Pasithea

Burning Man was awesome! I had a fantastic time this year. :)

It was very windy and dusty this year. A lot worse than last year, but our little art tent withstood it pretty well. Its design worked as hoped, keeping us cool during the day and warm at night as well as keeping out the majority of the dust. We ended up talking about the design of it to a lot of people and showing them how it worked.

Stacey's power management system for our solar array also worked great. Our lights came on at dusk and stayed on all night and we always had plenty of power to spare.

The boxes/camp seats were solid and got a lot of use and kept us fairly tidy and organized.

The first coat I made the week before BM ended up being a good fit for a friend and she really seemed to enjoy it (especially since it kept tending towards rather cold at night) The coat I made for myself also ended up being pretty darned awesome and several chilly nights I went around nearly naked with my great coat thrown over panties and stockings. A comfortable and awesome-looking coat really changed how I felt about being out at night compared with last year. .. Actually, I took a lot of stuff I had made over the past year and had many different flamboyant costumes and it was rather fun. :)

Oh! And, happily, my solar oven performed rather well. There are a few things I could do to improve it. Notably, the counterbalance system was a pain to set up when loading up the oven, but other than that, it performed really well. Making my own hot meals at BM was a nice switch from last year when I lived mostly on granola. :)

My bike was also fun, though it was a little underwhelming compared to many of the bikes there. Plus, on the way up, our roof rack had a malfunction and we lost Stacey's bike so we didn't get to ride around together as much as we'd have liked and I ended up not riding my bike as much. Also, we had a problem with the SpokePov upload tools so I didn't have anything on my wheel but the default patterns.

This year I made a lot more effort to go out and interact with other people. I spent some time with friends and some time off wandering alone. I played flute for a lot of people and joined in several different jam sessions and went to a lot of different events. I even got up the nerve to make my way over to camp Beaverton for a lesbian social mixer (and ended up getting tagged by the monkey and kissed by a few different women. O_O; ) Met lots of really cool people and got lots of great ideas for future art and performance projects.

There was so much incredible and amazing art that I can't even begin to try to quantify it all. Best I can do is touch on a few of the highlights. The temple was incredible, the Raygun Gothic Rocket ship was amazing, the miniature ruins made of clay made from the Playa itself were really really neat. The alien eggs, the giant watch and zoetropes made from the insides of its gears. The trees that had focused microphones and changed colors reacting to sound, and on and on and on and on. It just didn't stop!

There were also some really really amazing vehicles this year. At one point, a chunk of New Orleans drove past my camp. Seriously. A bunch of people sitting in front of a little cafe with a live jazz band playing. The people were dining and dressed in period clothing because it was a performance as well as a vehicle. (There were lots of performance pieces this year, see gentle_gamer's report for more about this) but I confess that probably my favorite piece of art at Burning Man this year was the Neverwas Haul. Photos just don't do this thing justice. It's a 3-story tall victorian era steampunk house vehicle. It's richly detailed inside and out. It is utterly fantastic.

Anyhow. All in all, I summarize my experience as A+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Will do again.

And now I'm going to go work on some cleaning and unpacking and art while I'm still energized. :) I feel a need to do something more spectacular for next year. :)

Et ees still not complete but behold....

SqueebleFlornk by ~dv-girl on deviantART

Sunday morning I decided I wanted to get a horn for my bike for Burning Man but not a regular horn, something silly. My idea was a squeaky rubber frog. I cycled to Toys R Us and found that they have no rubber animals, squeaky or not. I was sad.

So I went to the pet store a little ways away and browsed the dog toys. I found the blue squeebly creature and decided that with some painting and such, he'd make a pretty good horn. Then I saw the flörnkle, just laying there! THESE PITIFUL HUMANS! They were marketing it as a dog toy! The flörnkle, as I'm sure you know is the strange hammer-like thing attached to the rear of the ship. When tilted or shaken in different ways it makes a variety of sounds. Squeaks, quacks, moos, etc. I had to have it.

I went to the hardware store and picked up a spring and, using some pipe clamps and an old bicycle tube I already had, I mounted the flörnkle on the stem and to an anchor inside the tail and covered the spring with the inner tube so it would not damage the tail at high rates of flörnkulation.

The tail itself is simple press board with some structure behind it and an array of alternate flashing LEDs. Yellow and green.

The white whiskers at the ends of the handlebars are clusters of fiberopitcs connected to green LEDs to make light-up bicycle pom poms and the lizardlamp is flexible sculpy over my normal bicycle light.

On the front wheel you can see a single bright yellow LED SpokePOV. We're waiting on sensors to finish the other two. Stacey has modified them for me to run off a single bussed sensor and we're going to upgrade the EEPROM from 4K to 1M, then modify the software to handle the new paging. The end result will be that I will be able to run ~1000 frames of animation on the wheel of the bike when its in motion, though for BM, it's probably going to be still images only.

The spokePov cluster will be moved to the rear wheel and I"m just going to put a string of green and yellow flashing LEDs on the front wheel.

Most of the rest is just paint and rhinestones. Oh, and a couple of cheap plastic plates from Michaels that I modified.

The really cool part is that the entire tail attaches with a single quick-release and all the rest of the parts come on and off very easily as well so I can strip it down for storage/transport and re-assemble it in less than 10 minutes.

The spring is configured for the bumpiness of dirt on the playa and has been a little difficult to test around town but I've rode the bike about 10 miles with all the gear on it, jumping off curbs and hitting every pothole I could find and it seems to be pretty solid and deliver an amusing range of noises when its jarred. It just makes me laugh like an idiot and makes everyone who's seen it laugh or smile. Flörnkulation is a complete success!

Though it's also made me a rockstar to the neighbor's children. I can't go outside my apartment for five minutes without being swarmed and asked about my bike. Doh!


Also, I took the opportunity to upload a different photo of the forest panel of my Burning Man tent. It's still not fantastic and doesn't really capture it, but it's better than the previous photo.


Burning Man Tent - Fores Panel by ~dv-girl on deviantART

Or guy help, if you happen to know where I can find this:

I'm looking for one of those tiny glass vials that perfume samples come in. The ones that are about as big around as a pencil and about an inch or so long.

Anyone have one or know where I could find one?

I've got so I hate showing a working in progress before it's done but... It's for this:



It's a wild deer's leg bone case that will contain a crow quill pen, parchment, and a miniature inkwell (IE the vial)

I still have to do the scrimshaw and polishing on the case. Just finally got the nerve to do the cuts. I was hoping that the bottom end would be big enough inside I could use a tiny vial from the bead store but it's not big enough.

I suppose, worst case, I can get some more map gas and some glass tube and make my own ampule, but the last thing I need right now is another project. So if anyone has one or has any other simple ideas (I'd like to avoid plastic, would consider using brass or copper tube) I'd appreciate them.

This object is going to be made to be worn so whatever the solution is, it needs to be pretty resistant to leaking ink all over the wearer.

I didn't remember to take a camera last weekend to take photos of my tie-dyed tent but it's just as well because it is a work in progress. The tie-dyed parts were meant as a backdrop for me to put the rest of my art over and as a fallback position in case I got sick of the project and abandoned it.

Well. Looks like I'm going ahead with it. this evening I pinned up a 10ft wide (at the narrow part!) 6ft tall panel of my tent and got crazy with the airbrush.


Burning Man Tent - Ocean Panel by ~dv-girl on deviantART


Also, since he's what inspired me and I haven't posted any photos of him (and he was conveniently out and wandering around the kitchen tonight for no explicable reason) Here's Signpost Squid that I built for Burning Man last year. He was supposed to have a dry erase board and let people leave notes but I never got around to it. He ended up being a good landmark for people anyhow though.

This year, he'll have the water panel as his backdrop. :)


Burning Man - Signpost Squid by ~dv-girl on deviantART

I haven't been posting a lot of art lately, though I have been doing a lot of stuff.

So. Today, in addition to a bunch of other stuff, I worked on a couple of things for my Burning Man camp.

We pack several of the things we take with us in those big ugly plastic bins they sell at Costco.

Witness example A:


Last year, we were going to make some cushions and skins to put on them, but we kind of ran out of time and energy. Stacey did make the cushions for them. Kinda a cool design. It's a very stiff foam that's glued together with E6000. The green piece in the middle is lower than the other two because there's a 1x6 piece of wood that fits into there. That distributes the weight in the middle of the box across to the edges and gives the box a lot more strength.





So.. A couple days ago, prickvixen and I were at Ikea and she spied some bolts of canvas with interesting patterns on it. Better yet, the stuff was REALLY cheap. $1.99/yard. (plain canvas generally runs more like $14.99/yard)

So... I got a few of the patterns and last night got to sewing.



I think I'm going to add a seam at the corners to make them look sharper, but anyhow... The fit on the cushion and are velcro'd t the box so the winds of the playa can't blow them away and I have more seats in my camp now, and I don't have to look at ugly plastic boxes.


Also compliments of Ikea:



My 7-dollar solar oven. It's a 5-dollar golf umbrella, a mylar emergency blanket, and some twine to change the shape of the umbrella into a more focused parabola shape.

At ~3PM ~75 degrees out, partially cloudy and very windy, I was able to get an instant air temp of 150f at my focus point. I couldn't hold my hand in it for more than about 30 seconds. If I put a cooker box there, I'd easily be up over 300.

Likely as not, at Burning Man, I'll have to defocus it so as not to incinerate stuff.

Best part is that it still folds down into an umbrella shape. I'm going to lash two bamboo poles to the handle so that it will unfold into a tripod with a rope for my cook pot hanging from the middle. That will also help anchor the oven. I'll probably also add a couple of tie-downs, just in case of wind, but I'm pretty darned happy for a half-hour build.

Lots of other little projects too, but I have to go pick Stacey up from the airport now. :)

When we visited Seattle back in November, I allowed myself to purchase a really tiny ocarina. I've been playing ocarina since about 1989. I still have my first one though it's rather worn and beat up. This one is the smallest I'd ever seen. It has a very bright sound, though it can be rather piercing. On the plus side, it's small enough that I can carry it with me all the time and always have a musical instrument handy.

I'd been meaning to make a necklace to put it on for some time. It'd just been on some black nylon chord since I got it. So.. Friday I went to the bead store, spent way way too long picking out some stuff and viola. An hour or so of fiddling around and I made the first neclace I've made in years. (It's the brown one with the pink, white, and blue beads) I really have to find somewhere cheaper than Global Beads to shop. It was fine for a one-time project but way too pricey to do use regularly.

A few weeks ago, I was visiting prickvixen and asked hir what I should draw. Sie said, "Oh... I don't know. A prickvixen sodomizing a rainbow!"

So... I said, "Okie dokie!"

(Link obviously NSFW. Also, Furaffinity will require you log in to see this abomination)

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1939278/

BUT WAIT! There's more! I forget how this came up but I was hanging out with paka and somehow the idea of Stimpy giving birth to hundreds of SpiderRens came up, and of course I drew that too.

I didn't have any refs onhand, so Stimpy is way off-model but somehow that only adds to how unpleasant this is.

Enjoy... http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1939030


Ugh. My gallery is so ruined now...

I swear that people are blind or something. :(

Yesterday when I was biking home from work, I stopped at a red light. There was a very old woman in the street carrying about 20lbs of groceries. She was making steps that were barely moving her more than two or three inches at a time. I asked her if she needed help. Poor thing. Even with me holding her groceries and her hand, it was difficult for her to step onto the curb. I walked her about a block to the bus stop where she was going; carried her groceries and held her hand. Had to ask a guy if she could have his seat. Whatever happened to manners? For that matter. What the heck, people? There were 3 other people at that intersection, two who'd crossed the road at the same time. They were all walking and unburdened. I'm sure they saw she was struggling. I don't understand how people can be so blind. :/

But it's not all people I guess. After helping an old lady across the street, I continued my wicked and deviant lifestyle by..... Sewing! Weirder still, I did it socially. There were a couple of people knitting, some people working on computer stuff and a few people playing games. Stacey went too and seemed to have a good time and like everyone there, and for my part... I was in a room with like a dozen people and didn't freak out and go into extrovert mode or run away and hide. Huh.

In other news, last night got me thinking about this crazy rave coat I made recently. I think I'm going to take another look at it, but I might give it away. It's fun and I enjoyed making it, but I'm not sure the colors really suit me and there's someone else who'd probably get a lot more use out of it. I need to think about it a little more though.

Here's the rest of the stuff from my sketchbook that was NSFW.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1823687/ 8Ball
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1823691/ Imitation Prickvixen
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1823692/ Spider-Ren's Hatching
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/1823697/ Preying Mantis Porn


I'm going to Hell now.

I'm a link thief today! Stole this one from Triggur.

Downloadable forms of many classic 'learn to draw' type books.

http://processjunkie.blogspot.com/2007/09/best-figure-drawing-books-ever.html