Self-Loathing

The older I get the uglier I get. The library got a 3D scanner, so I used it. Low res but I am still recognizable. 

Even got my turkey wattle. 

Blown up face is fun with the low poly look.

I found out I was mom's favorite baby because her first born, Eric, scared her. Eric is super smart, like that Egbert on Foghorn Leghorn. I was a happy baby. A stupid, happy baby. Not much of a baby now.

Surrender

Premise: commercial nuclear fusion is attained and the mechanism can fuse pretty much what you throw at it AKA Mr. Fusion.

Imagine every power tool run indefinitely with your lithium hydride fusion battery. You could carve Mt. Rushmore with that chain saw in about a month, and still use just a small fraction of the cost of a gallon of gasoline. You could do a charity lawn cleanup on Brazil and get all those dead cities well manicured. 

With this kind of fusion power, you could fly to Titan, bring back its ocean of gasoline, and run ICE vehicles to the death of the sun.

Fusion was deadly in the form of H bombs but this is what everyone worried about: the next step. Fusion annihilation in a gun. Powered by lithium 6 cartridges in a magazine.

All those old batteries from the electric cars, how much lithium 6 they got in those discards? Ah, well, the natural abundance of lithium isotopes is L-7: 92.4 and L-6: 7.59

Eight percent of my lithium battery recycling stream is a fusion bomb. 

All Gender Bathrooms

About 5 years ago, the college revamped and reconstructed rest rooms around campus and built a number of all gender bathrooms. Men's rooms were sacrificed, and that makes sense as men can go anywhere, like animals. I am a big fan of the all gender, because they are deluxe. Single room toilet and sink, a diaper changing station, condom and feminine product dispensers, and most importantly, well ventilated. A nice quiet, contemplative private dump and I have transsexuals to thank for it.

Public bathrooms vary in quality but a distressing common trait is very poor ventilation. Smelling someone's morning poo in the afternoon type of very poor ventilation. I assume it would cost too much for a separate bad air removal system, more ductwork and motors and fans, but geez. 

I have, as a slacker, always shit on company time, which makes me a mostly informed public shitter, and I can say without a doubt, that it would be nice to bring them up to all gender standards.

Anyways. I did a stop motion which I will show you in a minute. I had access to 8mm and Super8 back in high school. Never did the drawn on paper stuff. Iwas all about claymation. After college, I found a 44mm film camera that no one wanted. The reason was the film was hard to get as 44mm was fazing out. I found a place in Brooklyn that would sell and process the films. The black and white 44mm  film quality I fell in love with, despite the hassle of limits.

Dropped out of all that to be a workadaddy, but what with smartphones and stupid AI and laptops and computers, it makes sense to get back in it. It could be I go mainly back to 2D stuff what with being half blind now. I am not adapting to lack of depth perception even though it has been a year Anyways, here's a short stop motion. I went into my latest VR sculpt, took pics of one figure, rotating it 4 degrees per pic full circle (90 pics). Put them into a frame-to-timeline convertor and short film. Enjoy.

Digital Art and Animation Class

On a sad note, some of my essays have been flagged against community guidelines which is a first. Not forced to delete, but put behind a warning. Well, some were bodily functions in great detail, but hey, biology on planet Earth bitches. Here I thought this humble little memory hut of mine would go unnoticed, but no. Busybodies everywhere nowdays. 

The Internet has made us stupid is all I can figure. Anyways, I am a senior and taking classes for free. Yay. As faculty I get a free class a semester (tuition free, not totally free). This semester I am taking three classes: Bronze casting, Ceramics, and Digital Art and Animation.

I crave novelty. They know it. That's why I am attached at the skull to my phone. But I still have discipline (perhaps more than ever) and a kind of silverback planning that didn't exist before. I make up in reading the ground than in swiftness or agility over the ground.

We have five projects, here are numbers one and two:

Intestinal Maze

Citizen Cat

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

Very first attempt at oil painting with minimal instruction because it was the 70s man. Looking at it now, I'm giving myself a break. The hair was optimistic. Minus the teeenage exuberance or because of, not bad. 

I always drew cartoons, for fear I'd find out I couldn't draw. I took an art class, and the instructor, Kurt Anderson, threw me at every media they had. There's like seven different artists in on this painting, as it took me about a month to get happy with it. I am no Michelangelo

I traded the painting for an ounce bag of weed, $20 in 1975, $139 in today bucks. It almost got trashed, but here it is in the middle of the Pacific: US 50th state Hawaii.

The whole fine art draw? Yeah I can do it now. 

Why I Quit Worrying

I've prided myself on maximum slack my whole life. I never wanted to work, and realized you had to, and so made work at maximum slack. Never took my work home with me. No weekend work unless I wanted to. I was a pampered prince in the IT world. Never pushed past 40%. 

I've always been semi-retired. Now that I officially am, I would like to hit 100%, and then naps and recovery.

Item: the powers of the world act increasingly amoral and cynically provide bullshit. Bullshit and bigoted mediocrity.

Possible answer. Some aliens, or some Things, are coming and they've known it since 19xx.

And in, say, 202x humans go to cockroach status when the aliens/monsters/ demons show up but they got luxury doomsday hideaways.

I can remember my mom telling me everyone thought 1950 would be doomsday. Why? It's an odd year.

Everybody assumes something is coming. Some. Thing. 

It does arrive, but It is not what you expected. Funny thing, reality.

So, here's a story, set in 3000CE.

Fear rains down upon the monkey hives. From the high orbit citadels, to the magma turbines deep within the Earth, all were afraid. Our Robot Cousins silent and disappeared. Something. Some. Thing. has happened to them.

Our Robot Cousins, who had space for themselves, who had space to themselves (since humans cannot live long term off of Earth) are gone. It's just us monkeys now.

Pep Talk to the Kids

I had a nightmare last night. It was a dork nightmare. It was a nerd nightmare, where I was in the middle of a Harry Potter wizarding war. I saw a lot gruesome magical acts and tortures around me. I was untouched, almost unnoticed, walking around in the carnage, being a Muggle (which is what I am, and so are you). 

The wizarding war took place in the 1940s or 50s I guess, as everyone was wearing bulky long coats and hats. The chief bad wizard and his companions were suddenly in front of me., rudely crowding in, their attention upon the rooftops. I stepped forward and in half a second snapped the chief bad wizard's neck with a grab and a twist, just like on TV.

"Muggle THAT motherfuckers!" I shouted at the other bad witches and wizards right before they magically turned my atoms to dust. I woke up before that part.

Is it worth examing this dream? Not really. I do an off-and-on attempt to lucid dream. Alcohol is bad for that, as well as inhibiting REM sleep. Without alcohol, recall of REM dreams comes back with a vengeance, and that in the form of nightmares. Lots of pee nightmares I am fine with as I don't pee the bed. And as far as I know, I haven't shit the bed for decades. I'll have a dream I shit the bed, and will wake up and search the mattress, but no turds. I always wake up from shit the bed dreams saying "Oh no!"

Shit the bed means to really fuck up bad. I think a worse version is shit in the shower and slip on it, but shit the bed is so concise, so context rich, that it works in any language, in any era. Anyway lucid dreams. The path is through the nightmares as I am closest to awake. It's just a matter of time and patience. It's gonna be a bummer when I do it and it's not the magic bullet. Americans rely overmuch on the quick fix, magic bullet, the technocratic balm, the unicorn rainbow.

Maybe you can't tell, but I am in my manic phase. I suffer from Fragile Kurman Syndrome of the brain.. "What's that? you ask. "What do you got?" I reply.

Kurmans have autism, ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, etc., but measured in small amounts. A static measure, cup for cup, is not an apt metaphor, but a helical dynamism will work.

That means I am easily distracted, tending toward a dilletante, a butterfly flitting from topic to topic. As do we all, but I have a focus now. Assume I go another 34 years, I will be 100 (year 2057). If I am 100 years old I am a cyborg mutant along with everyone else. 

Apollo 12

Oh shit I wanted to die but then they offer up one thousand ten thiousands of years, well ok. whip it on me.