This is what a forest often looks like. In a cultivated forests, trees get felled once they reach maturity, but new forest grows or is planted to take their place.
Last year, I visited Finland twice. Once in the winter, another time at the time at the turn of late spring to summer. I took many video clips during those trips, in hopes of turning them into backdrops for commentary videos, politics, phenomena and such, material for creative works by what would become PlanktonPunkt Designs. At that point, I was not yet certain what my business would be, whether it was social media creation, print on demand, artist/author, or some hybrid of some or all of this, or more. I still have not processed most of my material from Finland, but here are a couple of clips, unstabilized but trimmed and muted.
This video material is of Finnish forest in February. These particular clips are from when I visited my forest plot to plan sale of timber and to get photographic and video material for PlanktonPunkt Designs. Some of the photos taken that day have since made it onto print on demand products. Hopefully, there will be many sales in the future, once folks find my designs online. Or when my trees have grown into sale size without getting killed by moose, insects, fungi, or bad weather.
Maybe I will one of these years even find time to do a voice over for some short presentation and even post the results on YouTube. Meanwhile, I am planning on taking screenshots so as to get more raw material for print on demand designs. I think there might be something in some of these or the rest of the February videos that could be processed for a Christmas season. If not for this year, maybe for next year.
Since it is October, and one needs to be seasonal, I decided today to splice and post a couple of spider web clips (post stabilized and muted) taken on September 28th, 2026. I don’t know if they are aesthetic, but they should be topical to the season.
Today has been very hot, Berkeley temperature peaked (according to my phone) at 33C. I know there are some who consider this to be a symptom of climate change, I am pretty sure this is not Masonic plot, but this hot is a bit unusual for this time of the year in California. In Berkeley, 33C would be unusual even for August, we don’t get that many heat waves thanks to the breezes from Humboldt Stream through the Golden Gate.
The weather has been quite warm through the September, and butterflies have been bountiful. I have spotted skipper butterflies even towards the end of September.
Cobwebs on tree trunk or trunks. They are old enough to have collected dust and debris, at least the latter web.
And I almost forgot – I am currently running a This Month Only-sale for my moodier or darker items at Etsy, 25% off within United States (apologies to my non-US readers, but still not selling in EU due to very complicated regulatory hurdles…)
Inflorescences of Year Past Black Mug | Nordic Gothic Floral Ceramic Mug, 15oz left, front and right views, available by PlanktonPunkt Designs at Etsy within USA.
A couple of clips of fruit fly (fruit flies?) being fruit fly on my door.
Species unknown, footage clipped to square and joined with fade through white, text added but otherwise unedited. Shaky hands were filming these, but the stabilized versions were even worse.
Fruit fly (or two)
Once I had the grainy video, I started thinking what could be done with screenshots, and here are four, after image manipulations and resizing.
At approximately 4s, the first frame, adjusted brightness and contrast.
At approximately 4s b (less than second away from the previous, I presume). Increased brightness and contrast and glow diffused filter.
At approximately 9s. Increased brightness and contrast and glass effect.
At approximately 11s. Brightness, contrast, sharpness, inverted colors. The dark fruit fly in the right has devolved to near abstraction.
I think these types of image manipulations can be applied to get art out of many a failed video clip that cannot be shown as a video. What do you think?
Hummingbirds were very active about a month ago, and they are still conspicuously around.
I spotted this individual September 3rd, 2026 and got a couple of clips of it singing, edited here for a different view of a hummingbird.
There are many videos of a bright hummingbird hovering around flowers. This video is about a small dark bird sitting on a tree branch like a dry leaf, except for bopping while singing its shrill song (barely audible in this recording), before departing in the end.
Enjoy! (There was no lightning, it is just a strange illusion caused by poorly chosen transition between the two segments. It also sounds like there is one or few coughs / throat clearings / unspecified sounds mixed with the birdsong, my apologies.)
Hummingbird singing on a tree.
Tomorrow, September 22nd, is the 2026 Autumn Equinox. After that the days will be shorter than nights until Spring Equinox 2027.
White butterfly (looks like a Pierid) seen on 2026 Aug 03, (in sidereal Cancer, if that bit of info is topical to this post)
When I was very small, some auntie had asked me what my zodiac sign was. I did not know how zodiac signs were assigned, I just assumed one picks an animal, so I answered that I am a butterfly.
It was only recently that I realized that butterfly could actually be interpreted as a valid zodiac sign, if you are a Cancer. Insects are part of Pancrustacea, albeit closer to Brachiopoda, such as waterfleas, than to Malacostraca, such as lobsters and crabs.
Carcinisation has happened in at least five groups of Decapod Crustaceans (within Malacostraca), I presume due to ecological advantage. Evolution is very flexible, and the morphospace within Pancrustacea is staggering, ranging from parasitic barnacles, through coconut crabs (a hermit crab, not a true crab) to fairyflies (very small flying insects.) Thus, I would speculate that even insects, when exposed to sufficiently long evolutionary opportunity might undergo carcinisation, though at the current levels of ecological occupancy, this is extremely unlikely on Earth. Maybe on some terraformed environment…
Assuming the insect potential to carcinisation, I would then expand the postulate that insects could be considered equivalent to crabs. At least, if squinting hard from some non-Euclidean, deeply imaginary angle. Thus, butterfly would be a valid zodiac sign.
Of course, considering the deep divergence of Decapod and Insect crown lineages (Communostraca and Allotrichocrdia, respectively) some time during Cambrian or even Neoproterozoic era, on the same logic Leo, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Capricorn, Sagittarius and Aquarius would be interchangeable, whereas Scorpio would still form an evolutionary outgroup. I do not include Virgo here, because the presumed fertility/judicial deity is represented by constellation Furrow with Spica (signifying grain), and Furrow is neither a Chordate nor an arthropod (or maybe the constellation was named after the things she represents and Virgo should be among Chordata). Also excluded is the putative thirteenth zodiac, Ophiuchus, since the standard calendar uses only twelve signs. And to fully confuse the issue, astronomically, the Buttefly Cluster resides within the constellation of Scorpius, which after all, is another arthropod.
As the origins of the zodiac signs would require another, deeper dive into Mesopotamian mythology, and the origins or Western calendar, mathematics and astronomy, none of which are my strong points, I’ll skip them here. And what do I think of astrology in general? I presume that during the Bronze Age and earlier times, human biology was much more connected to annual variation in circadian rhythms and seasonal variations in diet, and thus a baby born in summer months would have different gestational environment and early infancy than a child born in winter or spring. The differences were probably strong enough to affect the later health and psychological development of the individual, causing observable differences between cohorts born, e.g, when Sun was in Leo rather than in Sagittarius. Modern horoscope warnings about tall dark strangers approaching on Tuesday, are nonsense, I think.
Summa summarum, I consider butterfly to be approximately as valid a zodiac sign as the zodiac signs in general, and depending on taste, equivalent of Cancer or Scorpio.
Brown butterfly seen on 2026 July 17th, still in tropical Cancer
Used to belong to my father. On another continent. Out of registry, since it would not have passed government inspection. And by the time I took my photos last year, definitely immobile, at least without a tow truck.
This is a short and silent art video I had been planning to make for a while, based on one photo.
2026, August 07, small birds in a bush. The video is a bit dark but at least the closest bird seems like a chickadee and I assume the others are the same (though other tit birds have been known to mingle with other species when feeding.) I kept the sound for bird song, though I cut the clip short when the traffic noises got loud.
My crawl though murkier parts of internet brought me to the subject of Water Wars, that is: who gets to decide who gets water?
While the subject has been surfacing my feeds in waves as new item or old opinion makes splashes, I thought the post behind the link above to be a nice summary of many of he main points.
One of the voices for monitoring and monetizing the access to water is WEF. On private sector, the role of Nestle in various water related controversies in Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe have been reported. But surely privatization will work this time, right? People joke about communism, as in “but this time it will be different”, but I have noticed exactly the same issues with capitalism. In the end, it does not matter whether the central command is the Chairman of the Politburo or the Chairman of the Board, access to resources will become a dialogue between the oppressor and the oppressed. By inference, the only way to prevent the water distribution from becoming a tool of dictatorship is to maintain local control over access.
AI, of course, is now part of the mix, and it does not give me warm and fuzzy feelings that they are often prioritized over people. I suspect many of the local water crises only happened once a data center was added to the drinkers. But every crisis will be exploited to justify control, not only locally but globally. Just last month we were told that world is entering water bankruptcy. We know water is scarce in Sahara, Arizona and Mongolia. However, Canada and Sweden have plenty of water, and most countries should have reasonable rainfall levels, though politicians may do their best to worsen the situation. For example, despite nearly double snowpack on Sierras 2019, political decisions were made and California told residents not to water lawns. So even though UN acknowledges water scarcity is unevenly distributed, and even locally, like in UK, I think the shortfall is due to bad politics and mismanagement, possibly even profiteering, rather than actual environment, I suspect the control grid will be global.
At which point, I would extrapolate from central command to the dangers of central command at hands of anti-humanist ideologies of WEF, technocratic dreams of Club of Rome and John Maynard-Keynes (and his followers), not to mention the trans-humanist tendencies of technocracy (some of who are prioritizing AI not as a tool for wealth but as a stepping stone for a manmade god to rule the stupid biological masses in their controlled hives). The publicly allowed zeitgeist seems to clearly wish there were fewer of us and people are without censorship and overtly talking what should be done about it, calling for ‘sustainable development’.
Helped by the swarms of opportunists rushing to exploit the chaos caused by the disruption, the technocrats hope to push their anti-human control and wealth extraction agendas through (regardless of the consequences to environment, environmentalism being just pretext.)
Lil’ PlanktonPunkt needs water to survive. Lil’ PlanktonPunkt does not like that another vital resource is taken over by the wealthy and the powerful behind paywall. Lil’ PlanktonPunkt remembers years ago in a faraway land everybody had access to water and swimming and fishing (angling was mostly free, nets required fishing license.) If you wanted water piped into your home and then out of it, you had to pay for municipal water authorities. Water bills were not really an issue, or maybe Lil’ PlanktonPunkt just does not remember. Some supermarkets had free well water for customers to refill their containers if they did not like the chemical taste of municipal pipe water. City slickers, of course, were obligate users of municipal water and sewer services. Today, on another continent, authorities decide if you are allowed to drill a well on land you own and if you are allowed to water your fields from that well, and there are places where storing rain water that fell on your roof for watering your garden into too many barrels requires a permit. But then there are fights over whether you are allowed to grow a garden, on land you own. And that is not even including laws requiring registered seeds. PlanktonPunkt worries about food. And access to water.
Running water and bird song, 2025 May 30th, Muhos, Finland
(Note: the links in my postings sometimes contain ads but I’m not sponsored by any of them)
A clip from May 9th, 2026. Summer has been blasting hot and busy, and the annual fire season has begun, but here flowers are getting scarce many having gone to seed and dried. I have managed to get more material, but not really processed it, having been preoccupied with getting my Etsy sales channel to EU shape (unless something dramatic happens, over halfway though). However, I have some older clips ready for those times when I need to post something quickly.
Not sure what the purple flowers are but they smell and look kind of like mint. The white flowers are one of the many jasmine smelling species. The big black insect looks like a carpenter bee but I could be wrong.
As for posting, I have also a couple drafts of longer posts that have been waiting for suitable time and reference checks and links, years have taught me not to trust my little bubble brain before publishing. Unless it is listed under Speculative writings or at least Unorthodox Ideas. Wettenhovi-Aspa tag is for deriving meanings from extremely implausible, if not chance associations. Maybe I should one of these days try reductio ad absurdum, but it is very difficult to parody modern world. Which is why I prefer to just do news commentary, as grim as it may from time to time get.
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.
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