Christian Loubotin Toundra coyote fur boots - Jeffrey Campbell Xanadu fur boots - Alex & Chloe Oracle necklace - Burberry brass-and-glass cocktail ring - Tom Ford sunglasses - Maison Martin Margiela sheepskin clutch - Topshop nude lace tights - Marni frame bag - Ann Demeulemeester chain bracelet - Philip Lim waxed leather jacket - House of Holland knit skirt

Ever play that game with a pile of lookbooks and a Sharpie, circling stuff like a kid creating a fantasy Christmas list? I do, probably more often than is healthy. I call it playing Millionaire — what I would shop for if I had millions o’ bucks to throw at clothes. It gives me a good mental image to carry with me to the thrift store and the discount racks…although, sometimes it’s really difficult to top. (My knees turned to jelly when I saw that Margiela sheepskin clutch.)

So, spill, what would you snatch up if money was no object?

I’ve been backing off of outfit posts lately, but SteffMetal recently posted a piece on why they’re important and it motivated me to break out the camera again.

Things are starting to cool off around Boston. It’s been raining a lot (A LOT), but just before the deluge began, I started to see Monarch butterflies, long touted by my father as the first sign of autumn. Autumn is also one of my favorite and most metal seasons: everything is dying right in front of us and there’s Halloween, to boot! Now that the temperature’s dropping, I also have the opportunity to drag out one of my all-time favorite wardrobe crutches: the sweater.

Can I just say…I love my building’s creepy back alley!

I’m a huge sucker for anything that slouches and drapes. It used to be that I was mortified about my hips and belly; these days I can’t bring myself to feel much at all about it at all (other than an inward smile whenever I see art featuring women shaped vaguely like me being worshiped as goddesses…sweet!). This led me to hide myself behind tent-like structures disguised as clothing. Nowadays, the aesthetic has stuck, but I’ve angled for a slightly more flattering approach with clothing that fits, but still hangs in interesting ways.

PS: this is cashmere, from a small, US-manufactured company called Mystree (how cute is their blog?!). It makes me want to cocoon myself inside of it forever. Worn with Bullhead Solana jeans, MIA Maiden wedges, femur-and-jawbone pendant (a gift) and Viking drinking horn pendant from TruValkyrie!

Skullhedface here usually hangs out on the bookshelf in my entryway with a spare tiara on his head.

BLEARGH!!

Remember my post about taking care of your long metal hair? I broke down and finally followed the golden rule — I set up an appointment at my awesome local salon and told the stylist to be merciless and take off all the damage. Thankfully, I didn’t lose too much — I can still pull it back — but it looks and feels so much healthier! I’m really happy with it — if you’re in the area, consider this the Official Positively Bleak Seal of Approval for Interlude, they are fab.

It’s so short!

Thanks to a little color injection to bring my ten-different-shades-of-blonde down to one nice caramel color, I had to go some time without washing. Ew! I tried the no-shampoo routine and my hair just never adjusted beyond being a horrible greasy mess, so I was put off by the idea of going without shampoo for a day or two. I’ve been hearing so much about dry shampoo that I decided to give it a go. I washed with silicone-free conditioner and picked up a can of Psssssst! at the drugstore (no way in hell am I paying $40 for the Bumble & Bumble version!) and went to town on my hair. I have really fine, oily hair and it really worked a wonder at keeping it clean…for four straight days. All it took was a conditioner scrub and a lot of rinsing in the shower, then I’d hop out, put leave-in conditioner on my tips (I’m currently crazy about this one from Healthy Sexy Hair — I got mine from a discount store for about a quarter of the cost, though! It smells like pumpkin pie!), blow-dry on low, with a diffuser and then spray my roots down with the dry shampoo. Flipped my head over, fluffed my hair around, brushed it out and bam! It was damn clean. This shit is intense.

Sluuuuuuuuuurp.

Last weekend was S.’s first full weekend off in some time, so we had to go on an adventure! Him being a ginger and me being just generally pasty, we decided against the beach and went to an indoor water park - what a solid idea! No need to worry about the weather or pack sunscreen! Since this past weekend was Massachusetts’ tax free weekend, everyone was out shopping their brains out, so the park was almost completely empty and quiet — and it only emptied out more as the day went on. Even better, it was a water park that sported a full bar. A few trips down the waterslides and a nice, mellow near-nap on the lazy river later, I knew I had to get something pink and fruity and sip it in the hot tub. Highly recommended. (That’s last season’s Lucky Jeans bikini, scored for 90% off retail at a thrift shop! Yeah!)

It goes all the way from the ceiling to the floor, whoa!

A while back I mentioned buying used on Amazon — I picked up a wall hanging from Urban Outfitters at a fraction of the price, and I didn’t give them my money. (It’s a nice option if you really, really want something specific but don’t want to directly support the manufacturer.) Living in a rental is tough sometimes — I want color and texture everywhere, but I can’t paint or wallpaper. Finding this enormous tapestry and hanging it along the back wall of my living room really added some interest to my huge blank white walls…it’s a neutral, so it doesn’t clash with all the bright Mexican blankets I’ve thrown all over the sofa, but it’s bold enough that it draws the eye upward toward my nice, high ceilings. (I love you, high ceilings!!)

So, what have you been up to all this time?

(Wow, this post has too many photos of my dorky mug for my liking…)

DUMP IT by Lulu Vision

My friend Grimlocke posted a few links in my comments about “fast fashion” as it relates to ethical shopping; they touched on a number of subjects, from sweat shops to creating garbage to thrifting when you’re an odd size or pressed for time. I’ve read up a little on the subject but am hard-up for new ways to improve my shopping habits — I’m pretty utilitarian with my money and I’ve been checking the “Made In…” tags on my clothing since I was in high school.

Fortunately, I live in an area that’s pretty populated with resellers, discount shops, and secondhand stores. Most of my clothing shopping is done at Goodwill (not Salvation Army, I try not to support religious organizations) or resellers like TJ Maxx, and I though that was conveniently ethical. Two minutes’ digging on TJX shows I was wrong — low wages for factory workers? TJ Maxx has factories? As far as I knew, they were simply re-selling overstock from other retailers, which is why I see so many mall-store items from last season on the racks. Well, shit.

It’s one of the first world’s biggest shames, but unless you’re living like Ted Kaczynski, it is nigh impossible to live an American existence without exploiting others. It’s worth thinking about minimizing that impact, though — especially since many people just can’t afford to buy union-made sweatshop-free bamboo-and-soy clothing at the markup that comes with them, and such things are inaccessible to lots of us in other ways. (If there are brick & mortar shops besides American Apparel, where I don’t shop anymore, I don’t know about them.) There’s plenty of online shopping, but some of us — ahem — oddly shaped folks need to try things on.

So I guess my shopping methods may seem like a cop out, but I feel pretty comfortable in purchasing from Etsy, fair trade items from The Hunger Site shop, secondhand shops, most re-sellers (despite those mystery factories out there), and I am definitely not too proud to dumpster dive. Hell, I just picked up a few Urban Outfitters items (another place I don’t shop) used through Amazon; I saved money, bought secondhand, and got a sweet wall hanging without breaking a sweat. I’m still going to check tags and lean heavily toward handmade or union-made, but when I’m staring down a $40 t-shirt and a $40-marked-down-to-$3 one, the latter’s going to get preference, because I need to eat, too. To me, the most important aspect of keeping an ethical wardrobe is to make things last — waste is just about my least-favorite thing. I take care of my clothes, and even the cheap ones last for years, so I’m not constantly restocking. The last time I moved, I tried on everything in my closet and separated out the items that don’t fit — my friends got to come by for first pick at them, and the rest went to Goodwill, because seriously, who throws out clothing?

Recent lifestyle changes are making me smaller, which means I’ll need to do another purge-and-donate cycle and pick up some basics that fit soon. Can you share any tips that will help me generate a smaller footprint?

On a related note, I own a lot of t-shirts from shows and from silk-screening friends. I know that a crew neckline is probably the most unflattering cut for a lady, but it straight-up makes me feel like a little boy when I wear ‘em. I’ve done my share of t-shirt surgery, to the point where the only unmodified shirts in my closet are the ones I really love — I’m frankly nervous about fucking them up with my sub-par tailoring skills. Unfortunately, the fact that they have what my mother calls a “nun’s collar,” I never wear them — so I spent a scant few minutes dicking around with sewing scissors and pins to see what I could do without damaging the prints on them.

This is disgustingly god-damned easy.

Step One

1. Get together your supplies. A crewneck shirt that fits you, a good sharp pair of scissors, a needle and thread, pins (optional).

Step Two

2. Take your shirt and fold it in half vertically. Try to get it as centered as possible — I found it helpful to line up the shoulder seams. Crease the fold and jam your scissors down there, and snip as deep as you want, being careful not to catch the rest of the shirt in your scissors.

Step Three

3. Take your shirt and turn it inside out. Turn down the little flaps you just cut and straighten them out. Optionally, you can pin the flaps into place and try it on to see if the neckline lands where you want.

Step 4

4. Make delicious peanut butter flaxseed dark chocolate chunk cookies. (Optional but highly recommended!)

Step Five

5. Thread your needle — I doubled the thread so it would be stronger. Sew the corner of the flap down with a couple of small stitches, double-knot it, and cut the excess thread. Repeat with the other flap.

Step Six

6. Turn the shirt right-side out and see if you like where it lands. I usually go right down to the start of the print, because I’m a little anal about that — you might want to go deeper, in which case, you can take out the stitches with a seam ripper, cut deeper, and try again.

Step Seven

7. Put your shirt on.

Et voilà! This took me about five minutes per shirt and was totally nonthreatening, so I made v-necks out of about a dozen shirts over the course of a lazy Sunday afternoon. Some went deeper than this one, others were about this cut, but all are more comfortable, feel more feminine, and look better with a necklace, so I’m pretty happy with my lazy alterations.

The most metal Rocky movie. :D

…and he’s watchin’ us all in the eeeeye of the tiger! I ran for twenty minutes straight on Thursday, which probably doesn’t sound like much to most of you, but I’m a smoker with a desk job, so it’s an accomplishment to me. My awesome dad and I are going to run the Falmouth Road Race together come 2011, so I have a real incentive to keep picking my feet up off the ground.

And I got a promotion! Keys to the kingdom, passwords to the servers, everything, so I’ve been filling my brain up with new knowledge to put to use. I’m dying to start — designing networks is my thing.

Dragon rolls and an Tokyo-politan!

To celebrate, S. and I went out for sushi and cocktails! There’s a rather dingy area of my neighborhood that’s lined with dollar stores and pawn shops and shit, but smack in the middle of it is this classy little pan-Asian place called All Seasons Table — I wanted to give it a shot. (The upside of living in a neighborhood that’s often described as “resistant to cleaning itself up” means that there’s never a wait for a table or a crowd of tourists to deal with. I left a white-washed, affluent suburb of Boston for this awesome hood, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.)

Anyway, it was about a trillion degrees and humid,  so we left the gum-dotted sidewalk for the frigid AC and I did my best to keep my hair and makeup from melting down my head. (I did not necessarily do the best job at this, but a little of this stuff really helps!) The place was very casual; lots of regulars here, and sported a killer cocktail list, and a live jazz quartet! Wicked good date night.

It’s grosser outside than in.

Speaking of date nights staying local, want to know how gore-hounds keep the romance alive? There’s only one other person on this planet that will sit through The Human Centipede or Martyrs with me (hint: it’s S.), so we snuggled in with a screener copy of The Serbian Film. (Here’s the trailer — definitely NWS, and probably not mind-safe, either!) I’ve never turned a horror movie off in my life — you can frequently find me cheerfully eating dinner or doing my nails in front of surgery videos or Mermaid In A Manhole — and I wasn’t going to start with this one, but if you’ve ever had to avert your eyes or walk out of a theater, steer clear of this one, because it is E-X-T-R-E-M-E. If you’re a super-duper gore fanatic with a stomach of steel, look for a screening! I don’t necessarily buy the director’s statement that it’s an allegory for everyday violence during civil unrest, but I will say that it’s got some exceptional practical effects (it blows past Saw II but doesn’t quite reach Nacho Cerda levels of skill) and makes an effort to break ground in terms of shocking the hell out of an audience. Supposedly, most of the audience fled the theater when it screened at SXSW. I wish I’d known, it’s about the only thing that could’ve drawn me into the hipster nest!

I don’t like to plug random new products (and I’ve been trying to shop handmade), but really — I dropped a few bucks on this updo pin while I was out today. I’m the sort of girl that wears my hair held up with a ballpoint pen at work, so it was worth a shot to try something that wouldn’t scream “engineer.” This took me about ten seconds, with no mirror and no product, fo’ realsies:

No-effort twist!

…so I’m glad for the impulse buy. It looked even better with a little more hairspray and effort later on, too. You could probably make one yourself with a heavy-gauge wire and a little rubberizer!

Do you have some stupid-cheap drugstore thing that makes your hair awesome? I like to use the cheapie packet hot oil treatments once in a while, they make my hair soft for a few washes afterward and smell totally awesome. :)

Gonna end this on a crazy cat lady note, Lillehammer has really taken to acting like a dog these days:

Aw.

Someone, either a stranger or someone close to you, says something negative about you. Months or even years later, you’re still hung up on it, even if you refuse to admit it about yourself. Meanwhile, someone pays you a compliment, and you forget about it as soon as the first blush wears off. What the fuck are we doing?

I called up my shrink and we chatted about this topic today. (Yup, I have a headshrinker. I don’t believe in stigmatizing that. For the purposes of this post, we’ll call him Doctor Shrink.) An ex-boyfriend told me, over five years ago, that he thought I was slightly crosseyed, and I still catch myself staring into the mirror, trying to discern if one pupil is a millimeter or two off from the other. I’ve asked more than one medical professional to take a look and address my insecurities, and despite being told by not one but two doctors that they saw nothing unusual, I will still spend time in the bathroom mirror, trying to find the flaw.

When I came home from work yesterday, S. told me that my hair looked pretty, and I smiled about that for about five seconds before moving on to something else.

What the fuck?!

Paying attention to my body has brought me a lot of internal joy; every run concludes with a feeling of pleasure at the tasks that my body and my muscles are capable of completing. Eating well and seeing and feeling the physiological responses to that fills me with satisfaction. My mind catches up and says, “Look at the good that you’ve done for yourself, and see what your body is doing to repay you.”

Unwanted commentary from others presents a problem, because it never arrives during the private times when I’m marveling over my successes. It comes during vulnerable times — would I still be mentally beating myself up over an unwarranted comment about my eyes if I hadn’t been making an effort to look appealing and attractive to my ex when he said it? Would I be thinking about negative body image so much if I wasn’t stressing over landing a potential promotion? (I’ve been alternating between studying up on Cisco IOS and waiting to hear back from HR for weeks now and it’s taking a toll on my emotional state.)

(There are many reasons why he is now an ex, and his penchant for criticizing imagined flaws after I’d spent hours getting ready for a date is definitely one of them.)

The American metal scene offers little help; women are usually regarded as a minority, and the phrase “metal whores” is thrown around as though we merely exist as penis receptacles or venue decor. I’ve seen Angela Gossow (from Arch Enemy) and Hecate (from Treachery and The Venetian Snares) described as “hot” more often than “talented.”

Anyway, Doctor Shrink let me in on a secret. Insults and criticism remain with us longer than compliments because we usually believe them. It’s easier to write off a compliment as being conversation filler, or back-handed, or “they’re just trying to be polite.” When it comes to negative commentary, I’m at a loss. “Why would someone say that if it wasn’t true?”…forgetting entirely that some people are straight-up jerkoffs, or even just thoughtless.

My psychiatric homework is to follow up negative emotions regarding my body or my appearance with something to remind me to take pride in my functioning body, and that I’m privileged to have a fully-functioning corpus.

Even if it means doing 60-second prone planks in the supply closet, which is exactly what I’m about to do after clicking “Publish.”

♠ A cute Russian cartoon comparing subcultures: how they perceive themselves vs. how they really are. (The crusties made me smile!)

♠ The ABCs of the Twilight Zone. If you were anywhere near as nerdy as I was growing up, you should recognize all of ‘em.

♠ On a more serious note, a friend of mine is writing about her experiences as a sex worker (NSFW) and has posted a series critiquing Gail Dines, a Boston-local anti-porn radical feminist, from both an academic standpoint and a personal one. (As a third-wave sex-positive broad myself, I most certainly back her up. No matter where you stand, it’s important to get both sides of any story.) Excellent writing all around and an eye-opener for those of us outside the industry.

♠ Whitesnake Zinfandel, by Whitesnake. I wonder how it will compare to Little Jonathan…

♠ One of my running goals is to do a 45-minute fartlek. Why? Well, for one, it’s Swedish, just like Bathory. For another, it’s supposed to be pretty brutal, as all good things are. Finally? It’s called a fartlek. “Fart” is in the name. I’ll be bragging about it when I finally get there, but it sure as hell wont be with a straight face.

♠ The folks over at The Hungry Mouse have a new puppy! (What’s more metal than a wolfy-lookin’ pup in a black cauldron?) I pretty much live and die by their Rib Of The Week recipes, all carnivores should take a peek!

♠ Speaking of cooking:

BLACK METAL COOKIES. Don’t even pretend that you don’t want to be besties with these kids.

♠ I’ve been tearing up Etsy lately! Just yesterday, I received my drinking horn pendant from the awesome TruValkyrie — check out her shop for runes galore!

♠ Under Steff’s advice (she has great skin!), I also picked up some handmade goat’s milk soap from Summerland Scrubs. My skin’s always been a little troubled — I’ve got generally dry skin with combination skin on my face — so I’ll report back on whether or not this has a positive effect. Fingers crossed!

♠ Finally, I ordered a custom stash box from King’s Hand Press, one of my all-time favorite Etsy shops. Pictures when it gets here — I can’t wait! Screen-printed shirts, gloves, totes, and back patches everywhere, and jewelry to boot. (Don’t forget to check out the seller’s art portfolio, too!)

♠ AllSaints UK has a new leather jacket up for pre-order; they’ve replaced the back yoke panel with vintage Indian embroidered blanket. Apparently each one is different; for that price, would you pre-order a mystery jacket?

♠ In celebration of my future in free weights (I’ve got to wait for my doctor to clear my joints for lifting, but I am dying to bench press!) and finding a potential heavy metal gym buddy, I present to you The Black Metal Workout:

♠ David Meng is an artist with one of my dream jobs: he creates and sculpts bizarro monsters for Hollywood. Check out a small slice of his portfolio! (I’m partial to #10, personally. What’s your favorite?)

♠ Finally, I like to think that this is the work of the Ghost Of Dio. Prove me wrong, I dare you.

Who wore it better, Pris or Slymenstra Hymen?

The common theme in the comments for my last post seemed to be, “go big or go home.” I like this aesthetic almost as much as I like hitting the snooze button one more time in the morning. 90% of my makeup kit would be referred to as “office inappropriate,” and not that I’m one for propriety, but it seems silly to layer on the red eyeliner just to have it melt down my face the next time I have to carry servers around or spend time in the server closet.

What’s your favorite “go big” look? I had a brief fling with doing my makeup Bladerunner style when I’d go out to shows.

Remember Couch to 5k? I hurt myself like a total dink and had to take quite some time off. It was brutal; the weather is just starting to get nice, I was couchbound and acting like a caged wild animal. Walking and swimming and hiking helped, but I think I was born to run, because I’ve been mentally at the gate for a while now.

Tonight, my new (depressingly non-pink) shoes and insoles come in and I get to start running again!

Unfortunately, the shoes in these pictures (Reebok Zigpulse) ended up being wrong for my mutant-flat feet and left me with minor stress fractures — hence the time off getting weak and tubby — but my awesome friend Pope Tom took them for me, and I like both the photos and the obnoxious kicks too much to reshoot.

Breaking a sweat is a good excuse for me to drag out all those men’s L band shirts I’ve got lying around from middle school and software conferences — they’re broken in and breathe well and I feel like they finally get to see the light of day again. I’m wearing a torn-up AC/DC shirt here, but I might kick off my first re-run in my Texas Vibrator Massacre shirt (a gift from my last roommate!), just for shits and giggles.

(By the way, I think working out is the only time one can mix red, pink and purple in an outfit without anybody having room to bitch at you for not matching. I’ll be the fastest eyesore ever.)

Defeating the entire purpose.

The view from the summit!

It feels like summer’s smacked Boston square across the face, so in the interest of indulging my inner barbarian woodswoman, S. and I hauled ourselves out of bed and out to a hell of a hike at one of our local conservation areas. We wandered in the forest, spotted chipmunks and endangered orchids by the trail, and scaled a big rock face over the lake. Rampaging through the woods and climbing to the highest summit you can find leaves me with this feeling of gazing out over my domain — I am the master of these woods and all I want is a Viking helmet and broadsword to heft to the sky. It’s pretty awesome. Coming home from taking ownership of the wilderness and roasting about eight pounds of round eye roast with a bunch of root vegetables and a good beer is how I channel my inner Valkyrie. Feast!

Sunday, we went out for a big greasy-spoon breakfast and wandered over to the musty old flea market in my neighborhood (where I scored the awesome skull ring in my robo.to profile to the left — check it out!).

(I’ve had an account on robo.to for a while now, but I really only used it to occasionally spruce up my Tumblr — adding it to my sidebar seems to be the new Thing To Do now, so gaze in wonder at my goony visage and blurry videos of my cat!)

Anyway, on to the meat of my thinking this weekend: remember sneaking off with mom’s lipstick, or getting your first play makeup set with glittery-pink everything? Or when makeup was a “special occasion” thing? Do you get the same fun out of putting it on now?

Somewhere along the line, it turned into a chore for most of us. I still have fun with makeup, sure, but the small thrill of pulling out the eighties-glam purple eyeliner or giving myself a loud pedicure is always crammed in between the drag of endlessly blending the concealer into my undereye bags.

So far, I’ve spent the past four days without putting anything on my face beyond cleanser and sunscreen, and I’m thinking of continuing for a while. I skipped at first because I was outside! hiking! and who’s going to go to the effort of applying makeup when it’s just going to sweat off in an hour at most. It continued when I realized, at the market buying vegetables in my grubby  hiking gear, that nobody noticed, I felt just as attractive and comfortable with a fresh, bare face, and I wasn’t stuck with runny mascara after an impromptu climb in the hot sun.

Confession: this is probably the most embarassing photo of me that I have on-hand, you can see the stupid amounts of eyeliner and whiteface caked on. (Check out the classy ratted death hawk, too!)

Altering your look and wearing your creativity on your face is awesome, but have you ever stopped and thought about why you’re doing it? What’s your motivation, and how much are you trying to hide from the world? For instance, when I was younger, I wore heavy foundation and very heavy goth-chick eyeliner — it was my face’s equivalent of the big black baggy clothing that I was hiding my body behind. Are you hiding your features, or accentuating them?

Alt-chick types are notorious for layering on the dark, heavy eye makeup — I do it a lot, and it looks great, it really does! But does it lose some of its special-ness for you after doing it every day for years and years? Part of me is already shirty over the fact that men aren’t expected to paint over their every spot or pock mark — women are usually expected to carry the burden of “beautifying the world.” Another part of me is still nagging away at me — what if Anna Wintour sees, what would she say? (It takes a little bit of force to turn that concern over to the rational part of my brain, that realizes that Ms. Wintour would not only never be in my gray suburban technology office, but she’d have more nitpicks for me than showing up in public without foundation.) What if someone calls me out on a spot or a particularly unattractive freckle?

Who cares?

The few other women on my office’s floor wear makeup every day. Who are we trying to impress? I’m going to hit the snooze button one more time for the rest of the week instead of painting myself in the mirror. Sitting here on my lunchbreak without having to worry about checking my mascara in the mirror is pretty stress-free.

I’d love it if you’d join me, and weigh in on your experiences.

It’s a hell of a town! I can’t say I was reppin’ the fashionista look, due to packing one carry-on sized bag full of whatever is appropriate fro desert travel, but I spied enough designer bridesmaid dresses and killer sky-high around the casinos to last me a while. There’s nothing quite like hanging out by the blackjack tables, smoking a butt in my pajamas at 3AM, counting the number of brides wandering around — and, speaking as someone born and raised in the great Puritanical state of Massachusetts, it’s even stranger to see people walking around the Strip with a two-yard margarita straight-up in the open. (Quelling the urge to stuff everything in a paper bag was tough.)

The trip, in pictures:

The view from the Venetian, at night.

…walk out the front entrance, walk a few hundred feet, and you can see pirates in the middle of a sexy battle.

Walk another few hundred feet and try not to mob the abs-bus.

I didn’t spend too much time in the casinos; I’m not a big gambler, but I love to watch the high-roller tables and blow on a few dice. I played these…

…and my mom played THESE. (How adorable is my mom?) We might not have raked in the winnings, but we broke even and I was up about $0.30 by the time I walked. My fortunes are apparently made in small change.

This guy was parked right outside our suite, and in the maze of hotel hallways, he became a valuable landmark. “We’re right past the guy with the weave and the weird nose.”

Dos Caminos, a really excellent Mexican restaurant in the hotel, and the centerpiece of the decor: a wall of friggin’ skulls. Who else wants this in their living room?

We ended up taking a thirteen-hour tour of the Mojave desert, visiting a few different points of the Grand Canyon by off-road Jeep and helicopter, floating down the Colorado and pointing out Conquistador graffiti on the rock formations, spotting wild horses and bighorn sheep, visiting a working ranch complete with cute cowboys, and checking out the Hoover Dam. (It’s a damn big dam, hurr hurr!) Here’s our helicopter, leaving us in the canyon after our first trip down.

Want to know how to make people nervous? Crawl down into a crack in the sheer rock face at Quartermaster Point and snap photos.

We partied together pretty hard, saw just about everything there was to see (tragically, Star Trek: The Experience has yet to re-open, but the storm troopers patrolling the Strip helped a lot), ate and drank ourselves merry, and, in my case at least, spent the red-eye catching up on Junji Ito comics — Voices In The Dark is an excellent way of making sure that nobody tries to read over your shoulder.

Would I go back? Planning on it.