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Caoimhe

I posted a diorama I made for Caoimhe³ yesterday. I like to make little things for partners sometimes.

My other partner has a strong fondness for the pokémon goomy and I have learnt that your partner identifying with an extremely marketable pokémon makes putting together silly little gifts pretty easy. A couple of years ago I got a little 3D-printed goomy figurine from an Etsy shop (that doesn’t seem to sell it any more), painted it myself and and paired it with a love ball from a more official toy as a gift for her.

A goomy figuring with a love ball. Goomy in the love ball.

She has also been, more recently, getting back into Magic: The Gathering and had put together a ooze deck which she used my printer to make proxies for. While I was doing that for her I threw in some little custom cards for the deck.

A card that looks like a Goomy Pokémon card but with the rules of Slurrk, All-Ingesting from Magic: The Gathering. An ooze token Magic: The Gathering card with a photo of the goomy figurine from above on a pixelart background.

For the Slurrk card I used Poké Card Generator to fill in the basic rules then made more modifications in GIMP. For the token card I used Card Conjurer and put a photo of the goomy figurine over a swamp background made by Aveontrainer.


Caoimhe

Caoimhe³ has a Toyota GT86 named Takumi that she is taking out for a track day tomorrow. I gave her a little something today to commemorate it.

A diorama of a red Toyota GT86 illuminated by some tiny LED street lights.

I got a 1:36 scale model car online and originally simply intended to give that to her as a gift, but the idea of making a small diorama for it struck me and I threw this together yesterday in a fit of anxious hyperfocus. The construction was a mess and I was surprised with how well it turned out in the end.

An overhead view of the diorama.

Pretty much everything that you can see other than the car and the foam it’s mounted in came from a local model shop.

The cobblestones were originally a uniform grey but I painted them with some watered down black paint to sink into the crevices and then heavily drybrushed grey over them to give a little bit of depth. The footpath could have perhaps done with similar treatment but I didn’t think any of the paints I currently had were very suited.

The streetlamps, perhaps a bit out of scale with the car as well as not being mounted particularly straight, are powered by 3V from two AA batteries, which are mounted in a battery holder with a power switch that I cut from a length of fairy lights and sloppily soldered to the lamposts. It’s rough and I think the connections are liable to break if it needs to be taken out for a battery change, but it works and the switch to turn the lights on and off is accessible through a discreet hole cut in the side of the foam.

The foam itself is just something I found thrown with some other miscellaneous rubbish in the press under the stairs while looking for something to mount this on and ended up being almost perfectly shaped to hold the segment of road as well as having depth enough to hide the battery pack. I didn’t even have to cut it other than the hole for the lightswitch.





I accidentally stepped on my cheap theracane knockoff and snapped it. I have splinted it with a metal rod from a broken folding chair and judicious application of duct tape. Seems to be holding up so far.

Said home-repaired cane.




Caoimhe

I rambled in an episode of a podcast about German Army parkas after spotting one in an episode of Ring: The Final Chapter. I remembered seeing them around back in the day in charity shops and such. As a result of this a partner ended up buying me one that we spotted in a vintage clothes stand at a market. I really liked it but I don’t particularly want to go around with German flags on my shoulders so I decided to replace them with some alternative patches I got on Patchion.

The coat hanging on a hook. It’s olive green with a German flag patch on the shoulder.
The German flag being removed.
A transgender pride flag being sewn in its place.
Me modelling the finished coat, also showing some pink pawprint patches applied to bottom of the coat at the back.

I recently got hold of a roll of Harman RED; it’s a 35mm redscale film stock. Redscale film is film that is wound backwards in the film canister; that is, it’s wound in a way that you shoot through the layers of the emulsion back-to-front. This results in a large amount of the light entering the camera being absorbed by the red backing layer, resulting in images that are saturated with reds and oranges! You end up with these wonderfully strange and apocalyptic pictures. On top of this, some film scanning machines can get a little confused by this and try to correct the image by massively upping the missing blue levels in the image, which gives you this incredible orange-to-pink-to-blue gradient over the image. Let’s tell a little narrative with these dramatic crimson captures!

wild construction

Scaffolds give way to the infinite beyond above, gleaming a dark bloody rust as the rickety spindles of humanity stab the air in their sickly triumph.

fallen cola

Their chromed godsblood is spilled upon the ground. The parched earth soaks up what it is owed.

beep beep beep

False eyes peer from every edifice, searching for malcontent in the tired faces of long-gone wanderers. They report back their findings to an unlistening void, a silent obelisk, alone and proud in the data center that no longer stirs the dust with its fitful, air-conditioned gasping.

dogs

Their trust in us was broken. Promises unkept ring hollow to beings of unfiltered loyalty.

invent

Ingenuity drove the gears of malice. A twisted celebration of the force which ground the masses into slurry.

stairs

Homes within factories. Work within sleep. Solace within terror. Peace within war. All but mere steps from eachother, as the borders grew thin and weary.

tower

And so, as with all towers that race towards the heavens, the fall was at once sudden and glacial. And with time, the birds and plants regrew in the nooks and crannies of artifice, turning it once more back into nature. Those who were ground down into the earth sprang forth out of it again, the dancing union of clay and thought once again spiralling into new shapes to spite the entropy.

And so our story ends, as a new one begins.

(Can you tell I’ve been playing a lot of Caves of Qud recently?) Here’s a bonus picture where the film slipped and stopped advancing in my camera, and I got a triple exposure of a building, a cup of coffee, and a dog someone was kind enough to let me take a picture of.

triple time

Have a good one, folks!





Caoimhe

There are some things that I do occasionally but never often enough that I remember the procedures for them, e.g. if I use my printer’s scanner to scan to a U.S.B. stick what format does the U.S.B. stick need to be formatted to. I have started just writing this on the printer itself with a pencil.

My printer with a reminder to format U.S.B. sticks to FAT32 written on it in pencil, along with a procedure for printing double sided.

When I did this I was at first hesitant to “deface” my printer, but that’s silly. It’s my printer and I do not have it to look pretty. I think I should do this more often. I already have a giant stack of plastic drawers all labelled with their contents and I think I should label things more often with these kinds of reminders to save myself frustration. With my brain it’s the only way I can remember where anything is or procedures for using things.





Caoimhe

I was on holiday in Copenhagen last week. Here are some photos.

White specks dot the sea in a regular pattern seWen out the window of a plane.
Wind turbines seen from the plane.
A kabinenroller.
An Akira Toriyama-looking enclosed moped.
A shop called Normal.
Just normal men.
A stained glass window of a woman in a kimono.
Vela dyke bar.
A receipt reading “Cuiva”.
A valiant attempt from Gasoline Grill to spell my name.
A 7-Eleven with rainbow signage.
Found the gay 7-Eleven.
Ducks in lake.
Some ducks near Christiania.
A sticker featuring Yuri from Dirty Pair with text reading “HELLBOY OS BOYS”
I do not know what this means.
A meal.
Some vegan fish and chips from Atlas Bar.
Natu and Goomy Pokémon cards with vines and flowers hand painted on them.
Some little gifts for partners that I decorated at the Queer Krea Klub.
A very square-looking dog with white, matted hair and glowing red eyes.
An extremely fucked up dog painted by Nicolai Abildgaard.
A brown dog with a matted, brown mane but weirdly smooth body and also glowing red eyes.
Ditto.
A very sad looking dog with the body of a kiwi. The eyes don’t come out as red in this one but I think they looked red in person.
Ditto.
A can of Vinohradsky Pivovar.
A beer…
The back of the can with a radar chart rating the beer on “hop character”, “bitterness”, “carbonation”, “fullness” and “aftertaste”.
…with stats!
An ad for Cheez-It showing eyes with a spiral pattern and Cheez-Its for pupils.
Cheez-It hypno-advert jumpscare.
My being lit from below with some thin grey stubble barely visible.
Me after not having shaved for nine days.