machine dreams

Waiting to be picked up at the station was a woman with lavender braids.

Abby is a performance artist while her companion Maggie handles the technical aspects. They were going to auditions for a play about the Marathon bombings. Abby is as amazed by the idea of Love's Labours Lost in Space. I recommended Dr. O to them. They said they were getting a food in the singular. Abby was in A Midsummer Night's Dream in which she played the guy, dressed in a janitor's suit, who played the lion in Pyramus and Thisbe by wearing some sort of fake mane. She's been acting since she was eight.

I ran into a guy named Paul who knew Greg back when he was an intern at Tufts and he told me to say something about inheriting the Earth. I couldn't hear who the inheritors because we're on one of those old Vietnam-era trains rather than one of the fanky new trains are but I'm sure he'll know what I'm talking about.

Charles Tersolo is an artist. Inside the gallery was... UH OH, SOMEONE WANTS A BELLY RUB!

Seems that Ashera (the one with an album called Essence of Life) and Chelsea on Fire are too obscure for Cheapo Records. I didn't look for Gel and Serum and Vision Thing and Betwixt but I'd imagine they're too obscure too.

The bookstore nearby is decent, I'd say. Nothing I wanted (by that, I mean there weren't any Richard Grant or Ian Watson novels, or at least, there weren't any Richard Grant or Ian Watson novels on the SFF shelves) but I'm not sure how frequently new books are added to the shelves. There was a woman with green hair there.
I'm not sure when the next time I'll be hanging out in Central Square is. Probably something involving Emma.
Speaking of Emma, she made a drawing of Brookline Lunch's owner and she made the outside sign at Brookline Lunch. I have a few other things to say but I'll save them for September when they make more sense.

A woman had a vampire squid and hammerhead shark tattoo. I just got déjà vu. If I did mention that before, I can't find it now. Then again, Google is shit at indexing my livejournal. Actually, I think that the only reason I got déjà vu is because Zach was planning to get a hammerhead tattoo.
And she wasn't Zach. I'll confirm that on Monday. Besides, Zach has a regular squid tattoo, not one of a vampire squid which is an entirely different order of one species), so if Zach does mysteriously disappear, we'll know to look elsewhere.

At the MIT museum was a tesselated objects, a metapiano, which is basically a musical pinball machine. When the ping-pong ball clonks around in it, it hits keys and vibrates strings. There was a Geiger counter and if you're trying to find all the catalyst materials around Cambridge, the ones that are real, that is, here's some uraninite.
Most of the exhibits were the ones I saw last summer but there's a new one about the building of the MIT campus and a time capsule with objects made in Cambridge back when the United States was an industrial rather than post-industrial economy.

On the other hand, I did get to take a picture with the zoom camera. I took one of some nacre but the bit of nacre is curved so I don't like the way it looks.





Also, I made this with a kid.

Also, whoever was playing Tetris before I was, you're horrible. I got the first line when I started playing and the stack was at least six blocks tall.

There is nothing about what robots can do for us (if you ask me, there should be a robot orchestra) but there is a board with sticky notes about life one hundred years from now. If it's there when you visit the MIT Museum, if you see one that says Bender is great! that one's mine. Some people are optimistic: flying cars, human robots, robot teachers, you can go to the moon or Mars in seconds, telekinesis and teleportation, robot ducks, jellyfish that are not necessarily robotic, a cure for cancer, wigs for all, no war and free education and less traffic and free pizza and we'll be able to communicate with aliens and turn invisibile and we'll all have flying chairs and pet squirrels and play Virtual Pokémon and flying everything. A few were a bit more pessimistic, Rubix cubes that no one will be able to solve and the environment will die and the water will be too hot because we did not take care of the world.
I think the cure for cancer will be that we all become robots and I can't decide if that's optimistic or pessimistic.

There was a woman with purple Marge Simpson hair, along with sunglasses and six-pointed star earrings and a necklace of black beads. Someone behind me was watching me do this apparently.

Emily missed Megacities Asia because she was in Seoul for six months. Seoul is a lot like Boston climatewise except there's not as much snow in winter and it goes from dry season to rainy season in June and then it gets hot in July. They're in a drought right now, much like here. She got back on the sixth of August.
Emily isn't actually an artist but she knows enough about art to talk to her friend Yaeji about the stuff they see at the MFA. Her friend Yaeji is from Seoul.
We're pretty certain my dad was in Incheon, because it definitely wasn't Busan, Busan is on the Japan side, not the China side. And I'm thinking of Thailand when he mentioned rain so heavy, if it were we were standing, we wouldn't be able to see the Breathing Lotus, which is still there. She says you can see lotuses on the Han river.
I think the ones outside of the exhibit hall that runs from the old wings to the new wing are all still there except for Chaosmos Mandala.

Speaking of tattoos, a guy at the MFA had a tribal design that was the Devil with a sixpack and when he started going to church again, he realized that he couldn't have a tattoo of the Devil so he just made it abstract because it's less painful than removal. On his other arm is a scorpion.
A girl brought up the nudity in a Dutch painting. Actually, I think it takes attention away from the severed head Judith is carrying.
Some people do draw Mary and Joseph in a sundress and a t-shirt and skinny jeans respectively (unless they're in a Shakespeare play) and the three Magi in well-tailored three piece suits as a statement and maybe we don't think about how anachronistic their clothing is in these paintings because these are fashions centuries out of date. Although, you know, the men's suit has changed very little in the past 140 years. It's mostly the colors and the ties that change, and there was that brief flirtation with shoulder pads in the 1980s.

In one of the sculptures, Holofernes looks like an evil Jesus. Not the Holofernes from Shakespeare, the Holofernes from the Bible who was Nebuchadnezzar's general. The one who was beheaded by Judith.
Someone said that Prudence reminded him of Aphrodite and she reminded me of Janus because there's the face of an old man in her hair, and she's holding a snake. If you're not prudent, tigers will eat you. That's what it's saying.

Things are changing in the contemporary wing. The schema for Achilles' Shield is on the wall.

I noticed someone who looked very familiar and she wasn't Kitty Zen nor was she at Figment this year but she says that if I come into the MFA often, I'd see her.
I remembered her after that. I think her name is Ruby.

Clara has a shirt that says she's fluent in sarcasm and when she draws, she doesn't stick to one style. She drew a pixelated face and a humanoid otter or was it a seal? Whatever it was, I thought it was an owl. An animesque dragon and a woman in prismacolors. I know what those are because Krissy swears by them but I've never actually used them. I told Clara that art can change the world.
A man was drawing nude figures seated at the museum cafe's tables and flying in the air in bold and colorful chalk pastels.

Sitting next to me at the station was a woman with jeweled elephant earrings.

Jess is studying mechanical engineering and she's glad she wasn't the only person who had bad experiences with linear algebra, although her bad experiences with it are of an entirely different sort than my bad experiences. She likes physics and I said I liked it too even if I did screw myself by not refreshing myself with Calc 2 because it would really help if I had a refresher on when to and not taking math physics and diff eqs early on. Also because they ask for a 1500 word essay on what you want to do with your further education and I think I managed about 300 words, because it's a pure science, so basically "uhhhh, research... or maybe teaching?" Maybe they're more interested in people looking for a career than people who are merely interested in a subject.

Across from me at Downtown Crossing was a Big Red train car heading to Alewife. It was around six PM, which is not only not the peak of morning traffic but not morning, which lends credence to my theory that they just send the Big Red when and if they feel like it.
I had to get off at Downtown Crossing because the train I got on was an Ashmont train and since the digital display was black and dead and since the guy I asked said it was a Braintree train, probably because he was getting off before JFK and therefore wasn't paying attention, I got on.

Russell was on the train home. We talked about how the MIT museum wants the robots in their collection to have MIT blood, how it's easy to get burnt out even when you're doing what you love as a living, how robotics is all about logicistics both with delivery drones and warehousing, how we're losing that human interaction as everything becomes more interconnected, how people in older generations get pissed off if you don't like everything they post on Facebook, I said that I don't like how Facebook is basically becoming the Internet for a lot of people and Facebook is trying to be more than just a site where you keep in touch with your friends. He wondered what was going on today because he saw cosplayers and people in Star Wars costumes, along with some Amish and some people playing Pokemon Go and I say I like the eclecticism of Boston and am weirded out by places where Portuguese people are considered exotic. Utah, definitely. Yeah, they travel the world but they're the antithesis of multiculturalism. Colorado, if Brad Torgersen actually believes what he says. He's fascinated by dead malls.
On the way in, I thought this guy was supposed to be a ninja turtle at first, he had a heart pinned to his chest and wore a green shirt with a pale green band on it, and he was carrying a jacket, his eyes had red around them and he held a mask with long hair and black around the eyes and mouth. I saw a woman with blue face paint.

burning question: if you're interested in abandoned places, what's your favorite kind of abandoned or derelict place?