Photographic proof that @pauline dragged me into a trans bar and I didn’t run away (this time).

This top was not so midriffy on its original owner but it seems I have some sort of distinct spatial extension going on

“Even when you can’t make out the whole shape of a coming catastrophe, you might well feel that you’re living in an idyll, and count the hours.”

@pauline riffs on Auden, and on love in a time of politics:

atem.metameat.net/2023/08/21/0

Back from San Diego Comic-Con.@pauline and I dressed up; there was dancing; Tori Amos played. Best one yet.

You could tell me that "klaatu barada nikto" was Estonian and I'd have no grounds to disagree.

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New plan: every time I run across a Thin Blue Line flag I will take the color scheme to be affirming US-Estonian solidarity.

My sister just got this tattoo (cute!) and named it Jinchou, which I didn’t know was Japanese for penguin (also cute!) but when I looked it up I found it’s written人鳥, that is, person-bird. The bird just out there doing its business like a person. That’s the jinchou, that’s the penguin. Now you know.

In other news, Zooey Zephyr knows how to spell "principles," the Washington Post doesn't

@nicole For our listeners, the lower right is Matt and me demonstrating the 💪 that you do after you've successfully cracked open a Negra Modelo in the wheel well of a rented Kia along the Kern River.

@pauline and I, along with our friend Matt, were able to join the memorial services at Manzanar this year.

Manzanar is one of ten American concentration camps, where Japanese-Americans were held during WWII. The camp grounds are in California, near the Nevada border. At 4,000 feet, the atmosphere is thin, and the sun is blinding. Standing around, being cooked for hours on end, it was difficult not to imagine oneself on the surface of the moon: the terrain was as desolate as it was beautiful.

@calebcrain The etymology does make things clearer! Whatever dictionary was in the seminar room in Iowa in 2002 had both pronunciations, but the long o came first (because of historical priority? who knows) which the prof took as vindication. Maybe it’s just that objects in classrooms take a while to catch up with the arc of history, like my friend who taught in Oakland in the nineties next to a globe that showed Africa divided up between British and French colonies.

@calebcrain I pronounced it that way too! This is one of the biggest surprises since my grad school writing teacher insisted that “sloth” had a long o and the dictionary _backed him up_.

Today is not my most successful in that I’m spending it hiding in a hostel room in a temple on a mountaintop south of Osaka, and skipping my nightly bath because it’s a communal ladies room; but sometimes those are just the pragmatics. Happy day to all of you out there, I hope you’re just as visible as you’re able to be and that we all keep widening that horizon.

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myna.social

Basic models of flocking behavior are controlled by three simple rules: 1) separation: avoid crowding neighbours (short range repulsion); 2) alignment: steer towards average heading of neighbors; 3) cohesion: steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction). With these three simple rules, the flock moves in an extremely realistic way.