Notices by Tarnport (tarnport@mastodon.green), page 2

Sorry, but

1. If we can't talk to fish or tulips and they're in our own family tree, then how could we hope to communicate with a lifeform not from this planet?

2. If there is other life and it's interstellar, it may just stripmine and eat or even ranch us, exactly as we have every species we've encountered.

3. 'Terraforming' is ridiculous. We can't even survive (or fix) a 2c shift in a planet we're specifically evolved for, so the chances of survivable conditions elsewhere are exactly zero.

I remember when the name Obama was difficult on the lips because of how thoroughly Osama had been ingrained in Americans at the time. The Repugs made much of the rhyme and all it could be used to imply. But now that Mamdani is the new nemesis of the Right, I have not seen one conflation of his name. I don't know if this is ignorance on my part out of the loop, or if, just maybe, childish puns and name-calling no longer work so well, perhaps even because of Trump himself.

Today.

A 17th-century strongbox - original steampunk. I've never seen anything else like it.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/10/19/2349439/-Chicago-Mayor-Brandon-Johnson-Calls-For-A-General-Strike

Re Taft-Hartley, I don't think anyone should be too worried about the rule of law at this point.

The sitting President of the United States of America posted an AI video of him dressed as a king bombing literal shit onto protestors against his regime, and the American media has.... Nothing At All to say?? Nothing? Just another Sunday afternoon?

Is it just a matter of not knowing which of the FIVE most obviously appalling elements to address first? I can help with that, get us started...

Please stop waiting on the Democratic Party to show up and save us. They haven't saved anybody from anything in like 80 years. This is on us. We have to do this, us.

A friend went to her neighborhood Spanish-speaking bodega yesterday and said she'd pay for a home delivery service for any customers afraid to come in person to buy groceries.

I thought that was a smart, effective idea for solidarity.

This photo does not capture how it was blocks long on both sides of the road.

Savannah, Georgia

#NoKings

Epstein: Let's keep it front and center. Bang the drum.

Photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty, 2019.

Gauguin. Fisherman and Bathers on the Aven, 1888.

A friend was in Portland all week. She didn't see a frog or witness confrontations. But like being in SF in the Summer of Love or standing among students in Tiananmen Square, she's now adjacent to an eternal zeitgeist. This picture was not produced in Panama, Martinique or Provence, but in Brittany, just before he headed out for the most fateful historic summer in Western art, strongly influenced by his early post-impressionist work.

#Painting

James Ormsbee Chapin. Portrait of a Woman in Blue (Possibly Aileen Chapin), 1938.

12 years earlier he can plausibly be credited with starting all of American Regionalism with such strong stark portraits. This one is later and even more stylized, but I really like the way he selects what is seen. A World War was just about to begin. A deep and pervasive economic Great Depression had gnawed away all morale. And yet here, womanhood: erect, graceful, even glam. And those 30s colors!

#Painting

Alt-text is good for translation, subtext explication, searches & archiving, and slow connection speeds, as well as the most obvious benefit: equal access.

Also a lot of people like me won't boost images without it, so it's good for expanding the reach of posts, too!

#AltText

Some of y'all don't sleep 7.75 hours each night and it shows.

Yes dolphins, the former Dauphiné region, the Dauphins of France, and patates both dauphinoises and dauphines are all related, though none but the actual fishes ever swam in or even bordered the sea.

Girolamo Marchesi. 2 Views of the City, and St. Bruno, ~1520-25.

I've been reading on the new skulls that might push human history back 500000 years. Relatively speaking Girolamo here is practically the self-same as us today. Not only is our culture contiguous but we still recognize everything he was trying to say.

Also I love that one of the very few things we know about him is that he married a "woman of ill repute" in Naples. I hope they were both well laid and had good pizza!

#Painting

Some friends who have decided not to stick with Mastodon are very clear in their rejection: Basically they want the convenience of an algorithm and they don't care about the cost. At least I respect their honesty.

I have been exposed to a home sound system that I wish I had never heard. I'm relatively immune to hi-def big screen TVs, but the speaker system in this house is like sitting in the same room with the violin. I'm going to go home to my sad little tinny pie-plate of a speaker and weep.

Jacques-Louis David. The Death of Marat, 1793.

Chances are you know the painting better than the man, the event, or what the artist was trying to say (which many might not like today). It seems particularly poignant right now in several ways at once. The parallels are astonishing.

It's hard to word the function just right, but basically it's the first time naked politics was treated without any more elevation than the aesthetic. David was on the side of the Terror.

#Painting