The Longest Now

Madagascar’s presidential election, after 4 years of being couped up, heats up in neck-and-neck runoff with apparent vote-rigging and complaints about fraud on both sides.

It is a beautiful island of 22 million people; also a microcosm of regional political hijinks.

A cluster-class rant.  It warms up around 2:45.

Here is a gallery of great pope memes celebrating the awesomeness emanating from Catholicism’s new Pope.

After a Pope who sometimes made one despair that global religious leaders could inspire perspective, this is a daily source of happiness.

misplaced ideas with corollaries, antonyms with alternatives, symmetry with simulacra.

and then I am back in the moment. recalling, lives ago, looking forward to this future, married to my (smart, lovely, mad) sweetheart. perennially fighting over homes and children and unmeant slights and trivia.

I chose otherwards, nor ever doubted that, though it would have been sane and not wrong. now she has colonies of frozen fertilized embryos waiting for the next wave; you have families to love and sweat and curse and laugh about; I have corollaries yet beginning. different paths are necessarily incommensurable; and to the extent they can be directly compared, they all come out to the same possibilities in the end. never demean where you are; find the joints and levers at hand and use them with confidence and joy.

When I travel with my laptop, kids of all ages want to play with my cover. It’s full of books with wonderfully bad title-puns. Here’s a quick how-to for making your own form-fitting skins, for $20.

Start with your favorite high-resolution art from Colin Thompson — beautifully hued, full of word and visual tricks.

Pipe it through Gelaskins with your favorite laptop or phone model. End up with a thin, removable full-body sticker that will give you countless moments of joy. (I’ve tried covers for both top and bottom to fit my laptop; this was the best of the 3 skin-printing services I tried. The bottom skin survived being removed after 3 months when the laptop was sent in for repair, and reattached a week later, with no distortion.)

Adapted from Bunsen,
via Pipeline’s Things I Wont Work With:

Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzita-ane
Even though the synthesis
is something quite insa-ane
If you cough too close to it
You’ll lose a window pa-ane
Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzita-ane!