Can someone please validate me? This is screwtape's travel phlog. I left the keys to screwtape in NZ and I think lots of my usual ways of accessing sdf require validation (re: The horrible line truncation). I guess if it is to be travel writing, I should write about my travails. I sit here in view of a big banner of the right half of a tiger's face, except for its nose where a cabinet door has been installed through the banner. The banner reads hamilt on Rhinos->Chimps->Cheetahs->Giraffes->Zebras->Tigers->Kokako->Tuatara ;A trophic chain? That tiger killed a zookeeper a few years ago btw. [another cabinet door]ig attracti on in other parts of the transit centre, I think I can see appreciati on and du?rerececti on I'm not sure what's going on with what I imagine was directi on. Alright I think the w oman who brought me a hotdog (ona stick in NZ) whom I was chatting to is discretely ob serving me looking way too intently at these banners. That sign was Pure Recreati on b ut hard to see because it is quite oblique to where I am looking from. While I was asking the lovely old Indian woman what she thought I should order half an hour ago, the man who sold me my bus ticket a month ago appeared in the wings furtive ly hissing asking her where the person who was meant to be working was. No one would e ver have known that this woman was not meant to make me bus-station-coffee and a deepf ried hotdog. But I know, and now you know too. These intercity semi-private bus companies still accept cash, which is palatable to me . The privatised local bus system in the Waikato only accept NZ govt RealMe account is sued transit cards, then it needs javascript app online BeeBucks credit card purchases , so I stopped using buses a few years ago. NZ govt RealMe binds other semi-government accounts to an IRD (= IRS) account. While having three hours to kill, how did I get onto this topic? After buying my ticke t with cash, the kiosk person a month ago was absolutely desperate to get my email add ress, weirdly fervent about it. He asked how that email was hosted (how one can host e mails is an interesting question I guess). That doesn't really warrant remark but I then got many, many copies of a bus ticket pu rchase confirmation email. Attached to these is a pdf receipt, and the pdfs elicit mul tiple warnings opened by mupdf. I'm not aware of anything to be gained sending 10s of copies of the same email to an mx somewhere. Maybe it could trigger a rejection notifi cation from some servers or something? I'm not an email wizard. I wanted to look at the bad data in these pdfs, though honestly I don't know how pdfs work. I just opened one up in nvi (aside; my travel laptop, for compatibility purposes is the linux laptop I keep for the sole purpose of connecting to proprietary javascri pt applications my siblings use to communicate), including recently the mastodon web a pplication. But, the nvi default seems to be to not display non-text characters rather than give h ex values or something, and vis(1) doesn't seem to have been builtin here. The default should be hexadecimal actually. Maybe those "stream" pdf elements were actually just a bunch of spaces. Bizarre. I was just approached by a wandering chocolate salesman. I thought it might b e for a charity, but on inspection the four-dollars-fifty of candy's package has the f ace of the person who sold it to me on it and is a secret-family-recipe business ventu re. 13 ; hundred hours. My journey into the down-underworld began with boarding Charon's vessel, having paid m y two bits. If I posted it, you may have felt I was overflowing with negativity about Hamilton sit ting next to a hollowed-out derelict of a vending machine in sight of the moldering re mains of Shearer's Music, a sex shop, a government-funded Barber training business and a government-funded Urban Hair and Spa training business. I think that the biggest no n-academic state-funded training pure business, The Wintec, summarises my feelings wit h their gaudy banner ads around the city proclaiming that within five years after grad uating up to half of the graduates will either have purchased further training or expe rienced employment. (The bus station building was between me and being able to see the Wintec's campus in the city centre). Intercity bus travel from the midlands mercifully could not have had starker contrast. The bus before Charon's arriving was a little-town circuit. People filed out into the big city and settled, with each person having about one square metre of personal spac e and most people densely lit up cigarettes (to my own and other nonsmoker's chagrin). I talked pleasantly with the bus driver after checking the protocol for my 20-minute- later aeroport bus. He asked where I was from due to my mysteriously foreign accent, a nd he himself sounded very like Stug. I told him as much and he said he was originally from- I think he said "Pull" and seeing my bewildernment said a few things about nort hern England. Some of the other bus-waiters chimed in about how they were visiting Auc kland, and some of them were also going to the aeroport departures, and I couldn't mis s it anyways. There was more community in that smokey 20 minute wait than I think I ha ve ever experienced in Hamilton otherwise, since I worked in more rural IT settings an d was part of these bus scenes before anyway. Charon arrived, and began calling for certain names with booked large baggage, and the n issuing general bus leadership. International or cityfolk mused about what exactly w as being said in her NZ country dialect as she called out names. I tried showing her m y ticket which she waved away with a request for Your Name, Dearie. I chatted a bit wi th a Canadian backpacker (who politely identified my own accent as faint). Lots of seasonal fruit-pickers and small-towners. The Canadian guy, who turned out to be an infamous festival scene firespinner with a S partan helmet (on fire) theme said something about the internet, and I tried to give h im some cursory directions to aNONradio. I need to carry around some of snowie's promo tional materials. He's more about spinning fire to music than making music, but can al so tell festival and party stories, as well as talk about the wild places he has trave lled. It would be cool for him to do a show. During Charon's bus announcements, she reminded everyone to /please/ not press the eme rgency stop button conveniently situated next to every single person unless they reall y wanted the bus to come to a rapid emergency halt, and a discussion of road works and possible backroad alternative routes she might take if traffic seemed to thicken. She told us that the bus technically had seatbelts and it was the NZ law's opinion that s eatbelts should be used when available (no-one used them). I think the sort of people who take these buses take them a lot, which includes itiner ant workers and backpackers fulfilling at least persistent character roles. And you th en spend at least two to three hours of the day together on each journey, so everyone kind of joins together and shares some cause. After chatting a bit with firespinner Justin, Charon conducted some live inductive rea soning over the bus coms about the backroads versus the main route and chose us to ven ture the main route even though roadworks were scheduled today based on how traffic fe lt, a good call- the roadworks weren't out today (maybe there was a risk of rain after the weekend's thunderstorms). On arrival, she asked people who wanted to stretch thei r legs who were continuing to check in with her out and in so she didn't accidentally lose anyone. Evidently the arrival-direction pick-up point can't be missed if you go t o the aeroport arrivals' McDonalds. Of course, now I am six hours early (three hours early for checkin). There is barely any seating pre-checkin so I am situated on a bench outside beneath su spiciously leaky clouds. ; ---- 18 most relaxing security experience ever. Well, until I got here. There are these vertic al stair pits with fake rocks in them, and some of the stairs are bleacher seats? But your thighs would have to be twice as long as mine to use this as a seat. Some people are perched on ledges, others are sprawled diagonally on the bleachers. Departure stat us: Relax. A cluster of west-coast (US) accents near me are keen for anything salty. T hey don't know a bad time for nachos. They've even [sudden self-censorship]. My plane itself isn't for two and a half hours. According to the security guard, Melbourne is j ust like Auckland. I think that Melbourne is the NZer city of Australia. It occurs to me my show happened five hours ago (maybe) but I don't have any mode of checking in. I recorded it two days ago, a medley of depingus, ffog and ldbeth (and me, I don't reme mber if one of my tracks even made it in). Hopefully lots of people heard my show and want gopher directories full of synth music added to the shuffle. I guess we need a wa y of usefully inspecting that #'defvar. ; ---- 19 My three hour wait was sped up by two Japanese English students who had graduated from their studies and were on their triumphal return to Okinawa. I channeled my very sket chy knowledge of Japan from reading nm03 the gopherhole in Tokyo and our various other Japanese speakers and travellers. Naturally I enjoined them to investigate https://aN ONradio.net which seems to be the unofficial theme of my Melbournian adventure. I don' t really remember or know anything about freeflow (?) or all the Japanese music in the shuffle, but if we cross paths again they have been enjoined to tell me details about it. One of them wanted to move somewhere cold in America somewhere, and on considerat ion I recommended Vancouver and skiing at Whistler-Blackcombe with some context. Okina wa is tropical (evidently.). ; [ Luna & Eio (Aya? Downward inflection.) ]