Software Freemasons

Posted on by Liz Henry

From years of working from home in a tiny house I mostly tune out Oblomovka’s work meetings, but today a particular cadence caught my ear. He was asking someone a list of pointed questions about a software project and the staccato back and forth – I could only hear his end of it mind you – sounded oddly mystical. Who maintains it? When was the last commit? What are the dependencies? I realized that it reminded me of The Musgrave Ritual.

‘Whose was it?’
‘His who is gone.’
‘Who shall have it?’
‘He who will come.’
 

I then stopped listening.

“Did you have a list of questions you were going down? Or were you just riffing?” I asked after he was done with the meeting.

“Making it up.”

I then had to show him the Musgrave Ritual.

It would be funny to have a software engineer / open source project Ritual, maybe a bit like freemasonry.

Who shall maintain it?
They who will come.

At least – that is what we usually hope for.

Let us toast every Brother,

From the East to the West,

Who updates his packages,

And adds lots of tests.

More Inspector Rostinov novels; farm report; wheels n legs

Posted on by Liz Henry

I am now on book 10 or 11 of the Inspector Rostinov series. The Russian detective lifts his weights and considers his painful leg; his assistant Karpo is monastic and humorless with glimmers of feeling; the other assistants have their subplots and relationships so it is all very engaging. Right at this point in the book the collapse of the USSR happens and of course along with the current political situation (here and globally) it makes me think about “democracy” in a glum way where I wonder if it ever “worked” or the thing propping it up is mostly imperialism. And that’s all I want to say about that!

I love a good long series but also always have in mind that the author must be sick to death of their characters by around book 3 or 4, like Agatha Christie finally writing Mrs. Oliver into her series, a detective novel writer who talks constantly about how much she hates her detective and keeps trying to kill him off.

Of course I also think about the concept of “copaganda” which I wish I had recognized as a young person. While I love a detective novel I can also be at least aware that they are making the police to be sympathetic in a way that at least usually, or systemically, not deserved.

With all those caveats – This series is super relaxing and reading it is rejuvenating. I am also playing a lot of Stardew Valley on the Switch since the 1.6.X release has been out (Nov 5th). Voyager Farm is in mid winter, I have reached level 25 of the Skull Caverns and am slowly building up a small store of jade and iridium. My Meadowlands industrialization has progressed to the point where I will likely start buying iridium sprinklers from Krobus, as I continue my campaign to get him for my roommate. Usually, I build the community center in year 1 but this time didn’t really have that as a goal, so I have a pufferfish and a truffle still to go before it is complete.

Oblomovka is back from Thailand and it is so good to have him back after his way too long trip. He brought delicious Pracha Tai (tea from our friends at Prachatai) and made me a pot of it yesterday which I drank while playing Stardew.

Last Monday I also started a weight lifting class at a local gym that is aimed at women and in particular older or menopausal people who need to build up strength and bone density. My bone density is good despite my years of on and off oral prednisone; I am super flexible, have great balance, but my cardio is not great and my strength also not great. Though, I can swim a decent number of laps (for me)  where decent is like, 10 at best and then I can do more after a pause if my ankles and knee permit, but I usually don’t. So, weight lifting!  The gym is aggressively pink and has flowers everywhere on the wall and big fake flowers  on top of the weight racks and machines.  I do not need flowers to go to a gym, but I think they are useful here to filter out really sexist or anyone infused with a lot of toxic masculinity. Indeed, there was no grunting and sweating and judgey macho BS going on. Hurrah!

I got a very pragmatic instructor, M,  who I felt really comfortable with. No weird gender stuff. I wrote down all the sets that we tried together and made them into a weekly spreadsheet so I can check off doing all the things. For some exercises, M was maybe a bit too ambitious for me so I notched it down a bit or just failed to get all the way through the sets or the groups of reps. My little hand weights are 1, 2, and 3 lbs and I can combine them in one hand since they are soft with little straps. (So I am bicep curling 5lbs, and upwards pressing 6.) And, day 3 I only did the stretches because I was hella sore and could not cope. I had to switch from desk pushups to wall pushups as well. I think if I do even part of the checklist every day next week, I will catch up to where she thinks I might have been on day one!  We’ll see! For now, it feels good. The one thing I am “good” at is a rowing motion that uses my manual wheeling and kayaking / swimming muscles so I am able to unexpectedly “do” 25 pounds.

One of my little pretend goals, which I don’t take too seriously, has been to walk to the corner, buy something or sit somewhere, and walk back. 3 years ago at our old house — on the same steep hill we are on now — That was something of a dream and I would get kind of close and then not be able to do it. But now, I can do that half block walk and back on a good day. This has been a really long arc from my 2011 ankle blowout where I spent a year not being able to stand up without CAM boots. And let’s not forget the hideous pain like snakes squeezing 24/7 around my ankles and legs and feet.

Anyway, without having any REAL goal, I realize I have greatly improved my walking ability in the last few years. It is very slow and not linear. I spend weeks or months being able to walk inside the house now, with interludes or weeks or a month or so in the manual chair in the house.  (The house is now easier for my chair, too!!! With the bathroom floor level with the rest of the house instead of having an inch drop. Try wheelie-ing over that in the middle of the night half asleep when you need to pee. Ugh!)

I now try to just IMAGINE walking just a bit further than the half block hill to sit in the cafe, or buy something at the drugstore. (Standing up to wait in line part is intimidating.)  I try to imagine walking to the bus stop, getting on the bus, going somewhere that is right next to another bus stop, then crossing the street to the opposite stop to bus home. Can I do it? Could I do this limited “go one place where I know the number of steps I will have to take” trek, in a cab? I am only just starting to imagine it. Can I do it without setting my ankles back a year, or putting myself back into the Snakes Squeezing Walking Boot territory? That is my real fear I guess. But it also feels inherently scary, like I am about to leave the house defenseless and naked. Keep in mind I dream myself in my wheelchair or powerchair, and in dreams, when I realize it isn’t there, it is a nightmare that usually wakes me up. The thought of trying it brings up huge, weird, inchoate FEELINGS. They are not unfamiliar because I have done this before (in 1997, then in 2009 or so), had some amazing bipedal times, then WHAM, in a world of hurt.

a cartoonish outline drawing of a quadruped with the caption "defenseless animal"

 

Progesterone daze

Posted on by Liz Henry

Not a lot to report here – but that won’t stop me from over blogging about it.  I did want to mention I had a nice dinner out and a gossip with “Criplishus” and then over the weekend had the “Sunday Loaf” with radgendervibes where we hung out and did little projects – I mended some things, conditioned some boots and  a jacket, and tried stripping the dye from my boot toes and re-dying them to see if I could get them brighter red while she sewed something that was going to be a pincushion but turned out to be a tiny jewelry bag with a ribbon instead. We had tea and cookies and gossip and then tried some ways to modify the skirt of her dress. I am going to her dance performance soon so I heard all about that and what “heels dancing” is.

Anyway, I love mending and maintaining things. and i love my crafting stuff and sewing box(es) and tool bags and my little carton of leather maintaining stuff and the supplementary box of leather dye and deglazer etc. It is like having this quiet superpower. Danny and I are thinking to make the Sunday Loaf a regular and low key event.

I am still working out how to organize and store my wheelchair fixing and modding tools and materials, right now in 4 different toolbags, a shoebox, and a giant bag full of weird clamps and camera tripod parts, and then some PVC pipe of different widths and lengths.

I am reading through the entire series of Inspector Rostinov detective novels which are set in the USSR in the 80s. They are grossly sexist but still readable (somehow). I also started having a look at a giant doorstop of a book I got at the SFPL main library bookstore, called A Treasury of African Folklore, figuring I will at least look at the rabbit trickster stories in honor of Uncle Wiggly but it’s likely I’ll just read through it too!

I am not feeling 100% right now as some hormonal weirdness kicked off. Because of extremely heinous hot flashes I started taking estrogen a couple of years ago, which works amazingly well, except you have to take progesterone pills for the first 12 days of the month along with that in order to decrease your risk of uterine cancer and if you screw up the timing of the progesterone, or just think bad thoughts, or look funny at the sky, then you suddenly get either “breakthrough bleeding” or just a regular old period depending on if you think you are actually in menopause or not, which is NOT really well defined.

Either way, it makes me feel quite blah, with moments where it takes a huge effort of will just to get up and Do a Thing, and I am suddenly bleeding all over after months of Not Bleeding (I had to go search the basement for tampons) and also am having regular old painful cramps. I also have some fairly gnarly fibroids including some fibroids inside the uterine wall and adenomyosis which, if you have heard people complain about endometriosis I have that too but ALSO have it INSIDE THE UTERINE WALL. I am not knocking my uterus,  which did its job as well as it could. But i wish that it would be done doing things, growing things, leaking, being lumpy in strange new ways, feeling heavy, sloshing around in there like a, I don’t even know what. Like a heavy sloshing crampy thing.

Have  you seen those videos where guys wear a period simulator and some giggling women slowly turn up the knob from 1 to 10? It is best when it’s more than one dude at a time so they try to out macho each other but fail. I would love to try one of those machines and see if it really approximates the pain!  It does appear to from the stunned look on the dudes faces and the way they bend over and then when the dial turns up higher, the pain goes skittering down their leg and they freak out. Truly accurate. I think the period pain simulator is nothing without pouring about a quarter cup of blood into their pants though.

I spent an hour on a video call with my nephew looking at bits of his college essays and offering light editing analysis. He is always a bit mysterious, has exhibited a sort of strategic flare, or genius, from a young age as well as being able to inhale vast amounts of detail and analyze things at a high level.He is a very interesting thinker and has mastered a certain kind of rhetoric that made me think he will make a quite interesting career doing policy or political work.

My ex mom in law died this weekend and I am thinking about her a lot. I am so glad I got to see her and sit with her earlier this year at my ex’s wedding (which was so lovely!) And feel that we still had a connection. She was a really amazing and very intense person. M. came over and we hugged a lot and looked at old photo albums and talked about her for hours last night. I found an old letter she had sent from her trip to Tanzania where she not only climbed to hut 2 of Mt. Kilmanjaro but also visited some hospitals and small clinics for kids with cerebral palsy and developmental delays or disorders. So most of the letter was about that and I know she worked on those connections for years getting them equipment and other resources.

It seemed so wild at the time (~20 years ago) that you could email some random hospitals in Tanzania and introduce yourself, then show up, inspect everything, give some lectures, actually work a lot, and create a lasting connection. Never mind “going on vacation” – far too dull. They stayed in hostels a lot and would cook for everyone and then just go around meeting random Korean businesspeople who lived in town. You could also count on her and her husband both to do things people told them not to that were dangerous or forbidden or generally unwise. If there was a sign saying caution stay back, they would take it as a sign to investigate…. Sometimes maddening but also endearing. She also set money aside for all 5 of her grandchildren to help them through university. But, my memories of her are more about how hilarious she was and how she was a sort of shrieker and blurter and witchy cackler, and a generator of chaos, in a way that made us kindred spirits in a certain chaos goblin way. She only retired a couple of years ago at age 86. I am sad she has died but a little comforted to know she had been doing things like, reportedly, declaring it was fine now on her way out to have THREE DESSERTS if she felt like it. Correct!!!!

As I told various stories to my kid I had more of those stereotypical Gen X moments where i was just casually telling about something and the young person’s eyes go wide with concern and shock as they go “I’m so sorry that happened to you!” and they make you stop and get a hug. I cannot remember what the things were, because they don’t even register for me as particularly bad, but sometimes I can take the hug, step back, and think, Huh. OK. I’ll take a kind of care that I didn’t think was needed. Maybe it is!  I can learn things!!!! I thought a little bit about older relatives and how curious I was or would have been about their war experiences but how reticent they were to share.

We looked at several photo albums of their babyhood and toddler years and both sets of grandparents holding them and playing with them and I think that was a good grounding thing to do that made some space for emotions around loss but that were also making space for love.

 

And if the gaiome doesn’t hop down the lane to the badger’s library, I’ll tell you another story

Posted on by Liz Henry

Reading the last few days:

Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, which slides down easily and makes me feel like I can take deeper breaths than usual (physically and mentally) – Should you read this?  YES!!! Read it!!!! It explains some of the underpinnings of my feelings about why we should not be “going to Mars”. (Sorry.) I always tell Danny he can go to the Moon when we are very old if he really insists but I will be here making healthy soil from compost and a lovely ecosystem for bugs, grubs, and fungus.

Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf – Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret – To go with the Haraway book. Useful background.

Fourth Grade Rats – a very annoying short children’s book I got on spec from a little free library and am putting right back out – It is about toxic masculinity I suppose where one boy persuades another, more kind and innocent boy that to really grow up, he must be a bully, and misbehave, and throw away all the toys he loves and his cartoon lunchbox and stuffed bear, etc. This doesn’t go well and our soft boi is miserable. Their moms discuss the situation and meet them with a mixture of sternness and laughing at them. Soft boi gets a hug and his stuffed bear is returned to him. That sounds nice but something about it annoyed the hell out of me. I think the part where the moms fix it.  Figure yourself out! Jeez. So it is both putting the burden onto women, and also, condescending somehow. Also, sure fine maybe this would KIND OF happen at age 9 but try it in 5 years and see how it goes down.

Uncle Wiggly’s Fortune, by Howard R. Garis, in a splotchy pale green hardback from 1950, much like the ones I remember reading at my paternal grandparents’ beach house in the 70s as they were strangely short of books and yet had a large run, a whole shelf, of this Uncle Wiggly nonsense, which bored me even when I was small but I was desperate. I remember once starting to list out all the goofy chapter endings, where the author says something extra cornball and fake-down home, in a particular formula, like, “My! And if the butterfly don’t decide to take the grasshopper and use it for scissors to cut out a quilt pattern out of the tigerlillies to give to the post wagon man, then I’ll tell you the story of Uncle Wiggly and how he met the Littlest Hedgehog.”  I made that one up, but let me find a real one. “If the parlor lamp doesn’t go out to a moving picture show and melt all the ice in the gas stove, the story will be about Uncle Wiggily and also some more about the horseshoe crab.”  You may be able to imagine my childhood fascination (mingled with something a bit like horror, or snobbery) at these tag lines. They were foul, and boring, but I had to read them, and the only thing left to me was to overthink about the (horrible) style.

Looking it up now gives me a clue to where these books came from. Garis wrote a daily (!!!!) Uncle Wiggly story in the Newark News for over 50 years starting in 1910. My grandfather John A. Henry was born and raised in New Jersey (born in 1919) so he would have grown up reading this stuff maybe in the paper. It seems like a good theory – either he had some of these books as a kid, or he got them or was given them by his parents, to read to his children. I will have to ask my dad if he remembers them.

I guess we have to acknowledge Uncle Wiggly as a disabled protagonist – he walks, or hops, with a crutch.

Is he a manifestation of the African trickster rabbit? Even . . . a whitewashed one? Maybe! He is not very tricksy. But I could sort of see it.

I had also not realized Garis was a hugely prolific author not just for Uncle Wiggly but for a lot of the Stratemeyer syndicate books including early Bobbsey twins books. Probably the more boring of them.

As usual I spend more time writing about this nonsense than about the actually good soul-feeding book that I loved (Staying with the Trouble). Partly because i would have to think harder about what I’m saying.

I also read through a little new looking translation of Sallust (“How to Stop a Conspiracy”) which as I remember from some other reading/translation, is extremely confusing. To really understand what the hell is going on I would need to make a lot of little index cards for the cast of characters or generate an entire cheat sheet. Who said what, and who said who did what, and who said who said someone did something else, and for everything (this is the good part!) there is at least one other theory of what happened or some other group or different factions making different claims. Holy shit! Anyway, it also made me think again about Megalopolis which uses some of the names but none of the actual information or “plot” or anything you might think of as history, somehow. Like how you go from Sallust’s “everyone said something different and the situation kept changing very rapidly” utter chaos, to  a grossly boring plot about a genius great man inventing something with the love of a good woman buoying him up, but also somehow it feels like the Fountainhead, I do not fucking know. WTF again, Francis Ford C?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Legion of Honor 100th anniversary festival

Posted on by Liz Henry

There was so much cake! A marching band! Sketching in the galleries! Ballerinas and an organ player! Printmaking and free art stuff and activities in a sort of swirling all day chaos. I spent all day at the Legion of Honor and had a great time.

a ballerina in mid step in a marble hall art gallery with marble rodin statues

It was heartening to show off this gorgeous corner of San Francisco and a day of amazing culture to my parents, who have moved here from Texas! My sister and I hauled them around the museum  – we went through the Mary Cassatt special exhibit and both gift shops – and to the lawn where we had our sandwiches and cookies we brought from home & then attacked the aftermath of the Cake Picnic.

I hadn’t realized that to get into the Cake Picnic proper, you had to bring an entire cake! Per person! (or maybe a small group?) I have to share photos of the before and after. There were hundreds of different cakes. After the main crew of cake-bringers were done, they unleashed the rest of us onto the remains strewn across the labyrinth of long tables covered in white tablecloths. The mess of plundered cake plates looked almost as beautiful and colorful as the “before” tables. dozens of differentcakes on tables on a lawn

My favorite thing about this was watching people wander through the devastation and the emotions playing across their faces. First, being overwhelmed and confused  – then desire, even greed and lust, warring with a sense of the forbidden – and the moment of decision where people just said Oh fuck it and dove right into the smeary cake stands to get a glob of icing and crumbs. It was so beautiful.  That is how you know the cake picnic was art. It made people FEEL very intensely! The absurd abundance, the variety, the love and intent behind making something so delicious, unnecessary, and flamboyant – and the collectiveness of everyone bringing cakes!

a long table covered in the remains of many many different cakes. a man leans over and puts a finger into one in the distance

(There were forks over by the statue of El Cid, but by the time I realized that it was far too late for me, personally.)

We all laid on the lawn on my picnic blanket and my dad commented after a while that he hadn’t sat on grass for probably 20 years. “No fire ants here!”  Maybe he will warm to California!!!

I made prints from someone’s lovely art  – a poster of Alma Spreckels and another of a scene from the movie Vertigo – And got a free embroidered patch of the  statue of the Thinker – And then somehow a free magnet of the museum building which is now on my fridge.

a screen print of the legion of honor building with its many columns and an old fashioned car

The Mary Cassatt exhibit was great especially for seeing the parts showing her drypoint and aquatint process and experiments. I will be back to see that entire exhibit a few times!

Have a pic of my sister and I sticking our tongues out in excitement at our feelings of identifying with the lady reading a book:

liz and sister grinning, sticking out tongues cheerfully while liz points at famous Cassat painting of a lady with a book

It is always thrilling to see the real paintings of art that I have only seen in books or online before. You can get right up and see the brush strokes and the tiny lines of the canvas showing through which makes it seem so, almost holy, and real, and created, and I feel a shivery feeling of connection with people long dead!

(Though honestly when I think about it, which i often do, i also feel that way about every object i’m looking at, like, a random brick or whatever. Or – riding the bus past SF’s cute little houses – I look at the ornamental moldings or features of the houses, like the plaster shield things, and think about the decisions and aesthetic sense of the builders, carpenters, or house owners who might have wanted them.)

I had a good time trying to sketch in the upper gallery. It was set up so you could get a card to sketch on, printed with a border like a gold picture frame. You then could choose 5 pencils from their boxes sorted by color, and there were stools you could also borrow to sit on for sketching. Here is the painting I tried to copy,

rough sketch of lady in neck ruffle dressoil painting of a lady in a low cut dress with a huge neck ruffle

While I have never been able to really do faces and also never had any art classes I do love to draw and manage to do it expressively – there were some years where I drew comics and loved it but I was so slow at it that it was sometimes frustrating. Someday I’d like to take art classes and do a live drawing, contour drawing, all that kind of thing!   But words come more naturally to me and are my first love.

I tried to get one of the free wheelchair van Waymos, but none were around. My sister drove our parents back to the East Bay.  I ended up barrelling to Geary down the huge hill, which I love anyway — it is not like I go faster downhill in a powerchair, which limits my speed, but it feels extra joyous anyway on that particular hill and it’s a gorgeous landscape. I recall thinking, Huh a guy in a flat cap , looks a little like Horehound – but I raced past without even looking somehow and then we realized at the bus stop on Geary that we knew each other. It was nice riding the bus and chatting with Horehound (one of my favorite poets in the bay area – along with Steve Artnsen, Juba Kalamka, and Daphne Gottlieb, and Diamond Dave –  and some person named maybe “King” of indeterminate gender who read a brilliant poem about pouring milk into their cereal, while crouched on a stump in Holly Park earlier this year – and i’d like to meet more poets!!! I hope next year I will go to more open mics! )   A good end to a glorious day of connection with other people, strangers, my own family, and a fabulous poet acquaintance who I should go email right now so we can exchange information about various readings coming up.

Poesía hangout; bus stop philosophy

Posted on by Liz

A sunny cafe table at 18th and Castro – Sun’s out, buns out fully in force – I remove 3 layers of clothing from the chilly morning – A delicious salmon foccacia sandwich and the wifi password – pride flags flutter in the mild breeze – Conversations at neighboring table wafting towards me – they do not APPRECIATE my paintings, they are MEAN to me – they didn’t HANG THEM how i said – the DEYOUNG – I side eye over to the irked artist and her sounding board – cute boys with white beards quietly sip their coffee, one of them in a men’s dress shirt with spangled epaulettes – As the youth say – the vibes were impeccable.

colorful art nouveau poster taped onto a light pole of a sexy masked lady in a bustier and red stockings for an event called fancy pants

I did a lot of fiddly online things setting up stuff for my nonprofit, GOAT. And wrote lists of more stuff to do, and drafted posts and emails and emailed people and did all that kind of stuff. No poetry was written today (alas) in Poesía. I stuffed extra dollars in the tip jar for table rent.

Earlier – I tried to buy some flowers on 24th street and thought “Oh a bargain, 7 dollars” but then surprise, they were 84 dollars. What?! What the fuck? Absolutely not. (the “7” was merely an internal store code?) No flowers for me!

My brother in law texted me from the beach and I invited him to join me at the cafe, so then we had a lot of discussion of things like engineering meeting practices and what happens in the work life of a Principal engineer, what we might do someday if we retire, the intricate fucked up politics of our various families, and of course (because I was thinking about it) blogs. Lua was mentioned – Scheme – I suggested he might like looking at Spritely (goblins?)–

We drank two large bottles of water in an interestingly striped glass, striped sideways so when you look through the bottle, you see the stripes intersect and cross the stripes on the other side of the bottle, and I thought about how to do that myself maybe with some sort of calligraphic paint pen and a long narrow stencil cutout – Imperfectly.

I got my nephew an enamel pin in Cliff’s Variety for his half birthday and got myself sparkly bobby pins. It doesn’t matter how butch or masc I go – DO NOT LAUGH – I swear to god I’m so masc – I am GLAM BUTCH – like David Bowie if he wore sparkling barrettes – SHUT UP !!!!!!

:: shoots cuffs foppishly ::

On the 24 bus on the way home it was quite crowded as it always is at the end of the day – Full of school kids and people coming back from shopping or the sutter hospital – And a somewhat frail older lady stood in front of me and I explained I was going to brace my foot on the bit of the turned-up seat so she should not be alarmed or think I was rudely sticking my foot up; we were about to go up and down a roller coaster of hills and without my foot bracing me, me and my 100 lbs of powerchair would squash her like a bug despite the “brakes being on”.

(There are no brakes, it is a solenoid thingie that kicks in when the chair’s power is off but people don’t understand that so I just agree that “the brakes are on”. )

She asked me (not to be rude) in a few different (rude) ways what was wrong with me – was i born this way or was it a disease – You know what this lady was extremely visibly ancient and I give a free pass to people too old to have a filter on their mouths and I like talking on the bus anyway and I am not in the mood to be pissy to any human being who isn’t a fucking nazi, so I mildly turned away her questions with INCREDIBLE SOCIAL JUJITSU.

She then said that life is hard for all of us! you can’t always tell but really that’s just how life is ! for everyone! it comes to us all! I agreed and commented further. She said, there is a quote she likes by a Spanish philosopher (I already knew who it was gonna be, do you?) It was something about being Lost – she wishes she knew the name – Naturally I whip out my phone (already in hand b/c Pokemon Go loves the bus) “Oh! You are – of course the Young people – the google – ?!” I nodded – I was indeed going to young people internet google the shit out of her quote. Oh, to be in the incredulous bewilderment, in the fog, expectant, as the “young people” do things quickly in front of us. It will come to us someday – You young people and your brain fungus hijinks – zapping everything – I just can’t get used to it!

I then show her Jose Ortega y Gassett’s wikiquote page and read her a few zingers. “We cannot put off living until we are ready.” “Life is fired at us point blank.” Oh! I think she liked that. We parted fast friends at 24th and Castro, with a handshake, smiles, and an exchange of names.

Information garden parties

Posted on by Liz

I asked today on Mastodon (which I approached cautiously as if it were a loaded gun) for people to share their blogs with me so I can work on building a more current feed reader. I use The Old Reader which costs money but does much of what i want with a minimum of fuss. I might throw that out and go with Planet (though must figure out which one) or moonmoon.

We need to bring back things like blogrolls, blog carnivals, and construct our own feeds. Yes I know I’m going to have to explain “blog carnivals”. Later!

I suggest we all host some little local garden parties. Not necessarily in a garden – but to “garden” our information feeds.

We can give each other recommendations – we can build some systems that don’t utterly suck!

I am very much enjoying NOT reading news, social media, reddit, or anything Fast or Scrolly. It’s good here! Try it!

Let’s encourage each other to curate our own information feeds that are noncommericalized, not being SHOVED INTO OUR EYEBALLS by an unknowable ALGORITHM, and that nurture, feed, and connect us like actual humans!

(I do love tiktok and the endless fountain of creativity there! HOWEVER.)

What do we love about blogging? It’s so personal and strange! It doesn’t have to fit into anything that is a made up “genre” motivated by money! (though it certainly can!)

Anyway, just from my one post to my very tiny mastodon account with not many followers at all, I got back some fun blogs! I favor rambling eclecticness, wit, diaries, anything people are either obsessed with or know a lot about, and noncommercial, non-categorizable approaches to blogging. You will note I already have my old fashioned blogroll over there on the oldfashioned sidebar. Here’s some more from today, lightly and irreverently annotated!

* jr conlin’s ink stained banana – entertaining short essays, tech infused but happily not lacking broader culture. Maybe my favorite of the new blogs I riffled through today

* ddurst’s blog – opinions on tech stuff, music production geekery, rock music criticism, and more

* ODonnellWeb – one of those blogs that has been many things but right now is all about birding, with lovely photos of places to go birding!

* Our Magic – Metagrrl’s blog about rpgs and building a very elaborate miniature landscape which I hope to see in person sometime! Honestly, Dinah is one of my early blogging heroes, so good and thinky, versatile, and someone who always comes up with new interests & projects. Discardia! Cocktails! Methodically walking the entire map of San Francisco! ::hearteyes::

* Long story short pier – Kip Manley’s gonzo criticism and far-ranging overthinking of just about anything and everything, everything and nothing. A good kind of blog! (Does have some ads for Kip’s books; we’ll allow it!)

* We Don’t Agree – Frank Miroslav’s very interesting essays, more a list of well thought out essays than “blog”, which I expect to be more off the cuff. Political, tech, economic analysis.

In short – I have gone full “FUCK THIS”. Seriously.

Two kinds of soup

Posted on by Liz Henry

Did some blogging for my nonprofit, GOAT, to talk about the DIY lights and safety workshop we ran with ILRCSF, and a small conference I gave a talk at, Common Tools. I also did some extra work on my 2 consulting jobs, co-working on video chat with Sumana for companionship.

Before lunch I had a walk to bring soup to yatima since I made a giant pot of chicken posole yesterday. I actually looked up whether it might be possible to rent a miniature pony to bring to her in the garret where she is isolating, because i would like for her to have all the ponies, but maybe isolation and a visiting pony and several flights of stairs don’t QUITE mix.

At lunch (which was escarole soup my mom brought me yesterday!)  I read a kids’ book, Summer of the Swans, that I picked up from a little free library along the Bernal Cut. It’s a Newbery Medal winner from 1970 that I remember looking at and rejecting when I was a kid, basically for gender reasons as the main character bugged me so much I didn’t want to read the rest. I didn’t mind super old fashioned girls’ books when I was younger, like reading Heidi, or Pollyanna, or whatever, but a vaguely modern tween girl freaking the hell out that her feet were too big and hates her nose or whatever, was a big fat no.   However, I read it while eating my soup today.

In Summer of the Swans there are two POV characters, Sara who is about to be 14, and her little brother Charlie, who is non neurotypical in some way because of a severe fever he had when he was a toddler. Their older sister is 19 but acts maybe 15 by my standards even for 1970, maybe especially for 1970. Anyway, the younger brother has mutism and some kind of developmental delay, and his sister Sara has a fairly strong bond with him and defends him against people who bully or tease him. He then wanders off in the night and the extremely thin plot of the book is basically that Sara realizes how much she loves him and finds him in the woods along with the Yukkiest Boy she totally hated who turns out to be quite nice and asks her on a date for that very evening. The end!  Yawn. Did this deserve the Newbery? It is probably notable for having Charlie be a sympathetic character and including his point of view and how he thinks and experiences the world and what he considers important, and the fact that his family respects him maybe is radical for 1970 or even today.

The book goes right back out onto a free shelf though. I pick up a lot of free kids’ books like this, read and release them, and only a few make it to the bookshelf of honor and preservation in my house!

I am also well into, maybe nearly done with, Can’t Spell Treason without Tea, which is as fluffy or flufflier than Legends and Lattes, and is basically a knockoff of it where a tough palace guard and the land’s most powerful mage run off together to a small border town where they open a combination tea shop and bookstore/lending library while solving all the local political and magical problems and being adorable lesbians mildly processing their various insecurities and anxieties. Does our city guard “deserve” love or still feel she has to “earn” it? Does our mage take reasonable care of herself or run herself into the ground? Will they get married (duh yes but maybe in book 2). What will happen about the sucky, evil-ish Queen what’s her name? There are also mildly bad “puns” which I have to put in quotes because they hardly even deserve the name.

Obviously, I enjoy this comfort read and will read as many as appear before me magically on my Kindle.

Our contractors started painting today, or maybe just taping in preparation for painting the bathroom. Luis and his son also covered the back of the house in tyvek and started getting ready to do the exterior siding in the corridor alongside the new ramp, and also on the outside of the bathroom which was water damaged and a total teardown and rebuild. They are really great, but I am so ready for this project to be done with!!

Stardew and Voyager Farm await me – I am in mid summer and pushing hard on getting those 5 gold star melons for the Community Center bundle. I will also make myself amazing tacos with the remnants of the chicken posole. The broth is now gone, so it is just shredded chicken, peppers, tomatillos etc and the maiz blanco; I have white corn street taco sized tortillas which I will fry up lightly, maybe some refried beans from a can since didn’t think to cook actual dried beans, celantro, raw red pepper. I can’t remember if I have any salsa or cheese but am not feeling motivated to go out. Plain tacos are fine!

This weekend I am planning to hang out at the Legion of Honor museum festival with my sister and our parents and maybe my friend Mikayla. I will miss Lisa’s podcast for  Aaron Swartz Day this weekend (Saturday from 2-5pm) but planning to be on her podcast early next year to talk more about GOAT.

Books and Stardrops

Posted on by Liz Henry

Well, I read Metal from Heaven and am about to start Can’t Spell Treason without Tea. And I’ve played the new Stardew Valley update on my Switch for the last two days, so much that I’m well into Summer Year 1.

Last night had dinner in Annalee and Jesse’s garden with a bunch of really lovely people. Loudly shrieked with people about Metal from Heaven (psychically damaged hallucinating fantasy motorcycle bandit lesbian train robber revolutionaries! unions! strikes! with a side of  decadent aristocrat prep school girl graduates!).  Other fun messing about with Meshtastic with Jesse and Emma H. and then Jesse told us about AREDN. I still need to go get my ham license!!   Megan told me about being a Master Birder and then Rick and I just kind of gloriously explained to each other all the facts we know about different kinds of rocks, which is like one of my favorite kinds of conversations, and then about family history things.

Today I had lunch with my parents and later had a video chat with yatima, who has covid and has to isolate – I will bring her soup tomorrow, having just made chicken posole after going to the newly opened (today!) El Chavo supermarket, which is great & I highly recommend it.  I went to Stamper and ordered new glasses, the cheapest possible progressives, because I sat on my wonderful glasses that I love. (I did find the same frames used and ordered them from Canada, fingers crossed that works.) Lunch was at the old St. Jorge cafe, which has re-opened with new owners as Tea Rex, and I can report they have a very good quinoa-beet-apple-balsamic salad and excellent coffee. That is it. I am giving myself some space and down time to feel a wide range of things.

Last weekend I had a great time with new friend Tiffany as we wandered around Valencia, had ice cream, dumplings, shopped around in Silver Sprocket, exchanged stickers, and showed each other our tattoos.  Danny is still reading me chapters out loud from book 2 of Dance to the Music of Time, from Bangkok, when our schedules overlap.

Everyone is just so shell shocked.

I try to keep my historical perspective and I do know that I am lucky to be alive in a time where I have any rights at all to anything, and I never expected even so to see queer/trans rights and all the legal changes there and the shift in acceptance that we have seen. We hoped that was a done deal – with a little backlash – But no. We then saw our rights to our bodies taken away and people die from pregnancies, miscarriages, infections, women driven into poverty or in the control of abusers.  The dynamic here I think is less backlash and more the economic precarity that goes with climate change and rampaging billionaires or whatever, that leads so many people into hate, fear, right down the path to fascism. We are not unique in the world, and other countries are struggling with the same stuff. What to do? I don’t know, probably same as ever but twice as hard and with more determination. I did not get to blow my ridiculous celebratory bugle that i blew in 2020 but I will blow it again soon enough.

I recommend reading (and subscribing to) Erin in the Morning – I found her post This was always going to be a generational fight for transgender people to be heartening today.

Skibidi Megalon

Posted on by Liz

I went off to see Megalopolis excitedly knowing that a lot of people think it sucked, because even if it sucked I figured it would have some interesting thing to say about “the Future” and would also be something of a spectacle, part “neo Rome” and part art deco. But mostly, I am one of those people who often think about the Roman Empire! Danny, Mikayla and I escaped from the heat of this week at the Alamo Drafthouse, buckled up and ready for THE FUTURE.

It was ridiculous from the beginning. The signifying lesbians in the club (Girls licking each other performatively = Decadence!) The strange attempts to convey SCIENCE, the power hungry vamp, things that were like, vaguely Roman (?) And then the power to STOP TIME.

I complained to Danny that they did not lean in at all to the time stop power or any of the magic. “It’s because it’s meant to be ART – it’s like the power of ART!” OK fine…. it would be nice if the ART contained more artiness.

Aubrey Plaza leaned in hard to her part of the money and power hungry vamp “Wow Platinum” and I thought Adam Driver also did as good as could be done with his weird caricature of a Tortured Genius. They just played it as hard and cartoony as they could.

Things I liked: the trippy montages were embarrassing and pretty good at the same time. The dumb Megalon substance, never explained, that makes a beautiful 1920s World’s Fair park thing in the razed (and satellite-bombed) former slums. TBH I also liked the decadent performative-for-the-male-gaze lesbian gaggle. (I think it was Mikayla who pointed out that the first time they appeared it was like, oh they’re symbolizing decadent empire – but the 2nd and 3rd and 4th times you start thinking maybe Francis Ford Coppola just likes watching cute girls lick each other.)
The science startup montage in the office in the art deco skyscraper penthouse was so ridiculous it was good, at least at making me laugh, as they did a sort of trust exercise and spinned dramatically in spinny chairs while bouncing a basketball and unrolling scrolls on a drafting table. Maybe… maybe… the city planning aspect (while dumb as hell) kind of connects to how Rome would do very deliberate city planning??!

Every time Adam Driver referred to his Nobel Prize (often holding it up in its little case!) was a riot.

Another good laugh – when Adam Driver is partying because he’s upset (I can’t remember why – because his mom is nuts maybe?) And Julia mutters into her bracelet/smartwatch: “10:17pm. Drunk AND high.” The Caesar/Driver being drunk AND high montage is so silly! I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what it’s like to be drunk AND high!!!!

Best, was when we got permission to laugh harder at the vestal virgin in her post-scandal, hellfire joan jett haircut & eyeliner phase. OMFG best scene of the whole movie.

I loved being in a theater with other people who were also bursting into laughter and kind of groaning during the Serious moments. It was irresistible to me during the last half of the movie to attribute everything to Marcus Aurelius. All the quotes made me kind of hit my head and groan. It was all so sophomoric! Even the things I kind of liked I also didn’t like! Or I thought they were badly done in some way.

BUT then I was thinking, well, it is not a “good movie” by what we expect to be happening in a good movie, or in its narrative style fitting what we think is good, but that doesn’t make it invalid artistically! No one is (now) telling Herman Melville to “show don’t tell” so maybe I can kind of treat these plonking philosophical bits and the entire speech from Hamlet as Melville-ish digressions. But did it achieve those digressive glories? No. Not quite enough for me.

Things that made me go hmmmmm:
– The basic horrible elitism and “great man” theory infusing it all.
– The mob scenes are all about “the people” being manipulated and used by a few unscrupulous elites. It chilled me to the bone to have “power to the people” be shown in that way by someone who was around for the civil rights movement. It felt deeply racist and also like a racist dog whistle. We can see it as FFC’s commentary on Rome I guess. But none of the Rome stuff went that deep. “The people” don’t have any agency or politics or thoughts or even art (the whole fucking theme of the movie presumably, “Art”)
– None of our (in the U.S.) actual cultural connection to Rome and the various myths of Rome were really touched on. Coppola’s take on Rome and Caesar and everything felt like it came from having read some very outdated historian’s fusty 1890s perspective on the OG sources.
– The hideous sexism. Does anyone go, hey, does Julia also have this magic time stop power since she sees you do it and sees through it? No. no one asks. She is just there to be a muse and to BELIEVE IN HER MAN, who is a GENIUS.
– The more hideous sexism of the mayor being like “can’t you just be daddy’s little girl?” and trying to cockblock her whole relationship
– His original animosity towards Caesar/Driver very much unexplained. Why did he hide his dead wife’s body etc? What??
– Though I guess Julia does have the power with her one year of medical school to surgically reconstruct an entire eyeball and brain and face with Megalon ™. (But maybe just by girlishly Believing. Unclear.)
– that bit at the end where they are entering the world’s fair ass looking park where apparently inventing shiny escalators has solved all world problems, but the same mob who was grimy and looking through a chain link and barbed wire fence a few moments ago is now dressed in their best holiday party gear. Are they stepping merrily into the world’s fair? no! they are looking UP at the platform of famous pop star/politician elites step onto the shiny escalator in the sparsely populated theme park.
– just a nitpick, but if Adam Driver didn’t know his dead wife was preggers when she died, how?! since she was VERY pregnant including maybe an entire baby growing inside each enormous boob

I also thought, maybe this would have been a better movie if it had been made when he first thought of it! I don’t regret seeing it and I kind of like it better the further I get from being in the actual theater watching it and hitting my head groaning or shrieking with laughter. it did make an impression!

Maybe it wasn’t for ME… maybe it was for that 14 year old who is only starting to think about history and art, and looking for something to hook those thoughts on!

Well, anyway, I still love art deco curvey futurism.

But you don’t get to a place where the future is better and art is healing and the ecological interconnectedness of the Earth is respected, by looking to a Lone Genius Science Man to invent a magical substance that fixes everything and then having a bazillionaire donate a lot of money to fund it! And anyone sensible would know that because they would have thought about something that wasn’t the shallowest possible sophomoric Boomer-assed, Fountainhead-brainrotted, literary canon! They might have READ SOME SCIENCE FICTION which is literally a whole genre of people writing about the Future! Maybe even some feminist science fiction which deliberately writes about collective action, people’s relationships, people actually caring for each other day to day instead of giving an occasional speech about Love while totally forgetting birth control might exist, ETCETERA. The Earth / planet not even mentioned till the very last frame of the movie – I guess there were ecological problems (that weren’t fueled or caused by corporate/elite greed??????????????) that are all solved by MEGALON. Whew!

There is my review!

I definitely enjoyed the movie!