I volunteered to run the light booth for the theater's upcoming show. I should never volunteer for musicals. I've heard the same songs over and over every night since Sunday, and I will hear them every night through this coming Sunday. And then two more weekends after that.

I had to log in to the LA County library website to request a book this morning, and I remembered that they used to have a different URL long ago, so I decided to look on the Internet Archive and refresh my memory of it.

I do not remember their dial-in library catalog, but what trip.

There's a phenomenon I don't understand in which public libraries always have multiple copies of Lost World by Michael Crichton, but they never have copies of Jurassic Park

I gave up and I'm using photoshop to assemble a newsletter, maybe one of the worst ways to do this, but better than Scribus.

I told the board president that they need to buy some real desktop publishing software for next time

This software is AWFUL. Apologies to all the people who contribute to this open-source project, but dear god

I'm having to learn Scribus this morning for the community theater, and nothing is intuitive, and all the tutorials are videos and take forever to get to the point. Pray for me.

I needed pollen from a male squash flower to pollinate this female. I had only one open male flower, and today's rain had washed all of its pollen away. So i opened up a male that had been open just yesterday to see if i could get any pollen out of it.

I was startled when the flower started vibrating in my fingers. Some kind of solitary bee had been sleeping inside, and I had startled it awake. Neither one of us was expecting the other.

Second day of ceramics class

It's weird how people follow that fesshole account just to be mad about the confessions

I am trying really hard to not reply to this vice president and offer her my condolences that this is what her career has come to

I had a strange email in my work inbox this morning.

The vice president of an investment firm that invests in "manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, truck, rail, appliance, power generation, mining, oil and gas, packaging, pulp and paper, medical equipment, etc" emailed me to tell me about a new musical tribute honoring Nancy Grace Roman.

This vice president told me that the video and composition premiered at Goddard space flight center before the launch of the rocket carrying the telescope. She told me I could download the video and share it on my organization's social media platforms.

Left unexplained in her email was why the vice president of an investment firm was sending me an email like that.

I found the video on youtube without clicking on her tracking links. The youtube channel's icon was the logo of the investment firm, but the song was attributed to some guy.

Who was this guy? I went looking. A poet laureate of the Explorer's Club (hadn't heard of it before), and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bretton Woods Committee. Odd.

I searched his name along with the name of the investment firm to see if they had sponsored his work in some way.

Nope. He's the chairman of their board of directors. The chairman of the board of directors of an investment company is making the company's vice president of communications spam people with his song to get them to share it.

I watched the video. The song and video are made with AI.

Dreamt one of those dreams that never seems to end, even after you briefly wake up more than once.

I was in a facility that manufactured milkshake machines for restaurants, and while testing settings while repairing some machines, the technicians invadvertedly created a milkshake containing a virus that caused spider webs to come out of people nipples.

Then they accidentally created a virus that made people tall, and another that made people into tall zombies. (the little LCD screen on the milkshake machine told them this).

What they didn't realize was that the machine they were working on was connected to their server, and since they had administrator access, the changes were being treated as software updates, and shake machines in restaurants and coffee shops across the country were making viruses for tallness, zombiefication, and spider-silk nipples without anyone knowing it.

I'm an amoeba sliming around in a harsh environment. I collect the materials I need for my own survival.

These materials are sometimes things lying on the streets. Other times they are bits of information held in emails.

Would you pay $79 for an AI slop version of a neighborhood?

Apparently some theater companies and dance companies would.

Another note: The director and producer were going to spend $75 on an image of a starry sky. Why don't people think about these things at all?

NASA has many thousands and thousands of images of starry skies that are in the public domain!

I've learned something new about the community theater economy.

Increasingly, theaters seem to be using projections, in place of sets. These are basically just stock images that you download from the internet.

A theater that wants to use projections just needs to put up a scrim (a kind of translucent cloth) and project these images onto it.

I had a planning meeting with the director and producer for our next show last night, and they got to talking about the projections they want to use and how expensive they are. The director complained that she was already blowing through part of her budget just because of the projections.

"How expensive could these things be?" I wondered. I asked them for the website they are getting these things from.

They gave it to me and I took a look. These projections are anywhere from $75-150 apiece! And most of them just shitty stock images. A lot of them are things I could find Creative Commons equivalents for. And a lot of them are even AI generated.

I told them to hold off on buying any projections yet and to show me the ones they are interested in. I'm confident I can get or make us usable replacements for free.

I am a set builder, so I don't like projections anyway. I think it's a lazy way to do a show, but now that I know they are such a rip-off, I am really against them.

To make matters worse, the publishers that license the rights to produce shows are starting to push these projections as part of their licensing packages.

What a scam.

P.S. A lot of the projections are AI-generated, which adds insult to injury.

Another thing that annoys me is that every time there's an update to outlook, it breaks the search index on my computer because it resets some permission somewhere in the OS. That means I can't search my own emails until our IT people send a command that flips the permission and tells the computer to rebuild the index.

This happens too often. It just happened last week.

Tortillas (like everything else) are starting to get kind of expensive. I'm beginning to think about making my own. Maybe it will be too much of a pain in the butt for it to be worth it, but I think I should at least try.

A thing in Outlook that never stops annoying me:

You're typing a name into the To: box, and it drops down a list of suggestions. If the person's name is Jane Smith, you can type Jane and wait for the list of suggested Janes to drop down, and then select the Jane you want from the list.

It works, but not if the person is in the directory with a middle initial. If her name is Jane Q. Smith in the directory, she will never appear in the directory if you type Jane. Instead, you have to type Smith and look through all the Smiths until you find Smith, Jane Q.

It's so dumb.

(Please don't reply to say it's because of vibecoding or AI. Outlook has done this for years and years and years, well before AI coding was a thing).

My neighbor gave me a taylor farms bag salad. I wonder if he's taken out life insurance on me.