Saturday AM cleanup

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A very neat artist/caddis collaboration (via ectoplasmosis). I guess at nugget and wire scale the density of gold isn’t an issue. Any fisherpeople visiting New Hampshire in late June should make a point of getting up to Errol to catch the Alderfly hatch – Alderflies are medium-large caddis that emerge in huge numbers. Also – I’ve got to get a subscription to Cabinet!

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Goldfarming was a popular topic last week. I heard a reasonably good explanation on NPR in the context of South Korean gaming and some law-making around same. Then a BoingBoing post (great title – “Gold-farmers beat ad-ban by spelling URL in dead gnomes”) pointed me at this crazy video.

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Charlie Stross weighed in with a great little essay about explaining the video above to someone from the distant past – say, 1977. I can’t end a goldfarming item without a hat tip to Cory Doctorow’s great story on the topic – Anda’s Game.

Finally, on a personal note, things are going well (knock wood) with Luz, preparations are being made for the shorthair pup, and the summer is flying by. My energy has been very critter directed over the past few weeks – expect posts to be either linky (like this one) or snapshots of falcons, dogs, etc.

Puppies!

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Posting’s been light, and is likely to continue that way. I had to take time to post a few pictures of this morning’s puppy meet ‘n greet, though – clicking on any of the images below will take you to the Flickr photoset (rather than embiggening the picture, as is the usual mode).

My two – at least at this moment – faves:

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Rogue wave of pups (or is that wave of rogue pups?) swamps the S.S. Briar:

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Pinned in the timestream

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Driving home from the airport with Luz last Thursday night, I had an unusual internal experience. Unusual for me, at least – maybe this happens to other people all the time (though I think I’d hear about it). We were driving north on 95, well into the northern suburbs; it was dark and I was poking along. Being the worrywart that I am, I started reviewing all the preparation I’d done for Luz’s arrival – especially that morning’s final “is everything in place?” inventory. That’s when the feeling hit me – the prep work happened in a previous lifetime. I’m not going all Shirley MacLaine here; what I mean is that in the hours between preparation and the drive north, my life shifted, jogged sideways, rolled slowly over a curb. I had a strong feeling of time racing by – my truck, tootling towards home, was not only moving through space, but also through time. “Well, duh”, saith you and “I know, I know”, I respond – but very rarely do I get the sense of time’s passage so concretely. I had an intense sensation of ‘the present’ being a membrane – or better yet, a shock wave – one moment thick and I was (and am) pinned to this surface translating the future, as it arrives, into my past by experiencing, sifting and storing. I’m sure there’s a name for what I experienced (“whoa, dude”, perhaps), and the Bo tree it wasn’t, but it was strong and – at least from where I sit – interesting.