Sean's 'blog for 2010
[ 2009 Blog | Long Lost Twins ]
Happy
Birthday Carol!
December 10, 2010
Roundabout every year this time or so, Carol celebrates a birthday. Traditionally we use this day to get our Christmas tree. For some, Thanksgiving is the kickoff to Christmas, but for our family it's Carol's birthday.
But as it falls on a Friday, we get the tree on Saturday, tomorrow.
But today's her birthday. So I got her something. Something that I hope is meaningful.
It was a summer project. Finding the pieces and putting them together just right was a long process. Believe it or not, I took pictures of the work in progress, but I won't post those right away.
In the winter of 1978 several whales became trapped under the ice in Hall's Bay, Newfoundland, on which lies my hometown of Springdale. Several humpbacks and a rare Narwhal. Rare, because they are high arctic whales, and rarely get this far south.
Throughout the winter, locals kept a large hole open so the whales could breathe. In the spring, an ice-breaker came in to the bay close enough to the hole that the whales could escape. Not all of them survived the winter. The belief is that mid-winter, one made a run for it, but Hall's Bay, while being very deep, is also very long, and one humpback was found dead. The rest, though, we believe survived. They were gone the day after the ice was opened up.
"Springy", as some of the locals called this young Narwhal, whose
tusk was not yet fully formed.
One one particularly nice day, Carol, some friends, and I, skated out on the perfectly smooth ice, and spent some time with the whales. It was amazing. Here we were, mere feet from the edge of this twenty-foot-diameter hole, and these whales kept coming up and getting air. The big humpbacks made a show of it, but the little Narwhal would kind of surface quietly, we'd get a glimpse of her, and then she'd dip silently down into the water again.
Carol wrote a poem about the experience, which has been published multiple times, and is one of my favorite poems of her large body of work. The poem was called "Narwhal".
So this is the gift I gave Carol today:
Happy Birthday, Carol!
2010's
Halloween Pumpkin
October 31, 2010
What with one issue or another, last year we really didn't feel Halloween. I spent a few days in hospital just the week before, and other issues took our attention away, meaning we did little... and I didn't carve a pumpkin.
This year we threw Charlotte a Birthday/Halloween party, and we really went all-out. Cleared out the living room, pushed everything back to the walls, let her decorate as she saw fit, squished the paintings and wall art, covered it in spider webbing, put up signs, replaced the light bulbs with black lights, I even hung a lamp for that purpose. I also carved a pumpkin.
And here it is, in time-lapse:
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That's my cat, Willow, investigating before I begin.
That's her job. The final image is a cross-eyed 3D image, if you want
to see the depth. The final picture is also taken after the pumpkin
has been outdoors overnight, so it's a little shrunken, and the skin
has begun to tighten. To view, cross your eyes until the two pumpkins
join into one in the center, and let your eyes focus. |
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(Click any image for a larger version.)
Tea
Box Bookmarks
September 6, 2010
I have to say I'm really enjoying making bookmarks for the current book I'm reading using Red Rose tea box separators.
Here's my latest, for my read of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"
I seriously think I should e-mail the Red Rose people and tell them what I use their inserts for. They might actually print bookmarks for their inserts.
For the last four years, Jason Scott has been working dilligently on the documentary I've been waiting most of my life for - GET LAMP, a documentary about adventures in text. Yesterday it arrived.
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Shipping package |
The contents! |
Coin number 0859 |
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DVD Front |
DVD Back |
The best tribute I can think of. Right between Firefly and Serenity, and not far from TRON, Watchmen, Buffy, Greatest American Hero, love actually, and Cloverfield.
Wolf's
Head Amulet
August 1, 2010
For my latest Interactive Fiction project "The Promise", I need not only a wax seal (see below) but a Wolf's Head Amulet made from stone.
Today I took a smooth black stone and
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Almost at the beginning. |
Grinding in one cheek. |
The Dremel at work. |
Continue the grinding. |
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The other side also partly done. |
Now for the ears. |
Carving the individual ears, the loop for the string,
and etching out the ears. |
Delineating the head. |
Finished(ish) product.
For years I have loved wax seals. Those metal etchings that get pushed into hot wax in order to secure letters, commonly used for centuries. A broken seal means someone may have read the letter. Signet rings worn by important people were in fact wax seal rings. It was a signature. Unique to each person. So anyone receiving a letter knows who it came from, and the reader can be confident it was not read by the courier or anyone else if the seal is unbroken.
I have several sticks of antique sealing wax, but I also have some of the newer wax, much more brittle, in fact, and not useful for a project I'm working on. I have an "H" seal I got over a decade ago, a Stuart Houghton seal:
I recently discovered "faux wax" which is sticks of softer wax designed to be used by large-gauge glue-guns. Simply drop some melted was onto the paper, wait 15 seconds for the wax to cool a bit, dip your seal in, let it harden, and release.
The result is a fairly convincing facsimile of a vintage wax seal.
For the project I'm working on, I need a custom seal, so I used a glass bead (found at any craft store) and a Dremel tool and carved in a wolf's head. It is just a first attempt, but really, for my first attempt it isn't bad:
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The project is a large-scale Interactive Fiction game, and this is going to be part of a "feelie", a replica of an item in the game that players can hold to help immerse them into the world of the game. Not much more detail on that yet. The game is in progress, and I'm not ready to reveal much about it quite yet.
I went at it again today, with these results:
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Xevious
Toys From Japan
July 25, 2010
After passing the hat 'round at Turbine to buy a Crystal Castles arcade cabinet (in excellent condition!) I really began reliving my old arcade days. In the old days, back in 1982-3 I did the interior design for two arcades for a friend of mine back in Springdale. In fact I did it three times considering we rennovated one, enlarging it, requiring a whole new deco. If I find the photos of that arcade, I will post them. I also worked in the Arcade on Sundays, because I wanted to. I had a job, but that place was my favorite place to be, and so I worked there. Crystal Castles stood right by the cash counter and so I played it a lot. I got good. I could defeat it, I would say not routinely, because at those highest levels, it gets insane!
Another of my top 10 machines at the time was Xevious. Apparently, if you check the history of Xevious, it didn't really hit in the US. Well, it sure hit in our little home town in Newfoundland, in Canada. We had a town of 3500 people, and at one point we had three very active arcades.
This past week I stumbled upon this:
This is a Japanese boxed toy. The Japanese love these things. I have been buying their boxed 1:6 scale Sushi at a local Comic store. Push the button and you hear sounds from the game, in this case a four-iteration loop of the game's background music.
If I were to have done this, I think I would have gone with a metal backing and magnets on the ships, rather than a plexiglass grid of holes that kind of detracts from the desired effect.
This series has a number of dioramas from popular NAMCO games. So I jumped onto eBay, which is where I usually find these things. I actually found an online shop called GK World selling them for cheaper than I could find on eBay so I bought mine there.
It's part of a set of 8 dioramas. Photos exist of six of them, and other photos show two mystery ones. I have no idea if those mean that each box contains two extras of the six, or if there are two undisclosed ones.
But one interesting thing happened when I was searching eBay for "xevious". I found this...
...and bought it right away. A 3D diorama of Xevious. I'm sure this is from the later 3D version of Xevious, as there is a white tank on the road that doesn't exist in the flat arcade version, and the Solvalou (the ship) looks exactly like the one in the later 3D version of the game.
BTW, a couple of years ago there was this great trend of companies releasing joystick versions of classic arcade games. I got the Ms. Pac Man joystick which includes -- XEVIOUS! However, it's not perfect. While the arcade game correctly gives you equal firing buttons (one for the guns and one for the bombs) on either side of the joystick, this version only gives you fire buttons on the left. Any right-hander worth his salt plays Xevious with his left hand on the joystick and his right slamming the fire buttons as fast as he can. The joystick version of the game doesn't provide this option, so I am very weak playing it.
I intend to build myself a custom joystick with buttons on the proper side for me so I can play it better.
Atomic-Age
Artifacts
July 23, 2010
A couple of years ago an elderly lady was giving away a sewing table. A nice piece of furniture. It was chock-full of items from long ago. There are cats-eye glasses that were in vogue in the late 50s, watches, even a late 1970s digital watch, one of the first commercial models. Button tins, buttons, bunting, fabric, ribbons. Bake-o-lite thimbles... it is really full of cool stuff.
But the one standout item is this:
Clicky to enlarge.
It is a cardboard folder full of needles. But the packaging is classic. I mean this is one of the most gorgeous pieces of commercial art I've ever seen. It folds over, and has the exact same image on the reverse side. Sadly, there is no date of any kind printed on the packaging, but I'm guessing 1958.
This is the inside. Some needles are missing, but I scanned it to show the inside art, which is interesting, but nothing as interesting as the outside.
This is an item that needs to be framed and hung on a wall.
GI
Joe Convention - Diorama entries and results.
May 2, 2010
For years I've wanted to attend a GI Joe Convention. But they've been far away and expensive for me. This year, however, it was held in Rhode Island and I was able to go. I auctioned off a few items to pay for the convention, and I went. More on the con later, including the amazing convention GI Joe "Escape From Spy Island" set, but for now I want to talk about my diorama entries.
I entered two different dioramas in this year's con. They had two categories: Small Diorama and Medium Diorama. Uh... no Large? Oh well.
Without elaborating on them too much right now (because I'm actually rushing this in to get to the last day of the convention) I'm just going to post the images.
Note: Each image is a stereoscopic image. That means if you cross your eyes you will see the images in 3D. But if you can't do that, or don't want to do that, you can click on either image and a large 2D version will show up.
Sorry for the graininess. Low lighting conditions did that.
"The Final Regeneration" - This took 3rd place in the Large Diorama
competiton.
