Born in Pain and Sweat and Pee: the 2024 Gallery Update
I have been wracked by COVID over the last ten days. If I’m not hot enough to set paper aflame, I’m wet enough to single-handedly power a water slide. Throughout the night, every 25 minutes on the dot, I shed my own body mass in sweat like some kind of human hagfish. I take desperate midnight baths consisting of no more than 40% water: the rest is mucous and sweat (and pee the consistency of machine oil and the color of blood oranges, if I’m not fast enough hauling myself out of the tub when Nature calls). I fart like the Hindenburg. The BUG says she has not seen me laid this low since the days of Flesh-Eating Fest, over a dozen years ago.
And yet, I promised you all a Gallery update.
Normally I would just say, Fuck you all: I’m sick, you can wait another week or two. But this particular update has an inflexible expiry date, for it includes the printer files for Jon Bell’s Scrambler Christmas Ornaments, which are either useful now or not for another year. So I’m been slogging away. ragged, nauseous, the noblest Squid on the plain. Between hacks and migraines I’ve curated over sixty artifacts―thirty in the rifters gallery, the rest over in Blindopraxia―that would, I’m certain, comprise a special collection for the ages if only I could see the fucking things through the splinters in my eyes.
There are, as I’ve mentioned, the scrambler ornaments―just barely in under the wire, but that’s still plenty good enough for anyone with a maker in their possession. There’s a mini-soundtrack for Blindsight, courtesy of the composer who scored the only movie actually filmed in outer space. There are some surprisingly-good AI-generated renderings of the Juan de Fuca Ridge (also some slop, admittedly, but not a much as you might think). There’s some new official cover art out of Poland. There are radio spots, as capitalism staples on a cheery face to ring a few more bucks out of the apocalypse. And there’s an animated gif showing Sarasti as a furry.
Because of course there is.
Once I post this I expect to collapse either until the next drench sweat or until February. I will never do this again.
Merry Christmas.
Hang in there and take care of yourself. I admire your reckless productivity. When I had Covid, at one point I came to while sitting on the bathroom floor in a puddle of pee and/or sweat and there wasn’t a single damned artistic creation in sight.
Get well! And happy holidays!
The zip file for the scrambler printer model seems to be corrupt.
Get well soon!
Merry christmas! Hope you feel better soon