Flaming Chords

This is my front page. All comments here are screened; if you don't have my email address, you can drop me a line here. If I know your email address, I'll reply by email -- if not, I'll reply to your comment, and then rescreen both your comment and my reply.

It's also got every tag I have -- this is because my current LJ style doesn't include a tag index. (At least half of my participation on LJ is on my Treo. I chose this style because it loads quickly and it's still readable on a small screen.)

I'd tell you more about myself, but that's what my profile -- and the rest of my journal -- are for.

If you like ladies, you'll probably want to watch this pole-dancing routine.

If you like men, you'll probably want to watch this pole-dancing routine.

Of course, no one says you can't watch both!

It's all caprine's fault. She just posted a link to a website called Blingee, which lets you upload pictures and then festoon no end of animated sparkly shit all over them. Then, when you've finally finished created something that will induce either diabetic coma or epileptic seizures, you can save your masterpiece as an animated .gif, and post it anywhere!

(Sorry. There are certainly some cool things you can do with Blingee -- this picture of sparkly anarchist Emma Goldman is a work of twisted genius. But imagine this tool in the hands of a horde of twelve-year-olds...)

In related news, I decided that I needed more Twatlight icons that were in questionable taste, so I decided to make His and Hers. (NSFW!) For those of you unfamiliar, "sparklepeen" is a reference to this review.

"Comment to this post, and I will choose 7 of your interests that I am curious about. You post about them in your own journal and we continue from there."

I replied when ms_daisy_cutter posted this meme, and here are the seven she chose.

( Math Metal, Dream Theater, Weird Art, Strangers in Paradise, Protosciences, Oneirology, Ingersoll. )

Generally, I try to organize my Con-related posts, so that I'm not spamming you guys with shitloads of "OMFG I had so much fun" posts. Sadly, this year I really can't, so I'm wrapping it all up here. Yes, I'm leaving a lot out. It can't be helped.


I had a couple of chats with a couple of friends I know online, but I only end up seeing once a year. In addition to just having a lot of fun chatting, I got some interesting new insights into [Igor]'s habit of stealing small parts from my shop, before we caught him and told him never to come back. (Try to imagine a grown-up and homeless Linus, from the comic strip Peanuts, stealing from Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Now picture him as a long-unemployed electronic engineer.) In addition to this, they discovered a terrific pizza joint, and took me there for lunch. Tony & Alba's. I recommend them highly, and these friends liked them enough that they ate there three times over the weekend. Damned good stuff!

For those of you unfamiliar, Regency Dancing is a lot like square dancing, except it looks a lot more elegant, and the music is much better. I'd never done it before because I have this fear of looking silly and/or incompetent, but I decided that this was a stupid thing to fear, so I did a running tackle on it. It turns out that the fear was needless: it's easy to learn, and a lot of fun. And yes, unless you've been at it for a while, you will look silly, but so will a bunch of people around you, so lighten the hell up.

There was a panel on coping with Drama Llamas, which I attended mostly to pick up pointers just in case I ran into [Brad] and [Janet] again. Of course, I never saw them. Please note that I'm not saying that they weren't in attendance -- only that I never saw them. For all I know, they weren't there. Or just as likely, they avoided me. Or just as likely, they were having so much fun they forgot about me completely, and fate just decided that we didn't need to run into each other. I find I'm hoping for that third option. We've had more than enough of each other already -- why reopen old wounds?

Saw some neat stuff in the Art Show. Todd Lockwood was the Artist Guest of Honor, and his work definitely lived up to the title. Still, I got to check out a bunch of other artists. Some of them were amazing. And of couse, some of them were so bad they made me wonder why I put down my color pencils, because I could do ten times better in my sleep. And then I remember that I put down my color pencils some time after I started getting good on guitar. Go many arts, so little time...

I'm not generally fond of pornography (all that web design work killed whatever appreciation for it I might have had), but I do enjoy watching artists put one toenail over the line between Art-with-a-capital-A and pornography. My favorite examples of this were Sarah Clemens' "Patron Saints of Pornography" (NSFW) series, combining well-done nudity with sly, gutter-level humor (though the quadruple-dragon-nipple-piercing was a little too hardcore for my tastes). Well, those, and a couple of Sandra Santara's centerfolds. Her vision of Odin (NSFW) also dances on that Art/Porn line -- he's certainly arty. He's also discreetly, but unmistakably erect. And hot. (What? I'm straight, I'm not blind!)

I also tried to donate blood. (Every year, there's a blood-van in front of the hotel.) To save both my time, and the time of the warm-hearted vampires with the needles, I asked for a list of disqualifications, and found that it hasn't changed -- I'm still, more or less, permanently on the "please don't donate... ever" list. (I've shot up once. I also have male partners. Either of these alone is a permanent disqualification, no matter how careful I am about it.)

Lest we forget... every Monday morning at BayCon, there's a panel celebrating the lives of the people who've died since the previous BayCon. This panel is hosted by an old friend of mine, and a nice guy to whom I used to sell comics on a regular basis. This year was a bad year: Arthur Clarke, Utah Phillips, Robert Asprin, Steve Gerber (Howard the Duck), and Rory Root, among many others. My con experience is as much wall-to-wall fun as I can cram into it, with the exception of this panel. I can't say I have fun at it, per se, but I feel better for having attended it.


Sadly, there are things I didn't get to do. There always are. I missed Rocky Horror because I was low on sleep, and I missed Eye of Argon because I was on the party floor and forgot about it entirely.

There are also people I didn't get to see. Again, sadly, there always are. This year, they include a couple of friends whom I'd apparently successfully cajoled into showing up, but I never get a chance to say hi. There's also a friend I kept an eye out for, and I didn't remember until after the con that she was in Con Ops. There are others, but if you're reading this, you know who you are.


After the Con, I always feel a hint of sadness as I have to return to the real world. This makes me especially grateful for the blast I'd been having the last few days, and I always swear that next year, I'll have at least as much fun. (And next year, I simply won't bother with the elevators. I was on the sixth floor, and half the time I went to and from my hotel room, it was faster to use the damned stairs.)

Anyway, this concludes my batch of posts for BayCon 2008. I now return you to our regular programming.

(I've had this post half-written for a while now. Recently, another person and I friended each other, and as I usually do when someone friends me, I read the past couple dozen entries or so in their journal. I saw her post on the same subject, and remembered that I'd meant to write one of my own.)

Take a look at recent development in Dubai.

On the one hand, this place is a work of Art. The Three Palms and the World Islands are some amazing pieces of work, both from an artistic standpoint, and from an engineering one. Hydropolis promises to be amazing when it's done. In fact, the whole area looks like the cover of an urban setting on a science fiction novel: shiny, futuristic, a little alien, and very beautiful. Well, most of it. Hell, even the tower Trump wants to build isn't bad, and I thought I'd never say that.

(It figures that Trump wants to build there. But then, this douchebag has a few towers named after himself already, as well as a jet. I have to give him credit for ambition, though. Most guys with microscopic dicks would settle for sports cars or hummers with offensively loud stereo systems. Building several massive phallic symbols and then naming them after himself? Now that takes style. Well, it takes money, and that's just as good, right?)

The sad truth is that, since I'm not a multimillionaire, I will never see any of this up close... but the artistic side of me is very pleased that all this exists.

On the other hand, this is conspicuous consumption gone horribly amok. Half of the world's wealth is in the hands of two percent of the world's population, and this is how they're using it? A whole bunch of people saying to each other, "my steel and glass cock is going to be bigger than yours?" Somebody, please invent a penis enlargement pill that actually works. Maybe we'll see a lot fewer skyscrapers.

I've said it before: money is a concrete token representing power. In small amounts, it's the power to keep food in your belly and a roof over your head. In large amounts, it's the power to remake the world... or at least, your own small corner of it. This whole development strikes me as a blatant misuse of said power... and keeping in mind that by the standards of the rest of the world, I live pretty damned well, that's saying a lot.

I do not anticipate Dubai remaining this way forever. For millennia, people who work their asses off and only just sustain themselves have been asking, "what right do these few people have to be rich?" This question naturally leads to the question, "what can I do about it?"

And nowadays, any idiot can make a bomb.

I've tried to study poetry, on and off. Mostly, I do it because I'm working on writing lyrics for music, and I'd like those lyrics to be good. The thing is, with a few exceptions, I'm not really into poems for their own sake.

Well, there's Eliot, with his Hollow Men and his cats, and that jackass who made a musical about them. There's Nabokov's Pale Fire. And I own a book that includes all of Lovecraft's poetry, from epic verse about the Great Old Ones to poems he wrote for friends on their birthdays. Lovecraft is obviously well-known for his influence on horror fiction, but he was also an amazing poet.

(This isn't to say that all of Lovecraft's poems were good. One of them, in particular, is an exquisitely-spun, well-polished piece of shit.)

But other than these few exceptions, my appreciation for poetry rarely goes beyond the purely academic. I've tried, but it's like jazz -- I certainly respect the people who create it, but it doesn't do much for me. But I keep trying, because the more effort I make, the better my own work will be.

On the other hand... sometimes poetry is so bad that anyone can enjoy it. One poem that made it on weepingcock lately is "The Platonic Blow," by W H Auden (who wanted no credit for this piece of doggerel). You know how funny bad porno can be? Well, it's ten times funnier with rhyme and meter!

And then there's "Leah Sublime," by Aleister Crowley. Personally, I think he lays the shock value on a little too thick, but that's Crowley for you.

Both poems are really funny stuff. Go read them!

For a while, I've been making a joke about certain kinds of spam: that women tend to get the spam for penis enlargement products, and men tend to get the spam for breast enlargement products. (And no, I'm not the only one to notice it.) Now granted, I've got a couple of friends who think I'd look good with D-cups, but that's neither here nor there... my point is that the spammers are completely indiscriminate about hitting people who may not be even theoretically interested in their products. But we already knew that, right?

Well, recently, the spammers have gotten their act together... sort of. I now receive about equal numbers of both kinds of ads. I'm not going to complain about them, much. As annoying as it is to receive spam, my filters are pretty effective, and in two clicks, it's gone. I wouldn't even bother to mention this, except that the subject lines made me cover my computer screen in cranberry juice. (The image below has been edited as a courtesy to people with lower screen resolutions.)



"Get a visit from the big dick fairy." Yeah. That sounds like it would kinda hurt, actually. Or maybe, if I ever lose a tooth again, I should put it under my pillow, just to see if the big dick fairy leaves me a large rubber toy? I can sell it on ebay or something. Or, for some reason, I'm picturing a guy with strap-on butterfly wings and a giant phallus-shaped club:



"Big-dick fairy foo-foo,
hopping through the forest:
scooping up the field mice,
and bopping 'em on the head. (With a big rubber dick.)"

After a major newsworthy real-world tragedy has occured, it will remain in the public consciousness for some time afterward. During this time period, one should be especially careful when making art that depicts or refers to said tragedy, as anything that falls short of absolute brilliance will be viewed as the ugliest sort of crass exploitation. Case in point: this piece of shit. While I can recover the sixty-six megabytes of hard drive space sullied by this .mov file, it also represents ten minutes of my life I will never get back.

(The intro page to which I linked is worksafe. The movie "flesh.mov" is not.)

"Flesh," as this magnum opiate is called, can be described as follows: take some art student who's just gotten straight As for having photographed dirty toilet seats, and give him an assistant who majors in Computer Graphics. Then, picture said art student pitching his idea to the CG major: "I want to take the Twin Towers being hit by airplanes on 9/11, and with the magic of CG, project images of naked women indulging in various sensual acts onto the buildings. In fact, let's project naked horny women on all of the buildings in the New York skyline. And then, after the Twin Towers fall, let's crash lots of planes into lots of buildings! But not just any old buildings -- buildings with lots of tits and asses and pussies projected on them! Yeah, that would be so fuckin' cool!"

Then, picture the CG major doing it, because... well, I have no fucking idea why he did it. Maybe he'd just taken a heroic volume of LSD, and he thought the planes looked like penises. Maybe he was hanging around too many kindergoths, and he thought that being fashionably nihilistic and controversial would get him laid, or some shit. Your guess is as good as mine.

I'm sure that this art student has his theme all written out, and I'm sure that I'm just an unwashed Philistine for not grasping the great depth of his work. Perhaps, if I just had a glimmer of his brilliance, I'd see the genius of his work.

As it is, I think this movie is exquisitely crafted, meticulously constructed shit. You should all go see it for yourselves, and give meaning to this poor art student's life by being offended by his work!

Edited to add: I just noticed that the page had a section listing other sites that link to it. Most of these are from a website called (NWS) Sensible Erection ("All the news that's fit to be printed next to pr0n"), which is where I discovered it. There are also, as I type this, seven links from LiveJournal -- five from people who obviously found it on their f-lists, and two from my actual post.

I may catch some shit for this. Stick around; if I do, it'll be fun to watch. I doubt that Edouard Salier will rant and rave and flail and froth half as much as Stancery Chone did, but you never know!

Does anyone out there know any good programs I can use to do animated gifs? I have an idea for one that I'd like to use over at journalfen. (I'd mention using it on LJ, but I find that on LJ, I don't end up using "bitch, please" all that often. I don't use it much at JF, either, but this strikes me as a fun twist on it.)

Here, take a look. (All times are approximate. I'm sure I'll want to play with them a bit once I actually animate the damned thing.)

1.0 sec.	0.2 sec.	0.2 sec.
0.5 sec.	0.1 sec.	0.1 sec.
0.1 sec.	0.1 sec.	0.1 sec.

One of the people on my F-list who also happens to be a friend in meatspace, trishmcneill, does neat things with glass.

Really neat things.

Really, really neat things.

Go look!