Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

(note that this and subsequent pictures can be clicked to see a lovely embiggening process.)

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

51:04 long & 49 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss major changes to the game, spend a lot of time with feedback, and discuss how Jewish someone has to be in England.

We took some during-the-show notes. If you have Google Wave you might be able to take a look at the Wave we created while recording. For those of you without, you can check out the Google Docs transcription

- The Weird Jews Livejournal group that Joshua joined
- The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution
- The Alas, A Blog entry about the New York Times piece on England and Jewishness
- Kat & Michael Miller’s Serial Homicide Unit
- The Starship Troopers and Robocop films
- Feedback from Doc Holaday, Luke Crane (sorta), Vincent Baker, Jj
- cat and man!
- We know who the game will always be about now!
- Larry Ellison
- Rutgers and Yale Universities
- Blackwater Worldwide
- Postmodernism
- On Mighty Thews, by Simon Carryer
- Frank Frazetta
- The Draconis Montreal convention

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Taffy Lewis’ Night Club” by Vangelis.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Several views of Polar Piglets

In the northernmost geyland of Ashlesa live the Polar Piglets. The 35 cm long, waddling creatures are highly social in nature, spending as much time as possible in close proximity to several other individuals.

They mineral-rich water flowing up from below forms large, bulging rocks wherever vents open to the surface. These rocks are filled with microfauna — there being no true “plants” on Ashlesa — that eat the inside of the rocks, expanding colonially and through the underground streams and rivers. They’re the primary food of the polar piglets, who look for the rare tiny holes in the rocks where the microfauna dig too far. When they see such a hole, they waddle up to it and insert their 20 cm prehensile radula, rasping the microfauna off the interior walls of the hollow rock.

Once the piglet has been satisfied, it stops completely digesting its food, forming it into little balls in a crop and mixing it with packets of its own genetic material.

When a piglet sees another up against a rock, it will amble up and attach itself by its soft mouth to the cloaca of the grazing individual. It will stimulate the grazing individual with its radula, receiving the balls of semi-digested food and genetic material. Chains are made this way as much as four individuals long, each receiving the passed-up food and genetic material of all the individuals ahead of it. Past four, there is little nutrition and the genes are too jumbled to be much use. The last in line lays eggs of all the combinations of genetic material, with each individual’s material being combined with the material of each and every of those behind it in all possible ways.

Consumptive and procreative purposes aside, the piglets spend much of their time so attached. They travel around in chains of two or three, and when groups meet another, they’ll often form rings and knots in an ecstatic, wiggling, chirping pile.

Do you have questions for the researchers on Ashlesa? Please ask them in the comments below.

Please keep comments polite and scientific. HAB members, this means you.

(please see the thread on the previous Ashlesa post for questions and answers there.)

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

A raccoon skull, found behind the house last Autumn

Comcast has now switched to all-digital channels. We do not wish to pay for it. That means I get to draw and do other stuff that’s way more fun than watching the stupid TV.

Above is a life drawing of a raccoon skull. I’m not wholly happy with it and expect to do more drawings of it.

A beaver skull from the LIFE Nature Library book, The Mammals

This one’s copied from a photo in a book. Check out the size of this thing’s jaw. Holy crap. No wonder they can chew down trees.

Note the different way the eyes are supported. The raccoon’s are supported by the cheekbone with no superorbital ridge, while the beaver’s are supported by a huge superorbital ridge and its massive jaw.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

An Octoform ignores a Human photographer

When humans first orbited Ashlesa 5.2 (the second moon in orbit around the fifth “planet” — itself a brown dwarf — orbiting the star Ashlesa) , they were struck by its geology. A single vast plain, desert-like, with the occasional oasis dotting the landscape, broken only by chains of geysers, some thousands of miles across. Subterranean rivers ran under the hard crust, emerging only rarely. Life flourished both outside and in the geyser chains, but they seemed completely distinct. Not only was life in one of the “geylands” (as the explorers called them) different from that outside, it was distinct from every other geyland. They were each an entire closed ecosystem, biochemically (and in one case, physically) separated from the rest of the planet.

A team landing near the equator were met by titanic, 8-limbed, starfish-like creatures, slowly walking in a widely separated herd. Each “foot” was an obviously sensitive organ, feeling along, apparently sniffing and grazing on the thin scum that covers much of the broad plain. Its limbs were dotted with small, black, featureless eyes, largely facing up. The creatures, “Octaforms” as the explorers called them, completely ignored the human explorers.

A flying pentaform harpoons a running triform.

Landing near the Boreal geyland, the explorers discovered 40 cm wide,  three-limbed creatures they called “triforms” happily grazing on some sort of biochemical sludge at the edges of the glacier. While observing them, the explorers were startled when a harpoon shot from the sky and speared one, followed by a crack like a gunshot. Floating silently in the air above the triforms, its shadow cast to the north of its prey, hovered a balloon. Five arms reached out and hugged the envelope. A small cloud of steam drifted away on the wind. The remains of the triform’s small herd had galloped away, turning like wheels, scattering like birds. The speared one struggled for mere seconds before it went completely slack.

The harpoon remained embedded in the creature and the ice below it for several minutes while the surveyors noticed that they prey was becoming a dry husk. After a half hour, there was so little of the creature that, when the zoölogists approached later, there was nothing but a dry skin on the ground.

The balloon had retracted its harpoon and was drifting away slowly, directing its flight subtly with small barks of fire from the appendage from which it had fired its harpoon. It drifted up and away until its form was no longer distinct. “It’s like lightning that wants to hit you,” said one awed researcher.

A triform, dissected.

A boreal triform was discovered, partially eaten by some other animal. The team lost no time in dissecting the fresh specimen. It is completely symmetrical, each limb being a complete copy of the others. It is covered in a thick skin that responds to electrical pulses, itself a fine muscle. Underneath the skin are many thick bands of heavier muscle tissue, supported by a fibrous, almost plastic quill running the length of each limb. This particular species has soft, fine “fingers” along each limb, each with a small orifice.

At the base of each limb are what appear to be several clusters of nerve-like fibers. Experiments with living triforms — and indeed, every other planar form of life on Ashlesa shows that the distal nerve clusters control reflexes and autonomic activity of the limb. The most proximal body, on the other hand, seems to be involved in communication with the other limbs. With their simple eyes, this is the only way the creatures can assemble complex vision. As it is the largest nervous body, this is apparently a challenging task.

Coming up:

Polar Piglets. Warriors of the Southern Heart. The closest thing to a “plant” on Ashlesa.

If you have questions about life on Ashlesa, please ask in the comments and I’ll pass them on to researchers in the appropriate field.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

54:46 long & 50.2 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) finish developing the character-based situation for the game they’re designing — before your very ears! — then move on to discussing some ways that characters can be pushed to change away from baseline humanity

Rob’s during-the-show notes, the document containing the complete write-up of the relationship map, and Joshua’s ideas on the cloudkill technology.

- Rob does a staged reading of the lyrics to “Prevenge” by They Might Be Giants
- We reflect on how much podcasting is like The King of Comedy
- Obligatory references to Vincent Baker, Radio Lab, and Paul Beakley (we also talk about Ben Lehman)
- COINTELPRO
- The film Jarhead
- The Wire, Generation Kill, and Battlestar Galactica
- John Dillinger
- Toxoplasmosis, Brilliant Gameologists podcast, and Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
- Hampshire College, the college Joshua graduated from
- Crank, which has a sub-standard sequel
- Mortal Coil
- My Life with Master
- Cloudkill
- A Scanner Darkly
- JiffyCon
- There are mysterious goings-on on the Facebook page for shock:

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Prevenge” by They Might Be Giants from the album The Spine.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

If you play with Lego, I bet you do this, too! It’s one of the things I mourn, actually: Peeron and Bricklink are scaring away all the internal descriptions of pieces.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

58:34 long & 56.2 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) try out a new way of designing and recording. The show will be going biweekly and Joshua & Rob are going to start doing some design before recording, then discuss it. A great deal of headway is made making up the starting characters and mapping out some of their relationships.

Joshua & Rob’s pre-show work and formal/structured notes written during the episode.

- Joshua & Rob discuss fucking robots and the uncanny valley
- Jenn from Trapcast is happy to “see” us back
- The setup of the protagonists in a pentagram
- Each iteration of the game will have one of the five characters as protagonist
- Matt Wilson’s Primetime Adventures has rules for saying who’s the protagonist on a per-episode basis, and shock: does it on a per-scene basis; Rob presumes that The Buffy the Vampire Slayer Role-playing Game has something to handle a main protagonist with back-ups
- Seth Ben Ezra’s Dirty Secrets also has one main protagonist
- Vincent Baker’s game Synthia
- Emily Care Boss has a game in playtest that adapts Eero Tuovinen’s Zombie Cinema (there’s a Story Games thread post that discusses it very briefly
- Stealing the qualitative fictional rule-setting from Brennan Taylor’s Mortal Coil
- Joshua is reading Not of Woman Born on recommendation from Meguey Baker of Night Sky Games
- Joshua and Rob argue over whether police are just another gang
- A discussion including the film L.A. Confidential and the TV show The Wire
- I spoil the 1991 remake of Cape Fear to make a point

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Life During Wartime” by The Talking Heads.

Incidentally, you can find more information about the header image for the blog post at this article about ethnic cosmetic surgery.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

(EDIT: I’ve changed the header image that was originally on this post because it was NSFW. For posterity, in case someone is curious, you can find the original image here. Edit: No, Rob. That wasn’t the real image. That was for a completely… different project.)

52:24 long & 50.3 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), we talk about a few possible initial scenarios, and decide which one we want to explore first. There’s some good progress here from the absolute slaughter and misery we inflicted on each other in the prior episode.

Joshua’s homework and Rob’s notes during the show

- Joshua tries to let Rob off the hook for being lazy
- Vincent Baker gave us extremely helpful feedback on the forum
- We get more status by talking about Vincent’s input than we do from discussing Paul Beakley’s
- Joshua talks about a whispered Story Games thread between he and Alexandre (board name Kobayashi), who was a soldier in the Yugoslav Wars
- Joshua’s scenario idea is the refugee one
- In LIFELESS, you play…. (around 10:30)
- Simon C’s feedback, which brings up discussion of Vincent’s fiction-first posts
- Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and Crystal Express
- Requisite references to Dollhouse and Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
- We settle on the refugee thing, as at least the first “module”
- A mention of (and spoiler for) the film Silent Running
- Emily Care Boss’s Sign in Stranger
- We want to have the game to come with the scenario all set to go, like John Harper’s Lady Blackbird
- Our homework: each of us writes: a setup for the war, 6 characters, a relationship map, and the initiating technology that made it terrible
- No listener homework
- Working title: “Lifeless”
- We mention the comic book/game store we were about to head to in Northampton, MA: Modern Myths

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is from the same band and the same album. The song is called Sheena’s Got a Microwave Now, and I chose it because it’s the harrowing story of a love denied and interfered with by an insurmountable gap in technology.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

55 seconds long, I don’t care how big

In this non-episode, Robert Bohl and Joshua A.C. Newman explain why they don’t have an episode this week. Suck it.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

01:54:51 long & 110.3 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss how to pre-bake-in a situation for the game they’re developing. Many hearts were broken, unforgivable things were said, will they still be friends at the end of this arduously long show? Listen in to find out.

Joshua’s homework (Rob didn’t do his).

- We start of being enthusiastic about Idiocracy
- Rob skipped homework, Joshua didn’t
- Discussing input from Vincent Baker, Simon C., and Doc Holaday
- Charles Stross’s Accelerando
- Futurama
- Transhumanauts!
- John Cassaday and Warren Ellis’s Planetary
- My friend Blake, who had an interesting idea for a game
- The movies Cube and Saw
- Montsegur 1244 and carry: a game about war
- Ganakagok
- 100 Bullets
- Exquisite corpse
- Wildly various spider genetalia
- Twenty Bucks
- Psi Run (or, at least, its forum)
- Dogs in the Vineyard
- Mouse Guard RPG
- Do not look Vincent Baker in the eye
- Our homework: Vomit forth creativity on this project
- Listener homework: Give us some scenarios

Rob’s during-the-show notes

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is Overlap by Ani DiFranco from the album Out of Range

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

01:06:30 long & 63.8 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss possible structures for a session of play, talk about how to structure technological and interpersonal relationships, and talk a bit about how mechanics might work. Lots of meaty game design here.

Joshua’s and Rob’s homeworks

- Listener feedback: Paul Beakley, Nathan Wilson, Simon C, Doc Holaday
- The book Starfish by Peter Watts
- Discussion of how many players the game should service
- Initialization, a word to be used a lot in the game
- Drop initialization phase created NPC?
- Primetime Adventures
- Spotlight characters, scene order, and whether scenes are about players or characters
- Are there too many scenes? Can you run out of interesting stuff before you run out of time?
- The roles that PCs play in spotlight characters’ scenes when they’re not spotlight
- The Wire
- Introducing new NPCs and new tech, tying Currents to them
- Talking about the tech web
- Separate relationship maps on each character sheet to reflect different visions of relationships
- What am mechanics?
- Joshua = power, Rob = meaningfulness
- Joshua promises a diagram
- Mind control!
- Personality Anchors, and we argue over it
- Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
- Rob keeps talking about “spotlight scene” when he means “spotlight episode”
- Anchors and immunity
- Vincent Baker’s thread where he’s asking for critique on Apocalypse World
- What to call the co-GMs?
- Homework: write up what a scene might feel like, which we’re probably going to do on the forum
- No listener homework

Rob’s during-the-show notes

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is I Wish I Was a Boy by Angry Red Planet, provided by Podshow’s Podsafe Music Network.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Let’s try a little thing!

I just put up the game design studio here at xenoglyph. It’s a forum specifically for real, grown-up critique.

I will be applying the standards of studio group critique in order to support the creation of better games and better artifacts according to the publication objectives of their creators.

The forum will be heavily moderated. I want it to generate solid work, so any socialization that happens will be within the context of the stuff you’re actually creating. If you want to chew the fat, meet me at the bar at Story Games. If you want to actually work on your game, put on your apron and let’s work on your thing.

Read the rules. If you have something you feel could use work and you feel like the rules might help you, then we’d love to see your rules, your text, your page design, your cover. If you feel like you can help, please come help.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Matzah is only slightly more fun than dreidl. As a lot of folks know, I’ve been trying to invent a dreidl game that’s any good at all for several years now, to no avail. But I’m all up ons with the matzah thing.

Here’s what you do.

• 2c flour
• 1/2ts salt
• 1/2c olive oil. Use something good. I like Star, but we just went through a bottle of extraordinary yumminess that I can’t remember the name of.
• 1/3c water

1. Preheat oven to 350°F
2. Start your timer. This has to be in the oven in under 18 minutes or it’s no good for Pesach. 18 is the gemmatria for “Chai”, which means “life”, so it’s “alive” in 18 minutes, and that means it’s leavened.
3. Don’t sweat the time. This takes like 5 minutes.
4. Combine the flour and salt.
5. Sprinkle in the oil while tumbling around the flour. See if you can get all the flour stuck into oily, crumbly chunks.
6. Sprinkle in the water while turning over the flour/oil mixture as little as possible. Don’t knead it. That’s the key. Just get it mixed so everything’s damp with oil or water.
7. Oil up some baking sheets.
8. Roll it out just as flat as you can get it, ideally 2mm thick or so. I rolled it out on my baking sheets so I knew it would fit, but it was a little awkward because of our rolling pin’s shape.
9. Bake for 25 minutes.
10. While it’s baking, clean up the flour so you don’t have chametz floating around the kitchen. Also, it’s a mess.

The result is much like a pie crust. It’s awesome with meats and I want to try it as sort of an eggs-and-biscuits thing, too. When I did it, it was just as good the next day. There wasn’t any to test on day 3.

I checked with our favorite rabbi to ask about it’s KFPness, and he said he couldn’t think of any reason it wouldn’t be OK, though seder matzah has to be just flour and water. Since I was baking this so we could eat dinner (all the grocery stores being totally sold out of matzah), rather than as a ritual object, he figures it’s fine, since people fry matzah all the time.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been setting myself up with an electronic music studio in the basement built around some old gear. This project will include some found sound materials both from the freesound project and from me walking around with my iPod and a recorder dingus. I want to use not only ambient street sounds, but also percussive ones that might be good for drums, so I need some sort of drum controller. And here I am.

I’m using an Ensoniq SD-1 as a keyboard and Garage Band as a sequencer. I’m using PolyPhontics to assign notes to the pads, rather than fucking around with the 90s-vintage controls. I’m also not using any of the remarkably awful sounds these old synths come with.

Eventually, there will be music!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Beowulf is off to press on the morrow! I’m doing a very limited run, Ashcan-style, so if you want to read the poem, consider the exegesis, play the game, and give me feedback, this is your chance!

I’m selling it for $14+$5 S&H, or just regular $14 at Gen Con. Since the run is limited, I’ll be selling the remainder at Gen Con that I haven’t sold via my own site, so if you want to make sure you have a copy, preorder and I’ll shoot it off to you as soon as they get to my doorstep. If you want to wait until Gen Con, you can, but I’ve had a few people interested in preorders already, so you take your chances with the Wyrd.

Even better than picking up a copy at the Playcollective or Ashcan Front booths, order one from me, play with your friends, play with me at Gen Con, and give me feedback that will both be fun to generate and help produce a great final book.

It’s 244 pages long, 5″ x 8″, and I’ve made uglier things in my life.

(sold out. Please give feedback!)

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

InDesign, don’t die on me now!

Edit: InDesign didn’t die. It’s really good about that, actually. But 260 pages and counting. Jebus.

This draft should be done by tomorrow, though.

World’s stupid-biggest ashcan, it is.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

OK, let’s see if I’m getting my blog fixed here with a project update.

I’ve been working on this bike for about a month since I found the frame. It came from the basement of Northampton Bikes and they sold it to me for a song, seeing that it was going to a good home. Now, I’ve wanted one of these frames since I was a teenager and I used to ride the MS150 bike ride (which looks to be a much larger event now than it was in 1988 or whatever.). So when I found this frame, I knew this was a golden opportunity. It’s a 1992 r900 with downtube shifters (so quaint!) and short but practical geometry.

I started buying parts for it when I got the frame. I’ve been getting used stuff and trawling Ebay for parts, but it’s still coming in pretty spendy. The project means a lot to me, though, so I’m willing to do what I need to do.

Now I’m going to try my newly upgraded blog’s gallery function. Let’s see if it works! Pics and details follow the fold.

<

p style=”text-align: center;”>

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

A couple of days ago, I posted that I was approaching the finish line on building my new bike and asked around for a name. Thanks to Philip, meet Grey Fox!

(Click the images to zoom) Some features to note: The gear rati0 is 46:12. No front derailleur. Eight speeds on the rear and a big old school friction thumb shifter distorted and Dremeled into working on road bars. The brakes are time trial/triathalon levers and Tektro Oryx cantilevers. The back wheel is a Mavic  laced onto a generic hub. The front is a DT Swiss laced onto a cheap Shimano hub. The frame is a Trek 7300 with frankly insufficient paint to have any real durability.

Right now, it’s got a top gear of a paltry 97.3 gear inches.I haven’t yet switched the chainring in from the Iron Monkey, which will give it a top gear of 121.4 gear inches. That is, the wheel will go 1/3 further around for each time I pedal. The Yellowjacket’s top gear is 108. That is, it should haul ass.

The shifter and right brake lever. Note the clever “TAPE OVER IT” technique. Those tires were a trash find, by the way.

The powertrain. I like those cranks and I can not lie. But they don’t fit a big chainring. So they’re going to move over to the Iron Monkey and the Grey Fox will get the big ring and old Dura Ace cranks. The Tektro Oryx brakes are nearly as good as V brakes. Pretty impressive. You may also note the seat clamp from the Iron Monkey. I gotta get a permanent solution for the Grey Fox.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

EDIT: Hey, Makeketeers, I just finished the bike this eve! Check out this post to see the final product!

Like a lot of Americans, I was with my family over the last weekend celebrating Thanksgiving. Unlike most Americans, I’d come not just to hang with family, but to get some workshop time. My dad’s shop is a wonderful thing and he’s got some tools that I just can’t approximate. I’ve been working on a bike for a while now, but I wanted a hood to paint in because the weather’s gotten foul, and then there were a couple of parts that needed more force than I’m able to generate with the tools I’ve got. So I brought it along! I also had a homemade bike stand I’d made out of steel pipe and a clamp that needed delrin jaws and Dad had offered some stock and the use of his milling machine to make them. I could have made them with a band saw and drill press, but I lack a band saw and he had them already cut for another purpose.

The clamp clamping while the stand stands

So I got to work on the bike itself. I had to strip the paint, first using methylene chloride (nassty chemilcalses that it is), then switching to other stuff because I kept getting distracted and the stuff dried up before I could get all the paint off properly.

An out-of-focus picture of the methylene chloride attacking the enamel.

It took the ink right off the decals, but unfortunately left the decal substrate there. Invisibly. That had me stumped for a while.

This took me all afternoon, half a can of methylene chloride, and a surprisingly small amount of MEK. I don’t know if the MEK (methyl ethyl ketone) would have worked first. The stuff sure seems less nasty than the methlylene chloride, though. And as far as I know, it doesn’t REDUCE THE BLOOD’S OXYGEN CARRYING CAPACITY.

In any event, there was a fair amount of scraping and even some sanding at the end. Had I been on the ball a little more and gotten to use the methylene chloride at a stretch instead of having to run off and do family stuff, all the paint would have just flopped off.

That orange is an undercoat for masking purposes. The seat tube was an aborted idea.

The top tube masked with electrical tape. See where that tape overlaps? That’s a little problem. Thinner tape cut at the edge would have been a good idea. No big deal, fortunately.

… then I painted the whole thing “Machine Grey”. I really like this color.

Then I removed the mask. Rock. Yeah, I painted a lot of orange, then wanted just a little. I tried a bunch of patterns before I came up with this one.

See? Kinda neat. The light was low, but the camera did an admirable job.

So I threw together a bunch of the parts, and it starts to look like a bike! These are the wheels I built in a previous post, as well. Most of the parts, including the frame (from a Trek 7300) were from various folks on Ebay. As always, caveat emptor: the bottom bracked turns out to be cross-threaded, so I have to have it retapped tomorrow at Full Circle.

I think the cranks are gonna come off the Iron Monkey, which will then get my brother’s old cranks and chainwheel. I want the 53:12 ratio! I wanna haul ass! The Iron Monkey will probably be mostly ridden by guests (once I fix it up with a new rear wheel) who probably won’t appreciate a gear you can only be in for 5 minutes of the ride anyway.

And that brings me to a serious question: what should I name this bike? I called it Mithrandir over on Velospace for need of a name on the spot, but it doesn’t make me happy. Too nerdly. I’m happy to take recommendations, even ridiculous ones that I’ll reject out of hand because they’ll make me laugh.