Wednesday, October 29, 2008
After far too much time invested, this sad chapter in my life has ended — I have finally beaten Green Grass and High Tides in Rock Band at the “expert” level, completing the hardest song in the game and finishing the solo tour. Once I figured out the couple of tricks of how to time it, it actually wasn’t that hard. I have big fingers so it’s a little harder because I can’t use the solo buttons, but still…
FINALLY!
Also, my Cherokee just headed off to get lifted a little more (8″) so I can fit the 35″ Boggers under it… Below is about how much it’s changing (the photo doesn’t do it justice — I think it’ll make a big difference). It’s about the biggest I can make it and still fit into underground parking — a good size that’s lots of fun but still completely usable for day to day. For better reference it’s the same size as the Jeep in this video. Good timing, because yesterday it tore apart a heater hose…
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Proving that my hand web piercing has not yet damaged functionality (thanks in part to Simple Care, the best piercing aftercare product out there), I beat GH: World Tour (but only on hard, to unlock all the songs), and have gone back to try and best that cursed track Green Grass and High Tides in Rock Band on Expert… I got to 96% — which is past the hardest parts — and then stumbled. Arrrgh! Another day…
“Why is he sad?”
“He doesn’t like how hot it is in Australia.”
I’ve spent a bit over a year now avoiding any body modification interests other than a little tattooing because my interest in body modification had become a potential liability in court and was being used to help paint me as ‘unstable’ (not a fun thing to have to defend to decrepit old judges!), but now that that’s over, I figured it was time to celebrate. One of my very first piercings — and one of my favorites — was my hand web piercing, and I’ve been missing it… So I decided to do that again!
It was all DIY of course, and I used a 10ga needle and a 7/16″ 12ga ring (which increased the initial bleeding, but made the follow-through and bead placement much easier). The placement was done carefully to both minimize movement of the tissue trapped by the piercing (there’s no shifting of skin between the points), and to minimize movement of the jewelry. The ring lies flush against the skin (rather than dangling centrally), and what little movement there is can be absorbed more easily by a ring than by a bar in my opinion. So yeah. New piercing, DIY, good placement, safe.
But I also wanted to mention something frightening. I was talking to a friend that left the industry earlier this year. Because they no longer need to use their autoclave, they stopped sending in their spore tests. The scary thing is, for four months — continuing until today — they’ve received a letter from the spore testing laboratory (a big name place with a good reputation used by hundreds of studios if not more) saying that their test came back successfully and that their clave is functioning properly. Even though they didn’t send anything in. Scary stuff. I wonder if this is a small clerical error, or if it’s large-scale fraud — gambling with people’s lives — by the company. I suspect the latter.
So that’s one of the many reasons I prefer DIY. How does this person know that their clave didn’t fail a year ago??? It’s certainly possible that a clave in this situation could a blood-borne pathogen, and, with the right sort of bad luck, thousands of people could have been infected with Hepatitis C… Statistically, if they’re doing this on a large scale, it’s surely happened already at some tattoo or piercing studio, hospital, or dental office.
The nice thing about these ultra-budget cookies that I bought is that the creme filling does not adhere to the cookies at all, so you can dismantle them and stack them as high as you want.
