…and I’m spending it catching up on my emails, rearranging my image library, backing up my hard drive, and maybe–maybe–playing WoW.

I am a party animal, yes I am. The life of a BDSM poly activist is just mad. Mad, I say! Men, lock up your wives and daughters, there is no telling what I’ll do next!

That’s right, you all wish you were me. We are jamming over here.

In late 2003 or early 2004, somewhere thereabouts, I moved one of my Web sites from one server to another. In the process of doing that, I neglected to move, and therefore lost, a large number of images I had put on the server in order to embed them into my LiveJournal, with the result that many LiveJournal posts I made between 2001 and 2004 that contained images showed broken image placeholders.

Last night, while I was digging through the closet in preparation for packing stuff up, I found a couple of CDs from 2002 and 2004 that contained backups of a lot of my digital photography–including images that I thought I’d lost forever.

So I spent a great deal of time last night going through LJ entries from 2002, 2003, and 2004, identifying entries with broken image links, finding the images on the CDs, and re-uploading them to the server. Almost all of my LJ posts from mid-2003 through the present day have now been fixed and the images are now displaying correctly.

Took until 3 AM, and I’m still not finished with 2001 and 2002.

It was interesting going through the CDs, though. Many of the images which I’d thought were gone forever were from the most turbulent time in my entire life, and it’s been interesting how those images have brought back a lot of very complex memories and emotions. I’m really, really, really glad I found these CDs.

So I was digging through a bunch of boxes in the closet last night, and I found a box with some “experimental” T-shirt designs that I never ended up marketing on my T-shirt site.

Since I’m in the process of closing down that site, i didn’t feel like adding these T-shirts to the site, particularly since some of them are quite literally one-of-a-kind (in the “I only created one of them” sense of the word). So, instead, I figured I’d offer them up to you, my LJ-reading friends.

Several of these shirts were the result of an experiment using reflectorized ink. This ink is very cool (but ultimately way, way, waaaay too expensive) that looks gray in normal ambient light, but changes color depending on the angle you view it from and glows a blazing white when you shine a light directly on it. The ink uses the same principle that things like reflectorized tape and reflectorized paint uses, and it stands up to washing, but it turned out to be just too damn expensive to make these shirts.

I found one “Identity Zero” shirt, size XL, that’s printed with reflectorized ink. I took several pics of it to try to convey what it looks like. The pics don’t really do it justice, but you can get some sense of how it looks flat gray under normal light and bright white under a beam of direct light (in this case, the camera flash):

EDIT: The Identity Zero shirt is sold already. Damn, that didn’t take long!

I also found a gray “Goddess” shirt, size L, printed with the same ink. Depending on how it’s viewed, the logo on the front, which shows the three aspects of the Goddess, is darker than the shirt (if you look at it head on), is almost the same color as the shirt and disappears (if you look at it sideways or in low light), or blazes white (if it has a beam of light projected on it):

Next up is a single Nanohazard shirt, size S, printed in white ink on a red shirt (instead of white on black like the others). EDIT2: This one is gone now, as well.

I also found some conventional white-on-black nanohazard shirts in some sizes I ultimately ended up not carrying (two Medium and two Small).

And finally, I found some shirts printed in reflectorized ink with a logo that says “Satan Inside” in a parody of the “Intel Inside” logo. I printed these up before discovering that the laws which protect parody of copyrighted work don’t extend to trademarks (in the US, copyright and trademark are entirely separate things). I have one XXL, one XL, and 2 M of this shirt:

So I’m making these shirts available for $10 each. First-come, first-served. I’ve set up a special ordering page here; make sure you tell me in the “Special Instructions” section which shirt and size you want!!

(One of the very few friends-locked posts you’ll see in this journal, largely because I haven’t talked about these issues with the folks at the company I work with yet, and don’t want to incite any premature panic.)

So. Atlanta. Not really crazy about it.

I moved to Atlanta several years ago because the electronics company I’m a minority partner in relocated its headquarters here. Since that time, the company has encountered several financial crises, gone through a lot of employees, and just generally made a right mess of things internally. The company’s survival has been touch and go for a while, and on several occasions they’ve been late paying me or haven’t paid me at all.

Now, that’s not really as big a problem as it might have been. I’ve invested a tremendous amount of time and effort into the various other projects I have going–my Web sites, Onyx, stuff like that–and they mostly pay the bills these days. I’m not really dependent on the electronics company for my living. (It’d be nice if my stock in the company were worth more than the paper it’s printed on, but that’s a different issue.)

Had I known three years ago what I know now, I don’t think I would ever have moved to Atlanta. I don’t like that all my relationships are long-distance, I don’t like that I’ve never really been successful in building a community here, and I don’t like Atlanta.

That’s more or less irrelevant now, though. Water under the bridge.

What’s more relevant is I’ve finally reached the point where I can’t abide the idea of staying here any more. So, when my lease is up in June, I’m heading to Portland, Oregon, where I will be living with zaiah (at least that’s the plan) and where I feel I already have more of a community than I have in Atlanta.

My goal from this is nothing short of a complete, ground-up rebuilding of my life. I don’t like the way it looks right now, so I’m going to change it. The goals for the move:

– Not working in an office any more. I want to do 100% of my work completely online (including the work I do for the electronics firm; ideally, I’ll still be doing Web programming for them), whether that be consulting, Web dev, my own Web site, or whatever. That by itself frees up all the other things I’d like to be able to do.

– Spending more time traveling. It sucks having all of my relationships be long-distance; I’d like the freedom to be able to say “You know what? I want to spend the next four weeks with dayo” or “I want to spend some time living with figmentj” and have that be possible.

– Spending more time in poly/BDSM/sexblogging activism, including having a higher profile at conventions, retreats, and that sort of thing. For example, I’ve received about a half-dozen invitations to the Sex 2.0 convention this May in DC, and I won’t be able to go–I’d like to have the ability to attend next year. Ditto for things like SxSW, Loving More, Dragon*Con, and the like.

– A living arrangement that will better accommodate an extended local poly network. zaiah and I would like to create a home that can allow for multiple live-in or near-live-in relationships, should those opportunities present themselves.

– A much more active involvement in local BDSM and poly communities. This is something I had in Tampa but don’t have here.

I’m really excited about moving, and I’m looking forward to having a lot more freedom to travel. Now if only these next few months would pass quickly!