haiku 29 Mar 2018

Tiny beast herders
Fermenters of chewed plant pulp
Small yet quite weighty

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

on protecting mobiles

Mobile device enthusiasts are eagerly anticipating the commercial release of explosive reactive armor (ERA) accessories by AmeriBeth Protective Systems, Ltd., a joint Ynki-Israeli venture. Modeled after reactive tank armor that’s designed to protect what’s inside by exploding outward and dampening the impact of a foreign object traveling at high speed, soon-to-be-released AmeriBeth products feature an accelerometer-equipped microprocessor linked to tiny explosive elements built into the mobile phone or tablet casing that shoot outward to dampen the effects of a fall or sudden impact. “Our cases must, I repeat, must be worn on the outside of the body, with the back of the device facing outward, preferably using the belt-mounting device included with all of our products,” said company CEO Brien Gregory Edouard. “I can’t stress this enough - do not store or carry these devices inside a pants pocket or bag, as the kinetic elements will rip right through the material used to make your clothing or bag, damaging it beyond repair. Also, try not to drop it around children, animals, or people sitting on the ground, always wear long pants made of sturdy cloth, and don’t look down at a falling device.”


“You’re telling me that this case will protect my phone from a fall by part of it blowing up,” said Wilhelmina Francisco-Drais, a Ynki consumer sporting a brand-new handheld communications / entertainment device, while examining the AmeriBeth product at a trade fair. “But if I drop it next to a pet or kid the exploding particles might, uh hurt, said child or beast? Fuck it. Give me two right now. I paid more than a thousand dollars for this tablet and it’s more valuable to me than others’ health, life, or safety.” “People just love their mobile devices,” said Dr. Valencio Trammer, professor of behavioral studies at the University of California at Newton’s Harbor. “Chances are, AmeriBeth will find a way to make its product less lethal to things living at calf-level, but, for now, there’s always plausible deniability.”

According to the Pew Research Center, there are now nearly as many mobile devices in use in the United States as there are citizens.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 25 Mar 2018

Some funky music
Laughs and stories shared freely
Good friendship heals all

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ] ​

haiku 22 Mar 2018

We’re storytellers
All of us - day in, day out
Shaping inner worlds

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

explore your ancestry!

Outrage swept the internet today when tens of thousands of Americans went online to complain about the results sent to them by for-profit labs performing genetic sequencing to determine ancestry. “Africa. Every drop of blood in you comes from Africa. Duh. Read a fucking book,” all of the returned forms read, shocking some and non-plussing others. Instead of one or many pie-graphs, the forms merely featured a circle of light blue that said: Africa (100%). “Well, there goes a hundred bucks,” said Blane D. Whittlesrad, 34, while smearing sunscreen onto his pasty face for the short walk to the store and back. Industry representatives hope it will take at least a few more weeks until people catch onto the scam and stop sending in swabs for testing.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 18 Mar 2018

Filled with warrior’s blood
Yearning for enlightenment
Heart still; mind silent

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 15 Mar 2018

Wracked by Gherigsbane
Body-bound to a wheeled seat
His mind: limitless...

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

second amendment suspended

In response to scores of mass shootings in recent months, the legislative bodies of the United States suspended the inalienable right of people to arm themselves. Taking precedent from the Sedition Acts of 1798 and 1918, which did away with the freedom of speech in America, both houses of Congress passed laws forbidding the possession or use of a firearm by anyone other than active-duty military personnel (while they are on a military base and in uniform).

In response to widespread criticisms, chairperson of the Republican party Ronna McDaniel said in a telephone interview, “Y’all got used to us taking away your natural right to speak freely. You’ll get used to us having taken away your god-given right to arm yourselves, too.” Groups across the United States initiated lawsuits to challenge the Specifical Unilateral Firearm Suppression Act (i.e. SpUFS, Pub.L. 98-102, 20 Stat. 228), many of them representing hunters and the makers of weapons. “This poppycock won’t stand the test of time,” said Rufus T. Glanstone III, a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association (NRA), which represents firearm manufacturers.

In a statement, president Trump (who signed the bill into law) initially criticized SpUFS, then seemed to support it, then changed his mind and called it “garbage,” then said it would help “assure law and order,” then said he’d have to talk to his advisors before ultimately making up his mind about the whole thing. For the most part, however, life continued unchanged across America, as only a quarter of citizens own firearms and even fewer understand that the federal government already violated their sacred, inalienable right to free speech 230 years ago.

[This is a work of satire. No part of this work is to be taken as a factual representation of the opinions of the persons quoted or of conditions within the American republic. No persons were interviewed and all quotes are purely fictional. For more information on the rights inherent to all humans - rights which no government can either grant nor rescind - peruse the links provided, see here, or do your own research.]

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 11 Mar 2018

Hot rays of the sun
Heated rock warming water
Vast sources of force

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 8 Mar 2018

Von Zeit vergraben
Umringt von Habgier und Not
Bleibt das Kern verschont

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 6 Mar 2018

Long, life’s twisting trails
Hard, its pitfalls and perils
Sweet, its swift ending

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

dreamscape writing 1 Mar 2018

[This dream occurred after I had gone back to sleep following my morning thankfulness ceremony, having eschewed my morning meditation practice due to poor sleep and being in a foul mood.]

I and a handful of others were in a steam locomotive working our way through a long system of tunnels. We’d come far already, having traveled a great distance under what felt like a vast mountain. Reaching a fork in the path, the train split into two part, each with its own locomotive. From an initial position at the front of the first loc my perspective switched to the cow-catcher on the second engine, from where I could see and hear the engineers running them talking to one another. The first loc was driven by a dark-faced man, the second by a woman with dark hair. They were both wearing World War 1 style doughboy helmets and had to duck back into their compartments repeatedly due to the tightness of the translucent white tunnels through which we passed. (The tunnels were open at parts, bisected here and there by pillars that seemed organic, as if they’d grown into place.) The trains rapidly decelerated, and the female driver informed her counterpart that the tracks stopped just up ahead.

At least five people left the trains and walked into a large cavern located at the tracks’ terminus. Both tunnels opened up into the cavern via vaulted passageways. The rear and side walls of the cavern were of rough-hewn, living stone about five meters high and ten meters wide. Its ceiling was shored up by rough timber scaffolding and sloped in a rounded fashion downward from the rear wall forward, which I could see had a door of wooden planks set into it, locked with heavy iron chains. (The cavern was shaped like the quarter of a cylinder.) I and the others began to explore the cavern, finding a running spring to our left (protected by a rusted iron fence whose gate stood open) and four separate raised garden beds, two on each side with a shallow trough running between them. I began planning out where we could sleep and in which beds we could plant crops. As the others continued to explore, I floated over and examined the locked door, at which point I discovered that some of the planks had fallen aside, revealing through a square of intact mosquito netting (set into a framework painted red) a suburban street beyond (the street was one located on a hill above UCLA in Westwood, CA). Our group rejoiced upon finding that our journey was nearly complete.

Using a power-drill I then began to try to pull out the large screws that secured the chains to the crude planks of the door. They were slotted screws and my bit kept slipping, as I was using a Phillips-head. Suddenly, I and two other unseen presences were sitting on a vast mudflat which stretched ahead of us for at least five hundred meters, terminating in a coastal road with tall green mountains rising above it. The screws I was trying to undo secured not a door but chains wrapped around a gambling machine the size of a 1980s boombox. The machine had slots for coins and bills, the jackpot being a million dollars. I asked one of the others for a dollar to feed into the jackpot slot and was rebuffed. Attached to the rear, right-hand side of the gambling machine were various removable implements such as a multitool and an old-fashioned label maker, both of which slotted neatly in grooves designed for them. (The label maker was marked with the numbers, 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 19, and others.) I was attaching a slotted screw-bit to the multitool (for some reason, it featured a low-quality, full-sized steak knife), removing other tools so that I could manipulate the screws using the short bit. At that point the seawater started to rise around us and I patted my left pants pocket, dismayed to find my mobile phone located there. The unseen others and I grabbed the gambling machine and scattered tools and rushed for a mound of mud behind us, at which point I saw at least two others, the dark-haired woman and a man, bathing in a pool of blood-red liquid to our left. (We became halfway submerged before reaching the mound, which caused me to fear for my mobile phone and plan for ways to dry it out using rice.) Once reaching higher ground, a blond-haired woman jumped carelessly into the aforementioned, gated spring, which now filled a deep basin of tan sandstone, the roof and one of the sidewalls of the cavern having disappeared. The dark-haired woman, still dripping with red fluid, entered the pool as well. When she resurfaced her hair was also blond. I turned to look at the far shore and reckoned it would take us at least an hour to swim over to it, the mudflats upon which we’d been sitting have been entirely filled up by the sea.

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]