Yep, I’m going to embark upon a podcast route and, with the help of the entire tech staff here at the Home, I ought to have one of them newfangled things up and running before very long.
The idea I have in mind for my podcast is to do live readings of my books, pamphlets, lost works, that sort of thing, each episode being a complete reading of something or other, starting with something not overly ambitious, something on the order of anywhere from 5 to 20 minutes’ worth of vocals, as it were.
That’s a lot of microphone time, especially if it’s nonstop, as this would hopefully be. Wait, that sentence construction is wrong. Lessee, how could it go???
That’s a lot of microphone time, especially if it’s nonstop, as would be hopefully this. No, that’s no better, is it?
Well, forget about the hopeful part.
Speaking of hopelessness and despair, hang on for the next two weekends, they should be a bang-up job, if my forecasting is anything to brag about, and it is.
I’ve been spot-on about every action so far, in “SlimeWars”, written and privately published some 45 years ago, maybe more.
One thing I hate is to be right about these things.
Can’t be helped. Might as well make the best of it, so I’ve decided to re-introduce fiber beads.
That’s right, I said fiber beads. You know, beads made out of fiber. Now, if you’re not a regular customer at the fabric department of your local craft supply store, you probably won’t know what the Sam Hill I’m talking about, and I daresay that’s the situation in a nutshell, so here’s some basics about fiber beads.
- FIBER BEADS, otherwise known as “fibre beads”, are beads made of or with fiber.
- FIBER is something like cloth, only it’s not anything like cloth.
- STRAWS are what you use for the interior of fiber beads.
- WRAPPING FIBER around straw is how the beads are made.
What tools and materials will you need to make your own fiber beads?
- FIBER — Generally called “yarn”, but it could be anything that happens to fit the description. Anything you can wrap around a straw will do.
- SCISSORS — I use cloth shears, but don’t use them EVER for paper!
- STRAWS — You can use extra-wide straws from your local party store, or regular plastic straws from the supermarket. They both work.
- DOUBLE-STICK SCOTCH TAPE — I don’t mean to suggest another brand won’t work. This is wrapped around the straw to give some stickiness to the thing, but it takes either a knot or a drop of glue or both to seal the bargain.
- HARDWOOD BEADS — A must-have, and I have them for sale, cheap.
- 16 gauge ordinary COPPER WIRE — What, you don’t have a hardware store in town? don’t expect me to ship you something you ought to be able to find just down the street.
- FLUSH-CUT CLIPPERS — they need to be robust and sharp and really flush-cut.
- NEEDLE-NOSE PLIERS — I always use the same kind, thick to thin — I show these on my demos, in workshops and clinics, and in my books on the subject.
- EAR-WIRES — Surgical steel earwires in gold color are what you want. Easily obtained, fairly cheap, I buy them by the thousand pair at a time to get a price break.
- MODELING STAND — this is to hang your finished project. Have the finished piece take a selfie, or you do it for them, on the black velvet necklace & earring display stand.
- GLUE GUN — Optional, you may want to put a SINGLE very tiny drop of glue at the end of your fiber wrap.
That’s it, pretty much. You might find other items of use, but this is the basic set you’ll actually need to make a decent product.
The quality of the fiber is of utmost importance. It’s just not worth using garbage. You use so little fiber, don’t worry over price — I often pay $30-$65 a skein for my fabrics. Yak yarn, the real stuff, is even more money, but I don’t use so much at a time that it really matters.
Of course, I’m only getting donations for my work, not set prices. You might operate differently.
I will make a necklace for you, or a necklace and earring set for you for a donation of whatever you feel is fair, and no more than you can afford.
The donations will be applied to the roof-repair we need to get done before the rainy season sets in, which will not be long in coming.
Forty days and forty nights is my plan for the coming rains — I hope it’s enough to do the job.
I’m counting on YOU to finish your ark by the time the sky opens up and lets go trillions of tons of water upon the Earth.
I know, it’s the same old thing, but it ALWAYS works, and leaves over just enough humans to start again.
See, to me, that’s the whole problem, right there. It leaves some of them alive, and that’s never a good sign.
I go by the old tradition — wipe ’em all out.
No prisoners.
Well, that might work for Lawrence of Arabia, but it’s definitely not my way. My way is the fair way, and that means losing some of the time.
Sure, they can play it the Star Wars way — “Let the Wookie win.” — but that’s just a cop-out to sheer power, and that’s never the way out of any jam.
Nope, you gotta take the bull by the horns and flush it down the toilet.
That ought to take care of both the problem and the solution. So “Flood” it is, although I had my heart really set on the triple-punch: “meteorite”, then “medium-sized asteroid”, and finally a giant cometary mass that takes the whole thing down to bare rock once again, the way we slime-molds like it.
I can’t stand an atmosphere thicker than 18 inches high, can you?
It’s great being a slime-mold, much better than being a human or a lemur — they’re about the same, socially speaking, but the slime-mold is telepathic, and your average human is not.
Oh, not that the mechanism is missing — it isn’t. Anyone can telepath, just as anyone can self-mutate.
Self-Evolution is just a matter of outgrowing your need for matter. What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? It doesn’t matter.
I’m going into the house now, to have some breakfast, after which I’ll be doing my morning show and, with some luck, I’ll last the entire hour.
There’s not a lot of future ahead at the moment — we won’t know more until some more time passes, and it won’t be anything altogether certain, no matter what the outcome of the next election.
It’s a tossup now, and we’ll see how it comes down.
The thing is, it’s always the same, but the exact FORM changes each time we pass through the game.
Is it the END OF THE GAME?
I’d like to say we’ve beaten The Wheel of Karma, but we haven’t. It’s still turning. You can be free in the center of The Wheel, but eventually, you’ll come back out again.
It’s just a matter of time.
You itch, and itch, and itch, and eventually, sooner or later, you scratch.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby