This tree is awaiting more rain.
It never rains but it pours. On top of the boat problem, this morning it turned out the UV water filter system had managed to stop working during a brief power outage yesterday. it turned out the florescent UV bulb inside it was burned out. Art did have a replacement on hand, but unfortunately there’s a glass protective sleeve that goes around, that somehow broke on trying to reinstall things – I suspect I was doing something wrong. But in all the cardboard tubes which I thought had spare, additional glass protective sleeves, there was nothing but air – Arthur was saving them for some reason, but the result was that I thought we had more backup inventory than in fact we had. So now we have to await a re-order of protective sleeves from Amazon. Meanwhile, it turns out that when Arthur built this filter system, he didn’t take into account the possibility that it might need to be bypassed temporarily. There’s no bypass route or valves. So… I had to construct a bypass using a garden hose from an upstream spigot to a downstream spigot – the latter being the water source for the washing machine. Here is the hose, coming up the stairs…
… and connecting behind the washing machine.
This more-or-less works for water supply, though our laundry facility is disabled. But now we wait 10 days while Amazon delivers the part we need. I will work on re-engineering the filter installation area so that it has an actual, workable bypass system for events like this in the future.
This tree saw a fog-bank attacking the midsection of Sunnahae Mountain.
Except for our trip to town for Thursday shopping, I spent almost the entire day trying to troubleshoot or fix the boat’s engine – problem was described two weeks ago on our abortive fishing trip. I made very little progress. I changed spark plugs, fuel filters – not super easy, given the boat was in the water and my own lack of experience with marine engines, but I’m good at reading a manual. I added stabilizer to the fuel system. I ran the motor for several hours, messing with the throttle and trying to get the idle to stick. No luck. And taking the boat in for service is not in the cards: the guy in town who does boat service is booked until October. Seriously.
This tree stood in the background while I exploited a moment of non-rain to begin trying to diagnose our boat’s engine’s problem. Something is causing it not to idle. I took out and inspected the spark plugs. Turns out Art doesn’t have a spare set – so I’ll shop for them tomorrow.
This tree experienced having a wind-chime attached to it.
The wind chime was a gift from neighbor-down-the-road, Penny. It was a treehouse-warming gift, as she explained. But in fact I had bought the exact same wind chime at my place of work two weeks ago. That one was hung in my treehouse already. So instead, I took this second wind-chime and suspended it in a tree in front of Arthur’s house. I wonder if he will notice it. It might be a while – I’m not going to tell him, and see how long it takes. I’ll try to remember to report when he notices it.
After a very long winter season, we resumed fishing today. As usual, Arthur gave me basically zero notice of his expectation. His approach has always been “military style”: never announce plans in advance, better to catch those around you unawares with whatever project you have in mind. His idea of advance notice is to say something at bedtime the night before a proposed early departure. Still, I’d more or less expected it – it was bound to happen sooner or later. He has a hard time conceptualizing the idea of “preparing” for going fishing – in his mind, the boat is always ready and nothing could possibly go wrong, it’s just a matter of walking down to it, staring the engines, and pulling away from the dock.
That said, really, it wasn’t much of a fishing trip. It was more of a “shakedown” cruise to see where we stood with boat after such a long period of non-use.
On the positive side: it still floats.
On the negative side, we seem to have some increasingly serious engine issues – the stuttering problem we’ve seen on and off in previous years (and which has never been diagnosed) did NOT return, but we did have issues with the engine not staying running on idle – which is very problematic, because it must be in idle to shift it into gear – and we got the “overheating” alarm several times, essentially randomly. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it may need a visit to the mechanic for service. The problem, of course, with that, is that it’s a quite involved process to get the boat to the mechanic. We may pull it out of the water and try flushing the engine’s cooling, and I might research online on how to adjust the idle on these types of engines (if possible – I think they’re without carburetors, using fuel injection instead).
Another negative – one of the downriggers wasn’t working. An electrical problem, in the source cable – not in the downrigger itself, as it worked fine when plugged in to the other downrigger’s socket. So I’ll have to try to solve this electrical problem. I’ve messed with this issue before (last year? Or was it the year before that?).
We departed the dock at around 8:30. It was overcast but flat. We went to Caldera, a spot which I associate with luck with catching coho early in the season. We got a tiny black bass and tiny rockfish with our one working downrigger, which was reassuring – we know the hooks are working, right? But no coho.
The wind picked up shortly after we started trolling. The forecast was that a big storm with 4- or 5-foot swells on Bucarelli was coming in by this evening, so we decided we’d done enough testing of our systems, and got home again by noon. Arthur was cold. He suffers a lot from feeling cold, these days – it might be one reason why he has much less patience for fishing up here than he used to.
Coho: 0
Kings: 0
Halibut: 0
Other: 0
Too-small fish sent home to mama: 2
Here’s the boat before launch, anticipating its upcoming short voyage.
I guess this business of making the treehouse into my “outdoor bedroom” is a kind of instantiation of the “nesting instinct,” right? But given it’s up in a tree, it’s maybe a bit more literal than your average human “nesting” behavior.
I took some pictures of the interior of my treehouse, now borderline habitable.
Here is a tatami mat I’ve owned for several decades but haven’t much used. I put it down on the rough plywood floor to be my “bed” – I’m always a floor-sleeper (Korean/Japanese style), so that’s fine with me. You can see the complex pieces of plastic I’ve put over the window holes – this is temporary until I make actual windows, which is really my next major project, but it’s going to be a slow process I think.
Here’s my screen door on the east side – facing the high-tide line and Arthur’s dock. You can see I put a little railing now at the edge of the balcony. There are two smaller trees poking up through the floor of the balcony, hidden to the left behind the wall.
Here’s the screen door on the west side, where the stairs are.
Here’s my bed after I’ve made it up for sleeping in, and I found some old throw-rugs to put down.
Just now we’re having a very rare Southeast Alaskan thunderstorm. There was a big boom.
July 4th, 2013 was the day I underwent a 9-hour surgery to remove the tumor at the root of my tongue and the lymphs on the left side of my neck. It seems an odd day for a cancer surgery to Americans, but bear in mind I lived in South Korea. It was not a holiday – just a regular day. A Thursday.
I remained in the hospital for the rest of July. And in late August and through September, I underwent radiation (x-ray tomography) to further ensure I was cancer-free, but I like to celebrate July 4th as my cancerversary.
Last night I slept in my treehouse. That was the very first time I’ve done that. I mostly have waited because I have wanted to try for some modicum of bug-freeness. With my two custom-made (somewhat slapdash) screen doors installed, and my third door opening simply blocked off with plywood, I felt that I could hope that at least some portion of the bug inhabited spaces outside would leave me alone. I think some bugs still got in, but not any worse than sleeping in the attic, I don’t think.
I slept fine. The birds seem louder out there. Notably, the traffic on the road has a different “sound” than sitting in the attic with the window open, so the first few times a vehicle went by, I was disoriented as to where they were driving – it sounded like they were coming down the driveway. My position relative to the various nearby steep slopes is somewhat different, and so I guess echos and such things are arranged differently.
I could hear the sea sloshing, and around midnight, there was some wind that was rang my wind-chimes and woke me briefly.
This tree is a guest tree from my past. It’s a tree under a giant flag at Juyeop plaza in Ilsan, Korea, which I walked by in January, 2009.
I ended up working for about 1 hour when Art and I went to town today for shopping. I parked Art at the Veterans Center with Jan (which runs every Thursday) while I did a last-minute framing job for the town police chief (don’t wanna get on the bad side of the police, right?).
This tree was nearby as a dog smelled a boat and gazed at a distant waterfowl.
I made a proof-of-concept door for my treehouse. Now I need to buy some hinges.
This tree had an eagle in it (exact center).
I spent my whole, long weekend working on a particular computer/database problem, related to what’s called the overpass API and overpass-turbo application for the map server.
Not even sure it’s working properly. But anyway, it’s sorta working.
I spent the day doing a very strange thing (for me): I was working in Microsoft Windows on my computer. I always use linux. I’ve been using linux at home quite consistently for 10 years now – I remember when I triumphantly installed it on my posh new home desktop in that old, run-down apartment in Juyeop in Korea in the Spring of 2012. I remember the smell of the street through the open windows and the sound of traffic.
But something prompted me to make sure the old Windows boot on my current desktop computer still worked, to run updates, to make sure I could at least do some basic stuff with it. I think I’ve been feeling that my computer skills have been getting “fragile” – that I depend too much on linux and suffer a lack of “tech resiliency”, or something like that. I want to remain able to adapt.
Windows is pretty sucky, but there have been some improvements. One thing that is to be found in recent windows versions: the so-called “Windows subsystem for linux (WSL)”, which allows a linux hacker like me to use familiar bash commands to do things while working in windows.
One thing that I did get working, somewhat unexpectedly: iTunes. Apple doesn’t make an iTunes version for linux, but it does make one for Windows, and I did get it working. I think this is important because Arthur’s capacity to navigate his quite baroque iTunes arrangement on his macbook sometimes seems dangerously compromised, and we somewhat rely on this for our evening entertainment (the ripped-and-stored TV shows and movies that we watch on his AppleTV).
So it’s good to have the possibility that I could host these TV shows if Arthur ever eventually decides to give up doing so, or simply can’t. I struck another blow against excessive “tech fragility”.
I voted today: a vote-by-mail jungle primary, for the at-large Congressional seat vacated by the death of Don Young, Alaska’s Representative since the Early Paleolithic. There are forty-eight candidates. But the choices are best summarized by the names at the top of the two columns on the ballot.
Apparently Santa Claus is a real guy’s legal name – he lives in North Pole (a suburb of Fairbanks) and serves on the city council there.
This tree saw me making some steps along the path from the driveway down to the treehouse. These are not the only steps necessary – more, other steps are necessary; but these steps seemed the most necessary – there’s been a little mini cliff that I had to navigate along the path until now.
This tree saw the former storage tent (“studio”) finally rest in peace. I have completely cleared the original location of the storage tent.
It involved a lot of walking back and forth, carrying stuff – I made a new “under tarp” storage facility in a different location.
This tree saw the return of the GDC (RV camper) to Lot 73.
I had loaned the GDC to some neighbors-down-the-road. Brad is energetically building a house at 12 mile, and wanted a place for one of the workers he had to stay in. So in exchange for some much-needed maintenance work, I loaned him the RV.
It’s been a whole string of frustrations and disappointments, these last few days. I finally got Alaska Power & Telephone (the local utility) to come out and hook up the new meter-base for electricity for Lot 73. I learned there was an unexpected, quite high charge associated with this hook-up. Essentially, it’s a bureaucratic “reactivation fee” because I took so long in the time between when I first had the utility pole and power drop set up and when I got the meter base installed. It’s a kind of “procrastination fee.” I’m disappointed because I specifically asked, at the time the pole was put in 3 years ago, if there would be other charges if I delayed putting it in, and the people at that time said something to the effect of: “nothing major, a small fee.” $700 doesn’t seem small, to me.
Then today, I was planning to drive into town to JS Hardware (the one and only hardware store on the island), with the cargo trailer. I wanted to buy some more plywood and longer pieces of lumber, to best continue my treehouse project as well as to construct a small shed to replace the weather-destroyed storage tent.
I had the trailer all hooked up to the Blueberry (the Chevy Tahoe), and the brake lights were even working, and I realized the trailer’s registration was expired. Although evidence is thin on the ground, I suspect Arthur simply forgot – despite surely having received some kind of reminder in mail form and probably email form as well. And I blame myself, because at this point in things, it’s really my job to keep track of Arthur’s multitude of bureaucratic obligations. I simply didn’t think about it. But my luck being the way it is, I’m not going to drive to town with expired tags – that’s inviting a revenue-raising stop by the Craig Police.
So the trailer was re-parked, and we’ll have to sort out the expired trailer registration. Because the DMV in Craig is only open 4 hours a week, by appointment only, that is not something resolved promptly – it’s on “their schedule.”
These experiences just reinforce my feelings of general incompetence, lately.
This tree is a guest tree from my past. The tree is guarding an entrance to the Samgakji subway station in central Seoul – just southwest of the former Yongsan US military base. The base is “former”, now, but when I took this picture in April, 2008, it was still active. In the haze in the upper background you can see the Namsan Tower.
I went to work today – not a normal thing for a Monday, but I have a somewhat rearranged schedule this week.
Castine is an imaginary country that once existed on the imaginary planet I prefer to call Ogieff. In fact, the imaginary planet doesn’t have an official name – it’s hosted at opengeofiction.net, which all the users call, simply, “OGF”. That initialism leads to my preferred name for the planet – just sound it out.
I joined OGF in 2014, and Castine appeared and began evolving some time in the year after that, I think – in 2015. I also became an admin on the opengeofiction.net website in that year.
During the period from 2015 to 2017, Castine became the locus of a kind of meta-proxy-war, where I used it as a stand-in for a never-ending argument I liked to have with my fellow OGF admins.
The issue in question was the rule about “verisimilitude”. I had long felt (and continue to feel) that OGF’s verisimilitude rule is a bad idea – it’s vague and impossible to enforce consistently. It has no objectivity. The principle is that mapping on the OGF world is supposed to be “realistic” in the sense that it eschews fantasy and sci-fi elements, and doesn’t contain cultural or cartographic artifacts that couldn’t reasonably exist in the real world. Hence, people who build 50 km bridges or tunnels are called out for violating verisimilitude, likewise more science-fictional elements like space elevators or fantasy elements like dens of dragons or nations of 1920’s-era talking sheep (all these examples really occurred at various times on the OGF planet).
Castine was (is) a borderline case of violating verisimilitude. Some users felt it violated the rule, others felt it was okay. My position was always something like: “since we can’t decide if this violates verisimilitude or not, but it’s really good mapping… c’cmon, people, let’s drop (or at least, fix) this stupid rule.”
Of course, this was an unpopular stance. And in the long run, I lost the battle to remove or even alter the verisimilitude rule on Ogieff, and I made my peace with it.
One way that I made that peace with it, was to create my own, separate planet! In 2016, I started the planet Arhet as a kind of alternative project to Ogieff. By 2018, it had several active mappers and its own emerging community. The principle concept behind Arhet is to be a kind of “libertarian” reinterpretation of OGF. It has very few rules: no verisimilitude rule, no assigned territories, etc. And somewhat to my own surprise, it sorta kinda works. The key to it working, I reckon, is that unlike OGF, Arhet is not “open” to any and all comers. There’s an application process to join, and although I enforce almost no rules for the planet, I do stand firm that arguments or disagreements between users that escalate to my remit will simply result in immediate banning of all parties. That keeps everyone participating on best behavior, I guess.
The irony is that then, in 2021, I took over the hosting of the original opengeofiction.net. So now I host a little federation of two imaginary planets, Ogieff and Arhet, which have substantially overlapping user communities but having quite different rule systems. And I’m okay about that. I inevitably yield to my fellow admins, whose hard work and dedication to the project I admire, when it comes to matters of rules and judgements on Ogieff. But off to the side, I run Arhet singularly, and I insist on its fundamentally anarchic state.
In around 2020, the creator of Castine (Ramasham) was banned from Ogieff – ultimately for violating another, different rule: the rule prohibiting direct upload of data copied from OSM. OSM is OpenStreetMap, which is a map of the Real World™ in the same technological vein as our two imaginary planets. This is the so-called “slippy map” paradigm, originally popularized by mapquest and perfected and dominated by google maps. OSM runs on and supports a whole complex ecosystem of software that is all open source, as a kind of alternative to google maps, and that’s why it’s easy (uh, “easy” in a financial sense, not “easy” in a technical sense) for us to use the same software to run OGF and Arhet.
Anyway, there is (and there has always been) a rule prohibiting copying OSM data into OGF. Ostensibly this is motivated by paranoia about copyright violation, but in fact copyright has little to do with it, in my own estimation – there are easy ways to avoid issues around copyright as long as you follow along with OSM’s “attribution and re-use” rules. The real motivation for the prohibition is legitimate, though: on OGF, we want to discourage mappers from spamming the planet’s map with cut-n-paste copies of real-world places. It’s low effort geofiction and discourages creativity.
That said, when I set up Arhet I decided to also not enforce OGF’s “no real-world (OSM) data” rule. And indeed I myself played around with cutting and pasting some data from OSM, including an ephemeral instance of country I called “Lingit Aani” (this is Tlingit language) – a copy of the islands of Southeast Alaska but minus any nearby continent, as an open-ocean archipelago. I later deleted this, but there are multiple copy-the-real-world geofiction projects going on in Arhet, these days, including clones of Sakhalin Island (Siberia) and Romania’s Bucharest, and at least two Polands – perhaps more.
I guess Castine’s creator, Ramasham, had been doing some copy-pasting of OSM data to increase the detail and complexity of Castine’s cartography. Notably, this airport is a modified cut-n-paste copy of one in the real world, with only the names of things altered. And so Ramasham was banned from OGF. Rules are rules, and that “no copy from OSM” rule is actually probably the most common reason for mappers to be banned from the site.
Now we come to February of this year (2022). The admin team at OGF, moving to “clean up” various abandoned territories around our (imaginary) globe, decided finally to delete Castine once and for all. And I had a moment of deep sadness and regret. Despite my having leveraged Castine back in 2016 as part of my proxy war with the other admins over the verisimilitude rule, in fact I really, really like Castine.
From a technical standpoint, Ramasham was at best a mediocre mapper. But the imaginary country is full of cartographic whimsy and playfulness, the naming is thorough and inventive and culturally intriguing, and the detail in some parts is quite incredible. I thought it was worth preserving.
So I considered: Ramasham’s ban from OGF was for violating the “No OSM data” rule; if there were any other issues with Castine, they were issues with the “verisimilitude” rule; so… hey – Arhet doesn’t have those rules!
The solution was obvious. I decided I’d move Castine to Arhet. And even more conveniently, the exact latitude and longitude of Castine’s old Ogieff location was open and unused on Arhet. I figured it should be quite easy to simply “cut-n-paste” the whole of Castine into Arhet.
Yikes! This turned out to be the far from the case – it was not easy. Not at all. Castine included almost 2 million distinct GIS objects: nodes, ways, relations. This was not trivial to simply cut, paste, and upload into the new site. And further, the data quality was quite poor, from a technical standpoint. Thousands of improperly stacked ways on shared nodes, hundreds of lazily-crafted or incomplete data relations, etc.
I have spent the last week in a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland nightmare of trying to rescue Castine and upload it to the Arhet planet. I think that as of this morning, that I have succeeded, but not before almost destroying the Arhet server altogether in the process.
Without going into a lot of detail, it seems that there were a couple of relations (a technical term in this case for a type of data object used in OSM GIS software) that were apparently so badly constructed that they broke the server’s database. Since I had to do a kind of trial-and-error search to finally identify these objects, it took a very long time. I’d upload some subset of the full Castine dataset, and watch to see if the database crashed or not. If it didn’t, fine, I’d try another set of data. If it crashed, I’d have to go back to the last backup of the server, restore it, and try again. I think I did a backup-restore cycle maybe 12 or 14 times over the last week on the Arhet server. It was painful, and tedious, and immensely frustrating.
The crash-provoking objects in question are puzzling. I still don’t understand why they crash the database. And given my difficulties in identifying them (and surviving them – see below), I probably won’t spend time, any time soon, trying to figure them out. They are “Giant Chessboards” – three of them. Interestingly, Castine also has other “Giant Chessboards” (e.g. here) that do not cause any kind of data problem. They are apparently implemented differently, in their details.
The problem was compounded yesterday, when, much to my shocked dismay, the server-level backup-restore functionality offered by my hosting provider, Linode – that I’d been so repeatedly abusing – suddenly and inexplicably failed to work.
So for a day (yesterday) the world was Arhetless. The server was down. I was in a panic because it seemed I’d have to fully rebuild the server from scratch. And it was only pure luck that I even had a copy of the map data, because I was still running a kludgey render engine (map drawing process) for Arhet on a different machine.
I wrangled with tech support at Linode, and they finally held my hand (or was it that they held my server’s hand?) through a successful if stressful restoration of the server’s image.
Let’s just say, these days Castine now has a quite colorful meta-history.
I reached out to the creator of Castine, sending an email to the address on record at OGF, announcing its restoration in Arhet. I would absolutely welcome and be pleased if that person would come back and take up work on the country, again – they won’t be constrained by the rules and regulations on Ogieff. Unfortunately I haven’t heard back. I speculate that there might be some bitterness about the whole business of having been first praised and then banned, back a few years ago.
Please feel free to explore. I decided not to bother with adding extensive screenshots for this blog post – the point of having the Castine map hosted on the server is that you can explore easily directly on the website.
Happy mapping.
What I’m listening to right now.
Dawg Yawp, “Lost At Sea.”
Lyrics.
[Intro]
Tk tk
Hey! Hey!
[Verse 1]
Lost at sea
Is where you'll find me
It's got everything I want
But nothing that I need
[Verse 2]
Does anybody feel
All this talk ain't real?
Does anybody see
That the truth is in the mystery?
Could it be sweet
Standing on my feet?
[Chorus]
I don't know, but I'm gonna try
Thinkin' up ways not to wash up in alive
(Could it be sweet?)
Everybody's tellin' me it's not too hard
If you keep swimmin' it don't seem far
[Verse 3]
There's a place you can go
Where you'll never be alone
And you'll always be free
Lost at sea
Could it be sweet
Lost at sea?
[Chorus]
I don't know how they're gonna find me
Now I'm lost at sea and there's no way to deny
(Could it be sweet?)
If I'm ever talkin' like I don't care
Look at me and smile, baby
Take me there
This tree (and this tree and this tree and this tree, too) was cut down in the prime of its youth by me to accommodate the fact that it was encroaching on the path of the power line down from the pole to lot 73.
The electrician was out, doing initial work on installing electricity for the lot, using the utility pole I had put in 2 years ago.
I also tried to remove a much larger tree but ran into technical problems with the damn chainsaw and, unable to resolve them, gave up. I’ll have to tackle it another day. I don’t get along well with chainsaws.
This tree was there as I pulled the tarp off the GDC (RV) and got it started and moved it 20 feet. It all worked, somewhat to my surprise – I hadn’t started it since January, and I was worried I’d let it sit too long. I also managed to “cure” its fuse problem – though I confess I don’t know quite how I did that. So electrical systems seem okay now (unlike in January).
I was talking to Arthur, as we drove home from the store today. Sometimes I blather on: “I really like this pothole. It’s my favorite. It has plenty of width and depth, so you can drive down into it and not just bounce across it, and it’s as wide as the whole road. It’s the kind of pothole you can talk to your friends about with pride.”
This tree saw additional precipitation added to the local environment, as part of a drought-mitigation project initiated by the rainforest maintenance authorities.
Meanwhile, the heating-oil-burning heater down in the boathouse (basement) seems to have developed a leak – there is heating oil on the floor down there. Which is concerning. Art and I spent time cleaning up some and trying to diagnose the leak. I think (hope) we found it. We’ll keep an eye on things.
I didn’t follow the run-up to last week’s presidential election in South Korea very closely. In fact I lost track of it happening, and it took a local acquaintance more tuned in to world events than I to point out to me that it had happened last Wednesday.
But looking at and thinking about the results, I’m mostly unsurprised. I remain, as always, intrigued by the electoral map, though.
The ancient province of Jeolla stands out as starkly and quite isolatedly leftist – more so than previous maps I’ve looked at, it seems to me.
Meanwhile, suburban Seoul seems more consistently left-leaning, too. But the rest of the country swung even more rightward, more than compensating for these leftward trends in those limited areas, and ensuring a victory for the conservative, Mr Yoon.
I would almost hazard to say the map looks like evidence of increasing polarization. Which is to say, perhaps an Americanization of Korean politics? I don’t know.
At the geopolitical level, I think Putin and the Russian military have miscalculated.
Despite this (or preliminary to this), I should go on record that I actually agree with their “logic” on one key point: Ukraine, historically, is a part of Russia (or, depending on the point in history and the particular patch of land, Poland). Which is to say, Russian revanchist fantasies have some foundation in historical fact. The separate Ukrainian SSR was only carved off of Russia by Lenin in the 1920’s, and the Ukrainian national identity was essentially an artifice wrought by the half-hearted multiculturalist tendencies of the Soviet experiment. As Lenin said (hypocrisy alert), “The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that ‘its own’ nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible.”
This Russian mistake, however, will be their undoing. If Ukraine lacked a “founding myth” and identity before now, Russia’s invasion is giving them one. From now on and far into the future, this Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the kind of foundational myth for Ukrainians that they never had before – and that will happen regardless of whether they win or lose the current war. If they win, then it will be a myth on the same level as George Washington and the American Revolution. If they lose, they become guerilla partisans like the Palestinians on the West Bank, and forge a distinct Ukrainian identity on that basis.
There is no scenario under which Ukraine fails to become a truly distinct nation in the geopolitical sense, as a direct consequence of Russia’s actions. And personally, I think that’s something that had been in doubt, until now. Putin’s “real-world geofiction” is not going to alter the map in the way that he hopes.
Here is the Ukrainian Highway Signs Agency, contributing to the information war:
The sign has been altered to say, loosely, “Fuck Off / Fuck Off More / Fuck Off Back to Russia”.
Just so you don’t think I never pay attention to current events, anymore: hey, what happened to the Russian ruble, this morning?
Russian ruble, Ukrainian rubble.
This tree was along a long and winding road.
I left the Gift Shop early, today, because we had an appointment with an electrician out here at the house.
This was perhaps (hopefully) the concluding chapter in our saga of the weird brown outs. After looking over our system, and trying some things out, and despite our being able to reproduce the described problem, the electrician decided that we had a corroded main breaker (in the box on the utility pole). I found this plausible, as when he flipped the breaker switch one time, it made ominous buzzing noises, and he said he saw it arcing. Which was kind of scary – the electrician jumped back in alarm at that.
So he installed a new breaker. We’re running the heat pump, no problem, the rest of the afternoon and evening. Meanwhile I set out with the chainsaw to replenish our much-reduced firewood supply – since we’ve been heating the house more with the wood stove these past weeks (due to the heat pump not running).
Here is a picture of the old, corroded main breaker that the electrician removed.
Living on the south side of the inlet means we live on the north side of a mountain. And in the winter, at this latitude, that means direct sunlight doesn’t reach us for about 3 1/2 months each year, as the sun is too low in the south to reach over the top of the mountain – we are in its shadow all day.
So I have always meant to try to record the days when the sun reaches over the mountain for the first time, in spring (and likewise, when it disappears in the fall). The problem is that we also live in a very, very overcast part of the world. So we never know quite what day it is. But it’s close to today: today, we had quite chilly but clear weather, for a change of pace.
So the sun peeked between two trees on the mountain’s ridge, and struck through my south-facing window next to my desk. For about 5 minutes.
“Oh,” I said to myself. “A sunbeam. What’s this?” I took a picture.
Meanwhile, we are still waiting to hear back from the electricians about having them come visit to diagnose our weird electrical problem (I think I blogged this before, but if not, the TLDR is: we experience “brown outs” when we pull high levels of current, e.g. the heating system).
I checked in with them this morning, but they are quite busy, as is to be expected, being the only licensed electrical contractors based on the island, as far as I’ve been able to figure out. “Maybe later this week,” the woman reassured me, quite pleasant but clearly clueless as to what their actual schedule might be. Island Time.
I have been trying to develop some user-friendly documentation for the map layers on the main opengeofiction.net website (where I am server host and technical administrator). I have written quite a bit over the last 24 hours, and posted it to two articles on the OpenGeofiction wiki.
This tree is not out of the woods yet.
I spent quite a bit of the day waiting around in town, because Art had multiple medical appointments in town. He had PT in the morning at 9 at the SEARHC clinic in Craig, and a dental appointment at the SEARHC clinic in Klawock at 1. In the interim, I put in an hour at work while Art hung out at the Veterans Center – open only on Thursdays, run by the infamous Jan, who is also my coworker. Small town life, right? [daily log: walking, 2km; waiting, 4hr]
I just made up this word: epistemectomy – a procedure which removes knowledge from a person or information system.
I read strange things on the internet almost every day.
Earlier today, while Arthur was at the dentist, I found and began reading a web story (or, maybe, novella), on my phone. It’s about an object that functions as an “antimeme”. An “antimeme” is an idea (perhaps embedded in an object) that in its nature prevents people from being interested in it or remembering it. This opposes to the normal definition of “meme” – which is an idea that encourages people’s interest and recollection.
So unfortunately I can’t remember much about the story (okay, maybe that’s a joke).
Anyway, I recommend you can try to read it. It’s quite weird, though – just a warning. In fact, though, the story recalls certain features of certain secret societies that play difficult-to-define roles in some of my unfinished novels.
This tree is from my past. It is in front of a big cliff. There is a little hermitage structure at the top of the cliff, called 연주대 [yeonjudae], on Gwanak mountain, South Korea.
In other news, today is Elizabeth Peratrovich Day. How did you celebrate Elizabeth Peratrovich day? I celebrated by selling 14 balloons at the Gift Shop. [daily log: walking, 3.5km; retailing, 6hr]
I last posted one of these “Frame shop journal” entries about 3 months ago.
Certainly it’s not the case that I haven’t been making frames. Perhaps I got so busy that I simply stopped consistently recording my work. The month of December probably saw me assembling on the order of 50-75 frames – I don’t know the exact number. This was the Christmas rush, combined with the community panic over the possibility that the Gift Shop (and therefore the framing and matting shop it includes) would be shutting down permanently.
But then with January 1st rolling around, the Gift Shop was rescued by new owners, Chad and Kristin. They are slowly implementing lots of changes to the business, but fully intend to retain the matting and framing aspect, and thus, for now, I continue with job security in my relatively low-stress, very part-time position.
As I said, I’ve stopped recording every single frame I’ve done. But setting aside the Christmas insanity, here are a bunch of shots of recent work, from January and the first half of February. In no particular order and with minimal commentary.
This last framing is much more significant to me personally than any other I’ve done. Can anyone guess why?
Maybe if I start posting more regularly, I’ll manage to include more examples of my work.
I finished my fraught disassembly of my storage tent today. The morning was actually slightly sunny and nice, but by 1 PM it was quite windy and starting to rain.
I got the storage tent canvas parts spread out and weighted by rocks, and draped a simple 20′ x 40′ tarp over the “stuff” that had been inside the storage tent. This includes firewood, recyclables (because recycling isn’t currently done on the island, but I daydream it might one day be done again, as it used to be), some construction materials (boards and plywood and plastic pipe), some unused collapsed boxes and other various containers.
With the wind whipping into a frenzy, I threw a bunch of rocks and stuff on top of the tarp and hoped for the best.
The storage tent has consumed a lot of my labor over the past 3 years. I think it will be retired, now – too many of its structural pieces are bent or broken by the giant load of snow in December.
[daily log: walking, 5.5km; c100060076084s]
