Existential Dread

I'm starting to feel existential angst about how long I have left. More directly how long active will I be? On the assumption I will become less active over time, it makes sense to get stuff done now while I can.

The question is what? Metal for sure. That's strenuous and tedious and eventually I will not be able to do the hard parts.

Here are the latest bronzes.

Bronze is getting expensive though. Everything is, and I guess that is because we have consumed the same amount of raw materials in the past 20 years than we did in the prior 100.

Sorry kids. Can't blame the Boomers for this one.

Anyway I want to try cast iron. And maybe cast glass again. 

While I still can.

Living in a Chinese curse

May You Live In Interesting Times. What can I say? The American crime empire ain't trying to hide it anymore. And we chumps? We Munchkins waiting for a Dorothy? We are just going to put up with it. How Russian of us, and I mean that in a good way, like "Russians can handle suffering". Your average candy ass American not so much, except through not so quiet desperation.Regardless, I have to continue to make things. The cool thing about me is I'm a process not a product kind of guy. If stuff I make gets recycled, thrown away, I don't care.

Art is not an escape from living but it helps. I'm retiring, which means I am going to make a shit ton of stuff. Metal stuff of course. Here we got the latest but I want to go big. I want to cast art in steel. That requires electricity, the miracle of the Modern Age, the Monkey Singularity. Anyway, latest wax works.

Same theme, Monsters Are People Too. But miniature versions of earlier works. The monster can be gravity cast with ceramic shell. The figurine needs to be centrifugally cast. Here's my rigging for a flask. 

The flask is too big for our spin caster, so I fabricated an arm for the bigger flask. I think I just need to build a big ass spin caster, which makes me think about a wheel caster with a central crucible, and that is a very dangerous spring. Here's a shot of my kitchen workshop with ongoing shit and unfinihsed business.

Monsters are people too

Comet 3I/Atlas is on its way out on a hyberbolic course to, I don't know where. I do know that 1I/Oumuamua is heading for the constellation Pegasus, and came from the direction of the bright star Vega. Maybe the Vegans are invading Pegasus.

There are three known interstellar obects and who knows how many we haven't noticed.

The really sad thing is each time it happened, people were hoping it was aliens. Wow. Are we that bored and lonely?

When I was a kid and the planets were smudges through telescopes, we all knew it was common sense that there was not only life, but people living on those moons and planets. This wasn't a modern idea either. For thousands of year, we've assumed the universe was populated with all sorts of fanciful beings. Many looked like monsters. Eh.

Monsters are people too.

I wrote a short short story which I will just tell again. 

In 2017, the first interstellar object detected in our solar system, dubbed 1I/2017 U1, later called Oumuamua. The object was unusual and prompted speculations that it was an alien artifact. It sailed on through in a hyperbolic course towards the constellation Pegasus.  

In March 2028, one hundred million Oumuamua objects arrive from the direction of the bright star Vega, and sail on through our solar system at a hyperbolic course towards the constellation Pegasus. The stars making the constellation are all ridiculously big stars hundreds of light year away. The target is undoubtedly closer, probably 51 Pegasi b, which is a known extrasolar planet.

We expected a fleet of Oumuamua objects to split off and check us out, but that didn't happen to the disappointment of some. I guess we were too small to notice.

Oh, also I sold some art. The awkward thing is I was paid a few hundred dollars and was thrilled, while I have a rich friend who just rented his art out for tens of thousands of dollars. One thing I liked about NFTs was royalties.

Free To A Good Home

I know what gooning is same as I know what felching is but I don't care to remind myself all that often about it. The Internet just keeps exposing the nightmare levels of our minds with, lately, the Goonverse.

Don't search for it. Just don't. I don't want to strengthen links to the site. It is a porn site involved in extreme attention fragmentation and extensive masturbation. There are brick and mortar places with giant screens blaring porn throughout a room like a sports bar of porn, and guys will circle jerk there. 

Add in AI and you have private tailored porn that you can take with you into the circle jerk, and I suppose this is where it is all going for humanity plugged in.

Item: 87% of executives use AI on the job compared 57% managers and 27% of employees.

Anecdotal Item: There have been increasing numbers of media interviews where the CEOs seem to be on drugs.

Observation: Maybe drugs, but I think AI psychosis. I've noticed the CEO of Palantir, Musk, and strange correspondence from many including Travis Kalanick who gave us the horrible idea of Uber, who all seem to be hypnotized by their AIs. It's so much better than being in a cult, because the mutual delusion can be tailored to you, your own private goonverse. Instant Clanker Cult Cup of Soup.

This is horrifying.

Other things. I got two more bronzes done for the semester. 

Free To A Good Home

A woman told me they were abandoned baby monsters with their caretakers. She thought them beautiful and sad.

Luxury Agriculture

I've always loved greenhouses. I like spending time in them rather than working in them, so maybe I really like botanical conservatories. Chicago has a gem in the Garfield Park Conservatory, especially now, when you can walk from arctic air into a lush tropical fern room.

I like the greenhouse look, panes of glass overhead, arrayed in minimalist or ornate splendor. I like the controlled chaos of greenery. I like the artisanal nature of horticulture, attempting quality rather than quantity. Sounds like I want a greenhouse.

It's starting to look like we will need greenhouses, as global warming takes a toll on our agriculture. More specifically luxury agriculture. Things like chocolate, coffee, vanilla, etc. Not only is it becoming a problem to grow them, but the industrial agriculture aproach destroys the environment.

Case in point: Brazil has destroyed 20% of the Amazon rain forest to grow vast monocultures of coffee, among other things. A similar thing happened in West Africa for cocoa. Sustainable agriculture of these crops work, but you have to have a forest to sustain them (coffee and cacao being under canopy plants). 

A few years ago I read a story about a greenhouse in Iceland growing bananas. I found a more current article and most greenhouses in Iceland are at the "greenhouse capitol" of Hveragerdi. They grow tropical things like bananas, coffee, cocoa, but they don't do so well. Probably being grown in isolation from their prefered habitat, with all their little forest pals and fungi and mushroom networks is not so good for them. Kind of like being raised on the Moon.

For all the land in Iceland they haven;t built many greenhouses. Maybe because of the elves. The huldrafolk, described as looking like us, only taller and thinner, want their volcanic wasteland just the way nature wanted it . And Icelanders agree. But it made we wonder who does have the most greenhouses? I'm gonna bet Canada even though I know it's China. Yeah, it's China, the Jupiter of the Solar Greenhouse system. Followed by Spain, Italy, Mexico. The Netherlands is interesting, at number 9, their Westland green house complexes make them the 2nd largest food producer in the world.

But I'm interested in the luxuries like coffee and chocolate/ And vanilla. I'd probably nned a Garfield Park sized conservatory for the rain forest I'd need for proper growth. And all the critters as well. Bees like coffee buds, but cacao is fertilized by a tiny biting fly no longer than a few millimeters. I don't know what fertilizes vanilla. Edmond Albius figured it out. Humans are now vanilla's pollinators.

China's Century, if it can keep it

My elder brother called Thanksgiving evening and at one point he asked "Is China kicking our ass?"

Short answer: yes, since around 2008. Longer answer: "It's China's century, if they can keep it. If they can get rich enough before they become old".

Item: During the Russo-Japanese war at the turn of the last century, Russia  naval forces suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese at the Battle of Tsushima, patially due to technology. The coal fired Imperial Russian Navy suffered an 18,000 mile journey from the Baltic sea. Lack of coaling stations often meant almost piling mountains of coal piled up on decks. The modern Japanese ships were oil burners. The Japanese fleet outnumbered the Russians, but their battleships were faster and more manuevarable than the lumbering Russian dreadnoughts.

Item: At the peak of the USA Empire, 1945, US manufacturing was producing one German Luftwaffe (an entire national air force) every 18 days. 

Item: Year upon year, China graduates 3-5 times the number of science and math students than the US does. This isn't just scale, China has a higher participation rate.

Item: US astronauts were stranded on the ISS for 9 months due to lack of trust in the Boeing manufactured space capsule. Chinese astronauts were picked up after their own capsule suffered a lack of trust due to space debris. The new, stranded, astronauts received a new capsule in 8 days.

Personal Item: Construction rehabbing the bridge on my route to and from work over Hwy 53 if it matters. Destruction began in April, and only now are they close to finishing. China would have built the bridge, had it collapse, and rebuilt it in half the time.

So, yeah, China is kicking our ass. It has hegemony over all of east Asia and is pushing pushing pushing the US Navy to move back one island chain at a time. They will succeed if current shipbuilding trends continue. Taiwan? All they have to do is wait. The USA is at the end of a long supply line in defense of Taiwan. We are not so global anymore, if we ever were, despite all the bases everywhere.

The USA still has advantages, imagination, improvisation, a pretty solid high tech research environment, good education institutions and R&D labs. And toys. All of this is being laid waste by xenophobic imbeciles. Science set back 25 years while China surges ahead. Immigration, the influx of new talent and ingenuity, is another US advantage, sadly being diminihsed by short dick thinkers and that xenophobia again.

China has big problems just like us. The whole slavery thing is kind of moot. Their forced labor camps versus our treatment of immigrants and poors. But as long as they keep the money coming in, they have time before the population ages out. Ironic that China and India were the workshops of the world 500 years ago, and here they are now.

Here's a more comprehensive link to China's Century.

The thing about empires, are that empires eventually fall. Nothing lasts, but nothing ever really goes away. The imprint is there. I think that's a spooky action quantum thing maybe.

So if empires fall, maybe try being something besides an empire.  

Oh yeah I also got into the Little But Bold show. Titled Xenophile, but I'm open to better names. Catch might be a good one.

We Should Be Here

 In my last entry I said that Theia, the Mars sized planet that crashed into proto-Earth, was from outsaide the snow line, and formed with lots of water. Turns out, new chemical analysis indicates Theia was an inner solar system neighbor. So, I was wrong. We didn't get water from Theia. And we aren't the feak show planet I pictured.

Or maybe we are. Still a freak show of a planet. A glorious and magnificent one of a kind freak show. I'm good with that.

We had our first big snow and if you have never made a naked snow angel, well, you should at least once. My snow angels have spectacular manly buttocks. 90th percentile buttocks.

I have a feeling this is going to be a snowy winter, and so I have to adjust my enthusiasm towards that. Not that I have to. As a Northern Maritime Barbarian, I thrive in a winter wonderland. As I recall, the last big snowy Chicago winter, 2013, was a fucking blast.

We did another bronze pour. I include this picture because this is how you are supposed to pour , choking the cup, no old man piss trickle. Someone suggested I get a shirt that says that. I also want a shirt that says "Food! Where is food?" 

This was my post-pour meal. Yum.