Bureaucracy

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Couldn’t find the artist’s name but he goes by lordampersand online. The medium (?) is ink and watercolor. From his Mastodon feed:

“Research for this piece has provided a name for an aesthetic I’ve always been fascinated by: “Liminal Spaces”, the depictions of places in-between.”

You can see his sketches as this piece progressed here. From his website:

“i’m a self-tought artist from switzerland. my drawings and paintings are usually analogue (ink, watercolor). i’m fascinated by the interaction between organic and technological processes, the things that grow and the things that are built.”

More art here »

New tag: dystopia

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Given my fondness for speculative/science fiction, I was a little surprised I didn’t have a tag for ‘dystopia.’ Many of my favorite novels are set in “an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.”

Snow Crash, Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse, Twenty Thirty, The Handmaid’s Tale, Mockingbird, and –of course– much/most of William Gibson’s work (The Peripheral, Agency, the Bridge Trilogy, and pretty much all the early stuff).

“The country had cracked”

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“It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized, it became harder and harder for American culture to breathe. Not only were people broke, but they were taunted to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities. It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave.”

— Distraction by Bruce Sterling (1998)

Land Rover Hardtop Rack

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In a couple of weeks it will be time to remove the hardtop from the Land Rover. (The first true sign of spring.) For the last few years this has involved gathering a crew to remove the top (video) and move it to wherever I could find to store it. If the ceiling of one’s garage is high enough, you can simple winch it up until it’s time to drop it back on in the fall. Insufficient head-room on my garage forced me to store the hardtop in a rental unit which worked fine until a tornado swept through Jefferson City.

After repairing the banged up hardtop I stored it in a basement room, a tedious and cumbersome process. So the next year we suspended the hardtop under the deck. Which worked fine but, again, took a half dozen people. What I really needed was a way to unbolt the hardtop, lift it up, and drive away. I needed a LRHR (Land Rover Hardtop Rack).

A local machine shop has constructed a simple steel frame and it should be ready in a couple of days. I found a good spot for it on our recently acquired acreage. While raking away old leaves and wood chips I discovered big cement slab that was part of a dog run 40 years ago.

It’s almost in the exact right spot and here’s the strange part: the hardtop rack will be seven feet wide and twelve feet long. The slab is 7’5″ wide and 25′ long.

The plan is to back the Land Rover up to the rack, unbolt the top, and back the truck under the frame. We’ll then use tie-down straps to suspend the top to the rack and ratchet it up off the body of the truck. We won’t be adding the hoop kit this year because I discovered I liked driving the truck topless.

UPDATE 4/26/22: The rack has been delivered and assembled. Still have to bolt the rack to the cement pad but the plan is to lift the top this weekend.