Monthly Archives: December 2006

Night swimming is awesome

Here's a (prettied up) photo that Valon took of me when we went swimming at midnight on Winter Solstice. I want to do another night swim on New Years (but probably earlier than midnight — I'm thinking around eight or nine in the evening, before the night's other activities), since I think you're legally allowed to have fireworks for New Year's… I'd love to winter night swim under close proximity fireworks or even under the light of an aerial flare.

That reminds me, I had a dream last night about swimming… I don't remember anything other than there was a huge turtle in the water with me (I used to swim with turtles as a kid).

Other than that, I smoked a little pot wrote a little bot (Phil's cursing it right now, I know it) that's searching out submissions that slipped through the cracks, about five years back… it turns out that sometimes a bot would crash and leave an image or two or two hundred unprocessed, so I've managed to find around 2,000 unprocessed pictures from the last few years. So anyway, if you get email about an old submission, that's why.

Top contributor / staff shirts

I reworked the t-shirt design into a round logo that I think turned out fairly well… The latin legend text runs around the outside, and there's a slogan on the back (which I may have been given idea-wise by someone else here, so I apologize if I used your suggestion but didn't remember who gave it). I have a couple other year-end things planned but they still have to materialize so I don't want to mention them yet and curse them….

Foam + Wood

I roughed out the shape of my three/four legged stool this morning. As I think I mentioned before, it's got a full support structure built in so it's already strong enough to sit on… I still have to finish carving it, and then I'll fiberglass it. I guess it's sort of half way between Flintsones and Clockwork Orange in aesthetic.

Anyway, on to real work…

From Hell's Heart I stab at thee!

I have already watched it a couple times this month and I swear, Wrath of Khan gets better every time. Crazy channel Space (sort of like Canada's Sci-Fi Channel) is playing something like nine Trek movies in a row. Anyway… It's probably partially because I'm obsessed with post-apocalyptic eugenics and artificially created homo superior as a part of my own childhood mythologies.

I did this painting with Nefarious — “Ducks at Sunset” — for her grandmother. Nefarious drew the picture (the grey things in the background are mountains) using pencil crayons, and I applied the paint for her in the colors she specified. I like how it turned out:

We managed to do that in about an hour I think because it's small (12″x12″ — normally I work in 36″ to 48″ sizes)… Now I'm thinking about doing a series of them, like one a day for a week or something.

I've also been teaching my friend Saira to paint using a graphic method that's pretty close to how a tattoo artist builds up an image (including creating a stencil for the portrait and all that, which is a lot more than just copying or tracing it), coupled with ideas from silkscreening to punch up the image. I think she's doing a good job so far (and this is the first time she's ever painted a portrait, let alone painted at all, since highschool I think):

(I can post it because she previewed it for her husband who's in the picture and who it's for).

I'm in a construction-y mood lately and have been doing lots of painting and building related action and thought… I think I've mentioned I'm working on a series of canes both for myself and some friends who also occasionally use them, and I've got a bizarre little chair I'm making for Nefarious curing in my garage right now. It's good a solid armature under the foam of course, which now needs to be carved and cleaned up (it won't look anything like this in the end), and then I'll finish it in fiberglass and maybe add some light upholstery.

I haven't decided about the upholstery yet because that's sort of determined by whether or not I get myself a sewing machine as a boxing day present… I want to make my old XXL and XL (since I wear a M or L now) BME shirts into a quilt, and I want to do the upholstery for the furniture I'm making.

Speaking of construction, the rented house I live in (built something like two or three years back) is a piece of junk. It's kind of heartbreaking because this is the owners' first house and they seem like a really nice couple. I mean, pretty much every seam in the house (like where one part connects to another) has split by 1/4″ or so, meaning that parts of this block of houses have shifted from the remainder of the construction for whatever reason.

You know why this house sucks? Because like most modern homes, the people who built it just didn't care. It was just a low paying job for the workers, and a bottom of the barrel bid by some construction management company. I mean, they didn't even bother to take the purschasing tags off the lumber they used to build the house.

It's pretty pathetic. As you can see it's even on the top balconies where it's difficult to reach… Seriously, I would never buy a modern home that I didn't have a hand in building myself. Mass market construction already has made nearly every product valueless… doing it to our source of shelter is completely foresightless.

Hope everyone's having a good Christmas morning. BME has been updated with I think 13,000 new pictures (since the last update only became active now) and I think around 350 new experiences as well are posted… Fingers crossed that I actually got everything fixed.

Now to decide whether I go out, or stay here and work on BME and art projects…

HOT HOT CAR BOMBERS!

This is scrawled on one of the benches in the children's park next to our house where we play with Nefarious… I'm really not sure what it means or what its political and/or religious stance is?

This car was covered in white powder so I assume it had been on fire.

You know that there's something creative (or over-reaching) about your sex drive when looking at a crude drawing of a face on a garbage can makes you think about partners wearing nothing but a Domo-Kun shirt (source)… That said, fantasy or not, it's still better than a boring old faceless garbage can.

Anyway, BMEvideo should be all fixed now (we're up to something like seventy gig of videos) — sorry about the hour or so of broken stuff — and I'm currently uploading a set of images and indexes to BME that I hope will make about 13,000 (yes, thirteen thousand!) new images visible. That will happen either later tonight or in the morning depending on how late I stay up. I'm really sorry it's taking so long.

Other than that, I may do Jewish Christmas (dinner and a movie) with Badur and Warren tomorrow…