Category: Visual representation of complex ideas

halos on Mars

isn’t it stunning? This is actually a computer graphic, but apparently that’s what they’d look like. Researchers sought them but haven’t found them yet.

 

I have a month to get ready for Orycon. I have to admit that I’m jealous of all of Shad’s wonderful patches she’s sewn onto her guitar case, so now I’m going to announce my probably useless plan to sew patches on MY guitar case (Smokey’s going to the con, I don’t know if both ukes and the mando are going. I really want to take the dulcimer but then I keep thinking I’ll borrow Jeff C’s but I’m not 100% sure he’s going. Anyway, I have to figure all of that out. ANYWAY while tearing my craft boxes apart for patches I found Granny’s little Hummel girl on mesh, so SHE’S going on my guitar case and then I can carry Granny around with me every time I sing and play. I’m going to try to find some of the crochet work Grandma Zoos made and tack that on too, mebbe make a mesh pocket of it.

I need to select, assemble and print/PDF a filk-büche, practice until my fingies hurt, sew some patches, select and pack clothing,

Brief break for crafty Black woman! I freaking love the hat.

SHAD’S HAT THAT SHE CROCHETED AS PART OF HER CARPAL TUNNEL THERAPY. (SHAD IS CINDY, CINDY IS SHAD.)

is it not of surpassing excellence and tremendous beauty???? SAY IT ALOUD

So I’m ripping stuff apart in the craft area of my room (which I have to compress down into JUST ONE BOX lol AND I FOUND THE PERFECT PURPLE SPARKLY EMBROIDERY FLOSS TO MEND MY PURPLE TIE DYE TSHIRT WITH. SO I guess this morning has been a success so far.

I’m going to the Con!

 

 

Early one morn on a unicorn, well, I launched a rocket ship!
and I wore my silks and tie dyes and gave mundane life the slip
It cost me more than I could afford but I had to take the trip
for I have you all to thank that I’m a filker!
We sing the sweetest music and we laugh the loudest laughs
The robots sell their spares to hear, the wizards pawn their staffs
the circle calls in the function halls for a chorus fine and free
You can keep your wretched autotune –

it’s a filker’s life for me!

Nudes of the world

    1. Just a reminder that I am a proud nudist (naturist sounds funny to me, sorry) and that if you really piss me off and I don’t have other recourse I WILL REMOVE GARMENTS. Starting with the legal stuff, and moving on. Since there’s apparently hardly anything that disgusts and freaks out bigots than fat old naked women, I’m keeping that one in reserve. Also, Peter Verigin LIVETH. (This last specifically so mOm can read it to her sister lol)
    2. Also, I did not order those copies of “Grandma Was a Nudist” they JUST SHOWED UP HERE.
    3. Jeff gets a hall pass. Poor guy. It is true that one of the first things I do when he goes away is walk around the house naked and yodelling (sometimes it’s kazoo, and it’s all very much sad for Buster, who has a demonstrated preference for me remaining clothed since I make a better lap that way and he loathes my music.) (Except in the laundry room, which has a security camera vs the raccoons and since Jeff reviews the security footage once a month I don’t want him clapping his hands over his eyes and going AUGH NOMAN HAS BLINDED ME.)
    4. Which is why, although I haven’t been over there for what feels like centuries, and so not recently, the first thing I do when I get to Mike’s is AUGH FREEEEEEDOM. (I even have a cubby for my clothes like at JJ Spa – and Mike’s place IS a spa, at least as far as I’m concerned.) Also he keeps his apartment about 28 degrees, summer and winter and he’s got it set up so you can sunbathe on the balcony year ’round. Sometimes I wave at the neighbours over by the Skytrain station. I don’t know if they’re watching, but you never know, and I don’t imagine anyone I know would ever tell me.
    5. Sigh, the salt room at JJ Spa. I MISS IT SO. But with this new COVID wave, nuh-unh.
    6. I should probably call Mike.
    7. I do very very very occasionally still wear a bra and pantyhose but that’s like a church/weddings/funerals/someone’s paying for a classy dinner scenario.
    8. I made Yorkshire Gold Tea for the household (which will end up in the sugar free iced tea, most likely), peppermint tea as a day-opener for Jeff, and coffee for me. Honestly, I don’t know how many more times I’m going to get coffee and sugar and cream all in once place again, so I really try to enjoy it while I can.
    9. I played with my Kaossilator yesterday and came up with an ABSOLUTE banger of a beat, 56 bpm / g20/ c_ key/EGY scale/94&96 percussion and yowza. In my life I’ve never spent that little money for a tech toy that brought me this much joy, and Jeff commented that a small child and an elderly adult can both enjoy it!
    10. Anyone doing waste water research says the balloon has really gone up for the latest variant.
    11. Suzanne’s computer has been scanned and will be returned to her shortly. She got a scare but it’s all good. THANK YOU JEFF.
    12. Tanya Basu reporting from Corpus Christi on Twitter: The harassment has real-world consequences. The Corpus Christi area teacher’s union president’s house got shot at earlier this week. School board members are being heckled online. Educators, mostly women & poc, are quitting their profession in droves. 
    13. There are rumblings of a NEW hemorrhagic fever out of Tanzania; it isn’t Ebola and it isn’t Marburg (so saith local testing with help from WHO) and it’s currently killing about 1 in 3 of the people it infects. Tanzania is one of the countries on earth most lethally affected by mosquitoes. It sure would be good to know what other mammalian reservoirs there are for this bug.
    14. Keith and Paul are on the Island visiting various and sundry folks and by reports a mellow and convivial time is being had and mOm was enjoying FOOD DELIVERY what a concept.
    15. I sent the first half of Totally Boned to mOm about a hunnert times yesterday. Finally I stripped off all the formatting and re-sent it and now I’m mentally hopping from one foot to the other waiting to hear back. Google mail barfing on a 30k word document just seems like bullshit to me.
    16. Forced birth advocates in the US seem to be under the impression that since they repealed Roe v Wade opponents need to shut up and be nice to them and it’s NO ACTUALLY WE’RE GOING TO PROTEST IN FRONT OF YOUR CHURCHES AND THROW RED PAINT ON YOUR VEHICLES AND RUN YOU OUT OF RESTAURANTS AND GIVE YOU AAAAALLLLLL THE CIVILITY YOU RICHLY DESERVE.
    17. Putin has signed a bill banning media outlets that don’t recount the Russian War of Aggression against Peaceful and Democratic Ukraine in a way he personally likes, for starters by mentioning that it is, you know, a war. A quote: The application scope of the law covers the adoption of measures against false information dissemination, smearing the Russian Armed Forces’ performance, or disrespectful manifestations towards the Russian Federation’s society, state, and official symbols.  
    18. LOL
    19. David Osland on Twitter this morning, retweeted by Potsherd Man Paul Blinkhorn of Time Team fame: Consider Britain and Saudi Arabia. One has temperatures that exceed 40 degrees, is ruled by a royal family presiding over a corrupt government that is militarily dependent on the US, and openly represses peaceful protest. But Saudi Arabia has its problems too.
    20. Wordle in four tries this morning, good lumosity brain workout. *here I am, sighing over having to do mental math* *here I am, trying to get my response time down under 1000 ms* *Here I am, measurably 20 percent less smart than I was in 2014 HEY NUMBAS DON LIE*  I find it funny that often, the less I’ve slept the better I do.
    21. What happened to US health care? Ronald Regan was elected
    22. Jeff reports that at 5 in the morning THE ALLEY IS CRAWLING WITH EXTREMELY LIVELY RATS. Small ones medium ones some as big as yer ‘ead! When he takes Buster for an alley walk he sees them. MANY MANY RATS. ZIP ZIP ZIP.
    23. Today I shall read the most recent Capilano Review. It’s a really good literary mag y’all.
    24. Weather most fine; a/c still working well.
    25. Stomped hard on a Facebook friend yesterday. Women contestants are tired of the pure whites of tennis, and he said IT’S A UNIFORM WEAR IT and I said FOOLISH HUMAN HAVE YOU EVER HAD A PERIOD WHILE BOUNCING UP AND DOWN AND FIRING BALLS AT A 105 FUCKING MPH AT AN OPPONENT yeah I didn’t think so. Siddown and shaddap.
    26. 33487 WORDS end of Part I. Part II – Blossom’s return, Steve and Jack get their asses handed to them, Richie shows up just in time to make things a) better b) more dangerous c) more complicated (THANKS RICHIE YOU LITTLE B-) AND MORE SHIT ABOUT EMIGRATING TO CANADA THAN ANYONE WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT.
    27. I love doing research, I end up finding out things that are both hilarious and realllllly unexpected, but I now know that the Fran’s closest to TGH is open 24 hours and then I learned something actually demonstrably useful about how horselaugh bad the March time change is. See below for illustrated figure.
    29. that cliff? that’s the cliff your body falls off when there’s a time change. I had never actually seen it represented and HOOO WEEE THERE IT IS. Now imagine you’ve gone to Iceland or whatever and the cliff is literally 8 times taller.  And do you know why I saw this data set in the first place? Because I wanted to know the angle of the sun coming in to the side of TGH so I could visualize a scene (last scene in part I.)
    30. I learned that plots of land are as low as $40K out by 70 Mile House and it sure would be nice to have a family campground. This is not compatible with my current political leanings so I am irked by my inability to be consistent. If someone else tees it up I’ll help pay for it.

don’t break the internet while I’m gone

7539 words, no kudos. Felt absolutely terrible yesterday until just before supper time, at which time I felt much better (I’m assuming it was food rumblies based on, er, throughput and truly remarkable pain) and I’ve felt better ever since. Got my prescriptions delivered and we paid our rent. I also fell for NO FEWER THAN three April fool’s jokes, I must have looked batty to my friends.

Ducreux self portrait of man yawning repurposed to say I'm off to bed you fuckers, don't break the internet while I'm gone.

For the first time since I stopped withdrawing money from what’s left of my retirement savings, the dollar amount has gone down. THANKS VLAD YOU ASSHOLE

Theo Moudakis of the Toronto Star made this thing:

Editorial cartoon by Theo Moudakis/Toronto Star showing a man with his back to a wave cheering over a sandcastle Yay, Finally open for business again. The man looks remarkably like Doug Ford about to be drowned.

New drawings for great grandparents

Alex drew some quite interesting and scary pictures for GGma and GGpa including an absolute bloody masterpiece called ‘Remain Indoors’ which I don’t even want to sent to the great grandparents because I love it so much. He also drew this in red, black and white, his first time using a paint program on a computer:

It’s gruesome, even with the blood being in the inverted colour of teal! There’s blood in everything he draws.  (Not actually, just close.)

We (Jeff and I and Alex) walked to Timmy Ho’s at 7 am and then like idiots left the donuts in front of Alex, who was both tempted and satisfied by the box. We all ate too many donuts; let’s just drop a curtain over that.

He played the 2006 game Burnout: Revenge which involves among other things crashing your car as hard as possible into people minding their own business on the expressway. He slept reasonably well although he rolls over and kicks quite a bit and woke me up a lot. He tried playing the pinball Star Trek but the display was wonky, and he definitely got a couple of tube shots on Xenon. He also played some Tetris on my laptop, his current favourite game Stick To It on his tablet, and some Plants vs Zombies on the xBox. As well as drawing and singing into a kazoo for half an hour, an endeavour which, truth be told, fucking near killed me of boredom and self-control.

We forced him to watch a Cuphead  on Netflix; no comment, and to speak to his great grandma, but he was exceedingly polite about it.

At noon Katie whisked us away to Edmonds community centre, (which has zero entry access to two of the pools and the hot tub! Google what zero entry access means) where I got to hold Ryker for most of an hour (have you ever held seventeen pounds of kick, flail and squirm at arms’ length for an hour?) AND soak in the hot tub AND chase Alex around the lazy river. After my two k walk yesterday morning (it was pleasantly warm and not windy, although overcast) the additional springing, leaping, hopping, and flinging babby around during which he regarded me thoughtfully while pinching me and squirmflailed while smiling at me – all that turned my hip regions into a mess of angry meat strings and twingeing bones. Suzanne came too but I scarcely spoke to her after she arrived because Alex wanted to do something in the coldest pool AT the pool and Katie and I were most unwilling. He was once again very sweet with his little brother and Ryker makes anybody baby-positive sag to the ground with sentiment. Truly remarkable to witness. He’s a nice looking kid but he has this way of squirming and smiling that completely turns your own sensorium against you WITH BABBYINESSSSS.

Jeff found some more ‘Shetland’ that we hadn’t seen and gosh but I love that show and also Douglas Henshall is a very attractive middle aged man. Once again when you affix the number of people who die in each episode to the actual population of Shetland (just over 22k on several islands) it’s like the murder rate in ‘Hudson and Rex’; just about as bad as possible compared to the reality.

Paul’s in the US. He’s apparently gone for a week. I could go on about this but those who need to know already know and those who don’t can do nothing, so I am just going to leave it out there.

6076 words total so far; two kudos night before last.  Three more this morning.

This daguerreotype of a young woman was recovered from the SS Central America, a ship that sank in 1857 with 21 tonnes of gold. Isn’t she purty? love the dress and hair.

Copyright California Gold Marketing Group

 

Low energy day

Once again, another day of being tired. I felt dizzy after we got back from the store (didn’t last long, but my balance was shot all day) and after watching a Time Team with Jeff I went back upstairs and …. slept until supper time? I mean I woke up around midnight and couldn’t go back to sleep so more sleep was in order, and I just had a normal night of sleep and feel fine, but that was weird. Fortunately Jeff had both lots of work and lots of squeaky squeaky time (March Madness) to watch.

The little tweety birds have a series of songs and dances that they do to encourage me to put down more seeds. (Juncos and chipping sparrows.) Bought peanuts yesterday for the corbies. They made what I put out disappear in a real hurry.

I mentioned that I ordered a Fluent Pet starter board which will ‘allow’ Buster to talk and they emailed me a 36 page starter guide to read before the six buttons and the panels they sit on get here. I think Jeff is quite dubious, but I am really looking forward to it.

No work on the story because I slept all day but much pondering – the next convo is going to be hard to set up and write so that it flows correctly. One lead character is being an asshole to cover how traumatized they are and the other lead character’s about to drop the hammer and explain (kindly, firmly) that ‘your trauma doesn’t suddenly give you an all access asshole pass’….. Four kudos overnight. The gal who’s reading all my stuff on AO3 is, as promised, reading all my stuff. Squee.

Alex is coming for a sleepover tonight. I’m thinking of doing things a leedle differently than normal but mOm I’ll be trying to give you a call before bedtime tonight so you get to hear his voice. Tomorrow, bouncing around the lazy river at the community centre with my grandsons and co-grandma and Mamabear.

Fuck Ginni Thomas, I hope she goes to hell through a cenote-style sinkhole appearing in the goddamned floor. Stories all over the internet about what a great *** she is.

Despite everything that’s wrong with me yesterday I wrote A NEW INTRO for Gelis and Niccolo (I cannot let go of that song) – one that uses fingerpicking style rather than hammered guitar – and I’m thrilled with it because it just came to me in a lightning flash and there’s a really wonderful rhythmic change that makes me feel like I am, you know, a musician with a little flair, a little showpersonship.

Vyshyvanka are about to get reaaaaallly popular. I predict it. They are the Ukrainian national shirt. Go to Etsy and look it up for examples. The black shirt with buff and gold embroidery made me DIE OF WANT.

Here’s a photo that is really hard to interpret because none of us speak or read Russian. Here we go:

So there we have some bog standard Russian iconography from the days of the Soviet Union. This looks not particularly rude in anyone’s terms, it’s a hammer and sickle with the words “Mow” “and” “Hammer” BUT according to Alexey at Meduza, it’s an extremely sophisticated visual pun.

Why? because ‘Reap’ (aka ‘mow’) is Russian slang for DODGE THE DRAFT and ‘Hammer’ is Russian slang for IGNORE DRAFT NOTICES. So this means that the iconography of the former Soviet Union is now UNIVERSALLY ESTABLISHED as a symbol for draft dodging, inside Russia, and that is to my mind so fucking hilarious I want everyone who reads my blog to know about it!

There’s also a joke going around (not in Russia) that the reason the current war symbol is a ‘Z’ is that, thanks to Russian Engineering, the other two arms of the swastika fell off.

this is Mariupol:

Kyiv is still Ukrainian

Putin’s a month into his war and he’s achieved so few of his original objectives that some commentators, while not exactly mocking him, are starting to worry that he’s being thwarted, which makes him prone to lash out and be dangerous and threaten nukes, repeatedly. He’s already put at least two hundred children in the ground. Why, if it wasn’t for the wars on the populations of Yemen and Syria, which Russia’s armed forces have helped to prosecute these past many years, and previous Russian outings in Ukraine and Chechnya, I wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.

Learned about SKIF’s, the Ukrainian country/urban tank killer, whose name literally means ‘Scythian’. They’re ferociously effective in modern warfare, cheap like borscht compared to the arms it can kill. It’s a modern day crossbow in terms of its asymmetrical warfare effects – it can take down a person, a vehicle, a tank, a chopper OR – with luck – a jet.

Two kudos overnight, very surprised by one of them; one of the stories I posted to AO3 is a complete outlier because the central character dyad is not destiel, it’s a three person triad that turns into a polyamorous household full of kids, and all this while the lead character is dealing with CRUSHING depression, new fatherhood, and coming to terms with being bisexual. So it has a million feels and some very dramatic and technical sex scenes and it’s not like anything else I’ve posted. (SO it doesn’t get much love.) The other kudo, from another person, is for my most popular fic, which has more than 6000 hits now, and a 4% kudo to hit ratio.

Weather kinda miserable and damp.

very complex ‘tholian web’  migraine imagery just now. It’s probably pollen triggered, it’s just been HORRIBLE, how crappy the allergens have been making me and Jeff feel. I feel brain dead, and then I perk up a bit, and then there’s another puff of cedar pollen and BRAIN DED AGIN. Now it’s a square full of vibrating chevrons; now it’s fuzz. Now it’s fading. dammit I need coffee.

Report has come that one of the Dunnetteers from Toronto has passed of cancer. The kind words are coming in and people are speaking well of the dead; she sounds like she was a superior sort of person and we’re also told she was well cared for, and having been through sitting with Tom (even though it wasn’t much and I didn’t materially assist, not really) I am glad that she was, and that no one stinted on the morphine.

Wordle in three this morning. Somebody I follow on twitter made a hint, that the word seemed apropos today, and that really helped. Didn’t hurt that I guessed the first letter of the word right out of the gate.

R value across Canada has dipped way below one. We’ll still get another surge as the new variant comes through (BA.2) but it won’t be as bad. I feel safer and I’m not as worried about my loved ones, especially my immunocompromised loved ones, but you have to watch the numbers…

Laundry’s all done, now I have to haul it upstairs and put it away. The rug survived being laundered, thank god, often the plastic backing comes off and then Jeff has to disassembled the machine to clear it out.

Time to go back to the world of Omar and Brad and Blossom.

Katie’s making plans to go back to work; I think childcare is going to be split between Suzanne and the (humph, advised not to post this descriptive but possibly offensive soubriquet) other grandma, with me as a backup I guess. There are many advantages to this as one can see, and one can only marvel at Ryker’s good fortune that when so many kids have no grandma’s he ended up somehow with three.

March Madness continues, and I’m adding new words to my conlang, admiring the hairdos of the contestants and their ability to pluck balls out of midair, steal them from each other and otherwise perform feats of athletic magic.

Ted Cruz the douche extraordinaire, brandishing a book which he very obviously has neither opened nor read, repurposed by the lovelies at Working Class History (on finer social media platforms everywhere):

This was a possible Hair Sinister cover:

Sleep’s messed up

Off to the library to pick up a book I reserved in July, lol. I was, like, 85th in line.

Galileo's first sketches of the moon in 1609

Galileo drew these after his first glimpse of a moon through a telescope.

The Ukrainian tax office, taking a leaf from its comedian president, has issued a statement about the tax implications of acquiring a Russian tank. Don’t worry, they assure the populace; by the time you get it, it’s not worth much (implication being that it’s been blown to pieces) and it’s not considered a taxable good. Full marks for straight faced ludic nonsense.

More reports of Russians refusing to fight, but the big news is the lengthy file of tanks, half tracks and trucks going into Kyiv, and not moving. Apparently supply is an issue, but what I keep hearing is that Russian boys are holing their gas tanks for the privilege of staying put.

The Russian military is using vacuum bombs (thermobaric bombs) on civilian areas. Mostly people have evacuated but not everyone can. These are bombs that basically turn everything to mush and fix it so even if you’re protected by a wall or building your lungs get mushed.

Reports are overwhelming that Black people who were going to school in Ukraine (a popular destination for med and engineering students from Africa) are being refused entry, food and medical attention at the Polish and Romanian  borders. Some of the stories are nauseating and heart-wrenching.

One of the self-funded reporters in Kyiv is a Black man from Chicago, Terrell Jermaine Starr. The amount of racist abuse he’s getting in Kyiv (there are civilians with guns everywhere in town and Ukraine is just as racist as anywhere else) is still less than the fucking bullshit that racist armchair pundit warriors are giving him on twitter. Anyway, we’re into our seventh day of the invasion, and he says he has PTSD already and people MOCKED HIM. Like wtf you got brain maggots er what? If someone shoved a gun in my face I’d be unhappy, and if ten seconds later that gun went off (not pointed at me) because the civilian left the safety off, that would definitely fix me for not sleeping soundly for the next little while.

1594 words so far on the new story, one little kudo last night on the second last story.

Must finish leftovers! No more cooking til leftovers done!!

A link to Zelenskyy dancing with his comedy troupe in black pleather (as a parody, apparently) has caromed around the internet. Here’s the translation, scanged from u/viciuniversum on reddit, unitalicized words in brackets are the translator’s, italicized words in brackets are my explanatory notes:

“Let’s pour a shot of martini
Bud’mo hey! (Cheers!) (Bud’mo, pron bood mor LITERALLY MEANS LET US BE can you imagine being from a country whose nominal drink clinking words are literally ‘let us be’????)
For freedom, for destiny, for truth!
Bud’mo hey!
One shot, two shots, three shots!
Bud’mo hey! You are gay!
For Yura, for Yulya, dulya [hand gesture] for Lyashko! (saints and heros and politicians of yore)

Here’s my bulava (Ukrainian weapon and traditional symbol of power, a short handled round mace) my brothers!
Tomorrow we go dancing against Moskovites (Russians)
We will dance Gopak (Ukrainian national dance, began in 16th century, men returning from battle would re-enact and perform feats like the balletic leaps the dance is known for. Dance is also popular in other slavic countries), we have the strength
Ukraine is not dead yet, as long as we keep drinking well:
Borsht, salo (smoked pig fat), onion, bread, moonshine,
Drink, and eat,
I drink, I drink, I drink!

Lovers,
Those who were sent here (spies),
They are covered in glitter,
We spit on them.
Artists, stylists, move aside [can’t tell]
Lip-stick, gay-parades, and in Rada (Ukrainian parliament) everyone is like that.
I don’t want to, I can’t, but for salo, let’s do it.

Here’s my bulava my brothers!
Tomorrow we go dancing against Moskovites
We will dance Gopak, we have the strength
Ukraine is not dead yet, as long as we have salo!
Borsht, salo, onion, horseradish, moonshine,
Drink, and eat,
I drink, I drink, I drink!

like a poem

Just bragging about how I got wordle in three this morning. If any of you play wordle I am sorryunsorry. You can cheat if you like I won’t tell.

My heart is full of mixed emotions, but chiefly joy at seeing my friends, grieving and battered as they are. Ville’s death was the model of an unnecessary tragedy.

The RCMP who attended the scene were absolutely foul.

We spoke of many, many other things besides Ville’s death and Jarmo stood us all our meal, and the sauna was incredibly relaxing and I should not have drunk that beer, but I was feeling convivial.

I want you to imagine how honoured I was that me and Mike were literally the first people they’ve interacted with since he died.

Big hugs to My People.

that wasn’t four hours

I got to help a girlfriend, hang with my daughter, make faces at my grandson and get out of the house. I also got to see that cool house in Surrey Suzanne was living at. THE VIEW OF THE NORTH SHORE MOUNTAINS AS THE FOG MELTED AWAY oh my heart. Apparently Keith is going to help Suzanne with her move.

It wasn’t four hours but we did get shit done and she’s got other helpers coming.

By posting this pic on my blog I’m ensuring I’ll be first against the wall when the Chinese walk whistling into Vancouver…. it’s the SS Olympic Bloodbath.

Just said in a reddit comment I HOPE YOUR CLIENT SUES YOUR ASS CLEAN OFF YOUR BODY. lol

My UK fan worked her way through another two stories last night. The consistency is really getting to me.