hey look at this thing i made: XIII

So

*deep breath*

where were we then?

I have this vicious cycle. I will, for whatever reason, get it in my head to write something. Depending how that goes maybe I write more. This will go on for awhile before I write something that I think is just god awful. When that happens I come to the conclusion I'm a terrible writer and stop writing....until I get it in my head to write something again.

I think I've talked before on here about how I'm incapable of objectively judging any aspect of myself. It's probably more accurate to say that something just reallllllly needs to stand out for it to be apparent to me. In my writing this tends to mean I'll only acknowledge if something was especially good or especially terrible. That's probably the same reason I very rarely ever go back and read the things I write. Anyways, there's that.

Speaking of quirky character traits! I'm often (well, not as much anymore) oblivious to how my life experience differs from other peoples. An example I brought up the other day was how I didn't know for however long that a woman keeping her maiden name ISN'T normal. Since my mom did, I just assumed that was SOP, cause really, why wouldn't it be?

Another example, which seems more insane to have ever actually thought, is quilting. I had had it in my head that it was just a thing mothers did and they passed it on to their children. I really thought that that was the only way people learned how to quilt. Now, I didn't go around espousing this belief, but I held it in my head and I can remember the time, because we were sitting in the living room (or sun room? I have no idea what they call it) and my sister was talking about some sort of quilting program at a college. BOOM. Shattered my world.

I like to think this isn't as insane, since I did know other people whose moms quilted. Plus my grandma quilted to some extent and my aunt quilts quite a bit. In fact, they're having a quilt show! Sisters choice quilt show, is, I believe, the official title. Sisters choice eh? Psh, I can tell where I'M not wanted.

(gratuitous futurama quote)

Well screw them, I'll have my own quilt show, with blackjack and hookers, in fact, forget the quilt show!

Some of you might be quick to point out that I don't know how to quilt, which, would certainly inhibit my ability to enter a quilt show. Really though, when has not knowing how to do something ever stopped me before? Of course it probably wasn't realistic to think I could teach myself to quilt AND successfully make a quilt worth showing. The eureka moment came when I was reading an email from my uncle where he mentioned barn quilts, which is a thing I guess. Apparently all you really need to do is a make a thing and then attach quilt to the end and you can call it a, whatever, quilt. Stained glass quilt it is then.

To try and replicate the look of a quilt, I decided to make a bunch of blocks using the standard copper foil assembly method that all my other projects had featured, but then those would be assembled into the final piece using came (the stuff I used as a border on the last few). This would allow me to make the images in a way I was used to, but the rigidity of the came would allow for a cleaner looking finished product, more resembling a quilt.

I downloaded the program Electronic Quilt 5 (apparently it's very outdated) which served pretty well to help me rough out a concept. I decided to do a day and night theme.

Because of the way the program works I couldn't design the three blank squares (clouds and a tail to the comet) which tragically left them up to my drawering skills. The only thing really worth noting about this is how difficult the comet was to design for some reason. I for the life of me could not figure how to break up the circle to make it look like that. I ended up having to get out the ole sketchbook and draw it to see how it's supposed to look (for reference, all blocks are designed separately, so I couldn't just draw through all three squares on the screen).

The grid drawing there was to help me visualize how much came I needed to order.

I ended up going about this differently than most projects. Instead of doing all the steps in order, I made each block individually and pieced them together as I went.

It was interesting for me because I hadn't finished the entire design before starting on it, so the top half ended up being finished long before the rest. Anyways it came out like this:

I like it. Let's go quadrant by quadrant!

The sun was the first part that I designed. The general concept behind the piece as a whole was that each section of six squares would have one four block image and then two smaller things. I mentioned above that I couldn't draw the clouds in the EQ5 program. What I ended up doing was taking a circle (a teflon tape container to be specific) and then tracing it in an overlapping pattern. The sun was the first part of the piece finished and the clouds were just about the last thing finished.

The constellation power rankings looks like this:

1. Orion

2. The Big Dipper

3. All other constellations are for shit.

That would end up being a problem (more on that later). I had a similar problem drawing the moon that I had with the comet. Here it was a problem with getting the crescent shaped exactly how I wanted, not too bad tho.

The original plan called for a comet with two constellations underneath it. Then I consulted the constellation power rankings. Then I wept. Then I spent some time trying to come up with a different space thing I could stick down there. Then I said fuck it, I'm putting grass down there. I wasn't too happy about it, but I did like the idea of making it line up with the day (let's just jump to that).

The original plan was for this to be a sunflower. That was not practical so I ended up going with this tree. Originally the top four blocks were going to be the bottom four with no grass. I was going to do some birds for the top two blocks. I'd drawn them out and I felt it looked good, but this was at the same time I couldn't figure out what to do with the bottom night quadrant. When the best thing I could come up with was grass, I just went with it. I had wanted to do an animal on the grass and then it would be awake in one and asleep in the other. I had drawn that out as well when I remembered that these blocks are a little less than six inches on a side and it wasn't realistic to do the detail I could create on the computer in real life.

If you're wondering why there are lines coming out of the bottom of the leaves, it's because Hobby Lobby hates me. I had bought that blue glass there at the start of the project and for something like two months they couldn't stock more. The other stained glass store I goto didn't have any either and I wasn't going to try and order some. I don't throw out any glass scraps. If I deem a piece too small to be of future use, it goes in a bin. I ended up being so desperate, I put on the leather gloves and dug through there for every tiny scrap of that blue I could find. I ended up finding enough, but only if I cut those rectangles up into more bite size pieces.

Aside from that, I really was quite happy with how it all turned out. Which brings us to the quilt show.

I had neither the knowledge of how to find hookers nor the inclination to partake in services offered.

As far as the blackjack I had hired a guy to come over and deal. Everything was going great till I got dealt eights with the dealer showing six. I split of course and they each got dealt eights so I split again. Each of those got a three, so I doubled down winding up with two twenties, a nineteen and a seventeen. Dealer flips a ten, hits a five. I lost a thousand dollars on that hand and flipped the table.

This meant I had to find some other entries for my quilt show.

I said (and this is literally a word for word quote):

"Isn't that just colored paper stapled to a piece of wood?"

Bad idea. That guy was fucking pissed. We ended up going at it, but he had what I believe is referred to as a glass jaw.

I was ready to throw the guy out, cause I mean, that's a fucking taco bell wrapper. It occurred to me though that this would almost certainly be popular with the B/Nate Dogg set, so I went with it.

And then there was me. All in all a good day and I was glad to be a part of it.

hey look at this thing i made: XII

And then I said, "huh, haven't made any stained glass windows in awhile." I quickly came up with three projects. This is the story of none of them. During the concept phase for one of them, I came up with this idea and decided to make a weekend project out of it. Sadly I can't tell you the story without revealing part of the story of one of the three projects, which is strictly against company policy. So here's a story that has nothing to do with this stained glass window, with pictures inserted at random.

I find that there are things in my life I'm not capable of objectively grading. The movie I saw with someone, that song I heard at the exact right time. Hip Hop Hollas by Jerry Quickley is without a doubt one of my favorite poems of all time, but I don't know that it's necessarily that great or if it just speaks to me on a level past rational thought.

A scholar recently asked me about

the relevance of hip hop

I didn't know what to say to him

Let's do a by the numbers thing real quick here. My favorite album of all time (I'll sleep when you're dead by El-P) is a hip hop album. Twenty-two of the thirty-four songs that I've listened to in itunes more than a hundred times are hip hop songs (more on this in a bit). Every single album highlighted in, this thing i bought, has been hip hop (mark ronson, not entirely, but quite a few of the songs are). I'm listening to some right now. This is, I suppose, just a very drawn out way of saying that, I really like hip hop. Definitely was not always like that.

and there be moments like this

custom coach with 12 *people* on their first tour

gliding at 70 across the desert floor

and there be 12 faces pasted to the windows

instead a arguing about watching how the money goes

they be checking out the blooms of desert rose

and Arizona lightning smells of ozone

and sudden rain washes rocks that dwelled in the sea

and there's only the sounds of the engines rotary,

the bright cords of lightning

as heaven manifests subwoofers

ain't all that make the shit mad exciting

it's the snap crackle pop of Tupac

pushed out of Bose cubes

pressing the heart into this moment

and the scene is music

and this moment is an organ

and somewhere there is a

custom coach with 12 *people* on their first tour

For reasons I couldn't possibly explain, I like to trace things back to their start. The point at which everything changed. Seminal moments. The moment that me and hip hop intersect goes like this:

Growing up I can remember always telling people I liked all music except country and rap. I had no very compelling reason for this, but that statement covered all the music I was ever introduced too and since this was coming from people I took seriously, I had no reason to argue with it. The only rap I ever heard was what gets played on the radio. It's never a good idea to pass judgement on things based on what you hear on the radio.

Then one day I was driving somewhere with my brother and he tells me I should check out this group, Jurassic 5. I got home and listened to their song Quality Control and everything changed. That song gripped me the way almost no other music had (I'm gonna say this was when I was fourteen). I remember listening to that whole album and falling in love.

That's where it began, but the change really didn't happen for awhile. At first I reacted in the way most people do when being presented with something that goes their held beliefs, such as, that rap is bad. I remember thinking about it years later when I was leaving my apartment and I heard music coming from my roommates room, which, would normally not stand out, except it was the exact album I had been listening to, two floors down, not five minutes before this. The album was Dungeon Master of Ceremonies by MC Chris and when I went and asked The Godfather about this, someone who has always held that he does not like hip hop, he said "well this isn't really hip hop." Hey, whatever gets you through the night my friend, but make no mistake, it is hip hop.

and there be moments like this

four girlfriends driving out of the hood

going to a party in the oranges

this is the first time the youngest has been alone

in a car with her friends

they zoom across the GW

canopy of steel beams

paints the hoop de in fast blurs of shade and sun

and tires roar from the grates

and up front there's the sound of

bracelets and nails on the dashboard

and there is laughter and

there are no box cutters or police

and L'il Kim jumps through the speakers

and the youngest girl pushes herself

deep into the rear seat

as straining speakers conjure halos

she watches the world sway past

the tiny rear window

and this fat bass line will forever mark this turning point

and she has never felt so free

and she has never felt so strong and so loved

these are her *people*

and somewhere a young woman is going

on her first ride with her crew

It's all well and good to try and deny these things, "it's not really hip hop," but I couldn't really think it was the only album of its kind, there had to be others out there that sounded like it. I searched. I went through all of J5s offerings. I heard all of the collaborations they did. Looking around, I found some artists that sorta sounded like them, but there was a big problem. In addition to me fighting the hip hop, I still had this outcast mentality that popular things were bad. Ignoring even just the popular music I might have liked had I given it a chance, having that close-minded mentality runs over into other things. If you badly enough want to, you can find a reason to dislike anything. Having any kind of criteria like that meant that all too often I wouldn't give something a chance and maybe not because it was popular, maybe it just had one song featuring an artist I felt was too mainstream. Maybe for no compelling reason at all, but irrational things like popular is bad lead to other irrational criteria. Enter BobbyT.

In the internet age I am a person who can, uh, find things. Bobby had asked me to find him a copy of Kanye West's Late Registration. I can remember bringing him the cd and on the way I popped it into my cd player and wow. I mean I knew who he was, sure, but I didn't listen to the radio all that much and I had never been that big a fan of Jesus Walks. This was like J5 all over again. The album grabbed me. This was pretty close to the time when I had switched to using itunes almost exclusively. Heard em say, touch the sky, gold digger, roses, hey mama, celebration and gone are all part of the above mentioned songs that have had more than a hundred plays. Once again I dug through everything of his and then kept looking for other things. The difference was that this time I stopped having any preconceptions to guide, if I had any even the slightest reason to listen to something, I'd give it a shot. I'd check things out just because of the name. That lead me to getting I'll Sleep When You're Dead, because let's be honest, that's a name that stands out.

and there be moments like this

Nebraska farm boy sitting

on the edge of a quarry pit

all his crystal powder gone

he wonders about gravity

he wonders about his family

his sister writes to him from

a small town in the north

tells him of jesus and fewer black eyes

how he should visit in the summer time

because her boyfriend should be out of rehab

and how the yellin' ain't so bad

his pops tells him next year things will be different

and he wonders if he will ever escape next year country

and he feels weak inside his strong body

and gravity is making moves

and Jay-Z's Hard Knocks crow from the cab of his pick up

and for a few minutes he's lost in it

tales of a life closer than you think

close to the bone it unfurls like his own

runs to a neighboring corn field

he splits stars with his scream

he stands breathless in headlight beams

he smiles and he's high as a kite

and he knows that moonlight and beats have saved his life

and somewhere a farm boy

sits on the edge of a quarry

Atmosphere was one of the artists that cracked the original run of hip hop (interestingly enough, also by way of BobbyT). There's a hidden track on his collection of EPS, The Lucy Ford Eps that feature El-P. I always really liked the song and was sad I could never find any more songs of his. The thing was he was mainly a producer and didn't rap that much. Between that and the great name I was pretty much sold on I'll Sleep When You're Dead form the jump. Wasn't exactly love at first listen though. Up All Night was an immediate winner (we might have been born yesterday, sir, but we stayed up all night). It took awhile for the whole thing to really sink in, but that had more to do with me just not giving a very thorough listen. Even when I did it wasn't like those other albums. It took awhile for it to really click with me. Eventually it occurred to me that when I couldn't figure out what to listen to at work I was picking it. At home, it was the only cd that I really never skipped tracks on. Probably more than any other album, I was trying to learn the songs and having trouble with it (you'd probably have to have lived with me at some point to understand that that's really saying something).

In case you're curious, the title is a lyric in what may be the best song about suicide I've heard.

So how dare you assume that I'll sleep when you're dead

This is well outside the boundries of acceptable behaviour

I will not give you the go ahead and you will not be remembered fondly

I'm throwing down the gauntlet, fuck you this isn't your decision

and for all the holy fuck I give, your little spectacle is ended

But dont think for just one second you've honored your obligations to me

I'm serious look in my eyes, I don't find this funny

or whatever you imagine poetry and justice feels like when you combine them

I am not going to allow this on my watch buddy, nobodies impressed

with your imagined sacrifice device or insurmountable regret

You are not uniquely pained and if you go we won't be sorry

and who the hell are you to put me through the banality of watching this

Cause many better men have gone for clearly better reasons and I

starkly must remind you that you have not even been trying

And that's the only thing remarkable about you, stop me if I'm lying

and there be moments like this

with family and friends in the front room

a woman washes dishes at the sink

a mother with missing heart

buried earlier that same day

in the same casket with her young son

and across from their house

a yard party has broken out

and in this moment

her first moments alone

her chest is imploding

failure and loss have arrived

and they will stay for a very long time

and she didn't know hearts could break this hard

or what black magic makes her still draw breath

and in this moment

her first moments alone

De La Soul trickles in the window

and she begins to cry

as the brothers from the east

preach about how the Stakes is High

and somewhere there is an empty mother

washing dishes in a sink by a window

Hip Hop Hollas tells all these touching stories of people in these moments touched by hip hop, but the truth is it could be any kind of music. If country music is your thing I'm sure you could tell some story of when you heard a certain song at the exact right time. Or if for you it's rock. Or punk. Or jazz. Or what-the fuck-ever. For me I went from once upon a time thinking Weird Al was the only artist worth listening to and growing to where I love it all. Hip hop blew those doors open.

It's funny now. Of all those Kanye songs off Late Registration, roses, hey mama and gone are the only ones that still get any play. After listening to that album so many times, it sees almost no play these days. I honestly couldn't tell you how good I really think it is. Maybe it was good, maybe it was bad, maybe just average, but to me, whatever it was, it was important.

he don't know the price of the ransom

and doesn't recognize slippery slopes

or the sound of hope dipping out through the transom

swollen knuckles drift toward hip hop radio soon

as your hear it ump up the volume

pump that beat

pump that beat

pump that beat

and that's the fucking relevance

of hip hop

hey look at this thing i made: XI

I will often, when bored, browse watch auctions on ebay (more on this soon!). I have no real direction with this, just search for random things. Some years ago I found a watch on there that was apparently the movement from a pocket watch transplanted into a wristwatch case. For some reason this was entrancing to me and I really wanted it. Sadly so did a number of other people and it went way out of my price range. I wish this hadn't happened three years ago and I could bring up the auction, because it's hard for me to do it justice with the above description, but I don't have much to say for it beyond that. I have yet to see another like it.

I was on ebay the other day when that watch popped back into my mind. While I (currently) didn't have the means to make a watch like it, it occurred to me I could just take a pocket watch, then modify the case to make it a wristwatch. I was really high up on the idea because this was something I could do a line of, find some vintage pocket watches, attach strap dealies and make a strap. Of course I had no idea if that would look good, because I don't have a ton of control over the overall design of it. First I wanted to just get a pocket watch to do a proof of concept sort of thing. I ended up just getting the cheapest wrist watch I could find (that wasn't a cheap pos outta hong kong). It looked alright. There's not really too much to be said for the making of process. No real modification was done to the case, I just bent some brass stock and soldered it on. The strap was made in an almost identical process to the strap for HJ1.

It was actually pretty maddening. This managed to prove to me that it could be done, but while I think it looks pretty good, I now have to buy a pocket watch that I think looks really good and try again to see if it's actually a good idea. MY LIFE IS SO HARD.

hey look at this thing i made: -XIX

XIX is a money roman numeral. It got me thinking and I made a power rankings of 1-20 in roman numerals:

1. V. V is a strict upgrade over 5. Not only does it look better, but it's written in only two movements instead of three. Also V is for vendetta. This one time we were watching V is for vendetta at the big house and b was like, hey remember that scene where you see natalie portman's panties? No one did, so we watched and for less than a second you see it. Man has a sharp eye.

2. X. The thing that knocked X down was that it's not a strict upgrade over 10. Both require two movements to write. I suppose I'd argue that it wins in the aesthetics department, but the really compelling thing about X is it adds mystery. For example, if you see Rocky X, do you think it's Rocky 10? Or is it a mystery Rocky, like hacker X. See, I took this web design class in high school and we had to code some stuff in html. I went into other peoples code and while I didn't change anything, I added a comment that said "hacked by hacker X." I did this because my dream was one day someone would say "who is, hacker X?" Which they did, sadly without the news anchor inflection that it had in my head.

3. XIX. This was hurt by the fact that it sort of looks like an emoticon (you know, like, a dead guy with a big nose? I guess it would mean sorrow? I'd be sad if I was dead with a big nose). I'm morally opposed to non standard emoticons.

4. IV

5. VI. The main value in roman numerals is using them to up the epic quotient of something. For example, the only value of the new trilogy is to be able to write: Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope. FUCK AND YES. This doesn't necessarily scale though. In the roman numeral epic quotient power rankings, 1, 2 and 3 are V IV VI. I II and III are weak shit, stay tuned!

6. XIII. This might be entirely because I thought Red XIII in FF7 was badass.

7. XI. The great thing about XI is it's the name of a guy who visited my work from china. Somehow he didn't get any of my puns with the number 11 (no part of that story is true).

8. IX. I was really excited about Ledo and IX when I first read the description. Then I watched it and it was terrible. I just kept sitting there thinking "this has to get good eventually right?" It did not.

9. VII. This tends to be the limit of value when using roman numerals to label volumes in a series, after VII it's all downhill. Interestingly this is also the point where all the rest are downhill.

10. XII. A common theme in this bottom half is they're almost strictly worse than the number they represent. XII offers no improvement over 12.

11. XIV. Little too close to HIV. HIV is a touchy subject, don't let your numbers create unwanted drama.

12. XV. God that looks dumb. Doesn't that look dumb? God that looks dumb.

13. XX. While I've never tried dos equis, I hate it with a passion. As a result I hate things that I associate with it, like XX or interesting men.

14. II

15. III

16. VIII

17. XVI

18. XVII

19. XVIII. These all have the above mentioned problem of being strictly worse than the number they represent, especially XVIII. HOLY SHIT THAT'S DUMB. II almost gets a pass because I like to call people who are juniors the 2nd. For example, big KB II. Almost would warrant moving it up in the rankings, sadly it doesn't come up that often.

20. I. This is just terrible, if it wasn't necessary for making other numbers I'd question it's very existence. First of all, nothing warrants having the I talked on to indicate it's the first of something. You don't ever see Rocky I, that'd be dumb. Expanding on that, one of the other big problems is it duplicates an incredibly common part of the english language. Imagine if Rocky saw something that said Rocky I on it and since he's dumb he thought it was an unfinished note "Rocky I...am leaving you? Rocky I...need you to take out the garbage?? ROCKY I WHAT!?!" Underrated part of the Rocky movies is their lack of taglines. It's not Rocky II, The Rematch. Rocky by itself tells you all you need to know, someone is gonna get punched.

*ahem*

I have some sort of primal need to mod video game systems that I own. Here's the list of all systems I have/had that were able to play pirated games (not all instances required actual modding).

Playstation 1

Playstation 2

While I don't own it, I did mod a Playstation 3

Playstation Portable

Gameboy Advance

Gameboy DS

Nintendo Wii

XBox (original)

Xbox 360

There were three motivating factors in me buying a 360:

1. I thought Blue Dragon was gonna be awesome (it wasn't)

2. I had this coupon for 20% off.

3. It could be modded and as such was taunting me.

Of course the real appeal of modding it wasn't just winning another battle in the ongoing war of Mike Vs. Computers, it was a chance to practice for my dream project. Early 360s were plagued with something called the red ring of death (they might still be plagued with it, I'm no longer current on these things). This meant that your 360 stopped working and the ring of light on the front went red. There wasn't anything to be done about it in those days besides send it in to microsoft. I believe this was free, but took a long time, plus modding it voided the warranty, which meant I was kind of boned if that happened.

The overwhelming belief in the community at the time was that the way the heat-sink was clamped to the motherboard, it put undue stress on the soldered joints and when it got hot enough they would come apart, resulting in the RRoD (I'm not sure if this was ever proven conclusively). This led to a ton of after-market cooling products, fans you could strap on the back of it, replacement fans for in the unit. As far as I know they were mostly snake oil, but a sound premise in theory. The problem was that while heat might have been the nail in the coffin, the real problem was the stress put on the board by the X-Clamp (colloquialism for the clamp holding the heat-sink). People that I take seriously felt that the following things helped prevent RRoD: Replacing the x-clamp with a less stupid thing, replacing the thermal paste (thermal paste goes between a processor and heat sink to aid in the transfer of heat) with less shitty thermal paste (arctic silver baby!), replacing the in unit cooling fan and (and this is the part I kinda like) watercooling the system.

Computer chips get hot. That's bad. To combat that heat sinks are attached that wick away the heat and dissipate it. Different materials have different levels of effectiveness in this regard. Water is really good, but of course a sitting thing of water wouldn't get rid of the heat. The idea then in a water cooling system is that the water is continually pumped through a radiator, so that the water over the chip is always cool. In a normal desktop computer there's no reason to do this unless you're a serious over clocker (over clocking your CPU makes it get much hotter) really there's not a ton of reason to do it in a 360 either, but, fuck, it's cool innit? Ever since the first computer I've ever owned I wanted to have a water cooling system, just something about it made the whole thing seem more high tech to me I guess. Since any custom computer case I made would have a water cooling system in it, I figured this would be good practice. The to do list ended up like this:

1. Mod the dvd drive. This is how you play burned games on the 360, change some sort of software on the dvd drive, this is why you need to open the case up.

2. Replace OEM fan. People seemed to feel that this was a big plus in the fight against RRoD and if you have the case open anyway, it's really easy to do.

3. Move innards to a "custom" case. There are a number of replacement cases you can buy. I went with a clear one for two reasons. First, I've always loved visible man type shit, I like to be able to see what's going on inside. Second, I wanted lights in the thing (I ended up not doing that).

4. Install a water cooling system. Reasons described above.

Let's cover those in order. The modding of the dvd drive was an unbelievably nerve racking experience. This was pretty close to when it first became possible to mod it, so no definitive guide had come out. I was forced to cobble together bits and pieces and despite my best efforts managed to brick the unit. *Luckily* I had taken the necessary back up precautions and was able to fix it. Took a break, came back and managed to get it done. It was infuriating because it ended up being an incredibly simple thing, but I just couldn't find the exact right guide.

Again, the fan replacement is very easy when you have the case open. I don't remember the specific fan I bought, but it was recommended by people I take seriously.

God the clear case was a bad idea. I mean, it looks alright and wasn't terribly difficult to do, but the quality of materials is so bad. The OEM case is a quality piece and when I bought this replacement I was expecting similar things, alas. If I could do it over I would have just installed a window into the side. The main that made me end up so soured on the case was the decision to not put lights inside. I had bought some EL wire and I was going to line the edges, and, in my head, it looked awesome. In practice, when I had finally sat down to do all this work, between pitfalls of the dvd drive and the unexpected difficulty of the water cooling, I just wanted to be done.

I believe I've talked before about my inability to accurately gauge the difficulty of things (or rather, my ability to do things) I tend to either grossly under/overestimate how hard something will be. I believe I thought it was going to be very simple to install the water cooling system. Depending on how you look at it, there are a total of five components. The two blocks that go on top of the CPU and GPU. The radiator/fan assy. The pump. The reservoir. Putting those together outside of a system is easy, just a matter of attaching tubes. Working within the constraints of a case though, it becomes tricky. The physical logistics weren't so bad, I had based my "design" off something I'd seen online. The real problem was power. The pump and fan both required power and of course the 360 didn't come equipped with plugs that you could just attach them to. After a ton of research I came across a diagram some guy had made that told you what points you could solder on the motherboard to get various levels of power from. I then later read that you shouldn't do that because it's bad to sap power away from the system. This, once again, was an area lacking any definitive guide. Eventually I found that the thing to do is draw power straight from the plug. Of course then I was thwarted by my puny soldering iron. /sigh.

At the point I had finally done all this, it was very very late and I just wanted to be done, so having accomplished most of the list, I put it all back together. Looked like this.

Hopefully those aren't too dark, it's always hard to tell on this computer. All in all I was pretty happy with how it turned out and it certainly got plenty of use at that apartment.

hey look at this thing i made: X

My last apartment was well furnished. Oops, forgot some commas. My last apartment was, well, furnished. I mean, it had furniture, in fact the ratio of open floor space to furniture was probably pretty close to optimal (almost certainly a bit too much on the furniture side, but it was an awkward place). Of course when I moved into my current apartment, which is easily twice the size, I didn't have anywhere near enough furniture. The original plan was to goto Ikea, not because I have a great love for their furniture, but I really wanted to get a couple detlofs (still do I suppose).

That pretty quickly fell apart. I didn't intend to start making things when I moved in, but I did and it created a somewhat perfect storm of distracting me from my desire to have an apartment that was conducive to anything besides making things and sleeping and eating a lot of my disposable income.

Then I made a table. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that I could just make my own furniture. I couldn't envision making chairs as I had zero desire to upholster anything, but a lot of what I wanted was tables and shelves and that was well within my abilities I felt.

So there I was, post christmas sunday night wing night. Donnyk was asking what I got for christmas. It occurred to me at that point that it's kind of hard to describe what an oscillating multi tool is. It's um, well just follow the link. It like, vibrates and shit and um, harnesses the power of vibration to uh, cut shit and uh, sand shit. Listen, it's awesome and I love it.

"What are you gonna do with that?" says Donnyk. "For that matter, what are you gonna do with the rest of those fucking tools you for some reason own?" (He didn't actually say that).

"You know, makes tables and shit"

"That's interesting, because I need a tv stand."

He had gotten a sweet deal on a tv, problem was, it had no real way of standing up on it's own, it had to be mounted. I told him if he didn't care how it looked, if random mismatched wood was fine, then I could probably make one for pretty cheap. And then it was go time.

The plan was to go as simple as possible. The stated requirements were a) mount the tv, preferably as far from the ground as possible b) have a shelf for video game systems. Given that a shelf would be easy to attach wherever, I decided to start with the mounting setup and build off of that. My idea was to get a 4" x 6" x 12' then cut it in half. If the tv was mounted at the top of those two posts, that would put it right at the ceiling of the room it would be in. I felt confident it would be strong enough to hold the tv up (it weighs about a hundred pounds). Then I figured it would need a base, which led to me thinking, why not just make a box and then that'll account for the shelf too. Slot the 4 x 6s into the top, screw it all together and BOOM. Then I had this conversation (with myself, natch).

"I dunno mike, that seems like it's gonna be a bitch to move."

"I don't actually recall asking for your opinion and furthermore.....that's actually a pretty good point."

It certainly would have been possible to move it, but it woulda been tough. When designing things I try and stay within the confines of what I can do by myself. With the 4 x 6s sticking out, there's no way I could have moved it by myself and not with any of the vehicles available to me. I decided to make a slotting system. The posts would still slide in through the top, but instead of being screwed to the frame, they would be held in place with some guides. Observe.

And zoomed in on the guides.

ISN'T THAT COOL!?! And all for like a quarter of what it woulda cost to buy one at the store.

hey look at this thing i made: IX

Historically, when I'm asked what my dream project is, I say a custom computer case. I think it's born out of the same sort of thing that makes people want to customize their car. Not necessarily any value in it, but when you love something that much, when it's that big a part of your life, you want to make it your *own*. It's actually been quite some time since computers were that big a part of my life, in fact they're a pretty small part these days, which is why I say, historically when I asked. And when I say, when I say, I mean no one has ever asked me that.

Anyway, custom cases can be divided into two types. The first is a scratch build. It is exactly what it sounds like. Here's an example I recently came across. These sort of projects tend to feel more impressive as it requires a much larger skill set to do correctly. Of course it also makes it easier to do a terrible job, making everything by hand doesn't necessarily make it impressive. Same sort of idea applies to HJ1. That would be an example of a scratch build. I wasn't proud of it because I had made it all by hand, I was proud of it because it looked how I wanted it to.

The other type is a case mod. This is taking a pre-made case and modifying it to fit your design. On it's surface it seems like a cop out and inherently less impressive when compared to a scratch build, but, why reinvent the wheel? If you have a starting point that does a lot of what you want, what do you really gain by doing everything by scratch? Possibly my favorite custom case of all time was a case mod. It's often a very different skill set, being able to look at something and see how you could change it.

Like I said, HJ1 was a scratch build. This is the story of a case mod.

I guess this story starts around the christmas of aught nine. I had finished HJ0 and had come up with the general plan for HJ1. It was sort of a, every tool's a hammer, time. Not familiar with that saying? It goes (depending where you read it): when your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. HJ0 was made out of a found object, so to speak, and I really loved the idea of making things that way. This put me in the mindset of considering any given object as far as how it could be turned into a watch.

That year for christmas I received the book Vietnam Zippos by Sherry Buchanan. I had seen this on some blog and the pictures of the zippos really struck a chord with me. Luckily the book explained exactly why:

Popular culture has forgotten that many GIs in the latter part of the war were as anti-war as the long-haired hippies, the draft-dodgers on U.S. campuses and as the young Viet Cong, like Nguyen Toan Thi, they were fighting, some of whom had been in the field for clsoe to nine years. The draft lottery, Vietnamization - Nixon's plan to hand over the fighting to the South Vietnamese Army and achieve peace with honor, the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals and the My Lai massacre, all contributed to low troop morale. In-country, Vietnam Zippos became the ideal protest vehicle. They escaped brass' attention more easily than Afros, Buddhist swastika medallions, Tibetan prayer beads and the Make Love Not War slogans on helmets that incurred the disapproval of the powers that be. Peace Signs, Love, Flower Power and Hearts bloomed on the chrome-plated lighters. Ingenious Vietnamese engravers used the much loved pop-art swirls. In a meeting of mainstream and counterculture, combat slang blends with anti-war and anti-establishment sentiment. Any one GI might hate the enemy, dislike his CO, love his country and desire peace - and etch all of these emotions on his Zippo.

Later, this sentence sums it up:

I began to understand what these Zippos were: art without ambition, a real and honest venting of feelings, invaluable evidence of an experience, heavy juju.

Art without ambition. That was it exactly. The Zippos would not be impressive as works of art if that was their intent, but given that all they were ever meant to be was a primal outburst of emotion, they are somewhat stunning in their ability to convey that.

Naturally they seemed like the perfect vessel for a watch. The system I had come up with for watch design was to break it up into three parts:

1. The case: When I say this I mean the body of the watch, but not including the dial/hands. On HJ1 this would be the brass box and glass top. Here it would be a Zippo.

2. The dial/hands: You could say that the movement is included in this category, but I have yet to come up with a design where the specific movement is actually relevant. For this project I liked the idea of finding whatever watch was standard issue for a solider and then doing any modifications it would take to fit it in the Zippo.

3. The strap: Much in the way HJ0 used only parts from the camera for the case/strap, I wanted to stick with the idea of staying thematically there and not just making a strap from scratch. The idea I came up with was to get a army jacket from the era and turning the cuff into the strap.

I had this design pretty much entirely finished in January of this year, but never started on it. I guess I wanted to finish HJ1 first, but it's hard to say for sure. Of course HJ1 finally did get finished, which made this the logical place to go next. I never wavered on my design, so the biggest thing was sourcing the parts.

The Zippo:

This was in some ways the easiest and hardest part to source. I did know the general thing I was looking for, but it's not as though there's a big box store selling the exact one you want. I ended up just watching any auctions that came up on ebay until I found one that looked good. This is the one I got.

This had a lot going for it. Great saying one side and delightful middle finger cartoon on the other. While I didn't like the idea of cutting off the soldier's name, it would serve as a perfect place to fit the watch in.

The Watch:

This was tricky. I had just been assuming that there was a standard issue watch. When I say standard issue I mean, handed to you along with your boots and uniform. Apparently there was no watch in that package. After some searching I managed to find that the Benrus MIL-W-3818B was the watch you could get if you wanted one (which, I'm sure is a gross oversimplification of the process). Luckily they are not too hard to find.

The Jacket:

If I recall correctly (and, as I'm sure you know, I like to think that I do) I did an an ebay search for "vietnam jacket." I didn't bother to do any research as to the type of jacket I should be looking for, just browsed the pictures until I found one that seemed to be in line with what I was looking for:

As with most of my projects, I had created a design in my head, but didn't take time to write anything out to try and figure out logistics. This meant that when I got into making it things would have to be tweaked. Luckily it was nothing major. The original design called for the lighter to be vertical with the watch and have the stop sealed shut. This just didn't work with the way the watch would need to sit in there. There was an added bonus here though, when the lighter was turned sideways, it ended up being possible to keep the top portion intact, which meant the lighter could stay functioning (well, functioning in terms of opening/closing). The only other real change was the strap. I had wanted to simply cut the cuff off the jacket and modify it as necessary. When I tried to cut the cuff off, it looked absolutely terrible. The other problem with the original plan was I wanted to be able to see the bottom of the Zippo. Not really such a difficult proposition, but I didn't want to use anything that wasn't part of the jacket to make the strap. A lot of cutting and sewing later, this came out.

Let me break the strap down a bit for you. The base of the strap is just a strip of cloth I tore off the back of the jacket. It was then wrapped around and sewn to a piece of the liner I cut out. On top of that was sewn a lapel. The idea there was I could then attach the actual watch to a strip of cloth, put a button on it and then it would stay put, but you could still easily see the bottom. The strip that I used was the U.S. ARMY embroidered part from the left breast pocket. To secure the band, I removed every bit of velcro from the jacket and then attached it to either end. I was skeptical at first, but it ended up working quite well.

It's big. The strap itself is 2.25 inches wide. The watch/lighter is 2.25 inches wide. Since the watch is mounted off center, that part spans about 3 inches of wrist.

I was pretty happy with the final product. This is once again a case of, love it or hate it, it's almost exactly like I had originally conceived.

This isn't much of a making of, but it does have other shots of the watch.

Sidebar: To get in the mood while making this, I listened to the entire Phil Ochs discography. It occurred to me that at some point people stopped making good protest music. It's possible that this is due to there being nothing on the level of Vietnam to protest, but I think there's a simpler explanation. Vietnam is easy to work into songs, it's a very lyrical country name. I mean, take Iraq, how the fuck are you gonna put that in a song?

So there's a war in Iraq

I don't care too much for Bach

George Bush is someone I mock

A good soup starts with a good stock

And it's like, what the fuck does that even mean? It's easier if you mispronounce Iraq, but still. This was especially in my head when I heard I Can't Write Left Handed off the John Legend/Roots album, which, while great, it's a Bill Withers song, so the general drought continues. This brings me to my next point. I'm going to start giving watches like this names. This watch is called "I Can't Write Left Handed." After the song. Get it?

hey look at this thing i made: VIII

There's a battle going on. I can say with absolutely no hyperbole (or wait, maybe that's with ONLY hyperbole) that this is the greatest conflict known to man. Or woman. I say woman, because, I of course speak of the godparent power rankings.

Need some background? Well, that's why I'm here. See, it had been impossible to reach a consensus decision about who bel's number 1 godparent was. The only logical thing to do was implement a completely impartial system, sort of like the BCS. It's actually almost identical to the BCS, except it only takes into account one human poll and there's only one computer. Although, having now typed that out, it doesn't actually seem anything like the BCS, well, except that they both cause endless controversy. Check out this historical data:

Week ending 8/15 (2009) - Week ending 12/11 (2010)

1. MikeyK

2. D

I mean, that's unbelievable dominance. We're talking almost 16 straight months without a single change in the rankings. Some people would point to that and say there must be a flaw in the system, cause how could that possibly be right? Well, the thing is, I'm really just that great. This past year, was there a single (sane) person arguing that boise state should be ranked ahead of auburn? Fuck and no there wasn't. You know why? Cause greatness like that just can't be denied. Same principle applies here.

You don't just get to the top and say "well, that's that." Shit takes work. Take this Christmas. There didn't seem to be anything worthwhile out there, so I decided I needed to make something for her. Given my strict no gifts of clothing for anyone ever policy, the only other thing I could think of was a stuffed animal. Teddy bear seemed like the way to go. I had remembered seeing some crocheted things on some craft blog that looked delightful, so I found a pattern and I was off. Here's step 1:

Row 1: Sc 8 times into a loop (8 sts) - tighten the loop.

...

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN!? SC? HOW AND WHY DOES SOUTH CAROLINA COME INTO PLAY!? Oh wait, there's a key, let's rewrite that.

Row 1: Single crochet 8 times into a loop (8 stitches) - tighten the loop.

...

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN!? SINGLE CROCHET? WTFBBQ!?!

I guess I should go back in the story here. I don't (didn't) actually know how to crochet. This project was started under my unwavering assumption that given sufficient time and motivation I can do anything. Of course a big part of my plan here was that the pattern would be more intuitive. /sigh. Guess I better get a fucking book. The book I got had a section on deciphering patterns. It listed a number of things to look for that were not present in the pattern I had. Sure I could've gotten a different pattern, but as El Fuego would say, I was in too deep. I think I tried to do this ten times and was on the verge of seeking outside help, when it all just clicked. I went back and was off. It all came together pretty quick after that.

See, a nice adorable pig, just like I had planned on making all along. I totally didn't just do that because after making the body and arms it looked nothing like a bear.

hey look at this thing i made: VII

The important thing to understand about the nate dogg is he knows how to play casino. Which, I suppose, doesn't really tell you anything.

Are you familiar with casino? See it's a two man card game where cards are laid and subsequently picked up. Know what happens when a guy puts an ace on a seven, then the other guy drops the two of spades to make it a ten then the other guy picks it up with the ten of diamonds? All hell breaks loose. Tables get flipped.

I'm sorry, that didn't actually explain anything did it. I'd send you to wikipedia, but it doesn't actually explain any of the relevant parts of casino. The relevant part of casino is that it's apparently big in jail (though, not so much in prison).

This is really just getting more cryptic isn't it? Let's go back in the story a bit. I can say for sure that I knew nate in junior high and it's possible as far back as elementary school, but it's hard to say. We weren't especially close, but we ran in the same circles, so we saw each other a fair amount. One of those circles included donnyk (is that what I called him before? It's hard to keep the aliases straight). Donny visited jail and brought back casino. A whole lotta casino got played at his apartment. Fast forward some amount of time. I was hanging out at this apartment a lot (crestwood anyone?) and every day I would go pick up nate and we would sit in the kitchen and play casino for hours and hours. Of course the whole time we'd be bullshitting about whatthefuckever and by my estimation, that was when we really became good friends. Went on to be my first roommate, lived with the guy for years, countless misadventures, etc. etc.

THE POINT OF THE STORY IS!

It was no surprise, at all, that he would be the first person to commission a stained glass work. The guy is big up on planes you know and so he sent me a picture, which I promptly lost, but I had some memory of what it looked like and dug up this:

This was a really interesting change of pace for me. I'd been used to just making these things up as I go because I didn't need to have a set end point and since they weren't being necessarily made for anyone it didn't matter *so* much how they turned out. This was different, if someone's putting money down and they have a specific thing in mind, then I need to deliver.

I've talked in the past about how with stained glass, since you're necessarily losing detail, the important thing is to just pick some details you know you can nail, that really define the thing, and go with that. With this picture he had mentioned he really liked the view on the wings, so I wanted to keep them as intact as possible. I broke the plane down as simple as possible, with the breaks mainly being done to allow for some semblance of shading.

As far as the sky went, that's where I added the trademark mosaicyness. I wanted to make sure there was a clear break between the ocean and the sky so beyond the horizon I went with some plain blue glass. Then for the ocean I bought all the different shades of blue that hobby lobby had that I didn't hate and just alternated them.

Quick aside here. In past stained glass posts I've talked about my ongoing quest for a good pattern material. Apparently posterboard+3M 77 is the way to go. Worked like a dream.

Assembly of the picture went a bit different from normal. The typical system is to lay out the whole picture and solder it all at once. Here, since the plane was the most important part, I assembled it piece by piece to make sure that it lined up perfectly.

This worked really well for this piece because the shape of the sky was completely irrelevant, which meant if I needed to alter any pieces to fit around the plane, then so be it.

The last thing that was different about this piece was the framing. The book I got had talked about using cames, which are, I guess, U-shaped pieces of metal that you can use to build a frame. Of course they don't sell that shit at the 7/11 so I'd been out of luck. On a recent trip to the stained glass store however I noticed she had some hidden away. Definitely the way to go and is how all future pieces will be framed I think.

All in all this was probably the most painless window yet. Apparently practice makes something something. This was interesting because I feel like I always say "it looks better with the light going through it and the picture doesn't do it justice." It does look good with the light going through it, really brings out the shading int he plane, but it looks pretty good with no light too I feel.

I know I know, this whole time you've been reading this post and thinking, "Mike, how can I get my very own stained glass masterpiece!?" Well I feel like if you're reading this blog you must know how to contact me, but if not, shoot an email to highjack@fyadiaf.com. Let me know what you're thinking and we can discuss my ridiculously complex pricing system.