At long last: Necro photos!


Yes, it’s a science fiction convention, with everything that implies. My friend Sharra actually wore this slave girl outfit to the opening of Star Wars: Episode I. The gas mask I’m wearing in this picture was a birthday gift from datan0de to Shelly; I appropriated it for the convention because it looks so good freaky with that jacket.

And now, without further ado…
More bandwidth-crushing, not-safe-for-work pictures below!

No, not the Necronomicon photos yet…

…I’ll post those later today.

Instead, i want to complain about silicone.

The distribution of stress inside silicone rubber is fractal in nature. What that means is that silicone rubber tends to fail in unpredictable ways when it’s stressed. It never cleaves cleanly in the way that most solids do. It will rip or tear, always roughly and sometimes not at the point of greatest stress.

What that means is that carving, boring, and drilling a silicone dildo is exceptionally difficult and frustrating. It’s virtually impossible to get a clean hole through a silicone dildo, and the silicone can rip even when being sliced by a razor knife. It also deforms under stress, of course, so the cuts and holes assume an irregular shape when the stress is relieved.

Frustratin’.

Necro, Alcor, other proper nouns as needed

Tomorrow is the first day of Necronomicon, which means I’ll be out of the loop for a while, and probably post lots and lots of pictures come Monday or Tuesday. (Those of you with dialup access, be warned…you have three days to get broadband!) Alas, we’ll be missing the traditional post-Necro sushi run, as we’ve pledged to help our roommate move.


Finished all the Alcor insurance paperwork and mailed it off yesterday; I plan to finish the preliminary Alcor documents and mail them off today. Still on track to have my Alcor bracelet by year’s end!


AOL has begun intermittently filtering LJ notifications as “spam,” despite the fact that LiveJournal is supposedly whitelisted. Not all of ’em, mind; only a couple here and a couple there. If I don’t respond to something someone posts, that’s why.


There’s a flurry going around that George Dubya, the man legendary for (among other things) his complete incompetence when speaking in public, may be doing as well as he is in the debates because he’s wearing a wireless headset that connects him to an off-stage coach. Which is, to be perfectly blunt, entirely plausible. However, one of the people on a newsgroup I read proposed an alternate explanation for the buldge on Dubya’s back: “Maybe it’s a bra strap.”


Nxt weekend: Tampa Fetish Party. Following weekend: FantasyFest in Key West. Weekend after that: Collapse into an exhausted coma and die.

Fun link o’ the Day

Run MacOS X on your Xbox.

First, mod your Xbox to run software not approved of by the High Corporate Office in Redmond. Then, install Linux. Then, compile and install the Linux PowerPC emulator. Then, config it. Then, create a disc image of the MacOS Installer CD. Then, stick the disc image on the Xbox hard drive. Then, run the emulator. Then, install MacOS X.

Oh, but don’t try any heavy lifting…the PowerPC emulation environment is so slow, running the installer takes around ten hours(!). On the good side, though, a display of geekery this excessive is bound to get you laid… 🙂

War, war, waaaaar in Iraq…and daddy wants a new computer!

So far, the United States has spent a grand total of approximately $139,744,240,000 on the war in Iraq, not counting indirect costs or human lives.

*blink*

That’s roughly $474 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. You know, I could kind of use that money right now.

Or, put another way, that is:

– Enough money to build 69 space stations, with sufficient money left over to double the size of the Space Shuttle fleet;
– Enough money to give full college scholarships to 3,493,606 college students;
– Enough money to multiply the Federally-funded programs on AIDS and cancer research by 46 times, with enough left over to double the amount of health insurance subsidies available to low-income citizens;
– Enough to multiply Federal law enforcement and anti-terrorism budgets by a factor of five, with enough left over to double the number of guaranteed student loans;
– Enough money to increase the budget for national parks and wildlife preserves by two hundred and sixteen times;
– Enough money to rebuild every single interstate and US highway in the entire country, with enough left over to pay the salaries of 305,690 new police officers (at salaries two percent higher than the national average);
– Enough money to give every single schoolteacher in the country a $22,000 a year raise;
– Enough money to multiply the total national budget for education by two times, with enough money left over to double the budget for the EPA and double the budget for the National Science Foundation and pay for another Space Shuttle and triple the senior citizen prescription drug benefit;
– Enough money to clean up every single Superfund environmental site, with enough left over to double the Veteran’s Administration fund and wire every public school and library to the Internet.

I wonder if the war on Iraq represents the best value for that money.

And now for some good news…

Apple is replacing my iBook logic board for free!!! Apparently, the display problem I’m having is a known problem in one batch of 700MHz iBooks, and Apple has a free warranty replacement program in place for all the affected machines. So they’re replacing the guts of the machine and not charging me a red cent.

The cloud around this silver lining is that it might take as long as three weeks to get the computer back to me–it’s going out to California. But hey, it sure beats spending a bundle on a replacement…

So. About the weekend.

Saturday
Shelly and I went to the beach, and ended up staying until very late at night. On the way there, we sat in traffic for over an hour, as there’s only one bridge out to Clearwater beach from the mainland, and it was closed. There was a detour, which was closed as well. So we amused ourselves by inventing stories about the people–three men and a woman–in the car in front of us. I shan’t disturb you with the details, as they would…disturb you.

We’d planned to take a kite to the beach and fly it with the digital camera attached, so we could get some aerial photos. This plan was thwarted by the twin facts that (a) my heavy-lift kite is still in Boston (sob!) and (b) there wasn’t a breath of wind.

Once at the beach, we met this guy:

He looks fearsome until you realize that he’s, like, a quarter of an inch stem to stern.

Later, we had dinner on the beach, and I had my first exposure to raw fish (ahi tuna), which was nothing like I expected.

Sunday
Sunday, we went to a gun show with three-quarters of the Smooshlings. It was simultaneously interesting, creepy, and slightly horrifying.

Interesting: A dealer selling cannon. Real, working cannon–a six-pounder modeled after the bronze cannon Napolean used, a small bombard cannon that fired tennis balls filled with concrete, even a hand cannon that fired .45-caliber lead balls. Want want want the six-pounder and the bombard. Also a very nice H&K 9mm I’d love to take home with me, but not for $899 (ack!). A bookseller: the complete guide to manufacturing drugs right next to the complete guide to Ty’s Beanie Babies.

Creepy: Pro-Bush and pro-NRA propaganda plastered over every available surface. A booth selling bumper stickers reading “Loud Wives Lose Lives” and “Equal Rights for Southern Whites”. Posters and T-shirts proclaiming the right to “bare arms.”

Slightly horrifying: The booth selling Nazi memorabilia. An SS officer’s uniform, an autographed picture of Adolph Hitler, helmets and swords with swastikas on them.

We bailed for about an hour and went to the antique car show going on about a hundred yards down the road. Found a Ford Model T that had been retrofitted with a fully blown big-block V8 engine for sale for only $32,000. Just the thing for towing that Napoleanic six-pounder. Later, we went to dinner with the Smooshlings and other friends, and got to hear a tale of ketchup. (Ask datan0de about that one…)

And then, of course, the laptop failed, which was something of a down ending for the weekend. That’s what life is–a series of down endings. All Jedi had was a bunch of Muppets…but I digress.

The laptop is still backing up as I type this. Will be done soon. Sentence fragments. Good device. Will be used more later.

A quick and dirty proof of concept…

phyrra and some fast (and rather sloppy) Photoshop work.

This image is a “proof of concept” rather than a final product; it started out with a quick digital snapshot of phyrra while I was on my way out the door, and a quick sky shot, and about half an hour of very crude Photoshop work. ‘m thinking of doing a series of shoots with similar (but less sloppy!) effects, so this image is more valuable as an idea of where I want to go than it is on its own merits.

I almost lost this image in my laptop crash. Today i need to back the laptop up on my big hard drive in my office machine, and take it to the Apple Store for a quote on repair. God bless FireWire Target Disk Mode, or I’d have been well and truly screwed…