kiya

If anyone is up for helping me brainstorm, I am seeking:

Suggestions for names/images of people who are simultaneously leaders of a movement/action involving the long arc curving towards justice and synecdoche for that movement/action in popular discourse.

So:

Martin Luther King, Jr.
Malcolm X
Bree Newsome

as for examples.

Susan B. Anthony is probably the first wave icon most recognisable. Hrm. I know there were notable black feminists of her time but I cannot bring names to mind; must fix.

Gandhi. (My examples are rather US-centric and while that isn't a problem for the project per se I don't want to be explicitly US-centric.) Nelson Mandela.

I need enough visually 'I recognise this person as an Icon' people to make the ones who aren't visually recognisable clearly 'okay, even though I don't know who that is, they must be, also, an Icon'. (I don't expect most people would recognise Bree Newsome on the street, f'ex, but I suspect the silhouette of her up a flagpole would be appropriately Iconic.)

Miss Major, I think. Harvey Milk?

Crazy Horse. Some of the young people behind the DAPL protests.

Things.


Also seeking:

Iconic artists/musicians/etc. whose work provided rallying points for similar matters. Johnny Cash. Pete Seeger. Phil Ochs. Possibly Freddie Mercury, given Queen's particular cultural role and his death. Um. Things.

I blame brooksmoses for the fact that I now have some sort of vague notion that I ought to put out a call for submissions for good Discordian material and Kickstart a spiffy edition thereof.

I am learning to git.

So for a while I have been poking at my personal symbology in the hopes of making it integrate more smoothly. And I did this by means of seeing if I could fit it to a Tarot deck symbol-set.

And as I kept poking at it it kept getting more and more awesome, at least to me, and then I babbled about it at people, and they thought it was awesome too. To the "If that deck existed, I would buy it" level of thinking it was awesome.

Long story short: last night I made contact with an artist friend and said, "Would you like to help me with this awesome project?"

We will be trying out Kickstarter when we have enough sorted out.

I've discovered an actual use for Pinterest as a thing I would use as a thing.

Building a catalogue of glaze recipes with test images.

I am suffering from more than the usual horrible temptation to write thumbnail portrait superhero versions of random people I know. Not that I suspect my superhero webcomic will get off the ground in my imminent lifetime, but.

So last week I went out and got underwear, a double boiler, and a monkey.

( Cut. Includes photo. Also really random maundering. )

1018 words finishes 3.15. (1207 total.)

Unfortunately, I am utterly unsure about how 3.16 starts or I'd do a few lines to get enough that I don't have a blank page problem with it.


Meanwhile, I need to bump acquisition of the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts and commentaries thereupon up in priority, because some part of my mind is fixed on the notion of modernising The Book of Coming Forth By Day into the form of a Lonely Planet-style Guide to the Duat (suitable for perusal by the would-be traveller or gift to the recently deceased on the occasion of their burial!). I'm clearly having one of my religious crackpot days. At least I like my derangement well-researched.

(I'll use the Anpu icon for this. Not the Discordian one. But only barely.)

teinedreugan was home today 'cause he was feeling sick yesterday and wanted to kick it early. So we went hunting.

We went to Woburn to get brewing stuff. (Incidentally, qarylla, the supply store I use is I think a bit less than a mile from the Woburn Mall. I looked for signs of bus stops but didn't see any. But I figured the Woburn Mall was a good landmark and possibly bussable.) Got another gallon jug and appropriate bits, the malt I need for the braggot, and miscellanea.

Then went to the Lowe's right near there (far side of the Woburn Mall) and bought a large bag of dirt, because my other lily arrived before we left, and the last of the soil I bought for the other plants wasn't anywhere near enough.

Then we went to the pet shop and got some underwater plants for my tank, more fish food, and water treatment stuff. Didn't get fish yet, though I've got lots of algae in my tank for algae-eaters to eat; want the plants to have a little bit to establish first, and there was enough mucking about anticipated for getting the new lily in that the fish would likely have a rough time of it.

Planted the new lily. I suspect it may wind up grumpy at me; it's built on a rather different scale than the other one is. (The pads have something like thrice the diameter.) Must ponder building wider/deeper tank at some point. Planted the underwater plants too, in a pot to one side. Got teinedreugan's help moving the pots around, after I called him up to show him the lilypad that had wound up somewhere bizarre.

Went grocery. Got honey (for the braggot for whenever I start it) and unground cumin (same); got more flour and replaced the flour tub that brooksmoses and I broke making pierogies a while back.

It has been a good day. We hunted many needful and useful things. I may rack the melomel and/or start the braggot later.

So I got onto the subject of container water gardens a while back, and got a book, and have been pondering at the thing a bit. There isn't much that's different than the man-made-and-maintained pond that I helped set up and learned about the maintenance of, though there are a few points. So I ponder (and write thoughts, partly because jinian asked).

Most of the information-stuff I'm finding is presuming that the thing will be outdoors. However, I want to do some tropicals in the plants, and those won't survive the weather in this climate zone unless the pond goes to a certain depth, and that requires a certain amount of size which we don't have, and anyway, I'd like to be able to move the thing and take it with me.

Water lilies need at least four hours of good sunlight (many need six, and prefer afternoon sun) to bloom. An indoor garden should probably be by a window, and probably also have a supplemental sun-lamp on a timer. I need to see if I can dig up how much surface area an individual lily wants, to see if it's feasable to get two -- a day-bloomer and a night-bloomer, and a blue one and a white one. Probably easier with dwarf lilies and an oblong enclosure, maybe with the dwarf papyrus in a section in the middle to help keep them from taking over each other's surface areas if one gets off to a faster growth than the others. (Not that I've seen that happen personally, no, nuh-uh.)

Planting in the pond I grew up with was done in pots set on the bottom, or on bricks and the like on the bottom. The container gardens book I have (or maybe the one I flipped through in the bookstore yesterday) has suggestions for planting straight into the container, like putting rocks in to make a divide and raising the dirt in the area that'll have marginal plants rather than deepwater ones. I'm pondering which approach I want to take; I'm slightly leaning towards pots because it'd be easier to take the pots out and move the container empty than it would be to move the container, dirt, rocks, plants and all.

An outdoor water garden like this would need fish, to eat the insect larvae and otherwise prevent the thing from becoming a mosquito incubator, but also to help keep nutrients balanced, which would stil be an issue inside. Keeping algae down also an issue, so I should get some algae-eating fish. And I'll also, I think, get some neon tetras. Because they're blue, and I want blue fish.

According to some pond ecology balance calculations, such a thing might want snails. I don't want snails. You have two snails, you have infinite snails. They're worse than guppies. They'll completely take over an ecosystem when they don't have sufficient predation, and they put out enough eggs that 'the fish will eat the eggs' is not sufficient predation.

I wonder if papyrus count as 'bog plants' or 'oxygenating grasses'.

( More pond-ering. Specific geekery and misc. notes. Probably dull. )

Graah. Okay. Enough notes for now.