shinyhappyrainbows

Oh wow! This month is the approach to the 8th anniversary of this! Imminent Flood was released officially on March 31, 2017! My only proper album. I did dozens of "cassalbums" in the 80s and 90s and have appeared on Regeneration by my old Tassy band, The Breed, but Imminent Flood is the last time I made music for sale. It kind of marks where music became my hobby rather than my hope. And yes, it's a album, not an EP, it runs longer than 30 minutes.

In response to Trump and Vance basically stabbing Zalenskey in the back, the Norwegian oil company, Haltbakk Bunkers, has placed an indefinite ban on fuel sales to any and all US military operations in the country, declaring support for Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelenskey. A private (not stock market listed) company, Haltbakk Bunkers can do this without sharemarket reprisals. Wars start with small sparks that find fuel and quickly conflagrate. An Arch Duke gets shot by a nutter. A dictator invades a Polish province after agreeing days before to not do so. A team of non-state actors fly planes into a pair of skyscrapers and a military headquarters. An oil company bans sales to a military power stationed in the oil company's country after an undiplomatic Presidential outburst. I hope I'm wrong, but the Norwegian solidarity response to the US Presidential castigation of the Ukranian leader, smells like an "Arch Duke moment." I also hope I'm wrong in thinking t...

So many charlatanesque self-help books bang on about visualisation - "Imagine what you'll look like when you're rich and famous, see the lovers hanging off your arm, the Ferrari and HumVee in your garage..." It's nausiating bullshit... But is it? Athletes use visualisation. From seeing themselves, how they move on the field, how they'll hold themselves on the podium, how they'll scoop up a ball and pass it, how each stride will fall in a marathon. I've never been an athlete, but I've been a commuter cyclist, as well as a cycle tourist, and athletic visualisation has helped me get up at 4am, for a 5am work day start, and hammer down the main drag on 2 wheels, 5 days a week, rain, hail or shine. It's helped me visualise the downhill at the end of a climb, the big meal at the end of a 100km day. Visualisation works. I recently discovered that I am a little bit of a graphical artist. I never was for most of my life. To quote Mel Brooks, I could ...

A friend needed a new coffee table, their current one is too big for the space. I needed to find a project for the plywood from an old shipping pallet (a hard rubbish find) and a wooden chopping board discarded from the kitchen. The solution? Use the ply and laminated timber chopping board to create a 2-tier, rustic school desk "conversion!" The ply, as you'd expect from life as the top of a shipping pallet, looks, well, lived in. Likewise the chopping board. The ply also tends a bit ruddy when clear coated, I've used this type of pallet before. So I've mixed a tiny bit of green acrylic art paint with the sanding sealer to create a mid brown hue. Some of the green kind of globbed around the screw heads, countersunk 2mm below the surface but, a bit of elbow grease with sandpaper and PVA plus sanding dust filler, the green is a tinge like a copper screw corrosion stain. That really speaks "old" eloquently. By the time I finish the sanding and lacquering,...

Having just watched this before getting up and having breakfast... As a lifelong scifi fan, I've consumed a tonne (well, a fair few kg) of this kind of story in my time. Until now, I've just revelled in the legends, but watching this, I've realised there is an ethical problem with "generation ships." Consent. Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were volunteers and knew the risks. Collins went back as commander of Apollo 13 and got first hand experience of the life threatening risks. Space is treacherous and still largely unknown in Earth's perihelion (a wanky word for orbit), let alone beyond the heliopause, the end of the Sun's domain. What business do volunteers to crew a generation ship have, committing unwitting future generations of crew to such unknown?! It's one thing to risk your life on a tall ship to make a months long journey to another land, like has happened in previous centuries and generations, but how thoughtless and selfish do you have t...

Free education reduces GDP. Accessible health care reduces GDP. Equitable employment and freedom from exploitation reduces GDP. The only thing GDP fairly presents is, if a politician supports GDP as a metric, they're in the pocket of somebody like Elon Musk or Gina Reinhardt. GDP is, in short, a scam.