Custom Toys, Spade-Skulls, Totem Art and Much More : Reactor-88 Blog

Here’s a pic of my submission for the Crazy 4 Cult Custom show going on at Gallery 1988 SF this Saturday, Sept 4th. He’s my take on Scary Teddy, one of the classic characters from Nightmare Before Christmas.

Some things to note with this custom- it’s the first time I’ve modified the original shape of a toy for a custom, and also the first time I’ve used a sewing machine since junior high school. I planned to use a Munny for this custom, but since Scary Teddy has such big rounded face and his ears are on top of his head I knew I would have to do some modifying if I wanted to use this platform. So my plan was to rotate the head around and use the back for his face (since it was nice and rounded), remove the ears from the sides of the head and relocate them to the top. After a few applications of Magic Sculpt and lots and lots of sanding it started to look the way I wanted. The paint application on this guy is slightly different as well. I wanted the piece to still be easily recognizable as Scary Teddy, but still wanted to inject my personal totem style into it. So I did a very subdued/ghosted totem pattern into the body and head. And last but not least, it wouldn’t be Scary Teddy without a cape, so I cut out a piece of felt, sewed a little border on it and with that, Scary Totem Teddy was complete. For a few more pics, head over to my Flickr page.

So if you’re in the San Francisco area this Friday night, be sure to check out the show- from what I’ve seen so far it’s shaping up to be one of the best this year…

Maybe no one noticed, but about 10 days ago my blog here was “injected” with some malware javascript code. It seems to have been a specific attack on Media Temple’s Grid-Server clients running WordPress sites- the most recent documentation on it can be found in this blog entry. It didn’t seem to be too harmful- from what I could tell it was just there to pump up google stats via redirecting folks to some crazy sites- maybe they were virus-filled attack sites, but it seems Google shut them all down pretty quick.

So I went through two rounds to fix it. The first time I thought I could just manually go in and delete the code where I was told it resided, but that didn’t completely eradicate it (I think I missed a few instances.) After more research I came across this articleI followed along with it’s suggestions- I updated to some crazy, super-long passwords (that I’ll forget) and scrubbed my database via SQL queries. Google has since un-blacklisted my site and everything seems okay so far. I’ll be keeping a close eye on it for a while though…

Here’s a photo from SDCC of my Totem Skelanimals Qee- I think it came out pretty nice! I’m very excited to get my hands on a few of these little guys…