The Pod
It all started when I accidentally clicked on Facebook Marketplace.
I was trying to click on my notifications. On the iOS app, the Marketplace button is next to the Notifications button, and, well...
As God is my witness, I do not know why Facebook Marketplace thought I would be interested in a gigantic human-sized pod. I mean, it was absolutely 100% right, but how did it know?
And so it came to pass that I, after much back and forth with the seller (who owns a clinic that was moving, and didn't have space for it any more) and some absolutely heroic efforts from my friend Stan to move the damn thing, came into possession of a Bod Pod, a medical scanner originally, I gather, designed to calculate body mass.
Of course, when I saw that listing on Facebook on that fateful day, my mind immediately, as it is wont to do, went to images of the alien eggs from the Alien movies.
What if, thought I, I could cover this Bod Pod in silicone, making an alien egg large enough for a person? And what if, I continued as my brain inevitably rode this train to the last station, I could make a whole bunch of gigantic silicone tentacles-say, just for the sake of argument, nine and a hald feet long or so-that might explode from the pod, dripping with slime, trying to drag a Helpless Victim™ into the egg-thing? And what if, I continued on, having at this point reached the last station, crashed through the wall, and sailed on into the Beyond Space where anything is possible, I did a photo shoot, in which this poor Helpless Victim™ was molested by tentacles from this giant alien pod?
Now, of course, getting from pod to giant alien egg with tentacles is a Project, one I have only just barely embarked upon.
The first step to a pod with tentacles is, of course, the pod. The second step is the tentacles, and so it was, Gentle Reader, that I set about designing a Giant Tentacle in a 3D modeling program.
From this Giant Tentacle, I created a mold that could be printed in 15-inch segments, which is the maximum print size on my 3D printer, with an overall length of over 9 feet.
Of course, I didn't really quite imagine how long a 9-foot mold is, so it turned out that once the mold was complete-something that took days of printing-I didn’t have enough space for it without rearranging furniture.
Seriously, nine-feet-plus of mold is more mold than you think it is.
It's also a lot harder to cast silicone in an open-face mold this size than I expected it to be. Like, a lot harder. In this much space, silicone doesn’t behave the way you’d expect it to. It’s kind of like lava-it doesn’t flow to fill the entire mold. (It doesn’t help that my vacuum chamber also isn’t big enough to degas this much silicone all at once, either.)
So I had to make the pour in a bunch of steps, which created all sorts of weird problems. I’d planned to have the suckers lighter than the rest, with bands of color through the tentacles. That...didn’t work. The coloring pigment actually migrated up through the silicone, something it doesn’t do in a smaller mold.
The mold is just a liiiiitle teensy bit more than half the diameter of the tentacle, so it just barely starts to pinch inward at the top. This is so that I could cast half the tentacle, remove it from the mold, fill it with silicone again, then put the half I’d already cast on top, and that slight bit of pinch would grab the bit I’d already cast.
The result worked out pretty well, though it uses a lot of silicone-I made two tentacles, and together they’re about $100 worth of body-safe platinum-cure silicone alone, not including the cost of printing the mold.
When I flew to Springfield to see my Talespinner, I brought the tentacles (of course), which caused some degree of consternation at TSA (of course). We trialled the tentacles as a means of violation of Helpless Victims™, at which they excelled, but we (by which I mean she and her other lover, as I looked on) also gave them a try as an impact toy, at which they also excelled.
In fact, this may be the thuddiest impact toy ever conceived by man, more thuddy even than the Dread Koosh Flogger, a flogger made (as the name suggests) from Koosh balls.
I'm considering making an impact tentacle toy that’s basically a short length of this tentacle with a handle on the end.
When I returned from Springfield, armed with more information to allow the Great Tentacle Pod Project to move forward, I unpacked my suitcase and tossed the tentacles over the pod, lacking a better place to put them (and nine-foot tentacles are both heavier and take up more storage space than you may realize).
It struck me yesterday that visitors to my home, upon walking into my living room and seeing this, might be subject to some discomfiture.
