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.

...and with it, my first bout of holiday gloom.

Firstly, I would like to claim that I don't "believe" in Seasonal Affective Disorder. That said, I don't "believe" in ghosts, either, but while my beliefs don't include ghosts, my experience does, so my beliefs can take a running jump off a pier in this instance. So it is with the month-long mood swing I've just started.

It doesn't help that I've been reading a lot of anger-creating news. What the fuck, Catholic Church?

So! I'm going to post some happy-making stuff.

Stolen from naamah_darling: this is kitten with jazz hands. This is you, dead from cute.

Stolen from spotts1701: Bohemian Rhapsody, as performed by most of the cast of The Muppets.

Stolen from crackpig: The scene on the outskirts of Mos Eisley Spaceport, redubbed. The voice is Peter Serafinowicz, who does a variety of voices frighteningly well, and is a very funny dude.

Not stolen at all: A slightly NSFW dance to the song "Christmas Eve Sarajevo" by TSO, longtime purveyor of Christmas music that (unlike nearly all other Christmas music) doesn't blow goats. I don't remember for sure, but I think I found this in the related videos for that post I did a while back with Ms. Felix Cane (slightly NSFW) and Mr. Eike von Stuckenbrok (slightly more NSFW).

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!

First, some fail. I'm sure you're all at least passingly familiar with Barbie, right? About a foot tall, with measurements on the unrealistic side that have inspired little girls into eating disorders for years? Well, guess what? Some idiot designer thinks she's too fat. She has cankles, don'tcha know?

Now, some funny. Ralph Lauren has this horribly photoshopped ad of a woman who looks even more skinny and undernourished than usual for fashion models. It got criticized in a few places, including Boing Boing and Photoshop Disasters... and then they got hit with frivolous DMCA claims. Boing Boing didn't cave. In fact, their response was wonderful.

Finally, some hot. The fashion industry considers these women (slightly NSFW) to be "plus size models." Personally, I consider each and every one of them not only stunningly beautiful, but a refreshing change from the industry's usual ideal female form, which looks suspiciously like an underfed fourteen-year-old boy.


(Nothing against skinny women, mind. Skinny women can be beautiful, too. I just object to the fashion industry's insistence that only skinny women can be beautiful.)

Nudes! Getcher hawt, artsy nudes!

Not safe for work, obviously. Most of the photos are of women, though there are some men scattered here and there, and even if one or the other doesn't float your particular boat, the photos have artistic merit as well. Oh, and the site's in French.

Stolen from Fleshbot: Lots of really attractive Brazilians in their underwear. Apparently, this is a national holiday there.

(Yes, both sexes are well-represented. Enjoy. Or cope, as the case may be.)

The lady is Olivia Wilde. She's on House, as a doctor nicknamed "Thirteen."

The gent is Theo Theodoridis. He's a model.

( If these two had kids, they'd have the kind of eyes that could take over the world. )

...I was very fond of Eartha Kitt.

Rest in Peace, dear lady.

Sure, we all pretend Santa is jolly, but I assure you, he has called each and every one of these women (NSFW) a ho. He called each of them a ho three times, in fact!


These ladies and gentlemen are in the forum for the webcomic Least I Could Do. Worksafeness -- worksafety? -- varies. Sadly, you'll have to sign up at the forum to see these, but for some of you, it may be worth it. Some of you may like more diversity, though: nearly all of the women are playboy bunny types, and most of the men are fitness models.


This is the JournalFen community hot_daily. Every day, they post one piece of eye candy. They alternate between sexes daily, but it's well-tagged, so if you just want ladies or gentlemen, you can filter accordingly. Mostly safe for work, except possibly on Mondays, and Monday pictures are hidden behind cuts.

Well, the first one went over well, so here's another. Beneath the cut, you'll find lots of tasteful pictures of beautiful women... but there's more to this post than that. Each one of these women is also a damned fine musician. Each picture is a link to a song on YouTube, so that you can hear her for yourself. The Gothic Metal still predominates, since women are far better represented in that subgenre than in any other subgenre of metal.

(I tried to find pictures of Jo Bench (Bolt Thrower) and Leather Leone (Chastain), but gave up after Google Image Search gave me hundreds of pictures of furniture and jackets. I also decided against including Lita Ford, Doro Pesch, or Joan Jett. Maybe in a retro edition...)

( Now, on to the ladies! There are twenty-one images under this cut, so if you have a slow internet connection, it may take a while to load. )

I've been inspired, by one friend-of-a-friend, to make an eye candy post. Beneath the cut, you'll find lots of tasteful pictures of beautiful women... but there's more to this post than that. Each one of these women is also a damned fine musician. Each picture is a link to a song on YouTube, so that you can hear her for yourself.

(There tends to be a certain "kind" of photo that's favored by the bands and/or their agents. I've done my best to find a variety of shots, but you'll still see a handful of poses and angles being reused a lot. Also, these are real women -- none of them are perfect centerfolds, though a couple might come close. That said, they're all still beautiful.)

I had a little trouble deciding in what order to list them, but I eventually decided on vocal quality: starting with the perfectly trained (but rather icy) voices, and progressing to the if-only-Kathleen-Turner-sang kinds of voices.

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( Vibeke Stene )

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( Tarja Turunen )

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( Anette Olzon )

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( Anneke van Giersbergen )

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( Christina Scabbia )

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( Morgan LaCroix )

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( Sarah Jezebel Deva )

For a while now, I've sorta half-hoped for a Girl Genius meets XXXenophile comic.

You must admit, Agatha is drop-dead gorgeous, and Gil looks really good naked. Foglio would have a lot to work with just with those two, to say nothing of the possibilities with Klaus/Lucrezia flashbacks, Jaegerslash, the wild and crazy games that DuPree no doubt likes to play... and who knows, Castle Heterodyne and Castle Wulfenbach might find each other irresistible! I have no idea how that would even work, but he's got a good imagination, I'm sure he could figure something out!

Now, Foglio's obviously an open-minded sort, or he'd never have drawn a porno comic like XXXenophile in the first place. Still, I never considered that he might actually make an adults-only edition of Girl Genius, except as an idle daydream.

Then I saw today's strip, and aside from being insane and bloodthirsty, the Castle has a taste for innuendo. "Magnificent Death Ray?" "Oversized machinery?"

Now you're just teasing us, you bastard. :)

(But seriously, I can't be the only one hoping for a Girl Genius/XXXenophile crossover, can I?)

Never film yourself having sex.

Well, I tell a lie. The rule is, never film yourself havaing sex unless you've already decided that you're okay with the whole world seeing it. Because it will happen. Maybe you'll break up and your ex will feel vengeful, maybe someone will break into your house, maybe someone whill hack your phone, but whatever the case, it will happen. Then, if you're at all famous, it will spread like crabs at a frat party. And then people will talk all kinds of smack about it in intellectual cesspools like ohnotheydidnt. If your penis is a quarter-inch below average, if your breasts are even the tiniest bit lopsided, if you have the tiniest bit of belly fat, if it was more than an hour since you bathed when you started filming, you'll be mercilessly mocked for it. Hell, if you're female at all, no matter how perfectly you match Cosmo's idea of a perfect woman, you'll catch shit for it, because after all, only dirty whores do that sort of thing. So, best to leave screwing on camera to the professionals, unless you are absolutely not even the tinitest bit shy.

The latest example of this: Verne Troyer filmed himself with a lady. And shock of shocks, surprise of surprises, it's getting around. (I'm sure it's on the net somewhere. If you're really interested, go find it yourself.)


Pornography is funny. All it needs is wise-ass bunnies and falling anvils.

Normally, I don't post pinups in my LJ -- I think before now, I've only done it once, and that one time was actually quite tasteful. I figure that nudes are very plentiful on the internet and that anyone can find them easily if they care to look.

Usually, if I post pornography at all, I only post links to pornography that's funny, awful, or both: Superman (NSFW), Tarzan (NSFW), the Smurfs (NSFW), the Addams Family (NSFW), and so on.

One day though... I will hire Ron Jeremy, Lee Stone, and Jenna Jameson for a shoot, along with renting a lot of scaffolding, a plumber's uniform, a monkey suit, and lots of barrels. Can't you just see it: "Donkey Kong XXX!"

I'm just surprised no one else has done it.

...yet.


Eye candy for the ladies... and a few of the guys.

As I said, normally I don't post pinups in my LJ.

After a quick glance at my f-list, though, I can't help noticing that nearly three quarters of you are female -- possibly more, since there are a few of you who have been vague about your gender. Further, of the men here, a few are either gay or bisexual. So, I don't think it'll kill me (or my heterosexual male friends) if I post eye candy just this once. We can simply not click it, right?

So, stolen from crowdog66: Menz! Git yer hawt nekkid menz!

(NSFW, obviously.)

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.

Over on Fandom Wank, the delightful puipui, whom I do not know at all but suddenly love very much, has declared today to be International Boobie Day. As a result, some breathtakingly lovely icons have taken over fwank_icons.

What can I say? I'm male and I have a pulse, so I've been on top of these posts like white on rice.

Does anyone here read the comic series Strangers in Paradise?

If so, check this out. In the unlikely event that they make a movie or TV series out of it, this woman would make a perfect Francine. And if you're not a fan of SiP, go look anyway -- she's still very much worth seeing.

(I find it both amusing and alarming that she's considered a "plus-size" model.)