Harper Kingsley blog

I like my little electric composter machine. It doesn’t really compost; it dehydrates and grinds up the material put in.

I like that it gets the waste hot so I don’t have to deal with a bunch of mold and bacteria and whatever else might develop if you leave a bunch of loose compostable material around.

The electric composter I’ve got is an off-brand model. Like, it doesn’t have a name printed on the front of it–so I’m not affiliating myself with a company that could be terrible to their employees. But really it’s because I couldn’t afford to buy an expensive high-quality branded machine, and couldn’t rationalize my way into getting one that costs above a certain amount of money.

I was obsessing about electric composters for like a year before a sale dropped the price low enough that I was willing to get one.

And I love it.

It uses electricity, but it’s only a few cents per day. And if I had a solar panel setup or a little windmill, I could be able to run it "for free."

Yes, every appliance takes material to make. Running the machine releases "X amount of" exhaust.

So I realize that no appliance is ever "free" of costs and consequence.

But for what it is, I think it’s a net positive for me.

I have like OCD tendencies. I cannot maintain a conventional composting situation. Whether a big outdoor pile; the spinny bin; or even a series of holes dug out in a garden plot (You dump your daily kitchen scraps into a hole, layer it with dirt, and continue that over days until the hole is filled in to the point where animals won’t dig it up, then the rest of the hole is filled in with dirt. Then you move to the next hole and start again. Then you can use that plot for gardening a season or two later.). I can’t do it.

I have tried. It has been disastrous and horrifying. I can’t do it.

So the electric composter machine is the answer for me.

I can put in eggshells, kitchen scraps of vegetables and bits of fat, leftovers scraped off a plate, softened chicken bones, dead houseplants, coffee grounds. I just have to maintain a balance of ingredients.

Like, cooked food contains salts. So I can add a little bit of leftovers off someone’s plate, but I can’t add too much if I’m planning to use the results as compost. But honestly, I don’t put much leftovers in my machine. My mix is largely like cabbage leaves, coffee grounds, banana peels, and things like that.

We’ve been collecting then dumping my machine results in holes around the yard that we then fill in with dirt and let season. Just make sure it’s not too close to a tree or a bush you want to keep alive, because as the compost matures it does become a very strong fertilizer.

So most of my mixes are actually being composted and used to "feed" the land. But there’s been a few mixes that I made then threw into the kitchen trash bag. And that was because the mix was too wet when I added it into my storage container.

You want to let your mix cool down before you add it to your storage container. And you definitely want to make sure it’s a dry mix.

Otherwise just take that moist mix and put it right in a hole in the ground or to feed your worm farm. Any moisture in your storage container results in a gross situation you don’t want.

Like, the machine heats your mix to a high enough temperature to kill e.Coli and salmonella and a bunch of other baddies. And if you run your machine long enough, the result will be lightweight dry "soil"–but it’s dehydrated ground up food particulates.

A bit of moisture and you get gray fluffy mold. Yikes.

But as dehydrated food bits… An electric composter machine can help you create awesome mixes you can use for different stuff.

Like, you can sanitize the mixer bucket then use your machine to make food for your worm farm, for your pond fish, or to make a nice fertilizer spread to sprinkle over your newly sown ground cover. It’s basically a big spice grinder that dehydrates and chops up your kitchen scraps.

You can run a mix until it comes out like that lightweight soil they use on store plants where you can basically shake it off when it’s dry and it falls like brown fluff, or you can make a mix that’s like a crumbly cookie dough. There’s versatility there!

And my machine has two filters that I fill with loose activated charcoal pellets. And the whole purpose is to not have the machine blast a bunch of stink into the house. That’s it. That’s the whole purpose of the activated charcoal.

And I’ve been wondering if I can rinse the used charcoal then spread it out on a tarp to dry in the sun and then use it again.

I don’t think any gross stuff gets in the charcoal. Hot air runs through it, but it doesn’t come into direct contact with the compost itself. But still, I would probably have the used rinse water go into the sewer rather than directly into the yard.

Is there a way to sanitize activated charcoal pellets? I know some people wash then bake them.

The machine directions say I can drip some essential oil over top of the activated charcoal before running the machine, and the smell will be better. But I can’t try that because I have a cat. So I have no firsthand knowledge on whether adding essential oils results in a pleasant diffuser situation or a horrifying floral-scented hot garbage situation.

I like my machine. I just had to forget about the advertising around electric composter machines where the lady runs her machine, then shovels out the mix and immediately adds it to her potted plant.

Like, "You just killed your peace lily."

It’s better to think of the mix as being dehydrated food. If it gets wet, it becomes food again, and thus can rot and smell and create a big unwanted mess.

BUT if it’s mixed in a compost pile or mixed with a bunch of dirt and buried for a couple months, it becomes great plant food. Fertilizer. Conventional compost created in a roundabout fashion.

And knowing that it’s just dehydrated food, it has to be understood that throwing it away in the garbage means that it goes to the landfill. And its just been dried out… when it starts breaking down it releases the same amount of methane as it would if it hadn’t been dehydrated and chopped up.

It’s a minimized form of the same amount of garbage that it started out as. The greenhouse emissions it produces does not change.

So compost the "compost" you get out of your electric composter machine, and that would be the best thing to do with your mix.

Plus you can know what you’re putting in your garden or fertilizing your fruit trees with. I mean, I’ve bought those big bags of fruit and vegetable mix soil–from a NAME BRAND!–and there were chunks of green plastic in it. Like, they must have been chopping their mix up and someone dropped a green plastic piece in there on accident or something, but it was pieces of plastic being introduced into my garden.

I did not like that, Sam I am.

And just for a thought experiment:

I think it would be cool to have an apartment building or something where there’s a shared electric composter machine, but it’s a big industrial size one at like the center of the building. And people drop their stuff down into it, but the hole isn’t big enough for someone to fall in. And then the filter/exhaust port releases into a vent that has fans in it, and the exhaust causes the fans to spin, and that energy is collected to run air conditioning that blows through the whole building.

People can close the vent if it’s too cold for them, and their individual apartments have their own heating systems they can control. And during the summertime, people don’t die from the heat.

And in wintertime, the energy from the fans can be collected and used by the residents of the building. Like, they’re going to be running more heat because it’s cold. They’re going to be running their lights longer because it’s darker earlier. Maybe there’s a gym in the building or a laundry room or a shared indoor garden–all things that require electricity.

Like, you could have a building that has solar panels, and that electricity is used to run the shared electric composter machine, and the exhaust of the electric composter machine is used to spin the air conditioning fans.

I’m not a scientist or an inventor. I’m a consumer that can think about and wish for things I would like to use as a consumer. Things that the "techbros" are not funding because they’re no longer people that produce technology, they just wear nerd-clothes and accumulate wealth so they can show off to their bullies (the people that refused to put up with their narcissistic nonsense) and punish the people that didn’t want to have sex with them.

We need more inventors making inventions that people want to use, and less guys that just want to get rich quick by victimizing the public.

Please.

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

I saw a thing yesterday about how human beings are running 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than they did a hundred years ago.

And this is good information to know if you’re writing time-travel or transmigration stories.

Your character is like "Holy shit, they’re burning up! They’re all sick." And it’s like, "No, they’re not ‘sick’-sick. Not to the point where if you were triaging the situation you would drop everything and treat them as an immediate priority."

"They’re just existing in a near-permanent malaise. Every moment of their life is lowkey uncomfortable. To the point that if you suddenly exchanged bodies with one of them, the consciousness of their pain would shock you."

EXCERPT: It had been a lifetime since he’d felt pain.

Like, he understood emotional angst and that terrible sense of emptiness that can strike now and then. But physical pain had been a distant memory for a long time.

Darkstar looked at the blood welling up from his finger. The red pushing up through a slit in the skin. Almost beautiful in the sheer humanity of it.

And then the pain.

Oh. Shit.

The pain.

The human brain~ he thought. She is one tricky bitch.

Because the brain likes to lie to itself. Likes to take the pain memories and minimize them as small as possible. To the point that a person could have whole swatches of things they don’t remember.

So as he’d gotten more and more invincible, the memories of physical pain had disappeared. To the point, that staring at the cut on his finger, he couldn’t help wondering "Can I die from this?"

And it seemed ridiculous.

He’d seen people doing onsite first-aid before. (Though they usually cringed away from him, his aura overpowering in its nearness.) He’d watched some doctor shows on TV. (Like House-level of actual reality.) He knew how fragile the human body was. (They always came apart in his hands. One little squeeze too hard… It was good that he had Dr. Zee to fix things when he broke them. Otherwise he’d lose his fucking mind.) Humans were so delicate that a single cut could result in a deadly infection.

He stared at the cut and thoroughly recognized that he was a mortal being.

Something he’d missed for so long was returned to him in the most unexpected of ways.

He stared as the blood trickled and flowed and eventually dripped over the edge of his finger to speckle the kitchen floor.

/EXCERPT

Being afraid of infection and taking your or someone else’s temperature and finding out the baselines are completely different from expected.

We run cooler because our immune systems are not being overworked.

People before were exposed to different diseases without immunities or antibiotics, and as a result their brains would set their body’s regulatory settings to ones different from a species optimal baseline. So like, you’d fall into a pond, "catch a chill," and spend the rest of your life nearly dying every time you caught a cold.

Our brains decide the settings, then if you go swimming and you come out of the water, your body would have the whole time tried to maintain a certain temperature for your blood and organs and your extremities. You dry off with a towel and you "warm up" to your body’s preset temperature setting.

And if your body’s optimal settings haven’t been messed with, you’d run cooler like modern people.

And maybe I’m wrong, I imagine if your body temperature baseline is higher than the modern setting, you would be extra cold in winter. More likely to go hypothermic if you don’t wear warm enough clothes.

And like, the way the world is heading–into the New Dark Ages–there are going to be more and more people with dysregulated temperature settings. As medical care ceases to be accessible, more and more people will be exposed to the kind of viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms that leave permanent damage to the human brain.

It’s sad.

As kids, adults would have us drink out of the garden hose. We would watch kids movies where the kids would make and sell lemonade using water from the garden hose. It was both normalized and introduced to children as "something kids do."

Children learn from what they see. And if no one explains why something is problematic or criminal, a child might not ever consciously absorb that what they see is a wrong thing. They just don’t know any better.

Which means that there needs to be edutainment content. More correct examples people can point to.

At the very least, when a show has someone doing something dangerous, another character could point out how dangerous it was. So the character can have the realization that they could have hurt themself or even died.

I’m sure it would bring satisfaction to the viewer to be able to see some personal growth in the character’s they’re watching.

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

So we have senators voting to go to war against a country they don’t know anything about.

And through all their bluffing and bloviating, is the reason they’re doing all this because of their religion? Like, they see themselves as "Soldiers of God," so they’re going to "go to the Middle East and kill all the infidels!" because they think a "Holy Crusade" will launch them straight into Heaven?

Ugh.

I’m super tired of apocalypse cultists. I really wish the mainstream Christians would step up and step on the poisonous offshoots that are turning the world against all Christianity.

I think one of the worst thing to ever happen to the human race and the world was the advent of televangelists. Because it allowed backwoods pseudo-Christians to share their cult with the world.

And yeah, I can speak badly about the actions committed by the followers of a religion. It’s my opinion that they are spreading great harm to everyone and everything around them. They are actively causing harm to the world, and if we’re not allowed to call them out for THEIR ACTIONS without being accused of religious intolerance, I really feel that the 90s mission of tolerance has been led askew.

Countries should not be going to wars that involve guns, missiles, drones, poison gas, and NUCLEAR WEAPONS because of someone’s religion-fueled life mission.

And that some of the people backing up all the craze are desperate alpha/beta/sigma/delta LARPers that masturbate to the idea of full-flexing on a group of enemies and dry humping their dead bodies? Double ugh.

I’m just like "You wanna show off your BIG alpha cock to the WORLD??? Then it’s time to break out the Robot Jox! We don’t need to turn the world into a post-apocalyptic hellscape where even rich people can only afford a single hotdog because meat is so expensive. We could just set up stadiums and stream the fights and each country and each country’s team can make a buttload of money. And nobody has to die."

Seriously, a real man/real woman that wants to protect their loved ones and have a safe haven home that’s basically a warm womb for their beloved children would be 100% anti-war.

You don’t want people busting into your home and robbing everything you own and/or hurting your family? Don’t create a hostile environment.

Dudes should not be dressing as cops and murdering people in their homes.

Cops should not be dressing as cops and kidnapping and murdering people.

Police officers and military personnel should wear clearly identifiable uniforms WITH uncovered badge numbers. I think there should also be some kind of easily remembered nickname/callsign on their uniform. That way if someone can’t remember the long badge number, they can still be like "Officer Mad Cheetoh Dog was the one that helped us out. We’re really grateful he was volunteering at Toys For Tots today. It was good that his utility vest had a fully stocked First Aid kit including Narcan and an epinephrine auto-injector he knew how to use."

We all want to feel safe and happy. It’s only the weirdos that are desperate for conflict and war. Everyone else just wants to live their life and not be bothered by creeps and bullies. The kind of people so horny to oppress others that they’re willing to be horrifically murdered to have just one opportunity to successfully force someone else against their will.

There’s a movie I saw that’s about the end of the world. There’s some cosmic event happening–giant sunflares?–that will result in the death of all life on Earth within a handful of hours. And the main character wants to spend his last bit of time alive at a big party rather than alone with his girlfriend. But on his way to the party, he ends up saving a little girl that’s been kidnapped by pedophiles and tries his best to get her back to her family before flaming death hits the planet.

It wasn’t the best movie I’ve ever seen, but it makes you think: What would you do if you knew you only had hours left to live? What would other people do?

It’s like The Outer Limits (1995-2002 version) episode where during the night a scientist realizes something has happened to the sun and the other side of the planet has already been burned of all life. And when the sun comes up in his hemisphere, he will die with everyone else.

He had to decide whether it was better to wake people up and let them know they will die at dawn, or if it is better to let people sleep through their deaths. Undisturbed and vaporized, or upset and horrified before being vaporized.

In the scenarios from that movie and The Outer Limits episode there is nothing anyone can do to stop their deaths. But right here and now?

Say No to war.

Stop all genocide.

Protect the environment.

Tax the rich.

If we want to keep the world from burning, we have to stop idiots from lighting the match.

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.

Proper aftercare is essential in all walks of life.

Sometimes I wish I’d take better care of myself. I wash my hands and forearms. I wash my face and neck. I have washcloths. I moisturize my skin when I remember, though I know I should take better care.

So it’s like, I should remember to rinse my mouth out and drink some water after smoking.

I should hydrate and remember to urinate regularly.

More yoga. More stretching. More deep breathing. More beneficial health things that I don’t commonly do for myself. But that I should.

Beforecare, aftercare, and during care are all necessary things.

Only water goes in the eyes. A lot of it.

Closed-toe shoes. Ones that are lightweight and you can run in, but with soles thick enough to step on broken glass.

I bought some lightweight robes. I may set up a little wardrobe near the front door. That way if someone gets called out of bed without time to dress, there’s a chance of putting on a robe. It gets chilly at night/in the early morning.

~Harper Kingsley

https://paypal.me/harperkingsley.

https://patreon.com/harperkingsley.

https://ko-fi.com/harperwck.

https://amazon.com/shop/harperkingsley0.
https://www.harperkingsley.net/blog.
https://kimichee.com.

https://www.youtube.com/c/HarperKingsley.

https://harperkingsley.bsky.social.
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/HarperKingsley.