Zombie Lapdance

You know how you can have a whole lot of really important things to do, but you end up doing something random and weird and you just can’t stop yourself? That’s what happened to me this week when I made this:

When the Home Depot near my house had their moving sale, I found myself with some cheap Lexan sheets, angle aluminum, and several tubes of silicon adhesive (helpfully packaged as "aquarium sealant"). So I made a tiny little aquarium tank with the materials, with the idea at the back of my head that I would make it into a replica of an Austin creek habitat.

I like to think of this as the continuation of my response to Takashi Amano’s natural aquaria philosophy. Here is a natural habitat that is riddled top to bottom with the artificial. It’s an illustration of some ideas I’ve been talking about. It’s a policy of obfuscating the difference between an urban environment and the natural environment. There is no natural/unnatural dichotomy, there is only the natural, with a tiny subset which is human-centric.

The tank contains a large limestone centerpiece, a partially corroded plastic water bottle, a number of broken pieces of glass, and several rusty bits of metal with no clear purpose. Everything in the tank was scavenged from a creek.

The fish themselves were caught in a creek that was literally in the shadow of a 40-story condo high-rise. I’m thinking that the fish I caught are Guadalupe roundnose minnows.

The rest of the aquaria materials were scavenged. I’m using the same water pump I use for the Cryobev3000, and a lot of leftover tubing parts, for the filtration system. I decided to go with a sand filtration filter, because I could steal sand for free, I already had a bucket, and I’ve always wanted to use PVC piping (it’s like cheap, load-bearing, pressure-rated tinker toys!).

The water overflows from the tank and then filters up through the sand through the holes at the bottom of the PVC pipe.

I also made an indoor fountain to top it all off. Here’s the ornamental limestone with some anchor holes drilled in it. The masonry bit went through the limestone like it was a cheap block of pine. I had no idea, I’ll have to think of more things to do with that drillbit.

And this is the fountain itself, hovering eerily over a tank filled with terrified minnows.

I brought out the Cryobev3000 for an out-of-town guest recently. There have been a number of improvements to the design.

For one, I’ve externalized the powersupply and added the option to run it off a 12v laptop charger (which used to run my ancient HP).

Physically plugging the CryoBev3000 into the house power gave the water pump far more juice than the AA battery assembly had ever done (even though they are both 12v).

Just look at those thick, manly streams of coolant fluid.

Note that there’s also a hanger assembly for the coolant outflow. Before the outflow was hooked to the bucket, people kept pulling it out every time they made a particularly broad gesture with their drink.

The increased coolant flow made extra-thick rimes of frost on the coil.

I also made a larger coolant coil with extra loops.

This made a pint of cider (I know, some people like it though) plummet down to 32F. Which is damn close to the sub-freezing temperatures I’ve been shooting for this entire time. My own un-cooled pint of beer, the control beer, had already climbed to 60F, which I can assure you is an unacceptable temperature for beer.

There was however a side-effect to the increased power from the pump.

The website warned me about overheating, but I didn’t believe them.

Luckily I had a spare pump to finish up the drinking session, and I’ve already ordered a beefier replacement.

Just another experiment in cold beer that’s plumbed the limits of its material.

Friend of Space Squid and author of Last Dragon J.M.McDermott was kind enough to send us photos of the preserved corpse of a giant squid he saw at the Goergia Aquarium in Atlanta.

We are informed that it’s preserved in a delicious calamari-flavored liquid.

To establish scale, the giant squid is seen here with J.M.McDermott.


Keep in mind that J.M.McDermott is ten feet tall.

can you spot the three raccoons in this photo?

They were selling this at the bakery for Cinco de Mayo.

Now I’d like to talk about a pretty amazing movie I just saw, "Things to Come," a 1936 movie based on the story by H.G. Wells.

I got this off one of the public domain movie RSS channels on Miro. You can download the whole thing from the internet archive, should you so desire.

It’s the story of the cycle of war and progress starting from the 1930s and stretching past the weird and distant 1970s.

The prediction of a global war is eerily prophetic.

Or perhaps not so much, considering what was happening in Germany at the time.

After the war and the plagues, there was a period of barbarism, which only came to an end once the engineers took over.

It was the purpose of the engineers to instate a "freemasonry of science." This they did, with the help of all the weapons the freemasonry of science can build.

At this point, the film goes all utopian on us, and I wish that I had seen it when Super Dave put out his public call for utopian movies.

It’s a brilliant design of the future. A monumentally modern future of the sort that we don’t see too often.

With more than a little of the art deco aesthetic thrown in.

I watched this and wished that Guy Madden would make a sci-fi epic like this. I would happily throw in everything I have to fund it. Because it would be just that awesome.

During the May movie Revcast, after hearing the synopsis for "Battle for Terra", Gary commented that he was worried about being hit with the message stick. To which Deanna replied, "It’s a Canadian film, of course it has a big message stick."

But it was in 3D, and it’s the summer, so I thought I would check it out.

But it wasn’t in 3D. Not in the theater I watched it in.

With no special effects to buffer the experience, the message stick clobbered me pretty bad. Here’s how "Battle for Terra" sucks balls:

1.) The cute aliens float. Everything they own also floats. Humans don’t float. Nothing humans own float. No matter the environment. Nobody bothers to explain why gravity doesn’t work on the damn aliens.

2.) The evil general (remember, in Canada all military personnel are evil) says about the planet he’s trying to conquer: "They have real water down there! Not this chemical stuff!" Now, you have to be a hippie with advanced patchouli poisoning (or a Canadian) to think that makes any sense.

3.) There’s flying whales in this movie:

The flying whales participate in the cute alien’s "celebration of life festival". And during the battle sequence, one of the flying whales gets mortally wounded by a wild laser blast or something. Then, as its screaming bloated whale carcass plummets out of the sky, a wise elder (James Garner) watches the glowing hologram image of the dying animal and hangs his head in sorrow, a single non-chemical tear of water beading on his hippie-ass cheek.

Next blog entry: I find out if I have enough Norwegian ancestry to legally emigrate and join their whaling fleet.

While I thought that Star Trek was a perfectly adequate summer movie, there is no way that it’s worth the hype (and I would say that it probably wasn’t worth a 9 out of 10 on the RevSF rating system, but now that I think about it, there probably haven’t been any Trek movies other than Khan that were much better, which highlights the limitations of the RevSF ranking system and my personal prejudices both).

Here’s a list of pros and cons for the movie. There will be some mild spoilers, but if you haven’t seen the movie by now, you probably won’t care.

pro: Uhura is treated like a valuable member of the crew with actual skills.

con: Spock’s character arc is all about how he really does have emotions underneath his logical exterior, which totally ruins the whole point of being a Vulcan.

con: The narrative bends over backwards to put Chekhov and every other third-string character from the original series in the movie. I could care less about those people.

pro: The guy in red dies right away.

pro: Simon Pegg is far more interesting than the original Scotty. Plus, his fake Scottish accent is far more authentic.

con: Simon Pegg bears almost no resemblance to Scotty.

con: Like subsequent series, at several key junctions the plot hinges on technical deus ex machina.

con: Zachary Quinto is every bit as bland as Spock as he was as Sylar. Actually, he plays the parts identically.

pro: The new Spock and the new Kirk have some of the same mannerisms as the originals, but without it being the weird parody that it usually ends up as when people try to do that.

con: A Starfleet cadet who hasn’t even graduated the academy is promoted to the rank of Captain, which is the navy equivalent of Colonel. WTF?!?!

pro: Miniskirts rock.

con: The plot of the movie is an angry non-human with a spaceship tries to blow things up. This is also the plot of Star Trek II, III, VI, Generations, and Nemesis.

Basically I think this movie is a sentimental homage to a series that I never particularly liked in the first place. So I didn’t have all the same emotional buttons pressed as all you weird trekkies.

So that’s my petty blog venting for the day. Thank you for reading.

While sitting out on a back porch, we noticed a number of bugs with debris and detritus on their back.

Even squinting it’s hard to tell that there’s a living animal there.

Here’s a youtube link of the thing running around the ashtray.

Anybody see these things before, or know what they’re called?

I do a little wood carving. In previous posts I’ve documented my habit of making wooden busts as presents for my father.

This year I’ve continued the Simpson’s theme.

Here’s what it looked like in mid-process:

By that point it pretty much looked in my head the way it would turn out. It always baffles me how people will look at that and only see a misshapen lump of wood.