This is a very tenuous alliance.

At the capitalist bug farm, mice were always getting into our waxworms, because they buildings were poorly built, they used poorly-sealed kitty litter boxes to grow the waxworms in, and the racks easily allowed the mice to climb up (partly because of escaped-worm cocoons on them).

We’d see them running across the main floor all the time. It was very common to open up a box after 6 weeks and see a litter of baby mice inside, and barely any waxworms. Maybe one out of every 50 was like that.

You wouldn’t happen to know any fish nurseries in need of mealworms, would you?

So um…

…do you work closely with fish nurseries?

I used to compost the vegetable peels, now I feed them to my worms.

Sometimes it takes me a while to go through a sack of potatoes, and I am always going to aggressively peel what’s left.

not since I quit the capitalist bug farm, over there you’d get drizzled with roaches every time you opened a door or moved a rack

They do a good job of attracting oils and this can fill the gaps between them and block water from getting through.

There are barber shops that have donated a bunch of their waste hair to firms that make floating sponges that soak up oil from oil spills.

Excuse me?! I’m the conductor of the worm train.

Choo choooooooooooooo

little pressure and POP out comes a little beetle of ear wax.

All the commercial ear drops are based on either vinegar, alcohol, or hydrogen peroxide. And a list of antibiotics that steadily gets longer as resistance disseminates.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/24654-ear-drops

I was reading a scientific article a few days ago about mealworms (of course), and the process by which they extract water from the air. Turns out it more than doubles their metabolic rate just to do that.

So even the biomimetics isn’t going to get us very far on this one.

The kind of solution you’re looking for involves moist soils with high levels of organic matter. That, and using less water for economic activity.

I seriously am about to have more bugs than I know what to do with. I have maybe 50,000 mealworms right now and in a few months I will have over 200,000.

With any luck, I will find gec owners and chicken keepers and backyard birbwatchers to sell to.

I went by the farmers’ market the other day and a stall had duck eggs for $8-10 a dozen. Buying 36-packs from Walmart is maybe about $1 a dozen. I don’t see it going much lower than that, or higher than $20, though.

For a while now I’ve been fairly convinced that everyday expenditures scale logarithmically with income. The increase is pretty smooth, and tapers off pretty smoothly too.

Back in the day, before we invented hollow walls, you could do a whole bunch of effective home DIY with just a shovel, a hatchet, and a bucket or two. Forget commodities, retvrn to straw that you cut yourself.

A hot mess. I expect people to still be holding on to coastal real estate that floods regularly but they still do financial black magic with it. Already tens of millions of climate refugees, most western economies in a persistent state of managed collapse, lots of countries have a federal government that only exists on paper, social ties and norms have eroded on a scale we can’t comprehend due to capitalism and AI. The world order has already ended and capitalism is in the process of degenerating into techno-feudalism, yet most people are in denial about it.

Still, many constellations of safe havens exist. At least two of which I have built, mostly with my own labor and that of my accomplices. The bug farm stands as one of the enterprises that supports a commune, another is fermented foods, another is either plastic or textile reprocessing. I live in a mud hut, it’s warm as hell, we’ve got rocket stoves and like fifty blankets.

The maple trees where I live are all dead or moribund. But I do have a microclimate on one side of a hill where a yaupon holly I planted is growing.

What I probably regret is trusting people too much, letting them make rash anti-social choices rather than being assertive and proverbially kicking their asses into cooperating with each other.

Buddy, do I have just the financial instrument for you!

Physically quite dirty but ethically clean.

Perspective, composition, light and shading and textures, and proportions are all things that an introductory class would cover.

Beyond that it’s mostly a matter of doing it more. Draw a certain kind of object, and distort or tweak it in a bunch of ways, and you’ll get better first at drawing that object and a little bit of generalizable stuff.

The era of fucking around is concluded and the era of finding out is yet to come; now is the time of monsters

Getting the damn business up and running!

Hopefully, making 500 regular customers.