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Monday, September 30, 2024

Monday End of September OT, Beginning of Halloween Month

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!



Monday Morning Open Thread


Hello and welcome to another week in the world.

Sunday, September 29, 2024

Sunday Dinner OT

 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]

The Gallery

 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.

Sonntagmorgen

 Good morning.


"Daybreak" by Louis Servedio Morales.

Caturday Morning Open Thread


 Hello and welcome to another weekendish thing.

Friday, September 27, 2024

Friday Evening Post

Good evening. 


Artwork by Kaoru Yamada | The Cure in Orange performing "Push"

Thursday, September 26, 2024

Thursday evening open thread


 

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?

Blaurgh!Talk

 


Hello, peeps. It is time for the cleansing of teh blaurghs. What tomfoolery has got your hackles up this week?

Thursday Morning Open Thread

 

Just let the cat do its thing. Not like humans have a better track record with our decisions.

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Wednesday OT – Just practicing typing (~70 wpm, pas mal!) so ignore the typo-filled text and say 'Hello'

    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.


    "They're too dumb to find enough food to keep a stray cat going," Duck said.
    Cahill was talking to a guy called Duck. Well, really, Duck was talking and Cahill was mostly listening. Duck had been speculating on the biology of zombies. He thought that the whole zombie thing was a virus, like Mad Cow Disease. A lot of the guys thought that. A lot of them mentioned that movie 28 Days Later, where everybody but a few people had been driven crazy by a virus.
    "But they gotta find something," Duck said. Duck had a prison tattoo of a mallard on his arm. Cahill wouldn't have known it was a mallard if Duck hadn't told him. He could just about tell it was a bird. Duck was over six feet tall, and Cahill would have hated to have been the guy who gave Duck such a shitty tattoo, 'cause Duck probably beat him senseless when he finally got a look at the thing. "Maybe," Duck mused, "maybe they're solar powered. And eating us is just a bonus."
    "I think they go dormant when they don't smell us around," Cahill said.
    Cahill didn't really like talking to Duck, but Duck often found Cahill and started talking to him. Cahill didn't know why. Most of the guys gave Duck a wide berth. Cahill figured it was probably easier to just talk to Duck when Duck wanted to talk.
    Almost all of the guys at Fado were white. There was a Filipino guy, but he pretty much counted as white. As far as Cahill could tell there were two kinds of black guys, regular black guys and Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam had gotten organized and turned a place across the street–a club called Heaven–into their headquarters. Most of the regular black guys lived below Heaven and in the building next door.


    This whole area of the Flats had been bars and restaurants and clubs. Now it was a kind of compound with a wall of rubbish and dead cars forming a perimeter. Duck said that during the winter they had regular patrols organized by Whittaker and the Nation. Cold as shit standing behind a junked car on its side, watching for zombies. But they had killed off most of the zombies in this area and now they didn't bother keeping watch. Occasionally a zombie wandered across the bridge and they had to take care of it, but in the time Cahill had been in Cleveland, he had seen exactly four zombies. One had been a woman.


~ 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.

WEDNESDAY MORNING GREETINGS – SAY WHAT YOU WILL JUST SAY IT LOUD OT

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. 

CGIf of Chi from Kanata Konami's Chi's Sweet Home

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Tuesday OT – Golden Bat

How's your Tuesday going? 

ÅŒgon Batto (Golden Bat) 1966. 

If Haiku Turn Back Time

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon beholders...

~ Matsuo Basho

Shungo with Clock and Cat, c. 1780, artist unknown

Cher some art or poetry or music







Monday, September 23, 2024

Monday Morning Open Thread

 

Hello and welcome to another week in the world, and (FINALLY) autumn!

Sunday, September 22, 2024

Sunday later OT

 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. 

The Gallery


 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.

Sunday OT

 Sunday Morning OT


Sunday Funday or Sunday Scaries? I have another busy day but will check in with everyone later.



Caturday Morning Open Thread


 Hello and welcome to another weekendish whatsis.

Friday, September 20, 2024

Fur Face Friday

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.

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Thursday evening open thread

 


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)

Blaurgh!Talk


Thaaaaaaat's it, folks. It's time to primal whine your way to a cleaner soul. What's  making you pitch a fit at the moment?

Thursday Morning Open Thread

 

Good Morning Back Talk. It’s Thursday so one step closer to weekend.


Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Wednesday OT2 – RE: Backtalk Team Building Activity This Year

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. 

Uncanny X-Men Annual #7, October 1983, Marvel Comics, by C. Claremont, M. Golden, and B. Blevins

Backtalk Goes to the Movies–HALLOWEEN EVE

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:

Richard Straker doesn't do mornings. Richard Straker, are you me?

Wednesday the 18th

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:


Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Tuesday Evening Open Thread

 


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?







Monday, September 16, 2024

Monday, A Candy-Colored Clown

"I close my eyes then I drift away. Into the magic night, I softly say a silent prayer like dreamers do. Then I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you." In last night/this morning's case, "you" would be Hall of Fame closer Bruce Sutter (2.83 career ERA, 300 career saves, and 24 WAR). At his peak, that splitter would just vanish into thin air. I saw him pitch an immaculate inning against the Montreal Expos on TV – that's three strikeouts with 9 pitches; the minimum – after striking out the side the inning before. That's not what he was up to in the dream though.
In the 70s, you could only tell the hippies from the ballplayers by the uniform

Monday Morning Open Thread


 Hello and welcome to another week, folks.

Sunday, September 15, 2024

Sunday evening OT


 Coastal defence bot shoots giant laser! 

How'd it all go this weekend?

The Gallery

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.