14oct2024

Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day:) And oooh, the linkies are piling up...

(This is a rare page in which I actually did the intro first (about a month ago) & am just now adding the main page, &ofc the holiday greeting;)

• a colourized 60fps version of the dance scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I guess most of the lost bits have now mostly been found...?
• Oooh, an interesting book to read, Richard Rothstein's 2017 The Color of Law, which explores how government mandate contributed segregated housing.
• I've listened to some of Shaun's videos before and found them engaging. Athena Scalzi over at Whatever has curated a collection of her faves if you'd like to try the youtuber out.
• this stir-fry recipe is rather heavy on the oil, but looks yummy. This tofu mayo spread recipe also looks tasty (& a lot less oilier.)
• I think staying in a 19th century cabin in the middle of nowhere sounds like awesome fun. It sounds like all the appeal of primitive tent camping except with real beds and a (turf! moss?) covered roof, though they updated the kerosene lamp with electricity and a toilet. I wanted to know whether there was running water, and if not, how far you had to go to fetch it. (The shower is cold, but again, what I wondered about was laundry...not generally a problem for camping, you just get stinky & wash everything after you get home. But what if there was your home? There was a reason Monday was washday: it was backbreaking, and scheduled while fancy Sunday dinner leftovers were available to take that other great time-suck, cooking, off —ha! the table for 19ca housewives.
• Slate has an article about an orphaned music notation program, yet another variation on people becoming reliant on a closed-source computer program for storing years or decades’ worth of work that is then abandoned by the (corporate) owner. This sort of thing really grinds my gears, and if they don't want to maintain years or decades worth of spaghettified and cruft-heavy code, fine —but release the source into the wild, so people can have access to their own work. The companies don't like to do this, cuz they want you to buy their new, improved product, to which I say, tough. If it's that much better, then people should happily migrate on their own.
• Medieval hair care—less washing, more natural wooden combs/boar bristle brushes. Honestly another vid in which the comments were the most useful, the video is overly long & I didn't finish it.
• Another lay article on colour perception.. Spoiler: pinks and purple are an artifact of human brains, not an actual wavelength.
• Eliminate delayed decisions to declutter long term. One of those simple and effective, but hard-to-do approaches.

And of especial interest to me:

• I really, really would like to try this kayaking trip around NYC.

It's, like, nine hours long, but I'm thinking I might actually have the speed and stamina to do it now...?

Speaking of traveling, here's a collaged souvenir box all the way from Italy. (Some day I will go there...)

11oct2024

Ooooooh, two pages in one week! Part of it, I admit, is that the sun has been shining for the past several days, and that always improves my productivity. Nonetheless, it feels a bit strange to realize that here in the midwest the weather is as close to perfect as could be imagined, while folks to the south are suffering so greatly; at least with Helene, we got clouds and rain, though very gentle, but there was some connection. (Hurricanes are not really part of my ‘weather vocabulary’ but we do get tornadoes, and I wouldn't wish those on anyone: super scary! Seeing all those lightnings and tornadoes on the edge of Milton was truly awe-full, in the original sense of the word: amazing and very, very dreadful.)

I also can't help wondering what got Fred over at Slacktivist riled up buuuuut he mad—this fella is generally way further on the carrot end than stick as a rule; like one commenter I of course believe that the current weather events are natural phenomena, not biblically induced punishments, but also could see the interpretation of “well, we don't care about global climate change affecting all those other people half way across the world” coming back to bite us in the butt now that's it's having an impact in the US as assorted “plagues” (wild fires and typhoons...)

Naturally we need to address all the catastrophes currently in play, but I would like to think that in addition to improving long term emergency planning (always paid for in previous lives) that working on climate change generally will be more of a thing? Pretty please? Cuz I want everyone to have halcyon weather...

Oh, yeah, have some mixed media.

8oct2024

Whoops, sorry about the broken link in the last entry, I forgot to turn the page public—that's what I get for not making these things regularly. Fixed now, I hope. Also, I did not have allergies as a child, which was lovely, but now seem to be slowly developing them as I get older. The ragweed (I presume) was bad enough that I actually broke down and tried fluticasone propionate (e.g. flo-nase, though I have the generic) and wow, it worked in moments. Hurray for modern medicine.

But in a definite boo-hiss category, (via the wizard) The Mary Sue details a horrifying plan in Utah to limit what people stock in their own Little Free Libraries, on their own property. Of course they're cloaking this in that old bugbear, “protecting the children”. Um, why can't these lazy but oh so worried-and-protective parents can't keep their kids off private property? Or even discuss their values in a convincing way so their children aren't ‘corrupted’ by dangerous (oogah-boogah!) ideas not their own?

Abortion bans are continuing to kill women.

And horrid grifters like Marjorie Taylor Greene are spreading lies about FEMA assitance for Helene, or even more outlandish, that the government can control hurricanes (!) because it's in these liars’ interest to get a bit ahead, never mind they're causing 10 or 100x that amount of advantage in damage to the body politic (which is to say, the rest of us): I really do see these grifters as parasites of the most disgusting nature, excepting the average parasite has no control over its behaviour, whereas the grifters do.

It's now less than a month away to the US's election day, and more than ever I want to vote these controlling, lying, perverted assholes out. And as I have my absentee ballot I plan to, today. You probably can too...

Well, that's my rant for today. On a happier note, this is the back of an envelope for a card thanking the hosts to a kayaking party I went to; one of them is a fellow artist, and I thought she might enjoy this little token.

30sep2024

At last, that pile of blank pages I generated last June is used up, and oh yeah, this month I've managed two posts, so go me.

My sympathies to everyone affected by Hurricane Helene. One of my sibs is without power & has no idea when it will come back. The owner of our awesome new locally owned art supply store was nearly beside herself (& certainly not producing art) with worry for her sibs, also in North Carolina. Honestly, the devastation reminded me of some of Japan's disasters.

The northern edges of that storm extended all the way up to my (northern) midwestern state, where we really needed the rain, which for the most part alternated between drizzle, mizzle and mist. Since it was softened by the rain, I spent yesterday weeding the front bed of my sister-in-law's house, probably for the last time, and feeling pretty melancholy about it.

Take care, all. Oh yeah, and here's a winter-white mouse.

24sep2024

Oh, look at me, another 24-24 page, yay!

Except it's been a month since the last post, boo!

But hey, the bathrooms are mostly redone, the hideous green roll vinyl flooring torn up to reveal the original hardwood downstairs, and the hardibacker board that's been silently mocking me (for years) upstairs is now covered over in the mixed tile I've been planning (again, for years...) Bonus is that the upstairs toilet flushes properly:)

The occasion for all this was f2tY and Significant Other's visit, and visitors are always great for an all around clean and tidy, but three days after their departure, I'm still recovering. So that's my excuse this time. But in between bemoaning my exhaustion I watched an interesting OtherWords video on reading acquisition (in English). I'm old enough to have been taught the classic ‘hooked on phonics’ method of reading, which—spoiler alert—is evidently far more effective for teaching reading (to children learning languages with alphabets, at least...) than the “guess from context/recognize by shape” method that was popularized in Australia and evidently imported here in the 90s?

I mean, phonics isn't impeccable: I'm told I didn't truly learn to read until 4th grade, despite having all the advantages—parents who read to me, plenty of books in the home, phonics, even a parent who specialized in the speech therapy for children. I don't recall any of this, really, or even the teacher who finally managed to get me to learn, but the sticking point was evidently reading aloud, meaning all my mistakes were embarrassingly public; once I learned to read silently, off I went and by 6th grade I was testing, so I was told, at college level. This was, I'm pretty sure, an exaggeration, but the point was, once I got basic mastery, I devoured books, animal stories in particular.

But here's the thing: I'm attempting to learn 日本語, that is, にほんご, or in romaji, ni ho n go. The glyphs, or kanji, one could probably learn by shape, but the ひらかな　(hiragana, or syllabary, which [simplified] for the purposes of this discussion is roughly analogous to upper case alphabet just katakana is, again roughly [very, very roughly] analogous to lower case,) I really, really need to have firmly embedded what sounds they make, because if I'm say, trying to read My Happy Marriage in Japanese and I see something like わたしも。。。 embedded in a bunch of other hiragana I'm gonna do something like... ra-ta-shi-mo...unnnnh wa-ta-shi-mo...watashimo, wait, that's watashi-mo, 私も (“I also”)

IOW, I read Japanese so sloppily and slowly I can actually watch my brain doing it, and while I do recognize glyphs such as 私、猫、森、&　雨 at a glance (I, cat, forest, rain) the hiragana I figure out by sounding out and then assembling words (not helped by the fact that, unlikeEnglishJapanesetextdoesnothavespaces—they use the three writing systems, ひらがなとカタカナと漢字 to help break things up, and as you can see all of them look different, just as CAPITALS and lower case do.

So yeah, I can well believe phonics is critical. That said, the wizard taught himself to read with comics, and I can far more easily read 私　than I can わたし。。。let alone 森 for もり, not to mention the fact that I'm also finding manga far less daunting than the plain text. I mean, kids’ books have illustrations for a reason. But that sort of shape recognition, if I'm understanding the video correctly (not to mention my own learning processes) comes later.

Buuuuuut, I have to admit, I would be fascinated to know how written language acquisition works for, say, Chinese (all hanzi glyphs) versus Japanese (syllabary, with kanji to follow on) versus English (alphabets only). I mean, I presume that just as Japanese speakers recognize radicals, e.g., 木 in 森 to give a very obvious example, Chinese readers also recognize assorted chunks in Mandarin or other hanzi based languages. But that's not likely to be an experience I'll have myself: Japanese is already daunting, so the thought of having to learn a tone language with all glyphs seems almost impossibly difficult. (So kudos to all those folks bilingual in a Chinese and English—bear in mind, there's tons of dialects in both;)

In the mean time, phonics for the win. Along with mini-mice, such as this one f2tY selected to take back to Japan:)

24aug2024

Prepping, participating & recovering from a couple of kayaking trips ate up much of July and August, but hey, I thought I'd continue that patriotic series from last time (two months ago...)

As it turns out, the wizard and I were likely exposed to covid on the way home from the Isle Royale trip, and though neither of us manifested symptoms—certainly less than the time I know I was exposed, tested negative on my worst day (which basically meant, headachey & tired)—but we were pretty low energy.

Frex, I think I started this entry on the 23rd, am completing it on the 28th, but have worked on it sporadically for the 5 days in between, but I wanted another 24-24 post, so here we are; and without ado, a few linkies I have or mean to enjoy:

• via BB, Georgian (the country) bas reliefs —amazing, religiously themed monument that somehow managed to slide under the radar, instead of being yet another 100’ statue of Lenin. Kudos.
• Anne Applebaum on NPR discusses dictators and hope: the latter being critical to defeating the former. Certainly I'm appreciating the Harris’ campaign's pivot to what we can do, as opposed to the Biden focus on the dire consequences of what his opponent will do. Again, kudos.
• I've always thought it would be cool to ‘live off the land’, whatever that means—even our paleolithic ancestors banded together in groups to survive. Nevertheless, this guy is a lotta fun, answering survivalist questions.
• Alas, I think I'm gonna have to start exploring hacks for getting around paywalls. Can't subscribe to everything.
• ADHD professional organizers tips and tricks: I notice the first item on the list is decluttering. The second, set timers for tidying. That's it.

There would be more links, but multiple reboots have winnowed most of them away, which vis-a-vis that last entry...is a good thing:)

Enjoy the rest of your August!