Five minutes before the housewarming, it was an unmitigated disaster. We had trouble getting the regulator on our last-minute oxygen tank, cooking half the food we wanted to, the firebrick for the furnace had cracked, the copper ore was lost in the mail, the interplanetary magnetic field chose to deny us the auroras we'd been hoping to show our ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

I'd bought gfish a printing press as a Christmas gift. It's over a hundred years old, and spent the last eighty or so sitting in a barn getting rusty. Self serving gift - someone, and I have no idea who, of course, will have to help him restore it. So Thursday we went and rented a truck, and wandered to the shipping depo to pick up our twelve hundred ( Read more... )

I was playing with gfish's atlatl (a gift from the wondrous keen vixyish), and it is neat. I will now proceed to gush about it. :)

( physics and photos )

Metalwork is such a strange, fantastic thing. I'm used to metal being solid, the bones of cities, buildings with rebar skeletons and bridges strung with coiled steel, steam pipe and railway and ship hull. So there's some part of me that's always surprise at the way scale flakes pearly and grey, like eggshell, away from a blade on the anvil, or the ( Read more... )

She is tiny, birdlike, with short spiky black hair, almond-shaped eyes. Her head falls well short of my shoulder, and I am not tall. But she has fingers like cablesteel under lined watersilk, and she checks the purple-anodized carabiners at my waist, a slide and a tap and a pull, like a martial artist stretching her joints, like they're part of her ( Read more... )

This weekend, gfish, shadowblue, and I are going on a three-day canoeing trip along the Columbia river. These pictures are from one of our practice trips.

( but for a breath I tarry )

Yesterday, gfish and I built a hovercraft. It's a very versatile machine. It hovers! And floats! And drifts! And, um, hovers! :) Also, very easy to make, and a good way to spend a few hours.
( details )

By request, smelting pictures. These are not from the recent smelting party, where I was too busy playing host, but I am pleased to announce we actually got copper (in usable forms) from the recent one.
( pictures )

An essay by Xog, Warscout of the Zlyx.

( Dear mighty Zlyx warlords, )