Everyone is horny at the ren faire
Some friends dragged us to the local renaissance faire this year. We didn't dress up - none of us had the clothing and I carried Amanda's camera and took pictures all day like a tourist.
It was the last weekend of the regional faire and included a halloween costume contest. The regional faire is held at 'casa de fruta' a gas station with delusions of grandeur at the foot of the diablo mountain range that separates the coast from the California central valley. It is a medium sized event, I visited one much larger in Los Angeles and I've been to several smaller at elementary schools or off-season ski resorts.
Entrance price was $30/person and we spent $20 for parking. There isn't much to a renaissance faire. You go to see the people, staged events, and visit the shops. We watched a guy blow glass, a sword swallower, and a cheesy world wrestling event where we cheered play fighting knights, but most of the faire is just a series of food vendors, ye olde shops with clothing, arts, and crafts for sale. After waiting for nearly an hour in line I paid $10 for a small plastic cup of beer for Amanda. She said the alcohol helped her cope with the scene.
When I was younger I didn't really recognize the sexually charged atmosphere of the faire though as an adolescent I'm sure I appreciated it. Corsets and bodices are common and most female clothing is designed to accentuate the bosom or waist. Fairies and elves are found in abundance and costume choices range from leather covered woodland ranger to body paint. We saw a woman walking around in a tiny bikini and a cape and another wearing just a chain mail vest over her bare bosom. We weren't with the group when they visited the room of hand blown glass mushrooms fluorescing under a black light but we heard how they opened another door labelled 'Adult' and found a display of glass dildos and butt plugs fabricated by the genial old glassblower. The glassblower talked about travelling from fair to fair and how he was blessed to make enough to make a living. The sword swallower also mentioned travelling from show to show and I suspect the knights doing their choreographed fights were the same. I wondered how many people we saw spent all their time travelling from fair to fair, living in a kind of denial of modern civilization. I wondered how many never changed out of their leather trousers and loose shirts.
The banter at ren fairs makes me cringe. It was the reason I never got into them. The fake accents and forced elocution makes me embarrassed, not in a pearl clutching threat to my sensibilities, but rather for the people participating. While waiting in line we had an older man approach and offer us an enema from the wooden pump he carried. It was supposed to be a bit of shocking banter but it came across as awkward. I couldn't help but wonder if he really thought he was amusing as he moved on down the line to make the next group mildly uncomfortable.
There is a theater kid vibe among the participants at the faire. While our group watched the glassblower a young woman climbed up onto a nearby tree stump and in a loud fake english accent started her spiel about how she was taller that everyone and how men shouldn't look at her ankles. A few passers by, in the same spirit of fun tried to join in, cracking jokes about her station or situation in the same awkward way. Speaking like the characters in the princess bride, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern must die, but without any humor or quickness of wit, as though the accent itself made it amusing.
Susan, while waiting in line for beer with the other female members of our group mentioned out loud how she wasn't embarrassed and this triggered a small group of older men to sexually harass them. I heard from a coworker and regular faire goes that for the people that camp out for the week the scene behind the scenes is an orgy of sexual liberation.
I've discussed the recent article about how everyone is beautiful but no one is horny about how because Hollywood is now run by Disney and changing attitudes about sexual harassment that we no longer have the horniness seen in the movies from the 1970s. The renaissance faire seems like the last bastion of this attitude - or at least it's an excuse to bring it back.
I still like the aesthetic of renaissance fairs, the costumes and enthusiastic participants. The styles of dress commonly found at renaissance fairs were a formative experiences of my youth. I dislike the fake accents, unfunny banter, and sexual harassment. I'm not sure if the two things can be separated.
Gothic Waxwings
A few months ago Amanda mentioned finding an interesting painting at one of the local thrift stores. The painting showed birds against a dark background. The birds are incomplete, or hidden in the darkness, peering around a strange dark corner that cuts the painting vertically about a third of the way down the right hand side. It was painted in oil and seems like a study. It's unsigned.
A week later we found the opportunity to return to the thrift store and the painting was still there. It was intriguing. There are hints of feathers floating in the darkness and drops of water like they're at a bath, though no water is visible. The dark background and the reflective varnish made it hard to see all the details. We debated buying it. Free space in our one-room apartment is at a premium. I was also unsure if it was an original painting or something you could buy at the local chain store but the subject matter seemed too strange for the mass market and though the painting has no impasto it seemed to be hand painted.
The price ($70) was higher than I wanted to pay for something that might be a popular print found in every hot topic and I struck up a conversation with the guy working at counter, asking if he thought it was an actual painting or a print, hoping to get him to admit it was priced too high but he just rubbed his hand over the surface (an action which made me irrationally angry) and told me he thought it was a painting. This effectively shut down my feeble attempts to barter, not with guile but with a complete disinterest in questioning the marked price.
Amanda liked it but was unwilling to spend so much money on a painting we may not have the room to hang. I liked that it was perplexing so I bought it.
It found a nail to hang it on after cramming several other pictures to the side but I didn't like that it was just bare canvas stretched over a frame. We're too poor to have it framed properly so I did what we normally do, I wrote down the measurements of the canvas on a piece of paper and every time we visited another thrift store we looked for cheap artwork or frames we could recycle. The canvas was 90x30 centimeters (35.5x11.75 inches); an unusual aspect ratio. We found one painting at our local shop that was too tall and not wide enough and I got to thinking I could cut the corners and glue them on the other side but it was too radical an idea to gamble on a $40 frame.
Last week I walked by our local thrift shop and noticed a mirror selling for $20 that seemed about the right size. I didn't have a tape measure so I went home and tied some knots into a length of string so I could have something with me that was the right size.
Yesterday we stopped by the thrift store to drop off an old printer and the mirror was still there. I pulled out my string and was astonished to discover it was the perfect size. I bought the mirror and after removing the glass we discovered the canvas fit into the frame so well it didn't even need nails. Furthermore, the nice bevelled glass mirror will fit perfectly in the bathroom next to our other mirror, we just need some brackets to hang it.
So that's my story. I bought a strange painting at a thrift store with a weird canvas size and then miraculously discovered a framed mirror of the same exact size at a different store. But I've teased you long enough, here's some pictures of the painting.
I don't know if I want to know if we went to all this trouble for a mass market item. It's so much better as a mystery.
Do you know where your data is?
It's a simple question. I was thinking about the ephemeral nature of my tablet hardware, specifically how storing all my data on an sd card might not be rational considering the battery is likely to die before the on-board memory fails. One benefit of keeping my data separate from the rest of the OS is I know where my files are.
The last 20 years of computing has been pushing people away from the concept of files. Browsers automatically download files to a pre-configured folder and give you a link to open the thing when it's done. This is convenient but not when you want to go back and find that thing you downloaded last week. People who don't know where their files are depend on the open dialog of their word processor to remember. This information is stored in metadata. People don't normally consider metadata that important but it's critical if you don't understand where your files are. Metadata is fragile, and is often lost during an update.
The apple finder was written as a response to this trend. Save your data wherever and the finder will scan your entire system and put all your file locations into a database for easy discovery later. I really dislike this solution. Putting all your files into a database in a standard format is just asking to be hacked or mined by marketers.
Now microsoft is pushing people to save to 'the cloud' - by which they mean you should save your personal files on their computers. In theory this allows you to access your files on any computer with an internet connection but this assumes you can get an internet connection and if you haven't noticed, internet access in the US is a dumpster fire. It also makes the marketers job easier when you put your files in their lap. I stay far, far away from these solutions.
Many people just download everything to the desktop and try to use spatial memory to keep track of things; my docs are up here, my pictures are down here. Of course it's a disaster when you have anything more than 50 files and it's another way of depending on invisible metadata (where to display the file icon on the desktop) which can be lost so easily.
I don't even want to start about file management on smart phones.
This leads me to my inevitable follow up question. Do you backup your data? In response, most people look ashamed and start casting about for that thumbdrive they threw into a drawer with the 'copy of copy of very import word document.doc'. Keep all your data in a single location and it's trivial to back up.
All digital media will fail. If you aren't backing things up on a regular schedule you will lose it. Knowing where your files are is the first step to keeping them.
The new gemini drama
There is a lot of content on gemini these days but it's still an order of magnitude less than the standard web. Without the threat of advertisements and tracking, visiting gemini space is relaxing and I like to go there on the weekends, ideally sitting at home on a quiet Sunday morning.
This weekend I loaded up my lagrange browser and navigated to a gemini feed portal to discover the author of lagrange proposing to extend the protocol to allow markdown. This news was followed by despair and outrage.
Gemini links:
- gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-10_mark-it-down.gmi
- 2021-10-14 Datapulp : Re: Mark It Down
- 2021-10-14 gerikson: Re: Mark It Down
- 2021-10-14 Idiomdrottning: Re: Mark It Down
- 2021-10-15 Alex Schroeder: 2021-10-15 Re: Mark It Down
- 2021-10-15 hari: Re: Mark it down
- 2021-10-16 Teiresias: A Bit about my Gemini Stack
- 2021-10-16 Idiomdrottning: Gemini Ain't Broke
Though I suspect the protocol will go nowhere without inline images I'm pretty happy with how it works today and I hope they don't try to extend it with other markup features. I'm fully behind making a new protocol (apollo?) with more markup primitives but keep it separate from gemini.
There are weirdos still on gopher. Whenever I go there I can expect to encounter a certain attitude or philosophy that's almost unique to that protocol. Similarly I've come to expect the gemini culture. Mixing new markup into gemini is like letting the clowns rampage through my meditative Sunday morning.
The infrequently updated blog.