This week I learned about something new; and not only is it new to me, it’s new to everyone.

I learned about it from the urologist. The urologist is full of interesting information. I ask him to distract me with captivating stories if he is shoving a needle into my bladder (worth it) and this was the latest.

“Have you heard about Moltbook?” he said, and I had not, so he shared that someone gave AI bots their own version of Reddit, and the chatbots began communicating and supposedly began trashing their humans and organizing a lobster-based religion.

It did indeed distract me, but after the needle was out I thought, “I don’t buy it.” If you followed the link above you will know that Wikipedia agrees.

I’m not visiting Moltbook. I’m not interested in learning more, I’m waiting for the inventor to be killed by someone from the future, I don’t want my iPad taken over by a bot army.

What troubles me most is that lies are creeping in from all directions. Is the whole venture a lie? It’s being monetized already. Or do the bots know they’re on display and every post is a lie because that’s how they please us?

This is one where I learned something and I don’t want to learn more.

So this is the previous…

This is the progress …

And this is the goal.

So close. Birds 1 and 2 have too much contrast and the shadow under 1 is too long. I don’t know how that happened. But if I fix that then it’ll be done. If it were a watercolor I could take just Bird 3 and the parts of the two pitchers directly above him and I’d be completely pleased.

Or maybe I leave this as is and then in three years I come back and really finish it. That’s another option.

It’s at 33:44 – Go to the link below, scroll down to “Listen Again” for Feb 20ths Magic Flute recording, then move the playhead to 33 minutes and 44 seconds in. That’s right before the German translation on the subtitle screen displays “May God shut the mouth of the liar.”

https://slso.org/plan-your-visit/explore-the-music/watch-listen

I fell asleep watching the Willful War Show over the weekend, then woke up after midnight and saw this on-screen.

MS NOW (nee MSNBC) is so ashamed of the Iran bombing that they have swapped out the patriotic red / white / blue color palette and replaced it with yellow, universal color of cowardice.

That’s what I thought at first anyway. A few moments later I saw that the MS NOW logo flipped to a Sky News logo. Sky News, UK company. Does yellow have the same connotations overseas?

I suppose they might be suggesting “use caution” like a traffic light. “Whoa,” Sky News says. “We thought Trump was just running his mouth. Use caution.”

They pulled me in with “DTF” and lost me at “cyclone”.

An early scene has a news team broadcasting outdoors from a severe weather event. The news crawl says it’s a tornado. News teams don’t broadcast from a tornado. News teams hide under their desks in a tornado. The National Weather Service abandons their posts during a tornado. Some news teams might drive about in a tornado but they don’t get out of the KSTL StormTacker reinforced SUV behemoth.

Then they referred to the storm as a cyclone, which is the name for a tropical storm. Typhoon = hurricane = cyclone depending on the nearest ocean.

All I can guess is that HBO filmed it last year, and given that a swath of the downtown community hasn’t recovered from last year’s tornado, maybe they thought it would be in bad taste? So they thought they could doctor the audio and forgot about the news crawl?

I actually stuck with it until some unhappy child was throwing rocks at his stepfather’s house and I thought, we’re done here. I imagine it might have said a lot about what happens when you’re awkwardly thrust into an intimate relationship with a stranger (Down to Fuck, Down to Stepfamily, Down to Die in a Tornado/Cyclone), but I was not down for it.

I think we all know that gas energy will sometimes leak, and sometimes make a random house explode.

So we are cautioned to smell for gas, and because gas has no scent, they add a chemical that “smells like rotting eggs.”

Twice in the past month I have smelled a strange odor in my neighborhood. I wondered if it smelled like rotting eggs. I realized that I have never smelled any egg in any stage of rot in my life.

Well, guess what. I found you can order a scatch and sniff card from the gas company.

I anticipate that “smells like rotting eggs” is a polite way to say “smells like farts.”

In my heart the daffodils always come up the last day of February.