Krispy Kreme and SciFi parody!
Mood:  silly
Michael finally got it together, and made his t-shirt.

Go, look, buy:

Crispy Creme Is People!

Did you miss me?
Mood:  mischievious
Now Playing: Miguel-san talkin' about props.
Hello! Here I am!

Did you miss me?

Haven't been blogging much; have been going through all the many many many blogs I created while I was fractured to condense them all. Get rid of what doesn't fit, keep the things that do. Once they are all condensed, who knows what I will choose? I'm thinking I'll just use "Greymatter" at my own site right now, but I may change my mind.

Anyway, I wanted to say hello to the people on LJ who syndicate this, to let them know I am still here and thinking of them, although, probably not as much as I think about myself. Which is, after all, a right and proper thing.

I also want to share some pictures with you, but unlike past entries, I'm not going to pop the pictures into this entry. Instead, I'm going to point you to my shiney site, and let you look through them at your leisure.

This link leads to the pictures I took at the First Coronation for the Kingdom of Northshield. I don't have many pictures, because I did not have the camera in hand until about 6 PM.

Coronation gallery #1

Coronation gallery #2

One gallery is people, items, events, and the other is people and heraldry. I've been very interested in heraldry in use these past few months, and so have been deliberately photographing people using their heraldry for things other than banners or shields. I have also been writing articles about some of my projects; those are at http://www.merouda.com/asheraldry.

One of the fun things about the Heraldic Arts and Sciences site is the way the articles tend to morph into records of the mistakes I made and the notes for improving next time. LOL.

I hope you all are well and happy.



Anyway,

Posted by rpg2/merouda at 12:55 PM CDT
Updated: Saturday, 23 October 2004 12:29 PM CDT
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Pictures from Vegas and gaming plans
Las Vegas. Sin City. Hooooo-boy. Here is a small selection of pictures we took. It's going to take me weeks to go through it all, get it into some sort of order. We took a lot of digital pictures, and I took a lot of film, but I've no idea what sort of shape the film is in. Airport security had all sorts of fun with my film. Power corrupts, ayup.

Alas, some of the best stuff is on video. I'm thinking my next computer project is going to feature digitizing video and hosting said clips on the web. Clues on good web tutorials for such shit greatly appreciated.

So, anyway, I think I may be forced to take up scrapbooking; it may be the only way to attractively display all the stuff we have. My pictures from our trip to London are all scraggly looking, just thrown into a cheap photo album. It really deserves more.

And so, pictures:



Sock Monkey riding one of the flamingos in front of, of course, The Flamingo. It's very pink.



The Strip: Las Vegas Boulevard

This is a night time shot of a small section of the "new" Strip. If you don't know your Vegas history, then you don't know that the current "Strip" is a product of the building boom of the last decade or so, when the Bellagio came in and altered the face of Vegas gambling. While the "old" Strip is connected to the "new" strip, they are obviously products of different eras and intents. New Strip is more Disney World-like.



Night time shot of a fountain on Las Vegas Blvd.

I can't recall exactly which casino on the new strip hosts this fountain; I think it's the Paris, but it might be the new Caesar's Palace. I'll have to look when I'm feeling less lazy.



The Strip: Freemont Street

This is what is left of the classic Vegas strip, the "old" Strip. It is noticably seedier than Las Vegas Blvd. The old lights no longer move as they did, and the area has been remodeled to make it more competative with the resorts along Las Vegas Blvd. There were a great deal fewer people visiting Freemont street, and in some ways, I liked it much better. There is a different, more desperate class of gambler hanging out in the older casinos, but it should be said that Freemont street is not inappropriate for a family visit. It's not dangerous... it's Vegas de-Disney-fied. Vegas where the prettifying doesn't hide the reality.



Leesie & Poopie


Mikey & Poopie

Elise, Michael, and Sock Monkey having dinner at the Triple 7, the brewpub located in Main Street Station, one of the casino/hotels near the Freemont area of the Strip. Everything in Vegas touts itself as "the Best," but Triple Seven really was good food decently priced, and I enjoyed their beers greatly.

Darkwood
Now that the Nano is in the editing stage, I am again planning to pull together that world and prepare it for gaming. I would really like to pull an RPG together, and I think I will run the game just for other women. LOL. It will be fun to have a series of adventures for geek girls while ironing out the bugs in the development of the world for use in RPG gaming rather than just various fictional worlds.

Ah, I'm too tired to write the rest of what I planned tonight.

More Christmas Lyrics outside the ordinary
Jesus The Missing Years John Prine
Jesus.... the missing years

It was raining. It was cold
West Bethlehem was no place for a twelve year old
So he packed his bags and he headed out
To find out what the world's about
He went to France. He went to Spain
He found love. He found pain.
He found stores so he started to shop
But he had no money so he got in trouble with a cop
Kids in trouble with the cops
From Israel didn't have no home
So he cut his hair and moved to Rome
It was there he met his Irish bride
And they rented a flat on the lower east side of Rome...
Italy that is
Music publishers, book binders, Bible belters, Money Changers,
Spoon Benders and lots of pretty Italian chicks.

Chorus:
Charley bought some popcorn
Billy bought a car
Someone almost bought the farm
But they didn't go that far
Things shut down at midnight
At least around here they do
Cause we all reside down the block
Inside at ....23 Skidoo.

Wine was flowing so were beers
So Jesus found his missing years
So He went to a dance and said ";This don't move me";
He hiked up his pants and he went to a movie
On his thirteenth birthday he saw ";Rebel without a Cause";
He went straight on home and invented Santa Claus
Who gave him a gift and he responded in kind
He gave the gift of love and went out of his mind
You see him and the wife wasn't getting along
So he took out his guitar and he wrote a song
Called ";The Dove of Love Fell Off the Perch";
But he couldn't get divorced in the Catholic Church
At least not back then anyhow
Jesus was a good guy he didn't need this shit
So he took a pill with a bag of peanuts and
A Coca-Cola and he swallowed it.
He discovered the Beatles
And he recorded with the Stones
Once He even opened up a three-way package
In Southern California for old George Jones

Repeat Chorus:

The years went by like sweet little days
With babies crying pork chops and beaujolais
When he woke up he was seventeen
The world was angry. The world was mean.
Why the man down the street and the kid on the stoop
All agreed that life stank. All the world smelled like poop
Baby poop that is ..the worst kind
So he grew his hair long and thew away his comb
And headed back to Jerusalem to find Mom, Dad and home
But when he got there the cupboard was bare
Except for an old black man with a fishing rod
He said ";Whatcha gonna be when you grow up?";
Jesus said ";God";
Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?
I'm a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood
They're gonna kill me Mama. They don't like me Bud.
So Jesus went to Heaven and he went there awful quick
All them people killed him and he wasn't even sick
So come and gather around me my contemporary peers
And I'll tell you all the story of
Jesus...The Missing Years

Repeat Chorus:

We all reside down the block
Inside at ....23 Skidoo.


On a more soulful, sad note, I wish I could find the whole lyric for Over the Rhine's Jesus in New Orleans. Here is an excerpt:

"The last time I saw Jesus, I was drinking Bloody Mary's in the South / In a barroom in New Orleans, rinsing out a bad taste in my mouth."

I'm sick of Christmas Music, so thought I'd check the feed with Blink 182's not-nice lyrics.
Just some lyrics meant to give me a break.

I Won't Be Home for Christmas, Blink 182
Outside the carolers start to sing
I can't descibe the joy they bring
'Cause joy is something they don't bring me

My girlfriend is by my side
From the roof are hanging sickles of ice
Their whiny voices get irritating
It's Christmas time again

So I stand with a dead smile on my face
Wondering how much of my time they'll waste
Oh God, I hate these Satan's helpers

And then I guess I must have snapped
Because I grabbed the baseball bat
And made them all run for shelter

It's Christmas time again
It's time to be nice to the people you can't stand
All year
I'm growing tired of all this Christmas cheer
You people scare me
Please stay away from my home
If you don't wanna get beat down
Just leave the presents and then leave me alone

Well, I guess it's not cool to freak on Christmas Eve
'Cause the cops came and arrested me
They had an unfair advantage
And even though the jail didn't have a tree
Christmas came a night early
'Cause a guy named bubba unwrapped my package

It's Christmas time again
It's time to be nice to the people you can't stand
All year
I'm growing tired of all this Christmas cheer
You people scare me
Please stay away from my home
If you don't wanna get beat down
Just leave the presents and then leave me alone

I won't be home, I won't be home for Christmas
I won't be home, I won't be home for Christmas

Kiernan in his Halloween costume.
We don't have trick or treat on Halloween around here. Alas. Still, we had tons of fun taking Baby around for trick or treat on Sunday. Poor Angelique's arms are sore as the dickens today.


Kiernan is a little red dragon! Photo, Angelique, 26 October 2003.


"Mommie, what is this thing on my head?"

What a cutie.

Pictures from Coronet, Alex's party, Samhain
Got a lot of pictures today.

Some of them are quite old and self-indulgent. I wanted to post a bunch of them, but here are just a few.

Most Recent:

These pictures are from Alex's party.


Michael as The Phantom of the Paradise and Alex as The Phantom. Those silver teeth Michael is wearing creep me, man. Photographer unknown.


Sue as a Klingon; moi as 14th C. Wonder Woman. Photo: Michael, 25 October 2003.


Self portrait; sorta spooky, and Michael's favorite picture of me from this set.


This is not the best picture of me, per se, but it's the best shot of the dress, and a picture of "Wonder Woman" with Superman and Batman is too cool to let vanity get in the way of sharing the humor.

The dress is fun, but not original to me. I've had that sort of idea before; one of my very first SCA dresses is an interpretation of "Princess Aurora" from Sleeping Beauty, and I've a long list of characters I want to interpret medievally. G did Wonder Woman first; I've a picture of that dress coming. Although they look similar at first glance, there are a lot of differences in the two dresses.



G as SCA-period Wonder Woman. And yes, you clever things, that is an SCA-period Punisher in the background.

At this particular event, a bunch of people decided to do period interpretations of various comic book heroes. G interpreted Wonder Woman as a heraldic cotehardie, and I completely agree with that assessment. G used a linen-like material, I used stretch velvet--deliberately, I might add, to keep myself from wearing it to SCA events. Stretch velvet is in no way period.

That said, it's still a better dress than a lot of "attempts at period clothing" put together by people who have done the SCA long enough to know better. Ahem.

Anyway, we chose different materials and different shades. Her dress is divided per pale (the four panels of the cotehardie are red-red-blue-blue, making the dress half and half), my dress is divided quarterly (red-blue-red-blue). Because of this design choice, her eagle spreads across the the front and back of the red section; mine is only on the front red quarter. The eagle is placed at about knee height on both dresses. G used a mullet of eight to decorate the blue panel, stamping the stars with white paint; I used a mullet of 5 and heat-pressed an impression into the fabric. Again, she decorated the entire front and back; I only did the front blue panel; my seme of stars is more closely set. G's cuffs are lined with gold lame; mine are lined with a silver "brocade" that has a star pattern as the brocade. G's dress opens up the front and arms; mine does not. And some differences in acessories; I think she definately has the better headband; I have the better belt and lasso.

I wanted to make period boots to go with the dress; it would be pretty simple, actually, but I did not have time. And there was also the fact that I was making a costume, not a regular SCA dress, so I wasn't worried about getting everything at least "peri-oid" if not period. Still, that nagging little "do it right" bug was driving me, which is why I have the silver, mullety cuffs; the current incarnation of Wonderwoman has silver bracers, and the Linda Carter version had a red star on the silver cuffs.

So. I wanted to complement G without actually copying her dress wholesale. I think I did okay. There is only so much one can do before one loses the idea.

Last, some self-portraits from last Samhain. I liked them, but they didn't scan too well. Such is the problem with losing rolls of film and getting them developed a year after you took the picture.


This is the one that looks best as a print; it happens to look worst as a scan. LOL.


Another that I liked. I usually get one good picture; this time, I got 3.


Another. In some ways, the faded colors are kind of cool, remind me of old photos from the 60's and 70's. Still.....



And an attempt to make something better from the picture above. I had fun doing it. But damn, I got sick of looking at me.

The best things in the roles of film, though, was the 360-degree view of Kennsington Park. I just haven't figured out a way to effectively translate that to this medium. Still, it's cool. I stood in one spot and shot a whole roll of film turning in a circle. Line up the pictures, and you got a 360 view. :-)

Nanowrimo
I started this blog to have a public face for my journal, didn't I? But I haven't been writing much anywhere, lately.

That will change soon, I hope. I expect to do a lot of work on this site in order to get ready for Nanowrimo (linked in the sidebar). I figure one very good way to get ready for writing a fast novella is to assess the world building that I have already done, and then add what might be needed. SPend a month thinking about a fictional world, and then write the story. We'll see how it goes.

More fun with the scanner and Memory Lane
Intensely old photobooth fun from more than a decade ago. Does anyone ever look good in these things?

This is my favorite:


Angelique is about 4-5 years old here. I have the date written down somewhere, but I am entirely too lazy to go look it up.



And this would be Michael, me, in our first months together, way back in 1992.

Nothing much going on right now; have some pictures from last weekend to post, but I haven't located them yet. Gotta get started on my projects, gotta do a lot of things.

Pictures I pinched from someone else!
Emily (SCA: Rochl) took these pictures at the Pennsic War of 2001. I pinched them from her page, as I have no idea how long that page will stay online. It's been 2 years. She has a number of pictures there, but these would be the ones I'm interested in saving.



Left to right: Eliane, Merouda, Rochl, and Alissende.

One reason why I want to redo all my garb? I am still wearing that dress to events. It's needing retirement, for god's sake.




These are my friends Grace and Toshikage. They still wear those outfits, too. But THEY still look good. I just look like my dress is old. ;-)