The death of the queen has some people pining for the Great Chain of Being. I’m also not a fan of the acid bath of modernity and capitalism, but the re-sacralization of the world will not be accomplished through bad models.
We’ve been hoping for a dragonfly or two to find out little wildlife pond. Well, tonight we have a swarm. I assume they’re feeding on mosquitoes, which are plentiful on a humid evening like tonight. I have no idea if they’ll come back but watching dozens of them swooping and swerving is amazing.
Finished reading The Hobbit. It’s been a few years since the last time I read it. Now moving on to The Lord of the Rings.
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
Douglas Rushkoff was invited to speak to a group of tech billionaires about the future of technology, only to find out that what they were really interested in was how to survive a collapse of their own making. He’s written a book about it. /via Cory Doctorow
Interesting page on permacomputing, a.k.a., “radically sustainable computing.” Plenty of links. This is way out of my league but some of you may find it valuable.
The loss of the night sky
Jack Leahy: There are probably fewer greater illustrations of the alienation from our true human situation than the loss of the night sky. The more our technical civilization grows the brighter its artificial illumination shelters us from knowing where we truly reside. We navigate our brief lives by its lights rather than navigating by the stars. We are obscured from the cosmic situation in which we find ourselves and are befuddled and lost.
The problem is our solutions
Jack Leahy: The entire canyon had become blanketed in by fog. No, not fog. Up here it isn’t fog. Up here we are in the clouds. The evening sky had been crystal clear the evening before so this caught me by surprise. There was only the slight hiss of misting rain. A bit of wind. The nocturnal song of insects now hushed. I could hardly even make out the other buildings a few hundred feet beyond me.
Saturday at the horror convention
I had a great time with a friend at the HorrorHound convention yesterday. We watched one feature film and several shorts. The feature “They Wait in the Dark” was pretty good. One of the shorts was called “Tunnel Rat”, about a Vietnam vet with PTSD. Real life horror ending with the phone number for veteran suicide prevention. It was a small convention space but they packed a lot in. Cool vendors.
The British royal family owns a considerable chunk of British land. If you want to preserve that land from commercial development, maintain the monarchy. How’s that for a weird position to be in? (Incidentally, I am the farthest thing from a monarchist.)
Brewed a Belgian tripel from a kit today. Haven’t brewed beer in a few years so I had some re-learning to do. Original gravity was a bit too low because I added too much water to the bucket. Hopefully the only consequence will be that the ABV is lower than planned.
