sophistre

I'm a pork fan, but have had some awesome beef ribs, too.

I love pork ribs, but I admittedly have a soft spot for beef ribs. Done well they might even be my favorite. So much meat. So savory.

Hardly anybody does them in any of the places I've lived, though. :(

I just put together my new Weber gas grill. Grilling with gas is a new thing for me; we always had charcoal growing up. Tips for grilling chicken drumsticks like a boss would be welcome. I have a meat thermometer, but I'm still always paranoid about under/overdoing chicken.

@Cork: I used to live in Boston, so I went to the first...I dunno, 3 PAXes, when they started doing them there? Then, the year that I moved to the Seattle area, I got to do PAX East AND PAX Prime in the same year. Good times.

I wish I had finished laddering with D3 in the first season. I love my wizards, and my poor, neglected witch doctor. I got so distracted by other releases, though. I like Hearthstone and haven't tried HoTS yet (except briefly at the one and only Blizzcon I ever went to, before it went to beta), but I'm drowning in stuff to play. I've barely scratched the surface of Pillars of Eternity, and now Witcher 3 is about to drop! Plus, my gaming buddies and I are all playing Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate at night.

So many games.

I don't have thick ankles particularly, but I do have pretty beefy calves. They're just very, very muscular, to the extent that I don't often fit into zip-up knee-high boots (which sucks, because I love themmmmmmm).

I used to worry about this kind of thing with shoe choice. Can I wear the boots with the big piece in front? What about booties in general? Won't that make my leg look wide all the way down?

I don't really worry about this anymore. If you look happy in what you're wearing, people roll with it. If you look uncomfortable and nervous, they notice. There is no substitute for genuine joy.

Plus, I second the person above who said that tattoos can be transformative! Mine made me love my fat upper arm long before I started getting back into shape.

Having one color tattoo is fine! It worked out for Rick Genest.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

I sent an email. :cool:

I told myself I wasn't going to start anything on my legs until after August, because I'm deep in training to climb Rainier, and doing that with a healing thigh tattoo sounds uncomfortable. ...My shoulder didn't scab up too much when I had that done on the other side, though...

...yeah. I should totally do it. The linked pictures are too rad.

You're a terrible influence! Because of how you twisted my arm without mercy. Obviously.

Oh man. I really want to do this, but I have a family reunion mid-June that I should probably not be scabby for....fuuuuuu.

...now I'm sitting here trying to come up with places to get a tattoo that wouldn't be highly visible during healing in June...in Florida...

It's not a spoiler! I'm not even that far yet. Got caught up playing online with my buddies. So much fun.

I'm liking the campaign too, though...a little surprising, because I thought 4 was really boring.

I was born in '81, which was a weird time for geeks in general. Like, I was too young to do the 80's punk thing, but Pokemon was after my time.

I played a lot of video games. A lot. Basically from the moment I was big enough to work the controllers for my dad's Atari 2600.

I still have my original NES, even. Incredibly, it still works. I guess that part hasn't changed much, since I still play an ungodly amount of video games. Not sure what else we had going on in elementary school. Micro machines? Voltron? Oh -- haha. MUDs. AOL used to let you play Gemstone III through it. And there was that BBS game before AOL was even a thing, L.O.R.D.? Oh my god, I am old. I played around with writing little 'choose your own adventure' stories in QBasic. Played all kinds of text adventures (think Zork) -- my dad was into those, too. He also turned me on to science fiction; he gave me his copies of Clarke's 'Rama' series and pushed me to read Greg Bear. He was always into out-there fiction...I saw Eraserhead with him, and Tetsuo: Iron Man with him not much later than that, and this probably explains a lot about me.

I guess grunge was a thing when I was in middle school. That's right around the time I discovered comics, which was a brief love affair, irreparably stained by the fact that the local comic book store owner pushed me to only buy series from Image. :/ We played a few card games. Magic, some Star Trek game, I forget what else. My brother was into pogs. Dead serious. Pretty sure my magic cards (which are all Ice Age) are in a shoebox around here somewhere.

I was a band nerd too. Played flute for about 11 years, did symphonic, marching, pep, and jazz bands, and went to All State and Solo & Ensemble every year. After I went away to New England for high school, I had to drop that, but it gave me more time to do theater things. That's when I finally got into punk music -- I guess that was more the NOFX/Misfits/etc. punk era than old-school stuff.

I eventually got into RPGs through Shadowrun, though I only ever got to play it online, in what is the nerdiest text-based environment you can imagine. (Really.) I wish someone had gotten me into 40kz! There was nothing tabletop-ish, mini or otherwise, near me where I grew up. I have good gaming buddies who regale me with stories about 40k lore and their crazy Necromunda games. They paint figures. I'm always totally fascinated by it. Sadly, my few experiences with 40k nerds who aren't 'them' left something to be desired. Like tact.

I'm doing both! One of my arms is all one artist, and the other will be one tattoo from any given artist, though the size of the pieces so far means it'll probably fill up pretty fast, hah.

If you decide to do your arm one way, theoretically you always have the other one to do the other way (unless you don't, in which case another limb will hopefully suffice).

Someone I know just posted this on facebook:

And I don't wanna be that person, showing up in a thread and crapping all over it, especially since I've had to fence with her bad tattoo ideas in the past, but...aaaaaah! Nope nope nope.

I do have a PS4, but I do most of my gaming on PC, alas.

I have Bloodborne, though...

edit: my rockstar social tag is sophistre, just like my forum handle!

I am resurrecting this thread, because I want to know if any LSTers are playing GTA V -- for PC, specifically.

Or anything else I play, really. Video games are my poison of choice.

I am sad today, though, because I go to PAX every year, and I can't this year, because I will presumably be on top of a dumb mountain on the last week of August. My facebook newsfeed is full of people talking about the badges they bought today, and I am :(.

I've been drowning in fiction, so maybe I'll take a look at the non-fiction on this page as a palate cleanser.

Horror/weird fic bros: I just finished a pretty fantastic book called Bastards of the Absolute, by Timothy S. Cantwell. It almost doesn't even fit in the 'horror' genre at all, since it's not going to keep anybody awake at night, but the stories are strange and beautiful. So is the book. Pictures do not do it justice. I see myself spending a whole lot of money at Egaeus Press in the future. Bastards of the Absolute

Also, on the recommendation of Nathan Ballingrud, I picked up Last Days, by Adam Nevill. Ballingrud says Nevill is the only author who can scare him anymore, and I understand why. There were things I didn't like about it, but it's the first book I can remember giving me the creeps since Matheson's Hell House.

Yeahhhhh, it'll be okay. I don't sweat a huge amount on strength days, and my trainer and I just make sure to avoid anything that would affect the skin of my arm, put pressure on or stretch or abrade it, or anything like that. Luckily/unluckily for me, he has a huge arsenal of exercises to torture me with, so we never run out of alternative ways to do what we need to do. :/

If it was over a bendy part, I'd probably cancel.

Fresh forearm tattoo and strength training day, YEAH BUDDY. Gonna feel AWESOME*.

*terrible

Aw, lizards. I wish I had the dedication to take care of another pet.

And sure! Tapatalk sucks, but I'll shoot you a PM when I get home.

It's not so bad! I can't really drink anymore at all. Never really liked hard liquor anyway, so it wasn't hard to give up, but getting older sucks. Alcohol makes my heart pound these days. Gross.

I guess I should contribute something thread-relevant. Been doing tarot readings for friends for funsies. Haven't done this in years. (I'm not really into any of the mystical stuff that goes along with it, I just think it's a really neat tool for introspection, and the my deck is pretty, so I want to touch it. Haha.) If I can get through the queue I have, I should offer to do some for people here. Practice is always nice.

I wish tapatalk would let me click like on these. So many good ones!

I'm just gonna toss this out there and then fuck off to eat crap hotel food and ogle my new Gilsdorf tattoo:

I've seen plenty of people who don't like traditional best come here and express their opinions without getting everybody's hackles up. Nobody cares what other people like.

People get riled up when someone starts making condescending remarks about how the thing they love is in some way inferior - especially since that's a completely subjective opinion that has zero to do with fact. Everybody gets that you think trad is 'inferior' and 'for posers' (the latter of which is weird to me, because wtf, American tattooing was born on one-shot military pieces, but okay). They just don't want to constantly hear about it.

And it's kinda pass-agg to say things like 'true masters of tattooing,' insulting all of the other bitchin artists who are, yes, doing traditional work.

Tl;dr: nobody cares that you don't hold traditional in the same esteem as other styles. Just stop being a dick about it! Then we can all go back to just appreciating the stuff we DO like.

Yeahhhhh, I don't think I would ever try to match, exactly. I don't even think that's possible. It's just weird to have it on my radar at all, because I've always been one of those people who'll try anything on, in any color or pattern! I guess it's not helped by the fact that I HAVE to buy new clothes, since I'm changing sizes pretty steadily. I've never had to do the formal-wear thing with tattoos before. I did concede to a shawl to cover my arms in the chapel though. Can't be scandalizing the natives, I suppose. :o

I love non-traditional wedding dresses, and tattoos and floral sound pretty rad to me, honestly. And also congratulations!!

I guess this isn't totally a ladies issue, technically speaking, but:

Have your wardrobes changed a little since you started getting visible tattoos, for those who have? I'm going to my first really formal function since I started my arm -- a friend's wedding, cocktail attire -- and it was funny to me, trying stuff on in my closet, how fussy I've gotten about patterns and colors. I still wear all kinds of colors when I dress casually, but now I'm preoccupied with making my tattoos look good!

Thank god for little black dresses.

I'm going to start getting tattoos on my legs after August. I'm not looking forward to the healing. D: Even my lower arms throbbed a lot during healing, I can't imagine lower legs! It must be intense.

Oops, guess I'm trendy, now---does it count it if wasn't on purpose?! I found an artist whose stuff I loved (she does a lot of geometric mandala-ish work), and had her create shoulder caps for me--I wanted them to be symmetric, and reminiscent of Egyptian Revival jewelry. I *guess* they look kinda like mandalas...(?) Personally, I think they are kinda badass, but that might just be me.

Mreh. Mandalas are beautiful. They've been beautiful since like the 9th-11th centuries, B.C.E. Just because they've become popular subjects for tattoos doesn't make them any less beautiful! Geometric designs likewise; you have only to look at the ceiling of any given mosque to be blown away. Whether these things make great tattoos or not is open to discussion (by people who know more about these things than I do), but that's entirely a separate conversation.

Trends are a social phenomenon that has to do with perception and self-image. They often have little or nothing to do with the intrinsic worth of the object of acclaim/derision; it's more about social identity and group belonging and whatever else. I would totally get a mandala tattoo, and I don't give a fuuuuuu. It'd have to be placed well, but they're still stunning, imo. Don't care what anybody thinks, or who else might be wearing them. We tend to want to reject things that become trendy when we feel wiser about the thing the trend concerns itself with than the bulk of derps following the trend, but sometimes that's just cutting off our noses to spite our faces.

The other tattoos under discussion draw fire here because they make for crap tattoos. But, still. If somebody loves it, even if they got it because it's trendy, it doesn't really matter. Their body, their life. More joy to them.

I think for the most part anyone who gets tattooed more than a few times has already said their goodbyes to caring about what the bulk of humanity thinks about it. There are no doubt exceptions to that generalization, but still. Like all extremely personal choices that run against the social grain, you open yourself up to criticism...but, assuming that it was a personal choice and made for considered reasons, it's not going to matter. 'Yeah, I hear you, but I do what I want.'

I imagine the rest is a self-solving problem. People basing permanent decisions on ephemeral whims tend to be regulated by their own misery after the first few mistakes. (And if they come out of the other side of a trend with a tattoo they still love, then the point is still moot, because at the end of the day, they're winning.)