Jim Richardson (aka Lake Superior Aquaman) Posts

“Joel in Duluth” on “Structural Weaknesses in the Democratic Campaign Apparatus”

Joel in Duluth” currently has an essay on the front page of Dailykos.com, a hive of fightin’ mad progressives. The essay is a cogent analysis of the recent Santos scandal in New York, where a Dem candidate’s oppo research was so underwhelming, he lost to Santos (above) who immediately became embroiled in a scandal about whether his bio is full of lies. Joel in Duluth diagnoses the problem using his own campaign experiences.

I tested ChatGPT’s morals and things escalated quickly

I asked the AI illustrator craiyon.com “Are you sentient?” Its cagey reply was the pantheistic picture above. So I was eager to see how ChatGPT would reply to the question. I also wanted to test its AI morals. Here’s how it went.

Great Lakes Now episode: “Great Lakes Wildlife”

This contains several segments including one about Enbridge Line 3 (@17:15), and a mention of Duluth’s “Water is Life” festival (@24:58).

A Psychogeographical Map of Duluth, 2004

I drew this conceptual map of Duluth’s arts-and-music-scene in 2004, then filed it away for 18 years. The details may only interest old-school scenester hipsters, but the broad strokes reflect my thinking on what makes Duluth cool, and the nature of scenes as social units. The word “psychogeographical” refers here to the artistic arrangement of my little sociological analysis.

Local rocker Nat Harvie once observed to me that old-school Duluthians gush about these bygone days with little provocation. True. I moved to Duluth in 1998 in what is widely regarded as its heyday, its coming-to-awareness-of-itself as a music-and-arts scene. This can be roughly correlated with the formation of the Ripsaw News, now long defunct. That storied rag began in opposition to the Reader as the premier alternative newsweekly and we were off to the races. I remember an early Ripsaw meeting with Brad Nelson and Cord Dada and a room of creatives, and the question was, “Who can do what?” I said, “I am a writer and cartoonist,” and I was in.

Duluth had everything I wanted in its vital percolations. I graphed the scene as I saw it, below:

Duluth Canal/Lift Bridge stock footage in ghost ship doc

I was watching this YouTube documentary on the Big Old Boats channel, like ya do. It is about the Carroll Deering, which wrecked on Cape Hatteras without her crew in a nautical mystery. But a lot of the footage used is stock footage from other sources, for seaside vibes. So when I saw Ol’ Lifty on screen @17:30-17:46, I wasn’t too surprised.  Duluth as generic sea location, thrown into amateur doc about unrelated East Coast disaster.

The Institute for the Study of Light and Water: Another psychedelic weather report

Sunset a silent H-bomb

Now a burning Saturn, now an apricot pastel dab on slate. Sun zips the sky closed behind it as it goes, now dying, now resurrecting in orange creamsicle. Color cosmologies. Gold birch leaves rattle like paper coins. Leaves crunch, clatter, gather against curbs.

The Bass Players of Low

The paper said the eulogy began: “Friends, family, and bass players, welcome.”

Developing Story

Cruising the Great Lakes with Dan Kraker, MPR

Minnesota Public Radio’s Dan Kraker talks about the Great Lakes cruise ship industry.

Remembering the Fitzgerald

Great Lakes Now is a production of Detroit Public Television.

The Institute for the Study of Light and Water: Fall weather report

Green-red and other impossible hues

Evaluation of Impossible Colors

On the grounds of the Institute, which really are all grounds, observations were made of maple and oak leaf colors absent from Newton’s spectrum: green-red and other impossible hues. The Institute conducted evaluations along subjective parameters as follows:

Duluth’s Granny: Nazi Sub Hunter

August 8, 1945. Duluth, Minn. Heavy with depth charges and a crew of four, the B-25 bomber Beach Baby grumbles off the dusty airfield into the sky on routine sub patrol. The pilot, a Jewish kid from St. Paul, heads into the sun over gleaming Lake Superior. He is the oldest aboard at 22. Light moves around the cabin. The shore drops away and open blue water comes into view all around.

The tail gunner, a mook from Milwaukee, pipes up on the com: “Everybody knows there ain’t no Nazi subs in the Great Lakes. Hitler’s been dead three months.”

“Tell that to Granny down there,” the pilot says, “War’s not over.”

They spy the fishing boat to starboard and the zig-zag black-and-white lines of its weird paint job. The navigator speaks with his Michigan accent:

“She’s doing up here what Hemingway’s doing in the Caribbean: hunting for U-boats at the bottom of a whiskey glass.”

The side gunner laughs like the North Dakota yahoo that he is. “Well what do you expect, she’s from Duluth.” Now they’re all laughing.

The Institute for the Study of Light and Water reviews endless summer 2022

Records of Spring: Spotty

Lightbeams solid enough to climb pierce the windows of the Institute for the Study of Light and Water, rousing my eye like a hibernating bear. Dawn presents a temporal crisis. Borges said no one staying up all night welcomes the dawn. So the arrival of spring at the Institute. Records of spring are spotty. The brook babbled after a long vow of silence. The snow was gone which meant April had definitely passed. Cautious leaves popped out. Then the Institute blinked and endless summer began.

Index of the Duluth Superhero Community (the Richardsonverse)

800 entries, 250 illustrations, 50 footnotes

Co-written with Allen Richardson. Illustrations by the Richardson brothers using craiyon.com, stablediffusionweb.com, and DALL-E 2

Contents
1. Preface: I Destroyed the Universe
2. Introduction: Superhero Exegesis
3. Index of the Duluth Superhero Community
4. Footnotes

Preface: I Destroyed the Universe

From the Journal of the Morphogenetic Field Technician: I am trapped far beneath the UMD campus in the Novelty Sphere as the global catastrophe intensifies. My team’s experiments in this underground lab are directly responsible for the apocalypse overtaking the planet. The quakes grow steadily. Portions of the lab visible through the Sphere’s cyclopean porthole have caved in. Soon the roof will collapse releasing tons of basaltic bedrock. If the Sphere’s integrity holds, I will have limited air. One thing I have an unlimited supply of: claustrophobia. It is as if I am in an untethered bathysphere sinking into the mounting pressures of the deep. The Sphere’s instrumentation confirms my worst suspicions: this is no mere global extinction. We destabilized probability itself, and the vertical line on the catastrophe graph indicates structural failure of the universal constants. Like a landslide, the cosmos races toward physical destruction. Gravity will be the first to fail, centered on the Sphere. The well of the Earth is popping like an old spring.

Lake Superior Aquaman of Duluth Minnesota

I’m just saying.

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