The bid we got from the first contractor was half of the other guy’s. We’re going with that. It leaves more room in the budget to fix the increasingly scary backyard deck.
I could, I have no doubt, demolish the deck myself. It would take some number of days, I would need frequent breaks (involving walking around to the front of the house and up the steps). And then I’d still have to hire someone to haul away the debris, build a fence and, and concrete steps up to the back door.
We’ve been in the habit of just opening the back door and letting the dogs do their business in the backyard. This is going to be an issue during the deck/stairs process; neither of them is that happy about leashes, especially the little guy. So the faster that job gets done, the less of a pain in the ass it will be for everyone involved.
Mark Zuckerberg (spits) wore a t-shirt recently that said “AUT ZUCK AUT NIHIL”, which was a play on “AUT CAESER AUT NIHIL” (Caesar or nothing). So Jay Graber, the CEO of BlueSky, responded with her own t-shirt in a similar style: “MUNDUS SINE CAESERIBUS” (a world without Caesars). Naturally it has gone viral and copycat shirts were available within hours.
I find this exchange especially amusing, given that a few days from now is the 2069th anniversary of Caesar getting stabbed 23 times by the senators who’d finally had enough of his shit. I am not a bloodthirsty person, I am a… let’s call it a pacifist tempered by practical considerations. But there are a handful of billionaires and politics whose ironic demise I could only celebrate.
Speaking of the march of ideas..
On And Yet… I got into a certain holding pattern with techniques and gear, and stuck tightly to it. That wound up meaning very few software synths and no bass guitar. Nothing wrong with that!
But for the next project, I’ve decided to adopt some creative constraints as a sort of game. Here are the rules:
- Record tracks from start to end sequentially as they appear on the album, and have them transition into each other smoothly and continuously.
- The album title must begin with an E (because I want to eventually fill in the alphabet)
- The first and last notes of the album should be E. (As defined by A440 and 12TET; this doesn’t otherwise constraint tuning/scale.)
- Odd-numbered tracks use only bass guitar for a sound source, processed and layered however I like. (Other oscillators are allowed for modulation purposes.)
- Even-numbered tracks must begin with DecadeBridge Sn, and end with Arturia Easel V. Other sound sources are also permitted.
Seems like this should be pretty fun. 🙂
Reddit, or at least the cluster of nonbinary subreddits I follow, is really starting to lose its shine. I mean, I never really liked it as a platform, but it’s increasingly clear that it doesn’t really foster community, the way a forum or even Discord does. It was helpful to me for a brief while for a step on my journey, but it’s very quickly gotten less so. And it’s frustrating to try to stand against the endless tide and respond with helpful advice and encouragement.
I think this is why I was never into the idea of Twitter. Give me forums and proper blogs!
Sacred Gender continues to be quite good. One thought-provoking exercise was: describe your gender while avoiding words like masculine/feminine, male/female, man/woman, etc. The author says almost everyone has trouble with this and that nonbinary folks mainly tend to be weirdly poetic about it.
“Of borders” is the phrase that keeps coming to me. A rock, just off shore, jutting out from the waves, and the waves crashing over it. Tree roots spreading through soil, wood and earth interlaced and holding onto each other. Air blowing over a textured metal surface, vibrating it, droning.
(Counting Chinese elements, I see I have earth twice and no fire, despite the whole “star” thing and personally feeling more of an affinity for water and air. Hmm.)
Some people describe their gender as if it’s directly, almost literally related to something like outer space, forests, etc. That’s really not what I’m thinking with this imagery. But I think, having done the exercise, I understand that kind of thinking just a little bit better now.