Moving the Bar

I bought a skipping rope the other day, I thought the most important exercise is high speed arobic. Your heart needs to speed up a bit to improve your health. I look out for very cheap arobic exercise equipment that can be left outside in your back yard. 

Exercising is very much like having a hobby, you want to see how far you can push the bar, you want to see how much you can improve what you are doing.  In exercise you want to strengthen your body. In my cartoon Blog, I want my cartoons sketches to satisfy my own standards, they don't at the moment but they're improving but I wouldn't buy it if it was printed. That's ok, that's what it's about; you want to see how much progress you can make. This is my cartoon strip blog https://jokejohn.blogspot.com/. 

I look for things to improve my health and I try to improve my cartoon sketches until Jesus comes back or I pass away. 

Cabinet Reshuffle

 Recently David Lammy became the new deputy prime minister, this also means someone else had to move to his old position, we call that a cabinet reshuffle  because cabinet ministers are moved around to different roles. David Lammy took Angela Rayner's job because one of her properties was owned by a trust and that meant she paid less property tax than a regular home owner, so the public felt like they were being blind sided. If a trust or a bank owns a property, they pay less property tax because the law protects banking assets in this county, the trouble is individuals can set up a trust or a small private bank and use it to own property so they would be exploiting a tax loophole. If a minister uses tax loopholes, it is unacceptable because the public community is looking up to them for help and they're helping themselves. I'm not saying she is a crook though, I think accountants can sometimes tell people to do things like that. When you're working in the leadership cabinet, journalists and opposition leaders will scrutinise everything you do and your job is temporary. 

I only think about it when it happens or when it's on the news. Otherwise I just explore my imagination. I imagine owning a 12'' gauge train set, one you can ride on that is tucked away inside a large vent space in your home. No one would see it unless they opened a cupboard with no back panel, it would be a doorway to a mini train station. You could dress up all the fittings on the station and even build the train yourself out of large boxes. The wheels of the tiny train would just be skateboard wheels that sit downwards and sideways on the rails; the rails would just be sheet metal bent into a rectangle shape. The train itself would move by being dragged by electromagnets that are on the floor. The train itself would look like boxes with hinges holding them together but as you modify it, it looks more and more like a train. You cut out holes in the large boxes and put see-through plastic for the windows. You add stickers and paint, things like that. You use a 3D printer to print out seats and housing panels for the progress displays. Finally you make the doors because you're not content with a cavity on the side to get in. The vent would also take away the stale damp air and leave cool fresh dry air. 

Backless Cupboard Fishless Aquarium

It is getting darker and cloudy these days, days are noticeably shorter. I can sense the days are getting shorter because the sun dips below the horizon before 8. Here in Britain the skies can be grey for days at a time, it feels so grim, the summer is fading away for another 9 months. In virtual reality the weather is always nice unless you don't want it to be.  The talk on everyone's lips is the strange comet, i3-atlas. Some people think it is slowing down or changing speed like a space ship, others are sceptical and think it's just a comet flung out from another star system. Other people think it is heading for earth.

When the news is grim, when the skies are grim and filled with grey, what can you do? Get some comfort from your imagination. I imagined winning the lottery and getting planning permission to build my house on an abandoned industrial site. The house would have extra large vents, the vents would be used to contain a small gauge railway set. 

There would be cupboards in the house with nothing in them. You open the cupboard and there is no back-panel, just an opening to a mini train station. There would be small trains with 4 cars, each car is just big enough for one person to sit in it. Each train car would be a custom made box with an array of skateboard wheels screwed to it but it would be dressed up like a train. At the flick of a switch lights would turn on and the miniature metro rail system turns into a fishless aquarium; there would be screens inside little glass boxes showing fish swimming around but there would be no fish in them. It would be a fake aquarium. It looks real but there is no water and no fish.

The large vents would also be very good at taking stale air out of the rooms and filling the rooms with fresh air. A house with extra large vents to facilitate hobbies and make the air fresh. Imagination just for comfort. Sometimes imagination isn't just used to create things it is to settle the mind. 

What August 2025 Means to Me

 In august 2025 I was drawn to a cosmic mystery that came with conspiracy theories. A very fast moving comet was discovered in deep space by the NASA Atlas telescope. They called it i3-Atlas; the name sounds like a new processor chip, but it's a comet. They think the object came from another solar system because it is travelling too fast to keep a place here. They don't know what star system it came from or what it is made of. They think it came from a star that is closer to the centre of the milky way galaxy than ours and it seems to be a comet. They think it went close to a large object like a planet and was flung out of its solar system by the sling shot effect; giant planets sometimes cause smaller objects like asteroids and comets to be flung away from the star system where they formed. 

Some people on the internet think that i3-atlas is actually a space ship from an alien civilisation heading for earth, and the government are trying to cover it up because they think it will cause a panic. I will go with NASA's verdict, a large comet was flung out of a star system and drifted in interstellar space and is now passing through our own solar system. It curved towards our solar system because of the sun's gravity but it is going too fast to stay put and will pass through our solar system and continue to head away from the centre of our galaxy for eternity. 

For me the big thing is getting to know the world of virtual reality. I purchased a meta quest vr headset shortly after my birthday in the middle of summer. It is a notch on the sci-Fi portion of my bucket list. 

Talking with machines, check.

Exploring virtual reality, check. 

Conversing in real time with artificial intelligence, check.

Wearing a flying coat, not yet. 

Flying cars, not yet.

 You get the idea. 

There are countless worlds out there to explore. countless stories and games to try. Playing golf in virtual reality or visiting a pinball arcade; there is something for every type of leisure out there in the meta cloud. The thing that is missing is something to let you walk with your legs. You can step around in a virtual reality boundary but you can't really walk naturally. You have to use your controller sticks to walk in virtual reality. Walking without moving or stepping can make you dizzy.