Tumor Talk

At least the tumor isn't talking through me. Yet.

Wednesday I was interviewed for surgery with a ocular oncologist Dr. Garcia. He is going to attach the tantulum clips in my sclera that will be used to triangulate the proton beam. 

At one point Dr. Garcia puts a bright light contraption on his forehead and said "This is going to be uncomfortable  Let me know if this gets to be too much". He proceeds to attack my eye socket with fingers and a pen, blinding me with the macro go-pro and an inch face to face. I go into shut down mode and it got pretty uncomfortable. I wasn't about to admit it.

After consulting Dr. Kim, my opthamologist, Dr. G showed me a picture of the tumor tugging on the retina. "I'd like to laser that down a bit, take some stress off that retina. Dr, Kim agrees. You'll retain more of your sight". "Go for it" I replied. "When?" "Noon tomorrow"

I was at the laser office the next day. Short story long, the reception room is packed, everyone wearing masks, sure, but at this point I guess we've all given in to endemic. Honestly I may just keep wearing the mask just to piss people off.. and because it's winter and masks better than scarf.

The nurse drops the dilator drug in my right eye. Back to the waiting room to let it work. Once in the laser room I am seriously disappointed in the gear. Nice restraining rig for my head, but I was expecting a laser beam. None to be seen.The laser was a 1970s stereo amplifier box with a cable and pen laser attached.

The nurse puts in more numbing eye drops and then Dr. Garcia appears with a needle. 

The needle in my eye.

You know how when you help an animal stuck in barbwire or something and you're hurting it more to free it and instead of fighting and biting the shit out of you, it freezes? Yeah, I froze.

The actual discomfort was kind of touching. It was my heroic right eye, which until now, working around a tumor that kept my sight at 20/40, cried out to me in dismay at this strange pressure and just a slight pain. Meanwhile I had put myself into a strange calm.

As Dr. G lasered the shit out of my tumor, I just stared a thousand miles ahead and I'll bet my pulse rate never got above 64.

They put a patch on my eye and sent me home. 

Well, I think they just pissed the tumor off. I can't see anything out of my right eye now. 

Starting to clear just a bit tonight, but still like the bottom of a frog pond. I guess I'm looking out through cooked flesh. 

Happy Covid Christmas

I always wondered what society would be like if people worshipped Thor instead of Jesus.

Both Iron Age religions, but Thor is a lot more mellow than Jesus beleive it or not. None of this weird cannibalsim of blood and body. Every one just carries around a hammer. Well, not children. You are initiated at the proper age and worthy of a hammer.

I bet after 2000 years you got some maniac hammer moves people do when they greet. It's Russian death ballet. 

And people bless each other with the hammer too. Hold your hammer over something and pray? Why not?

Although blessing with the hammer originally meant Thor jacked off to make the hammer blessing. Because they are barbarians and are used to bodily stuff happening.

With Thor as your savior, we don't do the Crusades, we don't do the insurrections and mass conversions, we don't get churches or cathedrals. We get forests. Manicured forests, just like you want.

Happy Mayonaisse.

This is my art project about the tumor in my eye

I used a #gan, a generative adversarial network, crude neural nets, to generate images. I said to the little AI genie "Show me the tumor in my eye". These grisly little nightmares did not disappoint:

Yeah, those #gans are... wow

Bronze Age Makings

Pouring molten metal again, the most expensive therapy. I have a college fridge of waxes going back to 2017. That's only 4 years ago but feels like 40.

Ladies Night

The days of the week are divided between Roman days (Saturday, Sunday, Monday) and Nordic days (TWRF). TWR are named after Norse gods Tyr, Wotan, Thor. F is Frigga's day. Frigga is not a name, it is a honorific, like Ms. Mrs. or Dame. Friday night is Ladies Night. What's your pleasure?

It's not a night out without a broken heel

I always knew I was wolves and ravens; packs and murders. 

What I didn't notice until now was how much of a baseball mitt my hand is.

If you wonder what the new version of capitalism is, it's the same. The Anglo-Dutch fire ant disruption version of capitalism. Why compete when you can eliminate? Our ExPlures fuck it.

Trump is retarded fag. How did he get elected? Ah, maybe ask the aliens. I dont' know.

Anyway, I'm trying to recapture the thrill of death from the cancer diagnosis but I can't prolong it. Every now and then I do feel the push to excel. Not much time left., must perform at maximum. I can't sustain much as I want to. It's like listenisng to fast beat music or cocaine. You don't want it to stop.

"Jews will not replace us"

No, they won't. Why would they want your shitty lives?

Let's take a break from tumor talk.

I'm on page 234 of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wenslow. Graeber died in 2020 and this is a great loss as the duo had planned 3 sequels to this book. Graeber, Mr. 99% of Occupy Wall Street, was the Einstein anthropology needed. Writer of Bullshit Jobs and the magisterial Debt: the first 5,000 years, his insights are provocative and probably correct. 

What's my takeaway so far? We really need to study slavery and property rights in depth and from a great height. If you look at us as ape-shaped bugs, property is a spindling and folding of things as sacred things.

Sacred leading to rights; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Unlike the three expanisve rights listed, property is the only restrictive right.  Me. Mine. Not ours. The talk of a tumor.

If you think property rights are a human right, you are probably conservative. If you beleve property rights supercede others, you are a sociopath. You probably think that humans can be property, commodified, financialized. Which gets us to slavery.

Slavery a perversion of intimacy and care. After a while you get an uneasy feeling of social parasitism run rampant. Chattel slavery is actually quite profitable, as note our current global economy. Slavery by descent, beleive it or not, not as profitable. Better to kidnap and human traffic after someone else has done all the nurturing. It's all gravy that way. The only purpose of breeding chattel slaves is if you think you can improve them. The racehorse theory. Which gets us to the commmodification of the vagina.

Women are cannons that shoot out babies that can become warriors or cannons. And once you look at it that way, you are a conservative.And if you think forced pregancy is slavery, you are a liberal.

Which gets us to our current Abortion Wars. The interesting thing about Roe V Wade and the states is it finally gives a civil war solid geographic boundaries. The Coasts against Flyover Country, with intense ultra-blue dots throughout the Heartland. Set piece battle line sdrawn. Id you are an idiot. Or Steve Bannon. Point being, there will not be a bloody civil war. There will be a divorce. And E Pluribus Unum ceases to exist.

Meh, so what. Another confirmation of the great stagnation since Q2 1972.

Knock em Sock em Rock em Robots

Looks like I keep the eye. Which is a slight bummer since I'm ready to go Borg. 

UPGRAYDEDD!

Fuck the torch. AND BY THAT i MEAN the British term for flashlight. I want my right eye to be a fucking Moon buggy, not a Martian weather sTATION. Eyeborg. Iborg. sigh borg. borg blanket bingo zingo ringo

Once you go Borg, you never go back. 

My life has been gravy since 2006. Urologist caught a precancerous bladder, reamed me out and saved one kidney. Life is gravy since then. I don't feel guilty when I waste it.

But I relish when I remember in a way both great and tender the delicious span of life I should not have.

Middle Aged Johnny Death by the Stone, he quit peeing. Mordern medical science actually only caught up in the 1990s! So, again, I am riding the gravy train, and know it.I really need to work on the gratitude and spreading the wealth.

Because of Marvel multiverse shit, people start to get counterfactuals, which is the narrative after the change, the hinge, the divergence, the warp and weft of choice and fork of force and fraud.

Everyone assumes regression to the mean. Wrongo bongo Butt bongo bingo. iF tHat WeRe TrUe we'd be a carbon dioxide planet like Venus. 

Kurman Exclusion Principle: You cannot time travel back to your original universe.

You're welcome.

Tumor In My Eye

So that jelly in my right eye that grew in blurriness? turned out to be a tumor. Choroidal melanoma, distorting the retina, and right next to the optic nerve.

I joked, when I first had vision problems, that my right eye didn't like me and was trying to kill me. My right eye is trying to kill me.  My right eye has gone all selfish and right wing and wants to kill me.

Put another way, be careful what you joke about. The universe always provides a punchline. I joked as to how my 7th decade was going to kill me, and the punchline is cancer.

in the picture above, the top row shows the choroidal melanoma about 11mm in diameter, a pea sized horrid little thing looking out for only itself. Plan A, always the first  course of action, is for the whole eye is gotta come out.

Told this news, idiot that I am, I immediately started thinking about cool glass eyes. Eight Ball. Infinity. Cat's Eye. Maybe LED lights. Animated eyeball. Better still, an LED flashlight in my right eye. And also a laser if they can. Bluetooth with a wristwatch controller for Bionic Johnny. Laser Jack. (No, I'm not a Jack. I tried it. Didn't work. I'm on the Johnny end of the spectrum).

Anyway, since then I received a body scan, and I am cancer free everywhere else. Which is good, yay. Normally this thing in my eyeball would have spread from the lungs or the colon.

Honestly I expected that I am otherwise cancer free since I not only feel well, but feel silverback well, strong and powerful for someone my age. Of course, 35 years of heavy smoking and 45 years of boozing still give me a hefty chance for future cancers, but so far so good.

It's a melanoma. If it were on my arm they'd excise it and a chunk of surrounding skin, and off I'd go. Ah, but I got a squamous hairy mole wart  in the eye, so it's now proton beam therapy. Or we can always go back to Plan A.

Regardless, the vision loss is for good, proton therapy can't make it better. Whether the eye goes or stays, my right field of vision is now a suck of blur. Odds are, though, this health crisis is a speed bump, and viva la 2022 and beyond.

The thing that bothers me is folks are right. Death focuses the mind. There is a lucidity like smoking opium.  Ah, but the mind is a weak thing and that brief glorious moment of possibility worn down by daily living. I can still recapture it, but Nothing Lasts. Unless I come up with controlled nuclear fusion, I am already forgotten. And who cares? I'm not worried about death. I cease to exist. Why am I worried about accomplishing something that will soon be eaten by the vast wastes of the future?

There is the possiblity of me melding into an archetype at least. Think about it. I have a model of you in my mind, more detailed with exposure. Likewise you have me in your head. We metaphorically put pieces of brains in each other, which makes all of us individuals a mosaic anyway. An isolated human, cut off from the monkey hive, quickly ceases to exist. Except for what remains of her or him in the monkey hive. Or a free neutron outside the nucleus.

I've done enough acid to not worry if I cease to exist. Just a spark. Not even a spark compared to the Universe. I am a Planck length. I am on Planck time.

Capital As Power

Someone turned me on to the capital as power website a few years ago. I found this essay, Growing through Sabotage just yesterday. The essay is a worthwhile read, but what struck me was this figure:

showing world energy capture by humans from 10000BCE to present. I can't find any other charts to cerify this so let's assume its accurate but not precise early on, with more precision since record keeping. Archaeologists are now finding stuff (see The Dawn Of Everything) from early on. 

What's going on around 300-250BCE? If that isn't an artifact, it sure looks like we were going exponential and then got whacked. We got back to exponential 2000 years later but there was a slow down. What was it?

I'm going to say the Axial Age slowed us down. The deverlopment of unviersal coinage and universal religion. Although the Axial Age was supposed to be starting around 600BCE, this could be the conseqence. There was no catastrophe or social upheaval. The age of coin and lack of credit had finally stopped up the pipes.. Around 1700CE credit got revived, and there it is, capitalism.

I will submit that we need something like this now before the Big Squeeze.

I submit cryptocurrency, properly wasteful, is the coinage we need. It turns perfectly good electriciy into dead air and social constructs. It is no more trustworthy than credit, and a million times more wasteful, slow, stupid, cumbersome. 

At least until nuclear fusion. Go HB11!

 

Who's Ready For Some Metaverse?

Worries about a scifi dystopia are a little late, but thank goodness it's still a rich white boy problem.

Or is it? Time was when no one walked around with a phone cellular or otherwise. Now, practically everyone is bionic. Ear buds were invented in 1893, so more than a hundred years of electric telepathy.

If you had They Live sunglasses you'd maybe see the silicon clone of Steve Jobs latched on to your skulll and sucking like mad, depositing stigmergic tracings and QR codes on people and surfaces.

So, here's the scary article about the metaverse. AR inventor warns Metaverse could be Hell.

Here's my favorite quote of wortk he did in the 1990s:

This early system employed a million dollars’ worth of equipment, requiring users to climb into a large motor-driven exoskeleton and peer into a makeshift vision system that hung from the ceiling, all while they performed manual tasks in the real world, such as inserting pegs into holes of different sizes. At the same time, virtual objects were merged into their perception of the real workspace, the goal being to assist users as they perform the complex task. The research was a success, showing that we could boost human performance by over 100 percent when combining the real and the virtual into a single reality.

Bionic and that's your first taste of Borg. Nice huh? Then it gets easy to wear the They Live sunglasses all the time. 

Just thinking of the amount of malware that can be thrown into this new internet of shit is, wow, Siberia sized coal fields baked by molten magma toxics. So much so we may need to go Steampunk and have everything mechanical. Can you malware mechanical? Probably. 

Still, this remains a rich white boy problem. The global infrastructure doesn't exist for the Metaverse. Unless you are willing to sacrifice latency and granularity (photo realism), which we do, nobody will be interested unless it gives them a leg up.

(John Kurman. Alcoholic Drug Addict) hanging above my head, And what's above your head?

MAGA goo goo gaga

The Big Babyfication  of the Republican party is almost complete. Kyle Rittenhouse is not the Kwisatz Haderach, but getting close. Perhaps if we mate him with his mother?

Donald Trump, ah, ha ha no. That drifting plastic bag on the highway? No. (Bag driftsd towards driver. "No. No. Son of a-")

At the R apperat level cynical nihilism is at 11. Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley playing to the rubes with precision. It's not like the Ds are any better. Choose your horror.

Nevertheless, I don't know when they all got big babyfied but they did.

I'll pick Reagan. Jimmy Carter treated Americans like adults and said things will go to shit if we don't tighten our belts now. Reagan said, Go Out And Play. So Americans were already big babyfied by then. But now the conservatives were as well.

Everybody. EVERYBODY sucking hard on the government teat. So much so that some are moving back into the womb like wallabies. Like embryos. There's a word for this. Neoteny.

In many ways, human beings are walking throwing running fetal apes. We are a juvenile form, and conservatives regressing may not be a bad thing. I have a huge problem with the nihilism.

I mean yeah, Clinton, I get it. The Ds have turned nihilsim into a conjuring. Here's the difference. Social media. Innnertubes enfante under Clinton, a galactic armada out of a space opera by the time of Trump.

So what happens? I don't know. Anyway.

Thinking more aobut our nation and our governments as a small beast. Humans are generalists and yet we choose neural network jobs that limit our functions. Of course this is silly nomenclature as neural networks are reverse engineered, and incompletely at that,

5 million govnerment employees as a NN kaiju. Monkey hives within monkeys hives with feedback aplenty = classic.

That's a maybe a small lizard brain. That ain't bad.

Are You Of The Body?

Blair Fix gets me. The topics he writes about I have been thinking about for a decade. Thank goodness he is a lot more patient writer than I am.

Take this essay. I'm pulling up a chart in it, labelled figure 4.

Let's unpack this chart. The curves shown are total income for the years 1970(red) and 2007(blue), when income inequality was respectively at a minimum and a maximum. You will notice the horizontal axis is measured logrithmically in powers of ten, simply so that the very rich can be included. A linear measured axis would have the richest way, way, way off the chart to the extreme right. The chart also uses a median income rather than average income as an average income would be heavily skewed to the right, again due to a relatively few but extremely wealthy individuals. The vertcal axis measures relative density of the US population, such that the entire curve adds up to 1. In other words, if I select an individual and their income at random, the vertical number represents their share of same income individuals within the general population. (How common that individual is).

Note that on the left hand side, there is a cohort which barely existed in 1970 termed creeping poverty. Working poor who are earning less than 1% of the median income. This cohort fortunatetly is small compared to the rest of the population, and can only be explained by the elimination of the safety net and the erosion of social welfare programs from Q2 1972 onwards. 

On the right, extreme wealth, we have another cohort that did not exist in 1970 enjoying incomes in the millions or billions compared to your average thousandaire. The individuals themselves could not possibly earn such amounts on their own and so we have a case where their monies make more monies than they do. 

It feels like, if you are not thinking of humanity as a superporganism, a superhive, or a network of monkey hives, then you are wasting your time for explanation as to how and why things are. This is all really simple animal spirit. Emergent behavior and score a big one for the connectionists.

If I may, Kurrman's Scale Invariant Behavior. Example: when you get into a car or truck, you cease being a pedestrian monkey and turn into a large lumbering kind of dumb big animal. Membership in organization also augments as surely as bionic limbs would, but at a cost of similar numbers displaying similar behaviors. 

Humans are composed of trillions of cells, the brain itself some 86 billion neurons. Ants and bees comprise quadrillions of individuals on Earth. I doubt that neurons or insects are all that aware of the collective being they comprise. Not all humans do but they are much more aware of the augmentation of being a larger thing. Funny thing is how that collective behavior by supposedly intelligent and perceptive individuals is not all that different from smaller collectives. Curious, mysterious things, large or small, but things nonetheless. As organizations get bigger, they look similar to smaller analogs, as if there were isotopes of hives. Self-similar. Fractal.

Consider, in this essay we talked about humanity collectively as things, mechas, monsters, kaiju. And I would argue that mechagodzillas always end up with some despotic pea brain at the helm. Oh, brilliant, sure, but now bound to being a kaiju as best she or he can. Still just a little bug in the pilot seat. 

The formula used by Blair Fix is dimensions (in this case height) scale to the cube root of the mass. Take the cube root of (number of employees) times average height of a human in metric gets you your Godzilla sized thing.

The US Federal government is about 5 million strong, which, do the formula, cube root of 5 million is about 170. Average human is 1.65 meters, so 280 meters tall, or about 3/4 the size of the Empire State building. The analogy though doesn.t really apply all that well. Facebook, now Meta, with about 60,000 employees would be a mere 44 meters tall. a 145 foot tall mecha. Impressive but still, Facebook is worth one trillion dollars.

A better metric might be net worth of an organization, measured against median household net worth (to normalize and fit the extremely rich and powerful within the presentation of this silly exercise). Median household net work is currently around $128,000. One trillion divided by 128 thousand is 7,812,500. Using the cube root formula with one individual defined as a household gives us a creature 192 meters tall. That sounds more like it. Picture Mark Zuckerberg piloting a 624 foot tall mechagodzilla. Sounds about right.

The US federal government, with a net worth of around 128 trillion ends up being a 827 meter tall mechagodzilla. 2,687 feet tall and that sounds about right. Question, could all the corporate kaiju dogpile on the US of A federal kaiju? Why yes. Yes, they could, like rats on a monkey. But you forget the states and municipalities, which, as a union, has a shit ton more money than the US government. Regardless, this is all who would win Herman Munster or the Wolfman?

Let's go the other way. Take the USA, where each individual is a cell in a body. How big and sophisicated is this multicellular whole? The body? 330 million cells is like a silverfish or a cockroach. I'm guessing maybe 700-800,000 people are the brain of this cockroach, so the 5,000,000 cell brain is larger than it needs to be.

If you look at the behavior of the USA from 1789 on, it looks like a cockroach. A scuttling bug among other scuttling bugs. Or fish. Or big ass metazoans. Point being, As Above So Below, with exceptions.

Anyway, Blair Fix is an enemy of neo-liberalism. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. But he's not my enemy.

Ten Year Challenge Update

This photo is a fraud. Left side says 2011 but I'm pretty sure that was 2014. Right side reads 2021 but that's 2019. So I've aged ten years in five years and it feels like it.

And what a difference. The nose grows. The ears grow. The neck gets all turkey wattled. The belly bigger. Legs thinner. And... cancer.

That jelly in my right eye turned out to be a tumor. I joked, when I first had vision problems, that my right eye didn't like me and was trying to kill me. My right eye is trying to kill me. 

A choroidal melanoma about 11mm in diameter, a pea sized horrid little thing right next to the optic nerve. To avoid microscopic invasion of the brain, the whole eye is gotta come out.

Idiot that I am, immediately started thinking about cool glass eyes. Eight Ball. Infinity. Target. Cat's Eye. Maybe LED lights. Bluetooth.

"Do you smoke, John?"

"I quit in 2009"

"How long before then?"

"Thirty five years"

"..."

Typically this would be a secondary tumor. I have a date with the oncologist later this week, and no doubt a body scan soon after. 

Am I worried? Am I scared? Fuck yeah. But only because I lack information. If it turns out I'm a tumor riddled walking corpse. Well, the sex drugs rock'n'roll Vegas trip. Pack the blue pills. No redpilling allowed on my Vegas trip. And then the suffering until recovery or death.

But I've taken a lot of acid, and I know that no longer being is not that all bad.

Anyway, gentle reader, I'll let you know how it all goes.

Any suggestions for cool eye balls is welcome in the comments.

Don't Get Old

Grandma used to tell me that.

I always replied, the alternative isn't appealing. Dying young. 

I understand what she was getting on about. Getting old sucks. Take my right eyeball. Please. 

It's 30 years older than the rest of me.

About two years ago I noticed a jelly in the lower hemisphere of my right eye. I told the eye doctor about it and he said the vitreous humor, the gel inside your eyeball, can thicken in parts. It often happens right next to the retina and can detach it in the worst case. He told me to watch for flashing or shimmering and colors. Those were warning signs. The flashing and colors came and went away last summer, replaced by a giant jelly covering 2/3rds of my lower vision and warps and distorts the upper third To add to my pleasure, a bunch of capillaries decided to die in the right eye.

Closing my left eye is a nightmare of perception. I spy, with my wretched right eye, a world from the bottom of a pond filled with frog's eggs and jellyfish tentacles.

My amazing brain compensates so my total field of vision is intact. I only experience a superstition of something wrong. A shadow of doubt that didn't exist before. Especially the right peripheral vision. A continual nagging tug from the right, which is now Void.

Don't get old.

Unfinished Business

Molten bronze on Monday and Wednesday, ceramics on Tuesday, glass blowing on Thursday, welding all week. I havent had this schedule in thirteen years. I used to blow glass Thursday nights and got pretty good at it. Tried it again after thirteen years and made a tumbler. Certainly not a straight walled tumbler, but it survived Six pieces cast in bronze. Four one hitter weed pipes out of the kiln. This is a level of activity not seen in years. I assume its an allergic reaction to the quarantine. 

Here's a pic:

I stopped teaching Harper Bronze in 2016 fall semester. 2017 was a fantastic year. It was my year, the year of the Fire Rooster. Got a tattoo, which turned out to be a non-frivolous tattoo. Got a bunch of brands on my welding leathers. My brands. My tools. I'm surprised there isn't more branded leather in fashion. 2017 was a good year because I figured out who I am. 

I am your Uncle Thor. Or your Grandpa Weed if you need some weed. I am him. I am here.  I am that.

The numerology of John E. Kurman is always 6. Two to the 6th is 64 which means I die this year. Too corny.

My hexagram is number 64, go figure. The last hexagram in the I Ching. In every single mythology, I am an Earth symbol, a  momma's boy, Mother Earth. I am thorium, uranium, plutonium, neutronium. Point being I am reliable rock solid get you out of a fix with the least amount of scratches kind of Uncle Thor you need now and again. And I'm 24/7, exlcuding the afternoon nap.

The only place to go now is to raise or coach future Uncle and Aunt Thors. Which I'm trying to do.

Hard to be a bigot when you are desperate for talent.

Poison Apple

Unpopular Opinion:  Steve Jobs was a horrible man. His warped character brought technological horror into this world. Tech would have been better off without him.

His prejudice, arrogance and avarice distorted every design and business decision. For a visonary, he sure didn't get it. A lot. So many visions eventually appeared, despite his best efforts.

Had Steve Jobs been strangled in his crib, the tech world may not have been 35 years ahead of where it is, but it would have been 35 years with a lot less cruelty and cold empty contempt. I could actually write the same thing about John Lennon. They would both be nasty old men, You wouldn't want to spend any time with them at all.

Corporate Kaijus

I've been reading through entries from this Memory Hut, and it's 90% prattle. Animal noises. 

It is a rarity I am impressed by something I wrote. I also notice I'm still stuck on the same subjects a decade later. One of them was the surmise that humans are a super-organism as surely as ants and bees. Smaller cohorts of humans are also super-organisms as well, with their own pecutliarities and talents.

As an illustration, Blair Fix, in his essay The Evolution of 'Big': How Sociality Made Life Larger, estimates that the US Federal government is 10,000 times bigger than a blue whale.

"Were this mass packed into one animal, the beast would be three quarters the height of the Empire State Buidling".

I assume he equates employee count to pounds. Our metaphorical US MechaGodzilla is 938 feet tall. The largest movie godzilla to date is 1,043 feet. With this simple comparison of super-massive animals based upon human average weight, we can derive lists.

Wal-Mart-zilla: 1031 feet tall, McDonalds: 540 foot tall clown. The Chinese Communist Kaijus? Dwarf everything. 

How about instead of employee numbers, revenue size, or wealth or what? You can see where this is going. Portraits of Corporate Kaijus and Government Mechas.

Sounds lika a great landscape to explore limited only by yours truly. And see how that works? I am lazy and bore easily and am already talking myself out of the project. I should start hiring people to do this shit for me. They will have more and better ideas, and I just have to give it the nod and take the shit when it doesn't work. 

I imagine Elon Zuckerbergs, or Mark Musks, piloting their mega-mecha-zillas from stratospheric heights, feel like unto gods.

Zoom away one thousand yards, and you see a lizord with a pea brain.

For all practical effects, a small guy on guy-wires waiting to get rattled inside a metal skull. Happens to princes and paupers all. 

Best, my lovelies, to find Flow.

Flow destroys the ego.

You fade into the task.

All that remains is the work.

Close the Blast Doors!

Blast doors won't make a difference, not when your wormhole collapses into a false vacuum bubble.

And just be glad there is no false vacuum decay, else you, me, all our favorite stuff, suddenly swept away by a true vacuum bubble accelerating towards infinity. 

These scenarios are part of the superposition of stories when you operate a faulty Time Tunnel, part of OPERATION TIC TOC, buried somewhere in the Arizona desert. There is no such thing as a beta test for time machines. They either work, or work wierd. And weird may be great for a TV show. Not so great when you are lost in a swirling maze of past and future ages.

Before Irwin Allen became the Master of Disaster with the Poseidon Adventure and the Towering Inferno, he did cheesy scifi TV. 

Land of the Giants, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, and The Time Tunnel. The shows didn't usually start out cheesy and frantic, but TV ratings of the 1960s demanded increasing titillation. Irwin Allen was up against Batman, so race to the bottom. Couple of things that thrilled me as a boy: sparking explosions and scene shake. Irwin Allen was addicted to shaking cameras and rattling hammers in buckets.It's an unfortunate cheap practical effect still in use. Sparks? Irwin Allen did not know what a fuse was. 

The advantage of the Time Tunnel was Allen had access to 20th Century Fox film and TV footage, props stock and sets making historical scenes going back to 1,000,000BCE available for free. Still, it was one of the most expensive TV shows for 1966. When ABC told Allen to cut the budget, he refused and the show was cancelled after one season. I'm betting Irwin Allen made some serious coin here.

TVTropes is the best. There are other fan sites, but TVtrope cuts through the bullshit and gives you the insights. Best to read before continuing. I'll wait.

Two things from TVtropes I think are important. The only lady scientist, Dr. Ann MacGregor, is Smurfette, who I guess is making sandwiches for the boys. She's always being carrried out of harm's way the second shit hits the fan. Playted by Lee Meriwether She was 31 at the time of filming which made her a Handsome Woman, in other words a Living Prop.

Then there is Technician Jerry, played by Sam Groom. Jerry was offering ideas that the officers and scientistts rejected. Only to have them work in the end as a last desperate measure. So all the eggheads and authorities should have listened to Jerry. Why, Jerry had his life saved by Ann. He had a heart attack and Ann revived him with the severed ends of a power cable to restart his heart. 

I'm guessing some ninja reverse judo resistance fighting against the white patriarchy, a little class warfare. But you how it goes baby. We are a super organism like ants and bees. We have castes, a 40,000 year old adaptation. Castes as strictly defined as electron orbits.

My 2021 reimagining of the Time Tunnel  is a superposition of events and outcomes. Most of the stories are episodic, but the theme would circle back to Billy Pilgrim is Unstuck in Time meets The Ann and Jerry anchor team time machine.

In the 1960s, PROJECT TIC TOC is the US wormhole project. (Because wormhole=time machine).

A visiting Senator to the site is not pleased wih all the wasted taxpayer dollars. He demands a show or the carnival gets sold. Scientist James Darren (played by Kiki LaRue) steps up to the plate and is POOF GONE for all we know vaporized. But no, the Time Tumnel, she worked and they can see them backwards in time in chronoscopic bolzetron! So, they try to get them back but no go. A tether approach might work and Guy goes into the wormhole aperture with a rope like Poltergeist. And now they are swirling in a maze of past and future ages.

Episode 1,  an hour long unavoidable disaster. At the end of the first episode the universe and everyone dies. 

Episode 2,  an hour long unavoidable disaster. Same as the first episode, but its a time loop. 

Episode 3, Kiki and Guy end up on the Titanic and find some socialites with really good cocaine and booze and weed and opiates. They get really fucked up and then the iceberg hits. They get on a lifeboat and are picked up the next day by a tramp steamer.

Episode 4,Kiki and Guy end up at Pearl Harbor on the Arizona Sunday morning December 7th. "We gotta get the fuck out of here,pronto!" They do,

You can see the pattern, They're party ghosts, as well they should be.

Episode 30, Kiki and Guy are augmented in the future and sent back to kill themselves by the ape shaped ant-wasps of  Year One Million. Whic they do. Season Two is augmented Kiki and Guy Show.

 You gotta wonder why so few episodes are about the future and that is the same problem as the Fermi Paradox.

100 ton racks and the Cloud above the clouds

Elon Musk may not be as dumb as he looks. 

Over at Antipope, Charlie Stross argues that Elon Musk is going to build space based solar power generators. The satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, exposed to sunlight 24/7, and we are much better at broadcasting and collecting microwaves than when this was first seriously proposed. 

Starship has yet to do anything like orbit and return. Still on paper, it can launch 100 tons in orbit and return, 250 tons expendable. (250 tons is half the weight of the ISS). Other than canned ape there is really no call to put 100 tons in orbit for most anybody outside the military.

Still, 100 tons at geosync with current solar cells gets you on the high end of 2GW. Stross figures a 70% loss to the rectenna on Earth, gets you a 6 megawatt power plant.

That does not put much of a dent in the global appetite of 18TW per hour.

If  Musk comes even close to his goal of 1000 Starships launching every day, then after a year he has around 3 million tons in orbit after a year. 300,000 geosynchronous power satellites. 70% of 300,000 times 2 GW is 420TW. That is an insane amount of power.

Of course its all bullshit. 

What if Musk doesn't give a crap about power transmission and is instead interested in information? It's easier to compute above the clouds than broadcast power. What if Mush is building a 44,000-mile sized Matrioshka Brain? Granted you got big problems with cosmic rays and solar flares. Still, lots of people are seriously thinking about putting racks in space. 

And why not? If losses prove acceptable, 50 tons of data center powered by 2GW in geosynchronous orbit, talking to its others in orbit?

And since we've already established this all pie in the sky bullshit, cold edge computing. Literally cold in the shadow of field of solar panels. Cold plasmas, cold Bose-Einstein condesatesm time crystals, you name it. 

It takes a lot power for all global IT stuff, like 10% of the world's electricity. I figure a much higher profit can be made at less cost by sending all that stuff into orbit.

Signed, George Jetson

When I hear trhe word culture, I reach for my petri dish

I'm a Uranium-6. More later on this. I'm languishing between ideas and finally realized I have wasted an entire year on episodic CGI sculpture when I should have been storyboarding. I should have fed all my art into a GAN or two and let them generate my art to my satisfaction. Hindsight is golden.

What kind of story? Well, this whole memory hut should have something in it for a story or two. Here's a story not from the hut:

Some years ago there was a couple on my walking route. She was stack-and-that's-a-fact bleached bonde. He was a bodybuilder type. She would be skimpily dress and doing provacative lawncare. He would scowl and brandish his muscles.I figured that was their thrill. Or they were a Venus Flytrap with a basement full of gimps. Or just regular swingers.

I figure the more fearful your imagining, the more rich you are. Rich become fearful for having so much to lose, therfore the more paranoid their scenarios and the miore nefarious the actors. The rich live in fear. The poor live in fierce, or should. 

If I were rich, like duh billions rich, here's my plan. What is the most reliable, durable information storage medium on the planet? Protoplasm. 4 billion years tested nanotech. So, I would set up a corporation that would pay people to remember shit, and pay them well. Since most humans have a pretty good memory, most people can do a primary and several secondary expertises or memorizations.

I say this after reading (online) that the Encyclopedia of Human Survival is mostly online. Sorry foks,  but electricity is almost always the first to go. If I got specialists and facilitators, I'm so much beter off than being surrounded by people who look at phones. If you think about it, Steve Jobs laid an egg in all our throats with those evil things.

I would also lobby Congress to pass the Extended Family Act and set up craft guilds to remember shit through the extended families, on the assumption that someone in the extended family will have an interest and the restr of the family can fuck off. The idea is borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut's C minus novel Slapstick. It had the one good idea of the government issue middle name, and the program was titled Lonesome No More! Go try it!

The point is the window is closing on democracy and we need to share the power as much as possible.

As President, I support #landback, giving Federal land back to the Native Americans and let them choose to either stay in the Union as the 51st state or become autonomous. As chaotic as this sounds, it can, through One Weird Trick, be a win/win/win. The Federal lands are worth quintillons, if not sextillions and a few trillion here and there are bedbugs and fleas. So, Bartender, Canfields for Everyone. Reparations across the board. All objections to cost are irrelvant, but prestige? the US of A will always be remembered as the feral child western flank of the British Empire. in a later historical flip, Constantinople to Britain's Rome. But we can get Even Steven. We can Get Back On Track.

The fact of the matter is, folksies, we are at the top of the S-curve plateau, heading south just as surely as a Petri dish of cream cheese germs run out of cream cheese. The Kurman Solution to the Fermi Paradox is in poker called All In, In the case of humanity, we need 14 billion brains, maybe 20 to break the Great Filter and we aint' gonna do it. To make it to Kardasheve One means eating the world.

Speading of eating, Earl Butz, Agriculture Secretary under Nixon and Ford. Kicked out for telling an n-word joke.

Gave us plant hedgerow to hedgerow go big or get out fossile fuel corporate agriculture. Learned the lesson of Famine, probably from Nixon about China. Point being the American people, not being well fed, get cranky pretty quick, and if things so South, in the 2020s we are on our second of third plate of The Rich.

Nixon, no dummy, saw it. You got to keep them well fed. In fact, the fatter, the better. Ad here we are.

It's not sustainable. If my hypothesis of Singularity or Bust is correct, it shouldn't be sustainable. In which case, it's not too late to make civilization cat friendly. And also make monkey cats, which kead toi chimp cats, which klead to Thundercats.

The Unexpected

i am a vivid and frequent dreamer and pretty good at recall. I won't bore you with my dreams other than I am starting to suspect that a lot of begin points in my deja vu experiences start in a dream, Weird huh?

Maybe not. We are nonlinear creatures, so atermporal intersection is to be expected. Or, if you go with Many Worlds, some pretzel of world lines, a rebranching of timelines. A time loop. I've always assumed that a time loop excises itself from existence, but maybe its just a thrill ride. Dejsa vu is exciting, but never informationally helpful.

Many Worlds, or as it is known nowadays the Multiverse implies an infitnite or very large finite, number of worlds depending upon the granularity of the Jonbar hinge. The Multiverse contains every fiction, every myth, every meta, every dream.

Book Report: I finished reading Dead Lies Dreaming by Charlie Stross.and enjoyed it almost in one sitting. Four sittings and one lay down. The book title mentions it is a Laundryverse novel, which is not a lie, but has none of Stross's put-upon occult goverrnment spook characters keeping magic a secret while fighting Lovercratian horrors. Think Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy vs. Cthulhu Mythos.

Stross realized our current governmental reality is on pace with achiev ing Lovercraftian horror and so had to change up the pace. So he has Nyarlathotep the Black Pharoah as Prime Minister of Great Britain under the New Management, and magic abounds everywhere. The Dread Majesty is budling up his fiefdom before the rest of the Outer Gods arrive. (The Chtulhu Obviously, already has a tentacle hold in the US of A)

Stross discovered a new vein to mine by approriating the JM Barrie book Peter and Wendy (not the saccharine Disney story) and using the Lost Boy gang as his characters. And he's writing two other books with the same gang. I got to tell you members of the gang were all attractive and likeable.The villain you want he should die, 

Any grim fiction that exists is now fodder for his multiverse of madness. Hey Disney, and MCU, eat my dust, says Charlie Stross.

I felt Charlie had as much fun writing this as I did reading it. I find out from his crib sheets that this was the worst time of his life, losing first his dad, and then mom through a lingering illness. Suffering is good for the soul is horseshit, but creative writing to escape suffering? I can see that.

A Speedo and Black Socks to rule them all

I think I keep informed on important events. I might as well have been sleepwalking, turns out. 

It's normal but distressing to me, who puts pride in his up-to-date knowledge and hands on facts. More distressing is being confronted by my lack of intellectual curiosity and scepticism. Case in point, you've seen this graph of productivity vs. wages.

I've always taken this chart as a weapon of outrage. Speculated on what happened Q2 1972 where productivity and wages part for good. And I'm not the only one that speculated, including a fairly knowledgable economist so I don't feel so bad. My guess was the rich had attained escape velocity and no longer needed the rest of us. 

But an essay Debunking the Productivity-Pay Gap by Blair Fix made me humble. Not once did I question how productivity was a measure of what. And as it turns out it a measutre of aggregated average income which makes the chart a tatuology. Empty propaganda.

Well, shit. So, what should we see? How about this?

 

It shows stagnation beginning in Q2 !972 and a relative drop in compensation for production workers. So again I ask, what happened? I still guess the rich achieved escape velocity.

The Great American Pants Shitting

It's the one thing we are really good at. Afghanistan, currently. Ultimately, the failed state of the USA.

I find it amazing just how many elephants we can cram into one living room, and we are just not going to address it. We can't blame our blunders on youthful exuberance and head strong puberty waves. The US of A is older than the Ming Dynasty and twice as corrupt. At the top I mean. The stink of late 1970's Soviet Russia, sclerotic old men and their trust fund KGB kiddies waiting in the wings.

In order to ask, if you want to rend clothing, what went wrong?  Afghanistan doesn't start with Clinton or Carter (although it does, Reagan was Carter Lite, and Bush/Cheney had a Clinton researched and marketed world to conquer, once the juggernaut of policy is moving we get into Obama's clusterfuck, And Trump Caves and Big Joe figures he can move on, but because of political appointees, the dismantlement and privatizing, we, which is to say, you can no longer Have Nice Things

No dearie dears, the full story we gotta go back 40,000 years. And that story is called Something Went Wrong.

There's this guy who has been breeding e coli to check out evolution. The bacteria live on sugar, but he noticed one flask with an explosion of critters. He found out they had adapted to eat citrate. This Citrate Event is now recognized everywhere and it happened to us 40,000 years ago.

Looking at it from a fitness landscape, a pig flew to the mountain. How often do pigs fly?

WHAT HAPPENED??? My theory is we were partying and we got busted. Wedding planning from then until now. What's to be done? Fire the party poopers? 

Yes, when they fired the party poopers, I didn't care because I was a pants shitter.

Other things.

The Beverly Killbillies

The movie treatment suggests a TV series, so morph with Hotel California, and have guest stars that never leave. Granny's Pot. 

Everyone is Beverly Hills is a Satan worshipping cannibal pedophile or any phile pervert, including Mr. Drysedale. He pleads for certain people not to be eaten, for a return roles or surprise guests, otherwise he and his wife often sit down for vittles with the Clampetts.Surprise guest like Vincent Price no way anyone eats him. Did I mention they try to eat each other? They hire assistants that fight them to keep them from eating each other. Crank the aggression dial. Vincent Price comedy gold. He would be on until CBS cancelled it.

More 3D and VR apps, this one sculpts a head shot. I can take anyone and make them anything, anywhere.

It me

Against a Speedo Gorn

Kurman vs. Speedo Gorn

The Man in the Green Cap

That's my name to the neighborhood crows. I realized the crows have known me for 12 years. So that's, four? five? generations in this murder that know me. 12 years walking, running, biking the rich white suburban neighborhoods south of my shitbox apartment.

I've told the story before about the honor I received last summer when crows on the ground ignored me totally as I walked past, maybe four feet from them. I ignored them as well, but fortunately I had my sunglasses on so I stole jealous sideways glances. They were aware and nonchalant. Warriors. How can such young things be so canny? (It's like octopus, with a short life, but starts out smart. Epigenetic memory?? Shrug)

I was dealing with mama and babies. The babies are sister-brothers now and letting everybody know when I go for a hike. Their caws echo out over grandma and grandpa land. 

I don't know how I got on their bad side, or if I am.

I had what I am tempted to call an LSD flashback on my walk today. 

All of a sudden I had the distinct impression that all the plants were noticing me, knew who I was. I had never considered the idea that they'd been watching me for twelve years. Anyway, the obvious paranoia turned into a grace of living universe, even the pavement beneath my feet. I experienced joy. Would that I could have prolonged that jewel of time, but tripping is not altering reality.

Item: I had read a science news article how plants might actually have eyes or the equivalent. And then out on my walk I realized what a bunny I've been these past 12 years, thinking I was apex predator. All this time, like a small town, nature knew my business, my boring robot sleepwalk orc ploddings.

Hey, here's some pictures.

Madison's Orrery

Madison imagined the state as world orbiting a strong federal sun. it was shaky for four score and seven and then flung apart. The solution was to increase the gravitational pull of the sun. 

 

Brane and brane! What is Brane?! You are not morg! Your are not imorg! What are you? 

Cigarette Johnny heard a noise on the other side of a wall facing air seven stories up. Who was talking? "Some kind of jiber jabbber" Johnny coughs. $th statge lung cancer but he won't know for months,

"This is my demon. The god I must appease in order to regain my heart, my blood."

I'm surprised how many people haven't seen Big Trouble in Little China. If you haven't seen it, go see it. I'll wait.

Back already? Fun, right? So, that monster on the back of Jack Burton's truck at the end of the movie? Everyone was like, so, a sequel? But a sequel never came and rightly so. It's a cute puppy of a movie but who needs more puppies?

Anyway, if a TV series had spawned. I see two easy spinoffs. Egg Shen, that little shit village sorcerer, ahs adventures on vacation, kind of like Kolchack: The Night Stalker and, like Kolchak, only one season of 20 episodes,

Or. turns out that monster on the back of Jack Burton's truck is now along for the ride because he is Jack's servant. See, according a geas of magic, the monster gets inherited to the murderer of his former master, Lo Pan. Jack Burton does not work as a TV series, but it does as a movie. That monster thing learns to talk so the and Jack are trucker cop team that has to face what?

"China is here, Mr. Burton" Meaning there's black chinese magic in every chinatown across the US. Little shit village sorcerers everywhere coast to ghost. Maybe it could be a TV series. Jack Burton and Slobber. And after a while, a menagerie of lost magical creatures that worked for Lo Pan, and eventually meet up with Jack Burton, Jack of All Monsters.

Adventures of Fran

 Fran does what I am too cowardly to do, scratch that, won't or can't do. She is my vicarious brave.

You'd think genetically programmed males would be super brave. But, no you get a populated hypersphere of diverse variants. Drone males with the added role of mutual mother, advantageous for the tending of the babies and preparation for adult replacements but hopefully better tend to live longer than mere speediest breeder. Males have good reasons to be cowardly. Cowardly is a strategy, which, in the game of Prisoner's Dilemma, is Tit-for-Tat-lean-towards-Grim. 

Males as human males as men/thems add a primate sensibility, but we know we are expendable on account of our shorter life span and ability to father millions of children even into late old age. Women?

Women are tough, brave, almost fearless. They are the castle keep all us sweet stupid knights protect. 

Fran has been to a lot of tropes. Fearless.