Nov 15

 A tiny bit better today. I slept long. But did not fall into a horrible pit. Just a mildly shit one. Which honestly is better. I have forgotten what good feels like. I'll take merely shit.

The gout stubbornly remains, not terrible, not right either, bright red inflammation still visible, an ache all over, pain when you tense, but, meh, it has been far far worse.

I finished watching all of the Fargo series today. The last series, series 5 is excellent. And chimes queasily with the existential horror that the US is currently being sucked down into. About patriots. And stupidity. Cruelty. Christianity twisted into forms of hate and torture.

Great series. Not so easy to watch in todays world. It underlines a very ugly portrait of America. It left me hating the US all the more. Not good. I guess in a way, this is one of the things that makes the series great. A US production that does not shy away from taking a very hard look at some very ugly characteristics of American chauvinism.

I am mostly ignoring news from the US. I avoid mentions of Trump or politics. I have had enough of the ugliness. I am sick of Americans and their hatreds and pettiness and weaponised stupidity. I don't make that statement lightly. It's not something I would think or do. Whitewash a whole country. I don't know. Perhaps my patience with humanity has run out. My patience with America has run out. Even at the best of times, that cock sure, obnoxious swagger and bullshit Americans can have, that oh so not charming ignorance they range about with "world series" this, "world champion" that, when it's just a domestic competition. The utter ignorance of anything outside their borders. The allowances you have to make for the toxicity. And now. It's just doubled down on. Tripled down on. As shitty as it is. I want nothing to do with them. There are consequences for choices and actions. No more free passes. A land full of hateful christians, bigots, liars and idiots, happy to pollute the air and cheer whilst doing it. Plenty of innocent people are going to suffer trapped in that increasingly backwards country. Always the way. It is a tragedy. But the country has to be judged on the country's actions. Its leadership. Wholesale, at every level, thoroughly selfish and corrupt and beyond materialistic. The shining ideal that the US once had for itself is dead.

I am glad I can spend my time pottering around the UK instead. Isolated by a wall of water. A small country. Thousands of miles away. Rich with history and culture and a set of ideals that are not American. And I don't think, ever will be.

Good.

Pull up the drawbridge.

Lockdown the gates.

Let the US burn itself to the ground. I think this will end up being the end of the US Empire and it will fall. The rich ruins will be squabbled over by the con men and corps. And in all places where it will be felt most keenly will be in its military might. It will, quicker than you think, dwindle. The vast money consuming entity cannot be sustained in the face of rot from within eating all the funds and fucking up its economy.

Cheery.

In sweeter news, I have noodled a tiny amount today with my CnC machine. Just testing engraving my design for the boxes the cards will fit into. There are many variables. And a learning curve about what works and what doesnt. After a test run today I have realised that the gaps between some of my designs are maybe a bit too small for the softness of the wood to properly hold. The sort of filigree work holds, but boy is it thin, fragile. So. I have gone back to the drawing board and expanded the width of the white space. If I am feeling up to it, I will give it another try tomorrow.

I am edging closer to actually doing this in anger on an actual box. Of course. At that point. You don't want to be testing. You want to know how it will turn out.

My original version - before

After - more whitespace

Personally, the original looks better, but, the tricky thing with dealing with a physical medium like wood, is that scale matters - at a certain scale the wood just doesn't have enough strength and the drill not enough precision for you to have feather like carving. The first design would be good if the size of the output in practice was probably something in the order of 40cm x 30 cm. But it's half that. And it struggles. So. You have to design it for the scale it needs to be.

This also does occur in digital art. But only usually at the very highest or lowest of scales, most of the time, you can kind of, sort of, ignore it, and scale away without problem. ( the best example of this is trying to take any kind of image and scaling it down to pixel art. It just doesn't work. You have to design pixel art from the get go, as it's more a study in caricature of what looks right at that scale, than it is a faithful compression of a larger image - because at that compression level, you lose all notion of information, it just becomes a meaningless blur ).

I'll give the new one a test and see how it does. I also need to have a switcheroo of drill bits, and see if the down cutter I have holds a cleaner edge.

In the meantime of screwing around with this, I have started to have an idea that an altogether better design might just be the way to go with an Imperial Eagle instead. But eh. We shall see.