I started work on a new painting today — “The Blind Leading The Blind” — you can get a deeper explanation and read more about it on I Need More Life if you’d like…
Yesterday Nefarious and I and Caitlin and her dad went to High Park… I think he may have been worried a bit by Nefarious’s climbing… She can do some pretty impressive stuff for a tiny person — in that picture she’s about ten feet off the ground, and got there after transferring across three or four structures which required some serious acrobatics. I definitely agree with the “freerange kids” theory… The paranoid over-protection we tend to do with kids in the Modern West leaves stunted adults with no sense of responsibility or maturity — to say nothing of it being pretty boring.
Nefarious is working on a new painting as well, a couple of feathered flying unicorn-slash-pegasus type creatures in a magical landscape… It got a bit muddied up in the painting stage because she wanted to do it without any help at all, but I think once she re-lines it, it’ll be well defined again.
Other than that, I think I’m moving my sites from Dreamhost‘s shared server space to Mediatemple‘s grid service, because even though I’ve been really happy with them on the whole, I don’t like the inability to handle spikes of traffic, and even my current sites consume a fair load (you’d be amazed how many people want to know what looks like a duck) to say nothing of future work.
Oh! Almost forgot — tonight I start reading Nefarious Alice In Wonderland, her first “real” book… Definitely looking forward to that.
You know, I keep getting accused of secretly being a Muslim extremist, when all I want is my forty acres and a mule that I got promised, heh. Definitely surreal, definitely eye-opening, and definitely fascinating. Well, at least my sunflower seeds are going in nicely, and I’ve had fun fiddling with content management system options for my new site.
So I’m sitting at High Park this afternoon after school while Nefarious and a few of her friends played in the castle. I was sitting on the swing keeping an eye on them, and a couple fifteen or sixteen year old boys sat down on the swing next to me. I get a kick out of guys at that age, because they’re a hilarious mix of adult and child — it’s quite comical to watch them, totally “grown up” were we living in any other era, pushing each other on the swings. Were this anything but a rich, 21st century first-world nation they’d already be men, but our world is a soft one.
Anyway, this was their conversation…
Guy One: “Dude, are we too old to be doing this?”
Guy Two: “I don’t know, everyone here is really little…
…but do you want to go play in the castle?”
Guy One: “Yeah, I’m really feeling this, dude.”
Guy Two: “Okay, let’s go.”
So yeah, up they went into the castle and slid down the spiral slide with the five year olds. Ah, to never lose one’s youth.
I’m looking forward to this upcoming long weekend. Why? Because it’s Victoria Day, which means fireworks. Other than that, I really hope that this is as far as the drama in my life extends for the next little while — duck butts and dandelions.
After a personally difficult legal dispute over BME, I’ve had to face the potentially insurmountable reality of being massively in debt, and I have chosen to transfer the business to Rachel (the details of this deal are sealed, so please don’t ask). Within the month my role at BME will come to an end*, and new staff (made up largely of people who’ve been working on BME for some time as well) will be taking over. I will no longer be writing online about body modification, although I will be maintaining my regular blog and other projects of course, as well as working on several body modification book projects which I am eager to complete.
It’s definitely a very strange and mixed set of feelings, having run this site from the very beginning, over nearly a decade and a half. On one hand I’m very much looking forward to having the opportunity and time to paint and tackle new adventures, and on the other hand I will very much miss both the people and the subject in general that I came to know through BME. That said, when I grew up and fell in love with body modification — and later built BME — this was a very different and much more “outsider” culture, so maybe now, as not just tattooing but body modification as a whole enjoys unprecedented levels of popularity and acceptability, it is a good time to pass the torch on to a new generation. It’s my hope that they maintain the site in the spirit that it was begun, while taking on the challenges of a new environment.
I have very much enjoyed being a part of BME and I leave it with good memories. Thank you to everyone who’s been a friend of the site, and everyone who’s helped bring it to this point. I hope you’ve enjoyed my contributions — I know I’ve enjoyed yours — and I hope that you continue to enjoy what BME brings in the future.
See you in hell! :P
Shannon
snowrail@gmail.com
zentastic.com
* Edit, Jan ’10: In reality, it ended up being September before my role with the site wrapped up… One thing I discovered is that legal processes can move much much more slowly than either expected or desired!
