The thing about transscrotal piercings is that you can't just clamp and pierce them with a standard barbell, so they're beyond what the average piercer can do. Doing them as a piercing risks trapping an infection (which won't be able to drain) inside the scrotum where it can rapidly (within a couple days) become life-threatening. I have friends who have nearly died from this piercing and other scrotal infections — take this risk seriously!
In theory, the “right way” to do this is by creating a larger hole or slot through the scrotum, and then the front and back are cleanly sutured together. This is the technique pioneered by Jon Cobb back in I think 1994 that is now used by virtually all professionals doing the procedure. Done right, the piercing can fully heal in under a month (and the larger hole has better drainage ability in the case of an infection).
That said, as anyone who's had one, even with a professional doing it it's rarely that simple… But when it comes to home jobs, I see some intense — and unusual — ways of doing it. The photos above (on a very experienced old friend of mine) are a good example of one of the more over the top
“a hammer solves everything” solutions. It's not recommended of course, and the risks should be obvious, but if it's something you're into, it sure is fun… The full photo set is in the
FSPLITTER bonus gallery that I'll add to
BME/HARD in one of the next couple updates.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
I saw this technique linked on MeFi and quickly wrote a version of the action he described (although it has some fairly obvious flaws in it). To be honest it's easier to write it yourself than for me to provide a copy of it because even with the action you've got to “get” it to use it right.
Here's the first one I did — very sloppy, but you get the idea — this is a picture of Efix that I'd just processed a normal photographic version of for one of the next BME updates. Anyway, it really is a cool technique with a lot of potential… I may have to write a better action for it and play with it for shirt work.
Note: If you do want to see how I did this, here's the current version of the action. You will have to do a lot of the work manually still (like choosing your rotation angles, and applying any distortion to the lines). Note that the first time you run it, a few errors will be generated because of missing layers. Ignore them, but when it's done running the first time, press undo three or four times (until the 'Layer 1' reappears). Anyway: etchit.atn (F9 activated).
Saturday, January 22, 2005
With Rafael's help as a translator and oracle we went down to the beach today to see about reserving it for BMEfest. Tecolote, the beach that's pictured in the BMEfest banner is still top on our list and we all pretty much agree it's the ideal place. The food is great, and we will be able to reserve the restaurant so it's all ours (the beach is public). It's big enough that we've got more than enough space, and pulling on the beach will be totally fine as well, although just out of respect to other people who aren't into that it'll have to be a little farther down (but that's better for people doing it anyway). Here are two more panoramas, looking down the beach each way from the restaurant.
I'm not sure yet what's going to happen regarding fireworks and performance-wise; there will be some permit issues for doing it at the beach for ecological reasons, so I'm thinking about also grabbing a bar in downtown La Paz for the evening and having a show there but don't ask me to give a confirmed answer yet. A number of wonderful artists have offered to help with that, so there will be something cool. Here's a shot of our back-up beach by the way, we stopped and talked to them as well:
I'm already looking forward to this like crazy. Of course, I am crazy. Well, hopped up on Mexican energy drinks and booze anyway. But that's another story. Anyway, we should have the details solidly confirmed over the next two or three weeks, and then tickets will go up in
BMEshop (a nominal amount which will cover the beach rental, the bar setup, entertainment, and some swag).
“Excuse me. Excuse me, Señor. May I speak to you please? I asked for a mai tai, a margarita, and a piña colada. I asked for no salt, no salt in the margarita. But it had salt in it… If you do that again, I won't be leaving a tip. I won't be putting one down. I could check into a competing resort. I could write a letter to your nation's board of tourism and I could have this place condemned.”
“I could put… I could put… strychnine in the guacamole.”
I'm working on images and a new IAM toy (should get posted later if I don't pass out from exhaustion first), but I wanted to pause for a moment and show a few pictures of the BME staff shirts that Ryan just sent me, as well as one of the new Prof. Orbax shirts.
There's a few new things in
BMEshop if you didn't already see, including a reprint of the
10-year shirt,
Kilean in the Jungle, and the
BME Mexico shirt as well — check out pictures of the last two on ozzime's page if you'd like to know what they look like in person.
I finished my first week of Spanish. My vocabulary isn't the greatest, but I'm really amazed at just how much you can learn in a week. I can conjugate present and future tense (including irregular verbs) and handle basic conversations, as can the others in the class (it's not just because of knowing French and German). I think my favorite thing about learning new languages is not so much learning how to communicate with new people, but learning how to express totally new concepts. Languages don't let you just say things differently — they let you say different things.
New developments in the 'burbs
(I think one of my classmates is building a house in Pedregal)
As I mentioned the guys in the class with me are both Vietnam Vets; one was a pilot who flew medical missions in '65 and '68, but the other (the one who's been living as a nomad) is a Marine that served in much more direct combat, earning three purple hearts in '67 — and then became a cop in America, only to be shot in the gut by a sixteen year old drug dealer in Illinois. Luckily the kid's gun was a .22 pistol that had been loaded about ten years before — the ammunition was so corroded and rotten that the bullet wasn't even able to penetrate much deeper than the length of the bullet.
His USMC tattoo had been done earlier that year (as in 1967) by a woman going by the moniker “Painless Nails” (one of the few female tattoo artsists working in the sixties). Her shop was across from the San Diego (but I may be misquoting that) bus terminal at which he and the others just out of basic training caught their rides home to visit their families before shipping off to Vietnam. Especially when the tattoo is older, I'm always interested to hear when and how it was done.
It cost $8.
