Fun is a special kind of currency that blurs the lines betw…
Fun is a special kind of currency that blurs the lines between the giver and receiver. And it's contagious; it spreads between us. Fun needs people to spread between. It cant exist by itself. It's very easy to recognise; you know it when you see it and you certainly know it when you feel it, but if you were to try to objectively and rationally define exactly what it is, where it comes from and why, that would not be as easy. Being able to generate fun and play from the creation of food and shelter is a great accomplishment and I hereby wish to pay my respects to all of our ancestors past and present who have had anything to do with this equation. This forms the basis for this manuscript.
In modern industrialised society everyone has specialist skills and perhaps the price we have paid is that we’ve foregone a lot of singing and dancing and forgotten our most basic, general fun, food and shelter creation skills and become highly dependent on a system that we cant always count on. Modern conveniences come at a cost which can leave many feeling vulnerable.
I can imagine that in the beginning the idea of modern specialisation could have sounded good but it would have been difficult to imagine the costs that we now know as real. The reason we may have been so willing to give specialisation and mass production a go is because we never could have imagined that we would stop singing and dancing and that somehow we would also forget how to create our own food and shelter. It would have been impossible to imagine that we could have possibly forgotten how to have fun without money. And while not all of us have completely forgotten, it’s obvious now that our lives of modern conveniences come with a hefty price that is rising.
The basis of this manuscript is putting forward a case for firstly ensuring we know a few things about creating fun, food and shelter as a team, by ourselves, without a corporation or one of their products, as a foundation upon which to build other skills. Hopefully each paragraph from here onwards is a “how to” or “why” to this proposition. The bit about knowing something about food in this equation can come from cooking big batches of food for everyone at the events using locally grown food - so getting to know your local food producers directly - without having to go through the corporate machine.
One day, after more than a decade, those Solomon Islands experiences which sat somewhere inside me, laying dormant, waiting and wanting to come out and express themselves somehow, some way, decided to be born. One day, that seed sprouted and I began creating festive building events with food, music, audiences, and building activities. I happened to be in the right place at the right time, when I discovered the magic of sun-dried mud - the same recipe used for building many of the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited structures and settlements. It was so ridiculously easy to learn and I felt compelled to share my newfound discovery. Building with mud worked perfectly with a Solomon Islanders' style festive community approach. More on how this all came together later.
While the number and size of the structures built under the Mud Fun banner have been small, the amount of participation and positivity has been big. Mud Fun’s ratio of fun to square meters of construction is high because it is equally as much about food, music, relaxation, rejuvenation and entertainment as it is about construction. At last count over 20,000 have taken part, most of which have been children and youth. The generously playful sense of fun that children and youth have naturally imbued into the structures, program and its events is the key ingredient that has shaped this idea into what it is. And while a lot of the work for hosting these events has been performed in the spirit of a hobby, there is also a business drive, because money makes the world go around and everybody’s gotta eat. While participation in the program has been free for all participants, I have found ways to pay myself and others from various funds and resources that corporations, government and small businesses have allocated for construction, education, community needs and cultural arts. This manuscript has been created to suggest that you can do this too either as a business or a hobby or to build yourself a house and to provide you with supporting evidence that it can be done. Perhaps when more people get involved and give it a go, then the vision can be more easily realised. The vision is best “explained” through a picture I have included up ahead.
Covid lockdowns and school closures have forced me to take time off from the vision, and write all this down. There’s something about all this pandemphasis that makes me feel that the Mud Fun vision has come to a dead end, at least for a while. The program is the opposite of social distancing and lockdown and isolation, so it might be time for it to take a long winter’s nap until it's time for people to ch…
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Sketch vision of a musical mudstomp event.
That looks so cool! Literally a whole village of people! Here’s a sample image out of Midjourney, but it could be illustrated in any style. OK, I’m off to bed. I’m at the opposite end of the day to you!
Ok goodnight! Wow again!! Wikitty wow wow wow. Thank god for eyesight.
yes I think this is why I’ve been waiting for so long to put this book out. That opens up a new door. Thank you so much for opening so many doors for me right now. I’m feeling the vvvvip status again !!! And now I have both a new simplified lens (my completed sleeping pod and the feelings it is giving me) through which to deliver the messages within the message- gather a few friends and family - create simple songs and dances while building your small scale model to prepare everyone for the creation of a backyard sleeping pod- via festive building events where everyone feels welcome - (one of the African words for this kind of event translates to “feast” as in feast for the senses - including our sense of belonging. The path of sculpting a model around a table, (following a manual) leading into the creation of a cosy backyard sleeping pod is the most direct way to tip toe out of the matrix in plain sight.
I just found this crumpled up piece of paper while cleaning up. It’s a top view of a simple sleeping pod which for the southern hemisphere is pointing north to collect and store the warmth of a winter’s day sun which is then slowly released during the night and that would be reversed in your hemisphere.(facing south) It has a little kitchen alcove to the side/front so that you can enjoy cooking in the sun during the winter. From the stove it has a horizontal “kang” style chimney that goes under the foot of the bed to create extra heat inside during the winter - capturing and storing (in the clay) most of the heat generated by the cooking- while separating any smoke from the fire to be outside. I love using these types of stoves because they can be fuelled with fallen branches - which can be fed in long (uncut) - without the need for any wood chopping. It also has that other alcove in the east side which could become a bathroom. The southern side wall has an air gap to fill with straw to insulate it from cold winter winds (north in your hemisphere) and also the western wall has same to insulate against hot summer afternoon sun slowly setting in west. The bed is raised up.
When I first heard about crypto (without really fully knowing how it works - as is the case still) I imagined that somehow everyone at the Mudstomp event was earning some kind of tokens in addition to whatever other value they were getting. I’ve always paid top dollar for special musicians who have a special unique knack for infusing music and song into others, and felt that was still not enough to adequately exalt them as “construction activators”. I want to somehow value each participant at each event for their unique contributions -especially children who are able to magically draw in their parents, grandparents and siblings just from their sheer enthusiasm and their thrill of wanting to build. I want to create new incentives for the adolescent youth whose contributions are priceless and irreplaceable. I’ve previously been gifted the participation of adolescent youth at my events because they are happy to be getting out of the classroom but this is not a sustainable incentive as I’ve moved away from depending on the school system to incubate my vision. It needs to start growing outside of all that to accomodate and include the new breed of non-schoolers or “beyond-schoolers.” Or “new-schoolers”. DAOs? Also I want to recognise the value of the audience - which is really the lynchpin of it all. What is a show without an audience? Not much of anything really. I think it’s because we have been starved of our village that we are willing to pay $$ to be part of an audience and be used by the. When I used to buy live albums I recognised what incredible extra value the audience gave to the recording - and the same thing goes for a live show. The audience picks it up and takes it to another level and then the corporate music industry machine captures all that magic of the audience’s spontaneous generous heartfelt contributions and claims ownership of it, without the audience members consent. The role of the audience is key to both the entertainment value and the produc…
You could make a series of NFTs that have no innate value other than as collector's items--do you guys have Top Trumps or collector's cards? If so, think that but digital. You're essentially giving away art (Mud hut pictures/plans perhaps?) in the form of digital tokens. They acquire value if people choose to collect or trade them in an aftermarket. If nothing else it could give people some ideas for builds and be a fun thing to collect.
Yeah maybe some sort of unique souvenir / proof of attending an event like a close up of your finger prints in the mud ? Or a closeup of the unique mud blend of that build or that stage of the build - which would be infinitely different each time? But Im thinking something along the lines of attendance and or participation in the event or project as proof of work within an algorithm that results in the creation of the structure which is providing uniquely superior shelter that is free from the legacy banking system. That is real value. At the end of the day everyone’s crypto is still getting changed into fiat to pay the banks for our shelter. How does crypto see itself stopping the flow of money derived from shelter mortgages which is rising exponentially and funding all the things we are not aligned to? Can we not create algorithms and proof of work based on the organisation, hosting, attendance and participation at/of festive events that produce superior shelter (backyard sleeping pods) in a way that pleases the soul? Can’t we systematise what many people (in remote areas outside of the money system) are already doing (these are the only places where festive earthen masonry construction is happening) and what all of our ancestors used to do? If humans can complicate ourselves (from being born free and abundant) into mortgage debt slavery that lines the pockets of the predatory mindset which keeps us down, surely we can use complicated technology to incentivise dancing cosy structures into existence.
Cosy structures that feed some new ecosystem and not the legacy banking system. Once the formula is learned, the festive earthen shelter creation dance can be infinitely choreographed towards “perfection” to create an overall summertime magic made up of many genuine joyful feelings and experiencing the power of strength in numbers caressed by the cool, soft gentle, squishy sensuality of the muddy earth on our skin.