Doll doll doll doll.

[reddragdiva]

• Chef quits South Park! (courtesy kixie)

• Deeply evil things to do with DNS.

• Audiophile snake oil.

• My Guardian interview on Wikipedia came out surprisingly well.

I make a 3am post of down-to-the-metal geekery and the only replies talk about dollies. Anyway, redcountess has won the opportunity to spend a lot of money on this little boy, and so of course to avoid metamour rivalry arkady got this little boy. And the second battery arrived for my laptop. (It won't recognise it as yet, though. I might try it on narnee's M300 if my N410c still refuses to see it.) As such, today I have actually been talking to pimps. I might even switch on my phone soon (for the first time in a week) and see what's piled up.

Now cleaning the spare room. The kitties are being verr' helpful. I want to kill iTunes as a music player, but it's the most fatally simple MP3 ripper I've ever used. I'm shoving all the unripped CDs through it as I clean. And play music on VLC. The Very Things' This Is Motortown, which I picked up for three quid from a High Fidelity-style record shop in Walthamstow High Street, is surprisingly good. As is the Mojo Beyond Punk post-punk compilation.

My Own Private IPO is on VFH. If you have an Uncyclopedia account, please go forth and shill!

Update: I won the laptop motherboard. If I can find a dead NX9105 to drop it into, I will be very pleased indeed and get some cash back.

Comments

[sprezzatoura.livejournal.com]

Bloody hell, I can't believe how much those dolls cost!

[reddragdiva]

The dolls are basically hand-cast in resin in very short runs (the moulds don't last very long), so the prices aren't actually outrageous for the labour that goes into them. And they are very nice (if you're not creeped out by them). But Problems With Polyamory That No-One Has Any Sympathy For: supporting two women with expensive tastes.

[redcountess]

We're working on supporting ourselves!

[sprezzatoura.livejournal.com]

The dolls are basically hand-cast in resin in very short runs

Pardon my cynicism but this sounds like reducing supply in order to inflate prices. ;-)

But Problems With Polyamory That No-One Has Any Sympathy For: supporting two women with expensive tastes.

Heh, well, I guess you reap what you sew. Or they do. ;-)

[reddragdiva]

No, the moulds don't actually do very well in large runs. It's one step above sculpting each one.

They hope to get a few pennies from the sewing thing ;-)

[sprezzatoura.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. Then again I can't imagine having that much disposable income to throw at sculptures either.

[reddragdiva]

Cash is not something I'm actually that flush with at this moment, though you wouldn't think it from my horribly profligate spending habits of late. That said, it's a creative and active hobby for Liz, which has made an enormous difference in her mood (having been largely bedbound and passive for three years — really, there's only so much television and LiveJournal the human soul can take); and Arkady's creativity has really been sparked by it after two years' complete creative block and she's doing some great stuff, and writing and drawing again. I would throw quite a lot of mere money at something to get the results it's getting.

[sprezzatoura.livejournal.com]

It does sound as though there is quite a social scene around it as well, and I can see the appeal of it as a hobby. I'm just a bit shocked at the cost.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

No, most of the doll companies are basically very small companies. The doll artist handcasts each doll individually by himself (they're all men, unlike the art-doll world where the artists are all female, the dolls are unique and run to six figures in dollars easily, making BJDs look cheap by comparison), and as stated the molds don't last long so each run is limited - even the "unlimited" dolls will be retired eventually.

Urethane resin is potentially toxic to work with, too - particularly the fumes; so doll-making is also a hazardous business.

Typically each company has only one or two artists doing face-ups (i.e. painting on the makeup etc), and maybe a small handful of seamstresses making clothing. Footwear is usually made by small shoemaker co-operatives - it takes just as much work and skill to make a pair of 1:3 scale Doc Martens as it does a full-sized pair.

So no, it's not artificially inflating prices by reducing supply - these are handcraft works of art, not your typical cheap crappy mass-produced vinyl Barbie. These are dolls that will become heirlooms, much as porcelain dolls of earlier centuries did.

[sprezzatoura.livejournal.com]

I'm not disputing their artistic validity, if you happen to like that sort of thing. I couldn't imagine spending £250 odd on a porcelain doll either, but I guess we have different priorities. :-)

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Yow. I can't imagine spending that much money on anything other than my house threatening to fall down.

Um. And plane tickets.

[stevenothing.livejournal.com]

Me neither. I mean, I might spend half that on something hobby-related, if it were that month in the year when the council don't demand council tax, and if I'd done lots of overtime.

I can't think how much I'd have to be earning before I could justify spending that much money on a hobby, instead of things like food, the mortgage, etc.

[sprezzatoura.livejournal.com]

I don't think I could ever earn enough to spend that much on a hobby, to be honest. Then again most of my money is going on legal fees at the moment and I can't afford to have hobbies. I can't even afford to go out.

[reddragdiva]

I'm one of those middle-aged guys who always pissed me off when I saw them in an indie record shop wearing a suit, putting a stack of vinyl records on the counter and talking animatedly with the staff with a really happy look on their face. It's good to be able to afford shit at last.

[sprezzatoura.livejournal.com]

Heh, well, enjoy it if you've got it. I sometimes wonder what the hell I bothered to go back to work for seeing as it meant the loss of benefits, legal aid and childcare. Self respect is a truly an expensive hobby.

[reddragdiva]

Oh, I'm buying what I can before children come along ... somehow I foresee a string of daughters, and daughters can eat all the money any daddy can make.

[sprezzatoura.livejournal.com]

Mummy and step daddy in this case, but they sure can.

[reddragdiva]

My mother is quite enjoying her revenge.

[redcountess]

Fair enough we don't have a mortgage, but all our bills get paid on or before the due date. I don't claim any benefits, and if I did, it'd probably only be on the lowest level, enough to cover my taxi fares.

Think of it this way: I haven't been to the cinema in two years, I manage to get to B Movie once a year, if I'm lucky, and your post-wedding dinner was the last time I ate at a restaurant. I buy clothes once a year, nothing fancy. I don't drink, smoke, or take recreational drugs. I'd love to travel, but it would exhaust me. Gardening's a cheaper hobby, but I can only do it for five minutes at a time, tops. I rarely have the concentration to watch a dvd, let alone read a book.

This is a hobby where I can passively appreciate beautiful things when I don't have energy, and actively do stuff like craft dolls clothes when I do. It's not for everyone, but It makes me incredibly happy.

[stevenothing.livejournal.com]

I hope you didn't misinterpret what I said as having a go at you. I'm glad you have something that makes you happy. :)

[inulro.livejournal.com]

I suppose travel is a hobby, but it's the only thing that keeps me sane, and I do sacrifice an awful lot so that I can spend a lousy four or five weeks a year exploring the world.

[ashbet]

I'm a doll-sculptor (see icon), and I can DEFINITELY tell you it's not a matter of reducing supply -- you can get maybe 15 or 20 casts from a mold before it starts to degrade, and there are other issues (for example, there are always some miscasts/mispigmented parts that have to be scrapped -- unlike plastic, you can't melt resin down and start over).

These are, basically, art dolls . . . they're not at all mass-produced.

But, yes, the prices still do sting, quite a bit!!

-- A (making dolls to support my doll habit, LOL!)

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

But the music sounds so much clearer on my expen$ive cables made of toejamium IV. :)

I use this method of ripping CDs. It produces very good results and once I set it up it isn't difficult to use.

Tell me: why are blank help pages in Mediawiki considered to be a feature? (Rhetorical question that explains what I've been doing over my lunchbreak today.)

[reddragdiva]

I get results pretty much as good as EAC with cdparanoia. Mind you, I'm tempted to run EAC under Wine (which it apparently works quite well under), because it is that good. That said, iTunes hasn't missed a beat, and it's using a reasonably nice Pioneer DVR-104 DVD-RW drive.

The Help: pages are largely a hodgepodge of notes written by Wikimedia users as they think of it, or not. So they tend not to be worth including with the distribution. Have a look on meta.wikimedia.org if you can't find just what you're after. #mediawiki on freenode is a good idea too.

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

It would have been nice if they'd included some sort of editing help for those of us who don't know Wikitext as well as a brief how-to for some common tasks such as creating a new page. Hmm, maybe instead of bitching I should do that myself. :)

I'm copying help pages that are personally useful from meta.wikimedia.com.

[reddragdiva]

That's pretty much the way to do it. If you come up with what you think is a generic set, do feel free to tell the developers ...

[reddragdiva]

And I've just hand-crafted the perfect .abcde.conf because I am a smelly leegnux geek.