I know, I know -- enough with the Daleks, right? WELL, I happened to find this link -- The Ultimate Dalek Factory -- yesterday evening and just about lost my mind. A BONA-FIDE PATTERN FOR CONSTRUCTING A HOMEMADE DALEK!!! Perfect. I haven't made one yet, though, since the pattern was kind of crude-looking and needed a bit of fixing up IMHO... so after spending hours and hours and hours and hours with my nose several millimeters away from the LCD screen, I ended up with this -- note that I've mirrored it so that the plans can be glued back to back, such that one ends up with a "pure" surface without losing the necessary information for putting the blasted thing together. You will note from the filename, by the way, that this set of plans has been designated "9b", suggesting (rightly, I might add) that I have made a whole bunch of sets of plans for Daleks with different color schemes. I haven't actually constructed any of them yet -- at some point this week I'm thinking I'll go buy some of that glossy photo paper for the occasion, though I may try making a test one beforehand to see how it goes. In the meantime, you're welcome to try your hand at this standard one. 🙂

Ultimately, however, I think the best homemade Dalek will result from a combination of this and previous methods. A la my second homemade Dalek -- at least for certain color schemes -- brass fasteners (or brass fasteners colored black with a sharpie) can be used for the Dalek bumps on the body. The limbs and eyestalk should be made of something less flat in order to preserve the more 3D qualities of the model. (As you can tell, I'm quite fond of using screws for the eyestalk.) Hey, speaking of 3D Daleks, check out these Lego designs.

Yes, I am totally in the grip of the Daleks' power at the moment. And why shouldn't I be? These things are badass! There should be Dalek-flavored ice cream.

I bet it would taste like pistachio.

Putting those brass fasteners in was incredibly tedious. (more...)

(more...)

So admittedly I haven't been working on the memoir as much lately as I'd like. "Work" has picked up a bit, and then I've kind of been sidetracked with watching a lot of downloaded foreign TV shows and DVD purchases and whatnot, so yeah. The air conditioning is also out, so I feel kind of hot and icky and don't really want to do anything, and I opened a window, which helps with the stuffiness, but things are still pretty muggy in here. The chirping birds are getting on my fucking nerves and last night people in the neighborhood were outside yelling at each other at 2 AM. I haven't been sleeping well. YAY EXCUSES!

Anyway, here's an excerpt from the memoir (if you need to, click the image below to see the large print version):

So in addition to hopefully working on the memoir a bit this weekend and getting another SC article up, I'm thinking I want to write another short story. Nothing for submission to magazines or anything -- fairly convinced that avenue is a waste of time; nobody wants to pay for my stuff -- but I might post it here or on SC if I ever get around to it. But right now I'm so hot that I just want to take a cold shower in lieu of going swimming because I do not have access to a pool. But I wish I had a bottle of chlorine so I could breathe in the fumes and pretend I'm in the wave pool at Wild World.

Excerpt from an IRC convo about anime:

<Kyusaku> the lead voice actress actually had to go on maternity leave around the last 13 eps
<Kyusaku> and her replacement kinda sucked
<Wesper> whatever she could totally have done her part from the hospital
<Kyusaku> seriously
<Wesper> just have lots of scenes with her opening heavy doors

And that's all for now. Ja ne!

ph33r!

And here are the colorless pencils, which is the pic's original form:

First pencil drawing I've done in ages. Maybe since '01. Yikes.

For those of you unfamiliar with THE CAT WITH HANDS (for shame!), go watch the freaky video.

Previous cats with hands can be found here and here. Fun. Ja!