91
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: A Few Notes on an Inconvenient Universe, part IV
« on: May 08, 2014, 01:35:57 am »
This has really been stewing in me for a while now. Great to see it crystallized in rant form.
News:
There's only a handful of you, and you're acting like obsessed lunatics.
I honestly wouldn't want to ever be washed up on the shore unconscious on an island run by you lot.
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92
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: HOLY SHIT! ROGER!! (possibly NSFW)
« on: April 25, 2014, 03:59:24 am »
ECH has achieved total victory over the Internet.
I'm gonna go dig a nice deep hole and stay there.
I'm gonna go dig a nice deep hole and stay there.
93
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: Babylon is an attention whore ITT, even for negative attention.
« on: April 24, 2014, 07:33:36 pm »
Funny thing, I saw one of his comments on a thread on my FB feed for the first time just this morning, and I was like "Naw, that can't be him."
Totally him.
Totally him.
94
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: Watchdogs promotional site sniffs your FB data, generates charts!
« on: April 24, 2014, 03:29:12 pm »Wow, apparently I say "I don't care" a lot and also generate a generally completely misleading sense of everything about myself, including who's important to me, where I go, how much money I make, and what I care about. Also, I exhibit a high level of interaction with my dog, and she can be used against me.
Either that or the algorithm's broked.
I'm pretty sure that just means that you're using FB correctly.
95
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: NIGEL! RUIN PORN!
« on: April 24, 2014, 03:27:37 pm »You know we're looking at the future, right?
We're looking at A future, yes. A future in which a combination of wealth disparity and online shopping has caused many brick & mortar businesses to fail or rethink their basic strategies.
There are other futures.
I frigging hope so. A few months ago I was getting frequent visions of The Future, and I decided that prophecy is a HIGHLY overrated gift.
96
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: MSY36: After All These Years
« on: April 24, 2014, 03:21:07 pm »
Bam!
Nicely written.
Nicely written.
97
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: Babylon is an attention whore ITT, even for negative attention.
« on: April 24, 2014, 12:25:26 pm »
Much appreciated
98
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: Babylon is an attention whore ITT, even for negative attention.
« on: April 24, 2014, 12:19:46 pm »
Yeahhhh I'd appreciate a heads-up in that regard, just to be sure.
99
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: A new currency.
« on: April 23, 2014, 11:09:41 pm »
I still couldn't get the figures right. Sketches and drawings would come back to me, and the maps on the computer kept being wrong. The field people were getting more and more agitated, but not so much at me, really. Just being on the lot seemed to drain people's energy and patience like nothing else. They'd get a recharge every Wednesday when we got paid, of course, but eventually they started dropping out. Sick days, requested transfers to other projects, and one guy even took a leave of absence. Ms LaCroix reminded us every week how pleased the client was with our work, but not to forget the deadline.
When was the deadline?
Eventually, I had to go out there myself. A shortage of field personell and a need to finally get the maps right meant I had to get off my ass and onto The Lot. I was going to measure everything my damn self, and check all the sampling wells while I was at it. Simple enough work, and I couldn't imagine what was throwing everyone of their rocker about this job.
I took measurements around the outside of The Lot, a basic rectangle. Next, I decided to gauge the wells. I should explain to you what this means. We use a device called an interface probe, a moderately awful device that has a sensor at the end of a long measuring tape. When the sensor is in oil or something similar, it makes a shrill, continuous tone. When the sensor is in water, it makes a similarly shrill beeping sound. No off button or volume control, either. Anyway, this is how we determine if there is some kind of substance contaminating the groundwater.
I dropped the interface probe down the well, expecting to hear the ear-piercing tone after a few dozen feet. As it went down, however, I heard something altogether different. A deep, resonating hum that felt like it came from the air around me, getting louder as I sent it deeper. After a hundred feet, the sound had become a deafening, thrumming song that brought tears to my eyes. I should have wound up the probe and left right then, but I didn't. I kept sending it deeper, until the spool ran out at five hundred feet and the sound was shaking my teeth and I could hear and see and smell and taste the sound but I couldn't feel anything and the small hole in the earth gaped wider and wider and I knew that all I had to do was let it happen and everything would be fine, for the low, low price...
I fell backwards, and felt the coin, cold as ice in my pocket. Ms LaCroix had paid me three times, but I still just had the one coin. But I knew that I had been paid, and been paid well. I just didn't quite know how to spend it, until now.
The sound had stopped. I wound up the spool, made a very unprofessional note in my field journal, and stormed off The Lot. I would get those stupid maps done, one way or another.
-to be even more continued-
When was the deadline?
Eventually, I had to go out there myself. A shortage of field personell and a need to finally get the maps right meant I had to get off my ass and onto The Lot. I was going to measure everything my damn self, and check all the sampling wells while I was at it. Simple enough work, and I couldn't imagine what was throwing everyone of their rocker about this job.
I took measurements around the outside of The Lot, a basic rectangle. Next, I decided to gauge the wells. I should explain to you what this means. We use a device called an interface probe, a moderately awful device that has a sensor at the end of a long measuring tape. When the sensor is in oil or something similar, it makes a shrill, continuous tone. When the sensor is in water, it makes a similarly shrill beeping sound. No off button or volume control, either. Anyway, this is how we determine if there is some kind of substance contaminating the groundwater.
I dropped the interface probe down the well, expecting to hear the ear-piercing tone after a few dozen feet. As it went down, however, I heard something altogether different. A deep, resonating hum that felt like it came from the air around me, getting louder as I sent it deeper. After a hundred feet, the sound had become a deafening, thrumming song that brought tears to my eyes. I should have wound up the probe and left right then, but I didn't. I kept sending it deeper, until the spool ran out at five hundred feet and the sound was shaking my teeth and I could hear and see and smell and taste the sound but I couldn't feel anything and the small hole in the earth gaped wider and wider and I knew that all I had to do was let it happen and everything would be fine, for the low, low price...
I fell backwards, and felt the coin, cold as ice in my pocket. Ms LaCroix had paid me three times, but I still just had the one coin. But I knew that I had been paid, and been paid well. I just didn't quite know how to spend it, until now.
The sound had stopped. I wound up the spool, made a very unprofessional note in my field journal, and stormed off The Lot. I would get those stupid maps done, one way or another.
-to be even more continued-
100
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: HE IS RISEN!
« on: April 23, 2014, 02:29:58 am »
Iä Iä, infidels.
101
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: OPEN BAR: 50 Shades of Chronic Liver Disease
« on: April 23, 2014, 02:18:24 am »Request for honest feedback: should I continue with my Colombia/Necronomicoin storyline, or is it losing steam?
I read the whole thing and then immediately poomped out a page of writing, and I know pretty well where I'm going for the next page.
So, it's still got mojo.
102
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: OPEN BAR: 50 Shades of Chronic Liver Disease
« on: April 23, 2014, 02:15:24 am »I was an hour late for my geology quiz because I was working on my chemistry lab and for some reason I thought geology lab was at 1. The instructor did not give a single fuck, and I was done at the normal time so all's well that ends well.
Geologic time.
No, I am not going to stop making these shit jokes. It's the closest thing I have to rocks ever since my career trajectory turned the -ology into -ography.
103
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: A new currency.
« on: April 23, 2014, 02:08:05 am »
(maybe this should be in it's own thread because it's tl;dr and I'm just getting back into spewing words, but fuck it)
All I knew at first was that the owner was looking to sell the lot, and we needed to check it for environmental concerns. That's what we do, here; nothing unusual. I later came to discover that the owner had apparently been involved in some weird financial shit, hadn't been seen or heard from directly in ages, and was conducting their end of the business through a proxy. Some lady named Ms LaCroix.
Not that it all really mattered to me, of course. I draw the figures and maps for these kinds of jobs, and rarely interact directly with a client or even go to the site personally. The field people come back with their sketches and the GPS unit, and I draw what they need drawn. It's usually pretty straightforward, bland stuff. Usually.
The first problem happened almost immediately, but we didn't think anything of it. The GPS unit kept coming back with junk data, completely useless. The first time, we figured it was Murphy's Law at work and sent someone out again to plot out the locations where they were going to drill to check the water and soil. They came back with the same result, and then we figured there must be something on the site that was screwing with the GPS unit. Nothing magnetic, because compasses worked fine. Something else.
But we don't get paid to look into those kind of problems, so we proceeded with the job the old-fashioned way. Sketches and hand measurements. Ms LaCroix reminded us in an email that her client was expecting to get the finished report on time regardless. Probably some fishy business on the site making them eager to foist the property off on to somebody else. That's how this kind of thing usually works. Spill some horrible solvent with a chemical name longer than the alphabet, and hope the environmental geeks don’t find it before you hawk it off.
They got the job done in record time. I was pretty surprised when a profusely sweating man dropped a stack of sketches on graph paper on my desk and shuffled out of the office without a word.
I drafted the map on the computer from the sketches, like I normally do. Building here, soil borings A, B, C, etc. there, and so on. The next day, the project manager comes by and tells me that my figures are off–way off. The field guys can’t make heads or tails of the map. They’re pretty irritable about it, he tells me, and tells me to fix it. I check and double-check the sketches: sure enough, it’s completely off.
I don’t know how, but apparently I had drawn a map for a completely different place by mistake. I could swear that the drawings had been accurate. How could the building be that much larger than what I drew?
Before I have time to fix it, the manager tells me that Ms LaCroix will be paying us directly for this job. Some fancy new payment method called a Necronomicoin. I questioned the wisdom of accepting funny money from a client with a history of suspected financial shenanigans, but apparently This Is How It’s Going To Be, in the words of management.
She comes by on Wednesday afternoon, and presses a coin into my palm with a very professional smile. I don’t know why, but in that moment, that one single coin felt like possibly the most valuable thing I’d ever held in such a small object.
-to be continued-
All I knew at first was that the owner was looking to sell the lot, and we needed to check it for environmental concerns. That's what we do, here; nothing unusual. I later came to discover that the owner had apparently been involved in some weird financial shit, hadn't been seen or heard from directly in ages, and was conducting their end of the business through a proxy. Some lady named Ms LaCroix.
Not that it all really mattered to me, of course. I draw the figures and maps for these kinds of jobs, and rarely interact directly with a client or even go to the site personally. The field people come back with their sketches and the GPS unit, and I draw what they need drawn. It's usually pretty straightforward, bland stuff. Usually.
The first problem happened almost immediately, but we didn't think anything of it. The GPS unit kept coming back with junk data, completely useless. The first time, we figured it was Murphy's Law at work and sent someone out again to plot out the locations where they were going to drill to check the water and soil. They came back with the same result, and then we figured there must be something on the site that was screwing with the GPS unit. Nothing magnetic, because compasses worked fine. Something else.
But we don't get paid to look into those kind of problems, so we proceeded with the job the old-fashioned way. Sketches and hand measurements. Ms LaCroix reminded us in an email that her client was expecting to get the finished report on time regardless. Probably some fishy business on the site making them eager to foist the property off on to somebody else. That's how this kind of thing usually works. Spill some horrible solvent with a chemical name longer than the alphabet, and hope the environmental geeks don’t find it before you hawk it off.
They got the job done in record time. I was pretty surprised when a profusely sweating man dropped a stack of sketches on graph paper on my desk and shuffled out of the office without a word.
I drafted the map on the computer from the sketches, like I normally do. Building here, soil borings A, B, C, etc. there, and so on. The next day, the project manager comes by and tells me that my figures are off–way off. The field guys can’t make heads or tails of the map. They’re pretty irritable about it, he tells me, and tells me to fix it. I check and double-check the sketches: sure enough, it’s completely off.
I don’t know how, but apparently I had drawn a map for a completely different place by mistake. I could swear that the drawings had been accurate. How could the building be that much larger than what I drew?
Before I have time to fix it, the manager tells me that Ms LaCroix will be paying us directly for this job. Some fancy new payment method called a Necronomicoin. I questioned the wisdom of accepting funny money from a client with a history of suspected financial shenanigans, but apparently This Is How It’s Going To Be, in the words of management.
She comes by on Wednesday afternoon, and presses a coin into my palm with a very professional smile. I don’t know why, but in that moment, that one single coin felt like possibly the most valuable thing I’d ever held in such a small object.
-to be continued-
104
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: Adventures in Slack, chapter thirtyleven
« on: April 22, 2014, 07:06:50 pm »
I need to get a tablet or e-reader to maximize my Slackability through reading, I think.
105
The Richard Nixon school of ballet and the arts / Re: Jews ordered to register in East Ukraine?
« on: April 19, 2014, 02:24:54 pm »
Before Yanukovich was ousted, I remember a bit on NPR where they interviewed one of the Ukrainian nationalists. These were the kind of guys that went around in traditional Ukrainian clothing looking for people to make fun of them so they could pick a fight. The part that stuck out to me was, in the guy's own words (paraphrased), they would 'stand up to anyone who had a problem with Ukrainian sovereignty, whether they be Russian, Jews, etc.' Obviously, the conspicuous mention of Jews stuck out to me like a neon sign.
I can't even pretend to be knowledgeable about who exactly is doing what over there. But, things have gotten ugly and Jews happen to be nearby. This, historically, has never really worked out well.
I can't even pretend to be knowledgeable about who exactly is doing what over there. But, things have gotten ugly and Jews happen to be nearby. This, historically, has never really worked out well.