice pictures for you of a pretty day on the mountain and some crazy pictures of the pond skimming, but i am too tired right now to process those and post them.

and yes, for those of you not living in a ski culture, in the spring at most ski areas they make a pond and yes, skiers come flying down the hill and attempt to skim across the pond, often in costume.

many of them go swimming and ski patrol are there to fish out the unlucky and also to hand out fluffy white towels.

the crowd whoops and hollers and even the people who come out soaked and covered in livid red bruises -which you can see, because some people's idea of "costume" is skis and a speedo- even THOSE people seem to be having a good time.

even the tiny little girl who went face first into the pond and came up sputtering and started to cry decided that the glory of the moment outweighed the discomfort and she stood with her arms above her head accepting the cheers of the crowd.

corporate pricing

sloth feeding

here's one for the exiles.

who doesn't love sloths? nobody, right?

and we had sloths in glitch, and they liked to eat metal rods.

i know, it makes sense if you were there.

so here's some video of me feeding a sloth up in neelam saff.

cautionary tale

well, now the supreme court has finished hearing all the arguments about gay marriage and i just want to remind them that the very fabric of civilization is at stake.

gay marriages have been legal in canada since 2005, and in that time all of canadian society has broken down. the family has fallen apart, children no longer know who their parents are, heterosexual couples are no longer valued, and violent crime and all manner of vices have had unprecedented gains.

canadian society has collapsed and ottawa lies in smoldering ruins.

canadians can no longer live in peace, hold jobs, or worship freely.

our supreme court would be well advised to look at the catastrophic fall of the canadian social structures  and be sure to protect and defend the US from any such a thing happening here.

gas caps

when you are at the gas station and you see where someone has left their gas cap and forgotten it, maybe you think: i will leave my gas cap there, too, because surely i will not forget it because that is a great place to remember to pick it up from.

random you tube

for no particular reason, here are some youtube videos i like.

which i guess makes them not random, because what they have in common is that i like them.

the end of the line

one hundred and two days ago the game glitch closed.

i am not done writing about what an astounding thing that game was, or how beautiful and immersive it was, but this morning, in a few hours, the forums will close as well and we will no longer have our homepages to log into. they will put us all into an archival form which is better than we'd have a right to expect, but we are all putting on our archival outfits the way one might choose a burial suit and we are having our last goodbyes to each other because although we have all migrated to other places, it is the last time we have to talk with each other in this land we loved.

Voluptua Sneezelips I always thought it started with banjos for me, but now I think it started with Proust: "If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time." And I did, to my enrichment and detriment. In Glitch, I dreamed all the time. First minutes: Overwhelmed. Grinning at the contented tree-sigh. Into this new world, harvesting, petting, nibbling. Visually inundated. In love. Melismata came; she radiated at me then left me to explore. In hindsight, it was Groddle Heights. I wandered the world. I met many. Familiar strangers on my local streets and in the quarters. Some became friends. I moved to Salatu. More familiar strangers at the grocery vendor. More friends. New skills, new areas, new achievements. New selves and homes. And always dreaming. I knew Ur better than my real-life neighbourhood. Thank you all for sharing it and yourselves with me. I cannot leave with banjos, and so I will leave instead with Proust: "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." And so it ends as it began, though with far less dreaming now. I am awake for the first time in years. But I will always remember.

kastlin I wanted to say something really profound here for the top of my profile page, so here goes. ... I didn't want to love this game, I just wanted to have fun. I didn't want to get caught up in a community, I was going to hover on the perimeter. But TS made a game I couldn't help but fall in love with. And the people here (especially you troublemakers, you know who you are) are so wonderful, so understanding, so accepting that I fell in love with you, too. The awakened Giants are playing with our Glitch toys, our cubimals, our play cubes, heck, they're even sampling my herb hybrids. And now, well, now we disperse, a few here, a few there (a few of us kind of everywhere). Now we put our inner glitchen on the outside, where EVERYONE can see it. Because now, we are the Giants. And we will spark that tiny speck of creativity in everyone around us. All my love, kastlin 

flask there was a place once; no, it was a REAL place, with streets and geography and cultures and i lived there for a time. i lived there as much as i have lived anywhere and it was my home. and you were there too, with your garden and house and we lived there. it was a beautiful land but there were no more dreams and we were exiled to other lands, none as beautiful as the one where we had lived. for a while we got postcards from there and treasured them but now there will be no more postcards and the exiles will meet in bars and bus stations and sing the old songs for old time's sake, but none of us can ever go home again. it was a beautiful land. we miss it, and we can no longer go home. 

mushroom tent

i'm not showing you pictures of the mushrooms yet.

not really.

but i've been having problems growing them because apparently my home is not humid enough to grow mushrooms.


so i put a bag over them.

and they did better, but a two gallon ziploc is just not large enough to keep them humid without squishing them, so i cut up TWO two gallon ziplocs and taped them together and now apparently we're getting somewhere.

more about fred

i have written before about fred, so i'm not going to go into a lot of detail on this one but yesterday (two days ago by the time you read this) john green came out with his new video for the list show over at mental floss.

you should watch it.

because awesome.





and just in case you missed this gem when it came out, there's this:

open letter to the guy with the dog

hi, neighbor!

i think you have noticed me sometimes in the six o'clock hour watching you play with your dog out on the golf course behind the house.

here's the thing: when the sound of you and your dog playing is the thing that wakes me in the morning, i reserve the right to roll over and watch, mostly because i have just woken up and it is a pleasant way to spend my first waking moments of the day.

if you are bothered by me doing this, you may feel free to play with your dog outside somebody else's bedroom window.

i hope we're all square now.

love,
flask

open letter to entertainment media companies

dear entertainment companies,

we have to talk about ground rules.

if i am watching content you created or are paying to broadcast either on television or radio or over the web, i am totally toasty with seeing advertisements, because that's how stuff gets paid for.

if you have sold me a service that consists of advertising-free content, you may not place advertising in it, because by asking me to pay for the content was ostensibly what was going to be your revenue stream.

i know, it seemed rather like an easy choice for you to sell me content without advertising but then your ADVERTISERS got cranky because they wanted to put advertising on all your content!

that's not my lookout.

there is no double-dipping.

either give me free content with advertising OR let me pay for advertising-free content. you cannot have it both ways, you greedy little pricks.

and while we're at it, if i am watching AN ADVERTISEMENT, you may not put advertising on that before i can watch your ad. that is also double dipping and not ok.

furthermore, if i am visiting an ad-supported website to read an article but then i can't see the article OR THE ADS because of a second layer of popup ads, i simply close the window and therefore do not look at the popup but i also do not read your inline ads or your sidebar ads or your banner ads and i also do not read your content and i do not talk about it or link to it.

so while you're thinking about how you can squeeze every last penny out of my eyeballs by cramming ads into your content, what is really happening in the aggregate total is that i am not looking at any of your content, and my shopping dollars are going to sites and advertisers that have given some thought to how the consumer might like to see advertising.

because let's face it. the real reason for advertising is to boost actual purchases, and if i am so mightily annoyed as to turn off the media source, nobody is getting what they want.

and i know you didn't ask me, but here's is how web advertising works in my brain:

sidebar ad gets read, and most often clicked. i will go out of my way to buy stuff from sponsors of free content i enjoy.

banner ad is sometimes read, but most often ignored.

inline ad gets aggressively ignored, because it is annoying. did you not think i saw the sidebar?

popup gets closed immediately.

persistent popup means i stop using your website.

i know i have helped you.

love,
flask.

mmmm, spam.

among my hobbies are taking things literally and rummaging through my inbox for spam i can pick apart to see what fascinating techniques are being used these days by greedy predators against stupid greedy people.

making the rounds today is an interesting thing that purports to be from UPS.

Dear Customer,
This email is coming to you as a reminder concerning your pending package that has been with us for a long time.  As you already know that this package is containing an AUTOMATIC TELLER MACHINE CARD (ATM CARD) in your name and in the amount of $2.5 million USD.
United Parcel Service (UPS) wish to let you know that our delivery team has finally carried out delivery of your package though having problems with your availability on pickup which we assume that the address is not correct. The package was shipped from Nigeria and since on the 01/31/2013 it has been in Pine Bluff, AR, United States on transit awaiting clearance of location.
To track your package, go to www.ups.com and insert the tracking number below to view delivery status.
WWW.UPS.COMTRACKING NUMBER: 1Z9575R2P297341747
On the tracking page you will see that this package has been in our route for six months which led to our contacting you for proper identification of your address. This is because you have refused to give us your cooperation. You are hereby advice to provide us with the below details so we can immediately have it sent out to our deliverymen in Arkansas to complete your delivery to the current address you may provide now.
YOUR NAME (IN FULL):_YOUR DELIVERY ADDRESS: _YOUR DIRECT TELEPHONE NUMBER:_
Upon receiving your correct details, we will immediately notify our regional depot and the Airport Authorities in USA so that the package will be redirected to your correct address immediately. This is important and as such your immediate response will do you good.
You can also email our dispatch office at mrusifo@ups.de.vc (link removed. you should not click on links found in spam.)
Management,Mr. Michael Usifoh(c)UPS Online Management Team.All rights reserved.(c) 1995-2012

ok, to start with, if you go to the UPS site and enter that tracking number, you get a legitimate package sitting in arkansas. so of course you think:

wow. why have i so far refused to cooperate in giving my name and address and phone number to these people when clearly there is a legitimate shipment of that 2.5 MILLION DOLLARS THAT SO OBVIOUSLY BELONGS TO ME?

because, you know, not only do i HAVE an extra 2.5 million dollars, but i and my bank have no way to transport it around the globe other than sticking it onto a bank card that can be lost in delivery and clearly my address is simply misplaced.

you know, because it is perfectly reasonable for an entity sending me 2.5 million dollars not to have oh, say, written my address down in more than one location. aaaaaand also not have heard of wire transfers.

points to the hatwipes for apparently sending themselves an undeliverable package so that they can use the UPS tracking page to look legitimate, but really.

if you are actually looking on the UPS site to see where your package with the 2.5 million dollars is, you kind of deserve what's coming.

in the meantime, here is what UPS says.

Response

Thank you for forwarding this information to us. The e-mail you received is not a legitimate UPS communication. We are aware that individuals may inappropriately use the UPS name or its services to perpetuate fraudulent activities. We appreciate you alerting us to this latest incident. If you are ever concerned about the authenticity of an e-mail referencing UPS, do not click on any links provided. Open a new Web browser, type www.ups.cominto your browser address field, and either log in to your Internet shipping account from this page - or use the "search" feature located at the top of the page to access the information you need. You may also verify its authenticity by forwarding it to fraud@ups.com. While UPS is not liable for the actions of third parties, we are working to prevent and detect fraud where possible. For more information on protecting yourself from fraud, see our Web site at www.ups.com/fraudprotection. Thank you again for bringing this matter to our attention. UPS Fraud Mitigation Corporate Security fraud@ups.com the package is still out there, though.

rook attack

yes, yes, i know. it's a lot of postings about a thing that ended nearly a hundred days ago.

the thing about it is that just because it's over doesn't mean it wasn't beautiful, and the exiles still really miss our beautiful world.

and if i process vids to post them, that's what i've done today and what i'm thinking about.

so anyway, by way of explanation (that none of the exiles needs), our world of Ur was attacked sometimes by rooks. and we had to go fight them with our imaginations and focusing orbs and we had to use teamwork to do it.

it was a game mechanic that evolved over the course of the game, and while it had some great potential for development, there really wasn't any consequence to not fighting the rooks when they came.

back in the day when the devs were testing rook attacks heavily and they were also releasing new streets, i was at what i like to call "the battle of saker mank".  i may be wrong because it happened so quickly, but i am pretty sure that the original art for scaup low and saker mank did not include stumps and fallen trees.

when the rook came to the street, it did some damage. and the fighting spread to scaup low. and glitches died in the field, and trees were destroyed.


THAT, my young glitchen, was a rook battle.

scaup low

back in the day.

and then for a while rook battles happened on a schedule that was predictable enough someone had drawn up a little spreadsheet.

i kept saying (since i am a troublemaker) that none of us should fight the rooks when they came, just to see what would (or wouldn't) happen.

you know, for science.

so near the very end i was minding my own business in gopra byle and rooks started flying. so i just started recording screenvid. and then when glitchen came to fight it, i just stood and recorded.

because end days.

important for us later just to remember what it looked like.

 

bonaparte crossing the rhine

i was still playing with the googledoc demo and i decided that it was funny.

i took some screenvid.

word about that: when i record them they look a lot sharper than they do when i get them up on youtube. if you have any solutions to that, i will be happy to hear them.

DK

i am interested in the progressions of things.

i like to photograph the same thing as it changes over time, so last may when i was on the road and i didn't finish all the popovers before they started to grow mold, i did not throw them out.

normal people throw things out when they go bad.

i guess.

i imagine that's how normal people do things.

me, i saved the popovers and thought: i will simply take pictures of these as they progress through the various stages of anaerobic decay.

it's not very scientific, because i didn't have any controls or measurements and i did not photograph at regular intervals, but it's still kind of interesting.

13 may 2012

6 june 2012

13 july 2012

6 november 2012

15 march 2013

collaboration

this morning a friend of mine was playing with a demo for googledocs or something and i don't think it's currently in use as an actual demo because you have to dig to find it, but it is very amusing to play with.

if you have always wanted to write a thing and then have charles dickens jump in and rewrite your sentence while it's still in progress, you should play with it.

the link is here. you're welcome.

here is a short text from me and my collaborators this morning: emily dickinson, charles dickens, friedrich nietzsche, edgar allen poe, and i think maybe ralph waldo emerson.

so there was this one time... An hour behind the fleeting breath,  there still was no dinner... A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends. and it was pretty clear that the marvelous writer was all alone against zombies that knew where he lived.

I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.  because if you can write that mysterious ... nobody has any idea what you are talking about . Procrastination is the thief of time, collar him.

suddenly, it was 2:10 in the afternoon and nobody could remember where president garfield is buried. ... Let not sloth dim your horrors new-begot.

However, the good writer had nothing to do but nail some boards across the windows and wait. the horror was coming soon enough. why distinctly had he taken the souls of his friends? Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual. surely he realized now that it was a bad idea.

but they, who didn't smell the fire burning, were coming. it is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things; it was nearly dinnertime and they were coming.

immunity

a thing they mostly don't tell you in education school is that for your first year or two you are going to be sick.

very, very sick.

you are going to get more colds and stomach bugs than you thought were possible. many of you will go for eight or nine months without having a solid bowel movement.

you, new teacher, are about to enter an environment where all the germs in the world are going to pass through your classroom, and if you teach in an elementary school the sheer volume of pathogens that get dribbled out onto every surface will boggle your mind.

if you are a classroom teacher, you will be VERY heavily exposed to all the germs of the kids in your class, but if you are the music or art or gym teacher you will get light exposures to EVERY GERM IN THE SCHOOL.

at some point, maybe year four or five, you mostly stop getting sick. you only maybe get one cold a year, but the one you get is the epic one.

you develop such a resiliency over time that when the administrative assistant comes around to your classroom to take a survey on how many faculty will be calling in sick tomorrow because THAT many kids and teachers are down with this year's flu, you think quietly that tomorrow you will do your grocery shopping and maybe take yourself out to lunch.

you are so immune to everything that you do not hesitate to eat stuff you find on the floor.

in a rest area parking lot.

and then you retire.

and after a few years you maybe realize that your super immunity is gone because you live alone in the country and when you see live people it's usually outdoors or in sporting venues where sick people usually aren't. you don't get any colds, because you're not exposed to any germs.

so you go a number of years without being exposed to a barrage of viruses and all of sudden one day you realize that you have no resistance to anything anymore and on average you're going to be sick about five days for every time you spend more than an hour in a closed room with people.

if it is flu season, you just simply stop talking to people in person.

toy guns

on the one hand, i'm against toy guns.

you know, in a knee-jerk kind of way. because i've been a pacifist since before i knew what a pacifist was.

but here's a thing: sometimes a gun is a legitimate tool. i live where people actually eat meat they catch themselves. sure, we can go to the grocery store for that. but if you eat meat and you can catch it wild and you like that sort of thing, why on earth would you not?

and heaven forfend that big epidemic should arrive or the power grid go down or something. i am not a doomsday prepper, but it's conceivable that things could get shut down for a number of days in a row.

and some lawlessness might ensue.

and here's another thing: kids engage in a thing called mastery play. no, go look it up yourself. i'm sick.

i recall that as a child i did not approve of playing war games because those involved shooting people. but i remember having imaginary guns. and i remember that in my imaginary games i was prepared to defend myself if i had been attacked by imaginary people. and that i hunted imaginary meat to feed my imaginary pioneer family because there's no imaginary store sometimes.

my childhood games also involved knowing which plants i could eat if i had to and how to find water and read a map.

my concept of mastery in this world means knowing i could build a fire and keep myself and my companions alive in an emergency.

you know, because i grew up in a regular suburban neighborhood where so often you are left to the elements.

anyway, i don't fault any kid who picks up an imaginary firearm, especially if she's a kid who grows up in an environment where there are real firearms. heck, i hope that if a kid is in a place where people have firearms that they take a lot of imaginary target practice and real safety instruction including some no-nonsense age-appropriate talk about some real and scary things that happen when people mistake toys for real. or the other way around.

but here's some legislation we need: no cute or decorative colored firearms. no darling little patterns. it should be illegal to manufacture or distribute firearms that look like toys.

go ahead, google "pink gun".

i only did because i was thinking about the idea of my general disapproval of toy guns but then i was thinking of circumstances in which i might approve of them and why and it came down to safety.

it would be possible, i thought, for a kid not to be properly instructed and to make a very bad mistake.

and that, really, is the bottom line because even if i'm all pacifist and everything i don't have a right to demand that of my neighbors or their children and what constitutes appropriate play with toy guns is really up to individual families once we have the safety basics covered.

you might similarly demand that your chainsaw-loving toddler or your little one who is fascinated with flames or electrical cords only use these things with adult supervision and only appropriately in play, but there's no accounting for mistakes or other people's stupidity or even that terrible moment when you realize your kid is smarter and more mobile than you thought, or when he just doesn't follow the rules.

 so i was thinking about that and i happened to google "pink gun".  you know,  to see if there was anything about this idea that firearms made to look like toys was even a thing.

sadly, it is.

richmond market

really, i was going to have some deep thoughts about civil liberties and social structures because i was thinking about friends in Socially Liberal European Country and Socially Conservative European Country and some similarities and differences between US and canadian culture and also language as is  used to separate and humiliate people and the rising costs of special education but the truth of it is that while i'm having a lot of thoughts and many of them are cogent, i am well into day ten of the cold from hell and i find that i alternate between "i feel very sick" and "i feel ok, but i need a nap".

and while i might bang out a few thoughts to talk with you about, i haven't the energy to give you any links or cite any examples or sources or even related opinions, and if i'm going to go on about the erosion of civil liberties or european court cases that change corporate policies for consumers in the US, i should probably give you links.

so instead i'm going to tell you about what's more my speed: the richmond market. yeah.

richmond is a two street town. i live some miles out of it, but it's where i get my hair cut, and on the odd occasion that's where i go to order a pizza.

because maybe it's a two street town, but you can get good pizza there, and in more than one place. you can also get a good cheeseburger, a good haircut, and find a good bakery.

sunday afternoon i went into richmond to buy prepared food.

you know, because what i have left in the house either requires too much preparation or just makes me feel green to think about. sometimes when you're sick you just don't want to think about the eggplant soup.

the richmond market used to stand on the corner of main and bridge streets in a dumpy looking old building that appears to have been new sometime in the jackson administration. the first time i went in i simply didn't know any better. i was expecting to be able to get a box of cereal and a can of beans or something, and probably off-brands.

but no.

they had fresh produce. and hand cut meats. and four different brands of jasmine rice.

and now they're down in the new shiny building and you can get local produce and two different flavors of marinated tofu and five flavors of vegan dumplings and in-store made pot pies and wild mushrooms in season and all manner of really awesome things at reasonable prices.

plus regular groceries and toilet paper and stuff.

i am thinking of doing all my shopping there from now on. i am trying to think if i am really saving anything by going to the big chain, or if there's anything i really need at the big chain they don't have at the richmond market.

day nine, sick

you don't really want to know.

in the highlight reel, i peed myself coughing three times in one day.

bloodshot? yeah, those are my eyes.