Seeking Tattoo Advice

I know there are plenty of other folks around these parts who have tattoos, so I'll drop some lines here and see what responses I get.

I have a couple of tattoos already. Nothing major, both are just fancy text tattoos. But it's time to up the ante. I want to get a portrait tattoo done on my upper right arm.

This link is the subject matter of the tattoo.

Now, before anyone asks, "Why the hell do you want to get that?!", please understand that I have a personal rule that I won't get a tattoo done unless it has significant meaning in my life. That picture is, for all intents and purposes, a picture of one of my kids. I'll never actually have kids so my pets are my kids. He was one of 7 that I helped raise from his birth and he was very much my boy. He, and his siblings, helped me a lot through many dark days and trying times. He's been gone for 3 and a half years now and there hasn't been a day where I haven't thought about him and miss his affection and attempts to cheer me up. This tattoo is no longer something I merely want, but something I feel I have to have done as a tribute, not only to him but to all the others who have brightened (and those who will brighten) up my life.

Alas, I've rambled long enough, back to the matter at hand.

As you can see, he's a white rat. I'm a medium tone (not fair, but not dark) light skinned person. I don't think a lot of white will work well. I seem to recall that it may tint to an off yellow and look very poorly. The only change to the original picture is I'm going to get the tail to go down the length of my arm instead of being straight out as in the picture.

So I'm wondering what to do.
Would this work well as a black and gray portrait?
Perhaps black and gray but get the eyes the proper color?




Posted by Captiosus @ 3:42 am EDT | Permalink | 6 Comments

Haven't been here a while

Haven't been around here for a while.. for that, I blame Warcraft. And the two months I spent fighting off MRSA Cellulitis in my foot which nearly put me in the hospital but, instead, got me on a cocktail of antibiotics which made me lose about 10 pounds and sleep most of the day.

I just needed to find a place to ramble for a couple minutes because I had to have my last remaining, albeit elderly, pet rat put to sleep today. He had heart and lung troubles as well as advancing arthritis in his legs. He was 3 years old.

I always hate having an animal put to sleep because part of me knows I did the right thing but another part of me feels like I betrayed him or didn't do enough for him. Admittedly there was little that could be done. He could have been put on an antibiotic cocktail, too, but that wouldn't have addressed his heart problems or arthritis.

Anyhow, I buried him earlier today beside the grave of one of my other pet rats. I miss him terribly already. He wasn't the most social of rats we've ever owned but he did brighten up life around here with his presence.

Posted by Captiosus @ 3:22 am EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

Rock Band/Party Game thoughts.

Rock Band makes me both happy and sad.

It makes me happy because it's a great game, it whips Guitar Hero under the table, and it's very fun to play over and over again.

Yet, at the same time, it makes me sad because until they patch in the online Band World Tour (which they've promised according to both OXM and IGN), I'm extremely limited to what I can do. This is a byproduct of being an older gamer and having to coordinate with friends regarding when they can visit (or when I can visit them) around work schedules and busy lives. Add to this the fact that two of my friends can't play at the moment because they have borked hardware and it makes me really sad.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind sitting here playing solo guitar or solo vocals (or quickplay bass) at all, but I've only had a small amount of play as an actual band and that doesn't look to change until they give us the online BWT patch because it's a lot easier to coordinate online band play than trying to get multiple working adults (with kids) in the same physical location for a couple of hours.

It's this same "sadness" which keeps me from picking up SceneIT. I'd love to play SceneIT, but I would spend more time trying to coordinate getting people together than I would actually playing the game.

Posted by Captiosus @ 2:22 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

Hooray! 3 RROD.

As the title suggests, my 360 bricked on me today. Not only did it brick, but it did so in spectacular fashion.

Not content to just lock up and give me 3 RROD, it locked up, made a loud hissing noise, and then spewed forth some very thick, acrid nasty smoke out of the back. I've only seen that happen once before when I was working on a PC that had a bad power supply and a couple of the components went ka-blooey. I submitted a support ticket and the e-mail I got back was less than enthralling. "Due to the holiday season" ... yadda yadda yadda ... "we are experiencing a temporarily backlog of system repairs".. blah blah blah ... "please allow up to 2 weeks for the return packaging to arrive."

TWO WEEKS? For the freaking coffin?

Ah well, I had planned for this possibility. I've been slowly storing up credit at GameCrazy for the last 6 months and I had $207 in unused credit. So I went ahead and got one of the Arcade units. I'll still send back the broken 360, but time is no longer an issue. When I get it back, I'll keep it in storage in case something happens to the Arcade one. The new Arcade unit has a born date of 09/17/07 and has HDMI. I doubt it has the smaller GPU, but it probably does have the better heatpipe cooling mechanism.

As for the Gamefly thing, still no update to report as of yet.
I figure I probably won't hear anything until after Thanksgiving at the earliest.

Posted by Captiosus @ 5:56 am EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

A Big WTF

As I've commented elsewhere, I signed up for Gamefly recently.

So far, my experience has been typical and rivals the experience I had during my year and a half of Netflix subscription. That is to say that it's been very smooth and bereft of problems.

Until today. Today I got my next game in the mail. It wasn't the next one on my queue, but can't be too picky, I suppose. But something didn't seem right; the envelope felt terribly light. So I open it up, and to my amazement, there's nothing in the game sleeve. Nothing. The envelope was still sealed when I got it and appeared unmolested by the Postal Service. But inside the envelope was a sleeve and nothing else.

I've fired off an e-mail to Gamefly's support department, but I have no idea what to do. This is a complete first for me. I've had Netflix movies show up cracked or mutilated, but they always had something in the sleeve. I really hope Gamefly doesn't try giving me any grief.

Posted by Captiosus @ 10:00 pm EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments