Anyway, for starters, there's my Lego drivestation, currently holding three external hard disks and a DVDRW.
It is now inside some kind of mini shelving unit mushed together with bits from Lidl. Holding another couple of external drives, a floppy, a couple of USB hubs, a card reader, and - on the second level - an all in one printer, desk lamp, and clock. It is magnificent, and saved a hell of a lot of desk space.
At some point I might figure out how to add a photograph of it.
There's the motorcycle that's taking me to work tomorrow, as my car is ruined and therefore at the garage. I fixed the bike myself, with much hammering and swearing. It still doesn't have all the engine bolts it should have. The engine/gearbox block is an unholy gestalt from two different, closely related but not entirely identical machines. The front and rear sprockets therefore aren't fully aligned and the chain rubs very lightly on the chainguard. Which is an upgrade from it being fully seized on it, which was the case before I battered at a couple of the mount points with a chisel and bent them out of the way. It's also got ghetto spec wind deflectors on the handlebars, otherwise known as two cut-up 6-pint milk bottles attached with cable ties. There was also that 1-litre Polo I stuck a 1.3L 5-speed gearbox onto, long before all the cool kids were into giving their Eco cars super-long overdrives... it sorta worked. As did the foglamps and fresh wheels (even if they were just silver-sprayed steelies). And the replacement dashboard gauges. And two out of six of the speakers on the aftermarket stereo.
Or the comic strip I got about two pages into, collaborating with someone over usenet WAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY back in the day. They sent me ideas and script for a pretty neat story (something to do with Bug Robots, I dunno, possibly they overdosed on El Hazard and Beast Wars before I'd heard of either), I attempted to turn it into an actual thing. Realised quite early on that my art actually sucked, gave up, and gave my apologies. Ten years or more down the road, I also realise I was a total fool, given that things like "Cerintha", "1/0" and the like exist in this world, and how Questionable Content, DMFA and El Goonish Shive have progressed from being pretty scratchy and nasty (but with identifiable heart) to very well drawn works of daily-strip brilliance (yet others like Misfile have barely progressed in any noticeable way). And still one of my favourites is the Schultz-level "Freefall". Still, I'm somewhat better at diagrams and maps, now. And with maths.
Thankfully I haven't ever really had much musical talent (not for want of trying, mind), and the only novel recordings that have come out of anything I've played, notated, or edited would make the bandcamp cacophany from up top sound positively heavenly.
edit: Trollynstan just reminded me of the two closest surviving things to actual art I ever actually made, both of which were anime/manga inspired, and neither of which will ever, ever see the light of day on the internet. If I die, someone finds them amongst my personal effects, and tries to scan and upload them, I will come down as a spirit and make their scanner spontaneously combust. One pastel rendering of a slightly tweaked from-memory head & shoulders view of Greenpeace from Dominion Tank Police, full page, in an A3 workbook (yeah, somehow I got plunked into art class, and later design class when I would much rather have been down in electronics and metal/woodworking/engineering...), which came out ... OK ... but at best you could call it on a par with an early Picasso (ie not actually that good unless you're going to find all kinds of over-interpretive ways to talk up what is actually a not very good picture). And one attempt to draw a different hair/costume interpretation of a particular image of Nausicaa off a Ghibli calendar, no tracing, just sight-drawing with pencil and then ink over the top. It came out quite well I thought, but it was still just copying from an original that was right in front of me, making some changes along the way as it was initially pencilled. Not much artistry in straight copying and altering.
The number three, non-surviving one, unless some day I end up back in contact with the teacher involved, was a fake box and manual for a 2D fighting game for another art & design lesson. Drawing on a variety of sources but ultimately sewing it together from whole cloth. Well drawn (at least I thought so) with a vaguely but not overly anime style and as much originality as I could bring to something that was really about two paper-dolls knocking the crap out of each other at the command of a two-button joystick. Naturally, they took everything in for marking, including that, my only copy, and lost the whole lot. I'd like to think that actually they sold it all off to some IP-hungry games firm, and sooner or later my thing will percolate to the top. Particularly if you see one that's based around a roman circus maximus, has a goth (as in northern european barbarian, not a moody emo) gladiator who uses mostly boxing moves, and a black-african slave girl (in the roman sense) with a flair for big top circus style acrobatic martial art moves ...... or in fact, no, I think their backstories and move sets were actually the other way round (told you I was striving for as much originality as a geeky 14-year-old boy could muster) ... along with a few other diverse cohorts, you'll know I'm sat somewhere going... "************ - that's my idea! Can I have my booklet and glued-together mock-up box back yet?".
Why oh why didn't I photocopy that sonofabitch...
Sicohyclopari
