Updated whenever I chuffing well choose
Pissphone: I saw a mallard today with a white front. I’ve seen those before in the park as well. I looked it up and it means they have some domestic fuck in their family.
Pissphone: Omg, it finally happened
Pissphone: Autocorrect wrote fuck when I meant duck
DVD idea: Manufacture DVDs enclosed like floppy discs. It would make handling them easier, would keep them cleaner and more protected, and DVD players wouldn’t need a fragile moving tray; just a slot.
Murder idea: Spree killers ought to be called parallel killers, as opposed to serial killers.
Burger idea: Hamburgun (gun that shoots hamburgers).
Launderette idea: Launderette that also has showers. And if you want, you can get a disposable paper gown and slippers to wear while your clothes get washed. Could be good for homeless people who have only the one set of clothes and thus have no easy to way to get them washed.
Crisps idea: Like Pom-Bear but shaped like ghosts, called Wispy Crispy.
Fish idea: Breed yellow betta fish, and call them butta fish.
Quiz idea: Can you match the photos of people with their fursonas?
T-shirt company idea: gaming-related tee company called Mana-Tees. The logo is a cute cartoon manatee holding a glass flask of blue liquid (a mana potion).
Bum idea: Botox, but for your bum, called Butox.
Train idea: Instead of having a Quiet Carriage on trains, all carriages should be quiet by default and the noisy fuckers can go sit in the Blabber-Jabber Carriage.
Vampire idea: You can send vampires through the post.
1. Expose vampire to sunshine
2. Vampire turns to dust
3. Sweep up dust, put in envelope, put in the post
4. Recipient tips out vampire dust onto the floor and applies a drop of blood to resurrect the vampire
You would have to trust the recipient and it would take a few days, but vampires could save hundreds of pounds on international travel this way.
Zoo idea: Let zoo visitors feed tigers, wolves etc by charging them to have a go on a t-shirt gun that fires chicken carcasses or something into the enclosure.
How to Train Your Dragon idea: The How to Train Your Dragon franchise but with giant moths instead of dragons.
Pingu idea: A Pingu MMO in which you’d make a cool penguin (or maybe a seal like Robbie) and just run/roll/squash/stretch around going NOOT NOOT and throwing snowballs at other players. It would be a bit like The Endless Forest but with an elastic penguin instead of a freaky human-faced deer.
Bun idea: Hot cross buns with rings instead of crosses, so you can play Noughts & Crosses with delicious results.
Guff idea: If an MC/singer at a concert says ‘make some noise!!’, instead of cheering, everybody guff.
Pet idea: Put your small pet in a doll’s house and take some photos of what looks like a normal house occupied by a giant roach/tarantula/hamster/kitten.
Pig idea: Release 3 pigs in a school, labelled 1, 2, and 5000. Watch chaos ensue as everyone tries to find the missing 4997 pigs.
Stealth ops-themed Christmas tree farm idea: You go in and attempt to cut down and take away a tree without being detected by the staff. If you do, it’s free. Otherwise you have to pay for the tree. (Technically normal Christmas tree farms work this way, but with this they wouldn’t call the cops if they caught you. It’s just for fun.)
Banana idea: Make a tiny super sculpey banana and take ‘banana for scale’ pics with it so the other items in the photo appear to be giant.
App idea: Plays a faint Judas Priest song whenever you take a phone call, so the caller thinks they interrupted you at a Judas Priest concert.
Fancy dress party idea: Paint your bum yellow and pack your rectum full of Skittles. When someone asks what you are, drop your trousers, fart out the Skittles, and say ‘Pacman vomiting’.
Biscuits idea: Prevent people from stealing your bourbons by separating the biscuits, scraping out the icing, and replacing it with poo.
Cake idea: Save money on caterpillar cakes for children’s birthdays by buying them a plain roulade and telling them it pupated.
Penis idea: A naked mole rat can be used as an emergency penis. (If your skin isn’t pink, you might wish to colour the mole rat in with a pen.)
Clown idea: A meat clown who makes ‘balloon’ animals out of sausage links.
Cinema idea: Cinemas should sell film merchandise in the foyer. You can buy merch when you go to concerts and musicals, after all. Maybe if cinemas did that they could drop the price on the popcorn.
Moon idea: NASA or whoever returns to the Moon with VR-recording cameras. Once the data’s been processed, we can go for little walks on the Moon in VR. (You’d probably need to play on a trampoline to get the feel of low-grav jumping, though.)
VR idea: VR headset with several little cameras mounted on the outside, to show you how the world looks from the point of view of various other animals. Powerful zoom plus UV detection = hawk. Wide angle = cow. CGI snoot plus protanopia = doggo. And so on.
Ice cream idea: Stop people stealing your ice cream by labelling the vanilla ‘wee’, the chocolate ‘poo’ and the strawberry ‘period’.
Business idea: Big room lined with mirrors. Entry £7. Aimed at people who pay that much to go to cinema then just talk over the entire film.
Album idea: A circular album in which the outro of the last track segues into the intro of the first track.
Cat idea: Get a cat and name it ‘My Husband’, so anything you say about the cat sounds dead funny.
‘Urgh, My Husband wiped his bum on the rug.’
‘My Husband likes it when I pick him up and throw him at the curtains.’
‘My Husband likes sitting in boxes and eating moths.’
Videogame difficulty idea: Instead of having easy mode, normal mode, hard mode, etc., turn all the variables into sliders so players can fine-tune the difficulty as they like it.
I dressed up as Judas Priest’s Redeemer of Souls for Halloween!
The clothes are from Primark; I modified them with bleach + sandpaper. The feathers are old bicycle inner tubes cut up + stuck on with shoe glue. I went for epaulettes because full wings would have been hard to do.
Also: pumpkins! I carved the face one, my mum did the little skully one, and Bro2 did the one that’s all eyes.
Web design makes an analogy for genetics: the html + css corresponds to the genotype, the final rendered page to the phenotype. There are many ways to achieve a similar phenotype, changing just a bit of a genotype can have quite drastic results, and the same genotype is not guaranteed to build the same way every single time (although it is supposed to).
Hedgehogs, spiny tenrecs, porcupines, and echidnas are not related (they have different genotypes). However, they look much the same (they have similar phenotypes as a result of similar selection pressures).
There are many ways, some ‘better’ than others, to build a webpage of a specific design. Divs, tables or iframes might arrange the content the same way, for example. Some ways are ‘stupid’ but evolution is full of those.
The exact same webpage (same code = same ‘genotype’) can render differently across browsers. Building a body from the same genome isn’t guaranteed to always have the same result. Cloned cats, for example, can have very different markings from the original cat (because the genes basically say ‘put markings here’ and don’t specify it to the hair).
Sometimes, it just fucks up (mutations = server errors, connection problems).
I had a great time! Things I did:
Lovell telescope by daylight:
Lovell telescope illuminated at night:
Plus a couple of videos taken on my phone and then compressed even further so the CMS would take them:
The Luminarium at Bluedot Festival:
Bonus: a five-spotted burnet moth I met in Macclesfield (phone pic):
I went to ToyCon on the 29th of April, because that was my birthday so I was clearly meant to go. I bought lots of presents for myself!
My first purchase was this hermit crab by Catherine Unger for Angry Hedgehog. I love this charismatic little creature’s blue and red colour scheme and chunky shapes! (Here‘s a post (warning for moving gif) on the artist’s tumblr with another colourway.)
Some gachapon I bought from a couple of stalls. The sushi cat is absolutely hilarious – the design does such a good job of capturing the cat’s dejected and worried face. The little tree frog is darling but I’m not sure what to do with it. It can’t stand up and is designed to be clipped onto the top of something, but it has so little clearance between its feet that you can’t really clip it onto anything thicker than a piece of card.
The cat kaiju I was slightly disappointed with because that was the colourway I wanted the least! (I was hoping for either the calico or the pink and blue.) Still, it has its own charm, and it’s just mass-produced vinyl so I can always try painting it.
This was a robo-dog I picked up from The Droid Foundry. It’s 3D-printed, and the artist explained that he deliberately leaves his printed creations with a rough finish for a weathered look. I wanted this one because it reminds me of the rat things from Snow Crash (they are modified dogs, despite their name). I showed it to my mum and she suggested it was an ‘e-nubis’.
Patches, pins and prints!
I’ve been meaning to start a patch jacket, so I thought I’d pick up this lovely big cat patch from CreamLab to start (I’ll throw in a link to MintyFresh because they were the vendor at the con on behalf of CreamLab). The seller was kind enough to throw in a factory-seconds patch (the smaller kitty with a fish in its mouth) as a freebie! There’s a hole in the patch that should have been infilled with the white of the cat’s fur, but the seller told me it wouldn’t be that noticeable once the patch was applied.
I love that enamel pins are a ‘thing’ right now because I think they’re great. Okkle makes lovely cartoon bird sculpts and these little pins are very sweet. The seller shared a stall with Kerry Dyer, from whom I bought this necklace with a glow-in-the-dark fish skelly!
I also picked up a set of 3 prints from CZEE13 because hey, skulls in a jar of slime is my jam.
This lovely beast was my biggest purchase and my main present to myself this year! It’s an art doll by Creature Cave of Green Chimera. (Here‘s a photo of the piece from the maker’s Instagram.) I ended up buying it because I loved its well-made gentle charismatic face as soon as I saw it, and I couldn’t stop walking past the stall again to admire it. Eventually I decided it had to be mine!
Its spine is articulated and its legs are wired, so it’s poseable. It’s about ferret-sized and actually feels very like a real creature, because unlike a soft toy the plastic armature feels quite like bones under the skin of a living animal. It’s very nice to hold and cuddle!
I showed it to my brother and asked him what animal he thought it was. He couldn’t decide, so he made a non-committal sound that sounded like ‘horb’. Then he burped. Belch the Horb it is!
GUFFO: Bendydick Cuntysnatch
ling: Brandywine Fannypack
GUFFO: Bandicoot Chutneybash
ling: BasilTwit CouncilFlat
Pisscress: Babadook Cucumberpatch
GUFFO: Bonerstiff Wankyslap
Pisscress: Cummerbund Fuckaduck
ling: Benylin Dictosplash
ling: Bongohatch Campervan
GUFFO: Bouncytit Hairyflap
ling: Benidorm Itchysack
GUFFO: Smellyprick Bummysplat
ling: If you listed all of these and showed them to someone, they’d know *exactly* what we were doing
(Judas Priest sample used without permission in good faith under fair use. Farts are all mine though.)
