rato verde

Andrew Liptak at Transfer Orbit interviewed me about my upcoming art book!

Your first book was Worlds Beyond Time: what will this new book do that you couldn't do with that one?

There’s a great Leo Steinberg quote: “All art is infested by other art.” My first book took a really close look at one slice of science fiction illustration (mostly book covers, mostly 1960s-’80s), so this new one is pulling back to look at the web of influences that went into that era and emerged from it.

I’m covering such a broad area that it’s going to be impossible to include everything, so I’m approaching it more like an art smorgasbord that jumps around between centuries and mediums.

2-YEAR CHEDDAR

from GRAFTON VILLAGE

I usually try to review cheeses virginally - that is, ones that I’ve never had before. In this case, this is a cheddar I’ve had many times before. But I couldn’t leave it off the blog, what with its obvious appeal to leather and rubber fetishists.

As far as cheddars go, Grafton’s 2-year aged isn’t going to shock you. It’s mild, light on the salt, with a slightly sweet and grassy flavour. It’s got a nice texture. It’s dense, more moist than I expected, and smooth.

So what is the deal with the gummi suit on this cheese anyway? Well, cheese has obviously been around a lot longer than fridges. Fresh cheeses like mozzarella are too moist to last very long outside of a cold place (bacteria and fungi do so love damp places), though I don’t think anyone was too mad about eating that stuff quickly. But cheeses that have been aged (and dried) more have some more preservation options, which is where cheese wax comes in. The wax is a physical barrier, stopping fungal spores from landing, and also blocks moisture and air, making the cheese a pretty unfriendly place to grow. Even drier cheeses can be bandaged in cheesecloth and then slathered in lard to preserve them while allowing some ventilation.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

An Iranian motorist rides his motorbike past a mural depicting a scene from the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, on a major highway in the Iranian capital Tehran, June 1, 2004.