i must see borges. i didn’t know he was alive–i thought he was long dead. in this death, he becomes physically relevant to me. he becomes alive, out-of-order, through this death.

this is a personal, national, global tragedy; and i must haste before decomposition. willem baio won’t let the scene be disturbed (it is the monument to his life), so i know the bodies will remain.

i break into the house. it is a run down 40s two-story in pleasant valley. near a&p. in italy.

dim and dusty. i come into a wide-open dining area. i see a stair case to the right; opening onto a walkway on the left is borges’s study. sitting at the dining room table (clear) at a lone chair is a stocky, short, muscular black man wearing a studded leather vest. his hair is dirty and his eyes are rolled back. he’s repeating, over and over, words spraypainted on the side of the stair case next to him. he is guarding the scene.

i drag myself up the stairs. three quarters of the way there i stop; my scuffling wakes him. angrily, he discusses with the air. he won’t resume repeating. he starts to look around the room; i spray paint a new message on the wall–gibberish, in latin. he takes notice, assumes the message was written by the air. he sits and resumes with the new phrase.

i make my way to the study. i find j.l. borges. there is no blood. he has every book that has ever meant anything to anyone in every culture. he is beautiful, a saint. i am overcome with the grandeur and the sadness. i hear commotion; scott dafoe has entered. i hide behind a bookcase. willem debaio stands over borges, seething and silent for what feels like hours. i flee in terror out a window and into a warzone.

the death of borges has sparked a world war, but no one understands why or who with. i’m swept up into a crowd of soldiers. guns and poison gas. they’ve lowered a protective dome over the house; the house sits at the perfect mathematical center of the dome.

world destruction.

we settled in and sat through a long credit sequence with illegible, small white characters on black. it went on for a long time. all that was clear was that this was a david lynch adaptation of some children’s cartoon; possibly carebears or my little pony.

the intro scene: gloomy music, a camera pointed at the ground dips low and back up while moving forward. The ground is green and brown and grey; the angle of the camera slowly lifts up to reveal rainbows and clouds in the distance.

the audience member sees the film through the eyes of different character, but also experiences emotion, taste, smell. we’re introduced to a happy-go-lucky rainbow pony. she lives on a chicken farm. her parents are very powerful and she lives in a world of privilege and comfort.

an awful cretinous creature shambles up the hill to the farm. he is ashen and decaying, wearing tatters and covered in filth. crumpled, sad, broken. he is unlike anything else around–he has no rainbows, sunshine, or shooting stars.

the pony knows of this creature and has been told of its evil, so it taunts it and tries to shoo it away. it insists it’s hungry and needs chickens. or eggs. the pony refuses and threatens to get her father. finally, she throws heavy things (rocks?) at the creature and he’s knocked back down the hill and away from the farm.

the audience member is now seeing things from the point of view of the creature. he is overcome with hunger. he can feel himself dying. he knows his only chance is to get eggs from the farm. he starts back up the hill.

he reaches the halfway point and hears a commotion above. little eggs start rolling down the hill to him. ecstasy; jubilation. he frantically scrapes them up into his withered claws and stuffs them in his mouth.

instead of being crunchy normal eggs, they’re soft and yielding, like gushers. the audience member can taste them, feel them in their mouth. both the eggs and the mouth shrink and grow and seem far from the body, but soon they pop and the distinct taste of blood fills the mouth.

the creature is completely satisfied and wanders blissfully away.

the audience member is back in the perspective of the pony. while the creature feasted, some kind of official starburst pegasus came to visit the pony’s parents.

Some law had been broken; the farm would be taken by the state and the family rendered homeless. The final scene is the gut wrenching fear of the pony as she watches her father hand the land deed over to the official pegasus.

A_______ and I leave to find food.

I came across this collection by chance recently. I noticed that the HTML used for each play was clean and well structured, so I thought I’d write a twitter bot to perform them. I’ve been waiting for a chance to learn Ruby, too, so I thought I’d use this as an excuse.

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

features

• parses MIT shakespeare plays
• can handle an over-capacity twitter
• specify tweet interval, rehearsal (dry-run) mode
• authenticates to Twitter using the twitter_oauth gem

installation

it’s just source code for now as it’s not really useful outside of my one twitter account. However, it could provide a basis for a more general structured-play reader/tweeter, so in the future it may be a releasable tool.

For now, check out the source on github.

thanks to

• MIT, for having nicely parse-able plays
• mirhampt for getting excited about ruby with me
• twitter for trying its best to make the oauth conversion less annoying for one-off twitter toy writers like myself

I chose this opportunity to write my own todo list and learn Haskell doing it. I managed to produce something basically usable but it didn’t support due dates and wasn’t scaling too well. I had grown dependent on the tool, though, so instead of waiting till my Haskell improved I just rewrote it in Python.

Thus, I present done.

features

• natural date parsing (eg. ‘tomorrow’, ‘in 2 days’) for due dates
• color-coded due dates (items go from green to red as due date approaches)
• tagging
• hardly any footprint: minimal in design and in implementation

screenshot

done in action

installation

to try out done, you can do:

sudo pip install done

or download it from PyPi and run

sudo python setup.py install

In both instances, you need setuptools (python-setuptools in the debian repo).

thanks to

• the parsedatetime library
• SQLInterp for Python
• termcolor

feedback

I’d love to hear what you think. Leave a comment or open an issue on github.

Harry’s son nodded.
Three columns and two arches.
GLORY MAY NOT LAST.