Gentle reader, if you are of a delicate disposition… if you have any affection for the Dragonriders of Pern and don’t want it Ruined Forever, then I entreat you in the sternest possible way to not read beyond the jump. (While the following content is only NSFW in the mildest possible sense, it is poison to the brain.)

Some background, first, about the panel format. Each artist or team is issued a flip-chart and a selection of colored markers. An individual (either a participant or the moderator) is chosen to select a topic. The audience is prompted to shout topics, until the person doing the selection hears one he or she likes. The teams then have eight minutes to complete a picture based on the selected topic. A winner is chosen (by applause) from each round.  The person who suggested the topic receives the pictures.

While the drawing is in progress, audience heckling is mandatory.

Some of the topics this year included:

• Cthulhu eating pizza
• The Pink Panther on an acid trip
• Inappropriate superheroes (see Mr. Whitmore’s entry  for this round, via his Flickr feed)

Now, yr. humble narrator does like dragons. And, being a Rice alumnus, I’m fond of making fun of Texas A&M. The convention’s writer GoH was Todd McCaffrey (and the “ghost GoH”, Anne). And, it’s also possible I may have had a few adult beverages by that point in the evening’s proceedings. None of that excuses anything, but it may help explain what strange mental processes led me to shout “Dragonriders of College Station” at topic selection time.

It will remain forever a mystery to me why anybody else thought that was a good idea.

This is a thing that happened. (Art by J. Grant and Mel Hynes; image appears here with their kind permission.) Click thumbnail image for a larger version, should you want one.

This is another thing that also happened. (Art by Martin Whitmore; image appears here with his kind permission.) Once again, the thumbnail image is a link to a larger version.

My sincere thanks to the artists for the gift of their work, for putting up with my shenanigans, for being such good sports about the whole thing, and for agreeing (in the terrible, sober light of the following morning) to me posting it here.

(Oh, and by the way, despite threats to the contrary, I didn’t actually ask Todd to sign these. I don’t know him well enough to be sure he’d think it was funny, and he’s a nice guy whose feelings I’d hate to hurt. Remember what John Scalzi said about the failure mode of clever?)

Diffs

This version uses much the same ingredients and process as Black Swan APA v0.2, with a few important changes:

1. “Closed” primary fermentation process a la Charlie Papazian (et alia), where foam is discarded through a blow-off tube. (The last batch was “open” only in the sense that the foam from primary fermentation was allowed to fall back into the brew. I still used a carboy with an airlock.)
2. Greater volume (to fill the carboy completely, and make up for the volume lost via discarded foam).
3. Added 1# of light malt extract (to keep the gravity up given the greater volume).
4. Used swanky new bottle caps with an (allegedly) oxygen-absorbing lining.
5. Used a shiny new self-starting siphon and fill hose to help avoid aeration (and possible off-flavors from old, nasty plastic tubing).
6. Used liquid yeast instead of dry.

Recipe

Ingredients

7 lbs. light malt extract
1 1/2 lb. pale malt
1/2 lb. cara-pils malt
1/2 lb. medium crystal malt
1 oz. Centennial hops (bittering)
1 oz. Cascades hops (flavoring and finishing)
1 pkg. Burton water salts
1 pkg. liquid Nottingham ale yeast
1 pkg. Bru-Vigor yeast food
6 gal. drinking water (3 x 2 galllon bottles)

Procedure

1. Take liquid yeast out of fridge some hours before and allow to reach ambient temperature (no greater than 80°F). When starting brewing process proper, pop inner bag to activate yeast.
2. Measure 1 gal. of water into a stock pot. Heat to 170°F.  Add Burton salts. Stir. Turn off heat.
3. Add mesh bag containing mixed grains to hot water. Agitate gently and ensure bag is completely submerged. Steep for 30 min., stirring occasionally. (Continue with next step; do not wait until steeping is complete.)
4. While grains are steeping, heat another gallon of water to 168ºF in a second stock pot.
5. At the end of the 30 min. steeping time, transfer wort to brew kettle. Place grain bag in colander over brew kettle. Sparge (rinse) grain bag using water from second stock pot, turning the bag to ensure complete coverage. Squeeze remaining liquid from grain bag using a large spoon.
6. Add 1.5 gal. of water to brew kettle, bringing total volume to 3.5 gal.
7. Cover brew kettle and bring to a boil.
8. Turn off heat. Add malt extract. (Rinse extract bucket with hot wort to easily get the last dregs of extract out.)
9. Cover brew kettle and resume heating until wort is boiling. Boil gently for 5 min.
10. Add Centennial hops. Stir. Boil for 45 min.
11. Add ½ oz. of Cascade hops. Stir. Boil for 10 min.
12. Add remaining ½ oz. of Cascade hops. Turn off heat. Stir.
13. Cool the wort by placing brew kettle in sink full of cold water. Change the water when it gets hot. Add ice cubes if available to speed cooling. Continue until wort temperature has fallen to 90ºF.
14. Siphon ½ gal. of wort into a sterile sealed container. Place container into refrigerator. (This gyle will be used later for kräusening.)
15. Siphon wort into primary fermentation vessel. Check that yeast container has inflated. Pitch yeast into fermentation vessel. Stir gently, using end of siphon hose.
16. Add water to fill 5 gal. glass carboy within 2″ of top of neck. Stir. Measure gravity and temperature; record. Top up to within 1/2″ of overflowing.
17. Fit stopper and blow-off hose onto fermentation vessel. Place other end of blow-off hose into a container of water. (A used 2 gallon plastic water bottle is perfect for this purpose. There will be a lot of blown-off foam! Do not use a container smaller than 1 gallon.)
18. Allow to ferment for 4 days.
19. Rack to secondary fermentation vessel. Fit stopper and airlock.
20. Allow to ferment until activity ceases.
21. Check final gravity. Expected value is around 1.012. Do not proceed if over 1.017.
22. Bring gyle (from step 14) to ambient temperature. Add to secondary fermentation vessel.
23. Bottle. Age one week. Open a bottle to check carbonation levels.
24. Age an additional two to five weeks. Consume.

Presentation

The labels for this version (show up at the very top of the post) feature more original art from SJH. The design follows the same lines as the previous labels, although using a new font. (Some tasters had trouble reading the faux-blackletter style on the title text of the original.) You can download the original GIMP layers file (343KB bzipped, created with version 2.6.11).

I like mine at ambient temperature (72°F-ish) in a simple conical pint glass. If you are accustomed to cold beer, I would suggest cellar temperature (55°F) as a compromise.

Neil is the one on the left.

Happy Year of the Dragon to all. Neil Gaiman drew you a picture (click thumbnail to the right for a better view, or read about it on his blog).

If you hatch this year, you’re a Black Water Dragon — very auspicious indeed.

Roof support with intermediate rafters:

Roof deck, tar paper, and shingles (in various stages of completion):

Painting the underside of the roof deck:

Cleaning and staining the deck:

Staining the remaining wood:

Read on for full text, merch and source files for doing your own mashup.

First, the text:

Choose life. Choose a cutie mark. Choose a fucking elaborate hair style. Choose friends with crippling mental health issues. Choose a speech impediment, hyper-competitiveness, attention deficit disorder, style over substance, and social anxiety. Choose complete subservience to an all-powerful ruler answerable to no one. Choose a body in a range of fucking pastel colors. Choose inimical wildlife, unsustainable agriculture, artificial manipulation of the weather and an inchoate economic system. Choose standing in a sweet shop eating your own body weight in fucking cupcakes. Choose a thousand years of miserable solitary exile, forgotten and alone on an airless rock, nothing more than an embarassment to your insufferable sister.

If that’s a sentiment you urgently want to have adorning your body, I’ve grudgingly set up a CafePress shop to meet your needs.

If you like the general idea but want to make your own mashup, here is the original full-resolution design file broken into layers: ponyspotting.xcf.bz2 (4MB). This was created with GIMP 2.6.11, and you’ll need a similar version to open it. (You don’t need to uncompress it first.) The original Trainspotting poster is in there as a (currently-hidden) layer, as a reference for layout.

If you’re just wondering (as one does) what th’ heck is going on: Scottish author Irvine Welsh wrote a book called Trainspotting about heroin addicts in Leith, Edingburgh. A movie (with the same name) was subsequently produced. To promote the movie, Mark Blamire and Rob O’Connor created a classic poster. Gary Barnes created a parody (“Adminspotting”) about system administration, first as a Usenet post and then as a popular t-shirt; his site tells the whole saga. (My parody was certainly inspired, in part, by his.)

The tone and content of Trainspotting are about as far as you can possibly get from those of My Little Pony (a classic television drama and darling of the Internet — also apparently popular amongst adolescent girls, for some reason).

So anyway, SWMBO and I were having a conversation (AS. ONE. DOES.) about Rainbow Dash and possible substance abuse by same, and in that moment I knew what had to be done.

[Updated 26 Sep 2011 to correctly credit the creators of the original poster.]