And I'll ... if I wanna.

[gement]

Last night I had my first full-on headache in months. This is because I'm out of Maxalt, preventative drug of the gods. More Maxalt costs $65 for 9 tabs, after insurance [Edit: I believe that means that it's $260 at full price, or $29/dose]. Bad, stupid insurance. Bad, stupid pharmaceutical companies. Anyone with advice on older migraine-shortcircuiter drugs that might be cheaper? Anyone know how drugs from Canada work?

[Edit: preventative is inaccurate. I am looking for, as xmurf describes below, a "stop migraine-in-progress widgit."]

So I'm still fragile and achy from that, and perennially stressed from grad school, but otherwise feeling well. And I found a hysterical quote from a sexual advice page on the subject of "what nice girls don't do..."

It’s just that whenever I hear a phrase like “that’s something women only do to please men,” my Dworkinite Early Warning System goes off like a fire alarm. I start ranting like a harpy and screaming things like, “You can’t tell me what to do! You can’t tell me what I like and don’t like to do in bed! You don’t know anything about anything! You’re a narrow-minded, repressed moron, you’re probably frigid, and your mother dresses you funny!” and other equally relevant and coherent pearls of wisdom. I’ll try not to do that here. I’ll be good now, I promise. I’ll be calm and rational and sensitive and just talk to you about buttfucking. -- Greta Christina

Comments

[gement.livejournal.com]

You always come up with the most wonderful mad-sci options... Please do, and let me know.

On the subject of funny metal hats, you said once that you might be amenable to helping me with an Eowyn helmet? The styling of her official helmet is quite over the top. I much prefer Merry's. In terms of something reasonably producable and butch-looking, I was thinking a round helmet with metal banding and a nose stripe, with the ability to tie on a leather ear/neck guard around the sides.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I think that would not be difficult. I've made similar things out of pure copper. I can now weld copper or bronze sheet together, if necessary, and recently just found sources for both copper and bronze sheet.

This isn't actually that difficult to do. If you check out and read, for instance, Oppi Untracht's "Jewelry Concepts And Technology" you'll be well on your way. Lemme do a very quick summary: take three 3/4" pieces of plywood and one 3/8" piece on top, about 1 foot square. Make a paper template of your head, the way a hat would fit around it. (Doesn't have to be perfect: an ellipse with the right front-to-back and left-to-right works.) Trace that on the top piece of plywood. Put a 1 foot square piece of copper between the three thick plywood and the one thin one, drill eight holes around the circumference of the stack. Remove teh copper, bolt the others back together, and cut out the ellipse through all four pieces of plywood. Put the copper back in and bolt it back together. Now you sink the copper into the hole. The easiest way is to take a piece of 5/8" dowel or such, and sand the end kind of roundish/hemispherical, put a handle on it (a piece of 1/4" dowel sticking into the side of it) and then start hammering in circles, driving the copper sheet down into the hole. Well, spirals, really -- all the way around the outside, then a second run just inside the first, and so forth until you get to the center. Unbolt the stack and heat the copper with a plumber's torch until it just barely glows red in the dark, dunk it rapidly in cold water, then bolt it back up and keep hammering. Eventually you have a copper hat with a square brim, that fits your head down to your eyes. Cut off the brim, cut a strip of bronze to go around your brow and rivet it to the copper (drill holes every, oh, say, 3/8", using a 3/32" drill, then get some standard 14 gauge Romex electrical wire, strip the copper out (or buy it bare), clip off pieces about 3x the thickness of the two layers of metal, push them through the holes, and gently hammer on each side. (Faster way: get piece of random steel chunk -- a bit of a railroad track works well if you can find one. Drill hole 3/32" diameter, about 3/16" deep. Stick the copper wire through the two pieces of metal and down into the hole, clip off the wire a little above the surface of the metal and hammer it down, pull it off the anvil, turn it over, and hammer the other side. Two perfect rivet heads.)) Then similarly rivet on the descender material -- the nasal and the cheek reinforces.

Copper armor is seriously not all that difficult to do and is immensely rewarding, and you don't have to buy any strange tooling. A large hammer, a pair of wire clippers, a hacksaw and some files, and a drill, and you're in business.

If you want, I could supply the plywood with the correct hole in it, and the bolts. I have *several* sets of these laying around and all that's really important is that the top and first layer have the right size; the lower ones just are there to support the hammering.

For finishing, it looks great if you go over it with 220 grit sandpaper and leave it at that. Oh, and spray coating to prevent it going all brown.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Note that the detailing on the nasal and the browpiece are very much more difficult, but making a copper/bronze helmet is easily doable at home. It'd probably take a good 20 hours of work, though.