"South Carolina became the first state to offer Christian car tags last month, when Gov. Mark Sanford allowed the bill to become law without his signature. The state legislature had passed it unanimously.

"I think it allows people of faith to profess that they believe in a higher calling, they believe in God," said Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer.
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Bauer has offered to personally pay a $4,000 deposit required for the Department of Motor Vehicles to begin producing the plates. The fee would be returned to him later."

This isn't specifically 'steam', being based on a Napoleonic design: the jacket worn by the delectable Sean Bean in the Sharpe series, but I thought you all might appreciate it (and get ideas, hopefully!). This was a birthday present for a close friend of mine, he being a huge fan of the series.



Yes, the collar needs fixing: more layers of calico so it stands straight, even after a night of drinking. :P Currently the jacket is inside-out on my living-room floor, halfway through doing so. :) Unfortunately you can't see the tails in this shot; a full double box pleat.

Materials:
Rifles Green garbadine
Black cotton velveteen
Black synthetic (naughty!) lining
Calico (starched)
Black cotton braid
Metal buttons
Red silk satin
His own insignia... nothing quite like real pips to get a military jacket looking right ! :D

Pattern:
Largely by hand/eye, based off the Mess Jacket pattern of the Victorian era (as far as I can see, unchanged from the Napoleonic era through to now). Can email to people on request. Warning: complicated and a pain in the backside to fit, even with a real Mess Jacket to work from for 'look'; took me two mockups to get it sitting right. :(

Sewing:
Relatively simple once the pattern was fitted, mostly straight seams. The time-consuming bit was sewing on all the braid by hand; couldn't machine it, it looked wrong.

http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/images/comics/dorktower659.gif

Dork Tower by John Kovalic

Current Comic

Please support John by buying his stuff at your favorite game or comic shop. Alternatively you can shop online at Warehouse 23.

DT syndication services provided by John 'FuzzFace' McMahon
fuzzface00@livejournal.com
http://fuzzface00.livejournal.com/

http://www.io.com/~fuzzface/dt/dt.xml
Last Build Date: Mon, 07 Jul 2008 07:00:00 UTC-0500

Thought some of you would enjoy this.  I was talking to the writer the other day.  Very nice woman.

http://efemerabisiani.wordpress.com/

So people with a facebook (Yet one more evil net thing)

You know of this Steampunk group?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2229103541

anddddd.........

How to make Lace

http://lace.lacefairy.com/BeginGuide.html

If you can sit there and make your own lace it is fun and you can get some very nice fine work after you get handy with it. It can go on and in a great deal of projects. I wonder if some one would be brave and try to make lace with thin thin wire thread ?

As I mentioned in my last "real" post (about 3 weeks ago), I got to take part in a group show called "The Americans" at one of my favorite galleries in Portland, Grass Hut. The show opened on July 4th with hotdogs, beer, and fun. You can see my three pieces, "8 to 80," at the end of the wall.



I completely forgot to take any good photos of these pieces while they were in my studio, so if they sell, these will be the best I ever get. If they don't sell, I think I'm going to put some more work into them. I like them, but my recent trip to England drastically cut short my work time. I was also trying a new technique on them that I didn't quite get where I wanted.

Pix from 4th of July:

Town parade:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ztef/sets/72157605978118436/

Party at a friend's house afterwards:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ztef/sets/72157605999259843/

Holy crap am i wasted

I have posted the reveal for our first event on the brand new website: http://www.hmabadger.com/
 
I am collecting comments from everyone in the crew about their favorite or most surprising part of the game, as this was a learning experience for us as well. It was really fun for us, so I can only hope that our players enjoyed it as much as we did.  All of the crew agree that having a seven hour game to help get us ready for the two day event in September was a huge help.

We had about 50 people sign up and about 20 people come to the reveal at midnight. Since the game was free, there was no pressure on players to complete the game if they found other entertainment or were pulled away for more serious concerns.

The little afterthought scavenger hunt was almost more popular than the main game itself and this was because the party rooms at the convention were just so great. I'll be posting stories about what the party rooms made players do to get tokens as they come in.

We have some pictures, most of which are going to be sent in from others as we were just too busy to remember to take pictures of everything.
We already have a list of things to improve next time and ideas for next year's story arc.  Should anyone want to try something like this, I am happy to send you all of the material I have (most of it is already online) so that you could modify it for your own steampunk universe.

I've been lurking around here for something like a year & a half & finally decided to join up.  I've been a corset maker for about 15 years, do repro antique clothing for my own sinister purposes, and make jewelery that no one in their right mind would wear.  Keeps me off the street.

I spent most of my holiday weekend playing around with silicone molds and plastic & came up with these guys.  The one on the left is sort of a last-minute thing when I found an earring that fit the molded piece exactly.  The one on the right was what occupied most of my weekend.  Both pins are molded from antique typewriter parts and the pin on the right has a photo copied from a Victorian mourning pin in my collection.  The amber lens obscuring the photo is accidental but I really like the effect, sort of makes it a bit mysterious, as though age or misuse has fogged it a bit.  I think I got the paint looking like grease & rust.  I'd prefer metal but my apartment is completely lacking in torches & centrifuges & such, so no casting metal today. 

The horrible, endless manufacturing details here, including gratuitous photos of greasy old junk.

This is a day in the life of a typical home owner wishing to install a ceiling fan...

1. Decide to install ceiling fan in office. The goal being more airflow, and much better lighting.
   
2. Decide that a fan with multiple directional light units would be best, for focusing light at desk, and laundry machines.
   
3. Go to OSH and pick out fan that will look good in the office. Ensure that selected fan uses standard bulbs so that using CFL bulbs is an option.
4. Return home.
5. Remove ugly old ceiling light.
   
6. Note that old ceiling fixture is loose and wobbly and thus not appropriate for a ceiling fan. Also note that it is attached, badly, to the side of a beam.
7. Go to hardware store and buy a new 1/2" pancake light fixture (right), a 16" medallion (left) in order to cover old 4" hole in ceiling, and a sheet rock knife for use in cutting new 4" hole in ceiling, below beam.
8. Return home, cut new hole in ceiling, solidly attach pancake box to beam using 3 - 2" screws.
9. Start installing new fan.
10. Attach fan harness to pancake box.
    
11. Start attaching electrical wires to fan motor housing.
    
12. Detach electrical wires.
13. Remove fan harness from pancake box.
14. Install 16" medallion.
15. Re-attach fan harness to pancake box.
    
16. Start attaching electrical wires to fan motor housing.
17. Mount fan motor housing to harness.
18. Lose screws in fan motor housing 3 or 4 times. Each time, remove motor housing and shake vigorously until lost screw falls out.
19. Wrap motor housing in plastic in order to cover holes so screws will stop falling in.
20. Attach motor housing to fan harness.
21. Suddenly decide to double check light unit, notice that it uses candelabra bulbs, not standard bulbs.
22. Detach motor housing.
23. Detach electrical wires.
24. Detach fan harness.
25. Box up all parts as well as possible and rush back to OSH, before they close in 20 minutes.
26. Learn that the display model is an older version. The current version is what we purchased.
27. Return fan as there are no other models meet our needs.
28. As it is now 9PM and all hardware stores are closed, go to K-Mart and Target in hopes of finding a replacement.
29. Give up, go home and watch movie.
30. Wake up Sunday morning and go to a different OSH, in hopes that and older version of the fan we had chosen is still on a store shelf somewhere.
31. Get extremely lucky in finding said older version. Open box at store and confirm unit is correct.
32. Return home with fan, and celebratory candy bar.
33. Start installing new fan.
34. Attach fan harness to pancake box.
    
35. Start attaching electrical wires to fan motor housing.
    
36. Detach electrical wires.
37. Remove fan harness from pancake box.
38. Install 16" medallion.
39. Re-attach fan harness to pancake box.
    
40. Keep plastic bag on motor housing in order to prevent screws from falling into it.
41. Start attaching electrical wires to fan motor housing.
42. Mount fan motor housing to harness.
43. Attach fan blades.
44. Attach light unit.
45. Install CFL bulbs.
46. Turn on light switch and confirm that light and fan operates correctly.
47. Note that ceiling now needs to be painted to hide evidence of old light fixture location.
48. Log in to IRC, and LJ to document follies.

I was sitting at home, looking at this old hat I had sitting around, and thinking..the girl I love needs a good hat. She works at a Pirate Tavern, and has no hat.. and I was bored. So I went down to the fabric store, and they had this delishish black fake leather trim with gold threading in it, and some nice black brading, and I proceded to sit down on the floor and mess with the hat, took me 2 hours to decide what to do with it, but here it is. Found a lovely silver and onyx pin at the thrift store and sewed some feathers and fake roses onto it.

It fits her perfectlly and turned out a hell of a lot better then I expected.


http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=233887866&albumID=1108793&imageID=13752312

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=233887866&albumID=1108793&imageID=13752324

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=233887866&albumID=1108793&imageID=13752269

She has a old pocket watch necklace that would go smashing with it.


Was at the flea market today sand they had a really nice gold and wooden lighter shaped like a old derringer/pirate pistol, a real small one. But I got into a fight with the lady because she didn't want me touching the clocks to see how they looked on the inside and she snatched it from my hand.. or I would have bought it, but I had pride and told her to go **** herself and walked away...with great effort.

Next project is the parasol :)

Dear Lazyweb,

I could use some Linux xscreensaver debugging help. I made some fairly large changes to make it cope with the brave new RANDR world where monitors can be hot-swapped and have their resolution changed willy-nilly. Please apply this patch and test some things for me, k? Launch xscreensaver with -verbose to see what it's actually up to.

"Bad" would be 1) crashing, 2) part of your desktop ever being incompletely blacked out by a screen saver, 3) running savers on video outputs that don't actually have monitors attached to them.

If you have (or can has) more than one monitor:

• Do they all go blank when xscreensaver activates?
• Do things look right if you add a monitor while the screen is blanked? While it is non-blanked?
• Likewise when changing the resolution of the monitors using the "xrandr" command.
• Does it correctly realize which monitors are actually attached to the system and in use?
• Try configuring your machine to use the old-style multi-screen mode (where you have displays :0.0 and :0.1, and no Xinerama or RANDR.) Does it still behave sanely?
• Can you configure your X server to use just the Xinerama extension and not the RANDR extension? Try that too.

If you have only one monitor, you can still test this. Use Ctrl-Alt-KeypadPlus and Ctrl-Alt-KeypadMinus to change the resolution of your monitor without changing the resolution of your desktop, so that bumping the mouse against the edge of the screen pans across your desktop. (You might need to turn off the Xinerama and RANDR extensions to make this work, I'm not sure.)

• When xscreensaver launches, the savers should always be the size of the monitor (you shouldn't be seeing a zoomed-in portion of the saver, you should be seeing the whole thing.)
• Lock the screen. While the screen is locked, zoom in and out. The xscreensaver window should stay the size of the visible portion of the screen.
• With the screen locked, bump the mouse against the edge of the screen. The screen should remain covered.

Please let me know how that goes...

Update: There's a new patch with a few fixes. Please try that instead!

First, I will show a couple things online I wish to buy for my sky pirate outfit.

The Wants
http://www.aurorahistoryboutique.com/C000568.htm
http://www.aurorahistoryboutique.com/C000429.htm I love the look of the second one the most, and it's also 20 dollars cheaper. The Captain Morgan's gun just makes me want to say it so I can say "Psht, this is Captain M's gun, yo" haha. But I am SO leaning towards the first.

( The rest is under this cut! O: )

Who would've thought that six ordinary words, when put together in the proper order, could create something so wonderous?

what might one call this, plumberanalphilia?
Want it from behind while you play Super Mario Brothers ? - m4w - 30 (Vancouver)

Last mask from a series of gas masks "Stempunk".

( 10 картинок на 939,28 КБ )

With obligatory goggles and Nerf gun.

( two more )