New Design: Unobtanium Miners Local 314

One of the ways my bizarre geek mind works is that with whatever media (book, game, movie) I'm absorbed in at the moment, I'm often taking little side-ideas and expanding them in my head. For example, the wife and I went to see Avatar waaaay back during Christmas break. It was, you know, fun. Neat movie. Very long. Stuff gets blowed up good. Lots of cats.

If you're going to watch it, don't go for the plot, because you've seen this one before (Evil White Man discovers Gold on Indian Land, pushes Indians off to get Gold). But even so, it was enjoyable. Good use of language, which made me very happy. One other thing that got my attention was the mining (holy cow, the mining equipment!) - specifically, they were mining Unobtanium.

Unobtanium is a name that's been around for Quite Some Time. In short, it is whatever the writer needs it to be in order to keep moving smoothly past objections raised by Reality. The name "Unobtanium" most often gets used behind the scenes, instead of directly in the media itself. But in Avatar, the Gold that the Evil White Man discovers is not only figurative Unobtanium (convenient spaceflight ftw), but in-world it is an element explicitly named Unobtanium, and with a straight face. It thrilled my little geek heart to see that.

So most people will watch Avatar and take away from it memories of Noble Savage Blue Cat People and a strong impression that Western Civilization Is Evil. I watch Avatar and end up thinking about Noble Savage Blue Cat People, why James Cameron would want me to think Western Civilization Is Evil, and the logistics of mining potentially-floating rock. Would these Unobtanium Miners have a union? What would they talk about at their meetings? What would the logo look like?

Here's what I ended up with (complete with fun Latin motto!):



There's also an "icon" version with just the Periodic Table entry for the golf shirt, zippered hoodies, etc.:



Mugs, mousepads, beach umbrellas, light switch covers and jumpdrive caps to come, whenever I get around to them. ;)

-- Cynic

Timing Is Everything

So we had the little earthquake here the other day - USGS says 4.9 according to Richter, local papers say 4.3. They also show the center a good ways southwest of USGS's location, so I don't know. Whatever. It was nice that it didn't flatten the house with us inside. It was interesting, anyway - much more Exciting than Scary. Afterwards, I changed my IM status to "whee, earthquake!" to reflect this.

Guess who felt like a total heel when he found out about the Haiti earthquake a day after it happened?

Small update.

Just got the golf shirt and the zippered hoodies (tracksuit, etc.) up on the site earlier today. These ones don't have the full design with the text, it's just the single d20 on the pocket, so it's a cleaner, more iconic look. The die should be 1.5" tall on the finished product. Let me know what you guys think.

I wanted to do actual polos, but they're no-go for now. I had thought that I could do a transparent background behind the die, and they'd just not use thread for that part, but it turns out they put thread in the whole circle. You end up with a red d20 on a white thread background on a black shirt... Frankly, it looks like crap, so I decided against it. It's a shame, really, because it's the kind of thing I could see myself wearing to job interviews.

And back to work.

-- Cynic

New Years Resolutions

Man, Holidays can be such a pain in terms of Getting Jack Done. On the other hand, much fun was had. So congratulations, people, you made it to 2010 without blowing yourselves up! Most of you did, anyway. If you didn't, then look on the bright side: you won't have to suffer through this year.

So while I'm back within Internet Range, without further ado or whatever, here are my New Year's Resolutions. For 2010, I resolve:

a) to try to suck at things a little less. I mean, damn.
2) to not get shot over stupid jokes. (I hope I hope I hope.)
d) to listen to more Hooverphonic and Placebo. And Muse. And ELO. I love me some ELO.
d.5) to learn to play poker.
3) to learn more Spanish, dammit. I'm in an immersion environment, for God's sake.
4) (censored). Heh.
4b) to get my finances in order and maybe make some money. Being poor Sucks Hard.
4) ???
5) Profit!

Probably back out of Internet Range again tomorrow, but I'll see you guys around.

-- Cynic

New Design: Rolling Twenties

Sunday night, sitting at the dinner table, I was going through some fonts for a different project when I came across this 1920's-ish retro font. It's one of those that when I saw it, I knew I'd have to do something with it. It was too cool to just leave it there, but until now I could never decide what to make from it.

So in showing it off to my wife, I used the sample text "Roaring Twenties", which in turn made me think of the d20 polyhedral dice.



(I think I want a set of dice for Christmas. I saw a really neat "Skully" set the other day that looked incredible. Even the wife loved them.)

I think it's also the fastest I've made a graphic design yet. If you remember me fussing about how long it takes me to draw anything, then you can imagine this makes me happy. I've moved up to the new version of Inkscape, by the way (0.47 stable release, I'm not doing dev builds... yet), and it's a big improvement on what was already a very nice program. Brief example: path highlighting. When using the node editor tool, it briefly flashes the outline of paths as the cursor passes over them. Even such a conceptually simple step can speed up work a great deal.



-- Cynic

New design: WTF FTW!

I tweeted about this the other night, but didn't get around to making an actual blog post. I blame Wikipedia and bash.org. (If you're not already familiar with bash, it's a magnificent time-waster. Lots of fun.)

New WTF FTW! mugs are up on CynicWear. It's two WTFs for the price of one! Includes a bonus backwards WTF and does double-duty as a palindrome!

Dig that 70's-tastic font:




It's also available as Sigg water bottles or a ceramic travel mug. Oh, that fun-loving CafePress.

-- Cynic

Adjustment - a minor rant

For those of you in the tl;dr camp: Hondurans are culturally predisposed towards early-onset deafness.

Honduras has been an interesting exercise in flexibility. Different food, different language, different culture. Overall it's enjoyable, but it's not entire. It's like Jello spiked with broken glass: not that bad if you just eat the Jello part. And if you get some glass it's ok, because then it's something to tell the grandkids about, assuming you live that long.

I knew I was in for a lot of adjustment before I left, and was ok with it. The food here is great, by the way, in case I haven't mentioned that enough.  I'm cool with learning Spanish, I've got a thing for languages. My biggest problem there is being disciplined in studying it. The trouble comes in the culture department, in a couple of areas: noise and what I will refer to as "Professionalism" for lack of a better term.

Hondurans, to put it nicely, are bloody noisy. I'm not even kidding. Your average American with a Big Stereo, a Camaro with no muffler, an Outdoor Voice and three TVs on in the background 24/7 doesn't even know what "noisy" means, compared to these people. If they're not making noise, they're not happy, and when they are happy, then they're shooting things to show it. (If you're happy and you know it, shoot your gun!)

Car horns are a way of life in Honduras.  If you're driving here and you need to pull into traffic, you honk loud and long to let people know you're pulling in.  If someone lets you in, you honk at them to let them know how appreciative you are.  If you think someone might not know you're there (such as the pedestrians crossing the street 150 yards ahead) you honk at them.  If you're a Real Man in Honduras and you go to a friend's house to visit, you don't ring the doorbell; you sit in your car in front of his house and lay on the horn for about 30 seconds straight.  To ring someone's doorbell here marks you as either a Sissie or a Beggar or a Conman, and sometimes all three.

Music in Honduras comes in only two volumes: maddeningly painful, or literally deafening. The neighbor behind me (I call him Thumper) has a Bumpin' Stereo through which he blares music of a genre I cannot discern, because it's so loud that it's gone fuzzy and all I can make out is that there is a beat. I know there is a beat, because it's making my skull throb and resonate while it gleefully imparts its subliminal commands to Burn Them All.  Thumper will do this for up to 6 hours without interruption, sometimes until 1:30 AM.  I want his stereo to short out and burn his house to the ground while he's at work.

My neighbor to one side, a guy I've started calling Señor Unce for his love of All Things Techno, has a Bigass Truck with an exhaust system specifically altered to be as noisy as possible, which he cannot start without revving it like he's trying to break it for about 10 minutes.  His schtick is that he parks this truck with the doors open in front of his house and blasts his Techno.  I've only seen him go for 4-hour stretches at a time, but he makes up for it in psychological aggression by sometimes playing it as late (early) as 3 or 4 AM, on weekdays.  I have a fantasy in which he is driving this truck and runs afoul of a military checkpoint: he doesn't see the soldiers directing traffic because he has looked down to adjust the stereo, and he cannot hear their shouts over his music.  As he plows into the rearmost stopped car, the soldiers mistake this for a vehicle-bombing attempt.

The neighbor across the street has a thing for classical music, and has the loudest stereo of them all: we call him NBC, for Neighborhood Broadcasting Company.  Even our very nice next-door neighbors do it, though much less often, and so far always during the day.  A while back I got a ride with them to the mall, and before leaving, they popped a Big Band Jazz CD in the player.  They played it so loudly that the husband and wife, sitting next to each other, were shouting at the top of their lungs at each other to be heard. Not an argument: he was trying to tell her to go move the other car into the driveway, and she couldn't tell what he was saying. At no point in this back-and-forth did it occur to either of them to simply turn the music down.

Screaming is a big deal in Honduras, too.  When the neighbors argue (approximately one big fit per day, all three kids and the mom, with scattered smaller arguments), they scream.  When they throw tantrums (approximately once every ninety minutes when the kids are home), they scream.  When they play, they scream. The "oh God it burns, get it off me, it took my arm" kind of screaming, what we euphemistically refer to as "screaming bloody murder", except that it actually sounds like they're being murdered.  We have been brought out of the house more than once to see if they're alright, because we thought someone had broken a leg or something.  No, just playing around.  I thought at first it was just them, but it turns out the kids at the school I did tech stuff for do almost the same thing.

Professionalism is a rant for another time.

-- Cynic