Ramblings and webcomics from LeEMS
New album from Caduceus, the violence in your braille | Richard Glenn Schmidt. Cover art by me.
Hello! How are you? Me, I’m keepin’ on and experiencing yet another bleed from my professional life into my personal one. This semester has sent me quite a few more requests for copyright guidance than last semester. Sometimes the answers to these questions actually involve contract law, which is a different beast entirely – as any electronic resources librarian can tell you. What companies put in their contracts can make allowances for more or less use than copyright law allows.
And, I hear you saying, yeah, so what. How is this a personal issue? Our memberships, customer accounts, use of software and apps are all regulated by terms and conditions or EULAs (End User License Agreements) that are meant to govern our uses and interactions (beyond just copyright). Some companies are putting crazy things in their EULAs now a days. Example one: Palmer vs. Kleargear, where-in Company A declares that they can hold you financially liable and take various actions against you, like ruining your credit, if you tell your friend they suck. That was an extremely simplistic summary but the truth is no less scary. Example two: EULAs that explain that your download of a free media player means your agreement that their constituent will take over all your browser programs and change the settings for your search and home pages (you know who you are!).
Given these happenings, I have been trying to be more mindful of what I am actually agreeing to by using websites and services. I had a read of Facebook’s terms and conditions (that were supposedly updated over the holidays), and decided that what they said was not for me. I couldn’t agree, and since using the service equated agreement, I have deleted myself from Facebook. I’ll miss all the friend creeping, but bye.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that the U.S. is so big. Big enough to give room to lunatic endeavors, hidden military bases, engineered towns, concentration camps, and George Pullman’s greed. I think his burial might be the most interesting part about it, though.
Blood on the Tracks in Pullman: Chicagoland’s Failed Capitalist Utopia.
George Pullman died on October 19, 1897. He was so despised his family became worried that his workers might dig him up. To make sure that no one would desecrate his remains, Pullman was buried much deeper than usual, encased in thick concrete and under large railroad ties. The burial reportedly took two full days.
Upon learning of the rather elaborate burial procedure, journalist Ambrose Bierce was said to remark, “It is clear the family in their bereavement was making sure the sonofabitch wasn’t going to get up and come back.”
Every now and again a normal human being, like yourself, can end up with a frighteningly abnormal problem. If you are lucky, you might get hooked up with the name or pointed in the direction of someone who can help you. Sometimes the person who can help will be Olivia.
Olivia doesn’t want to help you. She doesn’t have a soft heart or work in a service industry, so you better make it worth her while to even lift a finger. Alternately, you could prove that your problem is more interesting than her day job, or, more accurately, night job. You may have to pay her; she’s not always clear on that.
Olivia carries a curse and a thirst for revenge. She also possesses the unique ability to move through worlds otherwise hidden to most people, which may or may not be due to a contract with Mr. Imp.
Mr. Imp is alarming in the way that a large, still, spider across the room is alarming. It’s difficult to put a finger on what exactly is so unsettling about him, and, though he is terribly polite, most people avoid him. This makes it extremely hard to learn anything about him.
They say that long ago a group of hunters were running through the forest, deep into depths where they had never ventured before. It was a sacred place, and though they knew to never hunt there, they had gotten turned about and were not quite sure where they ran. A glitter of light cut through the trees as it reflected off the back of their prey. Second to the front, a young man on his fifth hunt let his arrow fly. The others sent their arrows after it. They heard the cry of the bird as it hit the ground a few yards away and they trotted over to surround it and take stock of the kill.
Sprawled on the floor of the forest was a gorgeous bird, made of light and wind, a trickle of blood painting a line down the side of its neck. Their hearts sank as they realized the sin they had committed. A low rumbling preceded the darkness that fell over the middle of the day. The hunters slowly fell to their knees, praying hands raised above their heads in supplication to an angry god.
They were sentenced an eternity of death in their sin. White birds dropped from the sky, onto and around each hunter, still crouched in prayer. When the birds alighted, each carried with it a head, fused within it like some hideous tumor, and raising from between their wings were the praying fingers of each hunter. The hunter’s bodies collapsed onto the ground, headless and handless.
The hunter’s misery, forever not quite dead and not quite alive inside their bird tombs, will infect anyone who gazes into their face for more than a moment and drive them mad.
One of these creatures was in my dream last night, trapped in my utility room that wasn’t really my utility room. We were trying to let it out the door without looking it in the face, but then the alarm went off.
Living on a lake in Florida has turned me into a bird watcher. I mean, the things are everywhere…on cars, in parking lots, crossing the road during heavy traffic. I don’t need a lake, but having a lake means I get to see birds I wouldn’t normally. Like this stork who weathered a downpour in our back yard.
So, fair warning, this is probably one of many backyard snaps to come.
I was just going through my RSS reader and saw this blogged at BoingBoing: A Monsters in America map/poster by Hog Island Press, Philadelphia. I know someone who needs this. I might even know two people, me being one of them. Yes.
Part of taking possession of a house, for me, is figuring out where and what everything is. That includes identifying all the plants and trees, and learning how to best care for them.
I was channeling middle school biology class looking at pictures of leaves and determining whether they were ovate or pinnate. Everything is so much easier when you have a flower to look at, but it wasn’t going to be that easy for me.
The first challenge were the two thin, vase-like ornamental trees in front. I thought, “they’re like crepe myrtle but there are no flowers; all the other crepe myrtle in town are blooming.” Two or three weeks later, they bloomed, and my suspicions were confirmed. Though, why they took their time is still a mystery.
The next was the flowerless, leather-leafed bush in back. It was especially difficult to track down but eventually I figured it might be a camellia. I would have to wait until it bloomed to tell for sure, and last week, it did just that.
Camellia, also known as the rose of winter, is an evergreen shrub native to China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. It flowers in late fall, when so many other shrubs and perennials have gone dormant, even in Florida.
If you’ve never lived in Philadelphia then you, like me, have never heard of the Mummers Parade – perhaps the oldest folk festival in the U.S. The Mummers Parade happens on New Years Day, and is based on the Mummers Play tradition from the U.K. and Ireland, which is one of several begging traditions from around Christmas and New Years.
Though the Mummers Parade has been broadcast locally since 1993 and digitally streamed since 2011, it seems to have had far less fan fair than the West coast’s Rose Parade. I hate to think this is because of football.
