Tiled With Pentagons

(With thanks to JM, who kicked off this discussion on the summer solstice, and some apologies to MC-M.)     This is a picture of an oak tree, or at least it would be if the artist, MC-M, weren't a coward. In 1973, he created one of the foundational pieces of conceptual art:  an oak tree. Not a picture of an oak tree, but an oak tree. It consists of metal brackets, a glass shelf, a glass of water, and the ineffable act of having transformed a glass of water into an oak tree. "How long will it continue to be an oak tree?" an interviewer once asked him. "Until I change it," he replied. Tread carefully before you reject the whole premise as nonsense. I ask: would you be just as pleased to march into your nearest cathedral one fine Sunday morning, stroll down the aisle as the choir boys sing Mass, and unceremoniously knock the wafers and wine out of the bishop's hands as bullshit? If you'll bite that bullet, that transubstantiation is actually completely fake...

(As requested by EvN on the spur of the moment. This will make much more sense if you've read post 22, "Lorxus Favors: An Experiment in Self-Backed Giftlike Macroeconomics", first.) A Lorxus Favor is a claim to 8 working hours' worth of my time as applied to some task I'd otherwise be mildly averse to and whose fulfillment I'd be indifferent to, which debt is marked by a small silver coin. They look cool and are satisfying to play with and make nice jingling noises, and you probably want one. How might you get one? Usually, it'd be by rendering me or some other coin-bearer some specific good or service, on the spot or reasonably scheduled, or conceivably by paying significantly more money than you really want to. However, I have standing desires that for a long time I've been meaning to put up in print somewhere reasonably public. This is me, finally getting around to doing that. The following is a list of things I want or need, with bounties denominat...

(Epistemic status: a nonstandard frame for economics that finally crystallized; as usual, descriptive of patterns I've observed in trade, gift economics, and coordination; more prescriptive than my usual about what patterns build what kind of prosperity; and surely incomplete. Built heavily out of the Glowlarion theological-decisiontheoretic frame. For SC, and anyone through whose hands the coins I've made pass or have passed.) Come, sit down. Have a drink and let me tell you a tale... "Long ago, on a dusty road through a desert, there trudged a travelling merchant. The road was unpaved dirt, barely better than the shifting sands around it; the merchant's donkey struggled to pull his cart over potholes and through the occasional dune that had drifted onto the path; the merchant's cart was loaded down with bolts of fine cloth and sturdy pottery jars of preserved fruit. The merchant relaxed as he approached an oasis; he and his steed were parched, and he had been wal...

If you take nothing else away from this post, take this: business cards need not be about business. You can have something with the form factor and general function of a business card, but broaden its scope well past business purposes. This is why I call the cards I carry around with me for this purpose "calling cards", or sometimes "contact cards" - business cards are if anything a newer version of a much older practice, that of the calling card or visiting card. A calling card, or visiting card, started off in the 1600s as the successor to small handwritten notes that you might leave behind  if you went to visit someone's house and who turned out not to be there. They were small decorative cards, with a simple image and some text on one side, and a blank reverse to write a short message on, and they spread from France and Italy to the rest of Europe as well as America in the early 1700s. Later on in the mid-1700s, with the normalization of calling cards and t...

As promised, here are a few short extra bits about Lorxus Favors that I don’t think I’ve shared much elsewhere and certainly have never written down. (What Favors get exchanged for) Here are a few of the things I’ve spent Favors on, or that I’ve heard of others spending Favors on: Laptop repairs, driving for multiple hours to events and bulk grocery stores, help accessing medical care, willingness to make fair-sized (USD) loans, car jumpstarting, ritual work and organization, furniture assembly, purchase of antiques, gambling stakes, temporary housing, small coding projects, specialty silverwork, metalcasting help, and community organization. This is obviously not remotely a complete list, and I probably can’t put a complete list together, but this is the cross-section of Favor economy activity of which word has made it back to me. (4D sculpture) I have this mental image of what the kinetic sculpture comprised of all the silver alloy that has ever been in a Favor coin must look like. I...

It’s been almost exactly seven years since I spent the first Favor - a placeholder copper disk hand-marked with letterform stamps - on laptop repairs, thanks to SN, over six years since the chilly December night when I completed the first investment cast to forge the first silver Favor coins, and roughly five years since I wrote up the draft explanation of the Favor economy that still lives at lorx.us/favor . I think it’s well past time to provide a more succinct explanation, as well as to talk a little bit about my process, what’s gone well, what’s gone badly, and my future plans for the Favor economy. In a future post I’ll discuss the nanoscale reserve banking aspect more, as well as giving a perspective on a strange kind of sculpture I haven’t much shared, and some case studies of Favor use. I’ll start with an explanation of what a Favor coin is, what they represent, and how best to use them. A Favor coin is a small coin as pictured above, made out of a special kind of sterling sil...

When we left off, we had sprued the positive form into place and assembled the flask in preparation for the investment - the surrounding with mold material - that gives the method its name. Mix the plaster according to recipes that can be found elsewhere, making sure to be precise in weighing out the plaster mix and the water both in the correct ratios and as a function of the flask volume, mix it thoroughly, and then use a vacuum chamber to degas it as well as possible. Fill the flask thoroughly, avoiding reintroducing air into the wet plaster, leaving voids, or damaging the positive or its attachment to the sprues. Gently but firmly bang the table to ensure that as many trapped air bubbles as possible separate from the positive and the sprues and float to the top of the flask, and fill with leftover plaster if necessary. At this point you will need to wait 2~4 days for the plaster to cure preliminarily and be firm but damp to the touch, and can wrap the plaster to prevent further moi...

(This one turned out very very long. Turns out carefully describing a workflow for a general audience takes a lot of words! It will thus appear in two parts.) Investment casting is a manufacturing method for shaping metal into a desired form with a high degree of precision. In brief, the method involves starting with a replica of some desired form made out of a sculptable and relatively flammable material like wax or PLA, putting the form in a metal tube and surrounding it with a highly heat-resistant but brittle material that captures form well like plaster or water glass, and putting the metal tube in a furnace to completely destroy the flammable material so as to leave behind negative space. Then, one pours molten metal into a space left in the top of the tube, waits for the metal to cool somewhat and solidify, and finally plunges the whole tube into water to finish the cooling process and destroy the hard outer layer to recover the cast metal. Lost-wax casting is a particularly lon...