Our Descent Into Madness

We passed 100,000 total hits this week and I didn’t notice! I’d been meaning to post about that when it happens. I think it’s an important landmark. At this moment we’re just under 103,000.

Right now, Our Descent Into Madness has 1,367 posts, 2,123 comments, and 62 categories. Akismet has caught 22,770 spam comments over the course of its life. It has an authority of 53. It is the first result for a Google search of its name.

It gets more than 3000 views each week, up from about 1000 three months ago. It got 13,508 views last month, compared to just 429 in its first month of existence.

Our Descent Into Madness is 18 months old.

I’ve been distracted from blogging today by a fun project. To make it up to any other not-Christmas-celebrating people bored with the everything being closed today, I’m going to blog about my project. That way you all can do it too, probably better than I have.

So there are a bunch of way to make pins (and pendants, and earrings) out of old metal bottle caps. This is the chronicle of how I happened to make mine today, which you could read as a DIY guide, if you wanted.

For this project, you will need bottle caps, pin backings (or safety pins), clear casting resin (and catalyst), super glue, and some images you like. I recommend images of your favorite dead people, whoever they may be; black and white faces look ghostly and wonderful sunk into polymer, and I for one prefer specters to slogans. But to each her own.

First, cut your images to the size of the interior space of your caps. Push them inside. You don’t need to glue them or anything, as long as they’re wedged in there.

Next comes the fun part: toxic chemicals. Do this part outside, far away from animals and children. Wear plastic gloves.

The resin you buy will come with instructions. Basically though, you pour out the amount you’ll need — just a small spoonful per cap — into a jar you won’t be using for any other purpose again, mix in the correct amount of catalyst, and then put a dollop in each bottle top. Then you’ll want to leave them somewhere to harden, like your garage or basement. Mine took about twenty-four hours. Don’t be afraid to poke them gently with a stick to see if they’re done yet; if they’re still wet, your poke-mark will disappear. I wouldn’t recommend touching them, though.

Once they’ve hardened, it’s time to attach the pin backings or safety pins. I used pin backings; safety pins would definitely work, but might take a little more fiddling.

If they harden on an incline, you’ll get an interesting wave effect, which I rather like:

Anyway. You just superglue the pin element to the back of the caps and let it dry, and you’re all set. Before we get to the fun pictures of the finished pins, I want to talk briefly about the green factor of this project. Like everything, there are good parts and bad. Some pros and cons:

+ it’s handmade/DIY
+ uses recycled caps
+ uses family/CC/public domain images (mine did, anyway; I recommend doing the same), making a personalized, anti-commercial product

- uses toxic chemicals: resin and glue (anyone have an idea for getting around this?)
- uses some new products, i.e. resin and, in my case, pin backings

So a truly ideal project would figure a way to get around buying anything, like by using old safety pins instead of new backings, and attaching them in some imaginative way that doesn’t use glue. I can’t think of an eco-friendlier way to do the resin, besides maybe getting old or rejected resin from a business somehow, instead of buying it new.

Anyway. The following two pins are ones I made for myself, of my grandfather and great-grandparents respectively, in pre-War Poland.

And here’s one I made for Emily of Emma Goldman (shh, she doesn’t know about it yet):

I also made two more, one of Beethoven for our piano friend the Brendenator, and one of a hot air balloon. Lastly, a picture of the balloon pin in action.

We’ve just put up The Predatory Mollusks’ album, Making The Rounds. You should go check it out. We are happy with how it turned out — lots of good stuff there.

I think we should appropriate this as the official illustration of this this.

(Pardon my frequent linking to the latter; that poster is just too gross not to make the connection. Why does the latter file exist if not to provide an antidote to evils such as this one? The folks in the poster might not all literally be included in the poem/tirade, but they certainly are in spirit.)

Edited to change the title… It suddenly seemed too hostile, singling someone out like that.

I’ve just finished another video for a song from the project I’m working on, Over Our Heads (this is the first video). The song is called “The Mystery.” It’s about falling in love (with a human or with something else), and/or reaching enlightenment, and/or making peace with the universe (those are all kind of the same thing, I think). The video is stop-motion, leaves and flowers and shells and pearls and a piece of string all dancing together. The pearls belonged to my mother’s late friend, for whom I am named.

That moment about halfway through when the leaves all touch the flower reminds me of my tattoo.

Since all my friends are strewn across the country at the moment, I have a lot of time on my hands to do weird stuff. Today, for instance, I made this song, and then made this video for it.

Considering today’s date, is it timely or offensive?

look at your hands and see if they’re red George Bush isn’t Hitler yet eating is a choice starving is a choice dying is a choice look at your hands and see if they’re red George Bush isn’t Hitler yet

Edited to add: Hey, now Godwin’s Law applies to us, too!

I just made our first youtube playlist, Reasons Not to Kill Yourself Or Anyone Else. It’s a bunch of videos of lovely things that I think might make you not feel as much like destroying something. Lots of bioluminescence and sea creatures, of course, but also time-lapse videos of plants, the aurora borealis, and more. Here’s the first one:

Check the rest out.

I’ve just put up Strange Sounds, a gallery of some of the various weird sound files we’ve made over the years. Lots of interesting stuff to check out. Sound collages, poems, asking all the other kids what they do when they’re alone.

That is all.

I’m working on a sound project that will be done in a few weeks. So far what’s ready for the internet is the video for one of the songs. It’s called “I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.” It’s about how time kills people, empires kill people, and regular people kill people. In a more upbeat way than that makes it sound, I think.

Also there are newish songs on The Predatory Mollusks’ myspace page, which you could listen to.