Rays

Rays, originally uploaded by nicoletbn.

So yesterday I visited Treasure Island, San Francisco’s *only* active ghost town, and wandered a bit with Ian through some of it’s more abandoned areas. Happened upon a group of skaters shooting photos, some huge fuel tank things, and well, this.

Awesome.

Nicole dances

Nicole dances, originally uploaded by edrabbit.

This is the best photo of me playing DDR/DDI ever. I love it.

I AM ENTIRELY IN THE AIR! Wearing an fplabs shirt! With my hair freshly pink! and gloves strapped to my belt!

The end.

Dart

Dart, originally uploaded by nicoletbn.

Hm. I’m so sporadic about this posting business. Life’s busy lately, I guess that means it’s spring again.

I love this rope dart so much. It’s been with me for some time now. Maybe it’s time for a new rope? The blue goes so well with the red carabiner though…

Digital Ripples

Popwarp, originally uploaded by nicoletbn.

In the past, I was part of an oekaki community. That’s where I drew the pixel art bits I posted earlier. Every so often there’d be an image I loved, but it’d only be 300×200 pixels large, and I wanted something more wallpaper sized. Tiling looked terrible, and ruined the impact of the image, while stretching to fit or make larger made it look bloated and wrong. I started isolating my favorite parts, and pulling the ends out to reach the size of the frame I wanted to fill, which looked right to me.

I decided to try this on a photo. It turned out nice. It looks like pushing and pulling at time. I’d like to animate these ripples coming in and out of a photo, but I’ll need to figure out a less tedious way of creating them…

The original photo I used is one of Ed’s from his trip to Washington DC for the inauguration.

SockDreams delivers!

SockDreams delivers!, originally uploaded by nicoletbn.

I’ve been hearing about SockDreams for ages. Cute socks, colorful socks, long socks, decent prices. Finally I’ve placed my order, and 36 hours later my socks arrived. Nice job, guys!

What pleasing colors, stacked all in a line. I’m wearing the green ones today.

Timescale has been officially proposed

originally uploaded by nicoletbn.

A finished thing!

I’ve been working with Morley and Ian on this Burning Man proposal. A lot of working, design, cad, page layout, budget, the works. And the project feels extremely *designed*, like tight and complete and ready to build. So we turned it in! But we didn’t just send them over a pdf and call it a day. This project seeks to represent the history of the earth, all of geologic time! One does not merely submit electronic bits, or even just paper. For a project like this, you submit something solid, something real. Something dense, something… interactive. So we started by making a scale model of our proposed scale model. 52.4 feet long, it provides a short walk through the long and storied tales of our planet. A guidebook accompanies this ‘time rope’, and we’ve dubbed it the ‘time book’. Then we discussed how to best present this object, and decided to have it coincide with the concrete testing we would need to perform to make the columns that comprise the piece. So a concrete cube, with a cylinder cut out of the center was fabricated, three actually, with the best one expertly finished. Topped and bottomed with plates of steel, and the bound proposal document sandwiched between the top plate and a quarter inch of acrylic, we were on the right track. One final touch, a sling of hemp rope and treated wood, and we dropped it off at the Burning Man offices, proud of our handiwork.

View the images of the proposal carrier, and the proposal document itself is up for perusal at timescaleproject.com.

Wish us luck!

Skipping!

This movie by one of my coworkers at Kink.com is *so* cute!

Totally safe for work, but now I wanna go for a skip!

Awesome job, Justin!

Brand New Heelys

originally uploaded by nicoletbn.

I like to consider myself a connoisseur of wheeled footwear. I’ve got rollerblades, rollerblades that convert into boots (and from there into ice skates!) and shoes that have hidden wheels. My brand of choice for concealed wheel shoes are Heelys, which I’ve actually been wearing since I was about 16 years old! I’m regularly stopped by people surprised to find out that they make the shoes in adult sizes. I recommend trying out a pair if you have the chance. They have a bit of a learning curve to use, but add a small burst of joy to your life whenever you use them. It’s nice to have something super fun like skating being accessible whenever I’m walking somewhere. They do have a downside, in that they don’t seem to last as long as you might hope shoes would last. I go through a set of wheels about 5 times a year, which cost 20 each (but come with the shoes) and go through the shoes themselves every 7 months. They aren’t particularly spendy as far as skates or shoes go, so I don’t feel so bad, but I do wish they made their adult shoes a little bit heartier. Maybe I’m just hard on things.

Anyhow, recently my pair of Heelys gave up on me while I was walking around Disneyland, so once I got back I ordered a new pair from Zappos, and I’m really pleased with how these ones look. Digital skull camo! How very strange. I took a few shots of them and posted it up on flickr. Aren’t they awesome?

Photo date with Vanessa

droppin some parkour knowledge, originally uploaded by *takeitez*.

So this Saturday, I got together with Vanessa to work on my photography. I haven’t quite gotten to figuring out if any of my shots worked out so well, but I am in love with this portrait that Vanessa took of me! I felt like being particularly colorful, since I was to be hanging around with actual photographers, and imagined that I might be modeling as well as taking photos. Glad I did!

We started out at the mall in downtown San Francisco, which is where this crazy lighted floor lives. My back, which has been pretty sore from a fall during last week’s parkour class, was in good enough shape for me to do some QM (quadrapedal movement) across the floor. It makes for a good prowling body shape, don’t you think?

New shirt.woot random shirts!

New shirt.woot random shirts!, originally uploaded by nicoletbn.

You all know about shirt.woot, right? One day, one shirt, one future?

Well, occasionally they have random shirt days, where shirts are cheap and unknown. I was in for three, and curious to see what would show. The results came in just a few days ago! This is now the second time I’ve tried this game, and I’m thrilled with what I received.

Shirt the first is a dark grey with a bomb of some sort making impact with ground in a caution triangle.

Shirt the second is binder paper and scribbley cute things, with the words ‘draw more’

The third shirt is entirely covered in weird creatures. One has a knife! One’s a jellyfish! One says BRB! Fun for hours. Seriously!

Anyway, sharing is caring, so I’ve taken some pictures and put them up on flickr. Enjoy~