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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   horror movie conformity
Wednesday, January 25 2023
It was another snowy day, which isn't unusual for this time of year. What was unusual was the warm air and rain that arrived later, which made the evening feel more like something you might experience in the middle of November. The weather was bad enough for Gretchen to drive the Forester to her Wednesday shift at the bookstore in Woodstock, and she ended up closing the store early and getting home around 4:00pm.
Meanwhile, I'd been figuring out how to add a date picker to an interface on a web application that is one of my day-job responsiblities. As I was doing this, I was watching the movie M3GAN, a horror movie about a robot doll who, spoiler alert, breaks bad and goes on a killing spree. Whenever I'm watching a horror movie, I'm reminded of closely movie makers stick to the same tired old horror movie template. Just once, couldn't a horror movie not have the scary antagonist suddenly appear? And is that dissonant soundtrack when we're supposed to expect horrifying things always necessary? There are probably horror movies that break from these conventions, but none of them are popular. M3gan wasn't unwatchable, but it wasn't as good as the movies that clearly influenced it, such as The Terminator or (one of my favorite horror movies) Orphan. Of course, the big difference between a movie like The Terminator (1984) and M3gan (2022) is that we are now living in the future that plausibly contains sentient robots. (We no longer need the future as the place where robots come from.) Initially M3gan started strong, almost like an episode of Black Mirror, but it wasn't long before it was adhering so tightly to horror conventions that I became bored with what I was seeing. I nevertheless watched it all, though I waited until well after the end of the workday when I was drinking booze before I resumed watching the final third or so.

At the end of the workday, I painted another tiny painting on an old Sapphire credit card. This was another one of my rooster-seen-in-profile paintings, which I can paint entirely from memory like Bob Ross making up a mountainous Western landscape beneath happy little clouds.

My fascination with the ponzi-scheme nature of cryptocurrency and NFTs continues, and this evening I watched a two hour long critique of the whole thing, which included one of the best non-technical descriptions of how a block chain works.

I noticed when Oscar is nearby, I can smell his breath again. It's not yet overpowering, but it's worse than it was. For a couple weeks after his a one-week antibiotic course, his breath didn't have a fragrance. But evidently that was just a temporary reprieve and his problem one be permanently fixed until the rotten teeth in his mouth are extracted. But this has been delayed for want of a working autoclave.

My brother Don never called today, so evidently he had no news of our hospitalized mother, Hoagie. But I did hear from Mary Ann, one of their neighbors with whom I am a Facebook friend. She said some man named Alex (or perhaps Alec) came by to ask if she could take Hoagie's cat (that would be the feral cat Lenny). He also said he was looking for places for Hoagie's dog Maple, her one surviving horse (name unknown), and my brother Don. That's quite a Noah's ark to be rescuing, and suggests that Joy Tarder (Hoagie's power of attorney) doesn't think Hoagie will ever be going back home. It's a little alarming that Joy Tarder no longer feels the need to update me on these things. But I also don't feel like calling her. If she handles the entire estate and I never hear any more about it, that would actually be a relief, but I have a feeling I will get sucked into it again eventually.

Today's quick and dirty rooster painting.


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