Category: Photography

I spy, a multitude of eyes

It’s so tempting to see the proliferation of drones as a linear progression of sci-fi predictions, and on the surface of it it’s not difficult to imagine that drones will be as omnipresent as CCTV cameras, but what is lacking in that image is how it feels to live under such conditions. We can get a certain notion of the feeling by reading reports from war zones. There, drones are a constant presence with utterly opaque behaviour and motivations which causes enormous stress on everyone, since you never know if you’re being observed or potentially targeted for a killing, Or if you’re neighbour is.

In a non-military settings, I imagine that one might develop a habit of not looking into the sky as often, lest you be reminded of something looking back.

So this weeks project is an idea concocted in mirth but earnest in intent. “Ha ha only serious” as it were. Over beers I and Gabriel started laughing over my suggestion of a paraphrase of the “SOS Racisme” badge, which in Swedish had the text “Rör inte min kompis!” – “Don’t touch my friend!” I proposed a version for our modern times, adapted to the surveillance state as it’s embodied through drones. The text invents a new Swedish verb, and translates loosely to “don’t drone my friend!” Behold:

What the verb “dröna” in this sentence means could refer to raising awareness of the ubiquitous drone killings, as well as the panopticon-like surveillance they’re a part of, or perhaps it’s an appeal: —Friend, don’t drone! The enamel pin will be slightly wider than 5 centimeters, and depending on the colours I can get I’m leaning towards the red-cross red in the image above. Once they’re manufactured I’ll probably setup a subdomain and sell those, or something. What does one do with 200 pins anyway? I’m open for suggestions.

I’ve sent off requests to three manufacturers to get a quote on production, and this is my first venture into ordering to spec through alibaba.com, which is an OEM broker dealing mostly with Chinese manufacturers. Seeing as artists are supposed to be free agents in a free market, this way my Factory is an actual factory. It’s an odd world.

Strictly speaking, this project doesn’t fulfil the “finish by Sunday evening” criteria I set up last week since I don’t have the pins yet. But in my mind it’s finished enough that I can let it go; there’s nothing in the project awaiting my input until I get the quotes and technical specifications on how to deliver the original model. It’s happening, so I’ll count this as a partial success as far as my work ethic goes, awaiting the results once the pins are done and delivered. Their distribution will most likely bloat into a project of it’s own.

Regardless, next week there’ll be another project, perhaps more modest in scale…

Our ancestors could spot natural predators from far by their silhouettes. Are we equally aware of the predators in the present-day? […] This document contains the silhouettes of the most common drone species used today and in the near future. Each indicating nationality and whether they are used for surveillance only or for deadly force. All drones are drawn in scale for size indication. From the smallest consumer drones measuring less than 1 meter, up to the Global Hawk measuring 39,9 meter in length.

→ Drone Survival Watch: Twenty-first century birdwatching

Welcome to Global Drones Watch. The purpose of this site is to provide useful information about drones, and to encourage people to become active in efforts to stop killer drones overseas and stop domestic drones from violating our privacy and safety.

→ Global Drones Watch: Welcome to Global Drones Watch!

In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false.[…] Based on extensive interviews with Pakistanis living in the regions directly affected, as well as humanitarian and medical workers, this report provides new and firsthand testimony about the negative impacts US policies are having on the civilians living under drones.

→ Stanfort/NYU Report: Living under drones

Schmitt saw with prescient clarity that air war would not only create an “intensification of the technical means of destruction” and the “disorientation of space,” but also intensify the problem of unequal sides, and allow the dominant side to re-label enemies as criminals. Schmitt understood that air power would create a world in which those who command the sky could police and punish those who do not.

→ Boston Review, Nasser Hussain: The sound of terror: Phenomenology of a drone strike

The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death. Drones fire missiles that travel faster than the speed of sound. A drone’s victim never hears the missile that kills him.

→ Reuters Magazine, David Rohde: The drone wars

“I arrived to the site and there were bodies scattered all over the place. The people told me that my son Aref had died.” When he returned to the village, Al Shafe-ee was quoted as saying, “I saw the women of the village gathered crying and screaming.”

→ NBC News, Michael Isikoff: US investigates Yemenis charge that drone strike “turned wedding into a funeral”

“After an engagement, we have to conduct surveillance for quite a long time. Yes, we may only be seeing it, but sometimes, we’re seeing it for hours on end, and that is part of the traumatic impact of the mission. It’s a definite form of stress on the operator in and of itself.”

→ Live science, Denise Chow: Drone Wars: Pilots reveal debilitating stress beyond virtual battlefield

“Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”

→ Washington post, Ellen Nakashima: With air forces Gorgon Drone ‘we can se everything’

“[Depicted on the shield of Agamemnon:] And he took up the man-enclosing elaborate stark shield, a thing of splendour. There were ten circles of bronze upon it, and set about it were twenty knobs of tin, pale-shining, and in the very centre another knob of dark cobalt. And circled in the midst of all was the blank-eyed face of the Gorgo with her stare of horror, and Deimos (Fear) was inscribed upon it, and Phobos (Terror).”

→ The Iliad, Homer: The gorgeneion, image of terror

Another part of the arsenal are drones that will be, for the first time, monitoring the Games from above, as well as robotic bomb detectors that will prowl the Olympic grounds below.[…]”You can’t use drones to prevent suicide bombers … But they’re very good things to prevent [protests] because it might spot people trying to gather.”

→ CBC, Nahlah Ayed: Russia’s olympic security to set new surveillance standard at Sochi

If you’re going to develop secret airplanes, you’re going to need to figure out how to fund them. Now, how do you fund an airplane in secret when the constitution states that all federal funding needs to be accounted for? The point being that there are enormous economic, social and political infrastructures that need to be in place to create and sustain something like classified flight testing. Over time, when you build these types of infrastructures, you end up developing a state within the state that has very different rules and different ways of operating than what we would think of as a kind of democratic state.

→ Center for the study of the drone, Lenny Simon: Interview: Trevor Paglen

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

→ Richard Brautigan: All watched over by machines of loving grace

2014: the year or fulfilment-or-bust.

A week or so ago I had a coffee with Jonas who once again graces Göteborg with his presence, and proposed something quite akin to a new years resolution: Start and finish one thing each week. What the thing would be is unspecific, but I imagine that an essay, a finished portrait or a DIY pre-amp, all would qualify. The point is that ever since I started working almost full time at Akademin Valand last spring, my free time has been spent tending to my FPS-hand, liver or occasionally the 3D printer. Most projects I come up with are either poorly defined or so broad in scope that they never move beyond the doodle-and-rambling stage.

Starting the previous week, I resolved to get one thing done by Sunday night, and deliver it regardless if it’s as polished as I’d like. I’m going to use the blog to keep me honest, and so, with less than one hour to spare, I present to you the latest VECKA7 track.

Born a car [Delinquest remix]
[audio:https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Born-a-car1.mp3|titles=Born a car|artists=Delinquest]

VECKA7 is the sort-of-band a couple of us started last year, and the above track is my mix of the materials we recorded two months ago. Our other songs are up on vecka7.bandcamp.com and unless there’s opposition from the other members this mix will end up there as well — I’m hoping that each of us will do their own mix of the source material, which could be interesting.

I don’t know yet what I’ll try to accomplish next week, but I’ve put in in my calendar so will come up with something…

A pox on your thieving hands!

Yesterday we had a “kräftskiva” at out garden cottage, and much merriment was had by all. I spent much of the evening taking smoking pictures of people smoking, and some of those turned out quite well. I’d show them here if we hadn’t had the house burgled while asleep and the laptop disappearing. Sneaky bloody thieves — they walked just outside our bedroom door, and neither of us recall hearing a thing. Took us a while to realize that anything was gone as we spent most of the morning pickup up exoskeletons and beer bottles.

Losing the laptop, the cellphones and whatever else we find once we go through it all, is one very annoying thing and financially sucky. Worst is that now I keep eying everyone I don’t recognize, wondering if they’re scouting for opportunities or just passing by. Everyone looks like a theif. That’s the real toll of something like this (well, unless you lose something really important) and I don’t enjoy having violent fantasies of defenestrating the jerks. Goddam fucking asshole fuck-shits — I hope the cellphones give you contact allergies!

Recurring up/down motions.

Last fall my knee was giving me grief whenever I went for a run, and when I asked my doctor about it he pressed, pushed and prodded my leg into different angles, suggesting that I muscle up a bit to alleviate the grinding kneecap. So I started the way anyone sets about doing things today, by checking what imaginary people on the Internet recommended. Metafilter has recurring threads on excercise and browsing through them one finds some regimes popping up more often than others. One of those is Starting Strength, a program devised by Mark Rippletoe.

The allure of the program is it’s simplicity — you do five barbell exercises over and over, and if you managed to lift the weights last time you increase them this time. It’s a beginners program, keeping the number of repetitions on heavy weights high so that you’re less likely to injure yourself. Also, it’s a comfort for me to give up the “ambition” part of excercising to a spreadsheet: You lift some stuff in a particular order and check the corresponding box if you succeed of fail, and you repeat this three times a week.

I’ve become such a cautious person lately that in addition to reading the book and lurking on forums, I wanted to start working out somewhere where people might stop me if I’m doing something horribly wrong. I found a club called Göteborgs Kraftssportsklubb (GKK) nearby and after a visit I started showing up at their prearranged hours; getting the hang of how not to cripple myself; difference is between barbells; this end toward enemy.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but GKK is a powerlifting club and I’m an odd duck out as a member cause the SS program is a mongrel of techniques — it’s not geared towards any particular sport but intended to make weak people less weak. So while most others in the club are focusing on powerlifting — squat, bench, deadlift — I’m doing powercleans and presses half the time. This hasn’t helped my assimilation into the group, but looking over my track record of “fitting in,” I’m doing OK.

As always, some people are convivial and welcoming while others seem annoyed at the intrusion, greeting me only by mistake. Mind, I’m not the only one, and there’s plenty of mute male bonding going on — adhesion by way of sweat and spotting each other — and I guess it takes a year or so before one’s enough of a fixture in the gym to hang anything worthwhile on.

One side-effect of training with GKK is that I’m no longer self-conscious about making noises; Sara has a video of me grunting unceremoniously, and I bark and wheeze at the slightest pretext. The main effect though, is that I can lift slightly heavier things than before. And I’m also more injured than previously, with pulled muscles and a busted rotary cuff and other such annoyances keeping me company. Judging from everyone else injury is part of the process and not something one can completely avoid, so best treat it as the occasional speedbump and adhere to rehab exercises.

Last weekend I tagged along to the Swedish championships in powerlifting as a photographer. 30 or so sports organized their championships during one week in Halmstad; there were gymnastics, badminton, and apparently castling is a sport now. Three days and as many thousand photos later I’m back home; it was fun but exhausting — except ten minutes of roller derby I only saw powerlifting. We had three lifters participating from GKK, one of which set a Swedish record and won her weight-class, which was exciting all round. I still need to do a final selection, but there’s a bunch of images up on Facebook if you follow these links: Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Every sport has it’s idiosyncrasies which get cemented over time; In the case of powerlifting it’s a compulsion for playing loud metal between lifts; MegaDeth, Manowar, whatshisface and angry druid. They keep having to turn the music down for the judges instructions, but most of the time it’s grinding guitars and someone shouting about war or hate or killing demons. I get that in a sport that is about lifting heavy things for a very short time there’s a proclivity for using powerful imagery, but after three days it gets a bit old.

Also, in a different setting you’d be forgiven to confuse some of the participants and trainers for rightwing bruisers, but without knowing anything about anyone I’ll give people the benefit of a doubt and guess that the Norse motifs are there to inspire strength rather than viking-based patriotism. The participants were predominantly whitish, but there were prominent exceptions and I didn’t hear any slurs regarding them — so perhaps I’m reacting preemptively and as a photographer judge people by their skin and projection.

At the moment, I’ve been to Slottskogsvallen 45 times, and gone from deadlifting zilch to 3×120kg, and feel that I’m getting the hang on the exercises — although I’m nowhere near techinical proficiency in any of them. I’ll give it a while longer before I start changing the program around too much, but will try to keep to something simple with checkboxes. Things only exists if you’re able to tick them off a todo-list, after all. For example, this here post being the “confess to grunting in public” post I’ve been meaning to write for a while. Check.

Vacation!

I’ve been on and off work projects for so many years now, that the concept of “vacation” seems odd, but as of the start of this week I’ve been enjoying “vacation.” Sort of. The past two months I’ve been working at my old school as a technician, temping for Petter who’s been drafted into a side project at the university. I’m getting up at seven, at work at eight, and there’s no overtime and I get to sit in at meetings and lunch out. Having a day-job is a strange experience.

The vacation I’m on at the moment isn’t technically a vacation, rather my contract has expired and is renewed in August, so I’m “unemployed” rather than “on vacation” but hey, it still feels fine. I’m spending the days in the kolonostuga which Sara bought just now, and we’re clearing the cabbage patch, repainting walls and generally doing stuff that comes with owning land and a small house. “Active vacationing” in marketing speak.

The past six months have gone by with little thought or notice on my part. I’m using my cold and throat infection to slow down a bit, reach inbox zero and perhaps plan this year a bit. Apart from going to Poland for a few days, and after that going back to work, there’s a risk that I’ll be coasting — and both Iain M Banks sudden illness and death, and the book I’m reading (with the sobering title “How We Die”) make me want to appreciate being alive more than by tiredly playing Star Conflict on Steam.

I’m in front of the computer, editing a R Stevie Moore video, listening to Pixies and some Danish cartoon in the background where Sara fell asleep in front of the tv, escaping a brutal head cold. I’ve had warm union stuck to an aching ear for a while now, and perhaps it’s the onion, or the painkillers or the wine, but the pain is abating and I’m off to bed. Tomorrow is apparently “vegan pizza day” which ought to be celebrated somehow; or perhaps I’ll just clean the house up a bit — it looks like a mess and Tomasz is visiting in a couple of days…

Sharm Charm

I don’t know how the gene has survived in the Swedish climate, but Sara claims to be unable to function without a trip to warmer, brighter countries in the winter. You’d think that this trait would have been mercilessly bread out of anyone foolish enough to settle this far up north, but perhaps it’s combined with some other, more useful genetic features which make up the Sara, and have survived that way. Either way, she booked a charter to Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt, and brought me along for a January excursion.

My previous forays into charter tourism have been a mixed bag — n.b. The Tunisian Experiment — but this trip was a whole other thing: My ambition was to eat houmous, swim a bit and perhaps read a book or two. Sara had been there before, so even though she mostly wanted to counteract the effects of Swedish mole-like existence, there were some ambitions as to activities: Snorkeling, eating fish, walking in the mountains.

We’re on the flight: The stewardess goes to check, returning with “yes, unfortunately penut-butter sandwiches are out of the question because of the allergies.” So we spend the five hour flight very hungry, doing the most of our chewing gum and water. Back in the flight crew cabin, Sara spots stewardesses eating the Snickers bars they’d withdrawn from sale because of the allergic person, which does nothing to improve our mood. Once we’re through customs we’re enjoying the mushy white peanut-banana infused bread, palm treas silhuetted against the setting sun, and soon are on our way to the hotel. It’s warm-isch, bright and we’re not in cold dark Sweden anymore, which fulfilles the first objective of the trip.

We’re travelling with unspecified quarters, so when the guide mentions that our hotel “isn’t exactly a five-star resort” we understand it as a promise of a broken faucet and bats in the closets. No such thing though; hotel Regal is well kept and in the old part of town (“old” being a relative term, since there’s almost no building older than 30 years) which suits us well — according to Sara it’s calmer and more cosy than the newer areas, and the “old market” is relatively close by.

There’s only us and a family with kids getting out at hotel Regal, which doubles the hotel occupancy. Out of the eighty or so rooms only a handful are in use, and so when we open our ground floor back door there’s a still pool and a closed bar outside. No sound interrupts the evening call to prayers.

Luggage is dumped onto beds, bathroom lights are turned on and off three-four times, and then we head out to eat. We don’t even get out of the courtyard before someone stops us, and within minutes we’re in the office of Manta Ray divers and Ramez is showing us his diving videos and describing the available tours. I hadn’t been under water since I took my PADI license three years previously and hoped to get a chance to see all the corals and marine life that people rave about — the most exotic thing I’ve seen diving in Sweden are two pissed off crabs, fighting — and we were suggested that a day-trip would also allow Sara to try an assisted dive.

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With half-hearted and hunger-driven commitments of discussing the matter and getting back to him, we’re heading out to find food. Sara vaguely remembers a restaurant from last time she was here, and we’re soon heading downtown. Soon we’re in the Fares fish restaurant. It’s bustling, very bright, overstaffed, but the selection is big and the food plentiful; With a few exception this would set a routine for our stay, as Fares was one of the easiest places to navigate as a vegan – there’s plenty of houmous and baba ganoush and garlicky veggies. Not considered “main course material,” they’re dirt cheap, so I felt bad for getting the salad buffet each time and overtipped and bought unnecessary side dishes. Sara had all manner of evil foods and enjoyed deep fried, steamed and whatnotted marine life which I’m sure had a loving parent or thousand now orphaned offspring. Two missions accomplished and it’s only the first day. We’re off to a good start.

We go for a coffee, play some board games, and I try to get as much milage out of “la shukran” as possible in my interactions with the old market sellers. A couple of days later I also learn the hand gesture for “no thank you” which simplifies the process of turning down the taxis which badger you at every opportunity. Perhaps my Polish heritage instructs how I like my shop keepers — bitter and resentful — but I don’t see the value of shop owners assailing you and short of dragging you into their store. I understand that it must work or they wouldn’t do it, but I’m not sure what the mechanism is by which it works; certainly doesn’t with me.

More depressing is that some of the shop keepers — who without exception are male — take the opportunity when fitting a scarf to paw Sara. Far from everyone did this, but it was common enough to be depressing. As a tourist you’re a transient biped with cultural baggage, requirements and a wallet, and so are not afforded as much consideration as a real person, but it’s still sad when you greet people suspicious if they also are gonna rub their dick in your back accidentally for five minutes while grinning like an idiot.

And again, what the hell are you going to do about it? Huff and puff and storm off? You’re not making structural change, and not changing the mind of whoever wronged you. Trying to shame them, calling police or security? Sure, but how long will that take, what will you get out of it, and are you sure it would work? In the end, you flag the place and move on, perhaps write a blog post about it. This does make you appreciate more those men who sell you things who are actually nice and don’t grope you. I wonder if that’s a Yelp-review sticker they’d put in their window: “5 Stars! didn’t touch my butt once! ☆☆☆☆☆!”

Cars in Sharm El-Sheik suffer from tourrettes, but you pretty soon get used to the constant honking. “Driving” is better defined as “accelerating” while breaking is probably considered optional, as are headlights, even after dark. You soon learn to run across roads and never to assume that a driver regards you as more than a messy speed bump. The thirty centimeter curb which you thought was sloppy workmanship the first few times you saw it, turns out to be your well designed friend. Sucks if you’re in a wheelchair, but the cars can’t get at you easily.

We settle into a pleasant routine. Food at Fares or from the friendly falafel shop across the street (Later, Ramez the diver was incredulous. “You’ve eaten there and didn’t get horribly sick?!”) and swimming at by the lighthouse beach. We meet people who greet us first in Russian, then English, Turkish, Polish. Not enough Swedish tourists to merit learning that language. There’s plenty of racism all around, and Russians are the most numerous and most despised, viewed as angry drunk morons. In Fares — a non-alcoholic chain, as are many in Sharm — we saw a head waiter being berated for telling the party of ten that they weren’t allowed to drink their vodka at the table. The women looked put-upon but expensively dressed, the kids oblivious and fat, the men thick-necked and hostile — had you painted a more stereotypical image of a Russian family you’d have to add a babushka.

We bought a day trip with Manta Divers and with Ramez as instructor, and Sara did her first, and then second, assisted dive. I dove alongside them, and the corals and the fish and the clear water was ridiculously beautiful. I’ve become so over-sensitised by all grand imagery in movies and pictures that when I come across something similar in real life it feels fake. The first few times I saw the coral reefs while snorkeling I was laughing through the tube — it felt like a very immersive Disney cartoon. Diving among the corals added the bonus sensation of potentially maiming the local ecosphere by an uncontrolled descent, but I managed to stay clear of murder by adjusting the BCD once a second… The other bonus feeling was swimming out over the land shelf, and having nothing but a drop into darkness below me — it’s like a suspended fall into forever and ever.

For the remaining days, we’re swimming by the beach and drinking Turkish coffee — hot water poured over ground beans — eating at Fares, drining beer at the branded beer pub, or shopping fabrics and tobacco. Sara got a “very good price just for you” from the guy she bought from last visit, but in the end I spot the same leaf at the airport for half the price. The airport has the largest smoking lounge I’ve seen, and also a “Real British Pub” with probably the most atrocious service imaginable — checked-in people at airports are the most captivated clients short of prisoners — and as a moral support for my poor stomach which had had one Fares-dinner too many (my quota of houmous for 2013 is used up) I hazared a beer and some god-awful chips. Apart from a gurgling sound, and a constant feer of shitting myself while asleep on the plane, it was a content and browner Mateusz who landed in Gothenburg.

Human relations, parenting, future!

YOU have complex feelings and ambivalence about a lot of things, even if it seems like those things are good for you or for the best. Don’t assume our kids don’t have those feelings, or that moving into our home is happily-ever-after for them. Don’t tell them how lucky they are or how they should feel.

→ Casaubon’s Book, Sharon Astyk: What Foster Parents Wish Other People Knew

In addition to allowing this man to not only affirm his commitment to abstaining from all the sexual partners he would instead very much be enjoying, the Internet also allowed him to pledge his fealty by defending his pony-bride’s honor, reaching out to the DeviantArt user “Kevinsano” and demanding he stop drawing her in degrading sexual situations.

→ A.V. Club, Sean O’Neal: The Internet finally reaches its apex as man marrying My Little Pony character writes angry email to erotic pony artist

Enforcing social conformity though outright mockery is kinda a time honored tradition on the internet but I definitely agree that in many cases it’s not really intended to engage the target constructively in an attempt to help them but rather ostracize them to the point where they remove themselves from the community. Of course for some targets any attention even negative attention just feeds their narcissism so they just escalate and make the environment even more toxic.

→ Metafilter, vuron: My Little Pony Wife

So, the ‘future’ – as we have previously imagined it – does not exist as a ‘thing’ but can be a ‘tool’ for dealing with the unknown. In other words a ‘flying car’ is not a product with a sell-by date, but a conversation that we need to hold – and continue to need to have – about our transport systems. In other words, it is entirely appropriate that we may not yet have flying cars or ray guns because we’ve had conversations about transport and how to deal with emerging technologies for over a century, which have contributed to their considered evolution.

→ WarrenEllis.com, Rachel Armstrong: Where did the future go?

The trauma, the betrayal, the realisation

I remember a trip our family took to Kraków when I was a young teenager: I sat for a portrait that turned out really poor, not looking the least like I but still being kept by my mom in a rolled up bunch somewhere, along with all other precious 2D-artwork any parent amasses. I also remember that I wanted one of those okarinas which were warbling so magically all over the place, and I got to pick whom to buy from.

I picked a seller pretty much on random — I valued warbling over personality — but still remember that the one I’d picked looked a bit on the natty side once I got close. My parents, lord bless their polite ambition to be non-judgemental, bought the bird-shaped ocarina from the young man with the bad teeth, red eyes and yesterdays cracking clown makeup, but even before I had the chance to pour some water into it and make noise — which probably would have been awesome, since I’d gotten the same okarina that the man had used — my mom took it away from me, making vague comments about perhaps buying one from someone else, which she did, discretely tossing the first one into a bin. I thought my parents were silly and stuck up, but as both instruments looked alike I didn’t care much.

But the event stuck with me, and I was reminded of it again this evening when we were sitting at one of the less reputable pubs in Majorna with Tura, and one of the barflies took a shine to her and wanted to join our table. Being generally tired, and weary of having to cushion the ramblings of a boisterous drunk in the company of a seven-year old, we declined the offer and she shambled away.

Unless the other party has been extremely annoying or otherwise deserving of your scorn, you tend to feel bourgeois and uptight at such moments, or at least I tend do, but Tura became upset because the situation was confusing, and we’d just been impolite to a stranger who wanted to sit down with us and was talkative.

Of course, Tura would entertain the company of Satan if she thought he’d give her attention (kids being lazy megalomaniacs) but even so our rejection of the very noisy but enthusiastic woman must have sent mixed signals about how to deal with people. Some people whom we interact with, and who interact with us, can’t help but to be assholes, confusing or inconsiderate, and we teach kids tolerance, understanding, acceptance and the importance of giving the benefit of a doubt. Others are just annoying — and we don’t think about that we’ll have to explain our dismissive as well as our tolerant behaviour, least we cause confusion.

Music mæstros

It’s that time of year, in the life of slightly bored 30-somethings with a bit too much free time on their hands, that we drink wine and say: “Gosh darn it, but wouldn’t it be awfully nice to get together and do something? Like, I don’t know, music?” And lo! They made a mark in their calendar, and once the date came closer and the convictions grew flaky, a battlecry summoned the frail dilettantes — “Wine! At least there will be wine, surely!”

The jokes about drinking too much wore thin by the end of day two, but despite some wear and tear on livers and brains we somehow kept the process up for the whole weekend — much thanks to Petter and Sara, who had some sort of “idea” of what this might end up being — and by the end of it all we had two songs, a bandcamp site, portraits, and importantly a name: VECKA7.

The songs are made for driving, but could also serve other purposes, possibly. Sara, Erika and Jeanette on song and various instruments, Petter & Sara on guitars and bass, and I’m the reason there are drums and some plinky noises in the background. Go listen and download: VECKA7.bandcamp.com

Beans, romance and biking

A couple of days ago I’m standing in the kitchen rinsing the monthly batch of beans under cold water, and Sara is making tea next by me, absentmindedly singing “the thrill is gone.” I believe it’s called “the good life” as everything is mellow and comfortable at the moment.

But in order to mix it up it was a blast to go for another alleycat Saturday: Svartkatt 2012. We donned some makeup — Saras and Zenobias more elaborate than most — and biked around for a couple of hours, looking for clues to riddles, counting stuff in dark places and generally running around suspiciously with headlamps. As a sidenote, this was the first time ever that I’ve used a headlamp, and it’s so bloody useful that I’ll be using one at the slightest pretence — my God, I could actually see stuff without chipping my teeth on a soggy flashlight. What times we live in when this is possible!

Just as last year, I solemnly swear that until the next time I will actually exercise and have more than illusory muscles. Because of an organisational snafu we rode the second part of the race first, and once that was over my thighs were melting fillets of glue and painfully painy pain, so I called it a night and had a beer. Sara and Zenobia only rode the second part, swearing over the too big borrowed bikes. As of now they’re looking for race or road single speed bikes, so if you have one lying around get in touch.

Also, perhaps there is a gadget which could help Zenobia not to be half an hour late to the start of the race? Like a watch, but perhaps with an electric shock function?

In other news, I got a grant to do some outreach work with 3D printers. This is excellent since much other work has dried up, and I get to spend some time and effort to see what all this fabbing can lead to. I’ve taken the plan of cutting back on the number of projects too far and do hardly anything; certainly not my intention. So back up into the saddles, etc, which will be easier with the grant money. And this here brand new laptop I’m using.