Regretsy, one of the best URLS ever

Today’s most excellent website: Regretsy, finally providing a home for some of the train wrecks of unfortunate taste available for sale on Etsy.

Of particular note, for me, are the spray-painted Masturbating dinosaur plaques, “captured right at the point of climax and mounted on a plaque that is ready for hanging on the wall”, and the vulva earring-pendant.. things, “After purchasing, send me a convo describing your vagina: the shape of your inner and outer labia, colors, how much or how little your inner labia extend out from your outer labia, how well hidden your clitoris is, is it heavily hooded, or can you see it fairly easily?”.

leaving the curse behind (story seed, a letter)

theBonesOfJhayneLeaps
Tony illustrating a point with my picture and
a frame from one of my favourite music videos,
Elbow – the Bones of You

Video: Alasdair on a gigantic plinth in London as part of an art project.

Instead of going to Michael’s office after work yesterday, I went to the shop and got stick-on blackboard for the fridges, (both the one here and the one in Seattle), and scoured my way through Chapter’s cheap section looking for books about painting and colour, to try and better pin down what would be nice in the bedroom, (both here and in Seattle). I felt alone in the city, dislocated, as if my movements were an echo of someone else’s long past afternoon, a pattern of motion left like a mark on time, waiting for the right kind of lonely to step into it to manifest.

Eventually I shook it off, bought bus-tickets and a slurpee and went home, uncertain what my plans were, not thinking about it, reading a discount Hannibal Lector book and wondering what I needed to feel present in the day.

Thankfully David was home when I got in, and about as aimless as I was, so it was we found a mutual solace in finally tackling neglected projects around the house, our new sticky tape blackboard our starting off point. We folded away winter blankets and hung art and mirrors to Temple of the Dog and Live until eleven at night, when it was decided that continuing to bang nails into the wall might be crossing the line from antisocial to fully justified murder. Much of my art still needs to be framed, so most of what’s left isn’t going anywhere until some future pay-cheque, but it was mighty refreshing to get a start on what’s been on our To Do list since possibly last summer. The only thing that would have make the evening better was if I had a head full of hair dye, but again, of all things, that one will not hurt to wait.

how I live halfway

Bre Pettis and Kio Stark’s “Cult of Done” manifesto via bOINGbOING:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Frank is putting the moves on my computer tonight, bringing it back from the steely edge of death. Once that’s finished, I am taking these rules and turning them into a nifty desktop wallpaper, to make certain for awhile that I see them every day.

Currently my home desktop is a gentle sepia photo of a young girl with a fluttering dove, an anonymous photo of a magician’s assistant, beautiful and inspiring. Before that was Let’s Keep This Party Rolling, a New York City photograph by Rodney Smith of a couple kissing on top of a fleet of taxis. What’s yours?

Verstehen Sie?

MAKE Magazine: How to make a 1934 USB web cam.

A while ago I converted a 1934 folding camera into a USB web cam. I brought it with me to Maker Faire Austin 2008 and a lot of people seemed to like it. In fact, a lot of people wanted to know how I made one. I promised them I would do a how-to on the blog, and I always keep my promises, so let’s get started.


Yes, those are webcams. Yes, I’m seriously considering doing this to my broken antique Speedex. I think it’s the niftiest DIY I’ve seen in months. The problem that I have with a lot of oh-so-stylish DIY is that the end result isn’t generally useful. It looks neat, but it’s a dead object, art for the sake of art, like the Steampunk Space Helmet. Because these both work and look damned good they are therefore, in my estimation, about a millionty-thousand times more awesome. Yes. Now to get a webcamera. And, like, a soldering iron. And heat-shrink tubing. And a… Rosin core solder?