My future self is tolerant.

Any lack of documentation is fully his fault.😄

Love this one and I'm not even a badger 😄

Good observation. Reminds me of The Truman Show. Always great to break some glass cages. As long as we don't fly beak first into them.

While people often disagree regarding art preferences, shared values build powerful bridges. Bitcoin itself is a neutral bridge: property rights for all. Everyone who have their savings stored in bitcoin has incentive to protect that bridge.

This is a short background to the history of China's occupation of Xinjiang/East Turkestan, from the account of Rebiya Kadeer. She later became one of the first business women in China before her exile to the United States.

Excerpts from her 2007 book "Dragon Fighter":

"Even the name of our Uyghur nation is clouded with politics. The Chinese call it the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. It is also known as Uyghurstan or East Turkestan." (P. 4)

"Uyghur hero Yakub Beg led our people back to independence the last time in 1867. In 1876, however, the Manchu rulers reoccupied the "wild west", which they then violently integrated into the Manchu Empire under the name Xinjiang, which means "New Territory." (P. 6)

"Our land is not only of major military strategic importance, but its mineral wealth includes some of the biggest coal reserves in the world, in addition to large deposits of petroleum, gold, uranium and iron ore." (P. 8)

"I was one-year-old when the communists under Mao Zedong took over our land on October 1, 1949. Then a year later, on October 7, 1950, they conquered our neighbor Tibet." (P. 11)

"After so-called "peaceful liberation" General Wang Zhen initially took control over our Uyghur nation. Among his first actions was a "cleansing" of the region. Thousands of people were arrested or murdered." (P. 12)

"According to Chinese Communist Party theory, all people should live under the same standard as the majority of the population. In our case, this meant living as peasants. In the years after General Wang Zhen took control of the Uyghur nation he set about eradicating the rich, the intellectuals, and ideological opposition. Anyone who opposed his reforms was put before a firing squad." (P. 14)

"By March 1950, Chairman Mao had already ordered a program for the mass immigration of Han Chinese - the largest ethnic group of native Chinese - into our homeland, whereby the Uyghur nation would be afforded "mutual help" from their Chinese "brother nation"; in fact, this program was intended to foster socialism. The impetus for this strategic policy was provided by the Soviet Union's General Secretary Joseph Stalin. But this first influx was minor in contrast to that which still was to come." (P. 14)

"In 1949, there were approximately one-hundred-thousand Chinese living in our homeland. Today, the Chinese population has already grown to an estimated eight million, and at a rate excessively outpacing our own population growth." (P. 14)

"Mao Zedong formally declared our homeland as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China in 1955 and made statements about the rights of self-determination for the Uyghur nation, including the right to secede from the Chinese alliance." (P. 15)

"In reality, though, we no longer had any power in our own land. In the new Communist system, everybody was controlled by everybody else. People were encouraged to incriminate others. The Communists' collectivization of our agriculture took place in July 1955." (P. 15)

"Their violent socialization of our private trade and industry soon followed. Because of its size, our region was expected to contribute substantially to the agricultural productivity of China. For this purpose, military farms called bingtuan were established." (P. 15)

"The relationships among Chinese and Uyghurs cooled even more dramatically after several thousand of our people were again arrested and killed in the Altai region.

During the same period, the loudspeakers that by the time had been installed on every street corner would continuously broadcast the message that local inhabitants and the Chinese were friends and that we should live in harmony and unity forever.

The friendships they spoke of were merely words. In actuality, their words were veiled threats." (P.23)

"As we grew wiser, it became apparent to us that those in power in the government generally thought that the only way they could live in peace and quiet was if all of us regional natives were either exiled or murdered." (P. 23)

"In the spring of 1957, Chairman Mao called upon all intellectuals to state their critiques of the Communist Party. They were supposed to offer "complete and thorough opinions of everything." No one was to fear reprisals. Most people were grateful for this apparent liberalization. In reality though, Chairman Mao had only one thing on his mind. His carefully calculated intent was to "lure out snakes out of their holes."

"This wretched phrase was actually the official slogan of that propaganda campaign. All of those lured out by the chairman's call were indeed revealed as enemies of the state. Artists, university students, scientists, and other intellectuals were declared to be "rightists"."

"Any form of independent thinking was dangerous. Nobody was able to sleep soundly anymore because anyone, through betrayal or contrivance, could be declared an enemy of the state at any time. Everyone was supposed to think the same way and to speak the same way."

"Everyone was required to be vigilant against "incorrect" thoughts. Otherwise, we were told, the country would be threatened with disintegration. Our school teacher taught us that these words were from Chairman Mao himself."

P. 25.

We recently had block 777,777.

777 / 37 = 21

777,777 / 37 = 21021

777,777 / 21 = 37037

3 x 7 = 21

21 + 21 = 42.

(3 x 7) + (3 x 7) = 42.

Meaning of Life, Universe and Everything.

I had completely forgotten about this bizarre coin.🤡🌎

I'm glad we don't have mini-popes or any centralized bureau of popery.😄

Having multiple channels of communication brings resilience and everyone will pick their own path.

I will continue to speak out against vaccine mandates, lockdowns, ESG, social credit scores and CBDCs. The EU is heading down a dark path of authoritarianism, food shortages and agenda-driven energy crises.

It is vital to support farmers and truckers protesting. Ceaucescu's regime fell because of changes in perception. Protests leads to government over-reach, which in turn lead to public mobilization against a regime. Bitcoin is the natural funding channel for protests.

Nostr is a marathon and not a sprint. It is for long-term building and networking. Other channels have their purposes.

From $182 to $661 was a 3.63 X increase.

From $661 to $8600 was a 13 X increase.

1 year later; $8600 -> $58000 was a 7 X increase.

I'm not going to speculate on a price but I think the 2024 halving will be memorable.

Separate and interconnected at the same time.

Thanks. This was my most advanced sculpture from that time, based on Tutanchamun's mask. I didn't have a clay oven so I had to let the clay air-dry. I used a liquid gloss to help preventing cracks from forming from the air exposure.

Probably not your style but I made this gryphon some 20+ years ago with inspiration from a Babylonian-Sumerian tablet. I modeled the original in clay, then created a silicon mold for tin casting. Alas the mold broke in some places and the casting didn't fill up corectly, but the result was still interesting, like an archaeological artifact.

Nice to hear. There are hashtags for traditional mediums on Artstation but I'm not sure how often artists remember to add the appropriate hashtags.

I came across one artist on Artstation that built physical models of spaceships, in small scale of course, then there are some traditional painters also.

Overall I find Artstation to be one of the most interesting places for contemporary art. Over there artists are generally followed by other artists so there is mutual inspiration. Not sure exactly how the visibility algorithm is designed but it seems to function decently.

Cool to hear and inspiring thread.

I was about 7 when I first felt an obsession to program and design games. We saved up to buy a Commodore 64 and a few years later I was merrily making my first games, just for my own amusement. Then I went on with the Atari 520st and wrote games in GFA basic. Often I would get lost pursuing interesting ideas that my computer didn't have RAM to handle so many games ended up half-finished when memory dropped low. Then I continued with Lua, C and later C#.

My primary passion was always creating art so I have had long periods going back and forth between art and programming. In 2005 I became interested in deepening myself in 3D modeling after StarWars Battlefront II (Pandemic) was released with some cool mod-tools. So I started with XSI Softimage and learned how to model functional game assets. I probably modeled 20+ buildings in Tatooine style for my own maps. Every asset needed a high poly mesh, low poly mesh, collision mesh and an optional shadow-casting mesh. At that time the collision mesh was made from primitives like boxes and cones that you set up to approximate the game model shape with. Faults in the mesh would cause collision problems and then you had to munge all the assets over again.

I'm quite happy with this Scifi helmet I modeled in Blender + Zbrush, about 2 months of work:

https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/space/other/scifi-helmet-a89a6dcd-8ccb-4c69-b076-35149fc2b50d

I'm the same on here as on Twitter, although here I am unleashed from the character limit. I never cared much about follower/subscriber count - engagement and reach is what matters. Many of the followers on Twitter are bots or non-active accounts so they will not interact in either case.

The smaller population and lesser reach here on Nostr makes most of the difference from my observation. On Twitter I avoid participating in small talk while it makes more sense here at Nostr: we are at closer proximity to the Dunbar number of 150.

That's also a cool weapon.👍

Thanks and good suggestion. I like the longclaw sword you mentioned, simple and elegant, looks like a balanced weapon of war.

Another fantasy battle scene. I equipped every skeleton with the barbarian sword and meticulously designed 26 barbarian poses, a few of them shown here.