Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

First of all let me thank everyone who has picked up a shirt (see entry below). It’s greatly appreciated. In a day or two I will also post information on how you can get one using PayPal, since a couple people have asked me.

But in addition to drawing shirts (I also drew a shirt for a friend’s new food business), I started sculpting four new rings (one isn’t ready to be photographed yet). The first is a tiki ring, something I’ve been wanting to make for a very long time, although I admit that from some angles it looks more Mayan than Polynesian! Then I did a little winged Illuminati pyramid ring, followed up by a bigger pyramid ring, which was made because when Caitlin saw me sculpting the first one she asked me why I was doing it flat-on two dimensional rather than having the four sided pyramid climbing out of the ring in three dimensions. I thought it was a good idea she proposed, so I did just that. Check them out, as they are now in rough clay with a bit of blackwash to bring out the details:

I still have to touch them up a bit, but assuming that my hands are up to the job, I expect I will finish sculpting tomorrow and begin making the molds, meaning that there may be rings of these designs in the shop by week’s end. Plus they may even have some really nice new stones because in a short amount of time I’m headed to the post office to pick up a delivery of gemstones and cabochons that I’m greatly looking forward to. I got some more ingots on Tuesday as well, so I will probably take whatever day I’m feeling best this week and make it “casting day”. Anyway, then when I get back from the post office I have to get the stench cleaned off myself because Caitlin and I are going out for a rare nice dinner at Bloom, which I think is probably by a wide margin my favorite restaurant in this neighborhood (I like Rawlicious a lot too, but they’re so different that it’s not fair to compare the two). But I wholeheartedly recommend Bloom for anyone looking for something new to try.

Other than that I have been giving altogether too much thought as to whether there exists a truly “dangerous idea”. I’m not talking about “the truth is a virus” — what I’m wondering is there “software” (that is, an “idea”) that your brain can “run” (that is, “contemplate”) which causes the brain to “crash” in some way? When I was a kid I greatly enjoyed how it felt to contemplate concepts like infinity, trying to picture the edge of the galaxy and what is or isn’t beyond it, trying to picture the nature of time and it’s beginning, and so on. I still do. So I wonder if there is an idea that can cause something analogous to a buffer overflow or other computational error that results in a failure situation? I told Caitlin that I thought there was, and that it was actually so common as to be meaningless. My feeling is that the brain is extremely modular and parallel, with millions of separate processes/memes/plans/ideas being considered at once, and I suspect that they are constantly crashing, and that this is part of why the human brain is so incredibly fault tolerant — crashing is part of the way the brain functions. And more importantly, the fact that the brain is so modular means that there isn’t even an “overbrain” or seat of consciousness big enough to meaningfully crash anyway.