Immediately the thing became a debacle. It had started out as a combined intellectual curiosity and legal tax evasion scheme that I had created, again, because Sotheby's managerial contingent of useless field wiggers had refused to pay me enough, but became much more through no fault of my own. The USPTO refused to acknowledge my patent applications and then attempted to blame the entire corruption incident on the US Postal Service. I, meanwhile, was forced to depart the USA in early 2017 to Russia for political asylum because two felony charges were falsified against me in the US-Canada shared criminal database - the NCIC database - by the Seattle-King County Prosecutor's office, meaning that at any time I could potentially be wrongfully arrested and jailed.

At the time, I was basically locked out of the legitimate labor market in the USA as a combined result of extreme political persecution and a general preference for peasant-like idiots and unqualified new immigrants by human resources functionaries nationwide. I was able to find a position as the marketing director of a biotech startup at the University of Washington, but my apartment and cars were being sabotaged and broken into constantly - essentially, attempts were being made to steal everything I earned. Someone even tried to poison my dog. It was a nightmare.

Nevertheless, I did manage to produce a very good product. Elon Musk, Chief Dumbass of a federally-bankrolled welfare shithole of a company that hires unskilled idiots to make cars that should really be running on compressed natural gas began bombarding the entire world with random rhetoric about open-sourced patents around the time I started a Kickstarter for the project because Elon hates me for being related to my grandfather, J. Alan Smith, who led a team at IBM that launched a nuclear-powered digital telecommunications satellite in 1980. (This freaks Elon out, because his business model is entirely predicated on the notion that nuclear power is unsafe, but it's perfectly safe as long as you don't let imbeciles administrate the day-to-day operation of nuclear devices, and in any case, there were already several nuclear-powered NASA devices in space long before my grandfather's satellite was even launched - the Voyager-1 and Voyager-2 space probes!)

VLNLAB languished over the next several years. Today the USA prefers to fund fake startups where leftist losers get to sit around and pretend to be successful intellectuals. There's virtually no interest from venture capital in real companies with real products. But I was eventually able to establish full ownership of my own intellectual property by patenting everything in Russia.

What I learned, ultimately, is that despite E-Loon's best efforts at making it somehow meaningful on Twitter and elsewhere, open-sourcing patents is totally useless. Reason being that much as there are periodic efforts in the international human rights community to spur the proliferation of normal sanitation - toilets specifically - in third world countries that always fail, attempts to spur STEM and STEAM projects like VLNLAB among the general population also generally fail, because the vast majority of the world's population everywhere are descended from illiterate agricultural laborers. Classical music, historically, has been a primary channel by which talented peasants come up in the world - but I believe that this is no longer the case, in fact, personal experience now tells me the exact opposite. As such, the market for a self-build concert instrument is non-existent, and as far as I know, I'm the only person to have actually built any. Meanwhile, the stock of good older concert instruments available on loan to talented musicians continues to grow almost exponentially as values go through the roof and collectors die off.

So the website has been rolled into my personal website, and development has been halted, probably permanently. You can still download the 3D models and read the build instructions, though, and the Kickstarter video and original demo track are preserved below for posterity.

here's the patent