h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Okay, I just found the cyborg thing.... I think my friends are going to regret me finding this site...

Bye, Lil!

Sigh. l spent four -- count them -- four hours with a friend of mine, with that particular toy, laughing hysterically as we put in all the names of all the people we knew.
Of course, it was past two in the morning, so some of our ridiculous merriment can be understood in that context...

[sips his C of root beer...]

Hi, Jedi.
How is the root beer here?

Hmmmm. Conversations about root beer, forest roots and root canal work. Lucky I haven't got a dirty mind.

Green tea please IIEM.

There's a charming thought...

And it wasn't a root canal...

l just discovered today that the dentist gave me the teeth to take home. They're wrapped in a little bundle of gauze.
Does anyone else find that a trifle odd?

Odra, obviously your dentist believes in the tooth fairy. Put them under your pillow tonight and wish for something....

In NZ if you have an xray, you get to take the film home. Maybe it is a world-wide conspiracy by medical people to save on storage space.

What really hurts about dentist work is the bill.

*decides to put them under her pillow and wish for a continuation of her prescriptions*

l've just unwrapped them, actually. The things are ginormous. lt's really sort of an unnerving sensation, thinking that these things were attached to your jawbone twenty four hours ago, and you're now holding them.

l still fail to see the logic. Do they give amputees their limbs to take home? Gallbladder-removal patients their organs to take home? Sex-change candidates their...well...

Psychiatric patients their dementia....

Dark Jedi a red-bladed lightsaber ...

Nods sagely

Grumble. They never let me take home -my- dementia.

l suppose they're still keeping it. ln a jar somewhere. What packrats psychiatrists are.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her autobiography that she was involved in a motorcycle accident and bashed her face up and lost a couple of teeth. She healed and time went on and she began to be troubled by a cyst on her cheek which just seemed to get bigger and bigger. Getting fed up she worked at it and squoze, and what should come out but one of her teeth.

She said it was a very unnerving experience, most satisfactorily existential. Nauseous, you know?

Hi anybody, I finally made it back. What a work session I've had. I got so deeply into it that gradually I became aware of a strange noise. I listened and realised it was my breathing. I was concentrating so hard that my jaw had gone slack.

I was working on the right sleeve of Billy the Kid's cardigan, evaluating clumps of pixels; is this dirt on the picture or has the wool of his cardigan pilled? Don't know. Has the pill cast a shadow? Are there any bits of wool sticking around? If the edges are too perfect it's dirt. That kind of thing. Wow. Then I pull out, get a glass of water and a bowl of m&m's (internet timing device), sit down at the laptop and login ... and it's back to jostling and politics and stuff I basically don't want to talk about, I guess.

*puts bottled water on to boil for green tea*

*smiles*
As they were kind enough to provide me with said teeth on my leaving, l made sure to count them. Though two were split in half, l trust most of them have been satisfactorily removed...if not, l guess that explains the cheek-swelling, though...
Meaning-grappling Existentialist l may be, but l still haven't the nerve to dig a tooth-cyst out of my own cheek, l must say...

The photo work you do sounds fascinating, Lil. How did you get started, anyway?

Sigh. l myself, in RL, just managed to break most of an entire carton of eggs by dropping them on the kitchen floor. Attempt at preparing first solid food in recent memory was rather a failure, l may say...slightly less fulfilling than what you've been doing...

You can't pop narcotics and still have hand-eye coordination, I've found. Even dead sober, I had trouble with a bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich yesterday. Slippery buggers, but delicious.

I've been painting digitally since before Windows 2.x which is to say when programs ran in DOS, unless you had a Mac or an Amiga. Graphics was the Apple domain really, then. Anyway, back then you had to do your own anti-aliasing on digital montages, so I got used to working at the level of magnification where pixels become boxes.

*makes green tea*

Let's see, what's (3384 * 5298) * 600?
10,757,059,200

That's how many boxes are in this image. Which is when it suddenly becomes necessary to lose sight of the larger picture. A belt buckle is a major accomplishment. Brings out the Virgo in anyone.

l can't say my coordination's improved much, no. Of course, l'm not really known for my deftness in the hand-eye realm anyway, at least not in the kitchen. Thanksgiving-before-last l spent in a local ER room, waiting to have stitches done after nearly lopping off the top of my thumb, chopping onions for stuffing. Put a whole new spin on the holiday, l can tell you...

How long does a typical picture take you to do? And how does the magnification work? l take it you blow up the picture, section by section by section, until the pixels all become visible?

When I open Billy at 600 dpi in Painter, the image always centers on his navel, which always amuses me cos I'm easily pleased. So I am constantly dragging the image around to get a portion in the window, de-magnifying out as far as 30% then back in up to 300%, maybe. You do the fix in abstract, making a harmonious abstract. You don't always know what you're making, either. I rebuilt a few planes of light and shadow, and when I backed out to look at the work, I found I had begun to uncover a new article of apparel on the boy. That was at 300 dpi.

It was my second go at the restoration; one has the realization and then has to go back and do it again to un-do one's over-zealousness in cleaning on a previous go. So this is my first attempt at 600 dpi, which I couldn't have done before I bought the P-III at the beginning of the year.

His belt is a good exaple. In previous sessions I cleaned it off. Now I'm discovering that it is a very complicated and many-times-repaired belt, handmade to begin with. Maybe the buckle was mass-produced (in 1875? possible), but all the leather is hand-cut, uneven, with well worn holes, and a couple of studs where the leather was spliced. Missed all of that on the first few go-rounds. Sociologically significant stuff.

*tea has gone cold while she was yakking on about her work*

*is pleased that tea is now cold, as she can drink it*

All the detail. lt's incredible to think you can see so much in something so terribly small and overlook-able as a belt buckle. And then all the research that must go into sorting out the meaning of the detail you discover...l can't imagine that level of patience *sigh*
How did you get started doing this picture? For pleasure, initally, or for a client, or some other reason?