Looking at commercial building #3 at noon. In the process of looking at commercial building #2 we learned that the local city we're expanding to was so die-hard in preventing "methadone clinics" that they wrote out every other type of "clinic" despite the fact that they have flyers telling you about all the wonderful "health centers" you can build thanks to their new zoning. Like, one use case out of three that they're advertising is something they accidentally banned.

Fortunately I was in conversation with goobster who said "the mayor's an old friend, want an intro" which is why my weeks involve

- getting the kid to camp

- dealing with tax nonsense that is nonsense but has also made us $60k

- trying to figure out what China, Ukraine, Trump, the Fed and crypto mean for my family

- integrating some other unsung but vital part of a machining center nobody understands so that maybe I'll get to use it some day

- talking to commercial brokers about millions of dollars in loans

- talking to the mayor's office about whether I need to bother with milions of dollars in loans because they admittedly accidentally banned several entire categories of business in their fear of high-functioning addicts

- dealing with a rogue DJ who decided to spew 6000 words of lies all over facebook and every blogspot he owns that call me out personally

- helping out a buddy who has decided to switch from motorcycle parts to belt buckles because lo and behold, making pretty things is more fun

That part was cool. He was asking me about my torch because he didn't quite trust the hour I spent on the phone with a master engraver and the half hour I spent with a master caster about how to do inlay and wanted to "melt it in." So I whipped out the torch, got out all the things and did a demo and said "nope, not going to work" in a conclusive fashion.

Had another friend who only knows me through movie shit ask me about watches. It was a 2 hour conversation. Made me realize I'm an iceberg to most people. They know the 15% we have in common.

Based on projections, one of these buildings, if executed according to calculations and estimates, will pay itself off after 6 years, pay its initial investment off after 8 years, and thereafter make me roughly $280k a year in rent. But then, we haven't seen the real numbers. The other two buildings could be sold tax-free after 10 years ("economic opportunity zone") or razed and replaced with mixed-use up to 25 stories high.

It's really fuckin' hard to get rich in the United States. It's appallingly easy to get richer. I guess that's how you know your society is capitalist.

I'm confused. What is happening with this story.

Here's my educated guess:

- Putin promised Prigozhin he could run the war if he took Bakhmut (IE, take Shoygu's job). Prigozhin proceeds to slowly, incrementally, embarrassingly take Bakhmut at any cost, spending longer on a nothing city with no tactical advantage than the Kaiser spent on Verdun. Meanwhile Shoygu twigs to what's up and stitches Prigozhin.

- Prigozhin knows he's being stitched up but also knows that there's fuckall chance of taking Bakhmut, which means there's less than fuckall chance of taking anything else in Ukraine, so he starts hoarding ammo

- Bakhmut is about as taken as it's gonna be and the Ukrainians start probing for weakness. Things go badly for Russia, but not "collapse immediately" badly. Prigozhin goes to Putin and says "lemme turn this shit around, you told me I could" and Putin points out what a shitty job he did of taking Bakhmut

- Putin blows the Kakhovka Dam, which is a war crime the likes of which the UN is not going to ignore. Suddenly bashing POW heads in with a sledgehammer starts to look venial. Meanwhile Fox News cross-examines the shit out of Trump, who looks like a week-old party balloon. The best theory I've heard on "what the fuck is Putin's plan" is "Hold the line until Trump wins re-election in 2024 at which point the West goes away and Russia collects its winnings." I don't think anyone in Russia thinks Trump has a chance anymore. The invasion of Ukraine makes total sense with Trump in power, can maybe be saved with an ascendant Republican congress throwing shit everywhere, and is absolutely fucking doomed with a Democratic second term and Fox News made Trump look like a fool in his safe space.

- Prigozhin recognizes he can either use his ammo on the Ukrainians, who are by all accounts on the ragged edge of opening a can of whoopass, or he can reshuffle the deck. Apparently he was back at St. Petersberg HQ just like 36 hours ago; FSB raided Wagner HQ, apparently missing Prigozhin by minutes. I'll bet there was a phone call.

- Prigozhin grabs Rostov-on-Don in 90 minutes. It took the Nazis 90 days. There is now no resupply for Russian troops in-theater because most resupply runs through Rostov-on-Don. He grabs Voronezh in less time, and a convoy starts moving on Moscow. He publicly demands the traitors Shoygu and Gerasimov (minister of defense and first deputy) and says he won't interfere with the vitally important war against the Nazis in Kyiv.

I think things could have gone two ways here: (1) Putin gives up Shoygu and Gerasimov, Progzhin takes over the war effort, tries to wind it down and take over power. Putin is slowly nudged to his dacha where he lives out a couple years in luxury before drinking polonium tea. (2) Putin doesn't give up Shoygu and Gerasimov but lies low. Prigozhin rips into Moscow, Russian troops suck as they are obviously doing, Putin ends up captive and Prigozhin says he was out of touch shame shame we'll let the hero of the fatherland retire gracefully to his dacha and eventually drink polonium tea.

Either way, the minute Prigozhin started back-talking the MoD back in February/March Putin was kinda fukt. He's in power because he has no rivals. Prigozhin started trying on the rival role and didn't get slapped down. At that point Shakespeare says "if you come at the king you must kill him." Putin knows this.

He's fucking up royally, though.

It was such a blow that was dealt to Russia in 1917 when the country was fighting in World War I, but its victory was stolen.

This is a reference to the Kornilov Putsch. Which is interesting because from a Bolshevik/Soviet point of view it's the straw that broke the old order's back and allowed the Bolsheviks to come to power. It's also interesting because the Soviet/Bolshevik standpoint on WWI was that it was an elitist quagmire that stole the lifeblood of the proletariat for the vainglorious frippery of the bourgeoisie. So while Putin definitely wants to paint Prigozhin as Kornilov, a dilettante who ultimately did nothing but make things worse, he can't really do so without painting himself as the Tsar. Or Kerensky. Neither of which have been particularly popular in Russia over the past 100 years.

Intrigues, bickering and politicking behind the back of the army and the people turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, the destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.

And here he's uhh kinda aligning himself with the Whites.

_____________________________________________________________

I think everyone is confused. But I also think that the most underestimated force in the world is fatigue, and I think things tend to fail slowly, then all at once. We've been saying for a year that this is a body blow to Russian politics and society, and here it is.

Last night I saw Skinny Puppy's last-ever show. It was emotional. They broke 4th wall during the 2nd encore. Did the "and on keyboards..." thing which, for industrial music, is the equivalent of Marcel Marceau going into a monolog. "In the words of Fakir Musafar, we are gentle people in a vicious world, and we have to take care of each other." They even posed for a group photo with a nearly-sold-out Paramount. It was something else.

This morning I paid for Peacock so my family can watch Eurovision.

Half the brain's done.

Baseplate was a 40-hour print. Top case was a 60-hour print. Hinges and plates were probably 20 hours combined. It's modular now; I need to do it all over again for the other half of the brain. Switching to those crimp d-subs was a galaxy brain move that I wish I'd thought of six months ago. Still took the better part of two days to connectorize. There's about 120 connections inside there.

For some dumb reason SolidWorks refuses to output a PDF or EXS in anything resembling actual size. This is a problem as I print my paper dolls and rubber cement them to the 18x24" cutting boards that I'm using as side panels.

I need to land three sensors in the entirely-too-packed tool changer, which means I'm going to have to model more of the tool changer. I also discovered that I didn't fully understand the way tool changes happen on the accessory spindle (it's been at a friend's house for a year while he gets around to making me an adapter) so I'm going to have to land another solenoid, too, as well as do some high-pressure shenanigans. Right now I have an extra three relay controls landing on my low-pressure 12-solenoid Festo valve manifold but I'm going to need an extra high-pressure valve. With any luck I can do a little rework on the adorable little breakout box I made to fit on the back (I have a pair of high-pressure solenoids fed from a GX12-4 and I can swap it out with a GX12-6) but shit's starting to get tight in there. Especially as I now need to put three 25-pin d-subs, a 15-pin d-sub, a six-terminal 3-way high voltage switch and three extra hall effect sensors up in there.

"watchmaking."

I also just committed to a year of radio advertising 'cuz it turns out when you're a DJ you get a good rate. Apparently no other DJ ever thought to look into this. With any luck, this will incentivize the station to answer me when I ask "so I need to do this on my website can you give me an answer please" because I'm four emails into them and the next thing I'ma do is call.

Walking is hard. COVID really takes it out of me.

Last Skinny Puppy show ever next Tuesday.

Movie's dead.

Fuckin' sucks. I'm about $15k invested in it at this point, between plugin upgrades, studio upgrades, sample library upgrades. Not to mention about two months getting the studio from 6 channels to 10. And all the bullshit involved in that. Or the three months spent actually mixing the turkey.

It was gonna be good. It sounded goddamn amazing. I had a scene in there that was stupidly preposterously meme-worthy. Fuckin' zombies meticulously composed in Envy, swirling clouds of cultist jungle PA built through granular synthesis and Radium, underwater zombie knife fights, fuckin' riduculously lush environments. Atmos is so fucking liberating to mix in. I'm pretty sure I have the smallest, cheapest, shittiest Atmos rig in the world, at least if you pare off the poseurs who are doing it in headphones like simps.

Producers want to execute the completion bond. First time I've ever heard of that happening in post; there's very little reason to take it from the incumbents - who are doing it for free - to give it to a new group who are doing it for a fee unless you need to mark a loss RIGHT NOW for accounting purposes. So ultimately the task at hand is revealed for what it is: "take this money and lose it so we can balance out capital gains elsewhere, we actually don't give the first fuck about your project."

No, I'm not getting paid, neither is anyone else. No, I don't want your fucking pity. It just fucking blows because I'm actually really goddamn good at this and I can feel in my bones that we're about a month or two from someone posting yet another "actually we like reading our movies" article.

So for now? The massive pro tools rig is being used to DJ an hour's worth of industrial music a week. Next week we're live in the studio for the first time since like 2015 which means i need to move the rig to the Least Practical Laptop and entertain people for six hours while begging for money. The "six hours while begging for money" portion isn't really a big deal but I'm extremely apprehensive about plucking my shitty DJ controller and Rekordbox install and throwing it on a macbook air.

And now it's time to reacquaint myself with the mechanical side. I had forgotten how fucking complicated this shit is. None of that is from a kit, none of that is from an eHow, none of that is from an instructables, none of that is from anyone else's advice. Which is probably why my connectors fit cables but not my "why doesn't anyone make this" cable ends so I'm gonna have to redesign the shell for the brain. Which is okay because I need to design the shell for the co-brain because this monstrosity requires an EC01 and an ECS-1 and a PAIR of 7535Ns.

Control of this machine starts at an Ethernet cable and balloons out to three DSub25s, two Dsub 15s, six Dsub 9s, two HX6s and an HX4. And EtherCAT, can't forget the EtherCAT. I gotta test all that shit.

But first I need to redesign it so the connectors fit LOL

I put a social worker through grad school. Her entire family were Freudian psychoanalysts. Every Friday we'd go over to their house and violate HIPAA as they shot the shit about patients, therapy, and how you mindfuck people for money. She was also an emotional sadist; her jollies came from tweaking you when you were up so you would be down, and tweaking you when you were down so you'd be despondent. Once despondent you were reliant and once reliant she could crush you some more. Four years of that and you learn some things about emotions and human nature.

I bring this up because "introspection" plus "training" leaves you with "holy shit I coulda dated so many more girls in high school."

You gotta let it go, man. Mathematically? You're with that girl somewhere in time. Enjoy the hypothetical and enjoy the reality.

Li'l story. I built a car from the framerails up. I drove it from New Mexico to Washington, on my own, tweaking it as I went, breaking in the engine, discovering the auxiliary tank leaked and that I'd probably blown a head gasket because my cooling setup was, not to put too fine a point on it, designed by a seventeen-year-old. And somewhere north of Salt Lake and south of Boise I ripped past a girl with her thumb up and didn't even slow down.

Because, you see, if I broke down where would she be?

It took about a year for me to realize that if I'd broken down she'd be on the side of the road, exactly where she was then. Over the course of that year she'd become The Most Beautiful Girl In The World and also My Soulmate. There she stood, thumb perpetually up, for a good ten years at least. She even made it into a screenplay (that was a finalist for a fellowship I might add).

About Year 11 I realized I was obsessed with a glimpse at 80mph of someone who was more likely than not a drug addict or runaway or otherwise damaged human (I had a real thing for damaged humans) and that whatever romanticism I assigned to the outcome had nothing to do with anyone but me. It was liberating.

But there's an alternate universe where I picked her up. There's an alternate universe where we're married, there's an alternate universe where she's a serial killer.

Charlie Kauffman is a loser. Anyone who can take a story like The Orchid Thief and make it about themselves is bereft of insight. Find something other than sour grapes to chew on. You'll thank me.

I inactivated my account because I just don't have the fucking fortitude to be harped at for trying to help people anymore. Nobody does.

Gamergate broke social media. It took an environment dependent on contribution and weaponized it into a shooting gallery for takers. ThatFanficGuy? Has fucking blown up at me for fucking nothing like six times.

I'm fucking done with it. I'm fucking done with every unstable little shit on the internet taking any attempt at empathy, commiseration or advice as an opportunity to spool off and be oppressed. And so is fucking everyone else.

It's so fucking exhausting. It didn't used to be. Used to be you got out what you put in. Now you put something in and a million heinous little shits crawl out of the woodwork to parse your semantics for thoughtcrime then spool it all over every available fucking forum so that other lifeless edgetrolls can get that puny pathetic little dopamine hit from making other people feel bad.

There's no new blood here because there's no new blood. GenZ has learned that social media is their boob tube, not their public forum. It's where they're served endless tiktok videos to snark at, where saying anything publicly that isn't ridicule becomes fodder for ridicule. the only people with the sociopathic fortitude to contribute in that environment are either starfucking attention whores or edgelord incels looking for a reason to manifestomurder. Anybody with any fucking sense stays the fuck away.

It's one thing to push the boulder uphill every morning? At least when you get to the top you get to watch a sunset, right? But it's nothing but anklebiters now. It's by design - anger and hatred push more engagement, and engagement gets you higher CPM. So every social media platform out there teaches every single user that their expected behavior is outrage at the content presented to them, and every social media platform out there teaches providers that they are paid for outrage. It's no accident that every Youtube screengrab is a white male who looks like his nuts are in a pair of vice grips, that's just fucking mirror neurons for money.

There's this assumption by social media users now that they exist in splendid isolation. That there's no purpose to dialog other than edification. Nobody on social media will say this because everyone who knows it has siloed themselves behind a paywall - take to Twitter, block freely. Take to Substack, filter for fealty. Show your affinity through coordinated dunking, hashtag fuckthatguy.

You can only walk on eggshells for so long before you get out the broom and fucking sweep. And I tell you what - if you weren't there for the birth of fucking AIM, or have been regularly conversing with people who were, there is abso-fucking-lutely nothing drawing you into the room. The mere idea of online forums is fucking alien to the overwhelming majority of anyone still concerned about letter grades. The 'boomers found it too late (and poisoned the shit out of Facebook), the millenials found it too early (and influenced their way to oblivion) and GenX has always retreated into solitary cynicism because fuck you I'm a latchkey kid and Facts of Life reruns beat your bullshit hollow anyway.

We used to talk about "third places." that shit's been dying since 1995 and the bright shining marketplace of ideas has, through ruthless application of algorithmic capitalism, recreated the cultural milieu of the '80s, only worse. Kurt Cobain's been dead thirty fuckin' years yet Smells Like Teen Spirit could be about Instagram.

This has been the only place I've bothered to visit for the past, fuck, twelve years? And if it actively makes my life worse, rather than better, I'm a fucking fool for doing it. I don't know why anyone else is here but if you're taking more than you're giving you can't be surprised by the consequences. There's a push/pull in conversation, a give and take. Modern internet culture has become "I used to wear your face on my t-shirt until I realized you crack your egg on the pointy end you heretical shitstain die in a fire hey guys like and subscribe to my twenty minute dunk video supercut channel."

And I don't see any way any of that shit gets any better.

Used to be you could make friends online. Now? Now you just throw burning bags of shit out of a moving car window and wonder why you're so lonely. The sensible move is to stop hanging out by the roadside.