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Now With 20% More Steampunk - Report from ConDor 2010

Mar 7th, 2010
by Chris.
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This is my first post in the newly created Steampunk section. If you’re here because you stumbled onto this site from a web search, then welcome. Steampunk, however, is not the main focus of this blog. The blog is mostly about trying to find the humor in everyday life. If you have time check out the other stuff, great, but rest assured that if something is posted in the steampunk section, it will be about steampunk, and not just an attempt to drive traffic to my other stuff.

I’m fairly new to Steampunk. It started early last year, when my wife and I decided to do steampunk costumes for Labyrinth of Jareth, but I guess it was sort of inevitable that I would get into steampunk. First off, I love old stuff. I also love making things. I’m a big fanboy, although I can usually pass for mundane in polite society. Finally, I’ve always loved costumes, and Steampunk is the perfect way to combine all of these things.

I have some theories about costuming. I’ve never been one to buy a costume, per se. Most of the fun of doing a costume is putting it together from various sources, and I tend to find that the best things are the simple things. For instance, a four-dollar tube of mustache wax can go a long way to pulling a stemapunk outfit together. Also, as far as costumes go, I’m all about comfort. I like to take what in other contexts would be ordinary street clothes and make them into costume apparel, and a few trips to some good thrift stores, can get you half the way there. Then, there’s the props and that’s what steampunk is all about.

Enough rambling, last weekend, my wife and I went to ConDor, San Diego’s oldest continuously running Science Fiction convention, and this is the first time in years that my wife and I were able to attend due to scheduling conflicts. We got there at about 1:30 on Saturday, and after seeing dozens of people in costume, almost all steampunk, we decided to run home and put on ours. The result was that we had more fun at ConDor than we’d ever had.

Below are the better of the pictures we took. I didn’t want to take the time to make comments on each and every one them, but I’m adding the ones that stand out.

My wife Mary and I
This couple was in the Masquerade. I don't remember the presentation name.
Detail on the armor on the above

Details on the gauntlets
My wife with the girl from above

One of my favorites, and not just because she's cute. She said she had put this together about a day before. The goggles are ordinary swim goggles that she painted the edges with a metallic marker from Michaels. It's a great example of taking what might ordinarily be street clothes and turning into a great costume. The ribbon tie and garters on the sleeves are great touches.

Wanted to get the back of her dress and got her beau as well.
Should have framed this better, so that her was in the middle of the magnifying glass

Another entry from the masquerade; in her tray, she had gears and nuts and bolts as well as candy and cigarettes
Two separate entries from the Masquerade
I should of got pictures of his guns; this guy had great props

Halftime entertainment for the Maquerade, Steam Powered Giraffe

Nothing to do with steampunk, but great costume made with lots of twisted balloons

Posted in: Steampunk.
Tagged: · · · · ·

Winter Olympics and Dragons

Feb 19th, 2010
by Chris.
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I’ve been watching the Winter Olympics, and I do have my normal complaints. I would like to see all of the events, not just the ones that Americans don’t suck balls at. But there’s something else that is bothering me more at the moment. NBC has been treating commercials for the new Dreamworks film like it’s part of the Olympics. They always set it up something like this, “While snowboarding has only been an Olympic sport for the last 10 years, snowboarding has a much richer history going all the way back to the days of the Vikings and Dragons, as we can see from this clip of new Dreamworks animated feature How To Train Your Dragon.” And then the proceed to show a very entertaining clip from the film where a teenager snowboards with a dragon.

Okay, I get it, NBC. You’re a for-profit enterprise. You’re trying to make money bringing to us the Olympics at great expense for free. You primarily want to recoup your expenses, by selling commercial advertising. I get that. That’s the way that commercial television has worked since the very beginning. But don’t show me what is obviously a commercial and call it part of the sports. Don’t piss on my foot and tell me it’s raining. Please. The only dragons I want to see during the Olympics are the ones on the Japanese short track speed skaters uniforms. Kudos, Japan.

Posted in: Sports.
Tagged: · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

Ah, the Dutch

Feb 9th, 2010
by Chris.
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Before I start, I should probably let you know my prejudices. I used to work for a publishing company and was let go (twice) after the company was acquired by a Dutch company. My fault for coming back in the first place. One time during the question-an-answer part of one of those company-wide how did the company do last year meetings, one San Diego employee stood up and said, “I’ve heard that there is an expression going around, that ‘If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much.’ Have you heard this and what do you think about it?” The rep from the Amsterdam office who was answering the questions smiled knowing, sort of a silent chuckle, and proceeded to lie through his teeth about how important they thought their American counterparts were. Suffice it to say that there is no love lost between me and the Dutch.

That said, have you ever noticed that just about anytime the word Dutch is combined with another word, the meaning is either the opposite or something negative. Say someone invites you to dinner, and says, “Dutch treat.” That means you’re buying your own dinner. Dutch courage is bravery by virtue of being drunk. The Flying Dutchman, a sailor. I did some research and found several others:

  • A Dutch wife or a Dutch widow is prostitute.
  • Dutch comfort means saying things like, “Things could be worse.”
  • Dutch metal or Dutch gold is a cheap alloy resembling gold.
  • A Dutch concert is a noise or uproar, as from a drunken crowd.
  • Dutch-bottomed is empty.
  • Dutch pride means straight.

Okay, I made up that last one, but the others are real.

Posted in: Uncategorized.
Tagged: · · · · · · · · · · · ·

$3 DVDs at Big Lots

Feb 2nd, 2010
by Chris.
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My wife has managed to scour every single Big Lots in San Diego county (except the one in Poway) for $3 DVDs. I finally had to put her on DVD restriction. We must have bought 70 or 80 in the past few weeks (not to mention the 30 or so we picked up in the couple of months before that). God help me if she ever figures out that there are Big Lots in places besides San Diego.

Posted in: Uncategorized.

Revenge is a Dish Best Served …

Jan 29th, 2010
by Chris.
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At our Christmas party this year, we did a white elephant gift exchange. One of my bosses brought this USB rocket launcher, basically, a nerf dart gun, powered by USB. Still, pretty darn cool. Turns out she got it at thinkgeek.com. I had never heard of the site, but when I checked it out, it was so cool.

So the other day, I noticed that she had a box for an Annoy-a-tron in her office. Now, this is one of the meanest things I saw on thinkgeek.com. An Annoy-a-tron is a small electric circuit board a little smaller than a business card with a built in battery and speaker and a magnet so you can hide it under the desk, chair leg, or whatever. What it does is at some interval ranging from 2 to 8 minutes, it makes a noise, such as an electonic beep.

I see the box for this and say, “You really bought that. That is the meanest thing I ever heard.”

“Would that drive you crazy?” she say.

“I would kill somebody. I’d get a gun and come in here blasting.” I say.

She says something to effect of, really? So I go on ranting and raving. She gets up and goes in my other boss’ office next door, and they both smile knowingly at each other. I totally didn’t pick this up. She walks out and down the hall toward my office. She reaches under my desk and pulls out this thing, hits a button, and a cricket chirp plays.

Now, I’d had a cricket in my office about two weeks, or so I thought. We really did have some crickets in the building. I know I heard them over by the bathrooms. So when one showed up in my office, I figured that one of them had migrated. I didn’t worry about it, because I knew there was nothing I could do about it.

When Mary and I were first married, we lived in an apartment about a half a block from a pet shop which sold reptiles and raised crickets. We always had crickets in our apartment, and there was nothing you could do about it. They would chirp, and you would look for them and they would stop chirping. So when one showed up in my office, I didn’t worry about it. There was no point. It never dawned on me that it was always one single chirp, and as the woman in the office down the hall, pointed out later, always 3 minutes apart. It also didn’t dawn on me that a cricket has a finite lifespan, and it had been there for weeks, and never moved nor changed its chirp. For all I know, it should have been an entire colony by now.

After she pulled out the device, we laughed, but then I started thinking. I can’t just let this slide. Ahh, revenge. Sweet revenge. Then again, she is my boss, and I do really like my job. This is going to take some careful planning. Revenge is a dish best served …, in a way that won’t get me fired.

Links related to this post:

The ThinkGeek Annoy-a-tron 2.0

Posted in: Science and Technology.
Tagged: · · · · ·

One Man’s Bizarre Reaction to Fear

Jan 22nd, 2010
by Chris.
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I saw on the Daily Show last night that Keith Olbermann from MSNBC said of the new Republican Senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, that he was “irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

Now, I don’t care that he said it.  “News people” on the 24 hour “News” networks aren’t supposed to be impartial or objective. They’re supposed to be controversial, so effectively, he’s just doing is it just doing his job.  And what he said this one time is really only slightly worse than what pretty much anyone with a mic pinned to their chest on fair and balanced Fox News say about Obama, every single day.

I’m not going to argue about whether he should or shouldn’t have said it. What I take issue with is the use of homophobic in conjunction with tea-bagging.  Aren’t these pretty much mutually exclusive terms.  I know what homophobic means, and I’m pretty darn sure I know what tea-bagging means.  I guess it’s possible that different people have different ways of dealing with their fears. Apparently, the Honorable Senator Elect from Massachussets deals with his fear of gay people by sticking their testes in his mouth.

Links related to this post:

Video of Olbermann’s comments

Posted in: Church and State.
Tagged: · · · · · · · · · ·

Who’s that Doggie in the Window?

Jan 15th, 2010
by Chris.
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This has happened to me twice in the last couple of weeks.  I’ll stop somewhere on the way home from work, and I’ll get out of the car and see a  little tiny dog in the rear window of a parked car, on that little shelf between the top of the rear seat and that back window.  Both times I’ve wanted to say to the dog, “Shouldn’t you be fake?”

Posted in: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

Pixelated, Word Spellcheck Has Me Pixilated

Jan 11th, 2010
by Chris.
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I’m an editor by trade, and as a rule, I’m a pretty good speller.  I work for a wireless company,  editing software documentation.  Every now and then, I’ll see a word spelled so far wrong that I need to look it up, even though, I would normally know how to spell it. That happened last week.  In this case, the word was pixelated, meaning being able to see the dots (pixels) in a computer graphic.  I looked it up in my trusty Webster’s, and they listed pixel, but not pixelated.  Well, at least not that pixelated.  Webster’s did list pixilated (spelled with an i after the x), but not as meaning being able to see the dots.  Pixilated (with an i) is defined as, somewhat unbalanced mentally.

I had heard the term pixilated in a 1936 Frank Capra movie, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. In the court scene at the end of the movie, one of the women from Gary Cooper’s hometown says, he’s pixilated. Now, even in 1936, pixilated was an archaic term, and the judge in the movie asks what it means. One of the other characters explains:

The word “pixilated” is an early American expression derived from the word “pixies,” meaning elves. They would say the pixies had got him. As we nowadays would say, a man is “balmy.”

Balmy is another archaic term, meaning crazy or foolish.  Or pixilated.

I seem to remember one time, Alan Alda on the TV show, MASH, saying that his favorite book was the dictionary, because it contains all of the other books. While I won’t go that far, I do love the dictionary, not because of the other books thing, but because it has lots of cool (mostly) trivial info about words.

With that in mind, it made perfect sense to me that the word, pixilated, would be spelled with an i, because it was derived from the word, pixies.  Whereas, the word, pixelated, even though it was not listed, would be spelled with an e, because it was derived from the word, pixel.  It’s just the type of thing that strikes me as interesting.  When you read software documentation all day, you learn to take interesting where you can get it.

So back to work, I was in the middle of editing an Excel file, exported from our software change database.  Rememeber, the word pixelated had been spelled so far wrong that I had to look it up, which led to the above-described tangent.  Anyway, I finished editing the file and went to run spell-check.  I’ve been editing long enough to know that nobody catches everything, so the few minutes to run a spell-check is usually time well spent, even though, in techical material, you always end up ignoring the vast majority of the terms the spell-checker queries.

Anyway, one of the first terms that the spell-check had a problem with was pixelated, which I had just manually corrected it. The spelling suggested by the Excel spell-checker was pixilated, which would be correct when  discussing someone’s sanity, but dead-ass wrong when talking about the quality of a computer generated image, as was the case here.  This issue with the spell-checker would be the same in Word or presumably any of the Microsoft Office progams.

The worst thing is that I know that I have let the Office spell-checker change the spelling of pixelated to pixilated, just because I never thought to question it.  You know, you would think that a computer company as large as Microsoft would have noticed this.  After all, pixelated, meaning see the dots, is a fairly common software term, and pixilated, meaning somewhat unbalanced mentally, is term so archaic that it had to be explained to movie audiences of the 1930’s.

It’s enough to make you pixelated.

Links related to this post:

Pixilated - Definition of pixilated from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

IMDB - Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

Posted in: Workplace.
Tagged: · · · · · · · · · · · · · ·

Calandar

Jan 7th, 2010
by Chris.
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At this time of year, I usually write about my pet peeves about calendars, but since I driven this into the ground, I thought I’d give it amiss this year.  Some time before or after New Year, I buy a new calendar once they go on half price.  I usually got some sort of art.  In the past few years, I’ve had Gil Elvgren pinups, paintings of Spanish dancers, and New Yorker cartoons.  This year is a calendar titled, Salute (vintage French liquor advertisements). The art for January has the dirtiest, nondirty picture I’ve ever seen in my life:

grands

Posted in: Holidays.
Tagged: · · · · · · ·

Club Sabbat, Priceless

Jan 4th, 2010
by Chris.
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For the last few years, my wife, Mary, and I have been going out for New Year’s Eve.  Mary and our friend Anasthasia go out dancing once or twice a month at this Goth club, Club Sabbat. I’m not real big on clubs, but every once in a while and on special occasions like Halloween and New Year, I’ll tag along.  This year Anastasia was going to a New Year’s party, and I figured I might be off the hook for New Year, but no dice. A couple of days before New Year’s Eve, our friend Ned asked where we were going. The options were the gay club that Ned works at, or Club Sabbat. “Sabbat,” I said. “I’d much rather look at chubby Goth chicks than skinny gay guys.”  I kind of have a thing for Chubby goth chicks (definitely more than skinny gay guys). Also, I like the music at Sabbat better. The gay club plays what I like to refer to as, Gay French Disco music (not a big fan), while Sabbat plays Angry German Industrial Dance music (still not a big fan, but at least I like some of it).  Plus, in the back room at Sabbat, they usually play 80s music (which I really do like).

The way it usually works is that Mary and Anastasia dance to the Angry German music in the front room, while I spend most of the night in the back room with the 80s music.  In the back room, about every fifth song, they throw in an Angry German song, and most of the time, it’s not one of the ones I like.  When this happens, I’ll usually go get a drink or switch back to the front room for a song or two, depending on whether they playing something I like there.

The second best thing all night was this one chubbyish girl, wearing a corset that stopped just short of her boobs and four pieces of electrical tape on her nipples to keep her from getting arrested for indecent exposure. Awesome. Now, part of the reason that this was the second best thing all night is that this is what she always wears.  Still, I do always feel like I should thank her whenever she walks by.

Now, the best thing all night happened about a little before closing. Some time after last call, it seems like the two rooms switched.  The back room started playing Angry German music and the front room started playing 80s music.  Not only that, but in the back room, it was this really weird mix of one of the Angry German songs that I do like, where the song would more or less stop, while they play these electronic drum/synth loops for a minute and a half. After the next song showed all the signs of doing the same thing, I moved to the front room to dance with my wife, where they were playing Depressed Mode, woohoo, 80s music. Anyway, the during the next song, the second to last of the night, Duran Duran “Come Undone,” there was this woman in a skin tight back vinyl dress.  Now, I’m not going to say chubby, because clearly she was well into the fat range.  Not, that I necessarily have a problem with that.  She was dancing about 8 feet away from us and I was more or less facing her when she pressed her back against the wall and started to hump the wall. No, that’s not right, it was more like she was humping the air in front of her as she slowly slid down the wall.  It was freakin’ awesome …, up until the point where he butt got below her knees and sort of lost her balance.  Then for about two seconds, it was like, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”  She was able to recover and right herself without assistance, and she turned around did the same thing (without the balance issues), with her butt facing away from the wall this time.  Again, freakin’ awesome, except for the fact that I was still trying to keep from laughing at the whole “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” thing earlier.

So to recap.  Chubbyish girl with nothing but four 1-1/2-inch strips of electrical tape covering her boobies. Awesome.  Fat woman in a skin-tight vinyl dress, up against the wall, humping the air, both directions. Freakin’ awesome. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” priceless.

Links related to this post

Club Sabbat

Dark Prince Studios - Pictures from various Club Sabbat events

Posted in: Music.
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