You know how I said that I probably wouldn’t be posting pictures of the Easter Zombie event at Frugal Media? I think everyone knows by now that I have no sense of shame, so here they are.
(thanks to editor d chang for the photography)
And here’s the aftermath:
This is a little misleading, because about two pounds of glitter ended up in my hair. I’ve taken three showers and there’s still glitter migrating out of my scalp and down my face.
Damn, kids are vicious.
I made a Space Squid-themed boardgame for the funpage of the most recent issue. It came together over the course of several hours in the wee hours of the morning, so there are some parts that don’t necessarily make logical sense.
But it’s playable. I pressured some friends into playing it while hanging out in front of a coffee shop.
It really needs to be played with three players, because the strategy requires the application of personal animosity.
The Frugal Media people loved the zombie simulation so much, that they requested Space Squid come back and do some more zombie fun stuff.
But this time it’s going to be innocent and cute.
It looks like I’ll be dressing up as a zombie, while people smash cascarones on my head. It’ll probably be too embarrassing to take pictures, so you should show up in person.
Here’s the info:
Frugal Media Event with Space Squid
When: Saturday 4/18 1PM-4PM
Where: Frugal Media 5400 N Lamar
What: Kid friendly zombie attack with Free Drinks snacks and such
Smash Cascarones (confetti filled eggs) on the heads of willing zombie participants or come early and be made into a zombie participant.
this event is FREE
FREE beer for adults, juice for kids, and cake/ cookies, coffee tea and wine.
… from our Google calendar….
Evey one knows that zombies have a terrible sense of timing well a group of zombies meant to attack last week but.. well they’re late. So we saved some cascarones to smash on their heads (which everyone knows is THE best way to kill a zombie. So… come attack Zombies with confetti filled eggs from 1 to 4!!)
Longtime readers of this blog might remember that I’ve been working on a device that cools your beer as you drink it. It’s called the CryoBev3000. Here’s how it works: an electric pump circulates sub-freezing water from a bucket of salty ice, through a copper coil that’s in contact with the beer. Here’s a youtube video of a recent prototype test.
With the punishing Austin summer looming on the horizon, I have thrown down the money to upgrade the cryo-umbilicals to low-temperature high-performance latex tubing. The latex tubing is a huge improvement from the vinyl.
Another exciting upgrade, I’ve adapted the CryoBev3000 to work with my bicycle buckets. Cold beer has gone mobile.
A couple of days ago I took the CryoBev3000 out to Salvation Pizza for a field test. Notice an anonymous co-worker who is pretending he’s not with the weird guy with the beer machine.
Here at the bottom you can see the internal coil variation.
Later in the day, I took the CryoBev3000 over to a dude’s house and we played chess while enjoying well-chilled beer.
This was a scientific beer-drinking session, so we took plenty of temperature readings. The salt/ice solution had a temperature of 10degreesF, which stayed pretty consistent for hours. The cooling coils dropped the beer to a steady equilibrium temperature from their semi-warm state. The external coil maintained just below 40degreesF and the internal coil maintained about 35degreesF for the duration of the beverage.
It’s not the sub-freezing temperatures I was hoping for, but I know it’s possible at least in theory. When I put the internal coil in a glass of water, it quickly formed a sheath of ice about an eighth of an inch thick.
There’s more fussing and tweaking in store, so I’ll keep you updated.
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned the UT turtle pond here before. I know I’ve marked it on the Slacker Map of Austin (a giant PDF). It’s probably my favorite thing about Austin.
I’d like to take a moment to try and popularize a little game I like to play called "turtle roulette." What you do, is you sit on the edge of the turtle pond with your back to the pond, and the tip of your finger dipped into the water behind you.
Maybe the turtle that comes to bite your finger is little and cute, or maybe it’s that 30-pound alligator snapper that you almost never see because it’s lying motionless along the bottom. But you can’t look. That’s the roulette part.
If you’re really unlucky, the turtle that rises to bite your finger will be the nazi turtle.
Its jaws are strengthened by bigotry. Why must turtles hate? Can’t they love everyone as much as I love them?
I want to interrupt this topic, not to bring you tales of new things I have eaten, but to expand our knowledge of things already reported.
So I was eating tacos with a dude at el Chilitos, and he casually mentioned that barbacoa was actually head meat.
"What? Really?" I asked.
"What?" he replied. "I thought you knew."
I asked the girl at the cash register (the one in the wellies), who confirmed that this hipster Eastside taco joint had indeed been feeding people head meat this whole time.
I asked around, and other people confirmed this, surprised that I hadn’t known. A co-worker knew a guy who would frequently find teeth in the meat (for those of you who grew up in the city, away from most cow skulls, cow teeth are quite large).
All this time I had just thought that barbacoa was Spanish for barbecue, which according to Wikipedia it is, but why waste slow-roasting and sauces on meats that already taste good?
Moral of the story: never assume you know all the nuances of a Spanish word, just because it sounds like an English one.
I first saw the work of Arthur Ganson projected on a wall of the Portland museum of science and industry. It was a revelation. The videos were one machine sculpture after another, each work of art a clear statement of mechanical aesthetics and oblique purpose.
The video was unlabeled, so I had to call the museum offices three times in order to track down the name of the artist. It took another week to figure out how I could buy a copy of the video.
That was years ago. I have watched that video a dozen times (of course you can now see them all on his youtube account). This week, for the first time, I got to see them in person.
For some reason, the UT architecture school is hosting Arthur Ganson’s work. For a couple of weeks (according to the UT flunky I asked) you can see Ganson’s works in action at the architecture school (it’s the building with the beautiful courtyard that’s right across from the entrance of the UT post office, and the gallery is directly across from the courtyard entrance).
The sculptures are much more solid-looking in person. Margot’s Cat is just as funny in person as it is on video. Machine with ball chain is just as perplexing and seemingly impossible. Brownian Rice now utilizes black-eyed peas, which is visually more striking, but it lacks the punning. There’s also a few sculptures that are new to me, like the baby.
There have been revelations that weren’t clear from the video. For instance, inchworms is a piece that’s user-operated.
Most surprising was Cory’s Yellow Chair which I had always assumed used a full-sized chair. But it’s still one of the great works of Western art.
Looking at the back of the piece, there was a series of status lights and hand-written instructions in the event of an emergency.
I also got to see Ganson speak to a standing-room only crowd. But you can hear him give a speech that’s really similar on TED talks.
He spoke a lot about the "honesty" of his machines, which I understood intuitively. If I had to explain what that means to a non-dude, I would say that it means the mechanical purpose is clear from the visible components. The logic of the pieces follows from the form, which is completely unified with the function. It’s at odds with the Macintosh design aesthetic, where the function is completely obscured by the pretty noodling of the case.
I’m going to visit the exhibit again before it closes out, so if you’re planning on heading down there, let me know and I’ll tag along. It’s particularly rewarding to see the reactions of people who have never seen this work before.
It’s been a few years now, but the story I sold to Black Gate Magazine has come out in print.
There’s a very nice illustration by Bernie Mereault, and a nice little photo of me, courtesy of Jayme Blashke:
The story is "Murder at Doty Station," a steam-punk fantasy set in the world of the Patchwork Kingdom. This makes it more or less contemporary with the story "Race to the Noonie" which appeared in Tales from the Secret City. It also means that it’s essentially a prequel to my poor unloved novel Patchwork Kingdom, which has been sitting in my harddrive for years now. I guess I should finish those final revisions and sell it now, eh?
"Murder at Doty Station" reminds me of what originally attracted me to writing, this feeling that I can create amazing things with hardly any real-world counterpart. There’s a cranky snapping turtle in this story who’s there just as imagination candy.
I’ve spent so much time in the last few years focusing on the craft and the market, that I hardly ever seem to write something just for the sheer pleasure of writing.
Although I suppose that’s what the blog is for.
I’ve had several pleasant zine experiences lately.
At STAPLE! I picked up a zine from what I presume were a couple of brothers over at TorC Press. It’s called Death Nouveau, and it seems to be about a cybernetic-zombie-demon in a hell dimension who is also a private eye. Or something like that.
The graphics seem to be entirely in ballpoint pen, but the primary selling point (when I accidentally made eye contact while passing by their booth) is the CD that comes with the comic. It was described to me as death-metal-jazzy, and each track on the CD corresponds to a page of the comic. So I listened to this comic while the stereo blasted cookie-monster shouting, and you know, the two mediums really went well together. Now I have to find someone to pass this on to who will properly appreciate it.
I visited Domy books down there on Cesar Chavez for the first time this week. It reminded me a lot of the Giant Robot Store in Portland, lots of very pretty coffeetable books and pretty, over-designed collectible toys. Now, I can’t afford a coffeetable, let alone a $40 photojournalist collection of hot IDF chicks (sporting curly hair, freckles, and light machine guns), but I felt that I owed Domy a pity purchase (because Austin isn’t a reading town, they should have realized that before opening the store).
So I bought a zine that consisted of several color-printed sheets of letter-sized paper (classy zines use only legal-size) and photos of public performance art.
The photos inside are charming, but it ends with an asinine instruction manual for doing guerrilla art. Listen, kids, there’s no point in doing guerrilla art if it’s someone else’s idea.
Yesterday I was pleased to find in my mailbox a zine from my cousin Kelly. I won’t say that Kelly is my favorite cousin, but it’s fair to say that of all the cousins, we have the most elements of taste in common. It’s called "Blarg!" She refers to it as a paper-blog, and I think it’s fair to say that you will probably never get a chance to see this.
She has a number of interesting articles, including a rundown of her "Best Summer Ever (TM) 2008", and photo profiles of local karaoke singers.
There’s also an essay that perfectly encapsulates the feel of a lazy summer in Minneapolis, a city large enough to provide a steady stream of new experiences, but small enough to seem like one’s personal playground. I’m quite jealous. I don’t think I’ll ever have that level of comfort in Austin. I’ve had similar feelings about Madison, but it was always just a little too young and a little too small to be truly entertaining.
Recently I had to earn a City of Austin Food Handler’s certificate. I’m not going to go too much into how little I think of that program. It seems to be both futile, considering that foodservice is an industry with more off-the-books labor than la contruction, and cruel considering how few of the foodservice employees have access to the "convenient" online course, or the literacy and test-taking skills to pass it if they did.
Basically it seems like another way for the city council to dick around with people who are too poor to matter, unlike the developers the city government is always kissing up to. We can add it to the list, along with the under-18 bike helmet rule (a way for cops to dick with poor black kids on bicycles), the no unsupervised leash law (a way to impose white middle-class PETA values on the non-whites/non-vegetarians on the East Side), and the no-smoking ordinance (a way for people who don’t go to bars to make bars less fun for the people who are actually enjoying their life, as well as protecting the three bartenders in the Austin area who don’t smoke themselves).
See, I hardly got into that at all.
What I really wanted to get into, was the "convenient" online course. Aside from the entertaining emphasis on the "fecal-hands-mouth vector", it also had a unit on bioterrorism and how the foodservice industry can protect itself.
They made me watch an instructional video produced by the City of Fort Worth bioterrorism department.
I wasn’t able to find the actual video online (no doubt because they don’t want it falling into the wrong hands), but here’s some of the anti-terrorism guidelines it provides to those of us in foodservice:
*Regularly check all the lockers and storage areas in the facility for suspicious packages.
*Create an emergency response team to develop an ACTION PLAN in case of sabotage or other emergencies.
*Test your plan to identify any adjustments that might be needed.
Needless to say, there is not a foodservice establishment in the history of the universe who will ever bother doing any of this. We’ve had fires, power-outages, severe burns, and a man who died in the process of making the day’s muffins. Why would we spend hours a week on something that has less chance of happening than a tornado carrying the bakery to Oz?
Will there ever come a time when America isn’t filled with a bunch of hysterical pricks?