Rynling R&D

I should probably say that my experience of internet-stalking people is limited to, like: How do I figure out who owns the abandoned funeral home on the street corner? And how do I contact them? Because you can't call the police in Philadelphia (true story) to report a noise violation, and the fire alarm that's been going off for 24 hours straight has been driving everyone on the block insane.

ETA: You may be thinking that, if the funeral home is abandoned, why didn't I just go inside and turn off the fire alarm myself. The answer is that I have seen horror movies, and I know how that story ends. Thanks for asking.

Also, when I worked at a public university, formal background checks were part of the portfolio of candidate information I was given as a member of various hiring committees. We did our best not to look at this information, but its inclusion was required by state law.

Regardless, despite my limited experience, my one piece of advice to anyone who wants to protect their privacy online is don't put your age on any social media profiles, especially not in the United States or Canada. Your age will link you to medical and educational records, and that's how they get you.

One of my neighbors just came over (at 9am sharp) to give me a pair of cardboard Eagles flyers to put in my windows in case there's rioting / exuberant celebration this evening. She seemed very serious and concerned.

I was like, "Thanks, but why do I need flyers in the windows?"

She thought for a second and then replied, "It's like Passover."

Night River
https://shadowknell.bandcamp.com/track/night-river

SHADOW KNELL is a mystical, mournful, and doom-laced synth fantasy that echoes from dungeons deep and forests eternal. SHADOW KNELL’s warped and woozy orchestral arrangements serve as the murky soundtrack to untenable evocations, obscure dreams of grim grandeur, faded memories of the sublime.

I like all those things! Apparently a rising genre on Bandcamp is "dungeon synth," which is meant to recall the soundtracks of PlayStation-era FromSoft games. I really enjoy the Lunacid OST (which I can't link to because I had to extract it from YouTube like a peasant), and a lot of the work in this genre has the same feel. I'm too shitty of a casual gamer to be able to play actual dungeon crawlers, but it's nice to write and draw and edit while listening to weird ambient sewer level music.

Btw it did not escape my notice that the musicians who put together this particular album live in Philadelphia. Of course they do. This is absolutely the bgm that greets me when I step outside to go running in the morning.

I guess, for me, part of my recent fascination with ruins has to do with my everyday environment. Philadelphia is a fairly densely populated city (especially for a city in the Rust Belt), but there are still a ton of empty houses and buildings here. My neighborhood in central South Philadelphia is home to many vibrant and thriving communities, but also, I'd say that 25% of the townhouses are vacant. 25% doesn't sound like a lot until you think about what it looks like for every fourth house to be abandoned.

So this is the abandoned funeral home at the corner of my block, which anyone can just go into if they want...

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...and this is the overgrown backyard of the abandoned townhouse adjoining mine, as seen from my own tiny concrete-covered backyard...

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...which someone should really do something about at some point. But not me, because I like it.

So maybe it's problematic to say that there are a lot of overgrown ruins in Philadelphia, but also, there are a lot of overgrown ruins in Philadelphia. And I'm not saying that I wouldn't prefer home ownership laws to be changed to allow people to buy, sell, and inherit property without incurring debt from legal fees. Of course I think everyone who wants to live in a house or open a business should be able to, especially when there are so many vacant buildings in such densely populated areas. But, given that my ability to affect this situation is limited to voting in local elections, I have to live with it as it currently stands.

And I think it's worth saying that actually, it's kind of nice to share urban space with luxuriant plant growth.

The University of the Arts is closing June 7, its president says
https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/1d57wx2/the_university_of_the_arts_is_closing_june_7_its/

In an abrupt and stunning development in Philadelphia’s higher education market, the University of the Arts in Philadelphia is planning to close its doors for good on June 7, president Kerry Walk said Friday evening. The Middle States Commission on Higher Education, its accrediting agency, reported that the school with nearly 150-year-old roots notified the agency of its imminent closure on Wednesday, the same day it started a summer term. It comes following a precipitous decline in enrollment and a severe cash flow problem that had been building over time.

Apparently, the school decided to close without telling anyone on Wednesday. The Philadelphia Inquirer broke the story on Friday afternoon, and a lot of people only learned about it from the Reddit post on Friday evening. Students received an email a few hours later, but faculty have yet to be officially notified as of Saturday morning. Awesome.

As people have noted in the Reddit thread, a lot of smaller colleges (including art schools) announced their permanent closures in April and May of 2024. This is a general trend, which makes the current situation at University of the Arts all the more frustrating. What a university will do when the writing is on the wall is to hire an "undertaker president" whose job is to make sure the closure goes smoothly. University of the Arts would have known they were going to close since they hired their own undertaker president, and not telling anyone (to the extent of admitting new students and hiring new faculty for the next academic year) is extremely negligent and cruel. This doesn't affect me personally, but it sucks and I hate it.

Lincolnshire Poacher (numbers station)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincolnshire_Poacher_(numbers_station)

The Lincolnshire Poacher was a powerful British shortwave numbers station that transmitted from HM Government Communications Centre near Gawcott in Buckinghamshire, England, and later from Cyprus, from the mid-1960s to June 2008. The station gained its commonly known name as it uses bars from the English folk song "The Lincolnshire Poacher" as an interval signal. The radio station was believed to be operated by the British Secret Intelligence Service.

This link is apropos of nothing; it's just a specific numbers station I learned about recently and wanted to write down so that I don't forget the name.

When I first moved to Philadelphia, my car had a cheap AM/FM radio that I'd gotten from Craigslist after someone stole the vehicle's original radio console. I listened to a lot of AM radio in Atlanta (it's what all the hip hop and indie music stations used), and I was creeped out to find that the AM frequencies I'd saved on the radio's rudimentary display were all weather stations in Philadelphia, some of which broadcast in the weird dialect(s?) of German used by the Amish. I wonder if these sorts of stations still exist. They must, right?

At the risk of sounding like an asshole, I don’t actually feel alienated from “youth culture.”

98% of the time I see something that’s popular with people under the age of 24, my reaction ranges between “that sounds fun” to “good for them.”

1% of the time I get upset that a distressing number of American kids don’t really drink or do drugs or go to parties because they’re under constant surveillance by their parents, who pressure them to go to college, where most of them will be miserable for 4+ years only so that they’ll be buried under crushing debt, and meanwhile everyone else has to grow up with American cultural imperialism because of social media and YouTube.

The other 1% is whatever the fuck is going on with the Chinese internet, which frankly is none of my business. I am respectfully not looking.

Anyway, the context of this post is that the Philadelphia schools were on spring break this past week, and there was apparently a trend of kids riding around on public transportation for the purpose of forming flash mobs to create graffiti art. That sounds fun. Good for them.

Philly Mayor’s Office Learns Not to Mess With Librarians
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2024/02/07/philadelphia-libraries-mayor-cherelle-parker/

Through their Instagram accounts, some local libraries began a rather amusing campaign calling out the Mayor’s Office for this silliness. By Wednesday morning, it appeared that said campaign had been effective. A quick survey of the Instagram accounts of other local libraries show us that things are, indeed, back to normal.

It’s long been said that the first rule of Philly mayoral politics is: Don’t cross the labor unions. I think what we just learned is that the second rule is this: Don’t mess with the librarians.

...by the way, if you click on this link, you should be aware that the top story about librarians is followed by a short blurb titled "Philadelphia Police Investigating 'Unusual' Incident at Mütter Museum." I laughed for a minute straight when I read about this, but it's really morbid, and maybe you don't want to look at it if you're squeamish.

If you're not familiar with the Mütter Museum, it describes itself as "helping the public appreciate the mysteries and beauty of the human body," but really it's a beautiful old Victorian building filled with horrible things in jars. Back in the day, I was offered a job there under the auspices of a good friend, and I was like: No.

Content warning for politics. TLDR: I'm rapidly losing faith in Joe Biden.

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There is an (internet) argument that holds that planting trees in economically underprivileged areas is superficial beautification that has no demonstrable social impact.

I understand where this is coming from, but please consider:

- I don't care.
- The tree doesn't care.
- People in the neighborhood don't care.
- Human differences are meaningless on the scale of a tree's life.
- Urban heat sink is very real but also very easy to fix.
- We are literally making grass to touch.

And while I'm fucking around, I might just go full problematic and plant some flowers too.