Microcamper, Improv, and economic chaos - Mar 2025

img

I got a van and have converted it into a microcamper,mostly a half arsed temp job till the professionalscan do it properly in the Summer.

Also performed another Improv show, and ranted aboutonline safety and uk / us economics.

Me

Camper

As I said a few months ago, the estate offered me a garage meaning I finally have somewhere to put a van that I can convert into a microcamper.

So I bought this Berlingo last month.

I thought the fact it was already converted into a van would probably make the camper-conversion easier.

Turns out that’s likely not really the case. So it goes.

It’s previously been converted for a wheelchair ramp, which means the floor has been lowered, and this means there’s nowhere safe to bolt rear passenger seats, and so can’t have that “rock and roll” bed, that converts into seatbelted seats for passengers.

It does add a large underfloor storage area though.

I thought it would be fairly easy to remove the metal plates over the windows, but that turned out to be a mistaken assumption too. Was no metal plates. They’d just painted over the glass with some metallic paint. Luckily this can be just scraped off, presumably with some paint dissolving solvents applied too.

Dunno. I let the professionals handle that.

The folks that can do an actually good job of converting it into a microcamper are busy till July, so I get to play at doing a half arsed job to tide it over until then.

First job is taking out the floor to gain access to that underfloor area and to cover that in linoleum. Had some lying around after they did the bathroom last year.

Then to refit the floor and cover all that in a red felt carpet.

The job is shoddy here really. What’s needed is to insulatethe entire body of the car and then cover professionally andwell, but I dunno how to do all that. I just used spray glueto fasten this stretch carpet to the existing wood, that’ll be replaced when it’s converted proper anyway.

The roof will remain cold and metal till then.

Added a cool foldable chair, which works very well in the van. Should ideally be fastened better to the floor, but it has a nice three mode positions forsit and chaise long and lie flat with the passengerseat folded down.

You can get a folding leaf table, and if you saw off the bottom 15cm or so of the panels forming the sides and front of the table, and also don’t bother to attach any of the back leaf, then it becomes just the right height to mostly fit under the rear window.

It’s a little higher than the camper-fridge, but the camper fridge is pretty much the same height as a little bedside cabinet.

There’s also a small rectangular sink that fits nicely around the same width as the fridge alongside that cut down table.

And thus, the interior can be mostly constructed in my flat. The kids in the flat upstairs kept waving as me as I was doing a terrible job of cutting down those panels with a jigsaw in the yard.

Then there’s a whole day of carrying those things out to the van and trying to screw them into the floor.

Had to swap the fridge and the cabinet around fromthe plan. The fridge is less deep than it is wide and doesn’t block the table-leaf when it’s at theedge with door facing the front of the car.

I expected to have to pause here and measure up and buy some wood, but someone had thrown out a desk that matches very well and a bit more sawing managed to get that into the right shape to build a frame to hold everything in place.

That sink is attached by only one of the six grips that are supposed to hold it. Two can’t be used flat against a wooden board, and 3 aren’t against anything at all right now.

I like the easy access to battery and water and things from the back. Fair amount of storage there too which is accessible from inside if the table is up.

And that’s about as good a job as I can do really.Hopefully some of it will still be useable in a few months when it’s done properly by a professional.

At least the fridge ought to carry over.

The bed folding down past the passenger seat is great. I’m too tall for this van really, but that makes it workable. Shame the seat/bed has to be so narrow though. The two-seater was very temping and feels like it ought to just about fit but, wouldn’t really be any way to unfold it from within the van and the steering wheel gets in the way for folding the driving seat down like the passenger seat does so couldn’t really go flat without also lifting up.

And I tell you what though, it really does only just fitinside that garage. I can’t get any fatter or I won’t be able to squeeze my way out of the door when it’s parked inside.

My reversing skills weren’t great even before I spent 20 years not driving. Now I’ve reversed that thing into that tiny little gap a few times.

One time I forgot to fold in the passenger wing mirror, and then had to replace the passenger wing mirror

Early April I took the van out on a test flight.

It was damned windy.

Reconfigured the positioning after a while to make the car into a wind-break. Even then, very noisy flapping about and inflating all night. Feared it would fly away and be gone in the morning but it was still there.

Though one of the rings keeping the pole taught was stretched and broken! Luckily seems there’s a spare for that in the pack.

I biked around the country lanes for a bit till I feared for the bike’s battery getting me back.

Hoped to maybe do some writing without the distraction of the internet, but managed to forget the keyboard’s wrireless dongle. Worked at home in test coz that was nearby and plugged in rather than because it wasn’t needed. 🙄

Oh well, a lesson learned at least. Next time my keyboard will work.

Van has no a corkscrew, but managed to open the bottle with a screw and knife. That is one of the list of notes I have, lessons learned.

All in all successful. I think that the awning isn’t likely needed in most festival style setups. Just sleep and go out.

So I have a micro campervan now. To be improved in a few months.

Improv

Did another improv show this month.

Long form with Hoopla.

Mostly what is known as an Armando, in which a performer will riff on the audience suggestion telling a story from their life and then the rest do sketches based on the story.

I’m not mad keen on the Armando to be honest. It seems to result in a series of mostly disconnected sketches based on a theme rather than a story with a coherent narrative and satisfying beginning, middle, and end.

Plus, without explaining the format I think it leaves the audience confused as to what’s going on, and if you do explain it then, well, explicit audience explaining isn’t entertaining in itself.

Did a life and times skit after that though, which I find more satisfying. The story of Jim, and his quest to remove the chocolate from Maltesers. Pretty chaotic with 14 performers all at once.

And that marks the end of my Hoopla courses for now. No sensible session to move onto that wasn’t already booked up too far in advance.

We were trying to get the players together for a more independent group but that didn’t look like it’d manage to get the numbers and happen, so I booked into a Free Association course that’s started now.

I’m told the Free Association are less Free, in that they take it more seriously and have stricter formats and a three hour session rather than a two hour session, and it’s even possible to actually fail and so have to repeat rather than advance!

But it is like five minutes walk from my flat above one of my favourite pubs and should be interesting.

Meanwhile that indie group did in fact manage to form when confidence was increased by one of us booking an experienced host/teacher instead of trying to wing it on our own.

Which is nice but means I’ll be doing some improv two nights a week for a while from next week. Which is quite a lot!

Online Safety

This month was Online Safety Day because the terrible awful Online Safety Law comes into affect.

To me, Online Safety means:

  • Never use your government name on the internet.

  • Use fully end to end encrypted services like Signal.

  • Avoid using large online surveillance projects like Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp.

  • Self-host wherever possible to protect your data from Big Tech.

  • Alter your software to block ads, use ad-blockers everywhere.

  • Use a VPN to help subvert tracking technology.

  • Avoid allowing the algorithms decide what you see. Turn off autoplay, use RSS.

But the government, and most of the callers to talk radio on the day, seem to think it means:

  • All sites must ID check their users to ensure they aren’t children.

  • Encryption must have government back doors so the police and state can read all messages.

  • Only big tech sites are legitimate because they are more subject to legal control

  • Self hosting should be legally onerous so that only big companies with huge legal compliance departments can run internet sites.

  • It should be illegal to alter the software made by big business.

  • VPNs should be illegal since they can avoid government blocks.

So that’s all pretty depressing.

Good luck everyone. Stay safe.

Fight For Your Country

There was an article from Medialens on fighting for your country.

Mark Urban finds it “disturbing” that 40% of Zoomers would not fight for the UK under any circumstances.

Media Lens, and I, think it more marvelous, a glimmer of hope.

The idea that I should risk my life to fight in a war to protect the monarch’s right to reign Britain, the barely democratic first past the post system, and the increasing wealth of western oligarchs, and never ending austerity is sickening.

Fight to protect the monopolists rentierism, and Starmer’s welfare cuts and attacks on the needy?

Nope.

Fight to protect this bipartisan tory oil regime that rules the country and intends to burn fuel till the walls come down? Nope.

This country is already under occupation, by the bankers, and the capitalists, and the petrofascists that will destroy us all for more dollars in their pockets.

Every war they have executed in my lifetime was based on a lie.

They can all fuck off if they think I’d fight for any of them. Wankers.

The only worrying thing is 60% of the zoomers are apparently still falling for it.

UK Budget

My water bill is up 30%, primarily to pay interest in bad debt borrowed to enrich shareholders. Gotta pay it this month.

Which brings to mind a philosophical question:

Who should own UK infrastructure and industry?

A) The UK government

B) Multinational capitalist enterprise

Thatcher decided (B) and the people never got a referendum on it because Labour decided (B) as well, and it’s a two party state really.

It’s firmly embedded into the politic. When governments of all colors are insisting they need foreign investment from rich capitalists before they can build anything, they are implicitly accepting (B).

They don’t need money, they can print that.

The foreign investment doesn’t bring labour, they use local labour.

They are just looking for an owner so the governmentdoesn’t have to own it.

There’s hidden options too:

C) The workers who work in that enterprise should own it communally and inalienably

D) A cooperative of the customers of the enterprise should own it communally and inalienably

But we don’t even talk about those.

Instead, the chancellor of the exchequer does a budget in which she’s expected to cut a wide range of benefits and allowances and generally try and balance the books by taking from the poor to give to the rich.

Rachel the reverse Robinhood.

They won’t call it Austerity, because that name is poisoned and they promised not to do anything called that, but that’s what it is.

It won’t work.

Duh.

Making the poor masses poorer reduces spending in the economy,which reduces government receipts, and makes the deficit bigger not smaller.

Austerity never works. Can’t work.

If balancing the books matters it really needs to be done by taxing the rich to spend on the poor, so that the poor spend the money into the economy and grow the economy to increase the government receipts.

The rich end up with the money anyway, once the poor spend it. They always do.

Cutting from the poor to avoid taxing the rich just means more money goes into overseas tax havens and into pumping up the untaxed prices of assets for the rich.

No growth, except in asset prices and the hordes of the owner class.

You’d hope a left wing government would get this, but of course Starmer’s Labour aren’t a left wing government, they are just more tory.

Not that their budget even stood for a weekbefore all the numbers changed because of Liberation Day….

Liberation Day

Really amazing how they can label the biggest tax rises on America seen since the big wars as “liberation day” and people swallow it.

Look forward to being liberated by having these giant tax increases, expect the big price rises to be very liberating, the reduction in choice at the checkouts to be a liberating experience.

Increases in poverty and shifts in the tax burden towards the poor?

How liberating!

Seems like they want to fix the balance of trade with the rest of the world, which may be a laudable aim, but there’s a reason it’s so skewed: The dollar.

You can’t print all the global reserve currency that the world needs and supply the world with money while also having a balanced trade sheet. The world is takingyour money, your promises to pay, and giving you consumer products in return.

If you want to give them consumer products in returninstead, then they no longer take your money, and theworld has to find something new to trade among themselvesother than dollars because they no longer have dollars.

Perhaps it really is time to destroy the petrodollar as the world reserve currency. Would likely be good forAmerican workers to do that.

But this seems a somewhat chaotic method to pick.

The balance of trade can’t be fixed while dollars arethe world reserve. Those nations he is tariffing needdollars to pay their dollar debt, they must have a balanceof trade deficit. Even if they could relocate immediately all the industry they would still need dollars to pay their dollar debt.

The world money system is designed to impoverish countries with dollar debt to force them to sell goods to America in return for dollars to pay their debt.

That’s how the IMF and America extract all their wealth

Now they will be further punished for it by tariffs aimed at preventing collecting the dollars to pay the debts?

Madness.

Pundits seem to think they’ll back off the tariffs because otherwise they’ll wreck the system, but I think their aim might be to wreck the system and replace it with something out of handmaid’s tale.

Releases

Wordcloud Tarot

On the first of April 2025, the stock markets were crashing because Trump’s Tariffs are due to kick in.

We did a five minute tarot reading to investigate andfound that mutual trade and comparative advantage has lead to pleasurable global effects but now an impulsive foolish naive man-baby has rewound that situation, causing a meltdown and sadly the world will suffer the impulsive irritable reckless felon’s rule for some time to come.

img

Watch the five minute show on our site:

https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2025-04-01-trumpstariffs/

Reading

Not Till We Are Lost

Read “Not Till We Are Lost”, the fifth book in Dennis E. Taylor’s “Bobiverse” series.

Another great one with the Bobs fighting against a superintelligence, exploring a strange network of abandoned civilizations, studying a species of dragons with stoneage tech, and generally being sarcastic and hip with each other.

The universe the Bobs are exploring is getting pretty vast and complicated now, though they still keep talking about the Fermi paradox. Which isn’t really a thing once you have actual contact with lots of alien species.

Where is everyone?

Oh, there they are.

Bob was a 21st century geek, and his voice is filled with cultural references familiar to us all. It’s not like Ready Player One, which often seemed to just devolve into lists of 80s things, but does make the character/s seem alive and relevant.

The characters in Zombie movies often refuse to even acknowledge that they have ever previously seen a zombie movie or use the word Zombie. This isn’t like that. If they see a thing that’s like that thing from Star Trek they’ll mention that.

Great stuff anyway, hopefully Taylor can keep doing a new one every year.

Watching

Star Trek Discovery

Watched the last season of StarTrek Discovery, in which the crew race against a couple of renegades to solve clues that lead them to technology left by the ancients that spread life around the galaxy.

Ridiculous.

I quite liked the renegade characters, star crossed lovers fighting two empires to survive. And the crew of Discovery include some decent character with nice arcs.

The idea that Next Gen era scientists left clues that future people would follow 800 years later is like something out of a game rather than a drama though.

Makes no sense.

Those guys should have done what Burnham does and burn it instead of hiding it for more peaceful times.

And those last 20 minutes of happily ever after wrap up was terrible. Sentimental schmaltzy bullshit. Certainly should have cut that, showing aged characters in retirement and the last mission to just abandon the ship. Nope. Would have all been better without any of that.

Farewell then Discovery. You started before Kirk and ended a thousand years latter. I enjoyed most of it, and it was better than Archer’s Enterprise, but a long way from the best of trek.

What We Do In The Shadows

Watched season 5 of What We Do In The Shadows, ten episodes in two nights.

Great stuff. Very silly and fun.The vampires continue their strange adventures on Staten Island, covered by the documentary crew. They way the characters are all so self absorbed and incompetent gives lots of room for stories interacting and clashing.

Great show.

Question Time

Watched BBC Question Time since Gary Stephenson was on it. He’s great of course.

Everyone else is exactly the same as why I stopped watching.

The panel filled with pompous bootlickers and wankers who defend the status quo and the rich, even as they attack each other.

The audience full of barely coherent idiots whose questions miss the point where they make any sense at all.

The panel other than him is unanimous that Wealth Taxes can’t work because they’ve been tried in some places, and those places then stop trying after a while.

I mean the obvious reason for that is that wealth taxes affect the rich and the rich run the country, so they stop those policies that effectively reduce their wealth.

Strange to jump to the conclusion that it’s because they’re ineffective.

On the question of how to respond to Trumps Tariffs, Gary just doesn’t know. Maybe take some of the money that’s flowing to US Tech companies but not details on how to do that.

Some suggest that Brexit has a benefit here, that rather than standing in solidarity with the rest of Europe we should negotiate a special deal just for us, by giving him what he wants, whatever that is.

The government want to be a bridge 🤦

Nobody even aware of Cory Doctorow’s plan of removing the protections that prevent reverse engineering and forced competitive compatibility.

The thing which might actually work and do good is unthinkable.

On improving mental health services especially for children, they just wanna blame lockdowns and ban kids from phones, or maybe tax social networks to pay for councilors.

They all think the internet is to blame rather than the pressures of poverty and capitalism.

Gary on the other hand has been open in his book about his own mental health, and does blame povertyand that working a job won’t even give you enough to feed your kids.

Earlier generations were able to earn enough to have a family and a house, and modern kids can’t, that is why he thinks they’re all struggling.

Because they face a bleak economic future.

Links

AI Security

Signal chief says agentic AI has having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues.You think privacy is rare now? Wait till AI has

access to our web browser and a way to drive it as well as access to our credit card information to
pay for tickets, our calendar, and messaging app to send the text to your friends.

Ars Technica talk to some Open Source devswho are drowning in AI traffic sucking upall the data on their servers.

According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of
their traffic originating from AI companies’ bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.

Austerity

They try not to call it Austerity any more butthe government just can’t stop themselves.

All this is designed to reduce the fiscal deficit, allegedly. But reducing economic activity will reduce 0 revenue. It is a death spiral. If the aim was actually to reduce the fiscal deficit, taxing those who have money would be far more sensible than taking money from those who do not.

Gary talks about the Squeeze Out:

1 - The rich take the resource of the working class leaving them in debt,

2 - economic collapse,

3 - the rich take the resources of the government leaving it in debt,

4 (happening now) - the rich take the resources of the middle classes,

5 - the right fight each other for resources, world war.

Bleak.

End Of America

The American age is over. And it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it

A lot of people have a ’need for chaos’, as long as there’s no chaos.

When, in decades to come, history students look back at the late 2010s and early 2020s … they will as one ask a confused question:

“Why was there a Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party?”

more

————-That’s just the highlights this month,there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed

Around the Fediverse

It feels like the entire internet is justseven massive companies draining your dataand your attention to try and manipulate youinto supporting fascism, and that’s because itis.

There there is one holdout, one part of the web still independent, without manipulativealgorithms, without adverts, just people talkingto people.

Here’s some of it’s best.

Fediverse itself

The most promising social media network from a specifically social point of view is the fediverse. Of our current options, it is…

  • the one least tied to commercial interests,
  • the one with the strongest grassroots bona fides,
  • the one best situated to enhance the autonomy of communities online.

At present, it is our best opportunity for building a new kind of social media, a radical departure from global communication as a site of provocation and extraction.

It is, I worry, an opportunity that’s slipping away.

Canada Vs United States

Trump’s threat to annex Canada actually isn’t “crazy”.

The USA has always wanted to annex Canada. It’s wanted to annex Canada since the USA came into existence….

Online Safety Bill

Hamsters not xhamsters?

You may or may not know, there is a porn site called xhamster - I have literally no idea why it is called that.

I’ll save you visiting the site to check: Even though it has a cookie banner, it has no attempt whatsoever to operate the age verification required by the Online Safety Act. Not even a simple “I am over 18” button (which would not comply).

Yet, it is reported a forum for people with pet hamsters has shut down, along with hundreds of other sites and forums run by volunteers and individuals, because of the risk of fines and cost of compliance with this crazy new law.

AI

When you start to look at the classic trigger points for revolution, it’s easy to see how the mass, fast adoption of AI is going to create them.

(LONG THREAD, I KNOW, IT SHOULD BE A BLOG POST)

Open Code

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been building #GPSTracker
(git repo) as an open-source alternative to both Google Maps Timeline and Foursquare/Swarm.

I have more than a decade of GPS beacons stored on my database from my mobile devices through the likes of Tasker and GPSLogger, but no feature-rich UI to navigate them or run stats on them.With GPSTracker I’m trying to fill that gap, and provide a self-hosted alternative to cloud-based location services without compromising your privacy.

Tariffs and Trump

I’m upset with the trade deficit I have with my grocery store. I buy much more from them than they buy from me. So I’m putting a 5% tariff on everything I buy from them.

That will teach them.

I am a genius.

If we got rid of the state, who would protect us from people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who only pose a threat to use because of their control over the state?

In the time since Trump’s election, many people who perhaps didn’t entirely believe me when I spent the past ten years or so pointing out that everything about MAGA and its leader were genuinely fascist, have asked me, often frantically, “what do I do now?”

This is a complicated question for me to answer for at least two consistent reasons.

  1. We live in a fascist police state where it’s already pretty risky to urge people to impede, resist, or topple that fascist police state and the extraction of profit all this fascism is designed to protect; and let me assure you, it hasn’t gotten any less risky to do so now that Downmarket Mussolini is in charge again.
  1. Almost nobody who asks me that question really wants to hear the answer they already know I’d give, if I were free to be completely honest with them.

She links to Some More News doing a How To Resistepisode

United States Disappeared Tracker

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/danielleharlow/viz/UnitedStatesDisappearedTracker/Map

Subscribe

❤👍👎😆😢😮
Un/SubscribeSharechat