Category: The Green Grass of SILVER BROWN

I like to smoke. Occasionally I write about it.

The Green Grass of SILVER BROWN

The Romancier’s Guide to Netflix, Part I

X. Jupiter Hart

Most of the books I read during the (first?) COVID-19 lockdown were textbooks. As in, non-fiction. Try not to hate me for that; I have always consumed a wide gamut of literature. Figured I should make the best of a bad situation, using the downtime to learn a few new skills. For the inevitable moments when I felt like banging my head against a brick wall, be it from writer’s block, the fate of nations or a particularly troublesome bug in some app I was building, it was Netflix to the rescue.

The other night I happened across some animated series from India (presented in the original Hindi with no dubbing whatsoever, which I appreciated) depicting the hypothetical wacky adventures of Ganesha as a boy. A kids’ show, obviously. But kids’ shows are (more often than not) the shit after a couple of bong rips, so I decided to check it out. At first I found Bal Ganesh endlessly fascinating. I was being offered a glimpse into what kind of Saturday morning cartoons I would’ve been watching had the Fates decreed I be born on a different continent. Subsequent episodes impressed upon me that this was exactly like one of those gawd-awful religious shows my cousins used to watch when they were kids (if you have never heard of Psalty the Singing Songbook, consider yourself blessed), only with a Hindu angle to it. Once it dawned on me that every episode of this series basically has the same plot, the fatal flaw in its premise became abundantly clear to me; a flash of insight which I immediately tweeted…

The Green Grass of SILVER BROWN

A Digital Fossil Exhibit

X. Jupiter Hart

This is actually not the first blog I’ve ever started. I’ve created about half a dozen of them in my lifetime, but none of my former blogs presently exist. Most of them were shut down voluntarily by me a few months after launching. Usually out of boredom. Or maybe because I just couldn’t be arsed to do the work involved in creating and maintaining a blog. It was one of those reasons. This current blog has already outlasted every blog I’ve done before, so it’s got that going for it at least.

I archive most of what I create, and remnants of former blogs still exist in my personal digital vaults. Here’s a titular wordmark I created for the header of one of my old attempts…

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Rough translation: “The Brainfart Place”. I wrote it another language and used a fancy script font to make it an elegant brainfart place.

…and here’s a banner I created for somebody else’s blog (which also no longer exists)…

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There’s also this skull banner I did once, although I can’t for the life of me remember what blog I did this for…

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Lastly, I give you this collection of photographic evidence from that time five years ago when I created a (working!) ganja pipe from a jalapeño pepper. One that had just the right shape to be used for such a purpose. All it needed were exactly two incisions…

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There’s my trusty old laptop Lucille in the background, who has since retired to the great network in the sky. #RIP

Despite being refrigerated at all times when not in use, the jalepeño pipe only lasted for a few days before it started rotting and I had to retire it. But it was an interesting experiment while it lasted. This pipe imparted a zesty Tex-Mex flavour to the smoke. At least it did while it was still fresh. Then decomposition set in and it started tasting more like Taco Bell…

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The Green Grass of SILVER BROWN

Those Little Extras In E-Commerce Packages

X. Jupiter Hart

I’m currently in the midst of editing a Frankenstein of a passage in SILVER BROWN, stitched together from bits and pieces of chapters from previous drafts. Centered around a Big Reveal. One reminiscent of Neo learning the true nature of the Matrix, with respect to what kind of reaction it provoked in the protagonist. I’m personally not banking on the audience having a similar reaction. Never set out to make this book The Exorcist…

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…which by the way is one of the all-time classics. If you haven’t seen this film, then you just don’t know culture.

While writing and rewriting high profundities in two different languages (English and JavaScript), I obtain at least half my needs from this here Internet thingy. At least. In the weeks that have passed since all these lockdowns started, some e-retailers have taken to throwing some much-needed extra love in their packages in the form of free merch. Like this particular publication I received with my usual shipment. A retelling of the first Harry Potter novel in comic book form, with an interesting new angle to it in which Lord Voldemort is reimagined as a police officer…

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