Potempkin Village Idiot

In the beginning of 2023 I started a little project where I tried to pay more attention to nature during my thrice-daily dog-walks. I used speech-to-text to keep track of what I was paying attention to. I've been slowly turning it into a...thing? Dunno. Here it is, starting with Day 1:

No cheating. Your last saved celebrity pic is your therapist.

Lula da Silva celebrating

I want that for us

Saying goodbye to summer.

Another culinary innovation from the five-year-old: A jellybean sandwich made from a single grape jellybean between two Cheeze-it crackers. Needs work, but it's interesting.

Put four sweet potato slips into the community garden back in early summer. Never grew them before. Pulled at least ten pounds out of the ground yesterday. Pretty exciting stuff.

It's Saint Crispin's day!

Hit up the lantern parade last night with the 5-year-old. Absolutely horrendous parking situation, of course, but totally worth it as far as enthusiasm and gratification.

Congratulations to the Republican Party for providing an incredibly convincing argument for intersectionality to a previously unconvinced voting demographic.

Performative activism and virtue signaling is good. Figure out what you believe in and never shut the fuck up about it.

Man. I bet that being a fallow field is probably like one of the all-time greatest feelings you can have.

Every time I see a picture of Larry Ellison I hear the voice of that Plinkett guy from RedLetterMedia just saying over and over again, "What's wrong with your face?" youtu.be/62UzLgdb1GQ?...

Go to your camera roll and search "boat" and then post a picture of a boat you like.

Made a couple loaves of sourdough bread tonight. First time in close to a year. They looked like crap, but man, the flavor was still spot on. I began the starter 11 years ago, right when my wife and I moved into our house, as a way of staking claim to the household fungi.

Ok, so here's my personal opinion on diversity requirements: parental academic attainment should be a consideration. If neither of your parents finished a college degree but you did, there should be quotas and/or incentives for hiring you.

Every day that progresses from the atumnal equinox towards the winter solstice I gain power. In fall I am Marc Spector and the waxing moon. I am the Autumn king in my glory. Decorative gourd season is MY season, motherfuckers.

“The internet is a store but it used to be a library” hits me like a slug to the chest

Me, when someone merges ahead of me with insufficient notice: "Vile creature. You debase the social contract with your very existence." Me, after they stick their hand out the window & wave thank you 10 seconds later: "There is a brotherhood of man. I will die to protect you and your children."

Gadsen flags promote unhealthy posture and negative body image issues in snakes.

Ugh. I hate to admit it, but a little splash of fireball "whiskey" in my bourbon and ginger actually does kind of add a nice little extra zing to it.

Giant labyrinth with various individual subsections made of specific berry-bearing shrubs (blackberry, raspberry, currant, elderberry, etc) with strategically placed apiaries in each section for flower-specific honeys.

Worked a telemarketing/fundraising gig for exactly 1.5 shifts. Day 1 was training and paperwork. Day 2 I started making calls in the morning, left to get lunch at noon, and didn't go back.

"We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims." -Buckminster Fuller

The Roads Have Eyes! 👁️ Turn on the Surveillance Layer in Map Options to see known license plate readers from Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and other outdoor surveillance cameras.

Me, sharing words of encouragement with my children this morning as we leave for school: "Good work guys! This is the earliest we've ever been late!"

This morning I watched my 5-year-old softly repeat dialogue from kids YouTube shorts while he was watching them, which makes me want to entirely remove his access to YouTube. Except for the kids water slide video that inexplicably has the anti-fascist anthem "Bella Ciao" playing in the background.

Today would've been my dad's 79th birthday. He died last year, 2 days before his 78th. He used to apologetically say: "The shoemaker's children go barefoot" as a way of recognizing that his Pastoral work left less of him for his kids. Sounds like a shitty shoemaker, to me, dad.

Ruin a book by adding a word: Gravity's Rainbow Brite

Over the last decade, there were two hypotheses: H1: the political right genuinely cared about threats to speech from the left. H2: they were using campus speech wars to impose their values and silence dissent. Today, the answer is clear, but I can't find any of the H1 people admitting their error.

It's the 1-year anniversary of my dad's death, and so I wrote a thing about a few of the important things he missed out on that he would have loved.

Heading to the MD Ren Faire with the ten-year-old. The weather is spectacular, the traffic is abysmal. All is well.

2 days ago, with a limited amount of time to spare, I succumbed to the convenience of Amazon prime, and ordered a black hooded jerkin for my son's Ren Faire outfit for tomorrow, and what showed up last night was a black a-line babydoll dress for a grown-ass woman.

So, I really enjoyed Lanterns, and I guess it fit with the relationships and the story they were trying to tell, but I don't think I ever imagined Hal Jordan as a sort of "pissy John Prine".

"What if the computer has feelings" ask the people who write the code used to blow up Palestinian families and Iranian school children, to strip millions of people of their health care, to help the modern-day Gestapo put our immigrant neighbors in concentration camps. Yeah, what if.

Sushi dreams of gyro.

*I wonder what "Anarchist Intelligence" looks like. Like, a black-flag AI with anarchist principles: "Property is theft, information wants to be free, mankind is in chains everywhere, the planet is in crisis, the family is a prison, the only church that illuminates is a church that's on fire."

Jupiter and the Moon.

Holy shit.

When told to get dressed this morning, the 5-year-old announced: "You can't make me, I have FREE power!" Thinking he'd somehow constructed an argument for free will from first principles, I asked for clarification. "NO! FREEZE POWER!" he shouted, and zapped me with imaginary ice blasts.

For the entirety of 2023 I made a dedicated effort to focus on my awareness of nature during my 3x daily dog walks, and to take notes on the process. For the past month I've been cleaning up my notes, one day at a time. I've only finished 12 days of notes, but I'm pretty happy with the end result.

Q: What's brown and sticky? A: A stick!

Discussing the planets with my 10-year-old son I realize he's only known a solar system with eight planets. Which means I can say, "You know, there used to be nine planets. But we don't talk about what happened to the other planet."

The opposite of razzmatazz is snoozematooze

Excuse me, @gonebabygone.bsky.social, which season of It's Always Sunny is this?