One of the “problems” with our current roster of space ships and space stations is that they’re built to be as light as possible due to the extreme per-kilogram cost of lifting things into orbit and beyond. You can practically punch your way out the side of the International Space Station, and the entire space station, three hundred and sixty feet long (the length of an NFL football field), two hundred and forty feet wide, and almost seventy feet tall only weights as much as 280 of my truck (which is not particularly heavy at 1,600kg) even though you could park over seven hundred of them in its shadow. I know I’m being a little loose with my comparison because it’s not a solid mass and much of that space is solar panels, but point is, it’s built as light as we could get away with building it. I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to spend time in a kill-you-real-quick environment as hostile as outer space, to say nothing of bombardment of micrometeorites, I’d rather be in something built like a tank or a U-boat than something built like a tin-foil pie plate.

What we have versus what we should have?

As I’m sure you know, the ISS was built in orbit, which arguably increased the complexity and risk and cost of construction. This is because, as the ESA website points out the obvious, we don’t have a launch vehicle big enough to lift its entire 450 ton mass into space in a single launch. Almost exclusively we used the Space Shuttle, which can could lift an admirable 24,000kg to low earth orbit at a go. So far it has taken 31 separate launches with more scheduled. While the official cost to date of the ISS is $150 billion, with 27 Shuttle launches, 2 Proton, and 2 Soyuz launches, I’d ballpark that the cost of the launches alone — not including the cost of developing the launch vehicles (for context a Space Shuttle costs) — was probably somewhere in the realm of $12 billion dollars. For context that’s less than a month of Iraq war spending, and the cost of building the Space Shuttle Endeavor was $1.7 billion, or about 80% of the cost of a B-2 Stealth Bomber. When you look at it that way it didn’t really cost a whole lot. That said, as long as it is a logistical nightmare to lift stuff into space, it’s dubious whether we’re really ever going to do anything all that exciting, at least until there’s a commercial interest.

Flying skyscrapers… These things are about 350 feet tall!

The biggest heavy launch vehicle we ever built was the Saturn V rocket that lifted the Apollo missions (above left). The Saturn V was able to lift an incredible 120,000kg into LEO at a cost of $185 million in 1965, or $1.1 billion in 2012 dollars. Using the Saturn V we could have lifted the ISS (and then some) in just four launches — or four and a half billion dollars, about a third the cost of the “modern” systems we used. We have had much larger launch vehicles on the drawing board, but for largely political reasons — it certainly wasn’t technical reasons — they never ended up happening. To understand why, peek over at the Soviet space program of the sixties. They also had a moon shot, and a lot of people thought that they were going to beat America there because of their many space firsts — first ICBM, first satellite, first animal in orbit (and later the first ones to return alive), first telemetry from space, first moon probe, first images of the far side of the moon, first person in space, first Venus probe, first EVA, first lunar orbit, first space docking, and so on, and all of that happened before the Americans got to the moon. In some ways their moon program was smaller and less ambitious than the American one — it was certainly much lighter, which meant a less impressive rocket was needed — but this was mostly because of the fact that their main focus was Mars. They didn’t end up going with the smaller rocket that their moon proram needed, but instead worked on a rocket similar to the Saturn V called the N1 (above right), initially sized in 1959 to be large enough to carry their TMK-1 manned Mars mission (which also included a flyby of Venus on the way home) scheduled for 1971. Unfortunately after the Soviets exploded four N1s (one of the explosions still stands as the biggest non-nuclear kaboom we’ve ever created), they never made it to the moon let alone Mars. As a result, the space race lost a lot of its steam and the Americans stopped going to the moon, canned their own Mars program, and a million geek hears broke.

Because the Americans kicked the ambition out of their space program and decided to invest in the Vietnam war instead, they closed down NASA’s Future Projects Branch which was developing a number of heavy launch vehicles intended for the Mars program. The one that is most exciting to me is a gigantic rocket called the “Sea Dragon” (above) because it also seems the most realistic, both for back then and for what should be dusted off today. The Sea Dragon is an interesting rocket not just because it’s incredibly powerful, capable of lifting 550 tons into LEO — that is, the entire current International Space Station plus another hundred tons for good measure — but also because it’s wildly inexpensive. TRW estimated numbers as low as $59 a pound — compare that to about $750 a kilogram in the dollars of the day for the Saturn V. The reason it was so cheap is that a significant percentage of the cost of a rocket is that it’s a highly complex piece of advanced engineering using advanced materials built to precise tolerances and expensive fuels. And then gets wrecked after launch. Also, the costs are such that the raw materials are only about 2% of the final cost, so the price difference between rockets of different sizes is much less than intuition would suggest. So the Sea Dragon was built with the philosophy that it should be as big and as low tech as possible. The whole thing was just a giant steel sheet metal tube 550 feet long. It had one gigantic engine fueled by liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen (which also meant that it was clean, producing only steam as exhaust) and forced through the system by compressed nitrogen (ie. compressed air basically). The rocket was water launched, and the fuel — oxygen and hydrogen — was produced on site by splitting water into its component hydrogen and oxygen. The plan at the time was to do this with electricity supplied by a nuclear aircraft carrier, but if we were going to resurrect the idea in modern times, I’m sure we would just use wind generators. Sad that this isn’t going on. What a different world we might live in if we could inexpensively lift space stations and moon bases in a single launch. But I suppose we have wars to pay for.

Gawd damn. I hate thinking about the trillion dollar price-tag on the Iraq war. We could have colonized both the moon and Mars for those dollars. I mean, what makes more sense? Killing a bunch of Arabs? Or having thriving human civilizations on three worlds? I know, I know… it’s killing Arabs, right?

They are Muslims after all!

There are so many interesting launch vehicles I could go on about — there’s a nice list, including some speculative and fictional ones, here on the Atomic Rockets Surface-to-Orbit site. I love reading about crazy mega-rockets like Nexus (above picture includes a model) that could lift 900 tons in “normal” mode or almost 5,000 tons when spewing nuclear pollution. Dream big, dream dirty. I love the quote (from the first link in this paragraph) about the Aldebaran launch vehicle that was supposed to be able to lift 60 million pounds — “water take off and landing because there isn’t a runway in the world that could survive that monster.” Ah, back in the days when engineers when men.

Now, $60 a pound is pretty impressive, but it’s not the best we can do. That would be Project Orion. We did the on-paper and early testing (including accidentally) for this nuclear pulse launch system that was capable of much, much heavier weights for a much lower cost, but again for political reasons (very different ones this time) it was scrubbed. What I’m about to write is not a typo. We are talking launch systems capable of lifting as much as 4,880,000,000kg… Yes, five billion kilograms into orbit and for well under a dollar a kilogram. Even the “small” versions, which were about the same size physically as the Saturn V rocket were capable of tossing 1,600,000kg into orbit, or 1,200,00kg to the moon, or 800,000kg all the way to Mars with enough fuel left over to get back in a single go. That’s unheard of. It basically means that in a single launch you could throw twenty of the largest cruise ships in the world to the moon. I’ll admit that the way it does it is a little problematically. Your cargo sits on a platform, which sites on top of immense shock absorbers, which sits on top of a giant pusher plate, under which five hundred to a thousand nuclear bombs are detonated in rapid sequence (given the size of our nuclear arsenal, you could argue that using up the fuel instead of letting it rot makes a lot of sense — sure makes more sense than the intended purpose). I have to repeat that this is not theoretical — Freeman Dyson, who headed the project, got it to the testing phase, which you can read about in a great book written by his son or watch in “To Mars by A-Bomb (The Secret History of Project Orion)” that I just noticed some SOPA-antagonizer has uploaded to YouTube and all sorts of other direct-download sites. Highly recommended.

(Those pictures are from DRB’s coverage of Orion.)

Anyway, the short version as to the politics of it all surrounds the fact that it was nuclear bomb powered, which came with three big problems. First of all, it made it a military venture. Second of all, it made it highly classified, and made doing the required research on clean nukes and so on extremely difficult to sell to politicians. This was compounded by the fact that America’s space program had been put under the largely public civilian agency NASA. And finally, when America signed off on the Partial Test Ban in 1963 stopping above-ground nuclear detonations, it effectively shut down the program. There was a brief period in the fifties where America was debating whether to go with chemical rockets or nuclear rockets, and I have to wonder what space would look like if weight requirements were simply a non-issue. What would it be like if we could launch a small city in a single shot? If we could dump whole collections of factories on the any moon or planet in our solar system. And don’t get me started on the interstellar possibilities — Project Daedalus, a mission to Barnard’s Star, was based on similar technology, and Dyson considered a trip to Alpha Centauri since Orion could potentially get there in less than fifty years. It’s both inspiring and heartbreaking.

I will mention that we have actually recently dusted off the nuclear pulse technology because it’s the only thing we have that could push an extinction-level sized asteroid out of an impact path.

Up above I said that nothing interesting would happen in space until there’s a commercial imperative, and that wasn’t just a throwaway sentence. Multiple big mining companies are now seriously eyeballing both the moon and the asteroids. On one hand that sounds nutty, but on the other hand, mining already costs a small fortune. A big oil rig costs a half billion dollars, which is way less than Space Adventures private moon flyby mission is costing them. Big mining equipment costs a fortune — $150 million plus for some of the big excavators and draglines — and billions are spent on exploration alone, let alone the many, many trillions spent on mineral extraction itself. The dollars spent on mining right now dwarf the Apollo program’s cost. Hell, they dwarf the amount of money spent by every nation on space, ever. NASA and others are currently putting more and more serious feelers out to determine the exact mining value of the moon, but as soon as we can make a solid gamble at it, be it for precious metals, rare elements, or even Helium3 once we figure out fusion, there will be dozens of mega-corporations scrambling to loot the moon. And then it snowballs. In many ways — to say nothing of environmental issues — mining the moon and the asteroids is less problematic than mining the ocean. And all we have to do is get a couple mining operations up there, with factories and processing facilities, and boom, all of a sudden we have colonized the moon. Even if we never build a modern Sea Dragon or Orion, and we have PayPal fly up the first factories bit by bit in their new Falcon heavy-lift rockets, after a short while we won’t have to carry stuff up there — we can just build it with the moon’s own resources. And then maybe moon mining will discover arcologies from the past, right? Now that would be exciting.

That picture is completely UN-ambitious. Fail.

It’s gonna happen and it’s gonna happen soon. Stuff like this makes me really wish I was going to live longer and really excited about the kind of world my daughter is going to get to be a part of. World? I spoke wrong. The kind of worlds she’s going to get to be a part of.

Worlds. I like that.

These next ones are 8mm rainbow topaz and are also quite intense — they are iridescent across various blue, green, and turquoise tones that are hard to capture in a still photo.

These blue or deep cyan stones are a pair of 8mm simulated blue zircon.

Next is the actual stone that was ordered, a pair of 8mm black spinels. Totally black and opaque.

Also in black, I ordered a bunch of 8mm high dome black onyx round cabochons, which are basically half spheres. I got these largely as an experiment as I’ve never worked with them before, and wow, do I ever love them. They really look incredible. I made a couple of rings using them as eyes that’ll go into the shop in the next day or two.

In addition, I have started mounting cabochon’s on the backs of these rings whenever possible, inside my “signature” tattoo logo. It’s a very beautiful touch, and I feel like my work is getting better and better with time.

I have some more cabochons on order, so in a week or so I hope to do some more experiments. I have some really neat looking pyrite ones, some blood red almandine garnets, some green malachite, some very psychedelic glittering opal, some turquoise chrysocolla that looks like a planet, some pearly moonstone, and some stunning lab-grown star sapphires. Finally, because I have had so many requests to do a version of this skull ring but in a smaller women’s size, I’m beginning work today on a new skull ring that should fit sizes 6 through 9 (the rings about are size 10 through 13).

So is this old man ring (Caitlin thinks it looks like an old elf):

And this snowman ring (surprisingly innocuous for a change, right?) is rounding out the tiny ones:

Don’t punch anyone wearing that one!

This evil clown ring is a little bigger but still very much on the small end:

The gross venous eyeball ring is bigger though:

As is this oldschool toy robot ring:

The last ring is this silly exercise in ego stroking. No, it’s not a crazy hobo serial killer.

And finally, I also made a zombie pendant (or keychain). It’s solid and quite heavy, at least in comparison to the rings above which are all thin-walled and very light in comparison to some of my earliest designs. You can click to zoom in on this last picture but not the others:

Tomorrow I’ll be catching up on all my shipping and order fulfillment, so depending on how my day goes I will endeavor to get these new designs officially measured and added to the shop. Maybe I will do some plating or enameling first, like the clown’s nose or hair perhaps…

Production Rings

I’ve got a bunch of production rings that are good to go now. By production I mean that I have molds and they don’t use any one-off components (like the meteorite rings do for example) so I can manufacture as many of them as I’d like. One of the new ones is this “ugly ogre” ring, for lack of a better title. I just made it for a goof really, passing the time doing some silly carving, but when it turned out nicely I decided to finish it off. This one has an 8mm lab grown ruby set in the eye socket.

I also made a SUPERHERO RING that I’m pretty thrilled with. It’s based on one of the old plastic Ken Doll rings that I made ages ago. I fabricated a mask for one of them and made a new mold.

Of course I’ve also been making more brainiac skull rings…

…and my “Little Acky” (baby General Ackbar… IT’S A TWAP!) rings as well.

“Littlest Monster Shop” Paper Weights

As you know I have been making sculptures based on Nefarious’s “Littlest Pet Shop” toys in which I edit them to turn them into monsters and characters from various science fiction or horror fantasies. You may remember the “Mad Monkey” steampunk-esque alchemist that I’ve posted before. Stock is expanding on him. As I build up a mold collection, each time I do a casting run my stock grows exponentially.

While on the trip, I had along a chipmunk and I asked Caitlin and Nefarious how I should change it (I’ve been doing one-offs in plastic that I have posted in previous entries… I’m not sure if I’m going to go back and take molds off them or not) and they told me that I should make it out of wood. So wood it is — half faux wood, with leaves for ears, and a patch of mushrooms growing on the top of the head for hair. With that Gaia-vibe, I’ve also put a globe on the back of the head.

Today I carved a zombie pig while I waited for Nefarious at the swimming pool.

Froggy-Man Loves His Dino-Tooth

I made a little keychain or amulet that is holding (lovingly I think) a genuine fossil of a spinosaurus (think raptor meets sailfish) tooth. Right now it’s on a keyring but there’s no reason it can’t go on a chain instead. This was another idle carving. I’d coiled a piece of clay around the tooth (heavily lubricated so it wouldn’t stick) and never really thought about what I would make out of it. I think originally I got mixed up and thought it was a different tooth, one from a sea monster, and was going to do tentacles, but when I came to my senses and lost that plan, I just spent a minute staring at it with an empty mind, saw a silly character within the clay, and did my best to free him.

One-Off Custom Rings

Finally, I’m working on a wide variety of custom rings… Custom as in there will only be one made, because the ring is designed to fit a specific special item (like a fossil or a pretty rock) that I only have one of. For example, I had a bag of assorted semi-precious stones, and inside was this red-brown stone with sort of an “eyeball” on one side. Nefarious fell in love with it and asked me to make her a ring to hold it, so carved a gnarly “witch socket” with gross warty eyelids, a ridged “stalk” for the circumference of the ring, and then a monster mouth hiding on the inside part. Surprisingly it actually looks quite classic and formal when worn!

I also had a really cool little fossil of a sea urchin, with lots of detail, that I wanted to do something with. I guess I didn’t feel terribly inspired, and I thought that the item was so nice on its own anyway, so I carved a simple vertebrae/backbone design and mounted the urchin inside this curved spine.

Finally — I know, I know, this has been a monster of a bandwidth-killing entry — I made a ring built around a fossil of a seashell. I get that these shell fossils, even one as detailed and perfect as this one, are very common, so I wanted to go above-and-beyond. I carved a pair of merpeople, a mermaid and a merman holding a trident, with a shark swimming between them. I had to sculpt this whole thing under a magnifying glass!!! It’s interesting — my hands shake quite a lot, but the shaking largely stops when I work under a magnifying glass the shaking all but stops. Maybe it’s some sort of feedback loop?

Now I just need to find the perfect host for the store, because I have a looooong list of reasons why Etsy is a big turn-off.

…become this robot…

Yeah, not the interesting sort of “ewww”.

Anyway, observed today at the pool:

1. Some scumbum was walking along the side of the pool and did a gigantic hork/spit right into the pool. Think old man in Chinatown obsessively spitting, but white trash dude instead. He also did it right before his bro dived in, almost hitting the little floating island of grossness. Scumbum spit a whole bunch more as the day progressed. I don’t think he was a swimmer, as he spent all his time in the shallow end, so I suppose to him the deep end might as well just be a giant spitoon.

2. I watched the lifeguard (actually, the “manager” because the lifeguards refused) fish out a floating pad… and sadly I’m not talking about a lily pad.

3. A pale (likely from too much time in a suit) old man spent a few minutes absentmindedly (but with great vigor and enthusiasm) playing with his nipples, pulling and twisting them, as he intently stared at the fit teenage boys cavorting together in the water. For some reason he favored his left nipple. And aww geez, as I typed in this note, I just noticed an even older guy doing the same, although preferred the right nipple. He did however agree on the twinks.

A little later I noticed that the guy enjoying his left nipple had a ten year old son.

An ambulance stopped in front of the pool for about five minutes so I wondered whether I’d be adding a number four to the list, but it after I saw that they had blocked in my car (the Saab Sonett III) and were moving their ambulance forward and backward by about ten feet repeatly I realized that they were just eyeballing the car. I really enjoy the car and it gets a crazy amount of attention, but I’m thinking about selling it just because it’s very hard for me to get out of the car because it’s so low, and a car with a clutch can be hard on my legs some days.

PS. I might have mentioned that I made a little wall-mounted “bookshelf” display case for this growing collection. Naturally, these three were mounted on the sides. I also made a collection of miniature framed round mirrors to make the backs of the figures more visible.

And… oops! Taking a look at that picture, I just realized that there are three fellows that I nearly forgot. First is this fiddly little miniature. Sometimes you don’t have that many leftovers I suppose.

I also made a hand holding some eyeballs. My hand obviously.

And finally a blue warrior.

Well, well…. once again quite some time has passed since I last posted so I think I’ll stick to the nice things that have happened since I last wrote and post a collection of the different projects that I’ve completed since the last post. It’s not as much as I’d like because I’ve been having trouble being up and about and all too many days have been spent doing nothing but resting as I haven’t had the strength to do much more. Today was good, and I spent an hour hiking through the off-trail hills in high park with Nefarious and a friend she made in the playground. As we walked, his father trailed us, playing some sort of a handheld steel harp and singing gently in an African language which made the walk even more worth undertaking, even if I’ll spend the next few days paying for daring the climb. I do not anticipate any bad news but I got my requisition a few days ago for my heart test (an EKG) to make sure none of the medication is damaging it.

Alright. Let’s get started on the meat of the entry. First of all, here are a couple of Lego figures. I made the ghost (for lack of a better label) and Nefarious made the ladder. As you can see both attach to the Lego blocks just fine because they have peg holes molded in.

Caitlin liked the little figures that I made for Nefarious and asked me to make her one too for a necklace so I made this little skull-masked fellow. I like how the details and the hand/foot shape turned out. Painting his robe with the snake and strawberries was quite tricky and I had to do it with a brush trimmed down to just a couple bristles!

Quite a long time ago I cast a set of plastic bugs when I was testing some reusable mold-making compound, and I finally got around to painting the set. You can click on the first picture to zoom in (it’s the only zoom-able picture in this post). In the second photo you can see that I mounted cylindrical magnets into the bottoms so they work well as fridge magnets.

I made this silly fellow with the clay masters of the gloves that I made for the child soldier toy. I don’t particularly like how it turned out, but still, I have developed an obsession about trying to turn all my leftover scraps into something fun, so at least that’s something…

Here’s another silly “ghost”. I do quite enjoy making these guys because they’re so fast and easy to create and are quite cute. Sculpting them only takes a couple minutes but I’m such a slow painter that I guess I may be stretching the word “fast” a little.

Now here’s a project that I’m very happy with, and one where the pictures just don’t do it justice. I had a crappy skull made out of hard foam that I cast a while back that’s been waiting for a project to give it some value. Nefarious recently had some boots fall apart, so instead of just tossing them I cut them up and salvaged all of the faux-suede/leather. After painting the teeth (including a gold tooth) and the nose and eye sockets, I used a glue gun to “skin” the entire skull with a patchwork of leather, plus a furry hairdo made of a discarded stuffed animal’s hide. To finish it off I made a couple of eyeballs, although they’re not glued in place and are removable. Perhaps one day I’ll get ambitious and put the eyeballs on a servo so it can look around the room and freak people out.

I also made a tiny little container, so small that I’m not even sure what could be kept in it — gemstones perhaps? It’s nothing too exciting, but the lid is nicely made with a lip, and it was my first try at doing flocking. I sprayed the inside with glue and then covered the surface with fabric fluff, so it has a sort of velour finish to it. Mostly a learning project.

After supper Nefarious spend half an hour biking laps around the buildiing and returned with a smooth rock that caught her eye. She asked me to engrave it for her, so she drew what she wanted and I carved it. She likes the idea of leaving it on a beach at some point so that a thousand years from now archeologists find it and attribute some supernatural goddess value to her. I thought it was going to be hard to do but it was surprisingly easy.

Finally, I got some metallic “mirror finish” chrome spray paint, so I quickly cast a copy of a cat skull and sprayed it. It is as advertised… I’m not sure if I have any “real” plans for it, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something.

Other than that, there are an equal number of in-progress and just-started and eternally-only-started projects lying around. Depending on my health you may well see a similar post to this in another week. Hope all is well. I apologize to anyone I haven’t replied to… I really am not exaggerating that I’ve mostly just spent the week resting. Don’t let the long lest of projects mislead you… At any give moment I ws far more likely to be prone than creating, let alone using the computer.

As always, apologies for not bothering to proof-read the above.

I’m totally sold on the notion that 3D isn’t just a trend. Right now the market is set to flood and I think, in time, be dominated by simple dual lense 3D cameras. As 3D televisions and monitors, especially those that use lenticular screens and other methods that allow you to enjoy the 3D images and videos without special glasses, become the norm, we’ll forget all about 2D just like we’ve forgotten about black and white — “oh, how quaint” we’ll think when we watch old and strangely “flat” 2D movies. If I have to predict the evolution of the technology, I’d say that this will be followed by cameras that are able to also record per-pixel depth information in addition to what our eyes and brains will interpolate from the stereogram. I imagine this will begin with something that works a lot like the Kinect and then moves on up to something like a laser depth scanner like what the clever cars that drive themselves use, or what wealthy police departments use to record a crime scene. After that the next logical step is to include GPS, gyroscopes, accelerometers and other tech that lets the camera become aware of its location, in order to allow a person to take multiple photos of a scene which can then be reconstructed into a true 3D scene where the viewer can travel through it rather than being forced to stand in the photographer’s shoes. This could also work with multiple cameras, and would be incredibly immersive. I don’t see any reason why this entire evolution has to take more than a few years.

For now, I’m going to try and convert some of the pictures (manually) into “jiggle 3D” and see how that goes. The rest of the entry with more of that is after the break.

Anyway, feel free to click on through if you haven’t already. Hope it doesn’t crash your browser.

I spent the first day with the camera walking all around the house taking pictures of everything — here’s the progress I’ve made on the trike frame. This is the final foam, but it still needs to be carved down a lot, since the tube is going to be less than 1.5″ in diameter, although of course it will grow again once it’s wrapped in fiberglass. I’ve already done a small triangular test piece in order to both see how strong it is, and to ensure that the resin doesn’t melt the foam or anything horrific like that. I think though that before I do much carving that I’ll get the mechanical and electrical/electronic elements built. These consist of the front forks and the rear drive system, as well as brakes, lights, controls, and gauges and so on. It will be something for me to look forward to while I’m spending the holidays in the hospital.

Continuing to walk and take pictures, something that looked stunning on the display were all the ropes from the suspended reading platform (which is another project begging completion). You can click it for a closeup but nothing that you see jiggling here can compare with how cool it looks on the real camera. The camera has significant room for improvement, which is to be expected for a first generation camera, but I’m really having a lot of fun that brings me back to memories of the first digital cameras. Long, long, long ago a Kodak representative came into Stainless Studios, in probably ’94 or ’95, and loaned Caitlin and Ryan and the rest of us a first gen digital camera. 640×480 seemed so amazing back then.

It’s a little weak on closeup photos (and the lenses make it very difficult to do those anyway) but it takes really nice landscape photos.

Tonight Ari and I cooked our dear invalid Caitlin a wonderful shrimp dinner, using the so-called “gigantico” shrimps that come 9-12 per pound and are just massive. In addition to a nice stirfry of carrots, broccoli, and zucchini in udon noodles that had just the perfect amount of grilling, the shrimp (and all of it) was done in a sauce of fresh ginger, garlic, chiles, coconut, and mango. I’ve made a few meals lately that have turned out really deliciously (before this the flesh of choice was big fat sea scallops that make my mouth water just thinking about), which was nice after a couple lazy failures, and I’m hoping that this shrimp meal gives me pleasant dreams. Nefarious was out of town going to the circus with her grandmother and cousins this weekend, and her being gone combined with worrying about Caitlin’s injury gave me horrible epic religious nightmares.

The desert was strawberries in a sauce of brown sugar and squeezed lemon with whipped cream on top.

Oh, and speaking of religion, even though I’m an avowed atheist, the one thing that makes me ponder the possibility that Occam’s Razor leans toward the supernatural is thinking about the depths of physics. The sort of questions that made my head hurt as a child — how did time begin? What is the smallest unit of measurement? Does the universe have a border? I devour books and websites on these subjects, so maybe that played into my nightmares as well.

Oh, and as I mentioned in the previous entry I’ve started making human skull candles (the first of which has since been melted down and re-made with a triple wick). Today I got a big UPS order of new essential oils and soap bases (I know I’ve waffled on it, but I think when I get out of the hospital in the new year I will actually set up an Etsy store after all), and most excitedly, a big ten-plus pound block of Canadian beeswax. It has an incredibly strong and pleasurable scent, so if you like the smell of beeswax, this is as good as it gets (yes, they’re for sale). It’s also a nice colour, much darker and richer than the one below.

Anyway, it’s getting late, and I’ve got to go to bed (as soon as Enemy Mine ends that is), so I haven’t bothered proof-reading this. Apologies both for the bandwidth used and the errors in blog-communicology. Oh, the movie just ended. The end.

P.S. Don’t worry, I won’t be making a habit of jiggling entries.

Anyway, I was watching an old David Blaine special and in it he was doing a card trick in which the shot briefly is a little low and you can see the bottom of the card. Unfortunately the card is blurred, I think intentionally rather than from motion so you can’t see the card name. However, I noticed that for a single frame in the middle of the shot they’ve edited “NICE TRY” onto the card in red block letters which I thought was quite funny.

Nefarious and Caitlin and I watched one of his old specials, Street Magic I think, and he was doing a lot of mind reading tricks, which are very easy to write off as being done with plants when you see them on TV, or as shots that fail 95% of the time and he only guesses right through perseverance. However, the first time he flipped through and said “say out loud the card you’re thinking of”, I did just that, and BOOM! he says the same card as I just did. Next time Nefarious said her own card guess, and again BOOM! it was correct. I’m sure it’s something like when he’s flipping through only one of the cards is the right way around, or there’s a tiny flipping delay around that card or something, because he definitely does seem to be “forcing” the thought in some way.

Speaking of secrets, I’ve been making loads of these secret compartment books:

This one is made out of an old book of Nefarious’s (as it was made for her and no old book of mine sits convincingly on her shelf), on which in addition to cutting out the storage area, I’ve lined it with green velvet (sorry, I know the picture doesn’t show that) and framed it in foil. It really turned out nicely. I’ve made a few others as well, including some non-square ones to fit specific items.

After the break are more pictures and some food experiments too.

More of this hidden compartment book:

I may have mentioned that a while back I got a vacuum bagger. I got it for packing purposes, but I’ve found it much more useful for food prep, specifically fish. Here it is getting ready tp cook some trout, which I’ve packed up with carrot slivers, green onion, and some sweet balsamic fig marinade if I remember right (it’s totally buried, but there really is a load of fish in there):

I let the fish marinate alongside fresh spices and vegetables, and then boil it inside this plastic, which means that it stews inside its own juices. I only like fish that’s cooked quite rare, but cooking this way you can cook the fish as long as you want (within reason) and it’s still incredibly soft and tender, and has more flavor than anything fried. To say nothing of the fact that fried fish needs a lot of butter to be ideal, and this requires literally none, so the calories are much lower I expect.

As you can see that one was served alongside udon noodles and veggies which were pan friend, mostly because I really like taking these soft noodles and making them a little crispy and darkened in places. Oh, so sweet and delicious! Nefarious goes totally nuts for them too, and has been digging our cooking lately which is great.

However, I have something to share in the truly disgusting category. I cooked egg in the eyeball soap mold. I thought it would look cool to have the yellow yolk as the eye, and then the whites of two eggs as the remainder, but unfortunately I forgot to lube the mold so it broke a bit on the way out and looked even grosser than it’s “supposed to”.

Eggs totally disgust me already so I don’t know what I was thinking!

I feel particularly exhausted so I’ll probably not post again until the weekend.

Usual disclaimer: this is un-proof-read.

Anyway, hopefully I will be asleep soon because tomorrow morning I have yet another stressful doctor’s appointment right after I drop Nefarious off at school. I’m crazy tired in the mornings, but I still much prefer morning appointments because they’re convenient, and more importantly the doctors have more energy to dedicate to you. The latter point can make a massive difference in the treatment you receive in my experience.

Oh and before I go, one very mildly amusing thing about this morning, the patient in line before me (not sure what the cause of her chronic pain was) was also named “Shannon”, so I was a little confused at first when the doctor came in and yelled out our name and a moment later she got up, not me. Other than that I have nothing but ranting about what bad drivers everyone else in Toronto is, especially since I had to drive through Chinatown on the way to the hospital. Sad but true that sometimes the stereotypes ring true.

To begin, I made a new soap mold in the same series using the same method of making a master in clay and then pouring a silicone mold. This time instead of one eyeball, you get a bunch. The gold one is pineapple scented and the darker one is bubble gum flavor (I know, it should have been pink) with some powdered walnut hull mixed in. You can click on all these pictures to zoom in by the way.

I’ve been experimenting a little with putting a “ZENTASTIC SOAPWORKS” stamp onto the back, by suspending the stamp in the liquid soap, but my method is far from ideal so the results still leave a little to be desired. That said, I do grok how to fix it so the next batch I make will look much cleaner.

I’m also starting to do a little more experimenting with multiple colors. This white and blue-purple soap is a mix of camphor and eucalyptus, and was made by first pouring in some shea butter soap without any additives and sloshing it around in the “veins” and then letting it pool in the eyeball and harden before adding the main body of soap. Anyway, I’m likely done with posting soap projects for a while because I’ve committed to a big (and fascinating) programming contract, but if you would like some do feel free to contact me (via email to snowrail@gmail.com is best, with a subject line that makes me notice it among all the spam that still gets through gmail’s filters).

I started by making a plug. I cut an ovalized-rectangle out of a 3/4″ thick plywood board and covered it with a thin layer of Sculpey and baked it (just to save on clay, since it’s more expensive than scrap wood). Then I built up the eyeball and other details as a second stage, roughed out and essentially done, but not completely cleaned up.

After baking that I used my Dremel to touch it up a little, smoothing out tooling marks and seams between pieces of Sculpey that I’d added and not perfectly blended into the foundation. I also painted it just to give it one more level of smoothness. I then built a little cardboard box to create the mold inside. I used a bit more Sculpey to join the soap plug to the bottom of the box and I also made a little signature just for fun. The box and plug were then both oiled with release agent (essentially a food safe Vaseline).

The two halves of liquid silicone are mixed 50-50, which I did in a plastic container using Caitlin’s kitchen scale so as to be precise. I thoroughly mixed it (last time I didn’t do that enough and I ended up with some uncured sections) and slowly poured it into the box from a good height so as to reduce air bubbles. That was then left to sit overnight as this formulation of silicone takes a good five hours to fully cure.

The next day I peeled off the box (I was worried that the cardboard might stick — not that it would have really mattered) and then popped out the plug. It came out easily, but the uncured clay stuck a bit so I washed it out uneventfully. There were some air bubbles around the signature, but none on the bar of soap (I’m not really sure why). This is one of the cleanest molds I’ve made, and the brick-like shape makes it really easy to work with.

I didn’t take any pictures of making the soap base, but because I’m using a melt-and-pour base rather than messing with lye and all that to make soap from scratch, the process is really simple. I cut up a bunch of 1″ cubes of goat milk soap base and melted it in a glass measuring pitcher in the microwave. I then added some blue-back mica (powdered clay I think), some peppermint essential oil, and a bunch of raspberry seeds as an exfoliant and used a whisk to mix it all up. This had the consistency of a thick fruit smoothy, so it was a simple matter to pour it into the mold. I ended up having made more than I needed, so I poured the excess into a silicone ice cube tray.

About an hour later I popped the stars out of the ice cube tray and the detail was absolutely perfect, although the bottom 3/16″ or so was foamy, almost like an Aero chocolate bar in consistency, because of the air bubbles. This part of the soap was very soap and could be compressed easily by hand, which is what I did. The definition and sharpness was perfect.

Then I bent the silicone mold for the bar so as to separate the edges, and then turned it over to let the soap drop out as I flexed it a bit. I was extremely pleased with how much detail had been captured. It also had the same issues with the layer of foam, but it compressed easily and since I’d given myself plenty of thickness to work with it ended up being a good thing because it let me compress and smooth out the flat side of the soap into something with a more organic form that matched the face better.

Finally, here are three more close-up pictures of the eyeball soap:

There are currently a set of candies curing in our kitchen — pink-tinted white chocolate lollipops with a marshmallow and cotton candy flavoring — that I’ll post about in the next day or two, and I’ve also got a couple of nice molds on the go for candles.

On Caitlin’s blog you may have read about the gingerbread they made, but the best part was that because of the lack of eyeballs, Nefarious made one of them a one-eyed demon with candy cane horns, and all the others have screaming mouths on account their fear of the demon. Too funny.

Today we were at Canadian Tire getting me a balaclava and looking for a basketball hoop to put up here in the studio, and Caitlin discovered that they were selling one-man tents for the crazy low price of $14.99, a deal too good to resist!!! It was just big enough to fit her old child-size mattress, and we filled the rest of the innards with pillows, blankets, and favorite stuffed animals, so Nefarious has quite the exciting camp out this evening. And “thank god” says the tooth fairy that they did not have to search for an under-the-pillow tooth inside an all-too-tiny-for-adults tent!!!

Anyway, UFC time.

ModBlog earlier today mentioned what they called “Howie’s innovative procedure” for eyeball tattooing in regards to the clip below, and for now my comment on it remains censored (hopefully they change that, because it seems a little lame to change history out of contempt — and even if it does eventually get through moderation, it sits there so long as to effectively scrub it from the conversation… sad that this still goes on).

Howie is the artist that’s done a majority of the procedures out there, including mine, and has surely improved on the technique through doing many, but the procedure itself (that of injecting the ink between the layers) was invented and innovated by me, and it’s something that I’m quite proud of so it was a little annoying to see my name get scrubbed out of its history. I’d wanted an eyeball tattoo for years before we eventually did it, and the idea for the procedure actually came from the procedure that was used to implant the “JewelEye”, in which saline is injected between the layers to form an elevated bubble for the implant. I figured that if you’re not looking for hard edged lines, that a similar injection of ink would be the most effective way to do it.

All things considered these guys did a remarkable job. I wonder if they got the idea from the Internet or one of the magazines that wrote about our procedures, or if they got the idea from watching the episode of CSI that was obviously based on Lane’s photos of my eye being done?

That’s a bit of a loaded question, because as I understand it, the main problem with American healthcare is not so much the quality of the healthcare but the issues of class inequality and the fact that a significant percentage of people do not have proper access to healthcare. So as a reasonably well-off individual, I’d assume that under the US system I’d be well insured, and thus get excellent health care, the best in the world by some accounts, and quite likely better than I’m getting now. However, I don’t think that fact necessarily means that it’s a better system. Also, I do know wealthy Americans, self-employed folks in general, who skimp on paying for medical insurance and as a result find themselves in very unpleasant circumstances when things go wrong — so even the well off can be failed by the US system.

Here in Canada I’ve always had easy and completely free access to my family doctor, often many times a month. If I want an appointment, I usually have it the next day or at most two or three days off, and I can always go to any number of walk-in clinics as well who provide similar service with only a few hours wait (also covered by government healthcare). Emergency room service is acceptably fast, although if you go in for something that’s not emergency, you can find yourself waiting for a few hours or sometimes more, but that’s not really an issue of who’s paying, that’s more of a procedural decision at the hospital that’s difficult to find objective fault with. Most things — all the doctors visits and all the testing — are free, but I do have to pay for prescriptions (which can add up), eye care, and dental. These things are covered by employers for the majority of people with regular jobs, but I’m not in that category and never have been.

The problem that you have in Canada, that I’ve experienced to some extent, is that when you find yourself in a position where something less normal is going on, and you need to see experts, that you can at times have significant wait times — a few months or more — to see a specialist. This is more because we just don’t have enough qualified experts — the system itself does its best to get you in as quickly as possible — than because of some sort of “rationing” conspiracy that’s keeping you from seeing doctors. That said, I’m sure that the amount of specialists is influenced by there being less money in the system in general than there is in the US. Because the conditions that I’m personally dealing with are often excruciatingly physically painful, these wait times are very difficult to cope with, and I have sometimes wondered whether I’d be better off in a country where money can give you unfair treatment. Objectively I don’t like the idea that a wealthier person gets preferential healthcare, because I really feel that healthcare must be egalitarian, but on a subjective level it’s harder to believe in those ideals when you’re personally affected.

I’d love to see more money in Canada invested in healthcare — more technology, and more doctors — but in terms of the system itself, I’ve been happy with my experiences with it, all things considered. As to whether I think the US should switch to a universal system, of course I feel that it’s the duty of all nations to ensure the health of their citizens, but I think it’s important that the US not sacrifice the significant lead that it has in many categories to achieve this.

I don’t know anything yet about the results of my most recent surgery, which was done to try and figure out why my muscles are breaking down seemingly without explanation, but the incision that was left by the surgeon was beautifully closed and I expect I will have little to no scar — unlike the brutal gash left from the last two surgeries, that healed to about a half an inch wide scar with many stitch-marks from the staples that held it closed. Of course that’s a photo of it above, at one week old. I’m going with the assumption that the clean work and attention to detail on the incision is a sign that the work that was done internally is of similar quality.

Other than that, we’ve been having fun until school starts — last night we strapped flashlights to the RC cars and took them to the park for night races, and this week I should have most of the parts I need to get the Sterling on the road (the new exhaust went on today), so hopefully that actually happens before the snow falls this year. All-in-all though during this period where there’s no school or summer camp I’m pretty wiped out by day’s end so I haven’t been too motivated to write here. Nefarious is off at the CNE today with her grandmother, her second time this week, having just seen the amazing two-plus minute underwater escape act by Kristen Johnson (one of the most intense escape artists in the world) with an old friend. Might do another road trip next week, at least a short one, in part to get away from the night time noise, as my neighbor’s band has a big concert coming up so they’ve been putting a lot of work into practicing lately. Since I’m here alone, I finally watched Suicide Club (Jisatsu sâkuru), which I really enjoyed and recommend you check out, if you can find a torrent site that isn’t getting pushed offline…

*RING*

Interrupted by the doorbell, I just got a great surprise delivery of some homemade preserves and a conversation with a friend, which is a nice piece of synchronicity, as just an hour or two earlier there was another ring at the doorbell which contained a box of books, many of which were books on how to make such preserves that I’d ordered for Caitlin as a present.

I also got some sailing books in that shipment, so I think I’ll now read them in the bath and pretend I’ve achieved that dream. I continue to more and more seriously eyeball a nice big live-aboard catamaran on which I can spend a few years sailing around the world…

I put up another nice interview for the book at bodmodsex — I really would appreciate feedback so they’re in perfect form for print (email is fine if it’s more convenient). And no, even though there’s ranting and raving on BME that I’m “stealing” their material, that’s total BS and the text is all new and any photos are used with permission of the owners (some are new, and some have been posted on a myriad of sites). Sheesh. Focus on building a good site instead of whining about me.

In much more exciting and ego-satisfying news, I discovered that I am the #1 image result for the term “eyeball” on Google Images. Any attention is good attention, right???

Speaking of my eye, I went in for a consultation for laser eye surgery. I haven’t decided yet whether it’s something I want to do, but I wanted to know if I was even eligible. It was the first time they’d ever seen a tattooed eye of course, but after various tests (curvature, pressure, and so on), it again showed no abnormalities or damage that they could find, and they assured me that it should make no difference on the surgery. That said, they felt they’d err on the side of caution and recommend PRK over LASIK because PRK puts less stress on the eye.

So anyway, more good news. I consider what happened with my eye (and I believe the same happened to a woman in New Zealand with UV eye tattoos) is the “worse reasonable case scenario”, and while occasionally nerve-wracking in its initial uncertainty, it’s really gone remarkably well.

[Side note: Nefarious is having a bath after we're swimming which is why I've got a chance to post. She just excitedly called me in -- "I can explain the faucet to you. The 'C' stands for 'cold', and the 'H' stands for 'hot'. That's why they have those letters but not the words!". Watching her learn to read, and discover the world through the eyes of a reader, has really been wonderful.]

This is all hand drawn by the way and about 300 frames.

Translation:

1. “frog and tod / bi ari”
(Frog and Toad / By Ari)

2. “frog and tod gow to the prc”
(Frog and Toad go to the park.)

3. “tod goz to the prc and plaz”
(Toad goes to the park and plays.)

4. “frog wz wochin tod”
(Frog was watching Toad.)

We took the pages she made and I reprinted them at 1/4 size and bound them into a little book, which she then read to her dolls (cutest scene ever). The calendar by the way is a daily x-off until Halloween.

I did a little work on my Uilenspiegel painting as well. This is the base colour. It’ll be touched up of course, but the big change is that it’ll all be lined in the final stage which is what really brings it out. I have high hopes for this particular painting and think it’s going quite well so far.

We’re all prepped for tomorrow’s zombie walk (watch out)… click the flier below to visit the official site. Caitlin (who will be the primary makeup artist) I think is going as a walking autopsied corpse, Nefarious is a princess party zombie with an extra eyeball, and I’m going with gouged out eyes and a wide stitched up wound. I’ll post photos tomorrow evening.

I made a new video of my eye… I don’t have any editing software on this computer (I’m still using Caitlin‘s) so I just posted it as it came off the camera…

My eyeball tattoo (done by Howie/LunaCobra) remains one of my favorite body modifications, along with the magnetic implant (by Steve Haworth) and my split tongue and others. Admittedly it just looks like a growth/deformity and some strange spots, but I just love it… It’s approaching one year old, making it, along with Josh’s blue eye, the oldest injection-style eye tattoo out there, and the oldest one with a complication. The “cyst” type structure still has a bit of a dull ache from time to time, although I admit that it might just be a matter of feeling paranoid about a headache! It’s certainly not enough to stop me from wanting to add more.

It’s crazy how popular this has gotten… As well as being featured on CSI, I think Howie and a couple others have done around two dozen by now. When I was still with BME, only a small percentage of the people I knew chose to submit their pictures, so I suspect there could be even more people than I’m guessing. For example, here’s Stevve, one of Howie’s other victims customers:

Photos: LunaCobra

They’re doing a “demon eye” on him; this is the first stage of the work. Next they’re going to be doing a layer of black ink which should blend nicely. You can see some great pictures of Josh’s eyeball (a mix of blues), as well as other eyeball tattoos in my previous ModBlog posts. Definitely I’m very jealous every time I see one, and I hope Howie comes up to Toronto this summer again.

Anyway, it looks like what happened is that when I rubbed my eye too hard about a week ago (I knew at the time I'd damaged it), I broke a bunch of blood vessels in the tissue (which was weakened by the tattooing) above where the muscle injects on the outer edge of my eye and a hematoma has formed over the muscle, which is also slightly inflamed. This should break down over the next few weeks without issue, although I have another appointment in a week to have it checked out.

The doctors were nice and gave me a printout of one of the ultrasound shots. Assuming I'm remembering what I was explained to me correctly, there's a legend underneath this shot.

Note: I may have C and D shifted up slightly; this wasn't the clearest of the shots so I'm not totally sure, but it's the one that was on the screen at the end so it was the one I was about to get a printout of…
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