ALTMy latest cartoon for New Scientist
MORPHEUS
Morpheus drinking a 40 in the death basket remains the greatest lyric of all time
What I've been getting up to without my computer
Since I don't have any game updates at the moment I thought I'd give you a look at my very analogue Sherlock Holmes related project!
As you probably know, the Sherlock Holmes stories were mostly originally published in the Strand Magazine which came out as floppy monthly magazines with hardback collections every six months.
A while ago I spotted a really beaten up copy of the July to December 1893 book on eBay for £8. This book can sometimes go for £200 in good condition because it's the one with...
I immediately decided to make repairing it a Project!
You can see here that the text block has totally come away from the boards.
Along the spine I was really excited to see something a little familiar being used to give some structural support! My initial thought was that this had to be a slice of a cover of one of the floppy Strand magazines.
But when I got it loose and studied it, although the paper and ink colour is the same, it doesn't actually follow the layout format of the Strand covers. It's lots of little ads, and they run off the bottom like this is part of a larger document.
Scrap of paper on left, a Strand Magazine on the right:
So yeah, that's still a bit of a mystery, but it's cool to see this scrap of paper the printers had lying around. I had to remove it, but I'm going to keep it safe.
I did some gentle cleaning of the cover using a putty eraser, just gently pressing and rolling, never rubbing. It picked up a little of the grime.
The cover had got some paint splotches on at some point in the past, and I tried to gently remove these. Part of me wishes I'd left them as I think I was starting to effect the blue colour in the area.
I also reinforced some of the thing parts of the spine with Japanese tissue, which is very thin but very, very difficult to tear.
Now here's a fun part, with some help from my cat Miss Malkin!
The spine of the book had a few problems.
- The fabric which wraps around it and helps attach it to the cover/boards which is called scrim (or mull, I've seen it called both!) had totally decayed and turned into gross dust, I knew I'd need to replace it.
- Although the sewn binding was sound, I could tell that the glue wasn't doing its job anymore. It was old 'animal glue' that had turned hard and brittle. I knew I'd need to replace it with something else, like PVA.
I needed to get that glue off, so I tried out a trick I saw online. I made a paste/gel out of methycellulose, which is a substance that gets used as a thickener in lots of food products. Of course I keep mine in a fancy little jar:
The gel softens the old glue without getting it dangerously damp, allowing you to gently scrape it away.
Look at all this gnarly gunk!
But look at how good the text block looks with its new scrim and glue!
I was trying to think what I was going to use to replace the Strand Magazine page on the spine. In the end I decided to leave a little note, for some future person who might take the binding apart someday!
So, here it is!
I have to admit that this whole project has been a real challenge, emotionally more than anything! It's required me to be brave about messing with an old book, and to acknowledge that even where I've made mistakes, at least it's better off then it was when It arrived at my house.
horror movie where the protagonist only has an inhale activated vape as a light source
oh
The wikipedia page for The Coleman Frog is a but a single paragraph but what a paragraph it is
How dare this go around without the image attached
this is it im dying how could anybody believe this is a real frog
There's some company, blackstone, blackwater, something like that, buying up houses that go on sale for 30k above asking price. Immediately outbidding anyone who tries to buy. Corporations are also buying property all across america.
Fuck...
Nobody comes to my tumblr for this, but Americans need to understand that THIS is why my generation can't afford to own a house outside of Smallest-Town USA. THIS is also why people my age in bigger cities struggle to find decent apartments that don't consume half of our monthly income.
Housing Speculation is when rich folk, corporations, and wannabe landlords buy up property and sit on it like dragons hoarding gold. The Dutch have a dragon-adjacent term for this because speculation devastated their housing market in the 70s-80s leading to some gnarly Dutch squatting culture. They let homes sit empty, good as money in the bank and watch the value increase as everyone else competes for the remaining houses. That's value they can borrow against, that's a few hundred-thousand dollars if you need some quick cash, that's a property you can rent out for regular income while charging tenants for repairs or maintenance and fining them for wear and tear. If property values go up and laws prohibit raising the rent by a certain degree, in many places they can find shady ways to evict that tenant, make no changes and charge the next renter more. It's probably illegal but if you rent to people below a certain income, you can be assured most can't afford to take you to court.
I live in Chicago. Many of the properties that used to house students, small families, single parents, older people, low-income folks have been gobbled up by little airbnb barons who colonize previously well-established neighborhoods and price out families who've lived there for generations because they can't keep up with the artificially inflated property values. The airbnbs spread like cancer until a handful of people can dominate the "affordable" housing for an entire neighborhood. It's gentrification on meth, but without the kind of localized money circulation or community improvements you get when people live and work and spend within their neighborhoods. It pushes residents further and further from services and resources until all that's left is the locked-in commodififation of an exploitable renting class.
If that wasn't bad enough, it also means that when large areas of habitable property are being hoarded by investors with portfolios of empty houses and airbnbs, that reduces the number of actual residents, which can spoil legislation on a community level. When all the storefront space in a neighborhood like mine is controlled by 4 people, you find the number of businesses and services that catered to lower income families start to become whiskey bars, boutiques, vintage shops, and upscale chain retail, businesses that bring money into the property owners at the expense of community accessibility, turning a once largely Hispanic neighborhood community into a posh little destination for travelers, tourists, and other aspiring business speculators who see every empty building as their next revinue stream. Gut a block of apartments with attached commercial space and build half as many luxury condos above a combination tapas bar and day spa and you've instantly got half as many tenants on that block to vote against your expansion schemes. Replacing low-income residents with higher-rent folks also bakes in support for future "improvements" that further contribute to the commodification of communities.
Property ownership has always been a tool of the most privileged class to extract value from the working class because the only options become rent, move, or live on the street for all they care. At which point, the police will sweep you further and further into the gutter until they have an excuse to send you to prison. This kind of speculation and consolidation allows people with excess resources to buy up the things the rest of us require to function and sell it back to us forever.
These are the same people that invented the fairy tale about how if we work hard enough and save and spend like smart people, then we can be landlords too! We can own businesses, raise families, chase dreams and be happy if we are smart like they are. But if we can't it's because we're lazy little parasites who need to have our lives portioned out to us lest we waste time that could be earning money for the landlord.
I hate these fuckers so fucking much.
It got so bad in Atlanta that in 2022 they passed a law limiting Airbnb-type operators to two physical addresses, and the owner is required to live in one of them. In addition to that, they are charged an annual permit fee + additional taxes.
It’s an excellent start, but only applies to the city of Atlanta -- not any of the kazillions of Airbnbs in the surrounding greater metro area.
