Sanitized for My Sanity

Bleh. All the links for the images for my lj and jf layouts have gone over their bandwidth and I can't do anything about it until they all reset in a few days. And then if I do save them and upload them to my own hosting I'm not sure if I'll be able to edit the new links in because of my lapsed paid-accountness. So at the moment my JF friendslist is somewhat readable and my LJ flist is completely unreadable. So whatever, here's a couple of links about toys!

-First up, these Star Wars keychains are adorable and I want them, but especially the Han and Chewie ones! They're for capsule toys though so I guess they will require some hunting online if you're not in Japan.

-Next, Revoltech, the folks who made the fantastic Yotsuba figure (which I liked so much I bought two of them!*) and who have made lots of really neat, affordable and insanely poseable figures have announced a bunch of great stuff. They've branched out more from the usual anime and video game genres and have announced a new line using characters from popular movies. My big WANTs would be the Dark Knight Batman and the really sweet-looking Jack Skellington (with four bonus heads!). The rest of them are here, mostly prototypes, so there's no info on preorders yet. Looks like I'm just going to have to set aside some cash for them.



*But to be fair, it was a special edition with loads of bonus goodies

So my musical Star Wars-related assignment is complete! Well, for certain values of the word "complete" anyway. There's some confusion over whether the due date is today or Wednesday, but what I've got is presentable enough, and if I do have extra time I can make some tweaks (like maybe figuring out how the fuck to work the graph editor properly, and why Ae doesn't want me to use masks). AfterEffects was also bugging out on me in somewhat annoying/scary ways towards the end as well, requiring a restart. Oh, CS4. Just...CS4. :|

Anyway! The final file is a 42mb quicktime file, which is much smaller than I expected. If anyone wants to see it, lemme know. I'll either use a site like mediafire or megaupload, or stick it on my school website. The latter option will probably go under a friendslock, just because my website has my real last name in the url, as well as my full name on the site itself, and I'm not quite ready to connect my IRL identity with my journals just yet*. But you'd also be able to poke around and view some of my other terrible past assignments.

Also, my professor liked my final choice for the music! She thought it very fitting for the overall tone of my subject matter. :D



*Though I'm sure that at this point it wouldn't take much for an internet detective to connect all the necessary dots, especially since certain requirements for my classes have now made it so that I have a more public presence on the net than I used to have. Which still isn't much, and you have to click through a fair few pages on google when searching for my name before anything related to me comes up, as opposed to other people with the same name and people-finding services. Sooner or later I'm going to have to put up a portfolio site that will be connected to my name, but for now I guess I still want to hold on to whatever shreds of pseudonymity I've got left. I don't know. There are other issues at work as well, but I don't really have the time to articulate them at the moment.
/ramble

I just posted this to F_L, but I'm reposting here for my own sake: light saber chopsticks! The other Star Wars thingy that I'm working on right now is off to a somewhat smooth start. I made a rough animatic to turn in today, and the Richard Cheese (or rather, his band's) cover of the Imperial March is working out pretty well. The final won't be done for another couple of weeks, but I'll post it here when it's finished. I was going to just upload the final file to megaupload or where ever and post a link, but given how large just the animatic alone is I'm wondering if I should put it on youtube instead rather than expect people to download a huge-ass file.

My current favorite thing on the internet: Linus in Hats. I don't know why this cracks my shit up so much, but it does. I mean, seriously you guys. Seriously.

There is this thing screeching somewhere outside my house and I have no idea what it is. It's too deep sounding for a cat, and it doesn't sound like any bird I've heard of, at least not in my area.

It's stopped now, but still. Eep.

Welp, that's about the longest comments I've ever written on jf. First time I've come up against the character count limit even! First time for everything, I guess. I should have given a shout-out to Shaenon K. Garrity, since I linked to two of her reviews from her Overlooked Manga Festival (which was an excellent series that introduced me to some great manga series and I hope she brings it back from hiatus sometime).

And I forgot to mention Hellboy in my comment(s)! Hellboy is always good, yeah?

During my trip I wound up starting to play Animal Crossing: Wide World again, and got to see how my village had fared in my lengthy absence. Not good it seems, as my village was full of weeds, all my neighbors had left and been replaced by strangers, and my house was full of bugs. But I've become somewhat hooked on the game again (I will catch a tarantula by golly!) and decided to dust off my gamecube and play that version again. Well, since it turns out that I haven't played in over two years and my town was in even worse shape than my DS game. So demolished that (it turns out that I had already erased the town I gone the furthest with anyway) and started afresh. Right now I'm stuck in an annoying place because I can't buy the damn axe and fishing rod. For some reason they haven't turned up for sale at the store yet. This makes gathering money a much more painfully slow process, since I can't fish or plant fruit trees (well, I can, but without the axe to use to chop down existing trees and plant the fruit in its place the trees wind up growing only some of the time). To make matters worse it's been raining the past couple of days, and all the rare fish come out when it rains! Arrgh.

I might pick up the new Wii version if when I get a job and some cash. Yeah, it's pretty much exactly the same game but with better graphics, but the new version means that you can visit the characters that would only randomly visit your town in the previous versions. Also the prospect of finally being able to experience online play for this game is appealing to me.

Okay, let's face it, I probably will buy Animal Crossing: City Folk when I get the chance. I mean, I love this series. It's like a life sim game, except it's incredibly low-stakes in that you don't have to worry about any immediate needs like hunger or your character not wetting themselves or whatever. There are long-term goals to be met, but it's entirely up to you whether or not you want to work towards them. You can just...potter around in this cute little self-contained world. It's an incredibly relaxing form of escapism.

Also, apparently they made a movie? I'm watching it right now, and already I'm weirded out by the fact that the animals are speaking an actual language as opposed to gibberish that, if you listen closely, sounds somewhat like English. And besides, we all know what the definitive fictionalized version of Animal Crossing is anyway.

ETA: Link to the first part of the movie on youtube (second part in the sidebar links). Seriously, it's weird, everyone's voices sound so deep! They are using some of the little expression effects that are used in the game though.

omg so many recs. I wasn't kidding about me losing my DS charger cable, btw. It's not in the drawer were I usually keep my charger cables and I haven't been able to find it yet. Hopefully I'll track it down before I leave in two weeks. But I turned my room upside down today and I still couldn't find it. I will be incredibly annoyed if I wind up using part of my Star Trek and video game money on a new charger cable. D:

Also, I have a favor to ask of you. If you are near me at some point in the future and I utter something like "it will look great! I'll start by using the pen tool in Illustrator to partially trace a detailed photograph..." I ask that you promptly shoot me in the head. I assure you, it will be for my own good.

(I have been working on a final project all night and I am about 65% done with the image in question. And I'll still need to place that into the file that will be the final poster, and set the text, and retweak the logo and oh god please send help)

(Why not use LiveTrace, you might ask? Because I don't want the final image to have the LiveTrace/Poster filter in Photoshop "look" and it will be easier to make color changes with simpler forms. I mean, that was my thought when I began work last night, and now I've done too much to simply chuck it all out the window. Right? Right.)

*sob*

Man, you know what would really hit the spot right now? Some Totoro cream puffs, that's what. I've never made cream puffs before, since they've always looked a bit intimidating to me. But I could always try making Domo-kun chocolate marshmallows instead if I chicken out.

(After reading that I now I want some Beard Papa cream puffs so bad right now, you have no idea. I've only had them once, and it was the tastiest pastry I ever tasted filled with custard so rich it was like pudding. I haven't tried all the flavors yet. ;_;)

(Holy shit they make a pumpkin one)

Things from Another World is having a big old sale through April and all their "nick and dent" comics/trades/merchandise is sixty percent off. There is a bunch of good stuff in there from pretty much every major publisher, and I will be probably grab some of the Hellboy volumes (seriously, normally they're too expensive for me, but they're like seven bucks each right now!), Comics and Sequential Art (it's an older edition though) and possibly the Will Eisner Sketchbook. I'm actually a Bad Comic Fan, as I haven't read that much Eisner, even though I've been meaning to for quite a while now, but I love seeing "behind the scenes" stuff from comic artists, like character designs, rough pencils and sketches, and any other peaks into an artist's process. And also a few manga volumes too. And a bunch of stuff that I probably shouldn't be buying, but I want them and they're cheap and and! ;_; Life is so hard sometimes.

Thanks, Solid Snake! I had been waffling over whether I should go see the Watchmen movie, and recently had started to lean more towards the apathetic "maybe I'll watch the director's cut when it comes out on dvd," position. But you sure helped me make up my mind!

Instead, I think I'll use the money I might have spent on a movie ticket on the second volume of Pluto. It's an excellent murder mystery comic that expertly utilizes the strengths of the medium, told using wildly different reinterpretations of preexisting characters, all about how someone (or something) is trying to kill off a certain group of powerful and heroic individuals. But as far as I know, the creator hasn't yet tried using the Act Like a Huge Fucking Prick promotion strategy. However, one of the other comics created by Pluto's writer/artist is getting its own ambitious movie which promises to be faithful to the source material! So maybe that will underperform and one of its screenwriters will make a pathetic attempt to be edgy while trying to rally the fans. Hope springs eternal, and all that.

(The first volume of Pluto is also available from amazon. There is an interview in the back of the book with Naoki Urasawa and Macoto Tezka and essentially goes "Holy crap, I can't believe they let me remake an Osamu Tezuka story" and "Holy crap, I can't believe this guy had the balls to ask if he could remake one of my dad's stories, and that it turned out so completely awesome." Shockingly enough, both were able to discuss the merits of the comic without making any comparisons to brutal rapes.)

And I think I'll use the money the Watchmen dvd might have cost me on the second volume of DC's Starman Omnibus. I don't know of any recent failures on analogy on the writer's part, but he was responsible for the screenplay of the film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. However, please don't let that fact prevent you from trying Starman, which isn't bad at all and is actually really good.

I'll probably do a slightly extended version of this post for my lj later on, so apologies if some of you wind up seeing this twice on your friendslists.

Well, my McAfee subscription is going to run out in about a week and I think I'm just going to let it lapse and then uninstall the whole shebang. Because I have gotten so sick of it slowing down my computer to a crawl (and it's continued to do so even after I quadrupled my RAM!) with it's constant need to download shit every other time I boot up. Use a free antivirus program like Avast! or AVG and stick with the rest of my current security setup, which is:

-Firefox 3, with Adblock and NoScript
-MalwareBytes Anti-malware
-Ad-Aware SE (Although it looks like I need uninstall that and grab a newer version)
-SpywareBlaster

And once McAfee is gone I'll probably install Search and Destroy again, since MacAffe made me get rid of it when I had to install a particularly large update. >:|

Anyway, I put this question to you, my flist, in the hopes that anyone has any input: am I making the right decision here? My biggest concern is that once McAfee is gone I'll be down to using just the Windows XP firewall. My second biggest concern, after seeing Norton take down my family's last desktop PC, is if I'll actually be able to get rid of McAfee at all.

(I'm also wondering if it might be a good idea to install CCleaner, since after I installed CS3 space on my hard drive has now become much harder to come buy. If you have it, was it able to free up a lot of space for you?)

So I finally went and installed Firefox 3, seeing as how they will no longer be doing anymore security updates. And I am pretty sure that pages are now loading much more slowly than my last Firefox 2 install. But I wasn't sure if it was Firefox 3 or my wireless connection (even though my computer says that my wireless signal is strong) so I thought "hey, why don't I download that new browser Google put out? I can see what that's like and then compare the two!" And I did, and used it for all of thirty seconds before it froze on me while I was changing tabs and I had to Ctrl Alt Delete it. And now I can't get rid of the little floaty blue "close" rectangle. NICE ONE GOOGLE Your Scott McCloud comic lied.

On the new Doctor guy-- seeing has how I have never seen in him in anything or heard his name before today I guess I really will have to wait and see, though I will be renting Ruby in the Smoke and DLing Party Animals (and judging by the rate the usual hosting sites are going for me right now I should be done just in time for Smith's time lord debut). I think my favorite reaction post so far has to be one that popped up in my RSS reader talking how they obviously were just looking for a Tennant wannabe and oh boy did they find him, etc. ...based solely on his Confidential interview. Which, unless Smith turns out to have all the range of a crumpled paper airplane, strikes me as more than slightly unfair. I am hoping that his take on the Doctor does turn out to be very different from David's, but we won't know until next year (or perhaps well into the new series, as it took a few episodes for Tennant to settle into his portrayal of the Doctor). Right now, however, my only complaint is that Matt Smith's lack of eyebrows means that Eleven will be impossible for me to draw. I had enough of a hard time when I tried to draw John Simm, for goodness sake

And speaking of drawing: this summer I bought a lead holder, for use in a drafting class. About a month after the class ended I figured out that the lead holder came with a built in sharpener. Today, about five months after I took the class, I figured out how to use that sharpener properly. I am not a competent person, in many matters.

Interesting article on a movie adaptation of The Spirit that almost got made in the 1980s. An animated movie, directed by Brad Bird.

Yes, that's right. An animated Spirit. Directed by Brad motherfucking Bird. And this young dude by the name of John Lasseter was also apparently really interested in the project at the time.


Oh, but I'm sure Mister Whoreswhoreswhoreswhores' movie version will simply wonderful. I can't wait!




(Coincidently, the other night a commercial for The Spirit popped up on the TV and my mother asked me if I knew anything about it. I don't think she was quite prepared for the ensuing earful. Sorry, Mom, though I don't think it's very polite to roll your eyes at people like that)

Query: when a JF paid account expires, do your userpics get deleted, or do you just lose access to them until you renew the paid subscription? Same question regarding custom layouts.

I'm, uh, asking for a friend. Yeah.

Two additional things: Firstly, Rolling Stone had an interview with Brittney Spears. I don't read RS or care much about Ms. Spears, but given recent events that have been reported on in Fandom_Wank, specifically related to some fawning NYT articles regarding certain IP-infringing dweebs, this excerpt jumped out at me:

"Right when we got there, we just knew it was just bad," [Spears] says. "He looked like an older version of Harry Potter, but skinnier. So I had to get dessert first."

Lookout ladies! He's appealing and trying to be appealing! Adhsdghdfh...and then my brain died.

But! Not before I was able to read this bit of news about how Ann Coulter has recently broken her jaw and needed to have it wired shut. Now, while it is very temping to give into, like the link says, feelings of schadenfreude, now matter how many heinous things a person has said, taking delight in their physical pain is wrong no matter how you-bweheeheeheeheehee! :D

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

NORTH AFRICAN DAGGER
A nineteenth-century North African dagger with a sinuous blade.

AFRICAN RITUAL KNIFE
This African knife, probably made early in the twentieth century, was used in ceremonial rituals. Its hilt is decorated with a tuft of animal hair.

AFRICAN FIGHTING KNIVES
This pair of North African fighting knives have handles of ebony.

SCISSORS DAGGER
An Indo-Persian scissor dagger, with 6.5in/17cm blades. This was a particularly nasty weapon; the attacker thrust it into his victim's body, and the blades sprang apart during withdrawal to do maximum damage.

From Weapons: An Illustrated History, by Chuck Wills, which was sitting on the table next to my bed. I decided not to count the titles as sentences so I could include the bit about the SCISSORS DAGGER.

Star Trek trailer is online! Watch it before Paramount ganks it. Finally hear Simon Pegg's Scotty voice for all of a half a second!

Looks pretty fun to me. Mind you, I'm saying this as someone who has seen maybe all of two episodes of TOS, so I won't be going into this with the "ZOMG my childhood/object of affection is ruined!!"-type feeling of dread. I guess that will come when they decide to make TNG:Begins and cast Zac Efron as Data, or whatever.


And now a unrelated gripe: To Lane Bryant and other plus-sized stores, not every fat chick looks good in a fucking empire waist. Is it too much to ask for a top or dress that could conceivably look good on someone with an hourglass shape? Fuck, just grab your designers, show them some stills of Christina Hendricks' outfits in Mad Men and give them a memo that reads "LIKE THIS, BUT BIGGER". You stand to make boatloads of money. Well, from me at least. When I actually have some.

Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

I am not a good cook. Whenever I try to make something edible that does not involve microwaving, toast, or small marshmallow pieces and milk, I fail. I overcook, under-cook, start small fires (though to be fair, the last time that happened I was able to put it out pretty quickly and was still able to salvage the pot stickers) fail to check the expiration dates of one or more of the ingredients (I had an...episode with some maple syrup last week. I'll spare you the details), you get the idea. Even baking, which for the most part seems pretty hard to screw up, and I'm pretty sure I even used to be quite good at once! The last time I baked anything that didn't have "Tollhouse" written on the packet was when I tried to make some devil's food cupcakes, misread the directions and added a tablespoon of baking powder instead of a teaspoon, which is the sort of mistake that you expect to see written into an episode of a crappy sitcom ("Oh my, it looks like I mixed in salt instead of sugar!* How silly of me!" *canned laughter*). Those were some big cupcakes, let me tell you.

( In the immortal words of Jeremy Clarkson: 'How hard can it be?' )

Although I thought that the recent TV film version of Hogfather was quite well done I skipped out on the recent Colour of Magic adaptation by the same production company, as I've never read the original book (not really a fan of the Rincewind books in general). However...Jeremy Irons was Vetinari? How did I not know about this until today? So, now I've got to watch it ASAP. And hopefully it's better than the other fantasy movies that Irons has been in.

And there's an adaptation of Going Postal in the works now, so hopefully he'll be back for that! I have no ideas/opinions about who'll play Moist, but my more pressing worry is Vimes. Yes, I know he's not in Going Postal that much, but still. Oh god, I hope they don't fuck him up.

I'm also wondering how the Golems will turn out. The Death costume in Hogfather looked a bit too close to a cheesy Halloween costume at times (especially the mask), but it will be interesting to see how they turn out in the end.

Today I found out that the little end-cap/button on my leadholder apparently also works as a sharpener! Had I known this when I was still taking my drafting class I would have been able to save myself some time, instead of whittling away with an exacto knife. *facepalm* Still, now that I know about this I think I'll be more inclined to use it for freehand drawing in the future. Also, in the process of learning how to use the sharpener I managed to get graphite dust all over my forearm and my t-shirt...and my skirt...and the little arm rest area on my laptop (but not in the keyboard, I hope think).

In other writing implement news today I also finally placed an order for what may well be the most awesome pen in the history of ever. It was out of stock for the longest time on the website I wanted to order it from (and more expensive on the few other sites that sold it), but a casual check a couple of days ago revealed that they had restocked without sending me the promised automatic alert. I wanted to wait until I had bought some of my textbooks first, but I needn't have waited, since I won't be breaking my bank account because of that this semester, and this particular pen isn't outrageously expensive. Though it might just be worth it for the most awesome pen ever.

What type of pen is it? Well, I'm not saying until it arrives, though some of you might be able to guess. :) However, I will say that I don't think I've been this excited about a pen since I discovered rollerball pens with ultra fast-drying ink*, and Rapidographs, though I'm hoping that my newest acquisition is not as diva-like as the latter (PROTIP: Do not take a Rapidograph up in an airplane. They do not like it). I am positively giddy with anticipation!


*As a left-hander, finding a writing pen that doesn't leave the side of my hand a mess or make me frustrated can be hard. Ball point pens are especially annoying, since they're designed to release ink while being dragged across paper, so when a South paw like myself writes by pushing the pen across the paper the result is a lot of stopping to "restart" my pen by scribbling in the margins. So when you need to write a lot in a short amount of time it can be a huge pain in the ass. And until recently it never occurred to me that this difficulty wasn't something that everyone experienced. Right now I'm in love with Pilot's Precise V7 pens (and I *sob* lost my green one ;_;) which write like a dream and rarely dirty my hand, but can bleed through paper pretty easily. I've been reading really good things about the Uni-Ball Jetstream, so if I had noticed this before I had completed my most awesome of pen orders I might have been unable to resist the temptation, (ooh, cushy gel grip!) but I think I'll just grab a packet of the basic models when I get a chance, since they're probably about half the price.

I should also note that my handwriting is horrible, and I'm a pretty poor typist. Not "hunt and peck" bad, but after all these years I still only use my index fingers, so I'm pretty slow compared to most. I think I just all around fail at the act of writing.

Man, when did I become such a ink nerd? If I was right-handed I'd probably be a total fountain pen enthusiast too.

I'm watching Masterpiece Theater's version of Sense and Sensibility right now! I've not read the book (haven't really gotten into Austen yet. Mind you, I haven't read any of her stuff since I had to read Emma in HS). I did, however, see the Ang Lee movie version, also while I was in high school, due to a friend having an Alan Rickman crush. I remember being incredibly annoyed by Kate Winslet's character (Marianne, right?)...and that's about it.

However! This new(ish) miniseries happens to star David Morrissey as Colonel Brandon, so of course I must watch. Oh, David Morrissey. You may well be the poor woman's Liam Neeson, and your American acting career has...not gone well*, but I still like you a whole lot. Also, I was totally rooting for you to become the 11th Doctor, even if I guess that isn't going to happen now. ;_;

Apparently this originally aired back in the spring, so I don't know when I'll see the other two parts. So far it's pretty good. I really like the actresses playing the Dashwood women (the youngest one is so cute!), the actor playing Edward is pretty, and the actor playing Willoughby looks and acts very punchable. Also, Arthur Weasley!


*Now matter how good of an actor someone may be, I just don't think it's possible for your Hollywood career to recover from being the male lead in Basic Instinct 2