Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Yes, I do still post here on this terribly neglected blog from time to time. I do however post way too many times every day all about body modification (if it really counts as “posting” when I’m mostly just sharing my friends posts) over here: https://www.facebook.com/larratt. But I’m trying to stay alive here at least once a week. I think I mentioned that I had recently seen Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, and wasn’t expecting much, but was quite happy with what I enjoyed nonetheless. It was a surprisingly “serious” movie, but it seems the sequel is… not so much serious… In it, Che Guevera helps Frankenstein from getting convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. It is called “Che Guevara: Frankenstein Translator”. Here are some scenes from this upcoming cult classic:

Speaking of videos, my brother Devon just got back from Las Vegas where he fought 270 pound Ukrainian Andrey Pushkar for the superheavyweight left arm world championship title fight at Armfight #42. The action starts at about 8 minutes in, but because it’s not edited down you may want to jump over to YouTube and watch it there so you can see the thumbnails and skip through for the exciting parts (for example the match at 14:00 — or the one at 18:40 where my brother BREAKS HIS WILL COMPLETELY, in the next match at 22:20 he just embarasses him with the CAN OPENER!, in 25:20 he’s just playing with him, and by the final match at 27:40 Pushkar looks like a baby with nothing left). Short version is what I expected, that my brother returned DECISIVELY victorious and remains #1 in the world.

There’s also a pre-fight interview with Devon and one after the match, as well as some earlier footage of Andrey training.

That reminds me, one of the presents I sent along was a snap electronics education kit, which I got my daughter as well years ago. Here’s their website: https://www.snapcircuits.net/… I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s really easy for kids to use, and starts fun, but also can lead to a solid understanding of how these things work. One of the most recent things that Nefarious built here was an AM transmitter that broadcasts music over the radio, which she enjoyed a great deal, and we figured out how to modify it to broadcast the music from her tablet.

I’m a bit under the weather right now because my daughter is visiting her grandmother for a few days, and is actually up in Ottawa right now for her youngest Cousin’s birthday. Because she’s away, I’ve cut my pain medication in half so that I can get a little bit of a buffer put away. I am lucky in that I don’t suffer from withdrawal as badly as most people do, but it’s still not very fun and I’m in a lot of extra pain right now. That said, even if I double my medication I’m still in a lot of pain. In the last twenty years there is only one medication that has taken the pain away, and that’s diacetylmorphine, more commonly known as heroin. Unfortunately there are very few places in the world where it’s legally prescribed, and this isn’t one of them. Why is that? Politics alone. It’s just as safe if not safer than the majority of legal pain medications and far less addictive than cigarettes. However, because of the moralistic War on Drugs, the decision has been made that’s it’s more important to stop people from seeking pleasure for the sake of pleasure than keeping sick people out of pain.

To keep my mind off things I drew a couple of shirt/sticker designs and uploaded them to RedBubble, which uses a really nice quality printing process (so it’s not like the Zazzle shirts that eventually peel apart if you don’t take care to handwash them inside out), and they also can do one-off shaped vinyl stickers!!! And they’re cheap! The stickers are actually the best part of this probably. Anyway, you can click these pictures to get to the pages for the shirts and stickers. If you order make sure to specify your size, it’s easy to miss! I accidentally ordered myself a medium, so I have to give it to Caitlin, who says she already has way too many shirts (not that I don’t too).

I was rereading “Last Frontiers on Earth: Strange Places You Can Live For Free“, a utopian survivalist set of essays musing about weird deserted places you can live in peace, from remote islands to airships and submarines. I do love the idea — how very steampunk — of living on an airship, and as I’ve mentioned before I think it’s feasible and wish I had invested my money in such an idea back when I was still a multi-millionaire and not a poor bastard like I am these days. But another idea I liked a lot was something called the “Reefhome”, pictured here:

Unfortunately my net searches don’t turn up much and I’m thinking that it’s all but fallen off the radar and been given up on. But anyway, the basic concept is that you have an above-water deck area and a submerged weather-proof cylinder as the living space, and then a large underwater deck that would quickly become encrusted with coral and underwater plants, serving as aquaculture and to attract fishes as food. If you had a small income to support yourself, this could be a wonderful place to live as an alternative to boat living, and probably in a similar price range as well. Getting more radical, instead of mooring it near land, it could be attached to one of many sea mounts — undersea mountains, often extremely remote, that don’t quite come above the surface but are shallow enough to attach such a structure to.

I just re-read the “Golden Cup” and “Golden City” series of comics and I suppose my mind is on floating cities in more ways than one. I highly recommend these series for sci-fi comic fans by the way — there are some illicit scanlations into English floating around the net I believe. But ocean cities, were it not for my worry that it would only lead to further exploitation and destruction of that mysterious deep blue, I would love such a reality dearly.

In cabin’d ships at sea,
The boundless blue on every side expanding,
With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves,
Or some lone bark buoy’d on the dense marine,
Where joyous full of faith, spreading white sails,
She cleaves the ether mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under
  many a star at night,
By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
In full rapport at last.

Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,
The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,
We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,
The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the
  briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,
The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
And this is ocean’s poem.

More shall come another day, I am not done yet.

PS. If the Reefhome interests you, you may want to read this Seasteading Book Beta (and I’m not sure if this version here is a newer or older link so I’ll include both).