k i d n a p p e d k i d

So, tattoo No.2 by Xoil in Thonon les Bains.  A lot's happened since my last one with him, he's been doing so amazingly in the last 18 months, I've seen his "likes" on FB jump from somewhere just over 2k to over 127k now, and he deserves every bit of success and credit.  It's just an absolute pleasure to be a canvas to this man and this is only the second of four large pieces that I want in total.  Although to be honest, even after just four days of this being done I'm already thinking of another I'd like in a fifth place, tut tut, it's so addictive.

But the pain on the shin and the back of the knee was something else, quite a fucking challenge to go through.  The shinbone rattled all the way down to my ankle and up to the hip, the strangest sensation.  Plus, the noise it made as fifteen needles dug through my skin into what felt like the bone itself was simply disgusting.  Even Xoil's shopmate commented "Ah, you know it's hurting bad when you hear that grinding noise!", with a smile on his face I might add, the sadistic fucker.

However, I had no idea of the pain to come.  Xoil said while he was working that he wouldn't like to be me for the next week, but that I'd be fine in two, so I knew I should expect some healing pain for the next day or two at least.  But I really did not know to expect what followed: The next morning I simply could not put my foot on the ground when I got out of bed, but this was topped by the blood rushing down into my calf and ankle, soaring through inflamed capilliaries and swollen skin which felt like every single cell of my lower leg was trying to explode, I kid you not.  Honestly, I can't begin to tell you what this felt like -  I could say that it felt like an electric shock going through my leg and that would be true, but, well... do you remember when you were a kid and you'd play that trick on each other where you'd tell someone to bite the ends of their little fingers and then lock them together and pull as hard as they could, cos you knew it hurt like a bitch?  It was exactly like that, just all over your lower leg, a throb at first quickly flushing into full effect within 30 seconds.  Thankfully it would only last for three minutes or so, just until the capillaries got used to being full, and then die away, especially if I started walking.

Trouble was, it would do exactly the same thing again as soon as I stopped walking, or if I lay down, or if I stood up again.  Basically as soon as I changed the behaviour of my leg I had to go through this for 3 minutes, fucking ridiculous.  And it's only now, after four days, that it's eased off.  What a pain.  And yes, I am that crap as to make that dreadful pun.

I could spend hours on this site.  This is an interactive 3D visualisation of our stellar neighbourhood, including 119,617 nearby stars derived from multiple sources, including the 1989 Hipparcos mission.  Zooming in reveals 87 individually identified stars, including our own solar system (our sun is at the very centre of the images).  The galaxy view is an artist's rendition based on NGC 1232, a spiral galaxy like our milky way.  It has been created for the Google Chrome web browser, so if it's not working for you then give it a go in Chrome.  

An unexpected ass-kicking is a blog entry by Joel Runyon, a self declared "javelin-throwing, world travelling triathlete set on doing impossible things", as he puts it, the things only the cool guys on TV do.

He posted this article some time ago about a chance encounter with Russell A. Kirsch, who, along with his team of colleagues, invented the first internally programmable computer along with the first set of scanned digital images - an incredibly important breakthrough in technology.

It's a heartwarming tale of how important it is to be open to others around you, but even more importantly, a lesson in always doing what you want to do regardless of others and to make sure you always do things that have never been done before.  Humbling.

We Feel Fine is a really crazy site, which bills itself as "An exploration of human emotion, in six movements."  Designed by Jonathan Harris (an all round amazing Artist, storyteller and Internet anthropologist - check out his latest site, Cowbird, a simple online tool for telling and sharing stories) and Sep Kamvar (a professor at MIT media lab) the site harvests human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. 

If we don't, remember me.