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 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.

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