iamanangelchaser.com

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expressions

a lite briter than 1000 suns
my father's coloring book
chaos rock
contendi_nel_foco
clutterflies
communication
cruci-fix
the crucifixion of st peter
doodles
glyphs
photos
ray gun #1
subvertisement
subliminal screens
shirts, t-
triptych
zounds

files

art i like
cool ideas
dirty tricks
disguised weapons
design gaffes
dukane 28A680
the fine art of filing
grow room archeology
gunge
knife designs
links
photoblog
plant nomenclature
resumé
SAByM
stamped tools
quotes

processes

3d origami
binary balloons
bottle cutting
d-funct
dip trip
DIY hot knife
DIY video projector
dog tag poems
elemations
epoxy on tap
face flash cards
fractal chandelier
guerrilla gardening
handset pulls
jewel box picture frames
light bulb recycling
light fishture
peephole clip
plunger paper
sandpaper origami
stay tab alphabet
switchplates
wastecasting

products

booKrates
bonewrenches
chemist's flask
chessmen
deathblinger
fauxbius table
fast free floor cushion
fighting chance
glowbe
izza party pizza box
MASC
pill box
portable hole table
pot heads
puzzle chair
puzzle shelves
puzzle table
screamin' meanie
space invader table
sorry he croaked
sp³ lamp
stop sign table
street spam lounger
tears of the rain forest
trash lamp
trinitite display
viva la resistance
zen sander

writings

anniversary
aphorisms
bah-log
declaration of independence
ephemeralization
fiction science
hail to the king
the initiation of the navigator
no pills that start with j
one in the oven
static
undoing ourselves
a utilitarian considers war
whistleblower
tripping to write fantastic

iamanangelchaser@yahoo.com

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what's new

2008-2-14: Those of you who've been wondering why I haven't posted any new content for three months, here's your answer: I've been working on a new domain. And now it's up! The new site is www.seanmichaelragan.com and in the future all my new content will be posted there. These pages are being retired, and the material from them will gradually be moved over to the new site. Redirects will live here probably for a very long time, however, so you don't need to rush to update your links.
2007-10-28: My fascination with stamped tools has led me to design some with representational profiles.
2007-9-26: Declaration of Independence from Julie is a fictitious "Dear Jane" letter modelled on Jefferson's greatest of all written complaints.
2007-8-17: A pavé rhinestone clock face I call deathblinger.
2007-7-20: A motorcycle helmet safety awareness t-shirt for my father based on his slogan.
2007-7-19: A manhole cover rubbing taken on the UT Austin campus.
2007-7-19: A new addition to my "puzzle" furniture series: puzzle shelves.
2007-5-15: Those of you who've e-mailed about my fractal chandelier will be glad to hear that I've finally found a source for four light cluster sockets.
2007-5-11: As cool as Paolo Soleri is, I have to consider him more artist than architect.
2007-4-25: "Abdominal Snowman" t-shirt.
2007-4-17: Added more stamped tools to my file.
2007-4-12: Ingenious and inexpensive cube timer added to cool ideas page.
2007-4-11: Added a piece of Hellraiser fan-fiction.
2007-4-6: Added illustrations from Larry Todd's short story, Warbots, to the art I like page.
2007-4-3: I've finally found my fantasy flash drive.
2007-3-26: Jeez, more than a month since my last entry. How time flies. I promise to do better. Today, I present one of my oldest fantasy objects on my cool ideas page.
2007-2-24: I've accepted a position as an editor at Flat Design's DIY blog SuperNaturale. Look for my posts at least biweekly in their Glimmer feed, and probably some feature articles coming soon. My thanks to Tsia Carson for the opportunity.
2007-2-24: A layering process for producing psychedelic color textures on tool handles I call dip trip.
2007-2-15: For the first time in more than a year, a new aphorism.
2007-2-5: A new subvertisement.
2007-1-29: Added Fabrique National's new F2000 series assault rifles to my gunge page.
2007-1-9: Added the delightful MeBox Storage Box to my cool ideas page.
2007-1-3: A new year, a new bah-log. Actually, I've integrated the stuff from my old livejournal account in with a bunch of new entries at blogger.com, which is the only service I will use henceforth.
2006-11-30: A few more pics for my photoblog, and a set of brass knuckles with a built-in stun gun.
2006-11-14: An inexpensive kit that lets you turn an old oil drum (or two) into a woodburning stove.
2006-11-13: MST3K is probably my favorite show, ever. The menu design on this DVD, however, leaves something to be desired.
2006-10-13: Breakaway ties and release triggers added to my dirty tricks page.
2006-10-9: I had my space invader table done months ago, but just now finished the post. And in all that time I couldn't come up with a sexier name.
2006-10-1: Updated guerrilla gardening page with my cinder-block planter.
2006-9-24: My fauxbius table is a poor man's knock-off of the so-called "Moebius" table. Also added a new subvertisement.
2006-9-22: Necessity recently mothered my zen sander.
2006-9-7: The American Chemical Society sells a one-molar beach ball.
2006-9-5: An original mecha design added to my doodles page.
2006-9-4: I've just finished writing up a new major project, my sp³ lamp, which I've been developing and building on and off over the last 3 years.
2006-8-37: Quotes from 1996 Nobel Medicine laureate Peter Doherty, and a new bumper sticker.
2006-8-21: To speed the mixing of 2-part epoxy, I've co-opted a 2-in-1 soap dispenser to give epoxy on tap.
2006-8-17: Photoblog updated.
2006-8-16: You can all burn in Dell.
2006-8-16: I recently upgraded my soldering iron and recycled the old one as a DIY hot knife.
2006-7-13: Added TeleSteps telescoping assault ladder to my dirty tricks page. Also added a link to Network Science's cool ASCII font text generator.
2006-7-4: Added a wonderful visual glossary of botanical jargon on my plant nomenclature page.
2006-7-2: A process for exploiting the forms found in castoff styrofoam packaging inserts, and other trash, which I call wastecasting.
2006-6-23: Added the zoomorphic Power Squid and the enabling Ring Thing to my cool ideas page.
2006-6-15: It's a big day! Today I launch my RSS feed. To kick the syndication off properly, I've also added a new "files" section called dirty tricks, as well as an interesting mosaic made out of pills and a briliant visual mnemonic for learning Morse code.
2006-6-7: Added pictures of another mystery plant to my photoblog. Also added Inkscape, SketchUp, and Jeff Russell's unbelievably cool Starship Dimensions to my links page.
2006-6-3: Consideration of a fireplace lighter shaped like a giant match (and introduction of a new term) on my design gaffes page.
2006-5-29: Household appliances that look like terrorist weapons definitely qualify as design gaffes.
2006-5-24: For years I've been carrying a camera around with me everywhere I go, but I've just now got around to starting a photoblog.
2006-5-20: I recently challenged myself to design an easy DIY dining chair. The MASC, or Minimum Affordance Side Chair, is what I came up with.
2006-5-9: Handmade planters with faces I call pot heads.
2006-3-29: So a link to my fractal chandelier page was posted to boingboing.net sometime yesterday, and since then I've had more than 12,000 hits, almost doubling this site's lifetime total in a single day. Thanks to the posters and to everyone who e-mailed me, particularly those who pointed out the contrast/readability problem on this page. Hopefully the separation of image and text will resolve it.
2006-3-15: Added Herman van Goubgergen's amazing origami Skull to my art i like page.
2006-3-12: A custom plaque for the display of trinitite I made almost a decade ago.
2006-2-27: It was sometime in 2004 when I first noticed that my stop sign table idea had been commercialized.
2006-2-24: So after about 5 years of coding this site, I've finally figured out what the image HEIGHT and WIDTH tags are for. It should now be possible, at least on my cool ideas page, to actually browse to NAME tags buried deep in the document (c.f. Plushification, e.g.) without subsequent image-loading screwing up the positioning. Sorry that took so long. In the future I promise to use the "new" tags without fail.
2006-2-22: Plushification is what I call the human tendency to cope with collective anxieties by reducing them to stuffed animals. Sounds like a cool idea to me.
2006-2-20: The bin from a discarded clothes dryer finds new life as a tree planter.
2006-2-19: More gun porn.
2006-1-29: Added the nigh-miraculous zeer pot to my cool ideas page. No pun intended.
2006-1-22: It's been awhile since I posted any new content. It's not much by way of triumphant returns, but tonight I had time to add these Muzzlelite bullpup-conversion kits to my gunge page.
2006-1-03: School has been keeping me too busy to do decent updates recently. After considerable rumination, I have begun keeping a blog to fulfill my relentless need for self-advertisement. Blogging is somewhat antithetical to the spirit of this page, which has always been to maximize useful information content; contariwise, my blog, like most blogs, is full of half-baked ideas (even moreso than those on this site!) and more than a little whiny introspection. Still, keeping it has already proven useful to me both personally and professionally, and I enjoy it, so I'm going ahead. I will continue to update this page with really important and interesting stuff when I have the time.
2005-10-2: What do you call a globe with a light inside? Frank Herbert called his a "glowglobe." I call mine simply glowbe.
2005-9-24: Zounds.
2005-9-9: Added some information about a 3D unit origami techniqueI've been playing with a few years.
2005-9-7: Recently bought what I'm pretty sure is a rip-off of my tears of the rain forest product concept.
2005-7-30: A piece I've been meaning to do since my law school days.
2005-6-23: Another shadow box with religious overtones, made using a souvenir of last New Year's Eve.
2005-6-13: For years I thought I had lost my 1999 prize-winning essay The Ephemeralization of Educational Objectives by the Infostructure, but I recently discovered that the UT English Department had retained a copy. Yay!
2005-5-18: Check out my first homemade ray gun.
2005-5-2: My Screamin' Meanie hood ornament from last Halloween.
2005-4-20: Added a new keyboard recycling process, called d-funct.
2005-4-18: Replaced my somewhat janky flotsam fly assemblage with its more mature conceptual descendent, clutterflies.
2005-4-12: In response to Max Brooks' recent book, The Zombie Survival Guide, I've written an article entitled The Etiology of Romero-Fulci Disease: The Case for Prions, which is soon to be published in The Journal of Zombie Science. Interested readers will find it linked to my new fiction science page.
2005-4-5: My sandpaper origami page has been on the "to do" pile for about two years now. Finally got it done.
2005-3-30: Another tesselation (dueling pistols) added to my glyphs page. I would like to be able to use some of my tesselations as web page backgrounds; unfortunately, as far as I can tell, HTML does not provide for isometric tiling and, so far, none of the tesselations I have produced tiles in a normal rectilinear manner.
2005-3-24: Added my tesselating ghoul design to the glyphs page.
2005-3-22: Here's an (uncharacteristically) self-absorbed look at The Three Mr. Ragans.
2005-3-16: I'm still playing with water balloons at age 29. Hmmmm.
2005-2-28: Added the monstrous Smith & Wesson Model 500 Magnum Hunter to my gunge page.
2005-2-22: RIP, Hunter S. Thompson. I fear nothing.
2005-2-18: I've been making some cool cityscape plots over the periodic table which I call elemations. Check 'em out.
2005-1-24: Added the Army's new XM8 Assault Rifle to my gunge page.
2005-1-20: Check out my new outdoor light fishture.
2005-1-13: Smurf jokes went out of vogue about 20 years ago. Still, this one tickled me so much I had to make it into a bumper sticker.
2005-1-11: A picture frame made out of rulers is cool.
2005-1-5: At a crime scene, it's very important that everyone's role be clearly defined.
2004-12-19: Turns out artificial plants can be cool after all.
2004-12-16: Added the Toro tissue ring to my collection of cool ideas.
2004-12-13: I have a rich fantasy life. This is the switch for my garbage disposal.
2004-12-12: Added this body jewelry wheel gauge to my collection of stamped tools.
2004-12-10: Check out the Posterhänger on my cool ideas page.
2004-12-9: I recently received the coolest promotional item I've ever seen in the mail.
2004-12-7: Are the manufacturers of Robitussin marketing to potential abusers of the drug?
2004-12-6: The distinction between pure and applied arts has always bothered me a little, but I've had to give into it in the interest of economy; my cool ideas file is starting to get a bit stuffed, so I'm having to make some finer distinctions amongst the made objects in the world I think are neat. To that end, I'm inaugurating an art I like file, where I can write about the pieces of "pure" art that interest me. Some reorganizing of the cool ideas file may follow soon, as some of those entries may be more rightly filed on the new page.
2004-11-26: My "writings" column has been looking pretty short, lately, relative to the others. Posted my latest flash fiction, One in the Oven.
2004-11-25: It's cool to be a chemist. Really it is.
2004-10-21: I've finally produced some detailed plans for the street spam lounger.
2004-10-5: Yet another T-shirt idea. This one plays with the NFPA hazard diamond.
2004-10-2: My friend Maya Chavez-Akin has proposed the world's most tasteless sympathy card. It was a pleasure to aid in bringing her vision to life.
2004-9-30: Been meaning to do this one for awhile. For all you don't-tread-on-me types.
2004-9-17: Posted my resumé. Seems like a good career move.
2004-9-11: Added some stuff to my links page.
2004-8-19: Added links page to "files" section.
2004-8-17: Added some photos, rants, improvements, and thoughts about salt-and-pepper shakers to my light bulb recycling page.
2004-7-9: OK, so, they've replaced all the WALK/DONTWALK signs with new LED-based iconographic, no-literacy-required signage. This is a step toward better design. Now, however, it's only a matter of time.
2004-7-9: Changed the name of the parody ads page to subvertisement. This is the term I was grasping for, but didn't yet know, 2 years ago when I started the page.
2004-5-29: Posted my (relatively minor) prize-winning essay A Utilitarian Considers War.
2004-5-28: I've found some historical precendent for my puzzle chair designs.
2004-5-22: OK, so it's not going to change the world. Nonetheless, my compulsion to show off my new light switch covers is irresistable.
2004-5-6: Added my thoughts on professionalism to my aphorisms page.
2004-5-1: Over Spring Break my Dad and I went to Monument Valley. I got a good set of panoramic stills at "John Ford's Point" and stitched them together digitally when I got home. The results are here.
2004-4-22: Added Howard Zinn quotes from You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.
2004-4-21: Added Mateba Model 6 Unica autoloading revolver to gunge page.
2004-4-21: Added what's new link on main page.
2004-4-17: Both Bush and Kerry were members of "Skull and Bones" at Yale. Cf. E.E. Schattschneider in The Semi-Sovereign People: "The definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power." Then cf. this bumper sticker I designed to express my general disgust.
2004-4-14: Added various tasers and Bumblebee automatic BB gun to gunge page.
2004-4-14: LEGO has changed a lot since I was a kid.
2004-4-9: Added subliminal screens page.

If you find a dead link, or a grammatical, spelling, punctuation, formatting, factual, or other error on this (or any of my pages) please e-mail me and let me know. If you include your snail mail address, I will send you a reward. It won't be a diamond, but it won't be a turd, either. It will be better than either: It will be a surprise.