NOLA?
Mardi Gras world is good. Heyena Hell gave me a great behind the scenes tour there of all the restricted areas… but she doesn't work there anymore :(
It's still worth it though.
The markets in the French quarter are popular but just looking at all the old houses and the lovely beads hanging from all the trees like jeweled vines are quite interesting. All the permanently burning gas-lights on most of the houses are pretty disturbing though.
Snake and Jakes dive bar was probably where we ended up most nights…
The green streetcars are great to ride on…
Zotz on Oak street is the BEST cafe there! Visit it!!! Hyena Hell aka Becky works there late at night.
Magda's second hand clothes shop, which is almost next to it, has a great selection of cool clothes. Tomorrow on my flight back from Darwin I will be wearing a shirt I boughy from there…
Myers hat shop in the city is cool. Look at all the pics of the celeb customers and talk the the guy who runs it: Amazing accent!!! Straight out off a Tenesee Williams play!
Ummm… the mississippppppiiiiiii? The GIGANTIC Ponchotrain highway?
Gumbo was boooooring…
Alagotor poboys were nice.
Benguets (?) were disgusting.
The strip clubs are great!
You have to drink the local deinks too- Schlitz is yuk, anything with jagermister in is revoltingly sweetly disgusting, Mint dewlips are wonderful, especially when drunk from a silver stirrup cup… and other stuff. Can't recall it all but it was quite nice.
The gay quarter is pretty cool, very good food there.
There are no streetcars on Elysian fields… no streetcar named desire and Elysian Feilds is as far away from the meaning of that name as it's possible to get… STELLAAAAAA!!!!

bravo1102 wrote:

One can be stand right next to somone and yet be miles away and conversely a continent away but within each other's very soul.

What kind of person would ban a guy like that? You'd have to have a heart of spearmint.

—

Mother and daughter? I did not know that ayes' - what a cool family!
(Must be a beast in the attic or something - there's always a bad one somewhere).


e: I don't like spearmint.

RIP Ray Harryhausen…his movies were pure magic to me as a kid.

…and the forerunner to the blockbusters of today, with their CGI characters and compositing? Maybe! I kinda think so!

He will be missed. I remember him most for his animation work with films such as Jason and the Argonauts. The animated skeletons looked pretty scary back at the time. And all this without the assistance of computers…

Woke up from a very bad nightmare. Day care centers and newborn wards of hospitals and elementary schools being blown up in the name of a religion. And crazy people saying that if they weren't born to parents who worshipped their religion then they are “tainted” and must be put to death…

I don't think I'm gonna go sleep for a while… :(

Ray Harryhausen was a real innovator. It's amazing that many of his models and armitures still exist. Can't say that about CGI effects. Nothing to look at or touch just an image on a screen. There's my kinesthetic side again.

He was the first to do many things in the footsteps of the great Willis O'Brien. (The original silent Lost World and King Kong) These guys practically invented our modern concept of dinosaurs.

If you can find it read the From theLand Beyond Beyond.http://www.amazon.com/From-Land-Beyond-Harryhausen-Windhover/dp/0425035069

The main thing is the skill of the artist, not so much the techniques they used. Ray was an amazing artist.

Gotta love some of the players of the free to play MMOs I've been messing around in. Some of them keep saying that a subscription based game is better as you're guaranteed tech support, better content, etc… Problem is… in this day and age not everyone can afford to pay for the subscription fee every month.

I'm guessing a lot of the new players I've encounted playing Neverwinter must've come from the WoW playerbase. Most of them (that I've seen so far) are complaining about the apparent cost of high level mounts (+3) in the Zen Store (Neverwinter's Cash Shop). Funny thing is… I think $40 for the mount (it being an armored War Bear) is reasonable as every character you have on the account can claim it upon reaching the required level… meaning every one of your characters can have one just like every character who is elegible for one in Star Trek Online can use the starships you buy in their store.

The game needs more fashions though. I'm not sure how much longer my Cleric can run around in the same looking suits of chainmail armor (and yes… they have slots like in WoW).

ozoneocean wrote:
The main thing is the skill of the artist, not so much the techniques they used. Ray was an amazing artist.

Definitely. Even when he did something as simple as flyng saucers he made them visually interesting and uniquely his own. He sure could destroy Washington D.C. monuments (Earth vs the Flying Saucers) and Greek monuments (Twenty Million miles to Earth)

Haha! yes - Earth vs the Flying Saucers was an impossibly lame movie, but his iconic saucers are totally unforgetable. If like me, you watched that film on the back of seeing the saucer footage - well it's akin to listening to a Barney the purple dinosaur singalong album and suddenly there's a Hendrix solo.

—

What am I talking about, beast in the attic; they've got Product Placement!

Ironscarf wrote:
What am I talking about, beast in the attic; they've got Product Placement!

Meh. We don't make him stay in the attic when he visits. Maybe because Product Placement ignored this advice:

As far as being a houseguest goes, always bring a sack of dirty washing and leave them out with a note to be cleaned and pressed, but do it one item at a time.
Also, smoke cigars or a pipe and carry a large supply of matches to constantly strike on expensive looking surfaces.

Edit: oops, nearly forgot - pretend to be French if you can carry it off. I don't know why, but it adds weight to the above tactics.

All I've ever seen of Harryhausen is Clash of the Titans, and to be honest I didn't think it stood the test of time very well.

Ironscarf wrote:
What am I talking about, beast in the attic; they've got Product Placement!

Coincidentally I was just talking to my dad about how I'm glad that people aren't really expected to look after their loony relatives like in the old days, because we'd have to have my uncles locked up in the attic.

This is weird-
Apparently the head of the boring US clothes company Abacrombie and Fitch said this:

In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids, he told the site. Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people dont belong , and they cant belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely. Those companies that are in trouble are trying to target everybody: young, old, fat, skinny. But then you become totally vanilla. You dont alienate anybody, but you dont excite anybody, either.

It's like bizaro land… That stuff is so mind-bendingly dull, generic, boring, behind the times, and bland, and so are the sorts of people that buy it.
And doing a Google image search for “Abacrombie and Fitch” makes it look as if they're trying to market themselves exclusively towards still-in-the-closset gay men with bad taste.

ozoneocean wrote:
And doing a Google image search for “Abacrombie and Fitch” makes it look as if they're trying to market themselves exclusively towards still-in-the-closset gay men with bad taste.

And it doesn't have the polo pony. Not even a blasted alligator. What good is it? If I want bland “classic” clothing I want a logo dammit!

Skip Abercrombie and Fitch and go right for Land's End. Same clothes, better quality and no pretentious executives.

Loony relatives in attics are great for Hammer movies but make terrible houseguests. We did actually have a Frenchman over once for an exchange visit and he was exactly as described - right down to the match striking on expensive surfaces!
ozoneocean wrote:
Abacrombie and Fitch:



Holy crap - looks as though they've just hijacked a random container vessel of generic Primark/Walmart stuff from china and stuck their label all over it - at least they could hire a designer. I got this so wrong because when I read Abacrombie and Fitch I pictured something a lot closer to this:

Ironscarf wrote:
Loony relatives in attics are great for Hammer movies but make terrible houseguests.

Pity Hammer never did a version of Jane Eyre. The original looney relative in the attic. They also avoided Lovecraft who also had looney relatives hidden away like the dread spawn of the Old Ones.

We did actually have a Frenchman over once for an exchange visit and he was exactly as described -

Figures it was a Frenchman. I knew Texans like that in the Army. Fortunately there was no expensive furniture around to be ruined. You know they sell faux antiques with the dings and scratch marks already on them? I'd like to be the guy in the factory who gets to bang up the furniture with the hammer before it's sent off to get painted.

Bravo1142 wrote:
You know they sell faux antiques with the dings and scratch marks already on them?

I love how they've actually been doing that for hundreds of years so that now a hell of a lot of old fake antiques are actually real antiques ^_^

@Scarf- Yeah… The name sounds hoity-toity but the brand is apparently about “douche-bags” in hoodies. So classy, so unique and exciting! Hoodies with stuff printed on them and jeans with fake fade marks. AVANT GARDE!
The mad French visitor in the attic will be choking on his beret and stripy shirt!

I knew a French woman like that once… She was called Francious (Frans-wahzzzzzzz). Permanent sneer. The entire planet was beneath her (well, it literally is I suppose…), so arrogant.
If she'd have been younger I'd have married her. :)

So whats new here? been lurking a bit but not enough.
Lite bites should update again by monday.
Personal stuff. life is still in adjustment phase, really struggle to do art at present. I keep opening software to do BASO stuff and i get a blank. :( I cant write at all and even following my own notes i get nothing. Luckily i can follow others so back to Lite bites and i have done a couple of pages for heroes alliance. Stress messes stuff up. depression I can use, stress is wrong for creativity.

@ozone:
François?

—

First serious rant in a long time…
My sisters and I inherited significant (for us, anyway) amounts of money from our granddad when he died. It's been over a year now, I think, and we haven't seen any money yet. I don't even know exactly how much I'll be getting.
My mom is supposed to be dealing with it, and at this point I've just asked way too many times to ask again. My older sister told me our mom snapped at her last time she tried.
I don't even know what to do about this.

Over a year? sounds a little much to be honest. Can you not find out what solicitor is dealing with it and go straight to them?

Genejoke is right - you need to speak to the solicitor. I take it the Grandad in question is your mum's father and she is probably the executor of the will? The executor is responsible for carrying out the wishes of the deceased; maybe she just can't or doesn't want to deal with it, but as a beneficiary of the will you have rights.

This is where it gets tricky. If the executor is not carrying out their duties, you would have to apply to the court to request that somebody else (usually the next of kin) administer the estate and the court would then write to your mother informing her of this request.
As you can see, this is not going well! People usaully get ripped off by their nearest and dearest in my experience - money seems to be thicker than blood. The best you can do is bite the bullet and talk to your mum about this - and keep talking to her about it regardless of the response. She'll probably deal with it eventually if you persevere, or at least you'll find out where the cash went!

If the assets were not cash or readily convertiable to cash a year's delay is common in the USA. Liquidation of things that aren't money is sometimes necessary and that is often painful for the executor to do. Let alone writing out checks often requires one to be in the last stage of grief: acceptance. If one isn't there yet and especially in denial, the writing of checks just isn't going to happen in many instances. Then there is the settling of debts and that can go on and on and on and make inheritances vanish. And then the executor is often too ambarassed to say that it all went to the creditors and there's no money remaining.

And never forget Mr Taxman.

My wife is a legal secretary who did estates for several years and has also executed her grandmother's and mother's estates. Her mother died more than ten years ago and the estate still isn't completely settled as there are still creditors demanding settlement.

Similarly I just got a large cash settlement of a disability suit and it's all already spent on bills. I probably won't personally see a dime (or for all this talk of soliciters as opposed to lawyers should I say shilling?)

Ironscarf wrote:
Product Placement!
People are talking about me!



…

So 3D printed guns are a reality now.

This was inevitable to happen but the part that sickens me is that the person responsible for designing and distributing the plans on the internet, which now has been downloaded over hundred thousand times, is a friggin Law Student. The gun is 100% plastic, appart from it requiring a metal firing pin which are cheap and easily availabe.

Naturally, being a Texan, his justifications for providing the world with the means to make unlicenced guns that are cheap, easily available, untracable and capable of passing through metal detectors is that it was matter of liberty. And of course he's not planing on taking any personal responsibility for any deaths or injuries that his creation is gonna bring forth. It's just a tool, after all, and all tools have the potential of being exploited.

Yes. Thank you so much for making the world a safer place, in the name of truth, justice and the American way.(/irony)

Apparently the design requires some other metal part or it won't work, which is some sort of measure to make them legal- so they can be detected etc.
But the catch to the whole big story is that almost none of the people that downloaded the plans can do anything with them because the sorts of “printer” you need for them aren't the cheap $2000 sort, they're a more heavy duty kind that goes for $8000+ second hand.
Add to that the guns are only reliable for a single shot.
So at the moment it's still a lot cheaper and easier just to buy a real gun that will be far superior.

The story is not as bad as it sounds basically. Not nearly. The thing is though that it points to bad potential problems down the track:
-If the materials get better so the crappy “printed” (such an idiotic word usage in this context) guns can reliably and accurately fire more than one shot.
-If the 3D fabricators become cheap and high quality enough to be freely available.

But the Fabrication machines are the key themselves. People say you ca't regulate plans freely available on the net, well you can still easily regulate the fabrication devices as well as the material for the “printing”, so there are still avenues for control and that Texas Law student can gp and suck on his own tiny genitals.

From the looks of it, only the barrel part needs to be replaced, after every shot, and the gun was designed so that's easily replaceable. Thus, you don't need to make the entire gun again, from scratch. This certainly slows down the re-fire rate of the gun, but there's still potential for mugging/store robberies, after all, you only need one bullet to kill someone.

The report only noted that the firing pin was required for purchase and everything else could be made with the printer. If they omitted any extra parts, then that's fine by me.

As for the price of the printer, yes, of course that's gonna be the biggest limiting factor but they're becoming increasingly more common. This might create incentive for ne'er-do-wells to start breaking into facilities that contain printers capable of making this gun. After all, there's a potential business in selling these guns to people in the street. Apparently the street value for a proper handgun is around $150-200 dollars. Imagine someone flooding the street with cheap $50 disposable guns.

Edit:
So apparently, the firing “pin” is a simple nail, that you can buy at a convenience store. It's, in fact, the only metal part of the gun, aside from the bullets, of course. You don't even need to bother acquiring a proper firing pin from a gun store. The gun is otherwise made out of 15 plastic pieces that can all be printed out of a 3D printer.


Here's a picture of the gun with all of its non plastic parts.


Also… Deucebag responsible for making it:


P.S:
He's calling his design “The liberator”, after a single use gun that was airdropped by the allies, in mass, over France, during the Nazi occupation. Because you know this gun is gonna be used for noble causes.

Here you go PP:

“Additionally, Defense Distributeds plans call for a 170g piece of steel
in the body of the gun a little piece of steel that, essentially, is
the only thing keeping these legal. The Undetectable Firearms Act
explicitly bans any gun that cant be detected with a metal detector.
Without this piece of steel, theres virtually no way of knowing who
might be packing plastic-encased heat. Equally important: its also
impossible to get off a shot without it.”

Link:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2013/05/100000-people-have-already-downloaded-3d-printed-gun-plans-so-what/

There certainly seems to be some conflicting information floating around about this gun. I picket this up from a different source, when I was originally looking around for information about this metal part that you're talking about:

“Unlike the original, steel Liberator, though, Wilsons weapon is almost entirely plastic: Fifteen of its 16 pieces have been created inside an $8,000 second-hand Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, a machine that lays down threads of melted polymer that add up to precisely-shaped solid objects just as easily as a traditional printer lays ink on a page. The only non-printed piece is a common hardware store nail used as its firing pin.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/05/05/meet-the-liberator-test-firing-the-worlds-first-fully-3d-printed-gun/

Ok.

After further looking around, I'm still not quite sure that I can trust this particular statement that:
“plans call for a 170g piece of steel…impossible to get off a shot without it.”

I think the article writer may be confusing the necessity of the steel piece with the firing pin, but the latter is certainly needed to strike and ignite the bullet casing.

It's true that the models that are made by Cody Wilson (creator of the gun) and his company, contain a steel piece, so that the gun is detectable but it's there for legal reasons. Without it, the gun would violate the Undetectable Firearms Act. BBC, Forbes and my local news sites are either omitting the existence of that piece, which is why I'm hearing about it first now, or pointing out that it's only there because Wilson is operating within the bounds of American gun laws. They even point out that those that download the gun don't have to include the piece.

170g of steel wouldn't be a tiny thing, either, so my suspicion is that it's located inside of the grip of the gun. Here's an image, showing the inside:


And taken apart (note that the bullet and the pin are shown in the picture):


Further more, Forbes is the one pointing out that the gun can use an ordinary nail for a firing pin.

More pictures and reading material:
http://news.cnet.com/2300-11386_3-10016769.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22421185

With the plethora of cheap and easily obtainable illegal handguns that infest the USA this entire “printable” gun thing is a chimera. This is very expensive and not worth much as far as improvised munitions go. A single shot pistol with only one metal part? I know how to make a single shot pistol without the metal part.

Composite “plastic” hand guns have been around for decades and ones without that piece of steel are reaily available further making this a nearly academic exercise. The law student made his point with his printer. This is a publicity ploy and a red flag to wave in front of the anti-gun crowd.

I know places where $8000 will buy me a frigging arsenal where sneaking it anywhere won't be a concern because I'll be able to shoot my way anywhere I wanted to go.

I think Bravo has hit pretty close to the bone here.
The idea of the creator of this thing was to make a statement against anti-gun laws, in an extremely childish and ill-thought out manner. The idea is to get mass press coverage and create a scare so that his platform (that guns are impossible to control so should instead be made universally available) can be forced through and given credence- FAR more credence than he or his idiotic notions deserve.

His plastic guns seem a much bigger deal than they are, but won't be a threat until some time down the track. He knows this but his aim is to make it seem like it's a thing NOW so that people will take notice of his bigger pro-gun agenda.
“You can't stop it so you may as well not even try”

The reality is that ALL the power of a gun is inside of the bullet. A gun is just a casing for directing an explosion accurately and reliably. They are very simple machines, very easy to make with almost zero skill. Where it gets hard is making them accurate for more than one shot.

Regarding the plastic gun: I do agree with you that it is first and foremost a publicity but I do feel that it is a discussion that we should be concerned with. I do feel though that it is a bit premature by 10 years at least, due to the fact that this is a technology that's available everywhere…yet.


My friend gave me a fine brown leather strap for “late”birthday present. For my guitar of course, you naughty naughty ozone -.-*