Month: October 2000

Tattoo U

The new tattoo. Another in my ongoing series of tattoos based on letterforms I think are beautiful. From a visual standpoint, I’ve been wanting something big, black, and smooth-edged that would peek outside of most clothing, but that I could cover up when I wanted to look respectable. As I was walking home from CBGB’s last night (this month’s Homo Corps, where I looked like an ass because I was wearing a suit and carrying a box of Jordan almonds since I’d been at a wedding earlier in the evening), I had this flash of inspiration that a letter with an umlaut on my back would be a nice touch, so that the dots would be visible above the neck of a t-shirt.

So I started looking at old-style serif typefaces, thinking that an “o”, with its off-axis center, would be very lovely. Just for kicks I started looking at some bolder sans serifs and other letters, and the Meta Bold “u” really looked outstanding. I decided to move the dots of the umlaut out to the sides a bit more than where they would sit if the letter were used in text, since it looks better that way on its own. Once I did, I noticed this lovely effect where the letter began to look like two simplified figures standing side-by-side, one reaching out to the other. A little precious perhaps, but that little bit of added conceptual value was the clincher. (see how a nerd like me can turn an otherwise kick-ass tattoo into a tedious exercise of over-analysis?)

This one hurt like a motherfucker. It was so much bigger and darker than either of my last two, and went right over the bony parts of my spine. The sensation of the needle in the soft parts of my neck was also extremely unsettling. It was so uncomfortable that this time I give myself at least two or three days before I start thinking about another.

Good Gadget Grief

In the ongoing saga of my acquisition of new computer equipment, all my new peripherals arrived at my home today while I was at work haggling with Apple and my credit card companies trying to sort out why it’s so difficult for me to get them to accept the thousands of dollars I’m trying to spend. Luckily, I think we’ve got it all sorted out and the computer will go out tomorrow, so soon there’ll be something to connect to all these new peripherals.

But let me rant for a bit about some distressing things I’ve noticed about this new wave of computer equipment design (bullets, P.J., it’s all about the bullets):

  • Big-ass AC adapters are not a good solution. sure, I’m sure a lot of these vendors are into the idea of making all these new candy-colored gadgets seem light and sleek by removing the heavy parts of the power supply, but those honkin’ big adapters that came with my CD-RW, scanner, USB hub, router, DSL modem, et al., do not all fit on a power strip! Nothing was wrong with traditional power cords. Additional extension cords snaking around my floor will be problematic.
  • And speaking of all this candy-colored nonsense, I find it pretty apalling that the iMac-ification of contemporary product design results in such a horrendous waste of plastic. I don’t need a full set of replacement handles in all the colors of the rainbow for my scanner.
  • And a waste of space! All this curviness that the kids dig these days is just a freakin’ veneer that tries (ironically, while making the truth very obvious thanks to all the transparency) to disguise the fact that all these components are still little rectangular things on the inside. My CD burner is just a normal box, but it comes inside a big, curvy plastic shell that makes it unstackable and increases its volume needlessly by half. And the DSL modem, router, and USB hub are all just basically circuit boards of about the same size, but they all come in curvy plastic boxes of various shapes and sizes to ensure that I can’t stack them in one neat little pile. There are smooth little plasticy things piled all the fuck over the place now. Pain in my butt.
  • Ooooh, but I’m still so excited. I love new treats.

Treats!

I worked my ass off this summer to try and stabilize the cash flow situation and earn enough to finally get a new computer and a treat or two. Now that some of the checks have started rolling in, I’m discovering just how much stress I let myself feel when I was slightly less dirt poor. A little cushioning can go a long way, it seems.

And I’ve also been having fun playing with the first of the new treats — my swank new digital camera. I’m still getting to know the camera and what it can do, but in the meantime click them thumbnail thingies to peek at some samples:

 

Me on the CouchMe on the CouchMe on the Couch
Me on the Couch
Holly in Motion
Jason and His Jaw
Joe and Jason
Mike in Motion
Mike from Above

 

Meat Market

Forget all that queer counter-culture posturing you keep encountering on the Internet. Every gay blog I’ve looked at today has confessed to watching The Sexiest Bachelor in America last night, just like I did. We’re all ashamed. We were all horrified (if that eerie picture on Fox’s page for the show isn’t ominous, I don’t know what is). But we all made sure we didn’t have to pee during the swimsuit competition. (Which was lame, by the way. You know guys, there’s a reason the rest of the world makes fun of Americans for swaddling themselves with so much fabric on the beach. We look silly in all that fabric. And not as sexy as people are obviously hoping for.)

Despite the trashiness of this particular televised meat market — and for once it’s good to see men being the meat and not the shoppers, I might add — leave it to American televison to make sure that the winner was the most wholesome of all when it came right down to it. As if the only way to excuse such a tawdry (yet fun, in its way) celebration of beefcake was to show that in the end, it’s just good manners that matter the most.

But maybe that’s being a little too cynical of me. After all, this was on Fox, a fine, upstanding network if there ever was one. I’m not crazy about the lucky Mr. Virginia, but I was surpised and pleased that the judges (by coercion or actual fairness) would grant the prize to a guy who was all hairy and beefy, but not cut like a gym rat, the way the other guys were. Watch the swimsuit competition: he’s puffing up his chest so much to hold in his gut that he might pop a lung. Good for him, even if he was the blandest of them all.

I Would Like a Boy

Just to throw you all a bone, I contributed my own list to Lori’s really fun and sweet I Would Like a Girl/Boy… project. It was surprisingly hard for me to put the list together, because when I sat down and thought about it, I realized that there are very few things that I actively seek, just a vast array of things I respond to. Recently, David at (the totally excellent site) PlanetSOMA managed to articulate some of the key points better than I ever could:

I love cute little geeky guys. They’re only one of many types which can get me going sexually, but they’re probably the only type which will ever have a real shot at me romantically.

By the way, I’m not using geek as a synonym for “computer nerd” here. The two types merge sometimes but not always. My definition of geekiness is based more on an active intellect combined with an almost childlike enthusiasm for a few really esoteric subjects (one of which may or may not be digital in nature). The “childlike” part is very important; a good geek is first and foremost a big kid.

Also, now that I’ve just gotten a reasonably swanky new digital camera, I’d wanted to do something for Behind the Curtain, until I realized that it was a one-time thing, not an ongoing project. Well, screw that: I’ll just go ahead and do it anyway. Watch for an unveiling, here or at UltraSparky. If my ISP ever manages to get my freakin’ DSL hooked up (and increase my hosting allotment in the process) I’ll also get around to filling this place up with a bunch of new pictures and content and stuff. I mean, don’t hold your breath or anything, but it could happen.