Hey, don’t look so scared! I know IAM: lunar looks like he’s gonna cut you, but really, he just wants to make you some breakfast! So, you know, relax. (Just kidding, oh my God will he cut you. He will cut you so bad.)
See more in “Larger gauge nipple piercings“ (Nipple Piercing)
I’m sure you’re all familiar with João and his band of happy suspendees..
Well, we’re adding another to that every growing list today! His name’s Fernando and he likes dogs (although the feeling doesn’t appear to be mutual), smoking and hanging out (sorry)..
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[Alana G.] The very talented Alana (nee Miss Gossip) just caught up with Rasheed Wallace of the Detroit Pistons who, in addition to requiring technical fouls for sustenance, has dedicated his entire back to tattoo tributes to his daughter. Sheed’s one of the league’s most intense, confrontational, and generally downright crazy players (in a good way), so this sort of measured and gentle discussion is an interesting counterpoint to that. Not bad tattoo work, either. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the cuteness there, because …
[Telegraph.co.uk] … uhhhh. I just … But … Ahem.
/splashes cold water on face
/straightens tie
/sniffs glue
OK, much better. So, this is the story of a woman with a psychological disorder that led to an obsession with plastic surgery that escalated to the point that she got so much work done over a 20-year period that she was unrecognizable even to her own family. She was briefly treated for this disorder, but fairly quickly fell back into her “old ways,” finding a doctor that not only agreed to give her silicone shots into her face, but provided her with syringes and silicone so that she could continue to do the same by herself. The silicone ran out, however, and the woman began injecting herself with cooking oil. The result can be seen in a slideshow here.
There is definitely an element of the grotesque here: A traditionally attractive woman, likely addled by some sort of psychosis, becomes what many would describe as a monstrosity. Yet, with each additional round of surgery, as untamed scar tissue and various disfigurements piled up, she was continually pleased with what she perceived as an ongoing beautification process. Now, after having been made a spectacle of, she seems to agree with the people who have been trying to dissuade her, and claims she would just like her old face back.
Not to try to analyze the thought process of a person with such obvious and complex problems, nor to suggest that we should engage in any kind of insipid armchair-psychiatry, but this is a truly fascinating and sad story that, while not directly related to this community, certainly holds some cross-over appeal. How often do those outside of the body modification culture criticize those within it for lying to themselves about the inherent beauty in so many of these procedures? I’m not saying that this is by any means a valid comparison or that body modification as much of this community practices it is in any way analogous to the sort of psychological disorder that would lead a person to the lengths of the subject of the linked article, but it’s interesting to consider the parallels that an outsider may perceive, wrongheaded as they may be. That is all.
[Fade Fast] And as a nice pick-me-up, here’s a cute Flash ad from noted sell-out Allen Falkner (kidding!) for his tattoo removal company, Fade Fast. I don’t mean to give free advertising, this is just quite well done:
BME’s received photos like this in the past, and, if I’m not mistaken, this had been accomplished by running a tube through a urethral reroute and pumping whichever gas through, but I don’t think that’s the case here. It almost looks like some sort of device is just being placed in the urethra … but I can’t really tell. It could be going through a reverse-PA hole as well. Any piercers or amateur arsonists out there? There’s another photo after the jump, but above, as always, click through to de-Roo.
UPDATE! Roo claims this was done using a Prince’s Wand. I will take his word for it.
This BSD vs. Linux war has gone on long enough! Who in their right mind could look up at that image of utmost depravity and violation and not realize that this feud has reached unacceptable levels of mascot rape? (It was suggested to me, however, that perhaps this was a moment of reconciliation, rather than forced entry. The look on the penguin’s face is hard to read, I’ll admit.)
And because this isn’t a a geeky enough tattoo, the wearer says that “the artist did this to me for a hacked copy of Photoshop.” He added, “What a legend. BSD lives!”
Hi, folks. If you’ll recall, I mentioned a while back that BME was embroiled in a silly lawsuit with world-famous cybersquatter Greg Ricks. To recap, Ricks owned the BME.com domain and used it to host photos and ads related to body modification, which makes for a pretty clear-cut case of intellectual property theft. I tried to purchase the domain from him several times, and each time he would agree in principle, only to jack up the price at the last minute. (Shocking, right? If you can’t trust a professional cybersquatter, then really, what’s left in this world?) This grew tiresome, and BME filed a suit against him before the World Intellectual Property Organization, which promptly found in favor of BME. (Also discussed here.) Easy enough, right? All’s well that ends well and all that good stuff?
Well, no. Ricks decided to play the agitator, and made the preposterous claim that not only was he within his rights to use BME.com as a means of generating income by way of diverting traffic from BME, but that we were infringing on his copyright! Seriously! He actually said this! So he countersued (also claiming that BME is only a “pornography site”), and on goes this ridiculous comedy of errors.
Here’s where things start to get interesting. See, you get to learn a lot of fun stuff during court cases. Now, maybe it could be realistically argued that registering a three-letter domain like BME.com is just good business sense, and that Ricks had no intention of capitalizing on the sort of content that BME offers until he saw the huge spike in traffic he got from visitors trying to come to us, and then he decided to put up some stolen images and tattoo links and such. This is a charitable perspective, to say the least.
Except, ha ha, there is convincing information to suggest that Ricks is either heavily involved in or solely comprises Gee Whiz Domains, an outfit that seems to have a disproportionately large number of cybersquatting domains. BME.com is one thing, but when you take into account that Gee Whiz is also sitting on such frequently typo’d destinations as “yahooemai.com,” “msnnb.com,” “officedepo.com” and “cnnmmoney.com,” well … something doesn’t smell right. (For more on this, go here.)
For more fun facts, consider that Gee Whiz also owns domains like: drugdealer.net, youngpreteenlolitagirls.com, underagelolitaphotos.com, and xxxanimalclips.com. Drug dealing, underage girls, and bestiality. What fun. It may be that Gee Whiz only does business with Mr. Ricks, but if our suspicion is proven true — that Ricks is the owner of Gee Whiz — his accusation that we are a porn site will look really funny in light of his domain portfolio. (Ricks actually just lost a similar case, but for some reason decided not to follow that one up with another silly counter-suit. I guess we’re just lucky.)
The dispute largely centers on Ricks’s assertion that BME’s claim to “BME” is invalid, and that we have branded ourselves as “BMEzine,” which is simply not true. From day one, the “brand” has always been “BME,” whether it’s been:
But don’t take their word for it! Body modification experts like Master Piercer Elayne Angel and Allen Falkner have gone on the record to emphatically state that BME has always been the signifier for our site, not to mention the launching point for complementary projects such as “BMEvideo.com,” “BMEshop.com,” “BMEfest.com,” TeamBME.com,” AskBME.com” and “BMEworld.com,” among several others. Because, you know, it has been.
How’s this for a barnburner, though? A Florida-based lawyer named Kevin Wimberly (who, it just so happens, is also a self-proclaimed “tattoo enthusiast”) caught wind of this case, and it reminded him of a paper he wrote while in law school entitled “Tattooed Identity: Resolving the Tension Between Statutory Copyright Law, Identity, and Skeptical Subculture.” Much of the research for this paper was done with the help of BME’s article archives, and Wimberly claims he’s been using BME as a resource since at least the year 2000, and that, “[if] any other company used the designation BME, it would confuse me and anyone else in the marketplace.” (More on this here.)
So, even with all of that said, the cybersquatter is still making the argument that the “BME” name is his, and that we have been the ones wrongly using it all this time, which is his right as an American, I guess? Anyway, I just wanted to give you all an update on this silliness, and with any luck, this will all be settled soon. I’ll keep you in the loop. And of course, as always, thank you for supporting BME — without all of you, there’d be nothing to fight for!
I admit it, alright? If I go more than a few days without posting a gorgeous cutting by Iestyn of Diamond Jacks Tattoo and Piercing in London (MORE), I can’t sleep. I get the cold sweats. It’s a bad scene. So believe me when I say, this is as much for me as it is for you.
And with that, we bid another day adieu. Sleep well, ModBlog.
See more in “Skin Removal Scarification“ (Scarification)
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| Gilbert Arenas’s new Obama tattoo (Photo credit: Dan Hellie / NBC Washington) |
[DC Sports Bog] Update! We mentioned the other day that the NBA’s Gilbert Arenas (who once actually gave himself the nickname, “the Black President”) had cast off his indecision and jumped in head-first into his support for Obama with a hand tattoo, the photographic evidence of which can now be seen above. Arenas told the photographer he got the tattoo so that, among other reasons, he can look at his hand during games and see the words “We Believe.” This is the same reason I got “Delicious Nachos” tattooed on my hands — everyone needs a pick-me-up sometimes, right? Oh, delicious nachos. I’m feeling better already.
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| Photo credit: Retna |
[TMZ] I can’t describe how dirty I feel linking to TMZ and Fox News. Nonetheless, it’s worth it to get the details on a story this goddamn insane. Basically, Stephen Baldwin just got the initials “HM” tattooed on him for “Hannah Montana.” Strange enough? Well hot holy damn, try this next graf on for size:
The idea reportedly stems back to a dare that Cyrus made last year. The two became friends after meeting at the White House, when Cyrus told Baldwin that he could appear on her Disney show “Hannah Montana” – of which his daughters are huge fans – if he would get a tattoo, TMZ said.
Stephen Baldwin and Miley Cyrus, who are friends (!), met at the White House, and while there, took the time to hash out a tattoo-related dare. This actually happened. In real life. Head asplode.
[Somatechnics] Calling all academics who didn’t leave the site in disgust after the previous two vacuous celebrity stories! The good folks at the Somatechnics Research Centre at Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia, have put out a call for papers to be presented at next year’s fifth Somatechnics conference. Rather than absolutely mangling the description with my layman’s terms, here’s the deal for those unfamiliar:
“Somatechnics” is a recently coined term used to highlight the inextricability of soma and techné, of the body (as a culturally intelligible construct) and the techniques (dispositifs and ‘hard technologies’) in and through which bodies are formed and transformed. This term, then, supplants the logic of the ‘and’, indicating that technés are not something we add to or apply to the body, but rather, are the means in and through which bodies are constituted, positioned, and lived. As such, the term reflects contemporary understandings of the body as the incarnation or materialization of historically and culturally specific discourses and practices.
Possible topics:
• Somatechnologies of the self (‘non-mainstream’ body modification, body sculpting, performance, fashion, drug use, ‘self-mutilation’, religious practice, etc)
• medical somatechnologies (cosmetic, reproductive, imaging, corrective, sex (re)assignment, implantation, enhancement, bio-techs, public health initiatives, etc)
• somatechnics of law
• somatechnologies of gender, sexuality, race, class, etc
• somatechnologies of normalcy and pathology
• somatechnics of war
• somatechnologies of the post-human (cyborgs, nanotechnology, virtuality, etc)
• soma-ethics
A number of IAM members have spoken at this conference in the past and, by all accounts, it’s a fascinating and exciting project to be a part of. For those interested, abstracts are due in by November 30, 2008.
Click through to see Rafa‘s naked war photo in all it’s sculpted glory. Just remember kids, don’t believe everything you see on the television..
See more in “Facial and Neck Tattoos“ (Tattoos)
Sure, IAM: blockedintersection may be bored during a slow day at the piercing shop at which he works — “Thank you, George Bush and the economy” — but look on the bright side: While others cry tears of boredom, you are crying tears of m.-f.-in’ diamonds. (Or Zirconia, I guess.) So … cheer up? I guess?
And with that, let’s call it a day, ModBlog. Oh, and if you haven’t read it yet, I implore you to spend some time reading Ferg’s incredible article from earlier this afternoon. If you read only one intensely personal account of a Westerner being granted unimaginable access to an Indigenous community this year, make it this one.