Life List: California Scrub Jay

TLC said they don’t want no scrubs, and it was clear when that song debuted that it was about me.  I was born further south than where I was raised, so I am a California Scrub.  I’m just one descriptor shy of being this bird: the California scrub jay.  CSJs are on the boring end of jay styles, with a very generic bird profile, and more brown and grey than most other jays.  But they’re a cool bird.  Decent size and a tendency to briefly alight on fences and awnings, so easy to spot.

Less chonky and clumsy than crows, they don’t stick around for long.  Blink and you’ll miss them, and when I was a kid, I did a lot of blinking, because I only ever saw them once, and not close enough to ID.  I had assumed they were the blue jays known as blue jays, which, as it turns out, do not live in the region at all.  I am only confident those were CSJs in retrospect, because I am once again living on the very same street where I was at the time of that encounter, and CSJs are everywhere here.

Speaking of awnings, that was the only time in my life when you might have caught me lounging on a roof.  I was living in squalor and family dysfunction, but I was living on the second floor, and outside of my window was some rooftop.  I didn’t spend much time on it.  One night my brother and I saw something like the aurora borealis, but it didn’t make sense, middle of summer?  I know jack about shit.  I was skinny with long hairs, and I sang the Misfits’ Last Caress in the garage of that apartment, with my homies on instruments.  White people foolery.  Make the neighbors hate you.

CSJs only came back into my life again within the last couple of years.  I was living up the hill in Federal Way and commuting to work in the valley, at a building surrounded by scrubby fields of the exact kind you’d expect for them.  And yet I didn’t see them the first year I worked there.  Don’t know why.  When I did start to glimpse them, they were at long distance, shy, flighty.  Took a long time to get a positive ID, but once it happened?  Some pretty nice close encounters.

Sadly my work moved out of that building, which is surely slated for destruction by whoever it was sold to.  The enshittification of everything continueth.  But just as my work moved uphill to Fed Way, I moved downhill to Auburn, and CSJ City.

California Scrub Jays are blue on top, white on bottom, with a little reddish brown vest.  I’m not usually close enough to see this, but they have a bit of a black mask and white eyebrows.  They’re not the only jays in this neighborhood, but Steller’s jays prefer the cover of trees, are out in the open less often.  But I saw Steller’s pretty often during a decade of Federal Way, so scrub jays feel fresh and cool to me now.

I want to see scrubs
Scrubs are some birds that can get the love from me
I hear them inside when they have to cry
The sound down my chimney

Eh, needs work.  Not happening.

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Life List: Northern Flicker

My “life list” as a birder is unremarkable, but the wee beasties make me feel some type of way, so I thought, articles about them.  First entry…

I always liked nature, liked birds, but I somehow just didn’t pay attention to them – at least, not enough to notice just how many were around me, what they looked like, acted like, sounded like.  I’d see chickadees one month and by the time I took any note of another bird, forgot enough that I assumed house sparrows were the same species – then not noticed another bird for two years.

The first bird that sparked an abiding interest for me, at about age thirty, was the northern flicker – a very humble woodpecker.  Most woodpeckers in North America are bold black and white, with pure red flashes.  Flickers and their cousins are a tawny brown, where the black and white on them turn into “cryptic” camouflage, and the red ranges from rust colored to salmon to yellow, in the eastern end of their range.  Dull.  But still.

I used to see a brown bird on the ground with red bits and assume it was just an american robin (i’d rather call ’em the anglicization of their binomial, “migratory thrush,” because bitches do not look like real robins).  Until one day, I saw one of those birds take off, and reveal red all over the bottoms of its wings – then proceed to land on the side of a tree, in a way that was impossible for robins.  I stalked that bird all around Meridian Playground in Wallingford, hoping to get a better view, but the cryptic plumage and nervous demeanor kept it out of reach.

I went home and scoured the internet until I got my ID.  Despite my having never noticed them, they are extremely common.  There are no doubt tens of thousands of them in the region, maybe hundreds of thousands.  When you come to recognize their CHEEE! call, you realize how many there are, whether you see them or not.  And they aren’t that hard to see, because unlike most of the woodpeckers here, they feed near or on the ground.  I’ve seen them in the middle of a paved expanse, no trees in sight, flicking moss out of a sidewalk crack to get bugs.  They’re everywhere.  How did I miss them?

Now I try not to miss birds.  To honor the northern flicker, I got one tattooed on my left shoulder.  Still haven’t been able to get it colored.  Speaking of which, as plain as they are, they really are very cute.  They have these brilliant black polka-dots, a black crescent bib, red teardrop shapes sliding off their cheeks, and of course, the red under their wings.  Most birds are pale under the wing, for countershading, so it’s very cool to see a bird buck that trend in bold style – even if the red isn’t as pure as it is in their flashier cousins.  Compared to a lot of other brown birds, they are more tawny and pale, which makes their eyes look more dark and sweet.  They are about the same size as an american robin, but as woodpeckers, can easily move around on the sides of trees.  Powerful feet with two toes facing forward and two back.

I haven’t gone as deep into describing all the cool details about them as I could.  Check them out sometime, if you can.  Northern flickers.  Cool guys.

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PrAIse Jeezes

For reasons, I wanted to create an image of jeezis that looked like an old Klasky-Csupo cartoon, like Rugrats, Ahh Real Monsters, or Wild Thornberrys.  Trying this in midj came back with very undignified results, quite amusing to me.  You should be scared, jeezis.  I hate you and I’m coming for your ass.

Anyway, I actually wanted a result with smaller eyes, like the Thornberrys, but I did like the vibes on those ones, so I used one as an image prompt, while using words to tease out smaller eyeballs.  I said “little tiny eyes” and –no large eyes, bulgy eyes, big eyes.  However, when using a bug-eyed image prompt and telling it to not make bug-eyes, I broke the AI’s mind.  Results:

Eldritch, son.  Once again, I was heartily amused, tho I gave up on making smol eyes, for now.

Next, unrelated, I was trying to get some ideas for motifs, rendering style, and composition, in a heraldic design.  Composition isn’t my strong suit as a visual artist.  This was a really strong result, and shows what I was looking for: not an image I could use as my final design, but something that can inform aspects of it.

The next one had a more rough-hewn texture and chiaroscuro that was appealing in other ways.  I have a wealth of inspirations to choose from, with a few pushes of a button.  I likes AI art tools.

I also like randomly recombining unrelated AI works, just to see what comes out, so putting previous jeezies together with heraldry, I got…

Again, love the indignity.  Nice texture too.  This next one brings back the chickenshitness of the klasky-csupo messiae.

But this is my favorite, reflecting my feelings on the big mans.  Catch one in the dome, motherfucker.  Catch you on the flipside.

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A Christmas Miracle

Even while you regard conservatives/fascists as your bitter enemies and threatening to your life liberty and happiness, it is useful to not transform them in your imagination into supernatural monsters, alien from you and all you know.  They are human and we have to live with them, because much like how gay and trans and disabled people will always exist in a given population of humans, so will people with deficits of compassion, and people with the malevolence and greed to manipulate those people into granting them power and wealth.

I say to the idea of genocide against gay people and atheists, even if it was magically 100% successful, it would be undone within one generation, and sadly the same is true of fascist thought – and at this point the odds of that being expunged are basically nil.  On the plus side, ditto for lgbt people, etc.

That’s all getting way off topic.  What I meant to say is this:  we have a rare opportunity right now, and one we should relish, to feel bonhomie and kinship with our fascist family members.  It is but one fleeting moment and soon to disappear, so hold it up and marvel.

Left right and center, if you aren’t a billionaire or a saint, you liked seeing a health insurance CEO gunned down with a smile.  Even fascists suffer and die under capitalist medicine, and have reason to enjoy this.  And they have!  On facebook, of all platforms, his death announcement got tens of thousands of laughing face emojis.

Now they’ll probably be assuming he’s jewish, or daydreaming that immigrants are the reason the system exists like it does.  I dunno, I’m not them. But we have, in this one moment, correctly identified the enemy, and taken pleasure in this one random action against them.  It’s a miracle.

You won’t see this on the corporate news, except in some politically slanted form, scoring points for the establishment.  But it’s real.  It happened.  Appreciate it.

Then resume your watch for face-eating leopards with grim resolve, and resume your caution around the hateful fools that voted for them.  As you were.

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If you wanna say murder is always wrong in the comments here, congrats, you might be one of those saints I mentioned.  Keep being you; the world is a better place with you in it.  But understand, if you will, where the rest of us are coming from.  In America.

Pondering Web Programming

i used to have fun doing redesigns of my art website, pondering doing that again.  only this time, it’s not trying to get me work, so it can be the sort of memory palace funplex of my auldest ambitions.  i can’t program my way out of a wet paper bag, leaning heavily on the one or two things i need to achieve my vision.  back in the day, that was creating a website out of tables and columns with fixed widths, filled with bespoke graphics, to make a very visually oriented interface.

i still want to do a visually oriented interface, where the page appears as an image, on which you can click the little parts to go different places, to explore.  like in sandra bullock’s The Net, where if you click on the hidden π, it plunges you into a world of danger and thrizzles.  flash shit.  anyway, flash is no longer an option, but i’m given to understand you can do a lot of the same things with html5.

the cheap tricks i’d need to learn:

  • how to do even one thing in html5 at all, haha.  css and java if absolutely necessary.
  • how to make an image scale to the window, so that on phone it’ll fill the screen and on desktop it’ll be the same proportions with some color field or tiling background to the left and right.
  • how to make different regions of the image clickable as links, without having the region selection get borked by scaling the image to different resolutions.
  • having an alternate graphic show on mouse-over would be nice.

if i could do those things, i’d probably be gravy.  also gotta buy a new domain name, i think.  the old one doesn’t fit anymore.  how can i learn enough to do those things, without really trying?

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Police Priorities

On one hand, you can imagine a city like NYC has enough crime that police would have to prioritize investigation like a triage unit at a hospital. Some murders have a larger impact than others based on the role of the victim in the community, right?

On the other hand, a person’s life is the most important thing they have, and the loss of it to a murderer is the ultimate crime. This is equally true for a homeless black transgender sex worker as it is for a mass-murdering shitbird CEO.

If somebody else had been the victim, would they have even found the security footage? Or would they have chucked the body in a freezer and hosed off the sidewalk? If it was my hypothetical all too common victim aforementioned, what are the odds the police themselves would have been the murderers? That’d make the investigation cover-up easier.

The NYPD has such ludicrous wealth that they have foreign offices, like, in other countries. Why would a municipal police force need that?

Clown country keeps the horns honking.

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pay raised

got my annual pay raise, works out to about $75 per biweekly paycheck. that’s better than a punch in the scro, but considering this only comes once a year and the cost of everything can quadruple when a billionaire sneezes, kinda getting nowhere. it’s alright. i know i can sell my screenplay and make a bank full of money. i know it.

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too mad

i’m turning into an edgelord, talking violence too often. politics, maaaan. gotta shut it off, focus on other things entirely. sometimes when i hear other people talk, who are being upset by the same things that bother me, it helps me look at the same issue more calmly. a weird quirk, i wish i could call up on command. works more IRL than online, where i more often get the opposite effect.

;slkjgrdlkagjlskjrgfkjvrak i tells ya.

but i’ll be alright.

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What Should I Say?

A wiser woman than I said we should all give dems the spurs on trans rights, specifically to say we’ll stop supporting them with votes if they stop supporting us.  My initial reaction is to think of just how much I despise all the leftists who said it was OK not to vote this time around.  It was potential dem voters staying home that caused us this crisis in the first place, and the margin was so massive it must have had multiple causes.  Misogyny, racism, transphobia, vote suppression (i have firsthand knowledge of some, but it doesn’t explain the big shortfall by itself), apathy caused by a campaign relentlessly focused on fear?  Discouraging voters was surely one of the causes, as well as single-issue voters like pro-Palestine people not wanting to sully hands.  This campaign would be both of those things, right?  Single-issue vote discouragement?

On the other hand, voting for the lesser of two evils only makes sense if it actually does prevent some amount of evil from happening, undoes the evil that was done the last time their opponents were in power, something…  Like, I’d accept that my demographic had no legal protection and was royally fucked, if there were some kinda super-genius badass legislative masterminds successfully making great things happen to, say, benefits for the poor, or environmental legislation, medicare… something important.  The dems, and left parties around the globe, have been unbelievably useless at this.  Biden should be using the last days of his executive power to make baller moves, but there’s no indication that’s going to happen.

As an example of that, I thought about pardoning Leonard Peltier.  No dem was ever gonna do that, but I haven’t looked into the subject much.  I just assumed that since a lot of thoughtful people think he is innocent, they probably had good reason.  A brief look into the subject brought up this slanted-ass bootlicking NPR article that was covered top to bottom in e-begging.  (How long has NPR been sucking fascist balls?)  If there is reasonable evidence supporting his innocence out there, getting people OK with releasing him would be as simple as presenting that evidence, right?  I dunno.

How about something less controversial.  Commute the penalties of everyone on death row to life imprisonment.  Full pardons for everybody on death row where the police or prosecutors are legally proven to have fucked up the truth for the sake of a lynching.  Last time the billowing bowelsack was on his way out of office, he accelerated the rate of executions, including those of people who had strong evidence of wrongful conviction.  Just do the opposite thing.  That’s an obvious good deed that would not be easily reversed.

One factor in how the election was lost: the dem hesitation to simply stand for anything.  If there was a case being made outside of “at least we won’t kill you,” I didn’t hear it.  It may have been spoken, but the threats were so much louder.  All I saw was them using terror to ransack the wallets of the base, and making wacky jokes.  I dunno if anyone was paying attention when Clinton lost, but all the night show funnymen were joking in overtime, didn’t make a difference when it counted.

Having lost, it seems to me, puts dems exactly where they want to be, doing what they do best.  Tut tut ineffectually from the corner, play the good cop role in our persecution, and so lend a veneer of legitimacy to our deeply anti-democratic government.  They make themselves reeeally hard to defend, especially the centrists like Pelosi.

As much as I feel a nigh-murderous hatred for anti-voting tumblr anarchists, they represent a genuinely felt position among many lgbt people – particularly trans women – that nobody in power honestly cares about them or is willing to protect them from literal genocide.  That belief was stoked by social media cryptofascists, especially foreign ones, but it would have been there even without that encouragement.  Dubya’s government tried to use disgust of gay people to bolster their political power, unsuccessfully.  Us trans folk are even more disgusting to the masses, so using us has proven more successful.  Or has it?  The gasbag barely got more votes than he did last time.  Again, this was all about our side staying home, and not theirs achieving anything besides holding the base.

I’m conflicted.  This is an important enough issue for obvious personal reasons, as well as for all the trans people less privileged than myself, that it’s easy to see making it the one issue to vote on.  So are the other issues though.  US support of genocide abroad, anthropogenic global warming…  As I used to say a lot, everything is on fire and nothing isn’t.

But in the end, no, I won’t join the crew in saying I won’t vote dem if they don’t support trans rights.  I would implore whatever passes for human decency in them to throw us a bone, but I can’t say I’d one-issue this, as bad as the dems are.  The nazis are just so god damn much worse.  I say vote dem anyways, and if they ever win again (lol), don’t assume that’s the end of it.  We’ll have to fight them for what we need; it’ll just be easier to fight them than the fourth reich.  Maybe fight them like my comrades are trying to, with this campaign, if it makes sense to you.  I can’t join them in making those vows of non-voting against spineless dems, but I like to think I have other types of fight in me, when it counts.  Who even knows until you’re on the line?  None of us should have to be living through these struggles.

Either way, the country is going to be so gerrymandered and vote-suppressed in four years that dems will be lucky to win participation trophies, so I’m probably overthinking it.  Just done and tired, waiting for the hurricane of hammers to drop.  And still viciously, viscerally furious with the proselytizers of non-voting.

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EDIT:  forgot silver lining.  yes i think dems are not going to win next time without the republicans literally having a child sex orgy on prime time basic cable and using the blood of a vivisected vietnam vet for lube (that was a bit off color jeezis).  but people survived fascism in spain and we can do it here too.