random acts of downward causation
Jun. 3rd, 2018 06:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yamamanamaThere's a passage in All The Birds In The Sky about how the secret to a successful webcomic is to trick people into believing they will only get all the jokes if they read regularly. by the time they realize there are no jokes for them to get, they’ve invested too much time to quit, and they can’t admit they’ve been duped. There is a whole art to creating nonexistent jokes that appear to go over everyone’s head. It’s much harder than creating actual jokes.
It kind of reminds me of Gamingforce’s very sad sad sad attempt at retaining users. Close off the Community Commons and have everyone use stupid names like A Sometimes Mountain. No, I will never get over A Sometimes Mountain or THE PLANE IS A TIGER!!!!!
Also, honestly, I think the only reason they're still paying the bills is because they don't want to admit that the site is a failure with about 70 active users and about 30 of those spambots.
I encountered Holly. I told Holly that things weren’t going well with Ashley and that we had a raven at the wildlife center, but I wasn’t really able to sum up what feels like five years and Holly told me that one time she saw Ashley but they didn’t talk and that I don’t really want to dump a bucket of fish on Ashley and that she saw a duck in her yard and it was female and she said she called the wildlife center or humane society and they’re like “maybe she’s just resting.”
I later told Christina that despite feeling like 2000 days since last summer, it’s less “2023” and more “March 1st of the 9th phase of spring, 02018”
Aly plays flute, harmonica, and a bit of drums. I tried to draw her at multiple angles at once but she loved it anyway. She was wearing rings with large gemstones, and she has big blue eyes and long eyelashes and a pastel-colored patterned shirt.
Stella was a one year old chihuahua mix that I thought was a really young black lab puppy.
I arrived just as the last sculptures were leaving and I saw the goldfish and the big orange cat and I thought “oh, you lazy crap-for-craps! These are last year’s sculptures!” and there was a man with a light bulb atop his mortarboard and a game of Operation on the back of his lab coat. Not quite true: there are some new ones, like a robot knight made from circuit boards and laptop keyboards and cable dreadlocks with one of them cocktail umbrellas stuck in them. Later on, I showed Devon one of my sculptures that reminded her of that and she wondered if it did anything.
A woman had a tattoo of a crescent woman and a tree woman in embrace.
Jade had a tattoo of a wolf and a six-spoked wheel and of a sitar-playing god or man and another goddess on her other arm. On her leg is a sigil with eight outward spokes. She says that the Cambridge Arts River Festival takes their name very seriously because after all, that's where MIT and Harvard are. She called my drawing of her “her final form.”
A man had a tattoo of the Aztec calendar on his legs and Klimt socks. Around 12:09 that night, I got a sense of déjà vu.
Kim takes pictures at a nature reserve and one of the sets includes a mother and baby great horned owl. They're her favorite kind of owl.
Louisa is learning Korean and had some sentences in Korean written in her sketchbook and a pendant with her name in Arabic. I’m not sure what they were but here is what Korean looks like: 추가 파일론을 만들어야합니다. 당신의 전사들이 적과 싸웠습니다.
A girl was wearing a t-shirt that said "I will change the world."
I got a Fiery Koshari from Zaaki, which is rice (or you can get bulgar), elbow macaroni, lentils, tomato sauce with garlic and vinegar, chickpeas, and crispy onions with added shattah, a sauce of jalapeño, vinegar, garlic, and cumin. They sometimes have a pesto fish koshari. It's an Egyptian thing. Egyptian immigrants and their food are one of the few good things to come out of the suppression of the Arab Spring.
12:00
Receita de Samba played various forms of Brazilian music on vocals, bass, guitar, and drums.
Laura Cortese and the Dance Cards consists of Laura on fiddle, Valerie of Goli fame on cello, and Jenny on bass. Someone named Jess was on stage when they did their sound test for a few songs. I’ve never seen Goli in the wild; I only know them from Bandcamp and from a photo I found on Flickr. The funny thing is I immediately thought of Goli in mind when I met Jill and Megan and I was going to use that specific burning question.
Jenny's hair has streaks of pale in it, and Valerie has a tattoo of musical notation below her clavicle.
I missed half of Abbie Barrett’s set but the songs I remember are Here To Stay and Better Machine, which was released a few days ago.
1:00
I think that the area around the stage was the only place it was raining in Cambridge.
Kalliope Jones is a band, not a person. The three members are Alouette, Amelia, and Isabella.
One of the songs she described as "teenage angst" and one of the songs was something like "teenage angst mark 2" or "teenage angst to the second power." One of the songs was a cover and it was just vocals, finger-snapping, and foot-stomping.
2:00
Cilla performed vocals in lieu of Ali McGuirk, who was sick at the time. All I can think of is 신라.
3:00
Mary, whom I met at ArtBeat Somerville, says that she’s constantly thinking about the fact that whenever she looks something up or searches for something, someone far away whom she will never know now knows new things about her. She had a lotus pendant and a new tattoo of Navi below her ear and flower-printed rain boots (I posted about this a few years ago). She was protesting a so-called free speech rally which is really about the right to say that certain groups of people deserve death AND NOTHING ELSE. She wants to be the loudest and most visible one there which really isn't hard because most of these rallies consist of less than 25 actual ralliers.
Jenny The Juggler carries around a kazoo so she doesn’t get herself confused with one of those scary clowns and she made (deliberately) pathetic roaring noises.
Nutter does an impression of a pancake.
Fluff does an impression of a motorcyclist, which is all kinds of adorable. She holds her and makes vroom vroom noises with her kazoo and then blows air on her.
They can jump through a real hoop of fake fire.
blood drum spirit is an ensemble of percussion, saxophone, bass, and piano, inspired by jazz and traditional Ghanaian music. They played Body and Soul for some of that jazz cred and a traditional Ewe song.
When the downpour began, I ran towards a tent and soon a bunch of people followed, including Enne and Brianna, who were manning the table for an arts magazine. I asked if Enne was a German name and she said she made it up. Enne drew a comic about them escaping from the rain and leaving their seats behind to get wet and then, in the flood, using an upturned umbrella as an ark. The comic wasn't detailed but if it was, the umbrella would probably have a sliced apple pattern. Later on, Enne was drawing a woman’s face on a tablet and Brianna was tracing the water stains on the other side of a paper. They looked like an archipelago, only they were too regularly placed. There was a larger island and in one of the corners, part of a continent. She colored them in a rainbow with markers.
Brianna has a braid of russet and rhubarb and earrings with skulls on them.
4:00
Sophie was playing Singing' in the Rain on her Smokin' Squeezebox.
The Curtis Mayflower includes the drummer of The Curtain Society. They sound nothing alike. Much less shoegazy and a lot more soulful.
5:00
George W. Russell Jr. Quartet played their own take on Kumbaya and their take on A Love Supreme.
Jessica had a bathypelagic blue ponytail and her hair was tousled from the wind.
There was a booth set up where you could put ink on a paper square and then put the square in one of those salad mixers and spin it round and round and make spirals.
A man had a tatooo of a fox and of a fenghuang. His only regret is not having the fenghuang tattoo be larger because it’s incredibly detailed, while the fox has swirls of color and black patterns. A man nearby had the Millennium Falcon on his arm.
Gabriella spells her name with two l’s even though the standard spelling in Brazil is with one, because they want to be different. She looks far more Spiran and not at all Luxerion Gothic. Her dress is printed with black and orange butterflies.
Devon had a necklace of black beads and a t-shirt with a quote by Malcolm X on it. Devon says that most people named Devin she meets are male and most people named Devon she meets are female.
She thinks that Julie Rhodes' band needs a name and I thought maybe they were itinerant musicians that were just there for the day, but that seems a bit difficult when it's music that needs to be rehearsed.
The George W. Russell Jr. Quartet's band was itinerant musicians, she said, but I think it’s a lot easier for be a member of a jazz band for a day because they just have to learn the main melody and then improvise on it. That’s pretty much the definition of jazz.
There’s no reason Jade and Hope can’t be boys’ names. She wonders why we don’t just name people after things, like Planet or something. We kind of do, like with Rose and Lily or Hope and Faith and Chastity. I’ve never met a Chastity, but then again, I haven’t been hanging around any unsent from the seventeenth century. I’ve also never met a Faith who wasn’t obviously very religious.
Ghana, she says, seems like the place to go if you’re going to go to Africa, unless you’re Emma and go to Malawi and Madagascar. Probably because things like criticizing the government (Eritrea) or wearing glasses (Equatorial Guinea (I did not learn this from Geography Now, although I did learn that their army consists of Metools and Banzai Bills and Nguema had 150 of his political opponents executed by men dressed as Santa Claus while Those Were The Days played (that second thing is real))) are not a capital offense there. She wants to go, but she wants to go with a buddy of some sort.
Once she met someone from Madagascar and he spoke French. I learned from Geography Now that less than 20 percent of people in Madagascar speak French and I’m not sure if it’s because most people speak Malagasy and so it's a perfectly servicable lingua franca, pun intended, or if it’s because only the educated learned French in the colonial era, and France didn't particularly care about the well-being of the people living in the colonies, they just wanted their stuff.
Fun fact: 3 percent of Laotians speak French. 20% of people in Madagascar speak French.
I said that I was wondering if people in 19th century Chad were wondering if even the power-hungry French would find it worth their while to gobble up their villages. Spoiler alert: they did. Even though they only had things like uranium and oil.
I guess that people used uranium as a cure-all. Back in the early 20th century, people brushed their teeth with uranium toothpaste and used radium to cure their illnesses. Also, a really funny thing: after the Germans took over France during World War II, they took as much thorium as they could, and instead of using it to build a bomb or reactor like the Allies were expecting, they used it to make toothpaste.
There was a guy on the train who looked somehow important. Across from him were two women who were engaged in a conversation in Portuguese.
burning question: what if we falter, what if we fail, like drunken surgeons and paperships that sail on troubled waters?
It kind of reminds me of Gamingforce’s very sad sad sad attempt at retaining users. Close off the Community Commons and have everyone use stupid names like A Sometimes Mountain. No, I will never get over A Sometimes Mountain or THE PLANE IS A TIGER!!!!!
Also, honestly, I think the only reason they're still paying the bills is because they don't want to admit that the site is a failure with about 70 active users and about 30 of those spambots.
I encountered Holly. I told Holly that things weren’t going well with Ashley and that we had a raven at the wildlife center, but I wasn’t really able to sum up what feels like five years and Holly told me that one time she saw Ashley but they didn’t talk and that I don’t really want to dump a bucket of fish on Ashley and that she saw a duck in her yard and it was female and she said she called the wildlife center or humane society and they’re like “maybe she’s just resting.”
I later told Christina that despite feeling like 2000 days since last summer, it’s less “2023” and more “March 1st of the 9th phase of spring, 02018”
Aly plays flute, harmonica, and a bit of drums. I tried to draw her at multiple angles at once but she loved it anyway. She was wearing rings with large gemstones, and she has big blue eyes and long eyelashes and a pastel-colored patterned shirt.
Stella was a one year old chihuahua mix that I thought was a really young black lab puppy.
I arrived just as the last sculptures were leaving and I saw the goldfish and the big orange cat and I thought “oh, you lazy crap-for-craps! These are last year’s sculptures!” and there was a man with a light bulb atop his mortarboard and a game of Operation on the back of his lab coat. Not quite true: there are some new ones, like a robot knight made from circuit boards and laptop keyboards and cable dreadlocks with one of them cocktail umbrellas stuck in them. Later on, I showed Devon one of my sculptures that reminded her of that and she wondered if it did anything.
A woman had a tattoo of a crescent woman and a tree woman in embrace.
Jade had a tattoo of a wolf and a six-spoked wheel and of a sitar-playing god or man and another goddess on her other arm. On her leg is a sigil with eight outward spokes. She says that the Cambridge Arts River Festival takes their name very seriously because after all, that's where MIT and Harvard are. She called my drawing of her “her final form.”
A man had a tattoo of the Aztec calendar on his legs and Klimt socks. Around 12:09 that night, I got a sense of déjà vu.
Kim takes pictures at a nature reserve and one of the sets includes a mother and baby great horned owl. They're her favorite kind of owl.
Louisa is learning Korean and had some sentences in Korean written in her sketchbook and a pendant with her name in Arabic. I’m not sure what they were but here is what Korean looks like: 추가 파일론을 만들어야합니다. 당신의 전사들이 적과 싸웠습니다.
A girl was wearing a t-shirt that said "I will change the world."
I got a Fiery Koshari from Zaaki, which is rice (or you can get bulgar), elbow macaroni, lentils, tomato sauce with garlic and vinegar, chickpeas, and crispy onions with added shattah, a sauce of jalapeño, vinegar, garlic, and cumin. They sometimes have a pesto fish koshari. It's an Egyptian thing. Egyptian immigrants and their food are one of the few good things to come out of the suppression of the Arab Spring.
12:00
Receita de Samba played various forms of Brazilian music on vocals, bass, guitar, and drums.
Laura Cortese and the Dance Cards consists of Laura on fiddle, Valerie of Goli fame on cello, and Jenny on bass. Someone named Jess was on stage when they did their sound test for a few songs. I’ve never seen Goli in the wild; I only know them from Bandcamp and from a photo I found on Flickr. The funny thing is I immediately thought of Goli in mind when I met Jill and Megan and I was going to use that specific burning question.
Jenny's hair has streaks of pale in it, and Valerie has a tattoo of musical notation below her clavicle.
I missed half of Abbie Barrett’s set but the songs I remember are Here To Stay and Better Machine, which was released a few days ago.
1:00
I think that the area around the stage was the only place it was raining in Cambridge.
Kalliope Jones is a band, not a person. The three members are Alouette, Amelia, and Isabella.
One of the songs she described as "teenage angst" and one of the songs was something like "teenage angst mark 2" or "teenage angst to the second power." One of the songs was a cover and it was just vocals, finger-snapping, and foot-stomping.
2:00
Cilla performed vocals in lieu of Ali McGuirk, who was sick at the time. All I can think of is 신라.
3:00
Mary, whom I met at ArtBeat Somerville, says that she’s constantly thinking about the fact that whenever she looks something up or searches for something, someone far away whom she will never know now knows new things about her. She had a lotus pendant and a new tattoo of Navi below her ear and flower-printed rain boots (I posted about this a few years ago). She was protesting a so-called free speech rally which is really about the right to say that certain groups of people deserve death AND NOTHING ELSE. She wants to be the loudest and most visible one there which really isn't hard because most of these rallies consist of less than 25 actual ralliers.
Jenny The Juggler carries around a kazoo so she doesn’t get herself confused with one of those scary clowns and she made (deliberately) pathetic roaring noises.
Nutter does an impression of a pancake.
Fluff does an impression of a motorcyclist, which is all kinds of adorable. She holds her and makes vroom vroom noises with her kazoo and then blows air on her.
They can jump through a real hoop of fake fire.
blood drum spirit is an ensemble of percussion, saxophone, bass, and piano, inspired by jazz and traditional Ghanaian music. They played Body and Soul for some of that jazz cred and a traditional Ewe song.
When the downpour began, I ran towards a tent and soon a bunch of people followed, including Enne and Brianna, who were manning the table for an arts magazine. I asked if Enne was a German name and she said she made it up. Enne drew a comic about them escaping from the rain and leaving their seats behind to get wet and then, in the flood, using an upturned umbrella as an ark. The comic wasn't detailed but if it was, the umbrella would probably have a sliced apple pattern. Later on, Enne was drawing a woman’s face on a tablet and Brianna was tracing the water stains on the other side of a paper. They looked like an archipelago, only they were too regularly placed. There was a larger island and in one of the corners, part of a continent. She colored them in a rainbow with markers.
Brianna has a braid of russet and rhubarb and earrings with skulls on them.
4:00
Sophie was playing Singing' in the Rain on her Smokin' Squeezebox.
The Curtis Mayflower includes the drummer of The Curtain Society. They sound nothing alike. Much less shoegazy and a lot more soulful.
5:00
George W. Russell Jr. Quartet played their own take on Kumbaya and their take on A Love Supreme.
Jessica had a bathypelagic blue ponytail and her hair was tousled from the wind.
There was a booth set up where you could put ink on a paper square and then put the square in one of those salad mixers and spin it round and round and make spirals.
A man had a tatooo of a fox and of a fenghuang. His only regret is not having the fenghuang tattoo be larger because it’s incredibly detailed, while the fox has swirls of color and black patterns. A man nearby had the Millennium Falcon on his arm.
Gabriella spells her name with two l’s even though the standard spelling in Brazil is with one, because they want to be different. She looks far more Spiran and not at all Luxerion Gothic. Her dress is printed with black and orange butterflies.
Devon had a necklace of black beads and a t-shirt with a quote by Malcolm X on it. Devon says that most people named Devin she meets are male and most people named Devon she meets are female.
She thinks that Julie Rhodes' band needs a name and I thought maybe they were itinerant musicians that were just there for the day, but that seems a bit difficult when it's music that needs to be rehearsed.
The George W. Russell Jr. Quartet's band was itinerant musicians, she said, but I think it’s a lot easier for be a member of a jazz band for a day because they just have to learn the main melody and then improvise on it. That’s pretty much the definition of jazz.
There’s no reason Jade and Hope can’t be boys’ names. She wonders why we don’t just name people after things, like Planet or something. We kind of do, like with Rose and Lily or Hope and Faith and Chastity. I’ve never met a Chastity, but then again, I haven’t been hanging around any unsent from the seventeenth century. I’ve also never met a Faith who wasn’t obviously very religious.
Ghana, she says, seems like the place to go if you’re going to go to Africa, unless you’re Emma and go to Malawi and Madagascar. Probably because things like criticizing the government (Eritrea) or wearing glasses (Equatorial Guinea (I did not learn this from Geography Now, although I did learn that their army consists of Metools and Banzai Bills and Nguema had 150 of his political opponents executed by men dressed as Santa Claus while Those Were The Days played (that second thing is real))) are not a capital offense there. She wants to go, but she wants to go with a buddy of some sort.
Once she met someone from Madagascar and he spoke French. I learned from Geography Now that less than 20 percent of people in Madagascar speak French and I’m not sure if it’s because most people speak Malagasy and so it's a perfectly servicable lingua franca, pun intended, or if it’s because only the educated learned French in the colonial era, and France didn't particularly care about the well-being of the people living in the colonies, they just wanted their stuff.
Fun fact: 3 percent of Laotians speak French. 20% of people in Madagascar speak French.
I said that I was wondering if people in 19th century Chad were wondering if even the power-hungry French would find it worth their while to gobble up their villages. Spoiler alert: they did. Even though they only had things like uranium and oil.
I guess that people used uranium as a cure-all. Back in the early 20th century, people brushed their teeth with uranium toothpaste and used radium to cure their illnesses. Also, a really funny thing: after the Germans took over France during World War II, they took as much thorium as they could, and instead of using it to build a bomb or reactor like the Allies were expecting, they used it to make toothpaste.
There was a guy on the train who looked somehow important. Across from him were two women who were engaged in a conversation in Portuguese.
burning question: what if we falter, what if we fail, like drunken surgeons and paperships that sail on troubled waters?
