Backtalk: A Medium Place
I couldn't fall asleep last night so I selected random horror movies on my Prime watchlist at around 1am. The reason I chose Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat was because Bruce Campbell has a top billing in it, which I foolishly believed. He makes his entrance about twenty minutes in, and oh, what an entrance. His car breaks down on a stretch of desert highway, and he has to walk to the gas station. Exciting!
Tomorrow is Canada's Day of Truth and Deconciliation, observed in schools as Orange Shirt Day.
[A BC/ Codco post published as is by spaced99; will ask for forgiveness later]
It’s your weekly Photo Gallery! Come on in, take a look at what people have been up to over the past week and share some of your own photos.
They don’t need to be taken with a fancy camera or works of art. Share any SFW photos you’ve taken with even the poorest of potatoes. Of course we love to see that arty stuff too.
We had another hearing today where we gave a deposition. It won't have any effect on the decisions that were made in our case prior to this, but it sounds like they are going to tighten up some language, and close a loophole. Although it seems like these adjudicators have the discretion to throw out their rule book entirely. We gave a brief (5 minutes each) deputation, but we were unexpectedly hamstrung because they told us that we couldn't reference our case. So we had to try and change our language to "what ifs" and hypotheticals.
How was everybody else's day?
Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn't cross the river. They didn't crumble into dust, they were just stupid as bricks, and they never built a boat or a bridge or built anything. Zombies were the ultimate trash. Worse than the guys who cooked meth in trailers. Worse than the fat women on WIC. Zombies were just useless dumbfucks.
~ First page and a half of "The Naturalist", from After the Apocalypse, © 2011 by Maureen F. McHugh. A very good collection of weird fiction and sci-fi. Here's the rest of the story as read by Julie Day (Not Paul Harvey) for those interested with the preference of being read to: https://smallbeerpress.com/not-a-journal/2012/02/20/small-beer-podcast-6-maureen-f-mchughs-the-naturalist/ I can't speak to the quality of it. I'm really bad at audiobooks.
~ Images from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo (Pulse), 2001
McHugh also wrote China Mountain Zhang (1992). I very much enjoyed it in my previous life. It's a fix-up* novel. She was a little ahead of the curve writing multicultural, LGBTQA-friendly science fiction. Small Beer Press (run by the awesome Kelly Link) has kept some of her work in print despite the odds.
Random fun-ish fact: A very young Joan Didion used to retype Hemingway's novels in an attempt to learn to write like him. Did it work? What do you think?
* Several previously published stories and/or novellas "fixed up" into a single novel. Usually not tightly plotted as a consequence. If you've read a lot of genre fiction, you've probably read a fix-up at some point. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, The Gunslinger by Stephen King, To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer are some famous fix-ups you may have read.
Good... whatever time of day it is for you. It's Wednesday here. Supposedly it's 2024. That's about all I've got. I've nothing to say, so have some anime cats.
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| CGIf of Chi from Kanata Konami's Chi's Sweet Home |
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| Shungo with Clock and Cat, c. 1780, artist unknown |
The "internet is out at home and I'm out of cell data so I'm sitting in my car outside a community centre for the wifi" OT. No photo, no bandwidth for that, but I imagine the Photo Gallery has many beautiful shots to peruse.
Talk amongst yourselves, I'm stuck in the 90s.
They don’t need to be taken with a fancy camera or works of art. Share any SFW photos you’ve taken with even the poorest of potatoes. Of course we love to see that arty stuff too.
Sunday Morning OT
Sunday Funday or Sunday Scaries? I have another busy day but will check in with everyone later.
Hello and welcome to Fur Face Friday. Last week’s floofy friends were just hangin’ out, and this week they’re – well, same.
Kristinbytes’ Bindi says relax.
Tonight is the hearing about our zoning issue on our street. We seem to have stirred up a hornets' nest, but most of the arguments I'm hearing from opposition is along the lines of; "How dare they tell us what we can do on our own property; I thought that may one day, I might consider doing this thing that they don't want. Maybe. And they can't tell me otherwise". They are making emotional arguments, and think that we are too, when in fact, we will be armed with data.
So I probably won't be weighing in until sometime later in the evening, if at all.
(We'll see if my chosen gif works for anybody else; I didn't choose a Yarn gif this week)
I thought this would be a good time to remind you all that signing up for the annual team building activity isn't mandatory, but it is highly encouraged. After the Trust Fall disaster we experienced last summer in Wisconsin, I think it would be prudent to go back to 16" softball. Don't forget to sign the condolence card to Mrs Bubtastic when you get the chance.
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| Uncanny X-Men Annual #7, October 1983, Marvel Comics, by C. Claremont, M. Golden, and B. Blevins |
September is Halloween Eve in my house, but because the other residents are sensitive viewers, we'll probably just watch Over the Garden Wall for the nth year in a row. I do have a Horror Itch that needs scratching though. Had this transferred from a further branch and picked it up from the local library an hour or two ago:
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| Richard Straker doesn't do mornings. Richard Straker, are you me? |
A friend of mine once shared her idea that baseball games needed to use indigenous grasses for their games. She thought it would help the environment. A nice idea for which I could find no fault, and also fairly ridiculous in actual execution. An Illinois prairie grass good morning to you:
When's the last time you looked in your refrigerator? I mean really looked in it. Embarrassing, right? Sure, it's clean and well stocked. But drab, even unattractive. Maybe it's time to start fridgescaping.Yes Balkers, if your fridge isn't artfully appointed, is your home even decorated? I can't decide if this is a thing people are actually doing or a trend created by the media. Thoughts?
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| In the 70s, you could only tell the hippies from the ballplayers by the uniform |
It’s your weekly Photo Gallery! Come on in, take a look at what people have been up to over the past week and share some of your own photos.
They don’t need to be taken with a fancy camera or works of art. Share any SFW photos you’ve taken with even the poorest of potatoes. Of course we love to see that arty stuff too.
