Robusticalness

My right eye has been blind for over two years. I noticed that my brain was sad. The occipital lobes were not getting input from the right visual field, and that made my brain sad.

I'm not sure since when, but my brain isn't sad anymore. I guess the neural nets and associations found something else to do. What that is, I have no idea. 

In related health news, my doctor is trying to get my dangerously high blood pressure under control. I am on 4 different meds taken 7 times a day, and the BP still is up in the 170s/90s. Yikes. Stroke territory.

It's been this way for awhile and I jokingly and correctly noted that having two kidneys would fix it. They did ultrasonics on the heart and kidney. The kidney has a benign tumor which eventually could be a problem due to bleeding. My aorta is slighltly distended and I have a leaky valve, a heart murmur I've had since birth. The arteries look good no blockages thatnks to modern medicine.

I forget how much of a viking* I am. Seriously, for a guy slightly above average, I feel so much taller and bigger than I actually am, and apparently people pick up on that. I'm startled when I see a picture with my group of fellow big boys and realize I'm the shrimp. But I don't feel like that. 

I'm like the USS Nevada; torpedoed and sunk at Pearl Harbor, refloated and repaired, fought in the Atlantic, survived an atomic blast at Bikini Atoll. Sunk by practice naval gunfire in 1948. Well, perhaps not exactly the USS Nevada, but that's how I feel.

I got some welding in after casting more figures for Grandpa Weed's Funeral. I am very close to having to go to magnifying glasses as the cheaters are not good enough anymore. I do have a magnifying lens for my welding helmet. I don't know where it is. Anyway, here's some pics.

Have another.

Here's my work table in the kitchen. Never trust an artist that isn't a slob.

Way Past My Deadtime

I definitely think humans are ape shaped bugs. We go through larval stages our whole life, we just don't shed a shell in between.

I am in the silverback stage right now. I can only pity anyone that never reaches this state of - for lack of a better word - wisdom.

People lament wasted youth. Youth is to be wasted. It is the end years of accumulated effort and intellect that cannot be wasted. You feel the power.

At 67 I may be at my most powerful, although I could plateau into my 90s, but the Kurman side says no dice. So I have a limited time offer to dispense both advice and charity. Being childless, I choose my heirs on merit. I have given monies to people I am not related to but wish I was. I love my blood family, but I have chosen my extended family, through character and competence, to reward with what meager sums I have.

I will continue to do so until I die

I had a 20 year plan, now it is probably 7, before I die. My best and easiest plan is a glorious death, which will be glorious. Still and all, Always Be Recording, and therefore I will build a roadside shrine 

Grandpa Weed's Funeral. 

This is an ongoing art installation. It is a jar with my ashes, and around the jar, at not more than 1/10th scale, are my grieving mourners and curious strangers. Bronze. A fund set up to produce more figures aftyer I die, in perpetuity or the money runs out.

I've been to so many funerals where I said wow all these people show up, I aint; getting these numbers being an old curmudgeon. So I started to create my own mourners at 1/12 scale. And trhen it turned into a collection, a glazy of characters as happens when you work on personal mythology. From there, ritual, from there, science, from there, everything or nothing, the Singularity.

Soylent Green: Overbudget and Behind Schedule

But we get there. There is human food ecosystem collapse. No technological rabbit pulled out of a hat will fix this. By 2052 or earlier, no more food except at subsistence levels. The Monkey Singularity has done exactly what it promised, easy lifestyle, at the cost of eating everything in sight. Greedy monkeys. But it's not the end of the world (far from it, this old bitch Earth has been through worse than us). We are going to go through a bottleneck.

So where are we at? 11 eleven years ago, I lamented human carnage on our world:

Soylent Green predicted 7 billion people in 2022, with 40 million in NYC alone. Those numbers are a little off. We are at 7 billion now, with 2 billion more expected by mid-21st-century. Right now, 80% are at poverty level. It's true that some billion or so have been lifted out of poverty since the 1980s, but that just means an even bigger human maw to feed.

Half of the world's forests have been consumed, most since 1950. 90% of all large wild fish have disappeared from the world's oceans - all from industrial fishing. Dead zones from agricultural run off are spreading at an unprecedented rate. "Garbage patches" of floating and sinking plastics are on the uptake in size and numbers. The oceans are rapidly acidifying, and soon will be fit for naught but the most primitive life forms - jellyfish and microbes. It is estimated that humanity now diverts and consumes one quarter of the energy of Earth's biosphere. We are beyond a force of nature.

Despite concerns about resource depletion, energy is still plentiful. We will run out of fossil oxygen long before we run out of fossil fuels. Some 70 precent of the oxygen we breath is provided by underwater life. Blue green algae provide 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, other algeous and planktonic species, sea grasses, mangroves, kelps, provide oxygen and carbon sequestration.

All are in decline.

It is so much more worse now, I don't need 1950 as a benchmark. Insect populations are crashing. (My own anecdotal evidence is my car windshield. In the 20th century I would have to pull over and clean the bug splats off for visibility. Now, eerily clean windshields).

80% of global fisheries are in distress. People want to deep sea mine, which is the dumbest thing. The abyssal plains are not desolate. They are a fucking grocery store of microbiota. Fuck that up, harvest the twilight zone of little critters to feed farm salmon the Li'l Lisa Slurry, and you got yourself a Soylent Green, and god speed. Supply chain collapse, and thus a bottleneck. Not an apocalypse, a bottleneck.

Only behavioral change gives us a short bottleneck. Stop fucking killing things would really help.

Not that it matters to me, way past my deadtime. I've no dog in the fight unless I go all Tony Randall and have babies with a twenty-something assistant. And everyone thought he was gay.

Even then I won't care about my progeny, being dead before they reach adulthood. But Gen Z is having babies, and none too worried about the future. I mean we know and understand a world of squalor and want. Hell, this world, right now, must look like the planet Dune to our hunter/gatherer ancestors, who in their turn, decimated the world. But I would note the megafauna extinctions were after the last competing hominid had been eliminated. Homo Sapiens? More like Homo Orcus. 

Sure stinks like the Age of Orc to me. The Age of Men (Neanderthals) is long over. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Chris Hemswoth, who plays Dementus in this movie, observed that America has Star Wars, the UK Harry Potter, and Australia has Mad Max. Australia has the only fairy tale that can come true.

And the beautiful thing about the  Mad Max universe is it is as vast as the Wasteland, but still full of characters. It's not a franchise or iP, it is a post-apocalyptic mythology. The dregs and bottom scrappings of humanity, still have a sense of humor and gruesome dignity.  I suppose it all goes back to George Miller's emergency room days as a doctor, gallows humor, what's to do about it, mate?

Is Furiosa action packed? Yes. Hell, yes. As action packed as Fury Road? Nah, but, Furiosa is an explanation movie and I'm OK with that. How did Furiosa get to be the Furiosa of Fury Road, and where do things go from here?

At the end of Fury Road, Max goes off to wander the Wasteland. Furiosa and the Mothers now hold the Citadel*, Gas Town and the Bullet Farm**.

Miller has given us Woman the Builder in all but the first movie, in which the badass wife and kid got murdered, which drove Max mad. Ignore the fact that Max is like 72 years old in Fury Road, the characters are ageless archetypes now, ghosts drifting through stories of the Wasteland.

What's next? George wants to make a Mad Max V and I'm like absolutely, box office receipts be damned.

Kitty, I Farted

Hello Loves

In France, ChatGPT is phonetically similar to Chat, Je pete, which means female cat (kitty), I farted. New programs are worrying over jobs being replaced by kitty, I farted. 

Appropriate seeing as AI is a gas bubble. I and many others called it. The bubble won't pop until the ruling class gets their money back and unloads on the suckers. It's not going well, with Google turning into Trump, more or less advising them to drink bleach. The hallucinations will continue until we fix it, goes the publicity, so we will slap "experimental" on it.

The tech is unimportant. Or rather, the tech is important, but the business I slap onto it liek a parasite is not. Take the jet pack, the equivalent of the vaunted flying car, but for real. Turns out it was only the one jetpack all along, in all the movies, TV shows and commercials. The inventor flogged that deadly thing wherever he could. But it had inadequate tech to be other than a stunt. The minute you think of the entire American economy as a carnival, the less of a chump you are. 

Jet packs. Flying cars. Self driving cars.  Bitcoin. NFTs. AI, step right up and win a prize.  

It seems the only way to make money nowadays is fraud, but that's capitalism. Force and fraud is the salient of capitalism. The only reason it works is a thing called science. That's where the material progress comes from, the Great Acceleration we are experiencing that is undeniable. An acceleration that now threatens to eat the world.

I know such a statement is exaggeration. We humans may experience a Soylent Green collapse of the good times, but the planet won't give a shit. The quadrillions will out last our mere billions.

On that note of mortality, my current situation is now blood pressure. Eyeball is also continued fucked up, which I now realize is for the rest of my life. Each decade has tried to kill me, and my 7th secade may go the Kurman family tradition of stroke or heart attack. Given I've also inherited my maternal grandfather's weird head pressure problems. If I can sail through this , I'll hit 85, otherwise, my 18 year plan becomes my 7 year plan.

Regardless, my death will be glorious.

A Foundation of Joy

Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated on, either beating the fuck out  of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery eel of a retina of mine. 

Maybe 8? 9? times? A lot of needles in the eye, way too often to make my mother cry.

The last surgery in March was supposed to be the last surgery, but the bottom quarter of my retina decided to go wandering, not unlike the way doctors thought a woman's uterus would wander around her body and make her hysterical, and have to be brought back under control with the use of bad smells, thus smelling salts.

So the doc fixed it yesterday, and here I am. Abiding by the grim northern version of machismo, I suffered in silence without having to, but hey, I don't know, can you call it brave? At this point no, just endurance. Patient plodding andjust keep going.

I was supposed to stay home today, but I got bored and went into teach at the college. Apparently that made me a badass. Giving demos like a patch eye pirate. Well, I am a Viking. I know that because when I brag, its always about stealing something.

All vision is gone now in the right eye. The doc was diappointed and I consoled him. Hey you saved the eye. Again. Can't win em all. 

Not feeling sorry for myself. My stage of grief for my beloved right eye is now at acceptance. Acceptance, as in surrenduring to pain, the joy of life shines through. If this is a biological adaptation, beyond mere pleasure or pain,, then nice. Makes sense that enjoying a universe is of evolutionary advantage. I'll call it joy. The joy of being fucking great to be alive. 

And keeping the eye. 

A City On Mars

I think one of the reasons Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials are so pissed off is we were promised adventures in space that we never got. We were ripped off in our most hopeful aspiration along with all the other stuff that seems to turn to shit around us.

Short term, at least. But is that true long term?

Consider: if we set off every existing nuclear warhead all at once - in the worst possible way, some 4 gigatons of ground bursts - the resulting Earth, cold and poisonous, would still be better than any other place in the solar system. If somehow humanity made a comeback, and got a mangled Earth back to some semblence of our current pretty sweet environment, it would still cost way, way less than terraforming Mars.

A City on Mars is a book about all of what it takes to establish a permanent off-world human presence. The authors, space horny like me, talk to the experts, and get bummed out how Not Ready we are, but a hopeful consensus is Go Big or Stay Home

Go big also means go long; timewise. Go deep; as in research and experments on contained ecology and repair here on Earth. Go broad; figure out how to repair Earth systems before worrying about space.

But we are not ready. Forget about living up there, its the getting up there that is still a problem. Chemical rockets are not enough. You send cripples and corpses on a 2 year voyage to Mars with our best, which is Starship, if it were working, which it ain't. And the Earth to LEO dollar numbers (99% of your cost for your ticket to the solar system) are just not there. Reusable Starship and booster, Elon Musk figures down to $10 a kilo, from the Bullshit Cinematic Universe he inhabits. Without nukes, you'll never get less than $1-2 grand a kilo. Elon don't care. All SpaceX has to do is crank rockets out like sausages, plus network effects even better if SpaceX offers franchises to manufacturers to crank out those sausages.

No darlings, Elon wants the orbits, and he's getting them with a third of all active satellites being Starlink. Elon is Elon, and if someone comes up with a fusion rocket, his ass is saved. Otherwise, he must realize that 99% of existential disasters are exta-solar. That "carrying the light of consciousness" bullshit is just that.

On Earth, geology gets cranky and the Sun shoots deadly farts at us, but we live on with free air, water, a radiation shield (free!), a stable and realtively pleasant if not downright gorgeous environment. Surprise! we can start doing that right here right now!

So what is space for? Science! Robots! Robots throughout the solar system. I did a term paper on robot farms back in college and  it was not promising. von Neumann self replicating machines look good on paper, suck on the Moon.  Even today, with solar powered AI on the Moon's Peaks of Permanent Sunrise, stinky humans would do better.

Besides, the majority of people don't give a fuck about space.

Everybody loves plucky space robots, though. That's the angle. Like Voyager 1, an old gobber, trying to Phone Home. That is where the sentiment is, so throw monies at that. Put in a dollar for an old interstellar robot? Change jar for the good robots in your market store. 

Who knows? 2060, way past my dead time, might be pretty fucking sweet.