Category: History

An accompaniment to ‘the sproing’

ImageJenny L Davis academic details

@ChickashaJenny – we currently follow each other on twitter but that may change, since I’m curating my list pretty much constantly and sometimes if I think I’ve been too greedy of an Indigenous person’s time I quit following them to stop the damage.
anyway, what the hell is a sproing?
Glad you asked. Sadly, this device is fictional, and part of the UPSUN universe, but oh how I wish it warn’t.

Text of the user guide:

All my relations.

In English, this device is called a sproing.

The sproing was made by sixers for Indigenous peoples to reclaim their stolen heritage from museums, businesses, collections and private homes.

There is technology in it which makes it demand to be used.

It will self-destruct or become inert if not used for its purpose, because it assumes that when it stops reclaiming Indigenous treasures that it is in the hands of colonial powers who wish to understand its secrets. We can’t say how it makes these decisions, just that we’ve seen it demonstrated.

When you’re done with it — may that day come soon — think of where to leave it. If you decide never to use it, you will still have to leave it somewhere.

If it self-destructs it may reach temperatures of 850 degrees C. Think of this object as a person who is a tool who is a bomb.

DO NOT LEAVE IT IN YOUR HOMES. You have been warned. The smoke causes lung and skin damage to human beings, plants and animals. Sitting it on dirt or stones with a metal box over it is best when it’s not being used.

It is wise to ensure that anyone who will be using the sproing speaks to it first. The sproing doesn’t have speech recognition, but it becomes used to certain people and is much less likely to behave strangely if it hears familiar voices. Speak to it before you pick it up.

Since it will open almost any door, it exists in opposition to capitalism and so it’s always dangerous for you to carry. Thieves, cops, the military, journalists, spies and sixer technology cultists all want this object. If you are not the right person to use it, give it to one of your people who is honest and fearless, and let them use it instead.

The sproing will open almost all key-locked doors and the fobbinator half of all doors managed with a key fob. If it doesn’t work, don’t make a second attempt. Second attempts may bring on the self-destruct, as the sproing assumes the person using it is without the necessary self-discipline to use it safely.

Please treat the sproing with honour and leave it in the sun, directly on the ground, during ceremony, to the extent you can. It will run longer if you do.

The sproing is capable of independent movement. It won’t happen often but they have been known to follow people they like for several hundred meters before they lose interest.

No visible record of the sproing  – of any kind – should be made, which is why there is no illustration in this document. Songs and ceremonies are OK.

Do not leave it close to bonfires, as there is more than one report of sproings being attracted to large fires. Under no circumstances try to pull it out of the fire; alert everyone and move away with your backs turned, and keep moving. Although it appears to be made of metal, it is non-magnetic and non-ferrous. If you are foolish enough to try to take it through a customs-enforced airport and you are asked what it is, it’s a paperweight.

Operation.

The side marked “S” is the sproing side. Place the “S” as close to the keyhole as possible and push gently. The sproing will ‘kick’ once, and extrude and push the key into the hole. You can still pull it out at this time and whatever is extended will retract.

Push again and the key will ‘halt in place’ or advise you of failure by vibrating four times. If it works, you won’t be able to remove the sproing until the door has been unlocked and locked again. Turn the sproing as if it was a key and open the door. Return to starting position to remove sproing.

Push three times rapidly if the sproing jams after you’ve returned it to the starting position; this triggers forced retraction.

The “F” side is the fobbinator side. Hold as if it was a fob next to the sensor and wait. If it doesn’t work, it will vibrate, hard, four times. Don’t try it again!

Do not use the sproing lightly or without a clear understanding of your responsibilities as you use it. It is normal for the sproing to change colour over time. This will take the appearance of bleaching or darkening from the original gunmetal colour. If you treat the sproing properly, within a short time it will be the colour of the soil of your territories.

Memorize these instructions and burn them.

I referred to a Trumpenista today as a ‘cognitive foundling’ and I’m particular pleased with that locution.

an anonymous wikipedia edit

Someone really useful on twitter just blocked me because I ‘sexualized their feed’ well THEY WERE THE ONE TALKING ABOUT SLOPPING DOWN FORTY GALLONS OF HUMMUS lands’ sakes. That has nothing to do with this:

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Wikipedia editor MN070 is responsible for this gem, which has probably already been edited back out, but isn’t it a sweetie?  someone with a lot of neck in Irish slang is a chancer, someone with a lot of nerve, who takes liberties….

My strongest weapon, my weakest link

That would be my mind, although Jeff might argue that it’s really my farts.

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2020 really is something.

Stopped watching Hannibal, it turned out that even if it was network tv it’s giving me the collywobbles.

Walk and lunch with Paul yesterday was most pleasant. Weather continues particularly fine. The Usual Domestic Tasks like laundry and dishes continue….

533 words of fanfic.

The hammered guitar song is responsible for me toasting one set of strings, lol – the bronze wrapping is coming off and making the string buzz

Hey pOp which snail are you?

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“Open image in new tab” or your OS equivalent will pop this pic larger. Shown is a three by three grid of charming snails from medieval illuminated manuscripts. Some of them look very medieval and some look quite contemporary, although the one with a boar’s head is a bit much.

And here’s a good article about the philosophy of consciousness.  Pull quote:

I think of consciousness as a weakly emergent phenomenon, not dissimilar from, say, the wetness of water (though a lot more complicated)

Massimo Pigliucci is the K D Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York and he’s written about Stoic philosophy

stoic quotes when someone properly grounded life should have look outside themselves approval epictetus wisdom nature

 

george savile first marquis of halifax wrote these words in the character of a trimmer

just prior to 1700 ce

he was a byword for ease of address, wit, charm and political astuteness; he’s all over William and Mary like a dirty shirt. Enought background

 

IT must be more than an ordinary provocation that can tempt a Man to Write in an Age over-run with Scribblers, as Egypt was with Flyes and Locusts: That worst Vermin of swall Authours hath given the World such a Surfeit, that instead of desiring to Write, a Man would be more inclin’d to wish, for his own ease, that he could not Read; but there are some things which do so raise our Passions, that our Reason can make no Resistance; and when Madmen, in the two Extreams, shall agree to make common sense Treason, and joyn to fix an ill Character upon the only Men in the Nation who deserve a good one; I am no longer Master of my better Resolution to let the World alone, and must break loose from my more reasonable Thoughts, to expose these false Coyners, who would make their Copper Wares pass upon us for good Payment.

Amongst all the Engines of Dissention, there hath been none more powerful in all Times, than the fixing Names upon one another of Contumely and Reproach, and the reason is plain, in respect of the People, who are generally uncapable of making a Syllogism or forming an Argument, yet they can pronounce a word; and that serves their turn to throw it with their due malice at the head of those they do not like; such things ever begin in just, and end in Blood, and the same word that maketh the Company merry, grows in time to a Military Signal to cut one anothers Throats.

These Mistakes are to be lamented, tho’ not easily cured, being suitable enough to the corrupted Nature of Mankind; but ’tis hard that Men will not only invent ill Names, but they will wrest and misinterpret good ones, so afraid some are even of a reconciling sound, that they raise another noise to keep it from being heard, lest it should set up and encourage a dangerous sorts of Men, who prefer Peace and Agreement, before Violence and Confusion.

Were it not for this, why, after we have play’d the Fool with throw∣ing Whig and Tory at one another, as Boys do Snow Balls, do we grow angry at a new Name, which by its true signification might do as much to put us into our Wits, as the other hath done to put us out of them?

Giri Haji is not a show about Japanese gagsters

I am liking this show SO MUCH AND WE ONLY HAVE ONE EP LEFT wail

Did you know coyotes and badgers have been known to hunt together? There’s video on the internet that looks like the first shot of a movie. Further pics.

Storage Jar (1858), David Drake.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Stoneware vessel (1858), David Drake At the Stony Bluff Manufactory in Old Edgefield, South Carolina, the enslaved potter David Drake made stoneware vessels of extraordinary workmanship, often inscribed with short poems describing their owner and function. ‘When you fill this Jar with pork or beef / Scot will be there; to get a peace’ is carved into one side of the vessel, among other lines. This is of 40 known surviving ‘poem vessels’ by Drake, and the first to enter the Met’s collection.

 

 

Brynn Tannehill on the road to genocide

From twitter this am. She studies genocide. She’s moving to Canada from the US in 2021… she hopes.

What is interesting to me is watching for the warning signs:

* Rising infant mortality
* Demonizing government propaganda
* Us v. Them narrative
* Mythological past free of a minority
* Populist government
* Breakdown of democratic norms
* Politicized court beholden to party 
* Removing minority from federal service
* Legally establishing that minority doesn’t have same rights as everyone else
* Encouraging stochastic violence
* Preventing access to health care system
* Preventing access to education
* Mandatory segregation from general population under penalty of law
* Requiring something that outs people as the minority (ID, worn item, name, etc) * Random arrests
* Indefinite “black hole” detentions
* Testing to see if foreign governments will move to stop abuses
*Minority groups fleeing the country
she says the last two are signs it’s too late

I just watched the spire of Notre Dame fall on twitter

 

I’m crying. Why wouldn’t I be.

This is a fucking tragedy, and it was all triggered by workmen. I’ll bet anything there were safety shortcuts forced onto them by the construction management company.

 

later…. 52 acres of primeval oak forest was taken down for the pillars

 

jesus

Land acknowledgement

The world is now awash in land acknowledgments. The Aussie one at the end of many TV productions sounds like it went through a glass-cutter:

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

See, in my conception of the local Indigenous practices, they don’t own land. They’re in a permanent (in planetary existence timescales) and precious relationship with their land and their language and their people, and to call the land part of the relationship ownership is everything that’s wrong with colonialism in a single sentence.

I see that acknowledgment as shown above and I feel a gaping lack.

(However I urge you to look up how the word ‘country’ is used in English by many Indigenous people living in Australia, because it’s beautiful and resonant.)

As of 2019, this is my land acknowledgement:

I acknowledge that nothing short of complete restitution of Indigenous lands across this Earth will do.

I acknowledge that reparations for the land, war crimes, genocide, language extinction; theft, despoliation and destruction of great works of art and cultural centred-ness; as well as yet unknown damages to Indigenous people caused by sequelae from these events, are due in full measure, and I hate that capitalism is going to make that reparation virtually impossible even if it completely fails, as I hope it does.

I will hold up Indigenous rights and ask Indigenous persons no rude questions, tell no rude lies about them, and may study with consent but co-opt none of their spiritual or artistic practices for praise or pay.

I will pay Indigenous editors to read my fiction, some of which is already published, but which needs to be vetted by someone without my biases, so that it may be changed, and changed again if need be; the future comes on fast.

(note, from August 2021… this is proving more difficult than I had originally anticipated)

This land, the land I live on, belongs in the human care of Coast Salish people, specifically to the peoples of MST country, nations among whom made their own agreements, under their own systems of justice and negotiation. I hope to keep living here, after it’s been released from colonial bondage and theirs in the sense that they may be in their traditional relationship with this land, without colonial interference. I hope to live here when the sign at the city limits comes down and there are no longer any artificial colonial barriers between any of the lands here.

I’m a settler here. My descendants will most likely be settlers. I will never again commit the violence of ‘owning’ land under the stamp of the Province of British Columbia again or indeed anywhere in what is now called Canada, and I encourage my children to do likewise. I am unemployed and cannot pay the rent I owe to any local nation, but I acknowledge that I owe it and may be called upon to pay it some other way.

sideways thought

I’m a left-loonie, so-far-away, no brain, no balance sheet, no COMPETITIVE VIGOUR kind of person, except for my fondness for guns.

How on earth can I justify such a thing?

Well, I had never tried to, and then an Organizing Principle appeared from the writhing and fuscous depths of my sensorium: why not make a list of who else carries guns in Canada and, you know, compare and contrast?

I’m not really that much of a left-loonie I guess, since I have these libertarian and anarchist stripes, which I need to bury under a more ancient way of knowing.  No anarchist or libertarian ever fucking learned to live inside an ecosystem without destroying it, and the ancestors of the current First Nations actually had that well in hand, from the Haudenosaunee to the Gwich’in and all the peoples many days’ journey around and between.

Note that the slave based culture of MesoAmerica did not prosper.  They fucked up their water table and had armies of drones to support one big hereditary family of fucking parasites (who made nice art possible, sure, that’s the Eurocentric response and it was but an armature for later development like the Enlightenment and Oh Look there are still Royal houses in Europe bla bla bla.) Yeah, they put too many people on too little land and last few generations of the lower classes were in such rough shape that it’s amazing they gave as good an account of themselves as they did when the Spanish arrived.

The people who figured out the buffalo, and the salmon, and the caribou, and the three sisters, now THOSE are people we should respect.  We don’t even know how many of them lived here before white people came, but it was a fuckton, and if they didn’t leave much behind maybe it’s because they didn’t ruin everything.

 

So, about the couple ‘living Victorian’.  Three comments.

As you may know, my mOm is transcribing our ancestor’s diary. He was a lower middle class Victorian Englishman with pretensions, since he was an antiquarian and took tea with Carlyle (more than once, I’ll have you know.) He spends an inordinate amount of time diarizing about the weather, and how they had to break the ice on the wash basin in the morning, when they had infant children in the house. Damn right skippy, it freezes hard in jolly old England. Comfort was hard to come by and made much of when it occurred.

When people want to live their cosplay, I have no objections and am in fact quite envious. When I find out about their lack of technology in an article she wrote for the internet, I laugh quite heartily and my envy melts away, unless I missed something and she’s powering her server with a steam-engine. Then I’m envious again, although not of her neighbours.

Victorian birth control. Until you’ve done nappies the Victorian way (ancestors did vaccinate their kids, for what it’s worth) you have a contortionate and dreamily inaccurate view of a Victorian married woman’s life.