An excerpt from a podcast:

"In honor of this most sacred holiday: Leap Day, we wanted to wish a very happy birthday to all of the Leap Day Babies out there. Today, we hope you're at least one fourth as happy as a normal person with a normal human birthday. Not a birthday that blinks in and out of exististence like a quantum particle.
First up, Happy Leap Day Birthday to Dinah Shore! Singer, Actress, Golf enthusiast, Dinah Shore was born on Leap Day in 1916. She's dead of course. But, when she was alive she might not have known that it actually takes 365.241 days for the Earth to traverse the Sun. If we didn't add a day every fourth year, slowly over centuries our calendar would warp irrevocably. Spring would become Fall, August would become December.
Of course, if that were to happen, we'd be forced to confront the truth: that all of our calendars are a fiction we created to control the uncontrollable natural world; which churns around us and through us, unyielding, feckless, intemperate, and vast beyond our Ken.
We are but tiny ants crawling on the tree of life - a fact which should soothe us, but instead only fills us with the horror, in front of which H.P. Lovecraft himself would cower and beg for mercy.
So here's to you Dinah Shore! There's a Lesbian Party Weekend named after you, even though you were a straight cougar who dated Burt Reynolds - and that's a much better legacy than being born on a day that stands as testament to man's fruitless quest for dominion… Happy Leap Day!"
- Lovett or Leave It

Today is the Vernal Equinox, Twenty Twenty Four. The last icy gasp of Winter and the first day of Spring.

It’s also the Vernal Equinox right after Leap Day. Leap days are ephemeral non moments, real like the moon, but unreal like it’s reflection on water. The day that should not be, but is all the same. God forbid should something substantial happen on such a day… There’s literally years between the anniversaries. There’s actually a lot more to Leap Days, and adjusting the Calendar to fit the underlying chaos of reality more synchronously. For instance, there’s a Leap Second too which was added because the Earth’s rotation isn’t exactly constant and is slowing ever so slightly each year. There’s a certain gallows humor to all this: Man’s intractable quest to understand the natural procession of planetary bodies, and consequently what time it is.

Anyways, that just happened.

There’s also an Eclipse coming up. I’ll be making a pilgrimage to the holy site that is, erm, Little Rock, Arkansas, to bear witness. This will be the third Solar Eclipse I’ve seen, assuming we have good visibility. The first one I saw was on the back deck of my college apartment in 2005 in Orlando, Florida. That’s where I saw one of the last ever Space Shuttle launches too. My next door neighbor had some film stock and we took turns squinting through it at the fireball overhead. That one was only a partial Eclipse, but it was still pretty cool. Twelve years later, me and that same group of college buddies met up in North Carolina and observed Totality. Now that was a spiritual experience. You can read about it, watch videos, hear first hand accounts - but nothing compares to actually seeing darkness in the middle of the day; actually feeling the shift in temperature as the moon occludes the Sun. I remember the crickets getting confused and starting to chirp, as a liar’s twilight dawned.

The artwork I chose for today’s blog is The Vision of St. Benedict by Cosmas Damian Asam Bavarian, oil on canvas, 1735. It depicts the titular Saint Benedict, the founder of Benedictine Monasticism, tripping balls as he witnesses the black hole sun. It’s in a portrait orientation, but I worked some photoshop magic on it to make it 16:9. Saint Benedict died on the Vernal Equinox in 547 AD.

I always thought the word “decadent” was simply referring to a fancy cake, or a really good roast or something. Well, that’s one of its meanings. It wasn’t until recently that I realized that the root word in decadence is decay. That really changes what I thought that speech in the Edward R Murrow biopic was all about… A lot of that has come true since October 15th, 1958. We are those people living “fifty to a hundred years from now.”

What Murrow is talking about here is something I’ve often mentioned on this blog, and it’s a central theme of FLOLAS: Human ingenuity and creativity brings about this technology we all take for granted. We can use it to entertain ourselves to death - I’m just as guilty as anyone of that, just ask me how many video games I’ve amassed - but it can also elevate us beyond our humanity. It can make us more. I would even go so far as to say that there is nothing we cannot do if we do it together. Land on the moon? We did it over 50 years ago. We build robots that do that now. Multiple countries have done it. Video chat with anyone on Earth instantly? Old news. We are wizards - gods even, when we collaborate and embrace technology.

Ironically, if you’re familiar with the rise and fall of social media and the Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world, this same technology can also rip us apart. Perhaps we are too dumb to use it. It’s no surprise that the Oppenheimer movie was such a cultural darling this past year - it’s always been such a relevant story as a modern telling of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods.

What we create we use to destroy.

With every light, a shadow. It is the very foundation of what it is to be human.

But as Murrow put it, “there is, in one reporter’s opinion, considerable evidence against that contention.” The Moon will block the Sun for about 4 and a half minutes on April 8th. Afterwards, the crickets will stop chirping, warmth will continue to propagate unto Summer, and the light will guide our way once again.

Page 58 is probably half done. I swear to you that I’m about to wrap it all up. There’s a big action scene at the end that I’m really looking forward to drawing - and hopefully animating one day. I can see at least another dozen pages or so… Working on FLOLAS is all about the long haul.

Good night and good luck.