all that's best of dark and bright

but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53

but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone

^“At the bottom of the image is the segment of the flag cut for the St. Patrick’s Cathedral protest. Photograph by Mick Hicks”

Jim Lambie: Zobop (Colour-Chrome),

Exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery from October 22, 2025 to October 12, 2026.

Shockingly, however, spending most of your time in close proximity to 500 pounds of liquid mercury is Not Great For One’s Health and tons of lighthouse keepers started to go crazy from the whole. Mercury poisoning thing. Hence why there are a lot of “haunted” lighthouses or wickies that lose it and maybe do a bit of manslaughter.

In a letter written on April 19, 1825, Augustin Fresnel proposed the use of mercury to reduce the friction in revolving lenses. His statement follows: “I propose to float our rotating devices, of the first order, in a bath of mercury, instead of placing them on rollers. This project won't present many difficulties; nevertheless, as I have not put it into execution, I won't require you to adopt it for your first lighthouse.”

Fresnel’s plan for mercury flotation was not put into practice until 1890 when Monsieur Leon Bourdelles, Chief Engineer of the French Lighthouse Service, designed and built a workable mercury flotation system. The mercury bath allowed the lens to operate in an almost frictionless environment and, additionally, allowed the speed of rotation to be dramatically increased.

It mattered for optics reasons.

Under less-than-ideal conditions, you can only see the beam when it’s pointed more or less directly at you. In-between beams you would not be able to see anything. One solution to this was to create multiple beams, and the lenses Mr Fresnel designed usually created 8 beams. But, even still, duration between flashes could be as long as one minute in the old mechanical roller systems.

The nearly frictionless operation of the Mercury suspension system allowed the lenses (large pieces of precisely ground glass weighing several hundred pounds in some cases) to rotate fast enough that they could be redesigned to create fewer (usually 3) beams. Fewer beams from a similar light source will be proportionally brighter, and the gains in speed were sufficient that duration between flashes could still be reduced to as little as 10 seconds.

This was a big upgrade. It didn’t just make the lighthouse signal faster, it allowed them to completely overhaul the lens and derive more visibility from a light source.

The aim of the project was to travel 270 km / 168 miles between Helsinki and Turku in Finland, and to highlight the possibility of horse travel in modern society. Since then they've took to promoting horseback efforts in urban landscapes with several European collaborators and artists.

Yli-Vakkuri and collaborators first spent eight months practicing riding to become safely self-sufficient in saddle, and bought a Finnhorse gelding Toivottu Poika ('Awaited Son'). The route followed, as closely as possible, the old coastal royal country road of the premodern era, Kuninkaantie/Suuri Rantatie, and took 9 days.

Toivottu Poika is a very average example of his breed, standing at some 155 cm / 15.1 hh tall. The Finnhorse is a relative of for example the North-Norwegian Lyngshest breed, the Icelandic horse, the Swedish Gotlandsruss pony and the Estonian landrace horse and Tori horse breed. It is a mid-sized light draught and trotter, a sensibly realistic mediaeval country travel horse equivalent.

For more hardcore short-term treks, looking into competitive endurance riding can be helpful. Mongol Derby might be one of the most intense races, as it recreates the Chinggis Khan era postal system of swapping horses continuously over a 1000 km / 620 mile route.

By only including skilled endurance riders, keeping up a constant fast speed and swapping horses every 40 km / 25 mil, the Mongol Derby route only takes 10 days even though it's several times the length of the Trans-Horse project. This is the speed of highly organised imperial messengers with the supporting cultural infrastructure, professional marathon runners where Yli-Vakkuri and Toivottu poika were leisure hikers.

the last i checked, the map of roads stretches from Calais, France to Moscow, Russia west to east and from Košice, Slovakia to Tornio, Finland south to north. it doesn't cover all of Europe, for example Sweden and Norway are empty at the moment, but it is quite extensive and still being worked on! in addition to showing the old roads, you can calculate the distance and travel time from one city to another, and there are a lot of options:

and that's not all! here's a description from the site itself (emphasis mine):

"Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka's Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways."

That means that if the village says you shouldn't get pregnant when you don't have a man to provide for you and you get pregnant regardless, they can refuse to support you. They can reject and stigmatize your child.

When you make a decision—any decision—from what you wear and who you associate with to who you will be romantically involved with and what that will look like, to your education and career, family planning and whether you will leave your partner if they abuse you—the village has a say in all of it.

A proper social state, however, decides which services to provide, how much to fund them etc, there are still cultural biases there, but it won't tell you how to live your life. If all university programs are free, you can go study liberal arts instead of law, your parents can't stop you, and if the state provides a stipend, free housing and free meals while you study and also takes care of your basic needs afterwards, you have the ultimate freedom to do whatever the fuck you want to do with your life.

Want to have 8 children and a trad lifestyle in the countryside? Cool, they'll have healthcare, schooling, meals, competent teachers, after-school activities, public transit, public parks and activities—all for free. And none of that will be dependent on how many people around you like you and your kids personally and what they think of your lifestyle.

You want to be aggressively transgender and live in the city with your 8 person polycule and spend your days doing art and running a café that only does matcha? You can do that too. You'll get free housing for all of you and the business space provided for you, even if everyone in your neighborhood thinks you're weird.

The bureaucrats handing out the collective resources ideally shouldn't give a shit what you do with them.

When I applied for uni and chose a liberal arts degree instead of STEM, nobody told me "yeah no sorry we don't approve of that, you'll have to do something we think is useful or pay for it yourself". I got a free education plus a stipend, subsidized housing and food and everything else.