I’m publishing some of this so it gets in the search engines.

Recently, I decided to put away all the worthwhile blades that I have sitting in a stack on my bench. Also, I did a few kitchen knives for old classmates, etc., who needed blades. So, I needed a storage box. I did my own version of a ko-baku tansu (sliding lid storage box) and fell in love with it. Firstly, it is very easy to make with minimal tools – a table saw with a rip fence, and some glue. Since the sizes are sort of the same in several dimensions, there’s really not much cutting: 3 pieces that get cut up into smaller pieces to give, uh, pieces.

Here it’s made with contrasting wood to make it look even more shi-shi. That is birdseye maple and black palm wood, rubbed with 2 coats of BloTung(tm) oil. BloTung is a slow-drying penetrating wood oil conceived by me, formulated by ChatGPT, and extensively tested in my exclusive underground torture lab. Anyone want the recipe? By the way, GPT is great at coming up with recipes for stuff that is no longer manufactured, if you want it (e.g.: metal polishes that are no longer manufactured, etc.) I am becoming quite a library of weird stuff and I now find it easy to just whip stuff together in my kitchen (what, you don’t have liquid silicone in your cabinet next to the oatmeal?) rather than pay for someone else’s packaging.

This is just a piece of the “recipe” for the box, the full form of which is [here on ranum.com]

If any of you have a dire need for this sort of thing, but no table saw, I could be persuaded to bang out the parts for a couple and mail them to you: “just add glue(tm)!” so long as it’s not some insanely crazy wood or you don’t live somewhere where I’ll get slapped with a tariff or legal difficulties.

So, that’s the box.

I have been alternating between hiding under the bed, and making war-blades, since we appear to be heading toward Mad Max World, and I want my legacy to, oh god, I have no idea. It’s all so useless. Anyhow, I’m alive, kicking hard, but my social media “presence” mostly consists of writing snarky comments on instagram ads. I know I should grow up and leave that site. But, I see it as an intellectual foreshadowing of the Max Max wasteland we are heading toward, intellectually. Recently, I have been seeing not just moon landing deniers but space deniers: their way of convincing themselves that flat earth theory isn’t stupid is to claim that “space” is all fake. Basically, they’re exceptionally unoriginal simulationists. And it’s impossible to touch anything about the Titanic without running into actual people who claim that the ship down there is the Olympic, which was substituted for the Titanic because, of course, Rothschild something something jews stupid OMG it burns get it off me!!