From ashbet…
Artist Kseniya Simonova tells the story of the Nazi invasion of Ukraine, and the effects it had on two young lovers, using nothing but sand and a light table.
The words at the end are variously translated as “You will always be near” or “I’m waiting for you”.
My birthday is coming up soon. I mention this for two reasons: first, because it means that I have to renew my vehicle registration; and second, because… well, I’ll get to that in a minute.
The registration is relevant to the object of my lust, because, you see, Georgia requires vehicle emissions testing every time the registration on a car or truck is renewed.
This afternoon, during my lunch break, I went to have my emissions tested. The place where this is done is a tiny steel building, about the size of a Quonset hut or metal shed, with a diminutive office–really, a space hardly big enough for two chairs and a magazine stand–attached.
In the magazine stand were several copies of some “high fashion” magazine or other; I don’t remember their names, as they all look the same to me.
In the magazine I picked up at random and flipped through while the technician revved my engine and prodded my car was an article on wristwatches. And in that article was a description of the thing to which I am by degrees coming.
It is a wristwatch made by a company called Romaine Jerome.
It is not a wristwatch in any conventional sense of the term, however. Rather than a dial and hands, it tells time by means of small drums which rotate, and on which are printed numbers. The drums are driven by–get this–a tiny chain, like a bicycle chain whose miniscule links are well under half a millimeter in size. The whole thing is steampunk and retro and gorgeous beyond belief.
This, gentle readers, is the Romaine Jerome Cabestan watch:
Just the thing for a steampunk ‘con costume.
The only down side? Suggested retail price: $220,000.00 US. Did I mention my birthday is coming up?
The last few days of zaiah‘s visit, I was sick as a dog–first with her cold, then with an opportunistic throat infection that moved in while the crack special forces commandos of my immune system were busy dealing with that issue. Stayed awake all night last night with a sky-high fever and hacking cough, lost my voice, went to the doctor’s office this morning, I’m now on some potent broad-spectrum antibiotics which should give the opportunistic bacteria the what-for.
Still can’t talk, though. Which sucks when you’re me.
So not as much kinky sex and other fun stuff as I had hoped.
On the more interesting side, though, I got an email from one of the editors of Penthouse magazine. She said they want to do an article about the Human Sexuality Map, and could I send them a press-ready version of the file kthx? Right now it’s slated for publication in the March 2009 issue. (When I first started working on it, figmentj predicted it was going to turn out to be a big deal. She was right.)
I really, really want to make posters of the map. Unfortunately, it looks like unless I’m prepared to plunk down a lot of cash for a large production run, the posters are gonna cost me in the neighborhood of $12 apiece to print(!), and I doubt I can sell them for much more than that. I can get the price way down if I print a whole lot of them, but then I’m out a bunch of cash I don’t have and I’ll be sitting on a huge pile of posters if nobody wants ’em. Grr.
One thing I think I will do, though, if I do make posters, is put a glossary on the bottom of the poster. I still get a lot of “What does ____ mean?” emails.
The idea is surprisingly simple once you think about it: pair a large touch-screen LCD display of the type used in the Microsoft Surface prototype and elsewhere with an ordinary mirror. Simple, but the result is, I think, a whole lot more interesting than just large-format touch screen displays alone:
There’s a blog entry on the gizmo from the folks who dreamed it up.
I like living in the future. 🙂
…and there’s an eBay auction going on right now for a full-size, hand-built, three-story-tall piece of Roman siege equipment, specially constructed by The Discovery Channel for a piece on the history of siege warfare.
I’m, y’know, just sayin’.
I’ve always been fascinated by fucking machines. The idea of a mechanical contraption designed and built to fuck the person riding it, relentlessly and tirelessly, appeals to the mad scientist in me. In fact, I could easily see myself making a living designing and building fucking machines, were it not for the fact that I lack patience and attention to detail, two qualities of incalculable value in the performance of said job functions.
Indeed, I’ve always wanted to own a steam-powered fucking machine, because the notion of such a thing appeals to my sensibilities on so many levels. It strikes me as being at once quintessentially steampunk and also a repudiation of Victorian social mores; and besides, how awesome would it be to have a partner being fucked by an enormous, clanking machine with jets of steam issuing out of it, while I cackle with glee and scamper around tending to the boiler and oiling the various parts of the machine with an oil can?
Ahem. But I digress. In any event, such a machine would be impractically big and unreasonably dangerous, and conversations with physicsduck about the practical realities of such a machine soon dashed any hopes that I might one day own such a thing.
However, I still like fucking machines, and on my trip to Los Angeles I met a couple of folks who do make their living designing and selling such machines. And they gave me one. Which is–get this–designed to accommodate two people at once.
This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Monkey Rocker Tango: The rest is even less safe for work
I’m a big fan of the new Battlestar: Galactica television show. It’s arguably among the edgiest and most brilliant things that’s ever been attempted in a mainstream TV show. It’s also unremittingly grim and depressing; fitting, I think, for a program whose premise is the genocide of the entire human race.
One of the things I particularly like about the show is the music in it. It’s unlike any science fiction program’s music I’ve ever heard before; stark, simple, and absolutely lovely. I’m especially fond of the opening title music, which I use as figmentj‘s ringtone on my phone:
What I didn’t know, though, is that the lyrics are in Sanskrit. Specifically, they are the Gayatri mantra (Sanskrit: गायत्री), an ancient Hindu hymn:
ॐ भूर्भुवः स्वः ।
तत् सवितुर्वरेण्यं ।
भर्गो देवस्य धीमहि ।
धियो यो नः प्रचोदयात् ॥
Transliterated, it reads:
oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ
tát savitúr váreniyaṃ
bhárgo devásya dhīmahi
dhíyo yó naḥ pracodáyāt
It’s a mantra that appears in the Ŗg Veda, and it’s the second most important mantra in Hindusim.
And I think that’s pretty cool.
So in my ongoing exploration of my new status as a consumer whore, I’ve discovered that the Internet, long the place of porn and open source software, is also a most remarkable innovation in the field of finding things that I never knew existed but desperately want.
First on the list is this chair, made from the jaws of a torpedo loading crane on a nuclear submarine.
I want this chair. More precisely, I want to fuck in this chair.
Next on the list is Luis Berumen’s Zero Point Zero watch, made from a pair of handcuffs. The display built into one cuff shows the hour; the other shows the minutes. Who says digital watches can’t be cool?
And finally, Kacper Hamilton has designed a set of drinking glasses around the Seven Deadly Sins, each glass in the set embodying one sin. This particular glass is for Wrath.
This…is a tripod-mounted, twin-rotor Gatling gun that shoots rubber bands.
I know it’s almost impossible to absorb that much cool all at once, so sit back, relax for a second, and then read that again.
It’s a tripod-mounted, twin-rotor Gatling gun. That shoots rubber bands.
For the love of God and all that is holy, someone has built a rubber band minigun.
I mention this only because my birthday is fast approaching…in a strange twist of irony, it falls on Easter Sunday this year. Just so you know.