Skip navigation

Bioshock (for reals)

I actually saw this awhile ago, but I’m only getting around to posting about it now.  Really quickly, if you haven’t seen the article and don’t feel like reading it, PayPal’s Peter Thiel is helping to fund an initiative to create a free-floating libertarian country out in international waters, where residents can be “free from the laws, regulations, and moral codes of any existing place.”  I don’t know about you, but reading that automatically made me think of the BioShock series.  And apparently, I wasn’t the only one.

For those of you who don’t game or following the gaming industry, BioShock and BioShock 2 are RPGish first-person shooter (FPS) games that are set in an underwater dystopia.  Well, it wasn’t founded as a dystopia.  Obviously, it was intended to be a utopia.  Anyway, businessman Andrew Ryan is fed up with government and decides to form is his own laissez-faire utopia where humanity can work and live without that meddling above-water government.  And then…things turn horribly wrong.  You should go play the game.

Now then, doesn’t that sound very much like what Thiel is trying to do?  The only big difference is that BioShock took place under the water and Thiel wants his utopia to be above water.  It seems to me that he wants to create this libertarian, Ayn Rand-esque, laissez-faire place just like how Ryan was trying to do in BioShock.

Um…do you think that Thiel is really a LARPer?  I wouldn’t really be surprised if he is after reading about what he’s trying to do.  He wants to be Andrew Ryan and form his own underwater utopia.  Only, it’s pretty hard to build stuff underwater and I don’t think it’s been extensively done.  Not in terms of whole cities and the like.  I’m sure it’s more expensive than building above water.  I mean, oil rig technology has been around for a long time.  You’d probably have to research all kinds of new building methods to be able to build a city underwater.  You might as well build a city on an oil rig that’s above water.  You don’t become a wealthy businessperson making entirely stupid decisions, after all.  Now you can spend some extra resources on meddling with the forces of nature.  I’m sure Thiel will have something other than Big Daddies, Little Sisters (and later, Big Sisters), and Splicers to run rampant over his now dystopia, but the idea will probably be there.

The thing is…Rapture (BioShock’s dystopia) was underwater and thus fairly remote and cut off from the rest of the world.  Thiel’s project, being above water, isn’t as far removed from the rest of us.  I wonder how we can contain the dystopia, when it becomes such, from spreading out to the rest of us?  Do you think…this is where the zombie apocalypse is going to start?  O.O

Moar laundry bags (2010)

Continuing the presentation of secretive summer sewing…

Twenty ten was a hard year for me in terms of getting these laundry bags out.  I was ridiculously late in doing so.  Only two of the five seniors got their bags before they left for school.  It was just a mess of things kept happening one after another.  Pipe burst and flooded a good portion of the house, insurance company took their sweet time getting people to fix things up so there was just no room to make this stuff, work was crazy, I ended up going to Egypt for about three weeks for work at one point…the list goes on.

When I got back from Egypt (it was in the summer, not a fun time to go to Egypt), it was abundantly clear to me that I would not be able to finish all of them before school started.  What’s more, is that four of them were going to semester based universities, instead of quarter, which meant they’d all be leaving in August.  Even less time for me to work on the bags.  So, I gave them out as I completed the bags and asked them to send pictures to me of them inside them.

037

Cow!

First up was the cow.  I made this one for one of my girls whom I’d seen grow up from jr. high.  I made the cow first because the recipient was the last to leave of the semester people and I had a clear idea of how I wanted this bag to look.  This one was pretty easy to make and went pretty smoothly.  I rather liked it.  She got a cow because of her stuffed animal cow she brought with her to a few of the conferences we attended.

042

Bashful turtle!

Second was the bashful turtle.  Only his tail stuck out.  I had a clear idea of how this one should look too, so I made this one next.  I had to mail it to the recipient though.  She very nicely obliged my request to send me pictures of her inside her laundry bag.  She got a turtle because she wanted turtles on the pillow that we were making one time as our Friday night craft.  We…never finished the pillows.

047

Dignified camel.

Then came the camel.  The kid just reminded me of a camel.  So…I made him a camel.  He doesn’t understand why I think he looks like a camel.  Anyway, he was the only one going to a school on the quarter system, so I knew I could get this one out in time.  It was also the last one I had a really clear mental image of how it should look.  I had to revise the eyes a few times (it looked a bit like an alien at first) but overall, I was rather pleased with how it looked.  He was a good sport and even put the photo of him inside his laundry bag as his Facebook profile picture for awhile.  The comments it generated still make me laugh.  (=

WP_000088WP_000094

Then came the ill-fated whale.  This one was the first laundry bag I made that wasn’t a typical cylindrical bag.  It took two paper prototypes and a ruined cloth prototype before I got it right.  And then…it got lost in the mail, along with some other stuff I had sent her.  This made us both very sad.  I had sent her the bag just before Thanksgiving and it should have gotten there right after the holiday.  Never showed up.  I waited a few weeks and it didn’t come back to me either.  I figured it was just lost in the mail and I started another one.  The photo you see is the third attempt that was completed early January.  I gave it to her in person as she started school later than the rest.  Since I gave it to her in person, I also took the photo of her inside her bag.  Since it’s not a cylindrical bag, I figured it would be better to have her go in head first.  Hehe.  Incidentally, about a week after I finished the bag, the lost package came back to me.  She has two whale laundry bags now.  I think I have enough pictures of this one to do a tutorial too.  Maybe I’ll write one in the future.

002

Propeller mushroom!

And finally, my brother’s.  I made my brother’s laundry bag last (not counting the third time I made the whale) because he’s my brother and it’s easier to get things to him, and also I figured he wouldn’t mind as much to get a really late grad present.  He got a propeller mushroom from Super Mario Wii.  It took some calculating to get the mushroomy look, the brim of the hat, and also the propellers.  They’re stiffened with some fusible interfacing, but without some wire the propellers won’t stand up on its own.  I don’t have a better picture of it where you can see the whole mushroom with propellers.  But still, I rather like it but I probably won’t do another one.  Mushrooms are hard to make in laundry bag form.