Monthly Archives: March 2006

United States of Saudi America

Thursday, March 23, 2006

The extent to which America continues to revoke its civil rights is escalating… The new theocracy has already gotten abortion banned in South Dakota (more) with a promise of more states to come, and in Texas they're currently running a statewide sting operation busting people for public intoxication if they get drunk in a bar (seriously).

As you may have read recently, rape videos and videos of people being shit on are legal in the United States, but you can now go to prison for videos of nipple piercing, which are legally considered “obscene” (more, more). In addition, “obscenity” is currently being defined as the US as something which would offend any community (more). To be very clear — if the content you're producing is offensive to Christians, you can not publish it in the United States without risking obscenity charges.

Anyway, if you download and view the video below (let alone show it to anyone else) and you live in the United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and handful of other deeply repressive and controlling cultures, you may be committing a crime that could get you serious prison time.


(about a three meg wmv file)

Obviously the content in this video is graphic, but I would like to make it very clear that what you see in the video is completely consensual (it's solo in fact), no one else is harmed (and the injury is temporary), it is done for personal pleasure in private, and the individual doing it wasn't paid — they did it because they wanted to and it made them feel good. I find it deeply offensive that me sharing that video is a criminal act, while I can share videos of extreme violence, murder, and rape, and not face persecution.

Ah, theocracratic priorities… Violence, fear, and hatred are good, but pleasure is bad.

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Super cool!!!

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Check out the great shirts that Ryan printed for me for my brother's arm wrestling team. You may not know this, but as well as running BMEshop, he and Corrie also run a (not just) shirt screen printing company called We Print Good Shirts — so if you ever need shop shirts, or anything else that gets printed on fabric, let them know!

The artwork is hand drawn by me with markers. This much maligned Christian burner says that I may not be an artist because I draw piss-poor hands. And please, don't go looking up the anatomy in a textbook, because you won't find it looking like this.
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This picture has been photoshopped

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Thanks to a little help from Jon on the server end of things, I've had a chance to update UnderMars; click the picture below to jump to it now. I do need submissions, so please, if you or a friend has served in the military, I'd love it if you'd share your pictures with undermars@gmail.com.

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Let's get this party started

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

So my night of dogsitting was alright. I didn't bring my computer along so I just kind of relaxed with Milo. This is how he stared at me all evening. Like most beagles, he has a sweet tooth and gets pissy if he doesn't get seconds of supper (which he does not need).

The walk home was nice; it was snowing lightly, but enough that the horizon over the railroad tracks disappeared into the haze. When I got back I check up on the ModBlog posts and learned that people are mad that I'm posting too many thin pretty white girls, ha… Well, seriously, I post what gets submitted — I wish I got submissions from a broader range of people, but the truth is that the body modification community skews hard in the direction of whitey.

Other than that, I have to go out and get a vacuum today. Probably another Roomba robot, but because of their policy of donating 15% of their earnings to the Church of Satan, I may go with a Dirt Devil product instead. Most people are unaware of the fact that the name isn't just a marketting decision — the company was started in 1966 by the original members of the CoS as a financing scheme.

I mean really, why else would they partner with Walmart?

And yes, this is me considering the merits of starting a libelous internet rumor.

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Steam Power?

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

So as I've posted here several times in the past, this winter coming up I'd like to build another truck, and this time I'd like to not only build something more imposing than my last truck, but something that can truly go anywhere. Not only do I want it to be able to handle any territory and environment (including being amphibious), but I'd like it to be very versatile in terms of fuel.

Initially I'd considered a completely portable gasification system (basically it lets you turn organic garbage into fuel that can be fed into a traditional engine), but I've moved away from that to something more classic — I want my truck to have a steam engine!

Before you decide I'm an idiot, let me tell you what I'm thinking — to maintain a 55 mph speed in a car about the size of what I want to build consumes in about fifteen to twenty horsepower. You just need a lot more than that for rapid acceleration. Another thing to point out is that “steam horsepower” is that it has almost unlimited torque —


A steam engine can produce maximum torque at almost 0 rpm. If you have ever seen an old 10 to 16 horsepower steam tractor at a “tractor pull” pulling against our modern 400+ horsepower gas engines, you will understand. The steam tractor always wins.

Modular and modern 20 hp steam engines that can be clustered for more power — and they're basically indestructible (rated for about 10,000 hours at full throttle between bearing replacements and so on, versus about 100 hours at full throttle for a normal car engine). In terms of “average power needed”, modern steam technology is completely capable. But still, the problem as I see it is that it's not really a throttleable or responsible driveline option in the way we expect a modern car to be (which I suspect is the main reason that gas engines dominate today — they are an incredible solution in terms of something that can throttle power quickly over a wide range).

My thought is that the way to make a steam engine work in a modern car is to have some way of buffering or storing, and then releasing the power to the driveline. Probably the easiest way of doing this would be to have a secondary electric driveline (like in a hybrid car), so that the consistent power from the steam engine can be stored in either battery banks or a large capacitor array (which would be able to release terrifying bursts). A secondary option is to use pneumatic engines (so basically you're storing kinetic energy in the form of compressed air in a 5000psi tank).

Coupled with boilers with a burner unit that can be swapped (so you can choose to run off of logs, or coal, or wood chips, or even just propane), and maybe weirder things like firing the exhaust into Hilsch vortex tubes to both extract waste heat and power the air conditioning, I think you could build a vehicle that would be functional in nearly every environment and not just relatively reliable and indestructible, but also something that could be maintained in the field with relatively simple tools.

I really should have gotten myself an engineering degree (so as to avoid potentially talking out of my ass). Any hot, single engineering types reading this that want to move to the middle of nowhere and build monster trucks and websites? Surely I can't be the only one that thinks that would be the good life?

Well, I'm off to eat supper and then go dogsitting.

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My mundane life

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

For lunch I had a sandwich (three open-top ones actually) topped with herb tofu, sweet peppers, onion, and roasted garlic in a ginger, mango, and black bean sauce.


Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof.
- Ezekiel 4:9

The bread I was used was a really awesome ezekiel bread, a pre-sprouted (as in bread with sprouts in it) multi-grain bread that I guess, according to legend, will keep you alive in the desert if you happen to find yourself there for a couple years. Either way it was really yummy.

I also got a chance to finally see Modify (the movie) last night… I'll do up a real review soon, but I really think they did an awesome job with it. The release date is very soon now, and we've got them up for pre-order in BMEshop already — click below to place your order now (they will ship a week from next Monday; April 1st).

Greg and his crew really hit a homerun with this one I think (or maybe the credit goes to those interviewed, either way I enjoyed it a lot). I want to get a bunch of people together (mostly professionals in this industry) and have a little viewing party and record an “unauthorized not-the-director's commentary” mp3 track that can be downloaded and played with the movie. Want to take part in that? Drop me a line.

Let's see what else… Here's a couple pictures from yesterday. On the left is Phil standing next to the tower I built until I ran out of pieces. There are no secondary supports holding it together. And on the right I tried to take a picture of Marty and his mother — and I'm guessing he's well on his way to Texas by now (assuming he's not already made it).

I was reading the newspaper (I guess my landlords had a subscription that's still active) and they had all of these Iraq statistics, some of which are very interesting if true. I say “if true” because these are US State Department numbers and I really can't say for certain if they're accurate or misleading. A claim is made that the number of independent newspapers has doubled, and that the number of internet subscribers has gone up 328 times. I don't know how many subscribers there used to be, but that number is so extreme that I suspect the initial number was very small.

But let's assume for the moment that number is genuine and there are a few hundred thousand internet users, if not significantly more (and now that I think about it, the fact that jihadists are using the internet to organize makes me think it's likely in the millions)… Anyway, if that number is spread out across the country via internet cafés (rather than being clustered in just wealthy communities), it might actually have that “democratizing” effect that the neo-cons have been predicting… just not quite for the reason the expected I suppose.

Finally, getting pictures like this from Abel make me really miss living in Mexico. Now I'm going to do some writing for ModBlog, do some video work, edit some interviews, and then it's off to Saira's house to feed her dog while her and Michael are out of town…

Edit: Apparently I lost the photo from Abel. Sorry.

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