This should be a real thing…

I’m archive binging Questionable Content again, and I don’t remember this comic from 2018.Having stoned people in soft focus would make dealing with them so much easier.

And searching the tags for this post reminded me about when I was in “Least I Could Do” around the same date as the comic. I’m sure y’all remember that one from the week after Valentine’s Day 2018. I was worried about the prostitute character we hadn’t seen in-comic for a few years, and this was her sign-off from the comic.

What I’ve been working on to give me something to write about

In a nutshell I have been making a Micro Sprint-T from a Hot Wheels T-bucket. I’m modifying a set of Gasser wheels and tires to model the ones used on the A-Mod SCCA SOLO-2 version of the car, which is basically the widest set of slicks that will still work for the weight of the car. I remembered to take pictures as I was working this time, so I have something to show for the work until I get the $$ and spoons to make something else. That’s not something that happens much nowadays, having both at the same time.

Money that isn’t already spent does not happen very often around here, like almost never. And having spoons to do something that isn’t taking care of Mrs. the Poet or myself is also something that doesn’t happen very often, and is getting less frequent over time.

Anywho what I did was buy 2 sets of Gasser Wheels and tires to get 4 tires of close to the right size with 4 wheels of the correct style, then buff the treads off the tires to get realistic-looking slicks. I discovered that each tire needs a new emery board and about 4 hours to complete after spending more than 14 hours on the first tire with a used emery board and still not getting it done.

This is done, more or less. This took about 4 hours and destroyed a brand-new emery board.

The left tire is almost done after many hours of work and the right tire is getting there after the same amount of work with a used emery board and nail buff. I will use the nail buff to finish the other tires but it’s pretty useless for removing the majority of the tread depth. In scale those treads started about 2″ tall and are about ¹/₂” tall on the left tire now. They’re a little taller on the right tire.

The left tire is unmodified, the right tire has about 3 hours of work with a fresh emery board.

I’ll buff the rest of the tread off with a nail buff to get a perfect “used slick” appearance. Basically showing the various stages of completion from raw “as received” to waiting the final buff.

I thought you should see close to what I envisioned for the wheels on all the versions. I actually wanted oval port Ansens, but those aren’t made any more. These are close enough for ¹/₆₄ scale.

It has been a while, and I had a bicycle dream last night

OK why I was gone for a while, as you may have heard it got stupid cold here in N TX last week and over the weekend, like in the teens for highs and down into the high single digits for lows (official low was 10°F, but colder here in the suburbs). My computer desk is next to a window, that leaks air, and sitting down and writing was a no-go. I had to read my web comics on my phone because it was too cold to get out from under the blankets and even that was hard because my hands got painfully cold. I wore sweat pants and a long-sleeve T to bed because I ran out of blankets. Basically all I got out of bed for was cooking and eating, and trips to the bathroom to use the toilet. The bathroom was the warmest room in the house because it didn’t have any outside walls or windows and it did have heat. The heat pump ran basically over 48 hours straight because of the crappy windows we have leaking cold air into the house. It was below freezing here about 60 hours straight, an hour or two longer than at the official recording station over in Dallas at Love Field airport which is surrounded by the urban heat island.

I had some strange dreams about riding an upwrong bike in the cold with a group and one ride I remember was a 300km ride in the cold to qualify for a RUSA medal for riding 300 km or more with a high temp less than 1°C. I don’t remember what the name of the medal was, something like “Ice Butt” and I don’t know if that was a real medal or just something I dreamed about. Anyway, it was a long dream and people’s clothes kept changing colors and I don’t know if they were shedding and adding layers or if random dream coloring effects because dream logic, but it was interesting to dream about. I think I was dreaming about it because of the cold, but it was nice to dream about bike riding again. Even if it was on the wrong kind of bike. Back when I could still get on a bike I rode recumbent and crank forward bikes exclusively. Now if I want to ride I need to get a tadpole trike that I can just back up to and clip in and ride. I guess I really miss riding.

Anywho, in case you didn’t hear we set 2 new record lows for the dates, one 11°F and the other 10°F. It was colder here in the suburbs, but that didn’t count because we are miles away from the official recording station, and I had strange dreams because of the cold. I’ll catch you later.

We didn’t blow away and we didn’t win the lotto

Not writing about writing today, just the weather and the lottery/Powerball. You know, normal things to write about in a blog.

The actual topics are good luck/bad luck. Obviously the “good” luck was nothing was damaged by the high winds last night, with gusts over 40 MPH. The neighborhood trash was “redistributed”, but because most people have “tornado rated” shingles around here roof damages were limited to tree limbs falling on roofs and I think I saw one broken window from a flying tree limb or other debris.

The “bad” luck was we were one number away from winning something in the Powerball. We had 2 numbers, and to win something you need 3 numbers or 2 and the Powerball. Although some might say that was the good luck to not win…

On another front I just spent over 2 hours listening to a single piece of music on the YTM trance channel, by a group called GOA. Nothing Earth-shattering, just nice music that was soothing for me and my ADHD maybe-autistic TBI-damaged brain.

Timeskip really needs another story

I feel like I really didn’t do the character justice with the short story. Basically I outlined his life and glossed over his accomplishments then said “The End”. But where to start and what to say about it. And I completely skipped any spawnlings or however you want to describe progeny. At some point if there were any progeny he became a single father after his wife died. And there’s another unnamed character… Basically I’m not a very good writer of fiction.

I really need to show how his powers make him basically impervious to getting hurt by a punch or kick. Other than just stating it. There has to be some threshold of harm that below he can feel the impact and take minor damage and above is like … a tickle or a slap when other people’s bones would be broken. Actually, I think that’s the threshold, a slap gets through because no real damage gets done, but a punch does more harm to the puncher than to Timeskip. Just for grins lets make it canon that someone broke their hand punching Timeskip because they didn’t know about the timeskip power and punched like they wanted to kill him and the result was like punching a concrete wall, with many broken bones and joints. The bad thing about this story is basically all the “Bad Guys” are street-level goons. There are no supervillains in the Timeskip universe. There may be another superhero, but there’s no confirmation she is a real person. For some reason nobody has been able to take a picture of her or even made a decent sketch. Nobody can even get her hair and eye colors, even when there were two people at the scene they saw different things. (Hey, it’s my universe/worldbuilding. I can add things as I want to. If I say that witnesses can’t even agree what clothes she was wearing, or what color her hair was, that’s Word Of God.)

Basically at this point Timeskip is Batman with a less-tragic origin story and no real villains. OK no Supervillains. There are villains aplenty when dealing with the world of high finance, just they all hide in the shadows. They may be Evil with a capital “E”, but they are banal as villains, they aren’t trying to take over the world or something like that, they just want All The Money! And they are so shortsighted they don’t even realize that they’re just destroying the thing they need to keep power.

And I need to come up with a name for his wife. Timeskip was married for 12 years, there has to be at least a first name for her, and the form of cancer she died from. And it has to be one of the ones that doesn’t have an effective treatment for yet. And if it’s something that keeps her from getting pregnant that’s even better for the story. Any suggestions? Leave them in the comments.

Well, crap

If you’re like me and actively avoiding the news lately because of Mango Mussolini getting his face on it every day, you may have missed that it only took 4 days into the New Year to get a school shooting that’s also a mass shooting. One dead 6th grader that was just there for free breakfast, 5 other victims who were just wounded (“just” 😦 ), and a dead shooter from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Also a rudimentary pipe bomb that may or may not have been capable of exploding as it existed but detonated by the bomb squad out of precaution.

And this is a result of all those “thoughts and prayers” members of Congress (the opposite of Progress) blocking any meaningful gun control legislation that keeps children and insane people from having access to guns. I put children with insane people because both groups exhibit poor impulse control. In fact that is one of the defining characteristics of children, poor impulse control.

I’m not going to list how this could have been prevented, because that has been hashed and rehashed to death, and I’m pretty sure y’all don’t need to hear it from me and that you are as sick and tired of hearing it as I am. But I do have one succinct observation: It’s the stupid guns! Can’t shoot people without guns and ammo; no guns, no shootings.

I have a solution to Abbott’s razor wire getting in the way of the Border Patrol

It’s really simple, the BP can’t get to people to arrest them or rescue them because the razor wire is on the riverbank, and the courts have said they can’t cut the wire because it belongs to the state. Well the road is technically Federal property and the river bank is too, so the courts could order Abbott to remove TX property from Federal property and place it on the side of the road away from the river.

Abbott could stack his razor wire as high as he wants to keep immigrants out of Texas, and the CBP could still arrest/rescue people on the bank. Personally I would just as soon take it all off the river and pile it up around the Governor’s Mansion and keep him inside if he’s so afraid of brown people, but that would be cruel to the other people in the Mansion. And eventually they would all run out of food unless someone sets up drone delivery, and in a few weeks they would get overrun with garbage inside the wire, so the perfect punishment for Abbott and those who are with him voluntarily.

So, wat’chu think? Too cruel, not cruel enough? Make placing anything obstructing the BP a Federal Crime if it isn’t already? Throw Abbott and his chair in separate areas of the razor wire and let him figure it out while he’s bleeding?

I didn’t find this in time, but if I had this was what I wanted for Christmas

Bigfoot Crossing MUTCD compliant sign

Y’all know I’m eccentric right? Well Imma need two of these and a post to put them on so they face both directions around the turn on the street I live on. Now I don’t have to give the exact address to the Uber driver, just say, “I live at the Bigfoot Crossing sign on Sage Drive.” And with signs facing both directions it doesn’t matter which way they come from. As long as they were on the right side of the feeder street Sage branches off from, they could find the house. And if I’m in my winter fur it would be technically true.

If you have some extra $$ and wat to get this for me leave a comment with contact data and I’ll email you the address and everything. Or text you if that’s your preferred method of contact.

The new page is actually about the superpower of being rich

If you read my latest story about Timeskip, well his real superpower is being rich. No matter how you get rich, if you’re rich, you have a freaking superpower. Rich people can literally change their worlds with their money. And in the story I do that, I literally pull people, lots of people, out of poverty and set them on their feet with the power of money to build low-income housing and give the marginalized access to jobs. Because that’s what moral people with access to lots of money do, they house the homeless, employ the otherwise unemployable, and feed the hungry. Notice how many moral rich people we have IRL, next to none.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

I figured some stuff out for the story

Basically I figured out how to have Timeskip use his powers in a fight offensively rather than straight defense. Basically he uses his ability to see into the future for seconds, instead of weeks to years, knowing where to punch or trip his foe and when he can’t avoid taking a hit, using the ability to take his body out of time to prevent injury. I think I mentioned that he already uses this ability to manipulate the stock market to use penny stocks to make him a millionaire by the time he’s 30, and a billionaire on the order of Gates or Musk by the time he’s 50 because he invests in stocks like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon while they are still penny stocks and holds them until, well he’s a billionaire.

A story beat I’m still trying to work out is how he becomes a philanthropist while still fighting crime and saving lives as a superhero, the transition from a poor nobody to billionaire philanthropist, building homeless shelters and food pantries, and funding scholarships etc. Going from A to Z with all the stops at B, C, D, etc. and still make it something like the real world, because he can see the timeline that he stays poor like me, but wants to prevent it from happening to other people, too. One thing you can be certain of is that he would invest in green energy startups, big time, and use whatever rep he had for picking winners promote it as the next big thing, because you can bet climate change would be a mess in that universe as well. Because Timeskip’s universe is basically this universe, but with fewer fascists and idiots in the GOP. And Timeskip would use an anon Twitter account to direct people to do good things and get rich like him. Basically Timeskip would be like Professor X but without the messing with minds thing. Maybe not an exciting story, but a feel-good story. And I don’t see many super fights, but some patrolling as a vigilante using the precognition to prevent crimes from happening and loss of life when possible. I’m sure Timeskip could stop a few mass shootings using his money to secure transport to the scene of the crime before the crime happened and stop it before it happens, either by alerting LEO, or intercepting the shooter and diverting him from doing the shooting. Obviously he can’t stop all the shootings, but he could save some lives.

So, that’s what I’ve got so far, comments?