interest

[leaving this one raw]

Special interest my ass. I’m making knives from mortal weapons. Previously I was a world class athlete, a businessbody, the heaviest drinker you’d ever meet… you get the idea. Go hard or go home.

So right now I can barely wait for the arrival of a new whetstone. I just realised I’ve never actually analysed these interests so… 

How to get good at something:

Dissect the fucker into lego blocks

Make sure that you dissect everything and know it intimately, tangibly. Do not follow guides; follow your hands. Look up the fundamental principles and muddle through after that. Find your own path and write your own instructions. Ensure that instructions are sequential and there is no temporal component, and make sure individual steps can be checked off as ‘task completed’ even if the project is ongoing. Leave the items necessary for task initiation where you can’t avoid seeing them, and where they are easy to grab.

So knives. Early days. Where are we in the process…

Anger to start as usual and buying loads of bits of sword, then high quality synthetic stones, and just rubbing that shit until something came out. More synthetic stones, too many, but twice making the same knife type and I’m bored so I try a natural stone with a funky shape from a 75 year old dude online.

The smell is amazing. The sound. The slurry on the fingertips. The feel. This is a rabbithole. I can spend decades here. Japanese sword polishers - 研師 - are respected keepers of the culture. It’s a meditation. It’s a healing. It’s history and culture and imagination.

It’s also technology. Infinite variations of stone. Different compositions sure, with fun imperfections. But also different size and shape of particle. Triangle or square? Some cut while some burnish. Making a slurry. Slurry thickness for cutting. On the fingers for misting.

Then there’s the steel itself; two different kinds. There’s at least 6 different words for steel in Japanese. The central one is the cutting edge and tougher, so you can select stones after polishing which will scuff only the soft steel, emphasising the hamon.

So this is amazing for me. I’m behind right now, where I would have been ahead if I’d been taught. That will change. Learning this way happens exponentially, and once you reach critical mass you just fly. It will happen with time. Break it down and build it up. And the satisfaction from doing so. I can feel it already.

So right now I’m working with 10 natural stones and 5 finger stones including a petrified tree. Working on 800 year old steel which has been sharpened down to the spine and has evidence of combat. This is so fucking cool. Special interest? Go sit on your football mate. Special interest…. I mean. Come on.

So yeah we will see if this lasts. It’s either 5 years and near-mastery or 5 months and never again. I don’t get to decide. Or maybe I do now.

But this time I’m being extra careful to define a purpose before getting too into it. Because apparently (as of 3 weeks ago) I’m autistic. If I don’t decide a purpose then one will be decided by my wacky dopamine system and it’s likely to just be some riff on ‘more’.

So the purpose: meditation. I’ll just make them until I feel they’re done and then… well… see how I feel.

Finger stones are super nice. Picked them up today. I’ve always wanted to do something like this. It was literally impossible until medication. I'll never be the best and that's the point. The art was my own; these knives are my own. The fact it can't be compred is what makes it suitable. Anything that can be compared will be abused.

20250615 2005