Dreams

Normally I don't remember them, but I had a few last night… First I dreamed that Caitlin and I were designing a huge multi-dome house that had a monkey reserve on the inside. Then I dreamed that I'd borrowed a Diablo and it got damaged my all the potholes in my driveway. Then I ran into Saira's boyfriend Michael pissing in my backyard and we talked about installing a hottub in the empty lot behing my house.

The update is going well, I have around 1000 images going up in a few hours. Applications were faxed in to the CC processors, so at least the FULL BME memberships will be back up shortly (extreme2 and stuff like that may be longer).

My day

First of all, the Maori shirts are just disappearing. I've never seen a shirt go this fast. Seriously, if you want one, I'm guessing you have as little as 24 hours before the run is sold out. At least BMEshop is doing well; if I go bankrupt maybe Ryan will give me a job. ;)

I had a bit of a scare today (yeah, that's a surprise): I had to pick my grandmother up from the airport today, and because I was in the middle of this credit card hell and still had about thirty pages of applications to fax all over the country, I just gave her my TT and told her to drive herself home. Keep in mind she was fairly tired, having been up for about 24 hours already. Four hours later my mother called me all worried as she had not made it home yet… Luckily I heard from her about five minutes later — she'd just stopped for coffee and a rest (and had a lot of fun driving my zippy little car).

I think the sale on my Jeep may be confirmed this weekend… Which, even though I'm taking a beating on it, is a relief given my current financial woes. Plus it'll give me a little spare cash to rebuild the engine in my trike (420HP in a 1700lb vehicle!) and pick up that .50 AE Desert Eagle I've had my eyes on.

The little guy was drawn for me by The Eternal. Check his page for some other IAM characters — it's really funny.

Disgusting

When I got home from Amsterdam, I almost puked. I don't mind a messy house, but the smell in my house was unbearable and unacceptable. So it's time to clean. I'm taking about three hundred beer bottles back right now, and then clean, clean, clean. Don't worry though, I am working on a HUGE image update, which will be posted on Thursday (sorry for the delay). Get your by tomorrow night and they'll be included in this update. It would be tomorrow, but my grandmother is coming back from Germany so I have to pick her up at the airport and drive her home (about a five hour drive in all).

At the beer store I made $30 in bottles… And then this sort of odd older guy came up to me and said “are you still living up on St. Clair?”. It was a shock because I hadn't lived there for I think seven years now! I guess I'm easy to recognize. A guy came up to me and knew who I was at the grocery store yesterday.

Oh, and I've changed some of the ways that banned users are handled. If you find yourself banned or logged out for no apparent reason, let me know. Oh, and if you have a problem with someone here, contact me. If you fight with them here, and they complain to me but you don't, it's quite likely that you'll get deleted as well. Don't stoop to their level.

Shirt Plug

Ryan dropped off my shirts today, and they really do look amazing. I know it's tooting my own horn a bit, but seriously think that the shirts we've been doing have been getting nicer and nicer as time goes by. Added to that the fact that there's such good customer service, and I'm very pleased with everything BMEshop has accomplished over the past months.

Finally, I wanted to mention that we got back the first fifty Bear action figures. I've attached a picture below. It looks alright in the picture, but all of us here agree that it's not up to the quality that we feel comfortable selling, so they won't be going up on BMEshop. If you desperately want one and understand that they suck, you might be able to convince Ryan to send you one with your next t-shirt order if and only if you are a good customer. Don't bother asking him if you're not!

Silkscreening

The intricacies are actually kind of interesting. Seriously, given an input color at a specific pixel location, and a list of inks and a base shirt color, how much of each ink do you need to screen, and in what order, to match it as closely as possible? Keep in mind that we're not talking about CMYK mixing which any idiot can do in their sleep. It might be two blue inks and a red ink on a black shirt. Added to that, the inks are opaque, making order very important. Added to THAT, silk screening is somewhat inaccurate and you have to take into account that because of the opaque overlaps, different levels of saturation will effectively have different levels of artificial transparency (because a high saturation will obscure more even if it's not properly aligned). I can think of the way to do this slowly ink picking through a trial-and-error process, sped up by a look-up table, but if there are any bright people out there that can tell me a quick algorythm, I'd love to hear it. I've gotten as far as thinking about it a lot and defining all the parameters, and writing the routines for doing the basics like reading and writing TGA files (a wonderfully simple image format).