Author Archives: Leo Tarvi
This writing thing really is a pain sometimes.
All the time I would have spent blogging got sucked up making a video that almost none of you will see. Sorry about that.
This is getting recursive
A few days ago I posted about a spam comment I got, and now that post is getting spam comments.
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Excellent, feel a little bit thump, spammers!
Yeah, I don’t have anything to say today, sorry.
Bonus!
Since that last post was kind of weak, here’s another. No, nothing interesting to say here either, just another Amanda Palmer vid.
Chocolate doomsday
Gentlebeings, I’d like to propose a moment of silence for all the chocolate bunnies.
Actually, screw that, here’s Amanda Palmer destroying Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”!
Style, class, bravado.
Found this in my spam filter:
One of the more impressive blogs Ive seen. Thanks so much for keeping the internet classy for a change. Youve got style, class, bravado. I mean it. Please keep it up because without the internet is definitely lacking in intelligence.
Now I’m not one to turn down gratuitous ego stroking, even from a spambot, but what really made me laugh was that this comment talking about how classy I am was on the post titled “Oh look, more angry depressing shit“. That’s me, keeping it classy!
So tired
Spent the day driving all over California. But it was a good day, a fun day spent with good people.
That’s all I have for now.
Ex-gays and the Anoka-Hennepin School District
Doesn’t it sound like the world’s most awkward band name?
I found this article very interesting. I’ve written about Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District before, and probably will again. It’s nice to see the school district standing up to the Parents Action League, gives me hope that maybe there really will be a better future for the children in those schools.
The Parents Action League is classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a title they wear with pride. That probably tells you just about everything you need to know about them, really.
Something the PAL was pushing for pretty hard in their list of demands was including “ex-gay” material in the school libraries and counseling offices, and generally providing access and credibility to ex-gay organizations. Frankly you start to wonder if someone has a money interest, there. Read the rest of this entry
Forged in the heart of a star
In my last post I mentioned our connection to the stars and the universe, and I’ve been thinking about that some more. Consider for a moment that every atom that makes up your body was part of a star once. Think about some of the implications.
There’s a young Earth creationist group whose favorite tactic is the phrase “Were you there?” They train children to ask this question in schools, at museums, anytime someone talks about something happening millions of years ago. It’s every bit as childish and annoying as you imagine, all the irritation of a four year old repeatedly asking “why?” with none of the actual curiosity.
The thing is, from a certain point of view it’s a perfectly honest answer to say “Yes”. Yes, I was there when the dinosaurs died out, and so were you. The atoms that make up my body were already here, in the air, the ground, the oceans, and the plants and animals, even in the dinosaurs themselves. Scattered across the world, unbinding from one molecule and binding into another, and passing down through the ages until the time when, for a brief while, they would come together to form me. The same is true of you and everyone else who’s ever lived. Read the rest of this entry
Full of stars
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy has once again blown my mind. If you never click another link on this blog, click this one. It’s a pan & zoomable hi res image of the Milky Way disc. There are a billion stars in that picture.
Pick any random spot and zoom in and feel amazed. I liked zooming in on the galactic core, but there’s no boring spots that I saw (except for the blacked out sections hiding the alien civilizations ;þ). There’s so much going on in there, and every pixel represents an area vastly larger than that ever occupied by humans throughout our entire history.
Naturally, it had to be taken from Earth, since we can’t get any cameras far enough away to make any difference. Which means there’s still much more of our galaxy not visible in that image. Read the rest of this entry
Just punching the clock
It’s never easy to confront your weaknesses. In the movies it’s always played up as a big dramatic turning point to stand up and do that, and then everything’s okay. Facing them once makes them go away, and everything’s just fine in the epilogue and the music plays and the credits roll.
In the real world, that kind of personal change doesn’t happen quickly or all at once. It’s not one dramatic moment that shifts how you deal with the world instantly, it’s doing that over and over again. Sometimes it gets easier with repetition, and sometimes it doesn’t, it’s just as hard every time.
This blog is coming up on one year now, and I really don’t know if, on average, it’s any easier than when I started.
Each time I sit down to write here is unique. Sometimes I just bang out 500 words like they were already there just waiting to be typed, others I’m practically screaming with frustration by the second paragraph. I haven’t quite worked out what makes the difference.
Fiction is much, much harder than what I’m doing now, just sitting and typing whatever wanders into my head. It seems like the more structured something is, the harder it is for me to write.
I really should work on that space opera serial some more. The plan there is to have a very solidly developed setting and characters, and then totally improvise the story. I figure I could write one installment a week, or two weeks, or once a month, whatever, and just keep going until I write myself into a corner. Maybe if I just spend, say, 45 minutes every day going through my notes for it and adding a little to them I can be ready to start soon. I’ll give that a try.
Well, that’s all for tonight. Just some random thoughts. Maybe something more interesting tomorrow. Take care everyone.
In which I wander among many topics
Was looking over my site stats, as I do sometimes, and I saw a referral from Daily Pagan News, who promoted my post “Curses“. Thanks for the link!
One of the first things I saw from DPN’s home page was this.
Gave me a chuckle. It was sourced to another tumblr page called teenwitchwendy. I’m not going to check that one out just now, because that leads to link-jumping all night and I have stuff to do. But the name made me think.
When I was a teenager, I knew a lot of pagans. Some Wiccans and Druids, but most of them weren’t so structured and simply called themselves “Pagan”. They were a diverse bunch, happy to agree on the broad outlines of the universe and just sort of fudge the details.
More than once somebody, usually an older person who was kind but not really “part of the group”, expressed the opinion that this whole “alternate lifestyle” thing was just a phase and everyone would grow up and become conservative Christians just like them. Now I haven’t kept touch with most of those people, but as far as I can tell that hasn’t happened. Sure, we all grew and changed, but I’m not aware of anyone who actually did that. Read the rest of this entry
Oh look, more angry depressing shit
A friend sent me this link, calling it “blog fodder”. I guess that much is true, but sometimes you read something and just want to kill the messenger.
Georgia passed the “Women as Livestock” bill. I had to check the date on that, but it says March 31 so I guess there’s not much hope that it’s just a very bad April fools prank. It bans all abortions past 20 weeks. There was a slight concession made for cases when the fetus was dead, not expected to survive, or likely to kill or physically injure the woman. What she wants, how she feels about things, her own pain and suffering? Irrelevant, they aren’t addressed at all. She’s just a vessel, nobody cares about her wishes.
For extra fun, they stipulate that during an abortion procedure the fetus must emerge alive. Seriously, these shitheads give us the bullshit line of “fetal pain”, and then set up the law to cause as much as possible.
Man, fuck Georgia. Read the rest of this entry
Well that didn’t work.
Obama the fiendly war pig!
My brilliant plan of blogging from my phone clearly needs some refinement. Anyways, I saw this while I was walking and thought it was weird enough to share. So there you are.
I’ll try to have another post up tonight, but no promises.
Horrors from the past!
So I was going through some old papers today and I found something remarkably awful: Angsty teenage poetry! I’m guessing I must have written it when I was about seventeen, give or take. And because I didn’t get any blog post written today (and I’m feeling a bit cruel) I’m going to share it with you. Flee while you still can!
“Confusion (The Self)”
What is this place?
Who are these people?
I know all their faces
know the sound of each voice
I know all their memories
every thought, every choice
I remember the touch
of their skin and their hair
it’s all so familiar
but when was I there?
I savor the flavor
of their blood, sweat and tears
I’m tasting their souls
all their hopes, all their fears
I love them all dearly
this alien flight
can’t wait to kill them as
we make love tonight
is this my mind, my soul,
or some rampant dimension of the self?
is this me?
what am I?
Yes folks, that’s the real deal there. I don’t remember writing that and I have no idea what was going on at the time. But I’m sure whatever it was I was dramatic about it.
Anyway, that’s all for tonight. Hopefully I’ll have something new for you tomorrow.
Random thought for the day
Ever see Mallrats? The second of Kevin Smith’s New Jersey series, and usually considered the weakest, it had a character who was a teenager writing a book about sex, which she researched by having lots of sex with different men that she carefully recorded.
I’d completely forgotten about the movie and the character until out of the blue this morning when I suddenly thought: “Her results are going to be skewed because all her subjects were guys who were willing to have sex with a 15 year old girl.”
Considering the already pessimistic tone she had for the content of her work, that can’t have changed things in a happy direction.
Jury cop out post
I have jury duty today, which means you get whatever I could toss together quickly last night. Since for me it’s “last night” right now as I write this, I’m having a little trouble with tenses.
Jen at Blag Hag is having her annual blog census this week. I took it, and was fascinated by the “Gender” question. It said “Check all that apply” and offered these options:
- Male
- Female
- Genderqueer
- Transgender
- Transsexual
- Agendered / Neutrois
To be honest, it makes me feel a little boring. Read the rest of this entry
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 