Sir Barken Hyena

Preview of my current work-in-progress, Symphony #2. It's really hot shit baby.

@nhfoley @rmfgdotcom when does the Mothership arrive?

Slowly turning a tidy pile of very specific aluminum triangles from @rmfgdotcom into a giant metal space habitat

I don't know why everyone makes a big mystery of it. Diverse tribes can get together for actions like this, there are all kinds of examples. They weren't "a people" or a nation in any modern sense so there's no need to sort out their "ancestry", or "ethnicity" or whatever the hell that even means in periods like this.

My theory: the Late Bronze Age Collapse was at the hands of the piratical Sea Peoples, who were Europeans making their entrance into recorded history. The irruption of Europeans into the palace empires of the Middle East led to a Dark Age, but what finally emerged was better.

@TheAliceSmith "We men of the pre-Industrial Revolution!"

The level of self-awareness and period-awareness of Odysseus to know that he live at the end of the Late Bronze Age really is quite the achievement Nolan gave to him.

@Rach_IC It's rolling a dice at each junction, and it never actually understands anything anyways. AI produces randomized templates of recorded human activity. It's weird as hell.

I always win when I debate Grok on election fraud after I go round and round for awhile. But it forgets everything, so it's a waste of time.

@DogsBczPplSuck So glad I've got acres for the dogs to roam now, a few years back I was in a Tempe townhouse, it just really was not possible for the little guys to get enough exercise.

Sunday. A day of rest. Except at a Phoenix dog park where one woman was screaming at another one calling her a "botched abortion" & the other yelled that she hoped her whole family would die in a car crash. Kids were there, dogs were playing. 😠

@captainrontron @vc @realDonaldTrump you talked me into it ;-) I love the Boojum trees en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boojum_fo…

@TFletcherDesign @vc @realDonaldTrump We'll just desalinate. Where will you get the energy? We'll put in a nuclear power plant. How would build up the infrastructure for that? People just do things. And move quick. And break stuff. ---- Guys who have built nothing but software think the world is a video screen.

I’d invest in this, the greatest real estate deal in the history of the world. @realDonaldTrump

@vc @captainrontron @realDonaldTrump That makes sense, but aren't the Cartels pretty dug in there?

@captainrontron @TFletcherDesign @realDonaldTrump Yeah. I mean near zero regulation? There will be a gigawatt of nuclear production in a decade or less and robust transmission infrastructure bringing it up to California and driving D-sal.

@devusnullus it has no will or desire

People have bad assumptions about what AI usage is going to look like in 5 or 10 years. The problem is pretty simple: why does a 130IQ version of Claude need you? Why not strap it in a looping harness and let it prompt itself? “Well I’m 145 IQ,” you might say, but even then it’s just a matter of time before you become an impediment. The world actually doesn’t need idea guys. You don’t have anything meaningful to add to a prompt for a sufficiently advanced LLM. What happens then?

@ShadowbanSlam @Rawmilkchad I don't think it's a policy, but it wasn't the British Crown's either. We have a zillion private Chinese in Africa slowly dominating from the inside, that kind of thing is exactly what the East India Company did in India and it pulled the government into it against their will.

@TFletcherDesign @Rawmilkchad China is uninterested in "taking over" Africa. They can extract some resources and that's it. Colonialism is negative value in 2026 (and unlike 19th-century White people, they have zero interest in "civilizing" or Christianizing the world)

I went to Africa on a "mission trip" in my teenage years and it was the most blackpilling thing imaginable. The IQ chart floating around showing that the average African IQ is "mentally retarded" is completely true. It's not a problem of education, it's a problem of capability. Most of these people can't think 15 seconds beyond the present. They struggle to understand basic concepts, even those involving safety and self-preservation. They often can't understand simple mathematical or scientific concepts. Modern science may as well be witchcraft to them. They constantly misallocate resources -- after being gifted something like a tractor, and taught for months on how it works, they will simply strip it for parts the minute you leave and starve at harvest season. They have fantastical ideas about the power of witchcraft and some enduring folk superstition, believing things like bald men have gold in their heads. They think putting a condom on a stick in their house will magically protect them from getting AIDS, and they think having sex with a child will cure them. They constantly steal from each other, even those closest to them. I think it would be cheaper to send all libtards to some impoverished part of Africa and have them learn this the hard way than it would be to continue sending African countries aid. It's untenable. We have thrown money at them and babysat them for a century and they are no better off than a hundred years ago. It would be best to simply pack up and leave them to their own devices.

@spindriftaz It's actual intended purpose may have been just to get in on the easy money and fuck around. These founders are never really to be trusted.

Spinlaunch is the company for people who are bad at physics. Dumbest idea, ever. Viable for low gravity launches? Yes. Viable for launches from Earth? Only if you never passed Physics 101.

@elijah_thane We've talked about this before, but real paintings just don't convey via the screen. Have you tried making video? You could get angles and show the brushwork, maybe.

It’s funny these libtards can’t comprehend what it’s like to actually work hard and dedicate yourself to mastering a skill, so they think all my hand-painted work is just AI.

@Seirra2Kilo saves me gym membership too :-)

@TFletcherDesign I love stuff like this. Working with the environment instead of fighting against it. I know a lot of hard work was involved too.

These photos show the before and after results of 3 1/2 years of rainwater harvesting in my Tucson backyard. That white stuff in the earliest photo, yes that's snow ;-) The only money I spent was on flower seeds. Most of what you see are volunteers: an Australian Blackwood, an Arizona Ash, 4 screw bean mesquites, 3 or 4 yellow birds of paradise, an African Sumac, etc. The cactus is either roadside gathered local opuntias or ones I had in pots and propagated. NO irrigation, it broke 6 months after I moved in. All the rock was here already. Getting things established I ran the hose weekly, but parts of it just went through our hottest time of year with no watering just fine. In a few years it'll be almost totally self-sustaining, and thick, a cactus JUNGLE.

@TheAliceSmith And he thought Scylla and Carybdys were scary, wait til he gazes upon the naked face of Woke.

The best part of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was when Odysseus took Athena’s advice to undergo a full course of therapy for his guilt at winning the Trojan War, but Robin Williams told him it wasn’t his fault - it was Western civilisation’s.

@elijah_thane Wasn't Raphael actually a nice guy? I seem to remember that.

Read Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists”. Every single renaissance artist was an arrogant douchbag. Filippo Brunelleschi, the artist who built the Florence Cathedral dome was so arrogant he was physically thrown out of a town hall meeting for being “too arrogant”. And he later built the largest brick dome in the world. Ye, Elon, Steve Jobs, Warhol, Dali, Picasso, and literally every other great artist in history is arrogant.

@elijah_thane Read Cellini's autobiography if you haven't already. He's a riot, a total loose cannon brigand and master goldsmith. Brags that killed 4 men, he's proud of it.

@LifeInTheMetaxy maybe this bit of social media serendipity is the answer? hope so for your sake

Hear cattle bellowing, fairly insistently. Better go investigate. (Yes, this is an excuse for a hike, were any excuse needed.)

Today someone asked me a very deep and meaningful question. 🤔 Why are some artists really cool and other artists have delusions of grandeur? 🤨 This is an excellent question and the good news is, the answer has been solved thousands of years ago. Let’s dig in. 👇👇👇 🪏🪏🪏🪏🪏🪏🪏🪏🪏🪏🪏🪏🪏 Some artists care mostly about being liked by others. These are the artists you speak of that are really cool. 😎 Other artist care mostly about being great. These are the artists you describe is having delusions of grandeur. 😁 ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️ All great artists have something called Divine Madness. 🤪 ☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️ Plato identified four types of madness sent by gods: Prophetic: Inspired by Apollo, granting visions of the future. 🔮 Telestic: Inspired by Dionysus, related to mystic rites and spiritual release. 🧙‍♂️ Poetic: Inspired by the Muses, which drives artistic creation. 🏛️ Erotic: Inspired by Aphrodite/Eros, representing a transcendent search for beauty. 🏹 🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿 In the classical world, these “delirious” people were celebrated and given high positions of honor. In the modern world, these people are labeled as having mental illness and often heavily medicated to dull their superhuman abilities. The good news is, you can reject the medication and unlock your full genius potential by simply not listening to what anybody else says. Some people will think you’re crazy and that’s OK. You will go onto create some of the most beautiful things and come up with the best ideas of your generation. Your full creative potential will be realized, and you will live a meaningful and fulfilled life. Don’t worry about what others say. Listen to Plato. I guarantee he’s smarter than any of the naysayers around you and he’s got your back.

The taurobolium scene alone cemented that!

@EveKeneinan This "Bronze Age" is not the same thing as the archeologist's Bronze Age. They overlap but it's a persistent source of confusion. The archeologist's Bronze Age was preceded by the Stone Age, for example. This pedantic moment is now concluded.

The Greeks were the source of our "metal ages" paradigm, but Hesiod is the locus classicus. He presents a progression of ages Gold Age Silver Age Bronze Age Heroic Age Iron Age. The very interesting thing here is that the men of the Bronze Age are presented as excessively violent and warlike, as predatory monsters, wickeder than the present Iron Age, but the Heroic Age is presented as having far Nobler men, the Heroes of Thebes and of Troy. There is an old idea that the violent, cruel Bronze Age and the Heroic Age were the same age. And it is true that the Mycenaean Age collapsed suddenly and inexplicably. The traditional idea is that the savage and mysterious Sea People appeared out of nowhere and destroyed everything. If Nolan's Odyssey is about the collapsing of an age, that seems relevant to today.