This weekend I took my New Face out for a spin. Mostly it went well — there were a few Schlockers at Fantasy Rules on Saturday who didn’t recognize me at first, and there were a LOT of people at Church who didn’t recognize me. Nobody exhibited the bad taste of the few members of the online community who’ve deigned to insist that I put the beard back. There were even a few people who said the new look is better.
I still haven’t gotten around to drawing a new avatar for myself. In the meantime, I’ll just borrow one from Corporate America.
1) My sister, in true pedantic form, called me a liar. My eyebrows are still there, so obviously I didn’t shave my whole head. Oh, and eyelashes, and nostril-hairs, and those tiny fuzzy hairs inside my outer ear… getting the razor into some of those places would have been tough.
2) The kids are FINE with the new look. I hauled the whole family into the bathroom for the event, so that they could see me transform. My earliest memory of my father (now departed) is one of him grinning at me, and I’m wondering “who IS this guy?” When I was about three years old, he shaved his beard. So… I decided that I did NOT want any of my kids’ earliest memories of me to be a creepy weird one like that.
3) Yes, I may grow hair on top. How much, and what color it ends up being is a matter for wild speculation.
Well, not ALL over. Just all over my head. And face.
It’s been over ten years since my chin has seen sunlight without the protective filtration provided by a beard. That’s a DECADE, kids. Some of you reading this right now didn’t know HOW to read the last time I shaved my face.
I’ve decided to put the Penguicon report here rather than in Live Journal for a couple of reasons:
1) It was really, really long.
2) I want to see what kinds of ads it generates.
So link on over and have a look. There’s an elapsed-time tour of the construction of the Chaos Machine on pages 4.1 through 4.5, and fun artwork I drew and sold on page 5.