And now, without further ado…
More bandwidth-crushing, not-safe-for-work pictures below!
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.
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…
…SpaceShipOne has won the X-Prize!!!!!!
As I type this, it’s on its way back from a maximum altitude of 368,000 feet on its second flight to claim the Ansari X Prize. The era of civilian commercial space flight has officially begun.
It’s almost impossible to express how exciting this is. Manned private space flight is one of those things, like nanotechnology and molecular materials science, that changes everything. Now everything is possible. Private space stations. Space tourism. But none of that is nearly as exciting, or as important, as the idea that we are, haltingly, leaving our ancestral home.
This is vital, to our future as a species and to our survival as a species. We cannot stay here. If we do, we’re doomed. The next species-ending catastrophe may not happen tomorrow, or two years from now, or two hundred years from now, but it will. It’s just a question of time.
And we should not stay here. We alone among all the animals have the ability to understand ourselves and the universe. Sapience is how the universe knows itself. If we are to become what we are capable of becoming, we must leave the cradle. That won’t happen until spaceflight is accessible and cheap.
What has been done today is more significant than the invention of the first crude dugout canoe. This is the next step in the same imperative that made us migrate out of Africa millennia ago. We now live in a time where we can see our way away from our homeworld. Very exciting times, these, and I am delighted to be living in them.
And the person who made the X Prize possible:
On the way to the office this morning, we spotted this little guy running around…he’s so ky00t! He’s a Florida anole; the whole place is overrun with them, but I’ve never seen one this small before. (This pic is very close to actual size.)
He was a bugger to catch the first time, but after I caught him, he had a great time running all over me. He finally jumped off (onto the sidewalk, not a good place for a lizard to be), so I had to catch him again to get him into the bushes. By the time I got him there, he’d just about lost all fear of humans, and was letting me handle him with no problem.
Yep, still more yummy goodness from FetishCon ’04. Friday night, datan0de went with Shelly and I, our roommate, and his girlfriend to the Fetish Factory party, which was a lot of fun. We ran into a bunch of friends there, including someone I haven’t seen in quite a while, who I ran into later at the convention proper.
The Fetish Factory parties are strict-dress-code affairs (fetishwear only), which actually helps to create a very immersive atmosphere–it was a lot more fun than I’d predicted. Pics of Shelly and I and our roommate’s girlfriend, as usual not work-safe
Hot girl-on-girl action in full suspension, of course!
One of the high points of the convention was Lew’s demonstration of double-suspension techniques. These two clearly had a LOT of fun during the workshop, and it really showed.
One of the things I like about the kind of suspension he does is that it affords the models a tremendous amount of mobility, while still being extremely secure. Still photos don’t really do justice to just how much mobility there is; essentially, this kind of suspension allows you to do just about anything you want, only in three dimensions rather than two.
During the demonstration, he said they have yet to find a position in the Kama Sutra that can’t be done in suspension, and I’m inclined to believe him.
Note: No nudity in these pics, but still not work-safe!
As promised, the first round of pics from FetishCon ’04.
Shelly and I met up with a friend of ours, P, who we haven’t seen in a while. (Actually, this was a recurring theme for the weekend; I met an old friend I haven’t seen in about six years or so, and we got the opportunity to catch up, which was cool.) P was acting as DJ for the post-con party, so after things wrapped up on Saturday night, we hung out with him and met many of the people who were planning the post-con events, including Lew Rubens, who was one of the presenters and did several sessions on suspension bondage–more pics of those later. 🙂
We hung out and chilled whle they rehearsed the post-con show, which made us the only two people not connected with the show who’ve ever seen it, on account of the hurricane, which killed power to the hotel just before it was supposed to be staged. Afterward, P practiced some rope bondage on Shelly.
Anyone who’s put off by nudity or bondage probably shouldn’t click, as these pictures are SO not work-safe
So. We’re back from DragonCon in Atlanta, the science fiction convention we were going to, then weren’t going to, and then at the last minute were going to again. We visited Atlanta while Hurricane Frances was beating up Tampa, more’s the better.
Thirty thousand science fiction geeks. The mind reels.
Shelly got Borged out and made an outfit out of saran wrap, which was great fun:
Lots of other fun photos, of zombies and faeries and cyborgs and carbon nanotubes and zensidhe getting assassinated, cut for your viewing pleasure…bandwidth-intensive and probably not work-safe.
Without further ado, Show me the half-nekkid geek chicks!