figment_j‘s kitty Liam, now living with me:
[Edit]: No, the eyes are not Photoshopped.
My first lolcat!
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Tag Archives: pictures
In which Franklin learns what it is to be overwhelmed
“Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”
–Henry Miller
This post is likely to seem a bit disjointed and chaotic. (And long; deal with it!) This is as it should be; life these days has been a bit disjointed and chaotic. This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind; normally, I thrive on chaos. But every now and then, it’s kinda nice to have a break, y’know?
My mother has this saying that she used to use to irritate me with. Any time I complained about any element of my life, she’d look at me and say “It’s a consequence of your chosen lifestyle.”
She’s right, too.
On the nature of work
The company I work with (and I’m a minority partner in) has been, for lack of a better phrase, on the verge for many years now. The company makes a hand-held storm and lightning detector and tracker; it’s actually a pretty slick little gadget, which can detect lightning storms from about 75 miles away by the extremely characteristic EMP profile produced by cloud-to-ground lightning, and by virtue of a great deal of mathematical wizardry involving fast Fourier transformations and other big words, calculate the distance, speed and direction of travel, and ETA of the storm. It then tracks the storm right to the device.
The company has been desperately underfunded and desperately short of cash for the entire time I’ve worked with them; in fact, for about a year they couldn’t pay me regularly at all. They recently got some venture capital (not enough) and relocated to Atlanta, where they’ve been paying me more or less regularly a quantity that’s more or less sufficient to keep a roof overhead and food on the table.
Recently, they’ve encountered a problem that many startups face without being aware that it’s a problem: they’ve suddenly become too successful. We’re now selling gizmos faster than we can build them, in part because of a significant change in marketing strategy. In the past, these gizmos have sold to military, government, and commercial users; after all, these are the people likely to be left with their ass on the line in a sudden thunderstorm. You don’t want to be climbing telephone poles or cell phone towers with a storm on the way.
But now the gizmo has been picked up by retail resellers–something that we never thought would be significant, because focusing on home consumers never really seemed like much of a business opportunity.
And it’s going bonkers. We’re signing deals with retail chains left and right. Hammacher Schlemmer just bought an entire production run. And this is a problem, because producing more gizmos on very short notice is very expensive, and the fact that we’re selling these things so fast doesn’t mean we’re making money as fast; we don’t see the cash for 30, 60, or even 90 days. But we still gotta pay to build ’em up front.
Interesting times indeed.
On the nature of opportunity
When opportunity knocks, it’s always at the most inopportune of times.
For months, I’ve been working on a major revision to my sex game Onyx, which has been going quite slowly for a number of reasons, not the least of which are that this isn’t my day job, the new revision involves a total rewrite of very large sections of code, and the beta testers keep pointing out playability issues which I believe are valid.
Concurrently with this, I’ve also been working on an enormous revision to the Symtoys itself, which will see it become roughly ten times the size it is now and will also sport an entirely new look, as the current site is, to be blunt, appallingly ugly. The new site will have all kinds of kinky sex how-tos, tutorials on everything from rope bondage to improvised sex toys, and even a sex toy store.
Last week, I got an email from the editors of Playgirl magazine. They have a “do it yourself” how-to column, apparently, and in October they want to feature the Symtoys Web site in the column. Which is good, but the timing sucks, since I’m still depressingly far from having the site revision completed. Or if not “completed,” at least in a state where it can be uploaded and made live.
And on top of that, an interested party has offered me an advance on the book on polyamory I’ve been working on (but mostly not working on) for a while now. I really want to finish this book, and now I have a strong incentive to move it to the top of the List Of Things To Do.
I have a pile of proposed changes to the outline suggested by the editor I’d been working with; I need to dust off the files, make the changes, and get back into that again.
On automobile license tags
I’ve finally got ’round to doing things like registering my car in Georgia and stuff. I got some personalized license tags, for the first time ever:
The tag reads “H PLUS,” which only a small number of transhumanists is likely to get. It’s okay, though; the people who do get it are cool. 🙂
I love my little car…
On Links and Stuff
slouchinphysics, you’ll appreciate this one; it relates to the conversation we had last weekend about China surpassing the US as a center for research and technology. It’s an excerpt from a paper published in the 60s about particle physics in China, the prequel to which is a great example of what happens when science and political doctrine collide. But lest we think that the same sort of nonsense doesn’t happen over here: the Creationsits, unable to get their bullshit rubbish published in respected peer-reviewed journals, are trying to create a ‘peer reviewed’ journal of their own. (Props to 6-bleen-7 for the links.)
phoenixgeisha has proposed a challenge: create a CD of songs which, when heard by another listener, give the listener a sense of who you are as a person. I think this sounds like great fun.
Some other folks have created a programming language based on lolcats. Here’s Hello World written in lolcode:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE “HAI WORLD!”
KTHXBYEAnd finally, satellite view of contrail clutter left by passenger airline flights. This is an amazing picture.
On cats
Shelly was up over the weekend, and took the kitty Molly with her when she returned to Florida. Now figment_j‘s kitty liam is all I have left.
Liam and Molly didn’t much get along (or rather, Liam was madly, frantically in love with Molly, and Molly didn’t care much for Liam–its a good thing cats don’t feel heartbreak as acutely as people!), so the relocation of Molly was necessary.
I like having Liam. He reminds me of figment_j. The fact that all my relationships are long-distance now sux0rz.
Visions of Chicago
Last month, dayo flew me out to Chicago for about five days. I didn’t take as many pictures as I’d planned to, because we were to busy having fun, but I did get a few, which I resent (edit: Present! Present!) for your viewing pleasure.
Chicago from the top of the ferris wheel at the pier on a particularly gorgeous day. The first day we’d planned to run around exploring the city turned out to be rainy and yucky, but subsequent days more than made up for it.
Shelly’s new tattoo!
One of the goals of this weekend, in addition to doing some dancing at the Castle and catching up with friends, is to get Shelly’s new leg tattoo. She’s been talking to her artist and working with her other partner’s wife on the design, and this is an approximation of what the design will look like.
I think it looks cool as hell.
It’s a cyber giraffe!
Aaaaaah! The KY00T!!!!
So recently merovingian got Shelly a gift from Amazon.com. Apparently, he also got a gift for Molly the kitty, too–the Amazon box that the video came in.
Molly really, really likes Amazon boxes. They are precisely the right size.
Cats! And deconstruction
The cats and I have developed, especially since I’ve moved to Atlanta, a number of little rituals we go through almost every day.
These rituals begin when i get up in the morning. I stumble blindly into the bathroom, making noises like “rrrrrgh” and “ungggggh,” ad run the water. That’s the cats’ cue to run into the bathroom and sit on the sink while I shower.
As soon as I’m done with the shower, I turn it off and stand in the tub to towel off. At that point, Snow Crash hops onto the edge of the tub, pokes his head through the shower curtain, and starts lapping at the water dripping from the faucet.
It’s really cute.
Ceci n’est pas une LiveJournal update
First, because the one thing LiveJournal needs more of is pictures of cats, I give you Molly, perched regally atop the new loft in my apartment. The loft has definitely become her space; Snow Crash has not once climbed on top of it, so it’s the place she goes when she gets fed up with him.
The Altar of Hideousness
Last month, Shelly and I and her partner and his wife went to Disney. We stayed a couple of days at a Disney “economy hotel,” the All Star Music Hotel (translation: a Motel 6 with a theme and a different brand name on the sign), a music-themed place whose various buildings were all dedicated to different kinds of pop music. The buildings ad gigantic sculptures in front of eac one–a huge guitar for the Rock and Roll building, a burning cross in front of the Country Music building–you get the idea.
Each room had artwork on the wall.
I’ve been meaning to post about the artwork for some time, but only now have I been able to muster the courage and the strength to do so. For this is no ordinary bland, corporate motel artwork, oh my no.
I photographed the artwork on our wall, which was apparently the same as the artwork in every room throughout the motel–a thought that to this day keeps me up at night.
The theme of the artwork is deceptively simple: children, three of them to be precise, one playing a banjo for the entertainment of the other two. Such a simple description, however, utterly fails to communicate the true ghastly horror of this artwork.
Good art has the power to move. This art has the power to crush the viewer’s very soul.
The artwork is untitled. I speculate that this is because “Hideously Deformed Children of the Post-Apocalypse” is too large to fit on a corner of the painting; Shelly’s sweetie suggested that perhaps the true title of this art is “You Should Have Paid More and Stayed in a Different Hotel.”
Since misery loves company, I have placed a photograph of this artwork beneath this cut, thus ensuring the eternal damnation of my soul.
Paying for my sins
This past weekend was one of the best I have had in a very long time. I got to see the movie Pan’s Labyrinth with Shelly and figment_j, then dayo came into town for a visit from Chicago, and… bliss. Snapped this pic of dayo and I at Panera Bread using the iSight built into my MacBook:
And now today I get to pay, karmically (karmacally?) speaking, for the wonderful weekend. The battery in my car has died. I know a dead battery when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now. It’s stone dead. It’s definitely deceased. It wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts through it. It’s bleedin’ demised. It’s passed on. My battery is no more. It has ceased to be. It has gone to meet its maker. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It’s shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisibile! It is, not to put too fine a point on it, an ex-battery.
This presents, as you may surmise, certain practical and logistical difficulties. Not insoluble ones, as I drive a car with a manual transmission, but difficulties nonetheless. Quite frustrating it is, especially seeing as how, at this late hour, I have little choice but to procure a new battery at the altar of consumerist greed and avarice that is Wal-Mart, and I loathe all things Wal-Mart almost as much as I loathe large, soulless corporations that have forgotten their ethical roots and become little more than gigantic, indifferent profit-vacuuming machines willing to do almost anything and commit almost any atrocity in their quest to improve the bottom line.
But I repeat myself.
And now, gentle reader, I am off, to leave work in quest of a battery that has not shuffled off this mortal coil. I was going to make a pun on the phrase “aggravated battery,” but restrained myself at the last moment. Consider yourself fortunate and escape while you still can.
“So what did YOU do this evening, Tacit?”
I have a problem. I am, you see, plagued by boredom. My days stretch out before me in an endless vista of dreary ennui, because I never seem to have anything to do. At least, that’s what I must be thinking, since I’ve started working on a huge new Web site with tips and tutorials and how-tos on BDSM, in spite of the fact that Onyx 3 still isn’t finished yet, I haven’t touched the book I’m allegedly working on in months, I have at least two other unfinished writing projects on the back burner, I need to set up my darkroom again, and the apartment still looks like a Category 4 hurricane went through it just moments after a Columbian drug gang staged a violent coup in it.
Ahem. Anyway, the first tutorial I’m working on is a photo how-to for making rope and chain harnesses, with the lovely joreth as my model.
I haven’t even begun to process all the images yet, seeing as how we just finished shooting all the pics, but I did pick out this rather lovely image from the raw photos, which I rather like.
Not even on your BIRTHDAY is this image work-safe. Seriously. I mean it.