A few years ago I decided I wanted something more engaging than bare walls in my work office. At the time I was reading Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook and was particularly enchanted by the work of R. S. Connett.

So now The Night Trawlers hangs above my desk.

The picture below makes my office look much sadder than it really is. Opposite of this wall are a bunch of windows overlooking the river.

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If you like unconventional (i.e. weird) movies, I can recommend Lamb.

I had no idea what to expect when JB started playing this one movie night. It quickly became very weird, and I loved it.

“A childless couple in rural Iceland make an alarming discovery one day in their sheep barn.”

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Austin Kleon’s newsletter pointed me to this cool deep read of Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts.” I’ve been itching to take a deep dive into some writer’s work and reading this essay reminded me how little I know about Auden. I’m checking out a bio and a collection of poems this afternoon (from the library!) to see if he’ll maintain my interest.

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Metafilter pointed me to a search engine (Marginalia) that emphasizes the non-commercial parts of the web. I can’t say I had much success with a few trial searches, but I deeply heart the philosophy behind it.

“In recent years, something has been simmering: Some call it the “Small Internet”. I hesitate to call it a movement, that would imply a level of organization and intent that it does not possess. It’s a disjointed group of like-minded people that recognize that the Internet has lost a certain je ne sais quoi, it has turned from a wild and creative space, into more of shopping mall. Where ever you go, you’re prodded to subscribe to newsletters, to like and comment, to buy stuff.

“The formulation of the problem differs from purely aesthetic ones, to ones based on political doctrine. I prefer a humanist explanation. The measure of a website should be how well it enriches the life of – and empowers the visitor, rather how well it enriches the wallet of the website owner, especially not at the expense of the visitor’s long-term interests.”

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Colossal remains one of my favorite sites. If it’s not part of your regular web browsing (or RSS feed), well… maybe drop one of those news sites and add Colossal.

The first time I saw the following image I thought it was an illustration of a dinosaur. It’s not! It’s a for real contemporary photograph.

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The Aesthetics wiki has a truly impressive list of aesthetics. This is where I learned about fairycore.

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A cartoon from Paul Noth.

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Abdera is a fictional town in Florida.* In one story I placed it thusly — “If you look closely on a map you’ll see somewhere between Tampa and Sarasota an easy-to-miss town named Abdera.”

Occasionally I think it should also have its own fictional county. Murder County. I imagine that the Murder family were early settlers and everything afterwards was named after them. They are named Murder after their historical family vocation, the same way someone may have the surname Baker or Wheeler or Lamplighter.

Extrapolating from that means there will likely be a Murder River, a Murder Elementary School, The Murder County Public Library, Murder expressway, Murder State Park, Murder Community College, a sheriff of Murder County, etc.

The joke is probably too one-note, but the idea of casually naming everything Murder cracks me up.

*It also used to be a real city, and is currently a real municipality.

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Originally I thought, Oh, I’ll just find a bunch of new songs and that’ll be the list. But there’s a lot of things I do instead of hunt down new music, so I’m going to wrap up this series tonight.

Tonight’s selection is the next ten songs that come up on shuffle on the giant list I made to listen to while cooking or washing dishes in the kitchen.

Until today I didn’t know “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” was not a Carpenter’s original (it was originally performed by Klaatu). The 1970s were weird y’all. Not only was this a hit single, but there’s a real World Contact Day. In fact, it’s this Tuesday, March 15. And The Carpenters had a TV special called “The Carpenters…Space Encounters.” I don’t remember it, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if I watched it.

I’m not really interested in having Christ for president (accept my infinite love or burn in Hell forever!), but the other sentiments I can get behind. I even used some lyrics from this song as a definition for abderitic in an earlier iteration of this blog.

We build our civilization up
And we shoot it down with wars

JB turned me onto DeVotchKa. This is a lovely song.

Even though Of Montreal sounds like something I should have probably been listening to for years, I only discovered them recently after Spotify suggested them to me.

Lizzo is the best.

I definitely went through a K-Pop phase. I love so much Blackpink.

I had some friends over a few weeks ago and this song came on and one of my friends mocked me! Are you a twelve year old girl? He asked. Don’t you like music? I responded. (Of course this came on right after Hanson, so…maybe?)

After they left I looked up this song because I know nothing about the band OMC, and learned that he’s an indigenous singer from New Zealand. Some people just don’t like some songs because they’re popular. But it’s not the song’s fault!

This may be the only Vampire Weekend song I know. I think JB went to see them live … a decade ago?… but I like this song.

This was on a list a few weeks ago. The Louvin Brothers with a timely reminder that nuclear destruction is always just around the corner.

Not a bad ending – fun, natural fun.

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Busy day at work followed by blank brain lethargy, so how about an update?

I know! I’ll steal a blog tactic from Scalzi and interview myself.

Q: How’s the New Year’s resolution going?

A: Tea time? It’s going well. I now have tea nearly every day between three and four.

Q: Any favorites?

A: I haven’t been too ambitious yet. I have a moderately caffeinated green tea when I’m at work. I had some lemon tea at home that I drank when I didn’t want mid-afternoon caffeine. That just ran out and I replaced it with a lavender/chamomile I haven’t tried yet.

Q: Do you only drink tea at tea time?

A: Nope. One of the things that prompted tea time was that I started drinking sleepy time tea in the evenings. That’s become pretty locked in. Every night at 8pm it’s tea time.

Q: Do you eat watercress finger sandwiches with the crust cut off during your tea time?

A: Nope. No scones or clotted butter either. I did buy some cookies one week and ate a couple of cookies with my tea. I decided it was a bad idea to get in the habit of eating cookies with my tea. Mostly I have nothing, but today I had a banana with my tea and yesterday I ate an apple. Last week I had some mixed nuts and dried fruit.

Q: How do you heat your water?

A: Glad you asked! I had to buy a kettle for work. I also had to buy a beaker so I could pour water into the kettle, pouring from the cup was a little sloppy. At home I use the coffee maker. It has a single-serving element I’ve never used for anything but hot water to pour into the tea cup.

Q: Anything else to say about tea?

A: I haven’t done the deep dive I was expecting. Maybe that’ll come later? Or, maybe not. So far I’m digging it.

At home we drink tea from Calamityware cups JB bought.

And that’s the story my New Year’s resolution to drink tea at tea time.

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Maybe the swamp is having a moment as a motif in philosophy and art?

I noticed it last year with

Swamps and the New Imagination: On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture, and Philosophy edited by Nomeda Urbonas, Gediminas Urbonas and Kristupas Sabolius.

“It is not easy to define a swamp, even in biology. The term is frequently used to characterize marshes, bogs, mires, wetlands, meadows, and other grey zones between land and water. In that sense, “swamp” is a metonym for a variety of transitional ecosystems and functions. This book invokes that concept as a tool to address the vital urgency of human cohabitation with other forms of life, placing the swamp at the crossroad of disciplines and practices.”

And today I came across Most Dismal Swamp.

“Most Dismal Swamp is a mixed-reality biome, an art platform, a multi-scalar mystic fiction, a forecasting laboratory, a long tail, a transitional ecosystem, a party, a cognitive scaffold, a bad dataset, a curatorial MMORPG, a memeplex aggregator, a planetary weirding studio, and a record label.

“It is a model for parsing, navigating, and elaborating a Dank Enlightenment: globally variable synaesthesia across multiple and simultaneous dimensions.”

Here’s an art video from the Most Dismal Swamp installation titled Swamp Protocol.

“Swamp Protocol is an atmospheric ‘procession of the damned… a procession of data that science has excluded…'”

Two items are clearly not a trend, but I suspect these projects grow out of some dank swampy compost oozing across the perimeters of contemporary scholarship.

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Spent this afternoon at the Gasparilla Festival of Arts and saw the Peninsularium installation.

It’s called “Bait Ball.”

Here’s a real life bait ball.

Here’s the prototype. It’s much cooler in real life. It’s at the end of the container and surrounded by kelp and weird lighting, and there’s a mirror beneath so you can see inside the ball. The strobe light make is look like a whirling bait ball of fish.

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Some recent speculative design/design fiction for an underwater habitat.

“A project of the Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Center (FCOLC), PROTEUS™ is conceived as the underwater version of the International Space Station; it will be a platform for global collaboration amongst the world’s leading researchers, academics, government agencies, and corporations to advance science to benefit the future of the planet. The underwater research station will advance scientific and oceanic research by making it livable for scientists to work for long periods of time, carrying out a variety of research missions.”

When I was a kid there was enthusiasm for underwater habitats. Hello Down There, a 1969 movie starring Tony Randall captures some of that enthusiasm. I find cheesy movies like this very charming, but be warned if you decide to watch it – it is not a good movie.

I probably first learned about underwater habitats from watching The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau as a kid.

(I looked up Cousteau while writing this post. Sad there’s no official way to stream The UWoJC, but folks have posted some episodes on YouTube. In the embedded video below Cousteau visits Florida and brings attention to the plight of the manatee.)

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Ryan North hits on one of the challenges of fairy research. Weeding out all the search results about fairy tales.

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