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.) ]