Caught in the Tuna Net

I have them on my back deck. Bet you do, too. Who knew that they were…well, the next big ‘Net meme!

This blog is hysterical as it is, but ZOMG, the Chair… you must read about the Chair.

UPDATE:

More chairpr0n on Flickr.

This has gotten to be an in-joke in the thread that I host over on the DAZ3D forums (Virile Noir). It originated with a series of wonderful 1950s beefcake photos that EdFury posted in the Vintage Beefcake thread, gems such as this one:

Vintage Beefcake

And this was the one that really started it all:

CHICKENS!

Therefore, LT, my partner in crime there, and I have come up with stamps of official approval! Mine is the basic white chicken, his is much fancier.

Official Beefcake! Seal #1

Official Beefcake Seal #2, Courtesy of LT Roberts

If you really want your render to be True Beefcake, you need a chicken in it!

It’s my blog, and I shall blow my own horn a little. Made it on the weekly statistical rollup at Renderosity as #30 favorite artist for July 20-26.  When I have a good week, picture-wise, this can happen. *beams*

Art Charts.

Don’t feel left out of the flat-panel TV revolution (does that mean they spin?). I only own a modest one and the Tivo upstairs, along with a Sony DVD player gotten on massive sale. Meh. The Honorable GF is the true Tech Ho’ in our house.

We squabble over how I could possibly be cyberpunk enough for her to hang out with, as I’m actually not big on gadgets for gadget’s sake.  I think it comes from my engineering training as well as temperament: I tend to only want something if I need it…and I don’t perceive “latest and greatest” as a need, necessarily. I hate techno clutter in real life. My ideal robotic/cybermind assistant would look, to all intents and purposes, like a Victorian drawing room…or just like a plain old room. You wouldn’t know it was there. No weird hummanoid interfaces, no massive writing ductwork or cabling or racks of equipment. No knobules and thingumawidgets would clutter up my space, ever.

Screens should lever up from the inlaid oak desktop if necessary, and include gestural interfaces. No mouse, no keyboard, unless you need to type  letters or draw something. Transfer the items in question to your smart-paper, which you fold up (one sheet) to carry in your pocket, purse, or bag. PDAs—bah. Phones—bah. Unless you *want* to have something to pick up and hold…then it might be modern or retro.

Thirty years ago, I wanted TVs you could hang on the wall like a picture to get it the heck out of my way. Well, finally they catch up with me! Refrigerators should compose grocery orders, and you should be able to use the fridge-front interface to make the order to be delivered or picked up. Houses should be able to keep up with the bills, not to mention the climate control, even if you use steam radiators with boilers. Plug the damned car into the driveway when you get home. And the driveway should heat briefly to facilitate snow removal, if the retractable carport  (which otherwise looks like a piece of architecture) doesn’t do the trick. Windows should dim for privacy when you clap or give the keyword, forget the damned dusty drapes unless you *really* wanted them (in which case they should be huge, long red velvet ones), but the house should otherwise look like a piece of Craftsman art.

I truly loathe the necessity for the badly-designed clutter of little personal electronics, most of which use text that is too small for anyone over forty to read. The damned wire from my earbuds to my iPod is constantly getting tangled in everything. Hateful wires…I should be able to plug the thing into the shoulderstrap on my bag so I don’t have yet MORE things hanging off me. Can’t stand a clutter of computer add-ons, either. Screens are ugly enough. Why can’t they have gold-leafed carved frames? or just be a glass panel that becomes opaque when you use it, but is see through when you aren’t? Why isn’t my mouse in between the halves of my keyboard, so the halves are separated by about a foot, so my arms and neck doesn’t hurt from scrunching into un-natural postures. And all cubes should have halogen or greenhouse like lamps with mandatory plants under them. OK, maybe not mandatory plants…

I have these grand mythical places in the mists of my beginning—probably quite mundane, in reality, small and fragile against the tides of time—and the Houston house is one of them, R.F. Isbell’s now historically-designated home on 639 Heights Boulevard. Mayor Isbell was my great-grandfather on my mother’s side. I’m glad someone saw fit to add it to the register, so there’s more of a likelihood that I might get to see it some day. Nobody in the family owns it, that I know of.

These places, in the telling, take on larger-than-life stature, places where my mother and her sister visited as children during hot summers, now only known through curled and fading black and white photographs of children in pale dresses, with smiling but still sober-looking ladies holding their hands on bungalow steps. Or a picture of my grandfather in his christening dress, from that era. (Yes, little boys in 1903 did wear christening dresses, all the children did.)  I open formal photographer’s pictures in sepia paper folders that smell pleasantly of paper mold, carefully preserving a diva, my great-grandmother, who sang for many, back in the early days of the twentieth century, almost a hundred years ago, whose trust fund is all that I have of her. I never even heard her voice once.

When I am done here, less than nothing of me will go into the future, like writing on water, like last winter’s crumbling leaf, the last passing sigh.

I’m glad this structure in the south still stands for a little while.

The Isbell house on Archiplanet