There's nothing more dangerous than putting on your blessed greased +2 gray dragon scale mail in the morning and thinking that you're invulnerable.

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11/6 '19 2 Comments
Bag End. I can't believe I'm still in Bag End.
Baaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha.

I lost a level 24 wiz-elf-mal-cha to a cross-aligned artifact blast last week.

30 years on, the game still catches me being sloppy every. Time.
 

Upon seeing me in my costume, everyone said the same thing. "I found him!"

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11/5 '19 9 Comments
I love this!!
Love it! Also, this was one of VERY few costumes I had to take a pic of at the Baltimore Comic Con. In fact, I had to chase the guy down to get the pic (he was on his way out). Figured you might appreciate it:
That's fantastic.
Right? It took me a second, and he was moving past me in the crowded space of the con. By the time my brain put 2 and 2 together, I had to hustle back through the crowd to stop him and ask if I could take the picture.
Werewaldo?

There Waldo!

... I'll see myself out.
Ha! Love it!

I almost didn't recognize you without your face fur!

Also *really* digging those glasses on you.
How do I know I'm getting old? I knew something 'seemed different' and had no idea it was the lack of facial hair. Where's my walker and my pills?
 

I recently had a friend describe me as a "straight arrow" in a vaguely critical way to someone who passing around their combustible drug of choice. I.E. "Ray doesn't partake, he's a straight arrow."

Pardon my social blindness, but since when was not choosing to indulge in your drug a decision worthy of criticism?

The definition of straight arrow being: A person righteously devoted to clean or conventional living.

Clean? Meh. Conventional? Hardly. Admittedly, my quirks are fairly mundane and my record is clean enough for the government to think I pass a sniff test. Perhaps this is owing to most people not knowing me very well. 

I guess I'm okay with that.

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10/30 '19 3 Comments
Well that's some hot high school level bullcrap. Like, you can be 90° from every other norm, but since you passed on huffing a combustible somehow that makes you a straight arrow? LOL

I know there are some folks who aren't comfortable with their own choices unless everyone around is making the same choice, but they need to sit with that discomfort *with their mouths shut*. Anything else is bullying.
Don't forget, m'dear: When people criticize like that, it's almost always a reflection of how they secretly feel about themselves. Someone feels ashamed about their drug use, it seems.

I think you're pretty fuckin' cool, wacky tabacky or not. :)
Jill beat me to it.
 

But there's always later today. 

Engraved on a sample of cherry hardwood flooring, about 4" wide. 

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10/30 '19 11 Comments
That looks great!
Thankew!
What did you use to do the engraving?
Laser cutter/engraver
That's pretty cool. I might just have to look into such things. :)
You can't carry it around in a backpack, so feel free to store it at my place. ;)
You are just SO selfless! Thank you for that. ;P
That's fricking amazing.
Thanks! It's not much artistically but it's got a fun texture.
This is gorgeous. Where did you make this? At a maker space with a laser cutter, or do you have one of your own? [drooling with envy if you do]
I have one; it's taking up like half my studio space and is a constant source of frustration, joy, and extremely unpleasant fumes (which are vented outside, but still). Learning how to use it has been most of the last month's work and I'm just beginning to get a handle on technique.
 
 
This is not a self-referential poem.

In fact, it's completely obsessed with talking about all of 
the other poems that influenced it, those poems which

once

were read by poets come and gone, or in other cases come
and not gone so much as moved quite far away, or had their
weltanschauung changed so greatly that this poem is not any
longer
particularly
impressed
as such things go

This poem is extremely, embarassingly well read;
it just finished
the Cantos (that wretched man),
and
the Duino Elegies (translated, sadly (but well-)
and it re-read
The Sonnets
for the umpteenth time just last weekend... this poem has an inferiority complex

It wants to apologize for its existence, but it can't seem
to find the right words. Which is just so...much...a thing It has big important neighbors, this poem, and often gets
lost in the shadows, but at least it's not a self-referential
poem...this poem doesn't like self-reference, and honestly
resents being the work of a poet who does This poem would consider itself a complete failure if it
didn't have something in common with the Iliad, namely,
this poem doesn't end, it stops
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10/29 '19 5 Comments
Well. That was familar. :)
I had forgotten about it completely!

Apparently I made some edits in 1999? So this is the final draft :)
Actually I don't remember reading it -- for all I knew it was brand new. However, it is a headspace full of sentiment as familiar as a pair of old shoes.
But I was still waiting for a closing parenthesis!
 

We usually wear name tags in choir. There's  more than a hundred of us so. Anyway people like to be creative with them. I have a hallowe'en themed one I'm wearing this month but needed to make one for November. 

It's a kind of intarsia with felt and foam. I cut the pieces on the laser. It was "fun" working with the different colours. Did you figure that cutting blue/violet things with a blue/violet laser might be very different than cutting black things?  I spent hours working on the right settings and insets to get the kerfs to match. 

I have to glue all the bits to something, probably black construction paper, but that's a project for tomorrow. 

oh, yes, I'm singing alto. 

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10/25 '19 8 Comments
Seriously nice work. I too love the type and the colors. Really good stuff.
So pretty!!! I love it.
Thank you! I had kind of a vision for what it would look like and I'm tickled that the result looks so close to it.
Looove the colors; looks great! And that "a" in Sean is especially satisfying. (I love typefaces.)

YAAS to you singing alto! (I sing tenor and even baritone.) Woot woot!

Also, I don't think I knew your pronouns are they/them. Thanks for this! Noted!
The typeface for the name is called Bullfinch and was digitized directly from an early 20th century typography sample book. It's so elegant!

One of the nice things about our choir is that no one calls the SAs "ladies" or the TBs "men." While I'm the only AMAB person in the SAs (trying to be a trendsetter here) there's a lot of AFAB people in the TBs and it's wonderful.
The detail in this is magnificent.
This is so gorgeous.

When I was in a choir, I had a range from soprano to tenor, but I'm so tone deaf that I had to sing soprano because it was the range in which I was least tone-deaf.
After a couple hours singing alto I am sometimes sure at the end of it that I'm just making tuneless squeaks but no one has yelled at me yet. Tomorrow's our 7 hour retreat so I'm sure I'll get at least one dirty look. Or not!
 

I woke at three in the morning to answer a call of nature. I'm one of those people who has to have moving air on me at all times when I sleep. So, in a pitch black room I open my eyes and I see a halo of light in front of me. I quickly blink to see if I'm hallucinating, but nope, it's still there.

Because I'm me, I alternately close one eye and then the next. The halo disappears when my right eye is closed. Hmm, says I. What fresh Hell is this? I lay there while my sleep-addled brain turns this problem over.

Finally, I realize that my right eye has the perfect paralax to see past the spinner of the fan and be able to observe the faint spark from the brushes in the fan motor glowing in the dark room.

Cool.

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10/18 '19 7 Comments
That is cool. But yeah, it sucks we're now at that age where our first line of questioning often is "Wait a sec. Am I having a stroke?"
Too true. We're all riding out the clock until it's adult diaper time.
I'm a fan.
What you did there? I see it.
Getting old sucks. I find myself second guessing _every_ weird sensation no matter how clear the cause is.
And dreading every doctor's appointment.
I probably would - if I was making any. *cough*
 

POODOO INHINT
  CA Q
  TS ALMCADR

  TS BANKCALL
  CADR VAC5STOR

  INDEX ALMCADR
  CAF 0
ABORT2 TC BORTENT

OCT77770 OCT 77770
  CA V37FLBIT
  MASK FLAGWRD7
  CCS A
  TC WHIMPER -1

  TC DOWNFLAG
  ADRES STATEFLG

  TC DOWNFLAG
  ADRES REINTFLG

  TC DOWNFLAG
  ADRES NODOFLAG

  TC BANKCALL
  CADR MR.KLEAN
​​​​​​​  TC WHIMPER


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10/17 '19 5 Comments
Not with an HCF, but with a WHIMPER.
Eeek! I don't speak Ferret.
I think “POODOO” is Huttese.
As in "Bantha Poodoo"?
Exactly. But this code predates Star Wars...
 

Yesterday my hubby and I chose to skip a JMU production of Twelth Night that we had bought tickets for months ahead of time in order to see Alien on the big screen in Charlottesville. At first I felt a little bad because I'm sure the students did a really good job (they always do), but I'm deciding to consider it a donation to a favorite institution. I'm sure the people who were sitting in the seats next to ours wondered why anyone would not show up to something for which they had paid $40 (the show was sold out), but it wouldn't be the first time. We've attending many events at the Forbes Center where we knew seats were sold and then not filled, so I'm sure we weren't the only ones who didn't show up. I wish I could've done both events, but the showing of Alien was a last minute thing (as far as I can tell) and there were only two showings on Sunday, both of which conflicted with the play which was going on right in the middle of them. So we chose to spend another $25 (plus the gas to get there) and see one of my all-time favorite movies on a giant screen. And we were not disappointed! I've watched Alien countless times, but I was only 11 when it came out and apparently I missed the re-release that happened for it's 25th anniversary, so I was thrilled to celebrate its 40th anniversary with about a dozen other fans in the theater. It doesn't matter how many times I see that gruesome thing pop out of John Hurt's chest, I love it every time! Definitely money well spent!

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10/14 '19 1 Comment
The college box office could really use a way of letting you tell them "I don't want my money back, but definitely resell our seats!" Never feel bad about having too many good things to choose between!