AAAAHH

We made the most of it.

At this rate, it looks like Inktober is going to run into Thanksgiving.

I discovered, recently, an essential aspect of the fall season that grows as the days shorten and the trees grow bare. , I feel a keen sense of foreboding. It is a foreboding for the cold. It is a foreboding for the dark. Dark days and drizzling winds carry a whisper of winter. Foreboding is at the heart of this perilous and exciting time of year!

Get out there and enjoy it while it lasts.

America, wealthiest nation on Earth, hub of global innovation, is the only place that doesn’t offer you free, straightforward healthcare. Our nation also lacks a slew of other safety nets and nice things that our friends across the water have had for decades. Perhaps you have heard this all before. That’s good, because this really simple discrepancy in the civilized world is finally reaching ears. I had the good fortune of living in London for a while, and I was floored by how easy it was to settle in and get some healthcare. I didn’t even have to sit on the phone with anybody or log into a digital portal, and it was completely free. When people in Europe pay their taxes, they get that money back in services. In America, tax money seems to enter a black hole. Or, more accurately, it lines the pockets of a thousand bureaucrats and inevitably returns to the richest people on the planet.

I am very happy to live in Massachusetts. Though “Taxachusetts” is sometimes a painfully valid nickname, our state actually has services to offer its residents. We pay our home-care providers, we give disabled people quality educations and jobs (not quite minimum wage though), and if you need health insurance you will be able to find some. We also support the best universities and public schools on the planet, fostering the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to live such technologically advanced lives. Our state does amazing things with its taxes, which is more than one could say for New Hampshire, Mass’s cranky northern brother that skims tens of thousands of dollars in property taxes from individual homeowners every year and only offers its residents opium addiction and anti-abortion legislation. Hey, at least we can shop up there tax free!

All I’m saying is, the taxes aren’t going away. They just aren’t. Anybody that claims to lower your taxes is lying, or else they are moving your taxes on to somebody else (hint: somebody poorer). So rather than throwing up our hands and letting the politicians pocket our money and walk, why don’t we try to make taxes work for us? If you are going to be taking our money anyway, I better get a tangible good out of it.

Oh wait… somehow this discussion always falls to the small folk, the lower and middle class taxpayers. There does exist in this insane year of our lord 2021 a class of people that wield such an incredible mass of wealth that collecting a few billion from only a handful of them would easily pay a lion’s share in services. How did this happen? There was a point in American history when the stars aligned for the ultra-rich and they finally managed to get a puppet into office. His name was Ronald Reagan, and by his decree our nation was plunged into a forty year+ reign of conservative policies that have allowed levels of wealth inequality to match that of the oil and steel barons of the early 20th century.

Now you are probably thinking, “well shit, if only we had somebody up in the white house willing to consider amending–” WAIT WE DO. Trump is out of office, and Biden’s limping operation, geriatric as it is, has put forth some really straightforward ideas about moving taxes off the working class and onto the tech gods. These measures one-by-one have been shot down, of course–first by republicans and then by democrats. Both are in the pockets of billionaires. Remember the old cave man maxim: “Democrat bad. Republican worse. All lizards.”

The latest attempt to tax billionaires by collecting off their asset gains is novel, temporary, and probably won’t even get off the ground:

“The tax would be levied on anyone with more than $1 billion in assets or more than $100 million in income for three consecutive years — which applies to about 700 people in the United States. Initially, the legislation would impose the capital gains tax — 23.8 percent — on the gain in value of billionaires’ tradable assets, based on the original price of those assets.”

“Billionaires have avoided taxation by paying themselves very low salaries while amassing fortunes in stocks and other assets. They then borrow off those assets to finance their lifestyles, rather than selling the assets and paying capital gains taxes.” -Jonathan Weisman

700 people could give a fraction of their wealth so that we can invest in infrastructure and fix our healthcare, and they won’t. Let that sink in. You should be mad.

Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, has decided that this proposed billionaire tax is unfair:

“‘I [Manchin] don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people.” People, he added, that “contributed to society” and “create a lot of jobs and invest a lot of money and give a lot to philanthropic pursuits.'”

Manchin, of course, makes millions in kickbacks from the fossil fuels industry and probably millions more in invisible bribes that we will never know.

Yes, praise be the techies. Our mech overlords, hallowed and merciful, have already done so much for us. We should leave them alone to play with their fancy electric cars and launch rockets while normal people perish in overstocked hospitals and starve in the streets.

Perhaps the Besos’s of America will remember the people that made them. They probably won’t. Never forget that we pay well above our fair share in taxes so they don’t have to. God bless Amazon.

To live in a new world.

Death is a part of the hobby.

My brother saw the knob on top of my tank heater and decided to mess around with it. He twisted the thermostat up to 90 degrees. I came home to check on the tank, and when I dipped a finger in it felt like bathwater. My gourami, unnamed, could only swim in fits. He sank like a leaf to rest on the rock between spurts of activity. His gills hyperventilated. He seemed miserable.

I never found the body. Either my merciful family decided to discard it while I was not home, or the fish jumped shift. If the latter case is true, perhaps his body slipped into a crack between the floor and wall. The phantom scent of bad fish wafts into my nose sometimes when I pass the tank, and I do not know if I am imagining the smell or not. Either way, my fish is gone.

My fears ultimately came true. I am not ready to keep a fish, emotionally or physically. I will stick to my snails and shrimp.

RIP. He was a good fish.

I hate Tom Brady I hate Tom Brady fuck Tom Brady Tom Brady is a cocksucker and a bastard. Fuck Tom Brady.

Bill Belichick is washed.

Inktober is an old tradition of making ink drawings every day of October. I have attempted to do it before, but I have never made it to 31 days. Will 2021 be different? Yes!

Some adherents to Inktober will follow a template of themes. I don’t have the energy for that, so my drawings will be random. I will post whatever flows from the pen.

The equinox is here, and summer dies a slow death with it. The breeze visits more often, and the air hardens. Further north, trees already begin a transformation of hue. Apples ripen on branches and gourds are plucked from the earth. Fall has come!

It is hard to acknowledge that the long, hot golden days of the year are over, but the change of the season brings with it the promise of cozy days ahead. Cherish the weather while it is still warm-ish. The frost will be here soon enough, and the winds will eventually win out over the pleasant air (climate change allowing).

Happy Mid-Autumn! Get a look at that plump moon in the sky.

They say that death is a part of the hobby. Though snails are honestly pretty hard to form a deep emotional attachment to, I really loved this nerite. Though unnamed, my snail was a lively critter, an honest guy, and an instrumental component of the aquarium environment. It always sucks to lose something in your care, and that depressing fact of the hobby is no different for a lowly mollusk.

I haven’t taken the opportunity to speak much about my five gallon tank on this blog. I took a trip in August, but before I left I quickly seeded a little aquarium with some clippings of vallisnera, hornwort, fine sand, and a nice rock. I filled it with some water that had collected in a plastic bin outside and left the tank on the windowsill by itself for a week and a half. The sunlight did its work. Clouds of algae cobwebbed the hornwort and an emerald film of duckweed covered every centimeter of the tank’s surface. The sand was a much more forgiving medium than the gravel had been and the vals sent forth a bounty of runners to propagate fresh growths. Even a pleasant fuzz of algae grew along the slanted face of the rock like moss over a boulder. It was a lush system vibrant with life, teeming with tiny pond snails and swirling daphnia. Mosquito larvae from the stagnant bucket water dove and danced in the primordial water column.

The algae on the glass was an eyesore, though, and I knew I needed a nerite to clean the place up. I discovered shortly upon returning from my adventure across the country that there was local fish shop not a fifteen minute walk from my house. The staff are incredibly friendly and knowledgeable, and their selection of freshwater plants and small fish are ideal for my interest in small, filterless aquariums. I was so impressed by the place that I returned the very next day after my first visit and immediately bought a gourami and amano shrimp for the ten gallon (detailed here). On my first trip, however, I bought a nerite.

It was large–a zebra nerite I believe. The shell featured a black strip spiral that bent toward a cracked tip. It was much larger than the nerite I bought months ago for the nerite, and I suppose I should have suspected that it was just an older snail. If a creature gliding along a single slimy foot could be described as lumbering, this snail lumbered. It may have been slow, but the job was done, and it was done well. In a week the glass was free of algae. I like to think that I gave this shy grazer a pleasant last few weeks before it passed.

RIP unnamed nerite, you were a good snail.

(If you want to read about my aquarium as it developed through the spring, click here)

Why do we build fish tanks?

We build fish tanks to house fish, of course. It was always my goal to house some living vertebrates in my aquarium, but a certain fear of moving prevented me from doing so. The thought of having to pack my fish into buckets and travel across the country filled me with so much anxiety that I couldn’t bring myself to buy some fish, regardless of how small. Well, my situation has changed for the better. I have what some might call *stability*. I didn’t post anything in August because I was very busy sorting out my life. I did a little traveling, applied to jobs, and generally tried to distract myself from myself, and the results were amazing! By sheer luck, I managed to acquire a teaching position with great pay and settle permanently into an apartment with my grandfather. You already know what this means: Money + Residence = Fish!

I am tempted to purchase a fancy camera, because my old Android is woefully inadequate for representing the fine beauty of my new pet. The above image is one of my better captures. The specimen pictured is a sparkling gourami, a relative of the popular betta fish. Gouramis and betta fish are both labyrinth fish; fish that have adapted a special labyrinth organ for taking in atmospheric oxygen. It is because of this trait that you’ll typically see bettas placed in such shitty conditions at pet stores–they don’t need highly oxygenated water to survive since they can breathe straight from the surface. The sparkling gourami is less immediately flashy than his cousins, but they are brilliant fish in their own right. If they capture a beam of light at just the right angle, the gourami will truly sparkle. Its eye glows bright blue, and tiny flecks in the scales running down its body will illuminate and dance as it darts about the water. This fish is extremely agile. It can turn on a dime, literally twisting its body as it weaves through dense foliage. When my gourami wants to stop short, he extends his fins (including two “feelers” that sprout from the base of his belly) and instantly drops his momentum to zero. He’s a curious fish, too. His bright eyes are always roving in their sockets, and he will come right up to the glass when you approach and watch you. If you stick your finger toward him, he’ll puff up and try to act tough. Sometimes, he’ll dash back and forth in front of the glass to show off his glittering splendor.

People that aren’t in the know tend to think that fish are boring pets. I think these people merely mistreated their charges. A fish given adequate space, good water, and plenty of plants to explore will become very active. At the very least, my single gourami is one of the most active fish I have ever seen. He is constantly roving his territory, and will always emerge to play when I sit by him. He has quite the territory to explore…

The tank has finally reached jungle status. Sometime after my previous post, the vallisneria on the right went wild. I suspect a significant portion of the root system finally broke into the nutrient rich soil beneath the gravel cap, because the blades suddenly soared with growth. I knew vals grew like crazy, but I really did not anticipate that they would wrap around themselves like this. It is a tangle. The blades a carpet along the ceiling of the tank. Combined with the hornwort and the duckweed, which just won’t stop growing, a rich canopy of green has overtaken the surface of the aquarium. This is an ideal environment for the little gourami, whose natural environment includes shallow ponds and slow moving streams. He is well equipped for navigating the tangle of foliage in search of flakes that I scatter along the breaks in the surface. The leftmost vallisneria is a smaller variety that has decided to grow horizontally rather than vertically. It has propagated into a dense forest.

The other plants are doing decently, but not thriving. My original tuft of hair grass is turning brown and starting to dissolve, but it is at least spreading. Smaller blades poke through the gravel and form small tufts here and there. The crypts that I had planted months ago are not growing larger, but new leaves are sprouting. Perhaps someday they will crack into the richer soil and start going big. Otherwise, I may need to trim the canopy to allow them more light. For now, I am going to let them chill. The algae isn’t terrible, but thick clouds continue to dwell around the base of my vallisneria groves, and there are some strands of hair algae growing up in the canopy. The solution to this is still growing. Observe:

Better pictures of him will come with later posts, but the skinny white guy beneath the gourami is my amano shrimp! Her scuttles through the water and along the surfaces of plants and rocks with his many legs. His whisker-like antennae are constantly swirling about as he gathers microbes and algae into his mouth with his front mandible things. He never stops eating. You can see the buildup of plant material through his translucent carapace, and it eventually forms a long dark line in his intestines before being released as a strand of waste. He is a machine of an algae processor, but he can’t do it alone. Next time I visit my LFS (local fish shop), I intend to get a few more alongside some little cherry shrimp. A 10 gallon tanks needs quite the cleanup crew.

The third new member of my aquarium ecosystem is actually not so new. The gourami and amano are probably a little over a week settled in, but I had actually purchased a nerite snail some months before. I never bothered to make a post about him, but there wasn’t any drama to tell of. He settled right in and started scraping the glass for algae. Nerites are slow, peaceful, and probably the best scrubber you can find for a natural aquarium. He doesn’t even emerge from the safety of his shell.

Here is another picture of my gourami. Someday, I’ll have a nice photo shoot and try to capture his glitter dance in action.

The 10 gallon is still at my parent’s house. Before the weather turns cold, I need to transport this thing to my permanent home. I’m living in Malden now, just north of Boston. The LFS nearby has a nice supply of gouramis, so my little guy will have some friends soon enough I’m sure. I’d love to breed them!

Meanwhile, in Malden…

What’s this?? A second tank??!

The hobby grows and grows…

I used to play this game in 9th grade art class. I sat at a table with Gabe and Jake, unlikely pals, and we wouldn’t actually make all that much art (the teacher was a bit loopy). We would mostly talk and tell stories. I was reading Homestuck at the time, so the idea of creating my own Choose Your Own Adventure was at the forefront of my mind. So that was the game we’d play. It was an art class improv! One of the stories we told was of a great undersea war between dolphins and sharks and orcas and all that. Gabe was a dolphin rider bent on justice and war.

Another of our creations was cruder, but I stand by my 9th grader sensibilities. Basically, you play as Hitler. The story started something like this:

You are Adolf Hitler. You have just been released from the Berlin jail after doing time for inciting a riot. You hold a book in your hand. What do you do?

No, we didn’t immediately start rounding up brown shirts and slandering the jews. We were 9th graders bored out of our minds in art class, not Wehrmacht idolaters. We needed to blow off some steam, and we did that by killing Hitler, a lot.

I’d be the storyteller of course, and my friends would be the players, giving Hitler commands and such. Depending on what they told Hitler to do, I changed the story. If they weren’t extremely precise in the commands they gave, however, there would be dire consequences. Telling Hitler to walk around, for example, would probably get him run over by a car. A passing woman might mistake Hitler for a lunatic and shoot his brain out with her pocket pistol. Hitler might accidentally kick a little baby out of a stroller and wind up in a police chase Grand Theft Auto style. Like some hellish ouroborous, old Hitler wouldn’t be dead two second before the game started again:

You are Adolf Hitler. You have just been released from the Berlin jail after doing time for inciting a riot. You hold a book in your hand. What do you do?

Adolf had just written Mein Kampf, of course. In this game, the tome was not all that useful for reading or convincing, but it was a very effective bludgeon. If I remember correctly, we used the slab of paper to beat the brains out of a cop once and crush a baby. The memories are hazy, but ultra violence was in vogue at the time. Our adorable little Hitler would devour babies, get into shootouts, and generally cause widespread chaos wherever his adventures took him. In that way, he’s not all that different from the real Hitler.

Killing Nazis is a lot of fun. Movies like Inglorious Basterds and Saving Private Ryan succeed entirely on the concept. These stories are told from an outside perspective, however. Has any story tried to BE Hitler? That idea has some obvious problems, namely because most of the people that would want to role play Hitler are also the kind of people dreaming of the next Holocaust. A written story of this kind wouldn’t work because you inherently need to make the bastard sympathetic (BORING). That is where a game shines. Cyclic loops, no need for character development, killing Hitler in a thousand different ways is fun, etc. You are Hitler, and you die a lot.

Should the player be allowed to actually recruit some brown shirts and start shit up? Sure, let the Nazi role players have a little fun, but the second you stand up to the podium to give a rousing antisemitic speech, the thing explodes.

It’s not the weekend, which is a perfect time to reflect on the weekend before last weekend. If you’ve already forgotten about the weekend before last weekend (and if you live in a place without fireworks, that’s probably an easy thing to do), then you need to remember that it was recently the Fourth of July. It’s one of those holidays, like Cinco de Mayo, named after itself, though sometimes it is shortened to “the fourth” like in the question, “What are you doing for the Fourth?” If the answer isn’t usually “launching fireworks!” then you live a radically different life from my own.

For an unfortunate majority of Americans, fireworks are something watched from a distance. Come the Fourth of July, folks across the world drive up to their local elementary school or their town’s empty patch of field to see the tax-funded display in action. I’ve seen a lot of those. From Massachusetts to Maine to Quebec city, there are a lot of fireworks to see. And guess what? They all suck.

In the state of New Hampshire, where people are allowed to buy fireworks at their own pleasure (though it is never pleasurable to spend money on fireworks), you can find some of the most incredible gunpowder shows that you will ever see short of an active battlefield. In fact, there is a particularly well-to-do lake in southern New Hampshire whose residents go fucking nuts over fireworks. Immense wealth and little concern for safety combine to create a display that literally blackens out the sky and generates a mist of smog that lasts into the morning. Dead aquatic life washes upon the beaches in heaps, and the children find burnt out shells in their sandcastles from generations ago.

The denizens of this lake, like horseshoe crabs migrating to their ancestral beach to spawn, pile onto their boats come sundown. They move by feel and instinct toward the center of the lake. Nobody ever really organizes the big firework show, and there isn’t a single authority overseeing its execution. Dozens of disparate group chats, Facebook, and the hourly weather forecast dictate the insane impulses that ultimately craft one of the most insane displays in America. Viewers crowd about their pontoons or set up adirondacks on the beach to catch sight of the show. The bravest and stupidest among them will seek the true center of madness, spots directly underneath the arching blasts. This is perhaps the only place in the country where you can have the quantity and quality of a professional fireworks show launched directly over your head.

This recent Fourth of July was special because it actually happened on the weekend. Usually the holiday falls on a Wednesday or something so folks wait until the following weekend to have their fun, but this year we got a rare Sunday Fourth. The problem was, however, that we had just suffered an intense heatwave and the good weather was spent. It showered intermittently throughout the day, and normally folks aren’t too keen on losing hundreds of dollars worth of cardboard and gunpowder to a storm. Emphasis on “normally.” You might recall that we are just getting over a global pandemic, and the people of the lake weren’t intending to wait inside any longer.

The action started around eight if my memory serves me. The sky had confined itself to an early dusk after a swath of grey clouds moved in. We had gotten some sun earlier in the day and had some good swimming, but showers ruled in the end. We had pretty much given up for the night when a brief break in the drizzle awakened a sensation within me, and the other lake dwellers felt it too. A familiar popping noise began to churn in the distance and I knew it was starting. Rousing the other folks was the hard part–the bad weather had made them lethargic and they had already given up the firework show in their minds. It took a lot of hollering, but the party was eventually corralled into the boat and we were off.

The growing sound of the firework barrage urged us onward despite the fresh sheets of rain and a blanket haze of mist. We ploughed through that black water as fast as the junker would carry us, parting fog as we went. The rain picked up, and I was terrified we’d miss the show. The red and green indicators of fellow boaters and the thunderous flash of fireworks amidst clouds of smoke and fog guided our way as we made a straight shot for the center of the lake. We slowed as we approached the nucleus of chaos, mindful of striking the other boats that had begun to lump together and drop anchor. We weren’t going to nest at a safe distance with them. We were after the heart of the action, a conspicuously empty patch of water just below where the fireworks fly. Many of the watchers had evidently grown skittish, for few boats moved to fill this space. The water directly in front of my grandfather’s house was empty, of course, though it needn’t have been this year. Uncle Kenny wasn’t going to be tossing any explosives into the water this year.

We hesitated for a moment at the edge of the boat herd and decided to push forward into no man’s land. A lot of the folks had moved to the lake recently, and this strange Fourth would be one of their first. Somebody had to show them how to take a little risk. Well, the second we moved forward, the cop that lives across from my grandfather started lighting off his payload (see, taxpayer funded fireworks!). They went off right over our heads, and the familiar deadened sensation in my ears returned. Hearing damage is a staple of this event. Getting soaked usually isn’t, but I embraced it.

Standing on the deck of the pontoon in a rainstorm as blast after blast is lobbed over your head is an experience. A friend of mine likes to say that the Fourth reminds us of our revolutionary heritage. The shower of fireworks, the deafening explosions from all sides, is about as close to the physical experience of gunpowder warfare as most suburban Americans will ever get. We joke about Apocalypse Now. While it would be silly to say watching fireworks a little too closely is akin to experiencing the Vietnam War from a river boat, The lake fireworks show really does capture some of that chaos. There is a danger to it. My cousin still can’t hear out of one ear because a box of fireworks exploded next to him. Despite the stupid danger, we continue to uphold the tradition. It makes us feel something. There is a rawness to exploding things that seems to never get old, and after Covid-19, the lake dwellers were hungry for it. They would have set those things off in a blizzard.

Ethically speaking, should we be blasting all of this plastic into the atmosphere? Definitely not. You aren’t going to convince these guys, though.