Thanks to Gone for letting me know that BME (including Rachel being credited as the most hardcore modder out there for her eyeball implant) was featured on MobuzzTV again (geek tattoos was the previous feature).
Click through if you're interested; it's a short segment that begins about at about two thirds in.
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I've just posted a bit over a thousand pictures to BME/extreme and BME/HARD. Thanks to everyone who's been patient and helped out, and to Dexie for the cover shot of her “strange person” kanji skin removal. More tomorrow!
I've got insane quantities of work to do over the next few days… genuinely unpleasant quantities… so I'll be brief, but while I was in Toronto I picked up the new Goat Horn CD… for fans of eighties basement metal I can't recommend it highly enough. One of the tattoo artists at Shane's shop did the cover art for the CD (they're a local Toronto band). His band also has a space next to them and he was saying they're 100% serious as well — there's no tongue-in-cheek humor when in the liner notes they write:
MESSAGE TO OUR FANS:
As soon as you get home from work or school on Fridays, even before you grab a beer, make sure you crank this record up. Then call your friends, figure out the pardy plan and make sure you bring Goat Horn with you to crank again... And remember: No synths, no pedals, no wimps, no nothing, Just Metal! Die!!
Even before I grab a beer???
I picked up some other great CDs that I may mention later but that's the funnest one.
Anyway, for those of you who are stopping by my talk at APP, I hope it's enjoyable — I'll be showing some things that haven't even been on BME by the way — because I suspect it will be my only public speaking appearance. Given how little I like being around people and how far behind on work I am, I have no idea why I volunteered!
Other than that, I got this sort of annoying email:
Ok, so this header on your iam page has intrigued me, but I just cant figure it out. It looks like Latin to me, but when translated, it doesnt make a while lot of sense.Eadem would be the same things, as the direct object of the verb. Then resurgo would be I rise again or I revive Then theres mutato this looks like a variation on muto, mutare, which would be to change or to alter in the first person singular, but that wouldnt make sense because you have two verbs in the first person singular without and or anything like that to link them. And thats really the only word mutato resemble so this is all confusing.
So fess up, what is this supposed to say?
I don't care if someone asks me what something means, but starting off by telling me that “it doesn't make a whole lot of sense” and smarmy stuff like “so fess up, what is this supposed to say” implying I don't know my Latin is just rude.
It's not as if it's that hard to type Eadem Mutato Resurgo into Google.
I've just posted an image update with just under 1,700 new pictures for today. I'm sorry, I don't think the cover model has an IAM page (correct me if I'm wrong) but you've seen his full Japanese body suit in the galleries before. As always, thanks to him and all the other contributors for their help on today's update.
The rest of this entry about the future so stop reading now if you don't give a damn about your flaming demise. Some rather disturbing predictions came out from the folks over at Morgan Stanley… here's what their chief economist had to say (more):
America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic "armageddon". America's record trade deficit means the dollar will keep falling. The result: U.S. consumers, who are in debt up to their eyeballs, will get pounded. Household debt is at record levels ... a "spectacular wave of bankruptcies" is possible.
None of this is a secret — Morgan Stanley is not some conspiracy-driven anti-capitalist collective — and anyone who understands the basics of economics sees it not only happening, but getting hugely worse due to Bush's reckless spending platforms. Where it gets “funny” is when you look at them from the start (as in y2k onward), they almost seem designed to drive up these problems, as nonsensical as that must seem at first. While one might be able to explain market fluctuations and downturns, trying to explain Bush's apparently suicidally indulgent economic policies is not so immediately simple.
That said, let's try and explain why Bush is doing this, and why instead of lowering spending as he promised during the “election“, he's continuing to increase US spending and debt levels.
Skipping over “he's an idiot” (more) or “he's a religious nut” (more) type explanations, there is only only one good reason for Bush to take the economic steps he's taking that actually serve the interests of his constituents who as you may remember he described jokingly as “the haves and the have-mores”. The end effect of a “spectacular wave of bankruptcies” is not that America itself evaporates and becomes Afghanistan. The end effect is that most private property and assets (and even public assets as they are privatized) are transferred into fewer and fewer — and richer and richer — hands.
I believe the current economic downturn is designed to steal the remaining assets of the poor and middle class into the hands of the ultra-rich ruling class, who will be left with perfectly legal slave ownership (and lives of luxury) as a result. They'll have additional power to do so because of Bush's only-for-the-rich tax cuts and corporate welfare policies stuffing their coffers pre-collapse… Unless of course the Americans have the courage and sense for liberty of the French that is (more), which unfortunately I doubt in these beaten-down and intellectually oppressed modern times.
“Parea non servin,” you say? Somehow I doubt it…
It's no secret that Rachel and I have moved around a lot, sometimes just briefly, but always with an eye open for a more permanent move. Almost ten times in the last couple years that I can think of off the top of my head — Toronto (Bathurst), Miramichi, Toronto (back at Bathurst), Tweed, Tortola, Antigua, Maui, Amsterdam, and now Toronto again — definitely loving it, and definitely appreciate all the people who've pushed me to travel over the past while.
Anyway, I was thinking about where I'd most want to live, and I think the answer is an airship. A little apartment hanging from a large airship that I could travel around the world in — I've been saying “boat” for years, but an airship is the ultimate sailboat. A couple satellite links and I'd still be online and everything, and more and more airports are gaining support for airships as they begin to be taken seriously again as a mode of transport. That said, I have no idea what an airship costs and I suspect they are extremely expensive.
I realize that it generates very little power in comparison to the nuclear plant out in Clarington or the Niagara hydroelectric generating stations, but I really like the wind-generating station that's been put up as a demo down at the CNE. I can see it out of my window (the photo below is off my balcony), and from it I always know what the wind conditions on the lake are like (and good for Rachel too because she can eyeball the wind conditions at the airport now that she's in flight school).
I have to admit that finding out that corneal tattooing is one of the oldest and perhaps even safest forms of tattooing really has gotten me (and a few others) quite interested. A person's eyes say so much about them… being able to alter them as we see fit really would be wonderful in allowing us to define ourselves and our “automatic introductions” even farther.
What would you tattoo on your eyeball?
