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Heraldic Needlepoint, Strike Two: DEATH METAL BEER STEIN
I blogged recently about taking my friend Kenn Munk‘s whimsical “Barcode Griffins” design, and turning it into something that looks like it would be on the cover of the condom packets sold in the men’s room of a Lederhosen factory. I mean, it was a pretty powerful effect, and not ineffective… but not really something,…
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Three biggest features of “The Thing”: cold, colld, and col-l-l-l-d!
About twenty-five people had a great time watching “The Thing” next to the frozen Brandywine river on Saturday night. For a screen, we ended up stretching a 4’x15′ tarp across two six-foot pieces of angle iron, bolted together to make one span, then clamped to some tent poles (thanks, Chris!) The whole range of human…
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Your suggestions for rigging a sidecar-portable 4’x11′ projection screen?
This Friday night, we’re going to be showing John Carpenter’s “The Thing” out in the snow, which of course is the best place to see a movie about a horrific alien shapeshifter trying to outwit and absorb a team of antarctic scientists (scientists with flamethrowers, naturally — “The Thing” is one of the canonical “kill…
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Green2Steam: Like a tea party. With fire. For MANS.
I keep writing and rewriting this blog post about how Eric Lewis, Harold Ross, Randy Schmidt and I met at Harold’s studio last weekend to see what coffee tastes like when you start with green beans, roast the beans, grind the beans, then brew them up in a fire-powered siphon brewer. All outdoors, because coffee-roasting…
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Spiritual Ancestors of Sir Mix-A-Lot
Kate went to a kniting party yesterday afternoon, and Lydia and I headed into the basement to screw the new anamorphic lens onto the Commando Projector. I had gone to eBay to buy the cheapest piece of “scope”-print film I could find, to test with. That turned out to be an eight-minute dance scene cut…
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The first batch of Nerd Merit Badges arrived!
The first batch of Nerd Merit Badges arrived! The little inch-and-a-half embroidered patches are backed with “hook-side” velcro. They came from the embroiderer in a small plastic tube, the patches back to back, like a little stick of candy. Here they are, decanted into Ikea bins: The little Tikaro gearxels aren’t merit badges; I’m not…
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When bad things happen to your friends’ perfectly good art
I was really happy with how the PodPost Patch came out. A design at that small size was easy and fast to stitch, a nice break from stitching endless background on the boxcar alligator. And it was fun to send as a present! So I thought I’d stitch up Kenn Munk’s “Two griffins, rampant, with…
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Nerd Merit Badges, Swallows and Amazons (Zine-Style), and Twinchies
Randy and I want to make and sell merit badges for nerds. There’ll be a merit badge for knowing regular expressions. A merit badge for open-source committing. Merit badges for knowing COBOL, and maybe for knowing what command-G does on line printers. There will merit badges for reading Tengwar, speaking Klingon, and rolling twenties. I…
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Crafts Involving Sterno, Wizards, and Coffee
December really has turned into Sterno craft month. It turns out that it’s easy and fun to upgrade your winter crafts with FIRE, HUMANITY’S WEAPON AGAINST THE FROZEN AND BRUTAL WILDERNESS. For instance, my brother Oliver is in town (hurrah!), and he came over to build graham-cracker gingerbread houses with us. First, we decided that…
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West Chester Guerilla Drive-In Special Winter Widescreen Showing: THE THING
The scariest movie ever made — and that’s just a fact — is John Carpenter’s The Thing, about a shape-shifting alien buried in Antarctic ice for thousands of years, until it’s dug up by a team of scientists. Carpenter’s aim was to create a horror movie with a group of competent, educated protagonists, rather than…
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