Once, when I was quite small, I had an opportunity to attend a science fiction convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I don't recall exactly when this was, it was long enough ago that Time Trax was on television and still in the first run of its first season (there was merchandise for it all over the dealers' rooms) but it made an impression on me. First, there were other science fiction fans out there, and second there was this thing called cosplay which I didn't really get into until college.

Long story short, I'm finally settled in enough to consider going …

I happened to be in the Bay Area with Amberite for the Fourth of July this year, and as we are wont to do we got it into our heads to do a little road testing of some costumes we've been talking about for a while, namely the trolls Sollux Captor and Terezi Pyrope from the webcomic Homestuck playing Men In Black.

If you're not interested in our costuming notes feel free to check out the photographs we took of ourselves or not as you like.

We assembled our costumes out of random stuff I had around the house (one …

Song: Showtime: Imp Strife Mix by Malcolm Brown, George Buzinkai, and Curt Blakeslee

Album: Homestuck Volumes 1-4

Book: Overthrowing the Old Gods by Don Webb

License: CC BY-NC-SA v3.0

Obligatory warning: If you are fandom-averse, you might want to skip right to the photographs.

Some months ago, a good friend of mine dragged me kicking and screaming into the Homestuck fandom by way of a novel length fanfic she and a friend are writing.

I won't tell you about Homestuck. That's not what this post is about. I will, however, tell you about the latest project to come off of my workbench, which was building as functional a replica of Jade's lunchtop computer as possible.

Cutting to the chase, after being infected with the Homestuck meme and searching for …

As before, much of my spare time in the past two weeks has been spent making two more Scalemate plushies so I could give one of them to my little nephew Brandon this weekend as a "Hi, welcome to the world" present. I wanted to make two of them in case I messed up, and also to have a choice of which one to give him because they weren't going to be identical or perfect, but ideally better than the first one I sewed. I wanted them to be fairly bright and cheerful looking, the better to get his attention …

Life's busy right now. I'm being pulled in several different directions, sometimes simultaneously, which hasn't left a lot of time or compute cycles to do any writing. What I have had time for lately has been a lot of "fire and forget" stuff, which doesn't really do anyone any good. Failing that, long hours at my day job doing what I do best. I don't think any more need be said on that point.

The next release of Byzantium Linux (v0.5b) is due in five days, so that's where most of my spare time goes - knocking out the next …