From glass rectangles, the hrair eyes of the homba peer down at the tiny ship rocked in the violent wake. The hrududu leaves a suffocating, oily embleer as it sails past Dander and Freckle, who glare back, tharn with terror.
After journeying northward for a long time, they find a quiet bay where the hrududu dare not come and drop a heavy metal hook over the to the side. They watch the sun set over liquid silver, knowing the elil to be far away and that before them lie the narn days, endless and warm.
They spend delightful hours under the golden radiance of Frith, rowing to the wild woods, wandering its luxurious overgrown trails, occasionally stopping to silflay. When the day wanes, they tell stories under the light of Inlé.
Everyday, Devine & I work in the morning, after lunch we go ashore and wander in the forest, parting spiderwebs with a stick as we go. It only takes a day for the webs to return, I feel bad for inadvertently destroying such intricate weaving. Some parts of the path are so thick with sword ferns, we have to push through with some effort. I think that with every walk, we are bringing more and more spiders back aboard. They've begun to entomb us. Everyday we find a new web aboard, hung from one stay to another, all clearly delineated, reflective, when the sun is high in the sky. After walking, we return to our personal projects, then around 1600, we pick up a book and read until dinner time. Late evenings are for more quiet activities, like rowing. The perfect time to do it is when the sun is about to fall below the top edge of the land encircling us. I really love rowing. I do it for transport, I do it for sport, and for scenery gazing. Internet floods and ebbs out of the bay as it wants, all we can do is work with its schedule. Sometimes we get a signal, sometimes we don't.
Cooking. The tray of the solar cooker I use aboard Pino is damaged, the welding holding the ends to the body have begun to separate. I can no longer cook anything runny, or that is immersed in liquid, like wholegrains, legumes and beans. Avi, a friend, will try to re-weld it, in the meantime I am experimenting with ways to keep cooking. The tube itself(the most important part of the cooker) and reflectors are fine, Devine built a tray out of aluminium cans, shaping it into a sort of canoe which we've since named the "cooking canoe." I put half a cut aluminium can at the end to keep the heat inside the tube. The cooking canoe leaks, so we can only cook things which aren't too wet, like bread, cake, dry beans and seeds (for roasting). I've been grinding legumes into powder so it is possible to keep solar-cooking them, mixing them with spices and water. I usually add a length of parchment paper underneath to help contain the mixture. My favorite mix so far is chickpea flour, garlic powder, turmeric, chili flakes, cumin, kasoori methi and water. The result is a long and tasty tube savoury cake, which I cut up into slices and throw onto a variety of meals. I've also prepared this recipe using lentil flour(ground brown lentils), and it tastes amazing. The fragrance of kasoori methi wafting in from the forward hatch when it is cooking is... very distracting.
ART. I neglected my own art and conworlds in the last few weeks. I am happy to draw for others, but I always need to take time to draw for myself and so I spent the month drawing and planning comics for hakum. I gathered older drawings and put together the shock, and also drew all new content for tangled. I completed all illustrations for the permacomputing project, production though is running long and it won't come out until much later. hundredrabbits also released no bears none, a book documenting our 2024 sail from Victoria, B.C, to Sitka, AK. The book includes 100 new drawings, recipes, and tons of new edited content. It's a detailed read, interspersed with silliness. If you read it, I hope you like it! If enough people like it, we'll release it as a paperpack book later this year.
READING. I read Tales from Watership Down aloud to Devine every night. The book begins with several epic stories involving El-ahrairah. The stories are lovely, but I was a bit disappointed to not hear more of the lives of the Watership Down rabbits. Thankfully, most of the second half involves them. I really enjoyed diving back into Richard Adam's rabbit world. I have now started reading The Sea Wolf by Jack London aloud. I am enjoying it so far, although the "Might is Right" attitude of the captain is a bit tiring at times. I am curious to see what's going to happen, since his views greatly clash with that of the main character, a literary critic and altruist. I read Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What a mad fever of a book. It is a dizzying, but thankfully, quick read. It was difficult to stomach at times because of its portrayal of natives, who are frustratingly referred to as savages, and who's country is hopelessly plundered. I grow weary of reading about resource-gobbling men with a God complex, even if it is meant as a critique of colonialists. The writing though is good, and you really do feel as though you are immersed in a sweaty jungle. At least, Aldous Huxley's Island was a true balm. I think about many of its passages daily. Brave New World was a warning, and Island is an offering, a fictionalized manifesto on what the ideal utopia could look like, were it not for Murugan; Oh Murugan, you know not what you do...
Animals don't behave like men. If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don't sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures' lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.
Richard Adams (a passage from Watership Down)
I thought, how different it would be to be old. I had this idea in my head when I was young that I'd be going through life by moving between things, that interests would roll off of me and that which was once novel would have to make space for some new other thing. But it's not at all what happened.
I'm about 15, and I come across this list of blue monospaced links. I have no inclination toward... anything really, I'm a teen, videogames are like my whole life, I can barely understand English; and somehow, through all that mess of folders with names I didn't understand, I find myself saving a text file made up of these large squares tables made of letters. Translation notes of the Liber Soyga.
Among thousands of lines, my eye catches a passage where the angel Michael, addressing John Dee who puzzles over how to decipher these tables, says: "It is revealed by virtue and truth not power". I transcribe this line on the top of my school notebook in large letters, it becomes woven into everything I touch:
Et haec revelantur in virtute et veritate non Vi.
It will take another 15 years before the 36 tables of the book are deciphered, and many more for me to even come across what they revealed, that the Liber Soyga is likely one of the earliest cellular automata. It's a coincidence, of course, but I can't help but see an inescapable inertia that runs back all the way to the start, and that nothing really rolls off of anyone after all.
It’s too damn hot again, if this is Spring then I’m dreading Summer this year. I have a portable air-con unit at least but that restricts me to one room.
My cycle commute has also suffered since we don’t have access to the showers at work and riding in for the afternoon shift would leave me a stinky goblin for the duration.
The month of May begins with renewed research into shell script, including a new proof of concept app that's not likely to see much use. Shell script is underrated in my opinion. Quirky, but much more logical than critics claim. Limited, but still more capable than it seems, especially since it's intended for use in tandem with the core utilities, not by itself. That's kind of the whole point, but it makes for a very different approach from other languages that try to be all-in-one.
While on the topic of underrated languages, I took a break to look at Wiki Creole, an all but forgotten markup language. (It was a big deal fifteen years ago, and still available as a plugin in Oddmuse or PmWiki.) Nowadays the official site is down a lot, but still exists; that allowed me to do some in-depth reading, enough to start work on a new implementation. Unlike others, this one is meant for use instead of Markdown, on the command line and in static site generators for example. Maybe it will work better than inventing my own syntax, much as it was a good thing to try.
Mid-month, I'm again looking at Jabber/XMPP and especially Movim, a federated social network built on top of it. You can have blogs+communities alongside chat rooms, and spaces are coming soon. That means a viable replacement for at least two proprietary social networks I can think of. Movim has been around since at least ten years ago, but recently gained a bunch of major improvements. Definitely worth trying now.
Just like that, we're three weeks into May and traffic stats for my site are simply sad. I'll definitely have to make some decisions between now and when I renew the domain name one last time this coming summer. At least this journal has readers.
With summer just around the corner, I'm working on my new site again. It's a sign.
Long sunny days softly swaying around our anchor, turning this way, warm rays sweep across the galley, now this way, a breeze lifts specks of fragrant dust off the basil leaves, with nothing to do. But reading until the elbows are sore, contemplating, gazing, birdsong listening, birdname guessing, shore inspecting, eye squinting, tiny swallows skirting over the water, bird spotting! And some napping.
There's that hurry that goes away at anchor when there's no rent to pay, no store to waste away into, no bandwidth to keep up with anything or anyone, but there's always sun and there's always something to take care of, roasting, bubbling, cooking in the solar oven. And there's always flour to mill when we're restless, and there's probably something to clean, but there's never boredom, at least not the kind of boredom that comes with that hurry.
