Depression is really quite depressing

Depression is really quite depressing.

That may seem tautologous, but let me expand a bit on my thesis with jolly tales of Stupid Brain Chemicals, and how they've made life less enjoyable (in parts) than necessary, and how I've tried to live with the importunate pricks.

Episodes of depression have been a recurring part of my life ever since adolescence. The first notable example was in my first year at university, in Palmerston North, in 1981, and it was notable for its intensity — in retrospect, I now recognise much of my earlier adolescent feelings as depressive, but they were more inchoate, and generally subsumed in the usual melange of hormonal chaos common to that age group — and also because it was the first time that I recognised what was actually happening to me.

I had a bunch of emotional complications going on at the time, which seemed terribly important then, so when the world became gloomy and pointless and everything seemed utterly futile, I assumed that these were objective, not subjective feelings, that this bleak sadness was in the world itself, and not just in my brain's interpretation of it. I didn't have any intellectual separation between my mental state, and the state of my life at the time (which was, admittedly, pretty parlous).

As well as making me feel generally sad, hopeless, and helpless, it frankly terrified me. I could see no light at the end of this tunnel, no worthwhile future of any kind, and I couldn't understand why or how the world had suddenly changed so much for the worse. I could see no way out. I drank a lot, and I took a lot of drugs.

I don't remember how or why, but one day I had an epiphany. "Aha!" I said to myself, "I am depressed! This is depression!"

That realisation didn't, of course, immediately make me feel all right, but it did profoundly change my mental process around my state. It meant that the world itself had not suddenly become so bleak and threatening as I had thought, and most importantly it meant that I could see my depression as a perceptual filter that would not be permanent, I just had to wait the fucker out.

I did not, of course, become a Secret Master of Depression at that time. Or at any time soon. But ever since that epiphany, when the grey fog closed in, I could at least — eventually — recognise what was going on, and grit my teeth until it went away again. I still made some stupid life choices when depressed, but maybe not as many as I might have if I hadn't known what was going on.

Over the years, those episodes became less frequent, and less intense, and less long-lasting, and I've come to recognise likely triggers — illness or injury will often spark a bout. Part of that reduction in severity is, I think, to do with the hormonal changes that aging brings. Another part is to do with my attitude to depression — I treat it like that old acquaintance, who I never really liked that much anyway, who turns up to stay, unannounced. I start consciously doing things that I know my Depressive Houseguest will hate, so that he will just FUCK. RIGHT. OFF. I try to do things that I will (or should) enjoy, and I consciously try to enjoy them. I treat myself. I get more exercise, and try to enjoy that. The enjoyment may be strained, and to begin with at least, fake. But over time, I basically fool myself into thinking that I'm happy, and one day I find that I'm not having to pretend any more, until next time at least.

It's not as simple as just "trying not to be depressed", which is, by the way, the most amazingly fatuous advice it's possible to receive. Maybe second most fatuous, after crystals.

I guess, if I were to boil down my technique for dealing with depression now, it is that will no longer pander to it. If you submit to depression, encourage its advances, it will just settle in and make itself comfortable. If that happens, there's the danger that you just get used to it being around, and when you do that, life just gets generally worse.

Depression is real, but it's not true.

Fuck depression.

A Neck of Great Power

I often use my sketchbooks as a kind of journal, an aide-memoire to remind me of what I was doing and thinking at the time.

This one, however, gives me no clues whatsoever. I have no memory of what I was thinking at all.

Pintle Hinged Box

I'm in the process of making yet another box to keep stuff in. Here it is being made all shiny and black.

It's just MDF, so nothing special there, but I thought I would try a thing: I cut a regular hinge in half to make a pair of pintle hinges (I used an old flush hinge, though a butt hinge would work as well or better). The idea with the pintle hinges is that I can then remove the box lid entirely, or leave it hinged to the body as need be.

I have learned a couple of things from this exercise:

1. that my soldering skills could do with a lot more practice because they are really shit, and
2. that one pintle should be left longer than the other so that you can engage them one at a time, instead of having to get them both lined up at once to assemble them.

The Great School Strike of '19

When I read some nonsense from an upright pillar of the community, be it a headmaster or a politician or whatever, about how outrageous it is that school pupils should have the temerity to disrupt their schooling for one day to make their voices heard on what is a vitally important issue to all of us, in my mind's eye I always imagine them as some gouty bloated bottle-nosed English squire in an overstuffed leather chair in his Gentlemen's Club, going red-faced with apoplexy as he spills his port and brandishes his walking stick, holding forth about the worthlessness of the younger generation and how they should all be thrashed to within an inch of their lives.

It is an image of obsolete social irrelevance that comforts me; such waffling buffoons will surely end up being shunted aside, and good riddance to them. Go the kids.

Everybody

Everybody.

Dunes — woodblock

Woodcut, approx. 340 x 110 mm, oil-based inks

I found this little woodcut I did years and years ago at Hagley, when I was doing the prep course for entry into CPIT's design degree course.

It's a simple thing, but mine own. I quite like it, though I think the colours could do with a bit of refinement.

Skull-Bones

Happy Valentine's Day

So Romantic.

Photoshop, 2007

New Commercial Venture

I've uploaded some of my artwork to RedBubble at https://www.redbubble.com/people/MojoBob as a means of hopefully selling some prints and things.

They print stuff on to all sorts of things — phone cases, pillow cases, cushions, curtains, key rings — as well as your normal paper or canvas prints and posters. I get a cut of the price they charge for the Things, but what that cut is I'm unsure right now; I think it varies between 10% and 30%, but exactly what determines that I'm not sure.

Whether this will bear fruit or not, I have no idea. I hope so.

If you have a burning desire to own a physical copy of something I've done, and it's not already available on RedBubble, just drop me a note and I'll put it up there.

Hairy Fishy Critter

Here's a hairy fishy critter. I'm not completely sure that I'm finished with it just yet, but I'm finished enough for the moment.

Mostly done in Krita, with a little bit of help from Photoshop.

I really need to see if I can create custom brush collections in Krita; There are only a few that I use all the time, and it's kind of a pain constantly scrolling back and forth through all of the brush types to get to them.

Crimes were committed, for sure

Just watched Fantastic Creatures - Crimes of Grimblebimblebumblyboo and didn't think much of it really. Terrible pacing and rather confused, directionless plotting. I get that writers like to give their characters some depth (usually), but that doesn't mean that every single character has to be emotionally wracked and distraught ALL THE GODDAM TIME.

Johnny Depp's Grindlewald was a bit of a relief in that respect — no emotional self-flagellation, just got on with the EEEEEEEvilness, like a proper villain.

Also, like a proper villain, he was always polite. That's how you can tell your proper villains. Manners.

I imagined Grindlewald's aides taking new people aside and saying, sotto voce, "Don't stare at the eye. Just don't." And then later on, sweeping up little piles of ash and muttering to themselves about stupid fucking people who just couldn't resist staring at the fucking eye when they'd been specifically told not to stare at the eye.

Also, when did Dumbledore et al. stop wearing natty tweeds and trilbies and stuff and take up wearing all those hippy velvet dressing gowns? Was it the sixties? Is that what did it?

Scrabble Box

Every household needs a box to keep their Scrabble set in, and this is now ours.

The original cardboard box finally gave up the ghost and disintegrated, so I made a new one, a bit sturdier than the old.

This is the first time I've tried a faux-finish. The top and bottom are just 6mm MDF that I've stained with a grain pattern, then shellacked and waxed. The sides are some bits of 8mm oak tongue-and-groove* I had lying around, and the inside is paint.

The most expensive part of the whole thing was the brass fittings, which cost an unreasonable amount of money. I would have liked to have had a bright brass latch as well, but I didn't have one handy, and I wasn't going to pay an exorbitant amount to get one.

* Actually some groove-and-groove. The reason I had it in my wood-pile is because somebody fucked up and then threw it in the rubbish.

Earthly Delights

Bubble Love

Earthly Delights

Swimming With Grapes

Really really big grapes

Earthly Delights

Pool Party

with fruit-balancing and bird-perching competitions

Earthly Delights

Owl Love

Earthly Delights

The Cone of Silence

Airbrushery

This is both sides of a piece of MDF I spray on to when I've got paint left in my airbrush reservoir. There's no plan to any of this, it's just what feels good at the time.

The panel is about 600x250mm.

Mystery Feet

I'm in the process of tidying up my workroom, so that I can tidy up another room's overflow, and I came upon this painting I did in 2005.

I have no memory of doing it, nor why it was done. The only reason I know it was 2005 is because I helpfully left a note to myself on the selvedge of the canvas.

It's oil-stick on unprimed canvas, roughly 680x850mm.

Fishy Doodle

Fishy

 These are not Daily Drawings, I just found them when I was flipping through the last few pages of one of my sketchbooks.

Both of them are A5, rollerball ink pen and coloured pencils.

Cascade

Daily Drawing 2018-12-09

My resolve to do a drawing a day lasted exactly one day. I forgot yesterday. Maybe I'll do another this evening.

Arty-Farty Resolution

I realised that it has been a considerable time since I drew or painted anything at all, and resolved to do at least one thing every day over the coming year, lest I lose all ability through sheer disuse.

I'll post each day's output here, no matter how awful it may be. Hopefully that will jog me along.

This is last night's effort, taken from a couple of old National Geographic photos. It's depressing how much one's skills deteriorate when one is slack and lazy about exercising them.

Toybox

Some time ago I made a bunch of shallow pine boxes, with the intent of turning them into drawers to store some of my multitude of toys in. The other day I decided to follow through with that plan, and make a carcase to fit them in to.

What I had forgotten in the interim was that when I made the original batch of boxes, I made one test piece to try out my method. That one box was not the same size as all the others.

So, guess which box I took all the measurements for the carcase from. Mmm-hmmm....

Well anyway, I whipped up a couple more boxes to match the original test box, and turned them into drawers. Now I shall have to do it all over again for the boxes I originally meant it for, but that's not really a big deal since I never, ever have enough storage for all my bits and bobs.

Airbrush Stands

My Badger Patriot, complete with cap-keeper
turned from a little bit of ash.

I designed a bunch of stands for my various airbrushes for 3d printing a while ago, and put the files up on Thingiverse.

Originally, I had all the stands mounted together on a single piece of wood (sapele).

Multi-brush stand... old and busted

However, that proved not to be ideal, as the brushes were a bit too cramped together. I seldom use more than two at a time, so the whole stand took up more space than is necessary. And finally, when my Badger Sotar 20-20 finally turned up after ten months of waiting and increasingly strident complaining, and I designed a stand for it as well, I would have to re-make the wooden plaque to accommodate the extra stand.

So instead I've made individual bases for each stand, out of some kwila, which is dense and heavy, and which provides a good stable base that won't easily be knocked around. Now I can just get out the brushes I want for any given job.

Intentional Stupidity Reigns Triumphant

Bench Seat (Part One) – in progress

Part one of the seating construction — eventually there will be a second one to the right of this one.

Having stripped the ivy away from the fence by our bricky place – let's call it a patio, just to be fancy – it's all looking a bit bleak and barren. Plus, our privacy has been compromised a bit, now that there's not a massive ivy hedge there to separate us from our neighbours.

So, with the onset of some fine, warm weather, I thought I'd make a start on expanding the usefulness of the area by putting a border bench seat along the edge of the bricks, and building up the dirt behind to make a raised bed for some sort of attractive plant growth.

Just in time for the weather to turn to shite. Ah well, hey ho.

The materials are nothing special, just treated pine. Once the concrete around the posts has cured properly in a couple of days, I'll put a 300 x 50 mm slab on top, and fill in the gap in front with some recycled bricks. For all that there's nothing much to it though, all the individual bits of nothing much start ringing up the dollars surprisingly fast. Building materials in New Zealand are stupidly expensive, and getting no cheaper.

I haven't decided yet what to plant in behind. I'd like to put a trellis run along the top of the fence, so probably some sort of climbing flowering thing – something not too invasive and enthusiastic, by preference. And maybe something pleasant-smelling and herby down the bottom. I know practically nothing about gardening, so it's all a bit up in the air as yet.

Next Day

Well, this is Part One basically complete, though I do need a few more bricks to fill in the gap in front. Next I'll do the whole thing all over again, but just to the right of it.

I bought a slab of 300x50mm treated radiata for the seat, and bloody hell, even cheap wood jumps up in price when you get much over 150mm wide. That seat alone cost me fifty bucks. Still, it will be a lot more comfortable to park our ever-spreading arses on than a pissant little 200mm piece, so there's that I guess.

Still Later

Right, so the bench itself is basically finished.

Although it may not look like it, the right-hand half is actually level to the planet; the left-hand side was levelled with the bricks, which droop away a bit to the left. Still, it's not bad enough to wail about too much, and it won't affect the sittingness of the bench. The clamps are just holding a piece of wood the end of the bench is resting on, to ensure that it's level with the other plank, for maximum butt-comfort.

Now, where to get some re-used bricks? I've finally run out of all the ones that fell out of our chimney and fireplace in the earthquakes.

Gift Cactus

People keep saying
it reminds them of something,
but when I ask what
they just kind of mumble a bit
and change the subject.

Our Gift Cactus has been sitting in the same tiny little pot (about a 100mm cube) ever since the cactus was thumb-sized. Now the cactus is about 300mm long, with a sadly constrained root-ball, and it finally rebelled and showed its displeasure with its imprisonment by getting blown over and smashing its hated Tiny Pot.

So, now I've transferred it into a much larger pot, along with a whole lot of tasty, tasty potting mix.

And that's what I've achieved today.

Childish

I downloaded the latest version of Krita (https://krita.org/en/homepage/) and gave it a very quick outing, mainly to see how my graphics tablet would treat it. Since I just saw a Childish Gambino video on YouTube, this popped out. I was going to do more on it, but I liked the simplicity of the chalk enough to stop right there.

Training Tanto

I fished this scrap of ash out of the rubbish and carved this training tanto out of it, because I like the way the grain goes.

All the swirls of tan and cream make it look like toffee, to me. Yum.

New Monitor Stand

Yesterday I set out to tidy up my workshop a bit. I didn't do much of that, because I got distracted, and accidentally built myself a new monitor stand out of some old rimu shelving.

It's taller than my old one, which is good: hopefully having the monitor a bit higher will help me to avoid slouching in my Kneely-Chair. Now the centre of the display is exactly at my eye-line, instead of me looking down at it.

An added benefit is that now I have a shelf to store my graphics tablet on, instead of having to leave it leaning up against the side of the monitor.

Quite apart from its better ergonomics, it's nicer to look at than my old one, which was just slapped together out of some bits of MDF and a vinyl cover stapled on.

There's nothing much to it in terms of woodwork, just a few housing dados, some glue and some screws. I could probably have got away without the screws to be honest; it's not as if it's ever likely to be under enough physical stress to make them necessary.

Judging. Harshly.

It both irritates and amuses me when the news media gets hold of the fact that some country's military has an invasion plan for some other country, and then they go completely doolally over the fact, usually presenting it as clear evidence that Country A is plotting some kind of surprise attack on Country B.

It's the job of armies to come up with plans for the remotest of contingencies, both for attack and defence. If the contingency should actually come to pass, it's far too late to start planning then. An existing plan may not be completely relevant any more, but at least it gives one a springboard to work from.

It's for this reason that I have no sympathy for EQC's excuses for their woeful performance after the Christchurch quakes. They claimed that the scale of damage was unprecedented, and therefore couldn't possibly have been planned for. But for decades, a significant part of their job was supposed to be imagining exactly this sort of contingency, and planning for it. It would have been nice if such a contingency plan had not been needed, but it was needed, and it didn't exist because the people whose job it was to make those plans DIDN'T DO THAT FUCKING JOB.

Jungle Bashing

Our back garden is a little bit overgrown.

I am waging a war with the ivy that I have let get completely out of control out in the back yard. It is proving to be bloody hard work.

Matters came to a head when one of our big trees, that had been strangled and killed by it, broke and fell into our neighbour's car-park. Fortunately the whole tree didn't come down, and there was nobody and nothing under the stuff that did, but it was a harbinger of things to come if I don't act.

I don't have the means to get right up to tree height to strip it off, so I'm cutting it back at ground level, and then will poison all the stumps and hopefully bring it under control that way. Judging by what I've already done on the fence on the opposite side of the property, it will take about five years of ceaseless vigilance and merciless brutality before I can start to relax again.

That patch of concrete wall at the back of the shot is the side of a carport next door. It's like uncovering the ruins of Angkor Wat, but with less sculpture.

Palaeolithic Barbie

Printed at 0.2mm layer height, eSun PLA+

---

I printed a dollie, Palaeolithic Barbie.

It's a piece that has become known as The Venus of Willendorf since its discovery in 1908; precisely what its function was, nobody really knows. Many guesses have been made.

I was originally planning to paint it all stoney, but now I'm tempted to just leave it in its shiny black plastic. The digital model has a pitted stone surface texture that doesn't show to best advantage when printed in relatively low resolution (0.2mm) as here, but as a Future Age representation of a Stone Age artefact, I'm not sure that's a really big deal.

Zig-Zag Hoops

Here's another pair of hoop earrings, a very simple geometric design this time.

These ones are designed to hang perpendicular to the ears, face on to the world.

They're available in bronze or silver at http://shpws.me/QBIk

Clockwork Hoop Earrings

I designed another pair of earrings to be 3d printed and cast by Shapeways.

The diameter of the main body of the earring is about 25mm.

They're available in raw or polished bronze or silver at http://shpws.me/QBFl

Monogram Earrings

This is my first design for earrings in quite a while. I'm figuring out how build customized monogrammed pieces, within the printing, casting and polishing limitations of Shapeways' process.

It feels good to be back in the 3d-design mines again.

These ones are available at Shapeways at http://shpws.me/QuUn

Realistically, unless your initials, or those of you and your main squeeze are AF, they're probably not going to be quite the thing for you. I'm trying to figure out some method of making them user-configurable, but I suspect, considering the palaver involved in getting everything aligned and overlapped for printing, it will have to be done manually. Still, with two letters, there's less than a thousand possible combinations. How long could that take?

Spokeshave Modification

I bought myself a couple of spokeshaves  from China for very little money. They're not very good quality, but they do work OK with a little bit of fettling. The irons take a decent edge, though how long that edge will last is anyone's guess.

The reason I bought them was because I wanted to see if I could reshape one successfully into a bellied spokeshave for cutting an inside radius, and if it's feasible (and workable) then I'll risk doing it on a better quality tool. The spokeshave on the right has had its leading edge filed down and rounded off for that purpose.

It does work somewhat, but it needs a bit more shaping I think. The front curve needs to be taken right up to the edge of the mouth, and the back edge should be curved away as well, as far as it can be without interfering with the blade adjustment screws. The much reduced sole area in contact with the wood makes the tool a bit more difficult to control, but that's only to be expected.

(Slight) Buyer's Regret: Dowel-forming Dies

4-die set. The plate has screw holes
in case you want to anchor it permanently,
but it isn't really necessary.

The die in use (cutaway)

I bought a set of Veritas metric dowel formers from Lee Valley (for more money than I really wanted to spend, but it's done now).
http://www.leevalley.com/us/wood/page.aspx…

They're good quality, but for the money I think you'd be better getting a manufacturing engineer to drill and heat-treat a ¼" plate with a range of hole sizes.

The separate dies are all very well, but if you're hammering dowels you get much cleaner results if you can take the dowel down in 1 or 0.5mm increments, and with this system you have to swap out the die each time. Also, there are only 12, 10, 8 and 6mm dies in the set, and a 2mm step is too much between each step really. You can hammer the dowels through OK, but it has a tendency to tear the dowel surface instead of shaving it, especially in an open-grained timber like oak.

Organisation

Bit by bit I'm sorting out places for all my hand-tools so that they're all in easy reach. Well, easyish reach, because I am something of a short-arse, and reaching over the workbench is sometimes a bit of a stretch. But all within reach anyway, easy or not.

This most recent spasm of organisation has been prompted by making a standing rack for all my most-used chisels (front right, by the battery drills). Up until now they've either been in a chisel roll, or more usually, just lying on a shelf or scattered about on my workbench waiting for an unguarded finger to pass by. This should keep them a bit more out of the way and accessible. All of my gouges — all the decent ones, at any rate — I keep in that box in front; they don't get as much use, so it's not such a problem having them all away in a box on a shelf.

That all seems like a lot of clutter, but I use everything here quite a lot. There are more tools out of shot as well — half a dozen more planes and various machines. Strictly speaking, you could probably do satisfactory woodworking with just a few well-selected tools. Personally, I like having choices.

Stung at last

New plane to the left, old plane to the right.

 I have been mercifully lucky with my online purchasing. Up until now.

I bought a Stanley 78 rebate (rabbet) plane on TradeMe, with the intention of repurposing it as a scrub plane. I had bought one a while ago to use in its intended role, so I thought I knew what I was getting; both of them ended up costing me about fifty bucks each. The photos on TradeMe indicated that it wasn't in mint condition, but they didn't reveal the true horror of the situation by any means.

Old plane above, new plane below.

The new plane is.... let's say it's a bit of a disappointment.

It's missing the fence, and it may never have had a depth-stop or nipper. It's missing the lever adjustment for the iron. It has a bodged-together replacement screw to tension the iron against the cap. It has been so corroded that the body looks like it's got woodworm, an indication that the steel its cast from was never of the best quality. It carries a US patent number rather than the English maker's marks, so I assume it's a US copy — probably a licenced copy, since it still bears the Stanley brand, and I suspect it pre-dates my English one.  It's been covered in thick blue paint, probably to disguise the extent of the corrosion.

I will give it one thing: it's got quite a comfortably-shaped grip.

It is probably still usable as I intend, as a scrub plane, though with the pitting of the sole it will never really be as good a tool as I'd hoped. However, if I'd hoped to be able to use it for its original purpose as a rebate plane, I'd be pretty much out of luck without doing a lot of work on it. Probably more work than it warrants.

This is maybe worth five or ten bucks as a curio to put on a shelf to look rustic next to a vase of flowers. I feel that I've been well and truly ripped off.