A GIF of lavender on July 17th, with a couple of bees.

PlanktonPunkt Designs puzzles available in CreateJigsawPuzzles
link to order print on demand PlanktonPunkt Designs jigsaw puzzles (printed in China)
PlanktonPunkt Designs POD products in Printify
link to order PlanktonPunkt Designs print on demand wares from the source
PlanktonPunkt Designs POD products in Etsy
A link to order from a selection of PlanktonPunkt Designs print on demand wares from Etsy
Many things have been keeping me busy, not the least of which is pivoting my Etsy strategy – I have decided to take expand my market area to EU and the rest of the world.
But only with Etsy. Because Etsy takes care of most of the bureaucracy, whereas with my other channels I would need to immerse myself to the regulations and tax codes of a couple of hundred jurisdictions. Plus the ever changing tariff conditions. Which all would be too much for lil’ PlanktonPunkt.
Originally, I tried to change the product descriptions and shipping profiles to (hopefully) EU compliant (I am copying the info provided by the production partner) by the end of this month, but now I am more modest in my ambitions and aiming to have done it during August. 2026, that is.
After that, Hello World!
Meanwhile, I heard one consultant on YouTube advertising that current trends in Etsy are back to school, feral, and cute bugs. So I thought I could try feral cute snail. On a mug that could work nicely for a college student.




Mug left side: Today, I’m feeling feral. Mug right side: Absolutely feral.
Mockups show 11oz and 15oz variants. Clicking any of the images in the gallery leads to my cheaper but USA only pop-up store.
Clicking this link will take to the mug in Etsy, which hopefully, sometime during August 2026, will be available around the world.
Just a GIF of a small bird I saw July 23, 2026.

I need better video editing software or a camera with stabilization / gimbal. But I am already usually carrying quite a bit of electronics around.
I wandered into a video about why Finland sucks. Some I agree, some I don’t, but I put a longish comment there and decided to republish it with some modifications and additions.
The downward turn of Finland became a point of no return at EU membership.
The money circulating in economy now goes to Brussels and multinational corporations operating under international rules, while Finnish economy is being strangled by EU directives designed to favor the looting of peripheral provinces like Finland. Everything else is downstream symptoms of this colonialism.
Including chopping state services like electric grid, elder care, and soon common water resources, for sale to international bidders (which I suspect to happen because the administrative and tax structures are heavily stacked against those domestic enterprises that do not use tax sandwiches and cheap foreign labor.)
Using regulatory capture via EU is a modified version of standard globalist modus operandi, sending economic hitmen to subvert national governments to facilitate their countries looting. Here it is a supranational structure operating under severe democracy deficit that functions as a middleman and a fig leaf of legitimacy to borderless looting. After quick googling, I got the impression EU itself seems to consider the political legitimacy a perception issue, i.e., the system may get (cosmetic?) changes and the EU subjects might be probagandized more, if the issue becomes more relevant to the powers that be.
Among other economic issues, the video mentioned refugees, which in case of Finland was a GDP Ponzi scheme coordinated at EU level. In general, the whole multiculturalism is just a marketing term used by elites pushing for their ‘remedies’ to economies that are already underperforming because of the epic looting that has been going for a long time.
The real original reason for the refugee business was at first ‘tax payers are not breeding, let’s import more labor’ (and charge the public purse cost plus for integration services by well-connected providers, which, surprisingly, have zero incentives to run out of people to provide integration services for). If nobody paid for the great social benefits to them (AKA the immigration industrial complex) the immigrants would go somewhere else. As would the integration service providers siphoning this money.
In California, we have a massive homeless industrial complex, with more and more tax money collected to subsidize more and more homeless services serving more and more homeless. Now people have began asking evaluation of results, even audits to find where 20 billion dollars (20 * 10^9 $$$) paid over 5 years went.
Then, when the newcomers did not get employed (the economy was still sick due to looting, and using the ‘integration services’ rather than job opportunities as a bait attracts different cohorts of immigrants), the rationale began to shift towards consumer headcount method of economy – more consumers mean more economic activity.
Except to pay for the new army of unemployed, the successive Finnish governments needed to borrow more money, cut other services and pay taxes. Which did not increase economic productivity but increased money in circulation while shifting it from pocket to pocket. Which means inflation and rising unemployment. But at least the economic numbers were manipulated to the EU standards using approved methodologies.
I don’t know what the next phase of immigration will be, but I would be surprised if it worked better than the previous two phases. Finland, I think, is still in the first phase but beginning to have doubts about it (I might be wrong because I don’t follow Finnish media that much any more.)
Slightly expanding on the subject, I think NATO’s current whining for war is just the grand finale in the leveraged buyout of nation states like Finland. The EU cash cows have been milked out of all the profits a peacetime economy can provide, let’s sell them to meatpackers. The military industrial complex, the war bond markets (large parts of Ukraine have been put as collateral for the loans required to continue the war against Russia), the reconstruction contracts, the overall firesale of the desperate (or dead) people’s resources for cheap to multinational investors. Finland is, of course, eager to go against traditional enemy, thinking that NATO will help them or that they will help NATO, or something.
TLDR: Finland is just a case example what happens to once stable and prosperous countries once EU gets to rule them. I suspect that once looting Finland with just current methodology is no longer cost effective, it will be one of the assets to be liquidated in the war against Russia.

Economic low pressure over remaining small businesses, a metaphor.
Checking photos of Finland to best illustrate the situation, I think this is better than one of the runners up, a dead tree full of concs.
Here is a sky darkened by rain clouds and a thin line of trees, cosmetically around a road rest spot, but no trees behind them. To the right was a rain drenched bog with sparse, stunted pines.
It could be that the line of trees surrounds a farm (those are also usually under heavy regulatory and financial burdens), but thin lines of trees can be seen standing between roads and clear cut openings all over Finland. Such a line could be easily considered a metaphor for cosmetic ‘Happiest Country Statistics’ masking over the remnants of Finland’s economy, while behind spread ploughed through clear cut openings, that would be the real state of Finlands economy. And the dark clouds of global economic collapse and war are looming.
Been busy, but managed to get some photography and short video clips, joined three together into a short silent video (standard stabilization artefacts apply), two clips of giant white poppies, probably Romneya or Matilija poppies which are native to California, and one clip of bees foraging in lavender.
I like the floppy petals of the poppies. The lavender and bees seem to be an all year feature – when one lavender bed withers, another seems to begin to bloom somewhere else, if not immediately, then soon.

Not all flowers are showy – here is Plantago (I don’t know the species, but it’s not Plantago major based on the narrow .leaves). I would love to process some day a photo of a Plantago flower from close up, they are quite funky to look at but difficult to photograph so as to show it.
PlanktonPunkt Designs failed the July 4th sale because of my bureaucratic error, so I’d like to apologize the inconvenience to any US person who were disappointed about the lack of access last weekend.
My shop on Etsy is back on, with 25% sale within United States extended to July 16th as a minor compensation for the inconvenience.
https://planktonpunktdesigns.etsy.com
I will next be working on my pop up shop on Printify, hopefully to be restored by the end of day, with the same extension to the sales.
https://planktonpunkt-designs.printify.me
I dun messed up, sorry!

While walking with intention to snap photos of urban vegetation, I noticed a skipper butterfly within videoing distance. Quickly, a clip before it flies away! It did not. I took a second clip. The butterfly had slightly shifted. I waited and took three more clips in case the butterfly would do something interesting. It id not. It was mostly concentrating on florettes. Eventually, I continued my walk and left the butterfly at it.
A bit of a slow paced video, but maybe somebody will find it ASMR despite the stabilization errors. Maybe I should invest on gimbal, but that would be one extra thing to carry for a rare moment (that will without gimbal be shaky or distorted depending on whether the original or the stabilized clips are used.)
Sucking nectar. Occasionally shifting position.

Some yellow flowers from July 10th, 2026, image cropped and colors adjusted brighter.
I’ll treat this as a rumor but where there is smoke, there could be fire. Some spot(s) in Texas are said to be running out of diesel and gasoline – this could be just a temporary and local supply chain hiccup, but in my lived experience, all sorts of hiccups are becoming the norm. Another rumor from the same report claims that New Jersey is running out of diesel and gasoline for big companies, as well as of motor oil. The motor oil issue spooked me already some months ago to buy a couple of pints extra in case I need it, when I learned that Toyota relaxed its oil specifications because there was not enough fancy oil available.
The purported low price per barrel of crude may be due to demand destruction, or so it has been speculated. As economies crater (especially Chinese), the world oil consumption presumably goes down, and there is suddenly enough barrels after all. Problem: can official numbers of anything, including fuel supply and consumption, be trusted? And even if the numbers are real, are models correct?
Meanwhile, I saw a video about people no longer affording fun like bowling, boating or going to movies. I think that entertainment downturn is also caused by demoralization. Nobody has time or energy for formerly fun hobbies, even if they had money. And people do still watch TV, play computer games and stream movies. They just are not consuming the new ones. I can sympathize. Call me old-fashioned, but I, too, used to watch more movies before COVID. I think that event fractured the society badly. Having said that, the last movie I saw in theater was Project Hail Mary, which I liked.
The gasoline prices are currently lower but that may be temporary as the action in Strait of Hormuz and elsewhere intensifies.
Dead meat. And lots of it. In California, in July. Though I suspect most of the biomass stored there was not meat, more like a mix of meat, fish, ice cream, frozen fruit and vegetables, and lots and lots of TV dinners, imagine the smell of 65 million pounds of rotting food stuff. And logistics of dealing with the mess. The panel in the video behind the link tried to. In this case, I suspect flies and other scavengers like mice and ants will become a plague, but still preferable to the putrescing health hazard. Having seen the organizational abilities of California in general and LA region in particular (Palisades fires, for example), having the mess to fly away after the maggot phase might be the fastest and most efficient way of dealing with it.
Heat dome is destroying our crops and cattle. Corn is currently silking, too much heat destroys the ears before they have formed. Soybean flowers are suffering, too. Cattle pastures are parched, meaning strain on supplemental feed supplies. Not to mention animals themselves at risk of heat strokes. And the farms are already under water stress, fighting for supplies.
In general, our wheat production is the lowest in 50 years. The US wheat acreage is lowest in over a century and when weather and fertilizer effects are added, the amount of wheat to be produced is in danger.
President has declared a national emergency over the availability of fertilizers. One reason for low wheat acreage is the unaffordability of fertilizer and if the farms do not get their fertilizer in the autumn, next year will be worse. This autumns fertilizer needs to start moving to wholesalers already to make it in time for the farmers. Next year’s crops depend on whether we can source enough now.
The past few years have reminded me of Revelation, chapter 6, verses 5 – 6, where Famine is given orders in terms of food inflation.
Hi Everyone!
This 4th of July is 250th Anniversary for USA, so I though to set up a sale for my US customers.
Traditional mathematics may not recognize 250% price cut, but lil’ PlanktonPunkt has a solution: 10 days x 25% sale sums to 250?
Starting July 4th and ending July 13th, for ten days total, a sale of 25% on all items in PlanktonPunkt Designs shops in Printify pop-up shop and in Etsy, valid within United States of America.
Happy Birthday USA!

Click the pic to go to PlanktonPunkt Designs Printify pop-up shop.