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This came up in conversation this evening, and seemed a good idea. Buy it now.

I saw a sticker with a similar design, and decided a t-shirt was essential. Get it here.

I figure it’s time to bite the bullet and actually start posting my artwork: after all, it just sits in a big pile at home, and I certainly spend a whole stack of time peering at other people’s output and deriving inspiration. As such, here’s this evening’s sketching:

Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License. Click here for more information.

I’m trying to do more demanding poses from time to time, and this was an exercise in foreshortening, perspective and whatnot. Rather pleased with where it’s ended up for now, though there’s clearly a lot more picking to be done. I think everyone has to do at least one “girl in hi-tech latex pointing gun at the camera” type picture. Haven’t gotten the perspective quite right on the laser sight, as yet, though.

I’ve been being quite the responsible adult of late. It feels ghastly, of course, however it does mean that I’m reducing the amount of debt I’ve got going on, including the amount of credit card debt. I have, in fact, paid off one of the damn things, and so my thoughts naturally turned to an appropriate way in which I could destroy the card. Now usually, being a pyromaniac at heart, it’s a butane torch over the sink, but I was recently reminded whilst trawling the tubes of that joy of childhood, the shrinky-dink. So, will the credit card shrink when put in the oven? Let’s see the result…

Alas, no! Whilst it shrinks a little bit, it more just crinkles, turns brown, and makes a nasty smell. Seems that it’s the wrong kind of plastic for the shrinking. At least it didn’t catch alight.

A quick interlude. Hard to go past playing with this:

Whatever Happened to the Milling Machine?

Well might you be wondering! It turns out that, being interested in a wide variety of things, I’m pretty easily distracted from one project to another — who’d have thought? In this particular case, I blame a combination of getting a batch of microcontroller PCBs back from the excellent Gold Phoenix, rediscovering the music of Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon on SACD is incredible), getting my work area really well set up, and messing around with the piano rather a lot. That said, it has been getting on, and I have been tinkering little-by-little with the mill, and have been slack about posting. So here ’tis. :)

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I’ve been getting more and more blog comment spam over the last couple of months, and I’ve finally reached my “I’m sick of it” threshold. As such, if you want to comment on posts from this point forward, you’ll need to sign-up and be logged in to do so. Sorry about that: bless the retards that make it a requirement.

Update: Following Keith Neufeld’s advice, I’ve installed the Akismet anti-spam plugin, and returned to not requiring registration prior to comment. Hopefully this’ll be the last of the whole spam thing. :)

I like to mess about making, pulling apart and messing with a wide variety of things: in particular, electronics, microcontrollers and the small housings for suchlike things. As a result, I was always finding that my workbench was getting terribly cluttered up with a myriad of tools that I needed to hand for the various projects currently on the go. All the tools were in use, and so couldn’t really get put away properly, but there were just too many of them eating up precious bench space. I needed some sort of quick, simple local cache for tools in use that would keep them ultra-accessible, but out of the way. After much thinking about it, I came up with the solution you can see below:

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Had to be done, really: I’ve been infected by the Venn diagram meme. Buy one, so I can buy me a football team. :)

This one’s been kicking around my head for a good few years:

I’ve been finding, over the last few months, that I’m increasingly getting asked for recommendations of books, films, music and whatnot by a variety of different people. Rather than compile the same list over and over again, I thought it best to simply post it up here, for everyone’s edification. Here ’tis at Recommendations over in the sidebar.

Ah, the tubes: Tevatron of culture! Smashing memes together so hard that they spray their bizarre, short-lived constituents around for all to see! A veritable experimental tokamak straining to contain the white-hot semiotic plasma of this bizarre modern world! As one of my favourite futurists, Charles Stross, is fond of pointing out, the world is getting weird a quite a rate – so fast in fact that it’s hard to speculate productively on the near future without getting lapped multiple times by the world.

And so, what joy did the tubes bring me today? The very future of televisual entertainment, all packaged up and just begging to be rehydrated! Just when I thought that western television had spiraled as far as possible into kneejerk titillation and insanity, I’m shown that we’re not even close to limit. I feel like a semiconductor engineer bravely forecasting the end of smaller, cheaper and faster microprocessors in 1991 because “We’re reaching fundamental physical limits”. It all begins with this video of earnest young ladies attempting to assess the virtue of toys handguns that are able to shock the user when their opposite number shoots their “chest pack”. Watch it now. I’ll wait.

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The result of some recent musical predilections. I simply must have one.

First t-shirt design of many, obviously the result of a sterling morning. Buy now, before our APEC overlords have it redacted.

I’ve been gradually getting exposed to more of the music of Led Zeppelin of late, culminating in watching various pieces of their performance at Royal Albert Hall on DVD over the course of the weekend. For those of you who haven’t heard any of their work, I strongly recommend it.

Now, you might think that it would be impossible to sustain the process of producing song after song purely and simply about sex, but Led Zeppelin do exactly this. Over and over again, with a mixture of low brainstem fervour, teenage obsession, and meticulous thematic grinding, they’re really going to explain to you, in complete detail, just what their kind of sex is all about. There’s nothing abstract about it, either. It’s visceral.

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I thought I might take the time to write up one of my standard rants about the problems of designing systems that are “good enough”, or that satisfy what “most of the people” desire; the problems, indeed, of catering technologically to the centre of the bell curve for reasons of economy. The particular example of this phenomena that has really been getting my goat for the last couple of years is the continuing use of the MP3 format as the de-facto standard for online music sale and distribution.

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It struck me many years ago that computers are engines for the practical realisation of a particular paradigm of magical working: the paradigm in which the name of a thing provides power over that thing. This is an observation that seems to have been made by a great many people — perhaps most entertainingly by Neal Stephenson — and is, I suspect, one of the waypoints on the road to enlightenment for an aspiring young programmer. In order to make the computer do your bidding, you must provide the ornery imbecile with an exact name of the task you require. Metaphysically speaking, this works because computers, as we currenly understand them, instantiate a separate internal universe in which everything is named with complete precision (or at least a sufficiently reliable facsimile of such).

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Updated: see below.

So, I found myself watching a neat, opinionated little show called Space Bubble today. Much to my delight, they turned their hipster cynicism in the direction of one of my least favourite modern phenomena: social networking sites, and in particular the nadir of pushy, invasive, “get everyone used to panopticon surveillance”, “make the extroverts feel good” craptastica — Facebook.

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This was bound to happen, but I’m glad it’s my brain that got there first:

• Materialism: CHEEZBURGER IZ CHEEZBURGER
• Idealism: CHEEZBURGER IZ NOT CHEEZBURGER
• Empiricism: CHEEZBURGER HAS A FLAVUR
• Operationalism: CHEEZBURGER IZ A FLAVUR
• French Feminism: INVISIBLE LANGUAGE!
• Western Feminism: YOU NO WANT CHEEZBURGER
• Postmodernism: I’S IN UR TEXTS KILLIN UR AUFORS
• Phenomenology: CHEEZBURGER CAN HAS U?

Please feel free to add more. T-shirt as soon as I get my act together in that regard.

Updated: see below.

We’ve all got those special songs that we listen to when we’re down: not just a little bit down, but really down. Stop eating, just smoke cigarettes and drink vodka to numb the hunger really down. Writhe in the confines of your own self-consciously fucked up worldview down. And perhaps most pertinently: inflict the most emotionally painful, self-destructive music upon yourself down.

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