Life List: White-Crowned Sparrow

I believe I’ve mentioned these guys a few times.  I started paying real attention to birds for the first time around 2006-2008 while living in Seattle.  I started paying real attention to bird calls after that, when being priced out of Seattle landed me in Federal Way, in the company of northern flicker screeches and one distinctive spring song that I came to recognize as the white-crowned sparrow.

Dweeet-dweet-wipwipwipwipwip.  That’s the impression it makes, but there are subtleties and variations, and the call frequently doesn’t make it to the last -wip because they will shut up if they feel nervous or distracted.  Incidentally, lots of animals will do this.  You don’t think of frogs as having an opinion about people, but if they see you looking for them, they will go silent.  A tittering bush full of bushtits, likewise, will shut the hell up if you come close.  It’s uncanny when you can’t even see the animal.  You got closer specifically to find them after hearing their sound, and then the sound stops.

Not as much of a problem with white-crowned sparrows because they’re fairly bold, living in open fields but also the kind of small trees you find in and around parking lots and sidewalks everywhere.  And in mating colors, they’re fairly distinctive – at least by PNW standards.  Strong black and white head stripes, bright yellow beak.  Larger than chickadees, smaller than robins, and they are easy to spot feeding on the ground.  Hello there.

I read once they’re considered crop pests in California.  Don’t care.  Let the birdies feast!  I kid, I kid.  Or do I?  I do.  Unless..?

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Prison Labor Will Set You Free

note:  don’t miss the post before this, if ur interested in doing role-playin’ game.

You ever see the movie Sorry to Bother You by communist commie Boots Riley?  It’s such a great film for this general stretch of US history.  If anything, it feels mild compared to the new fascist deathclown era, but still, worth a look.  One element of that movie that hit me like a ton of bricks was the sunshine-branded debtor’s prisons, called “Worry-free Jobs.”  It felt so real, so possible, so close.

Particularly, I have often felt so beleaguered by the cost of fucking everything that the idea of prison began to have some appeal.  The idea of doing a crime, well, if I got away with the loot it would help; if it didn’t at least I wouldn’t have to pay rent.  But we know how horrible prisons are because it’s a bad joke.  Worse is the specifics, about how for-profit prisons have given people moldy bread, watched their bodies ravaged by flesh-eating bacteria, got them pre-loaded with debt for the next time they hit the streets.

Every time I hear some liberal asking, “where do red states think they’re going to get people to do shit work if they deport all the immigrants?,” I know the answer.  “How can landlords keep jacking up rents?  What will they do about the expanding homeless population?”  Loud and clear, no question, no hesitation.  The corporate prison industrial complex is going to be massively expanded, and these gulags are about to supply a ton of slave labor for the new economy.

How will they feed bodies to the system?  Eventually debtor’s prisons will be more formally accessible, with a few laws rewritten or reinterpreted by fascists in black robes.  But until then, the big push for marijuana legalization?  That never did succeed in the vast majority of the union.  Expect brutal marijuana decisions to get handed down.  Expect states that have decriminalized it to see some reversals of fortune.

Anyway, prison reform (or abolition) was always a more important issue than we as a society were ready to handle.  But it’s about to become much more crucial than it has been for a lot more of us.  Don’t let yourself get arrested, my people.  The corporate prisons (with eager police and prosecutor collaboration) will do everything they can to keep you for the rest of your miserable life.

And solidarity for all laborers, no matter if they’re slaves or just wage slaves.  Power to the people!  Recognize we’re all the same to them.  Workers of the world unite.

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Edit:  Oh yeah, maybe explain the title.  Prison labor will set you (nazis) free (from the economic consequences of murderous xenophobia).

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RP by Comment – Still Open

Note:  This is a bonus post.  Hit “Previous” to see the scheduled post of the day.

Read the previous RP post and its comments to see what’s going on here.  I still have room for two players.

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The orientation guide continued with some basics about the neighborhood – the nearest public park with sporting facilities, directions to the largest public library in town, the hospitals, etc – before getting everybody in motion, following her with trudging little steps around the campus.  The names of the different buildings – after this and that donor or trustee – were a wash of meaninglessness to the non-humans among the freshmen.

As they walked down a long hall, where Ms. Selber mentioned some of the classes being taught, many of the freshmen talked among themselves.  Kaldonia kept on.

“What kind of music do you like, Ilmardan?  I could tell you what clubs play it.”  Why were lizard madonnas so interested in the elvenoid species, he might wonder.  The fashions didn’t hang on their bodies right.  The languages were a little off in that mouth full of uniform, sharp, curved teeth.

Some nearby humans looked judgmental about it, a hip aloofness probably inspired by the social terror of being new.  A male nymph drifted along nearby them, feet barely touching the ground, loose sky-colored curls floating around his shoulders.  He wore a stickball shirt, hipster jeans and shoes, and a little backpack over one shoulder.  There was some room to wonder, did nymphs owe their existence to the wild realms like elves, or the higher realms like giants and dwarves?

An orc jock tried not to step on any people and almost failed when a halfling got underfoot.  That little guy was some kind of raging nerdlinger.

Yup, any kind of weirdo might be in this company.

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How about you?  It’s urban fantasy.  You’re in community college instead of the big leagues, for some reason, but it’s a place where you can start learning how to chuck fireballs or wield a zweihander, so … excitements?

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Life List: Turkey Vulture

I’ve seen a turkey vulture once with clarity, tho my memory of it feels so weak and incoherent.  It was eating roadkill and we zoomed past it and out of sight in a split second, on a road trip I don’t recall with people I don’t recall.  Was it with my bro and my tech support guy?  Was it with my husband and his mom?  Was it with jeremy and brandy?  My dad?  Pretty sure it was in Washington state somewhere between Tacoma and Vancouver WA.

Other than that, I’ve seen a lot of them in Kansas when visiting my brother.  Down there they circle just like in the cartoons, but I don’t know that they’re specifically circling dying creatures.  They seemed to be circling hills at the sides of the highway… the highway with lots of roadkill coyotes and deer.

At that distance however – from the highway on a sunny day – they are so many black Vs floating in the sky.  Were they actually turkey vultures or black vultures?  Turkey vultures are more common in the places I’ve been down there, so I’ll assume they were.

Turkey vultures are in that New World vulture genus Cathartes.  They’re very different from Old World vultures, but still part of the eagle and hawk clade, Accipitriformes, if I got that spelling right.  Once upon a time some clever characters names Sibley and Ahlquist came up with a gene testing method that didn’t need sequencing, which wasn’t as advanced then as it is now.  They put chromosomes from different species together and observed how closely they married up – again, if I got that right.  Using this method, they arrived at the idea Cathartes grouped with storks.  The idea had a little staying power, tho it turned out to be wrong.

I think turkey vultures look kinda ill compared to Old World vultures.  Their head seems too small, too weak.  And with the red-pink flesh, they kinda look like they’re partially skinned.  Cenobite-ass freaks.  Black vultures are extremely similar but the mercy of having black skin on their bald heads makes them look much less nasty.

Not that I wouldn’t pet one, given the opportunity.  I like creachers.

Apologies to people who would prefer I fact-checked or researched these things.  I think it’s more fun to freeball it and have a smarty correct me in the comments.  Or just give me your vulture stories below!

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The Beautiful Dream

I’m a classic amurrican striver.  An entitled colonizer.  A zombie to crapitalism.  I’ve got this asinine notion that if I just get my hot amazing sexy ideas out there, people will jump on them, and I will make a bank full of money.  Be positively swimmin’ in ducats.  Doubloons.  Krugerrands.  Simoleons.  Smackeroos.  Showering my flesh with gold dust and blood diamonds.  Getting a miniature robotic Lamborghini to chauffeur my stretched Lamborghini around Lamboville.

I kid, I kid.  I genuinely don’t give an earthly fuck about wealth, do not want a single one of those things.  But I do want the ability to take it easy, to know that I and my loved ones won’t be ruined 5eva from a single run of bad luck.  I want security, and in this country, that’s expensive as hell.  So I want just that much, and then I’m chillin’.

The place where my zombification comes in is this:  On some primal reptile level of my brain, I can’t help but believe in that dream – that completely baseless delusion – that if I just do the right clever thing, I will get a windfall.  My merit will shine through and I will get all the money I ever needed.

Until the inevitable day when this dream is utterly disproven to me personally, it will continue to drive my ambitions.  I am thinking about this because I fucking hate the day job, and was recently approved to return to full time hours at it, which means my spare time became a lot more rare and precious.  So what should I be doing with that time, to fulfill the Beautiful Dream?

The project I have that is closest to completion is The Septagram, a urban fantasy adventure with dark elements and a lot of humor.  It’s one of my longer books but a little slight in length for a fantasy novel, about 100k words.  One of the main characters is asexual, another is gay, and the others mostly don’t have any cause to fuck, so it’s not very commercial.  Also, the genre was inspired by Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Wicked City and Darkside Blues, mashed up with a contemporary american setting, so it’s not very familiar territory for most readers.  Nonetheless, it would be the easiest thing to get completely finished and out the door.

I have a project in the Dan Brown thriller model, which is much less gay and experimental, while being similarly adventurous, called The Refinery.  There’s a lot of writing left to do on it, but it is intentionally commercial.  Even came up with a butch pen name for pitching it, haha.  I plan on finishing the first draft of it this July’s novel writing month.

I have a magical realism literary fiction thing, barely more than a novella at 50k words, but with one of those clever concepts that get people interested, and a lot of humor.  It’s called Swine and Camus and the first draft is complete, but the second draft is gonna involve a little heavy lifting.  Still, could be it’s got legs.

I have a cheeky scifi adventure about 75k words called Centennial Hills, you might recall.  How well do you think that thing would sell?  Two greyliens come to Earth and have edgy experiences.  A fictional stand-in for shitty etln mvfk features in it significantly.  The final draft of this one wouldn’t be wildly difficult.  I don’t see any structural editing or original writing being involved.  Should be a quick one.

I have a complete short novella called Mitosis – a take-off on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, featuring a trans woman as the main character, set in a 1990s college campus.  A dubious metaphor for gender dysphoria.  I’ve actually pitched this one to a few dozen agents with no bites.  But a lil polish and I would likely self-publish.  I thought the edgy concept would win some interest, but this has not proven to be the case.  What about you, though?

The Vaccine Scene is pretty close to complete as a novella, and despite the cheekiness of the concept – Reefer Madness with vaccines as the drug – it has become rather emotionally intense and literary.  Wouldn’t take much longer to finish it.  Would it be worth my time tho, financially?  Or just to catch people’s attentions, build that career?

My most heartfelt and epic story – Rent is Theft – has a completed first draft around 135k words.  Again with a trans woman as the main character, magical realism, urban setting, some heavy issues, some humor, a style that involves a lot of storytelling within the story.  Call it literary fiction.  Capitalism is the enemy.  But could this sell?  The next draft will involve a lot of rewriting and new writing, making it a big effort, and the concept is very uncommercial.

Of course, I can also ditch literature and finish my screenplay Gun Lemurs, which is pretty damn decent, if you ask me.  These days, however, hollyweird is not valuing original writing like they should.  I doubt this will go as far as I’d prefer.  Still, I get the feeling screenwriting is a less crowded field than literature.  Or am I completely wrong on that?  Cursory googling suggests I am.

As far as how I sell it, I had a bad time pitching Mitosis and am not going to pitch a book with queer main characters ever again.  The fuckos say they want to see that represented, but they’re full of shit, as evidenced by what actually gets published.  I’m going to pitch The Refinery and if I can’t get anywhere while selling out my identity and chasing trends, I’m done with seeking traditional publication altogether.

That gets me to the problem of how the hell to sell shit.  All of the markets are flooded with garbage from dollar-chasers and spambots.  Getting seen requires advertising.  I’d drop a lil dosh on that, but not anything outlandish.  I’m not doing too well financially.  Like, let’s say $600 could get my ad seen by 40,000 people for a few minutes.  I might consider that, just to see what the results are like.  Let’s say it’s a lot more expensive or being seen by the population of a USian suburb only gets five bucks worth of sales.  I’d never do it again, try to find some other kind of angle.

I once thought this blogging angle might be a good way to flog some products, but my audience is maybe a hundred people and of those, how many would buy something?  The profit margin on books is chump change.  Twenty sold is not enough to justify cutting my hours at work.  Ain’t gonna get me interviewed by chucklefucks on yewed choob.

What would jeezis sell?  What would people buy?  Holler at ya comrade.

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Life List: Rowdy Cocks

Note:  I’m still interested in replies to the post before this; check it out if you have a moment.

Who’s that yellin’ in the background?  It’s a rowdy cock.  The domesticated junglefowl.  I’ve called customer service and reached somebody in the Philippines with roosters crowing in the background.  As a customer service monkey I’ve received calls from Philippines, Hawaii, and the US southeast, all with roosters in the background.  You’d think a species with so many members over such a broad range might have more drift in its vocalization, but that shit is quite consistent and unmistakable.  Good job, cocky boys.

Most of the times I have heard that call from a live animal were on the phone, but a few times have been in person.  The most recent I remember was on a visit to Lake Hylebos, when roosters were lurking in the bushes near the entrance.  Never heard or saw them at Hylebos after that.  The birds looked smaller in real life than in my imagination.  The video game Sekiro has ones the size of a dude.

I never really thought about it before recent years, but how amazing is it that in ancient BCE domestic chickens made it from Southeast Asia all the way to Europe?  Global trade when many were far from understanding a global earth.  It really provokes the imagination.  If chooks got to Etruria from as far away as Funan, what other kinds of people and creatures could be hanging out in places one doesn’t expect to see them?  Might have been a very colorful world.

The Rooster is one of my least favorite songs by Alice in Chains.  As I’ve mentioned before, there was a spot on the tape of Dirt where you could pause and flip to skip both Rooster and Junkhead.  I remember the notes.  Two rounds of uwus.  The Cockatrice is the name of my big gay fantasy RPG that doesn’t exist yet and may never come to fruition.  Haha.  Fruit.

A cockatrice (as my character Jen would say, a coskalips) is worth note.  A lot could be said about it.  By the time it was invented, chickens had become ridiculously important to the world.  Eggs, eggs, eggs, and to some extent, that meat.  That means male chickens were not needed in large numbers.  You just eat ’em and let the best have all the gallies.  But what does that mean, psychologically?  Maybe nothing.  In more rural times and places people are less perturbed about slaughter.  It’s easy for me to imagine a medieval person feeling weird about cockerels tho.  Maybe the ones you killed come back for revenge.  Maybe one could be born from union with serpents and poison your eggs.  There were a lot of evil horse stories too.  If this animal is necessary, perhaps the need itself is a thing to fear.

I’m not interested in talking about the horror stories and calamities – especially incipient calamities – related to factory farming.  Or the folksy stories about how your grandma sliced and diced them.  There’s plenty of room for that elsewhere on the internet.  These posts are for talking about birds as interesting critters.  Chooks are pretty interesting little beasts.

If you need to know where I stand on eating them, yeah, I do it.  One of these years I should get over that, but damn.  Some emeffs are too delicious.  Factory farming is indeed a nightmare on every level, again not talking about it, so I’d be better to not do this.  My compromise on meat for the moment is that I’ll only eat beef on special occasions, or if somebody puts it in front of me.  By weight beeves produce the most carbon.  Non-ruminants put out much less gas.  In the future I may revisit that, may stop eating meat, but that ain’t now.

You know who has some interesting articles about chickens?  Darren Naish, of tetrapod zoology fame.  That is all.

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RP by Comment – Welcome to Community College

Note:  This is a bonus post.  Hit “Previous” to see the scheduled post of the day.

The last time I tried to do a RP by Comment, I had to shut it down because I only had one player left and it wasn’t my husband, and I didn’t feel like I had the mental resources to devote to other people while my dude was having some particular issue at that time.  Lesson learned – he is not invited this time.  Also, I’m not going to post as rapidly, to save those precious mental resources for my lovin’ dude and other responsibilities.

I’m tempted to do this because it gives me something to write about when I can’t easily think of something else.  In fact, if I’m rolling slowly enough, I can easily do this at the same time as I continue my one-queued-post-per-day thing.  I’ll do my introduction post, we go a round or two of comments, and then tomorrow (assuming I have anyone playing at that time), I do a new post.

Here are the rules:

  • Make up your character and introduce them in a comment on this post.
  • The first three people to post are the adventuring party; nobody else is admitted unless one of those players taps out.
  • You can tap out at any time, and when you do, decide whether your character lives or dies.  I’ll help RP that or either you or I can “write them out the door.”
  • If you stop responding without excusing yourself I’ll write your character into a “holding pattern” for three posts, and then if you still are not there, I’ll write them out of the story.
  • If you annoy me, your character dies.
  • If you really annoy me, you’re also banned and blocked from commenting on my blog.
  • Try to abide my two commenting rules in le sidebar: don’t use “stupid,” “crazy,” or their synonyms in comments.  Don’t be a doomer.

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Twas a bright and sunny morning in The City of Romance.  Moss and vines glistened with dew, puffing in every cracked stone and trailing from every untended surface in great green boughs.  The skyscrapers strained mightily into the blue sky, surrounded by more primitive buildings in varying states of decay, by layers of highway freeway tunnel and subway, dotted with parks full of homeless people and deeper crevices still – ruins that fell beneath the notice of the modern, of those focused only on the new and the lofty.

The City of Romance was so named because of its reputation, its storied history, and because the original rulers had named it something unpronounceable in the Elfish tongue.  Now it was just another modern metropolis, inhabited mostly by humans, and ruled by a puppet regent from the neighboring human kingdom, centered in The City of Commerce.

On the highest hill of the city, where once the capitol building stood watch, the neighborhood had been overtaken by college campuses and hip boutique businesses that cater to them, and by further shady characters seeking drugs and other diversions.  You didn’t do well enough in secondary school to go straight to the fanciest of the universities, no.  Your lot in life is enrollment in the Ward Wizard Community College of Arms.

WWCCA is a good place to get a technical education, a quick and dirty primer for a job that needs special skills but not the most sophisticated and prestigious careers going.  Courses in soldiering or constabling, nursing or accounting, video editing or helicopter piloting, etc.  Alternately, you could train in the rudiments of more advanced careers, in preparation to transfer to a more prestigious college.  WWCCA produced no small amount of acolytes and adepts in the magical arts, or disciples of the more mystically oriented martial arts – paladins and great knights, rangers and more.

While the city teemed with humans, the college campuses concentrated diversity.  You might rub elbows there with the elves descended from the city’s original founders, or foreign elves and other international students.  Animal-headed people, ogres, lamias, goblins, leprechauns, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, koneira, crowten, lizard madonnas, sileni, satyrs, nymphs, and more walk those halls.  Of the schools of magic, all are represented to some extent or another in the course catalog: Elemental, Holy, Hexing, Wild, Body, Mind, Death, Binding, Drama, and Alchemy.

You and a few dozen others checked in at an office of plastic chairs and buzzing yellow lights, before being shown to an architecturally dull red brick plaza, wonderfully appointed with flowers and small trees in the planters.  Returning students wander through endlessly, while you freshman mill about, waiting for the person who will conduct your orientation.

Who are you and what did you come to learn?  First three answers below are in.  If only one person bites, fuck it, we ball.  If nobody bites within 24 hours, I guess I will not be game mastering…

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Life List, Supplemental: Great Blue Heron Chicks

Great blue herons are nesting now, and recently I saw several nests in the little managed wetland at the foot of Peasley Canyon Road on West Valley Highway.  Several nests with little white dots floating above them, on skinny stems like dandelion seeds.  Chicks!  So many chicks.  Wish I could get a better view, but I’d have to take the bus to the mall and hike on foot along the shoulder of a busy street to stand there with my binoculars, in another busy shoulder that is sometimes clipped by aggressive drivers.

Great blue heron chicks are hilarious.  I couldn’t see them for shit here, but I’ve seen pictures, and it’s fun to know those little pixels in the treetop were attached to gawky freaky little monsters.  If you happen to drive by that spot in Auburn WA, and aren’t needing to focus too much on traffic, give ’em a peek.

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