My Righteous Bison Indivisible Particle Smasher has arrived and my laughter was just short of maniacal for an extended period of time.

Buwahahahahahaha!

"The world will not end in 2012 and the Mayans didn’t think so, either. The “end” of the Mayan calendar is like the end of your calendar. Go buy a new one and you’re fine."

--- Rebecca at Skepchick

And here's a great site that susinctly debunks the whole 2012 thing.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/2012-the-end-of-the-world/

Apparently, this meme has found its way out into the world. It involved bumper stickers, t-shirts and other presentation saying:


Pray for Obama, Psalm 109:8

So, if you open up the Bible and read the verse, it says, "Let his days be few; and let another take his office." The people sticking these on their cars would have you believe that they are merely praying for Obama to be drummed out of office. They may even believe that. But, if they do, it is merely because they are sheep who believe what they are told and do not actually read their bibles. If they really acted like they said they do, they would learn the context and see the next verse.

"Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

The following verses heap a whole lot of other disasters onto him but, simply stated, this intercessory prayer is asking God to kill the President. Asking God to be their hit man.

If I found some wise guy and asked him to make some other guy's "wife a widow," that's conspiracy to commit murder. I would be arrested, convicted of a class 2 felony and sentenced for 3-5 years just as the would-be assassin would. If this other guy happened to be the President of the United States, it would be expected that I would be paid a visit by the Secret Service and spend a lot longer time out of society once convicted.

And here we have an entire class of people advertising for the President's murderer on their bumpers and on t-shirts. How stupid can you be? The only thing that saves them is that the American legal system doesn't actually believe in this god-person and so, asking a fictional character to commit a crime probably isn't going to work it's way through the courts. But, on the other hand, there are just enough tea party nutballs out there who are being riled up by the likes of Glenn Back that they might just take matters into their own hand. They may think themselves to be God's instrument on this earth and take action, reinforced in their righteousness by the complicit encouragement of thousands of their fellow citizens who have put such an inflammatory statement on the backs of their cars for all to see.

Doesn't sound very "Christian", does it?

Back in July, a family was riding their bikes on a road in Asheville, NC. A husband, wife and 3 year old in a bike seat on the back. At which point, a man employed as a firefighter for the Asheville fire department pulls his car over, got out and harangued the cyclist for risking his child's life by riding on the busy road.

The the cyclist attempted to walk away, the firefighter drew a pistol and shot him in the back of the head.

Fortunately, the bullet missed the cyclist's head and instead passed through both sides of the helmet. The firefighter fled the scene and was later arrested and charged with attempted first degree murder.

He has since plead guilty to felony assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill and has been sentenced to 120 days in jail!

I am completely repulsed! He shoots a guy in the back of the head and gets a paltry 4 months? That's just insane!

The Steampunk Empire, which is an online Ning community devoted to steampunk, seems to be THE place to go with over a thousand members and still growing. There are a number of regional groups represented of which I joined the Ohio group because there was, as yet, no Pennsylvania group. There is a Pittsburgh Steampunk group on Livejournal but there isn't a lot of activity. The Steel City Steampunk Society on Lefora which hasn't seen any activity in months. And a Pennsylvania-wide group called Absinthe & Iron on Facebook. And so, lacking such a think on Ning, I figure I should just go ahead and create one.

But what to name it?

The first thought that leapt into my mind was the Allegheny Steam Society or perhaps the Allegheny Steampunk Society. I liked that it worked on both a local and regional level. Locally, it honors Allegheny City, which was annexed by Pittsburgh in 1907. It also references the route of the Western Maryland Railroad connection between Allegheny County (Pittsburgh, Pa) and Allegeny County (Cumberland, Md) and also the Allegheny River, which flows from north-central Pennsylvania to join the Ohio River at Pittsburgh. Finally, it refers to the Allegheny Mountains, the western-most line of the Appalachian mountains from Virginia into Pennsylvania, and the Allegheny Front, the foothills and plateau that extends to the Ohio plains.

However, after all these thoughts joyfully flashed through my mind, I was suddenly deterred by the acronym A.S.S.

Which was too bad. I thought it was kind of cool to reference the lost city of Allegheny instead of just defaulting to Pittsburgh.

In a chat room, I mentioned this thought and someone said that, if I went ahead and chose Allegheny Steam Society, in spite of the acronym, he would join the group even though he is in Glasgow. It had me reconsidering the acronym as something of a badge of honor. I then considered taking it even further with the Allegheny Steel and Steam Enthusiasts Society.

OK, so maybe that's too far.

Sunday was another day of getting up early. I didn't put on a costume settling for the "just another fanboy in a t-shirt" look. Packed the car. Checked out. Chocolate milk for breakfast. Off to panels.

I kept running into Claudius van der Graffe and Louis Nicoulin at panels as we apparently had the same interests in panels about metalworking and props.

Several months back, I was at a local gun show and bought a pair of fairly generic aviator wings. Unlike many that have crests or other identifiers, these wings simply had some concentric rings and I had some gears that would steam them up. There was another gun show this weekend that I was missing because I was in Chicago but I sent an email to my dad to find the dealer with the wings and buy him out. It turns out that the guy was sold out of them.

But the OK part of that is that there was a metalworking panel that reignited my interest in the metalworking stuff I have sitting unused in my basement. I have some mold making stuff and a melting pot, I could cast pins if I wanted. I also learned a technique for metalizing resin pins where, instead of using talc as a mold release you use bronze powder. And, a poor man's etching using a laserprint onto a transparency ironed onto metal. All sorts of good maker stuff.

At the last panel of the day, the panelists neglected to bring they gear to show off how found parts and odd things can be used to make props. Good thing that I want back to the car and grabbed a bag full of stuff.

I also showed the assembled an idea I call "Meta Steampunk". If there is one thing that makes someone an instant steampunk, it's goggles. I'm not sure where that came from exactly but there it is. People wear goggle. They will put goggles on their hats or hanging around their necks, even when they are also already wearing goggles on the faces. Goggles are the hamburger-helper of steampunk. Take any costume, add goggles, it's steampunk. Well, I was wearing a pair of welding goggles and said, "This is steampunk". When I removed those goggles, there was a pair of goggles underneath. "This is very steampunk." And when I removed those goggles, there were glasses underneath those. "This is meta-steampunk".

I'm wondering if I could somehow squeeze one more layer into the progression. Flip up lenses on the glasses? Pince-nez glasses like Orpheus from The Matrix had underneath the bottom layer of glasses?

A number of people took pictures of me doing this "demonstration". I don't have any of myself. I will need to remedy that.

Quote of the weekend: "Steampunk is what happens when goths discover brown."

Once the last panel was over, we hit the road immediately for the 8 hour drive home.

Along the Indiana tollroad, there were advertisements that included an Incredibles-esque super heroine promoting the EZ-pass system. I should have taken a picture because whoever did the eyes made her look a bit crazed. Maybe that's appropriate for turnpike superhero.

The bbq sandwich I had at a Dairy Queen was the worst sandwich ever. There were meat chunks that were still cold and some were nothing more than fatty gristle. At least they didn't screw up the milkshake.

Home again. Shower. Bed. Sleep. Unpack later.

In retrospect, having to spend an extra six hours turning around and going back for my costumes was totally worth it. I don't like to think of myself as an attention whore but I must be. I would have been absolutely miserable and generally bored if I was just dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. Or rather, it's not so much being the center of attention (because there were plenty of costumes that I thought were far better than mine) but being dressed up like everyone else is an icebreaker. A beginning point of conversation.

Steel City Con is here in Pittsburgh in two weeks. I'll have to decide whether to go with my standard steampunk look or with the pith helmet and infantry tunic look but I will be going. Perhaps I'll be able to drum up a little more interest in steampunk in the area.

The Enthusiasts has a pair of pretty good pictures of me up at their WindyCon gallery.



My Gentleman Explorer costume is looking terrific here with the dramatic camera angle.

Saturday is, of course, the big day of any convention and I got an early start of it because, unusually for me, I had a full slate of programming I wanted to attend. Even though I didn't get to bed until after 1:30 in the morning, I was awake by 7:00, made an ultimately futile attempt at getting back to sleep, and finally got up and going. I got a quick shower even though I had showered before going to bed because the hotel pillows really messed up my hair. (And that takes quite a bit for my hair.)

I walked next door to the Target and bought a quart of chocolate milk for breakfast and spent some time in the lobby with my laptop checking my email, webcomics and blog feeds. The Westin wanted $10 a day to use the wireless connection in the rooms but, at least, had free wireless in the lobby. I've been to hotels that cost half as much that have free wi-fi. I'm sure the more upscale hotels charge for it because they know that the business travellers will pay for it as a matter of course and just pass the cost onto their corporate expense account or write it off as a business expense. It's even easier money than the mini-fridge bar. Let the lower classes sit in the lobby for their Internet connection.

I went back upstairs and got dressed in my Explorer uniform. Being dressed in a British colonial uniform, I thought it would also be appropriate to walk around with the foam cricket bat I got from Specter Studios.

"It's for zombies."

I lost a button. Well, it was not lost but merely detached because I did the sewing on the buttons. I didn't make much of an effort to seek out a sewing kit to replace it because it being missing was (for the most part) hidden behind the shoulder strap of my Sam Browne belt. I'll have to fix that for next time.

I neglected to get a decently posed picture of myself in this particular piece of work. I should have just gotten one of the people taking pictures of me to do so with my own camera as well. I'm sure, though, the pictures will eventually show themselves on flickr.

I was very impressed by the abilities of a number of the attendees to not only stay in character, but also to produce a good accent while doing it. I'll mention specifically Kapitan R. O. von Grelle and Graf Georg von Ziger as having particularly interesting characters and accents to go with them. In their "Types and Tropes" panel, they talked about building characters that are described completely by the costume, manner and, at most, a sentence or two.

"Zebulon Vitruvius Pike. Gentleman adventurer!"

And while that seems to do a reasonable job of describing myself, I realize that I have almost nothing behind it. My Deadlands character is more fully fleshed out but that character is not "me", especially at a convention. Aside from being something of a heroic adventurer, I have developed no real background for Pike. No history. No quirks. No mannerisms. No accent. I admire those people who can put on Prussian or British accents when the best I can do is "Appalachian Redneck" which is an accident of having been born and raised in Southwestern Pennsylvania. While I perform the accent convincingly, I would never incorporate such a thing into my background.

It is something I will have to work on.

I made several runs through the dealer's room, as is my habit. The first is to simply walk through and look at the wares, considering what I might buy. Then, I come back later to actually lay down the money, collect everything up in a bag and then take it back to the room so that I am not carrying a bag around with me for the rest of the convention. I purchased several books from Larry Smith. "The Affinity Bridge", "Boneshaker" and "Leviathan". All three were on my Amazon wish list and I was planning on waiting for them to come out in paperback or perhaps having them given to my as gifts (that's what wish lists are for) but Larry Smith comes to Confluence from Columbus every year and I think it's good to support independent booksellers so I loaded up the bag and flashed my debit card.

I bought some goggle lenses from Morlock Enterprises. Red and blue to make conventions seem like they are occurring in three dimensions!

I stopped by the Blonde Swan booth to show off what I had done with the pith helmet I had bought from them at Marcon. I noticed that they were just trying their hand a flight caps and I realized that I was about to do it again. I purchased a pith helmet and then spend months building a costume around it. When I got home, I was going to purchase a Weta raygun and I would need to build a costume around that. I have a leather jacking in the closet at home. With the ray gun and jacket I would next need a WWII-style flight cap and goggles. The military shirt and tie, a few accessories and a holster for the ray gun would complete the Sky Captain/Ignition City concept.

That's the relatively easy one. I've also been thinking of something more Flash Gordon.

When I took my haul up to my room, I found my door open. We had left a tag on the door saying that we didn't want service to clean the room and they stuck it back under the door with a coupon suggesting that they appreciated the sentiment and were comping us $5 for saving the environment. When we left on the morning we didn't put the "do not disturb" tag back out and the cleaning staff came and made the bed, changed the towels and emptied the trash anyway, leaving the door open when they were done. A quick search of the room determined that no one had taken advantage of their oversight.

After I took another quick shower and changed into my more traditional look, I went down and let the management know. Nothing more came of it but I would at least hope that a flag went into my account and my complaint went further than just the atendant at the front desk.

I went to the group photo shoot and got more pictures.

I drifted through the dealer's room again, this time picking up the last copy of Martian Fluxx the one dealer had.

I completely missed seeing "Monsters vs. Aliens" in the film room. I would have liked to see that again but, having dropped in when "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" was showing, I thought the room was too big for the projector and the screen was a bit dim.

Instead of going to the masquerade I watched "Steamboy."

I will say that the TeslaCon room party was interesting and more unique that the typical darkened room with loud music and alcohol. I am a bit biased in that I am a Nicola Tesla fanboy and not just because we share a birthday, so put Tesla's name on it and you've got my attention. It was neat having a free photo shoot and it was a clever way to get a lot of email addresses for their mailing list. But the host really sold it. He was another one of those people that was able to effect an accent and performance that you couldn't help but pay attention to.

It would be about a 10 hour drive for me to get to Madison for that con and, while it sounds like it might be a lot of fun, I'll probably pass. Sure, I spent 14 hours driving to Chicago but 6 hours of that was because of my forgetting my clothes and having to go back to Pittsburgh. Under normal circumstances, 8 hours is getting to my driving limit.

Good luck to them, though. I am sorry my previous committments prevented me from accepting their invitation to high tea.

I'm planning on going to the Steampunk Worlds Fair in New Jersey in May. I was going to go to Marcon two weeks later over Memorial Day weekend because I know people there and adelheid_p would typically be interested in going as well but it turns out that she is thinking of going to a camping event that would be going on that weekend in New York. That would leave me to perhaps drive the additional 2 hours to Dearborn and the World Steam Expo. Maybe. I'll have to work it out with her and look at my finances.

One thing that would help my finances is sharing a room. I generally don't like to do that because, invariably, someone in the group snores and I'm a light enough sleeper that I get no sleep under those conditions. Since I am also typically the designated driver, sleep deprivation, a long convention weekend and miles of open highway are a bad combination I would rather avoid.

Saturday was another night that rolled past midnight.

Half way across Ohio in my 8 hour drive to WindyCon in Chicago, I suddenly had the dread realization that I had left my clothes back in Pittsburgh. My dress shirts, frock coat, vest, the infantry tunic that I had been frantically working on in preparation for this con. All of it carefully protected in a garment bag, hanging on the closet hook in the library.

Fuck!

This was essentially identical to what had happened to me starting out on my Erie Canal bike ride back in July when, in my excitement to get going, I neglected to transfer my trailer and gear from my car to the rental, not realizing it until well into the trip. This experience has pointed out a serious flaw in my packing strategy. Instead of checking off items from my list as I pack them in bags, I must now stand by the car trunk with mist list as I check things off. I will also be producing a standard con packing list that I will keep on my PC so that I have a difinitive list that neglects nothing.

Three hours, a tank of gas and $20 in turnpike fees late, I was back in the middle of Ohio. By the time I arrived, I had missed all the programming that I had wanted to see, most especially the Professors Foglio live presentation of the "Revenge of the Weasel Queen" radio drama. My only consolation is that, like the other radio plays, this one will be recorded and eventually posted on-line.

Hopefully Saturday will proceed in a much more positive fashion.

On the eve of my leaving to the steampunk extravaganza that is WindyCon, I have received word that Weta Workshops has released a new ray gun: The Righteous Bison.

"This honorable bovine could be the horn in the side of your most bothersome foe! It’s true! The Righteous Bison can bore a fist-sized hole through 17 yards of cheese, on tight beam, or put a zeppelin-girthed aperture in your uncle’s munitions factory (should he choose not to drop those charges). And all this without permanently damaging the family trust!"

For years, I have been lusting after all the ray guns that Weta has produced but have been also thoroughly deterred by their price, typically in the $500+ range. I have said on numerous occasions that, were they to produce trimmed down versions in plastic priced in the $40 range, I would be all over them. I would probably eventually have the whole set to hang on my wall. The decision making process would be astonishing linear.

Well, they haven't gone quite that far, but the "imitation metal" Righteous Bison is listing for $99US! To read the review, it is well worth the price, especially when compared to the quality and price of the replica firearms I already own.

"The result, ladies and gentlemen, as I'm sure you agree, is nothing short of pretty good."

Now, on the outside chance that such a thing might actually be available in the dealer's room at WindyCon, I did not immediately order it online but, should I return home without one, the order will be placed forthwith.

Huzzah!