Below are the most recent 5 friends' journal entries.

Monday, December 1st, 2008
nekojita	7:04p	my heartfelt gratitude I truly am very appreciative to everyone who has donated to Animal Friends (and is currently suffering through Storm Warnings - gah, looked at a chapter a bit ago and found more tiny little mistakes on my part that I missed, I apologize). It seems that they contacted a few of you because of a lack of an address to send a memorial card for Ban-chan.... oops. My bad, I forgot about that little part when I said to do the donations 'in memory of'. Someone thoughtfully gave them my email address, and here's what they sent me: Hello, My name is Jessica DiVito and I am the development coordinator with Animal Friends in Pittsburgh. Over the last 24 hours, we have received numerous donations in honor on Ban-Chan. Since so many of the donations that have poured in have come from all over the world, we found it to be highly unusual and attempted to contact one of the donors to understand who Ban-Chan was. One donor was kind enough to give us your address. I am very sorry that I am contacting you via email, but I just wanted to let you know how remarkable your work must be, and that your supporters care very much. As of three o'clock we have received over $250 from about a dozen donors. Thank you. This is truly amazing and I just want you to know how much we really do appreciate you spreading the word about our work and being a great ambassador for our organization. Thank you again for your support. If you have time, we would love to hear more about Ban--Chan, who must have been a truly inspiring pet. Sincerely, Jessica DiVito .... yeah, I get teary-eyed each time I see it. *massive huggles to all who donated, no matter the amount* I was hoping when I came up w/ this idea that I'd raise at least a hundred dollars and do a little good. Over $250 means a lot to a regional organization like this, especially in a time when people are strapped for money and pets are getting abandoned left and right. Not to ignore my fellow humans, but I happen to think that this is a time of the year when our faithful and loving companions get overlooked, and I know AF always does their 'Christmas/New Year's' round-up of as many poor animals they can take on who probably won't live into the new year without a bit of help and loving attention. Perhaps with this donation they'll be able to take on an extra animal or two. I have a monthly donation sent to them automatically because I know just how much Ban-chan, and now Ume-chan and Hoshi, means to me. AF was so understanding and helpful when it came time to find another cat to share my life with, and they're constantly striving to help all pets and pet owners, not just the ones who adopted/were adopted from them. Heck, I technically got Ume-chan for 'free' as someone saw a lovely cat with small health issues and paid her adoption fee in advance. I 'paid it forward' on a handsome gentleman who reminded me too much of Ban-chan for me to take him home even though AF put me under no pressure to do so. It's an organization that I'm very proud of and respect. Anyway, rambling aside, thank you very much. As I said in a previous post, I'll keep the offer of the whole fic up until about chapter ten or so in return for any donation of $5 or more. Some of you seemed to feel bad that you couldn't give more, but really, the saying that 'every little bit helps' is more than true. At the very least, you've made me feel very happy and humbled. And I can't think of a much better tribute for Ban-chan than this after all the years of him being curled up at my side while I wrote. (pardon the use of the 'meh' icon, but I just had to have Ban-chan's picture up there) Current Mood: indescribable Current Music: dante - fma ost (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 30th, 2008
nekojita	2:49p	Shadows Fic - Storm Warnings ch1 For your reading enjoyment (hopefully), here is the first of twelve chapters from Storm Warnings: http://www.catsdreams.com/archive/storm01.html (yes, I suck at making pretty links) All in all, I'm rather happy with this story. You start to see Yohji and Aya mature a bit and show new sides, some minor characters (such as Alexis and Eri) step forward, another couple of even more minor characters get fleshed out and steps are taken that pretty much make the war irrevocable at this point. And there's Teddy. >^.^< He's been too quiet lately. And a good bit of Aya and Yohji, hints about Roy and Crawford's bloodlines... just a lot of lovely little bits mixed into the general madness. Enjoy! The offer of a donation in return for the entire story still stands. Pretty much, this will be up until the last couple of chapters are ready to be posted: http://nekojita.livejournal.com/556227.html?mode=reply Current Mood: pleased Current Music: do you hear what i hear? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
nekojita	6:43p	Storm Warnings Story For Donations All right, so there hasn't been many site updates lately (though I think I need to post one or two Final Fantasy VII fics online... my bad). It's not because I haven't been writing. Nope, nope. In fact, I have finished the next part of Shadows, a story called Storm Warnings. Twelve chapters, about 400 pages all in alll. The reason why nothing has been posted is because of a little bit of a lag in editing. So, I have this completed story (if there are any Saint Beast fans out there, you'll like this) and am just now getting enough beta'ed chapters back to post it. Most likely, you'll see a new chapter every week or so until it's all up. During that time... well, I'm hoping to work on an original version of Shadows and maybe wrap up Art of Cruelty and a few other things. Since I have the complete story and it's mostly edited, I figured... well, there's a wonderful local no-kill animal shelter that can always use donations, especially in these bad economic times and since they have performed a couple of mass rescues lately. So here is the offer - you can either wait until the whole story is posted chapter by chapter or you can make a donation to Animal Friends and get the whole, mostly edited fic all at once. It's not 100% edited, but it's in pretty good shape, all in all. I'd love to set a certain amount for the donations, say $20... but I sorta feel bad doing so during the holidays and current economic times. $20 would be about the price of a hard-covered book and be a really nice donation, but all I'm asking is that you donate at least $5 to Animal Friends. If you can and do donate more, that would be wonderful. Go Here to donate, click on 'Donate in Honor or in Memory' and tell them that the donation is for 'Ban-chan' (my beloved 18+ year old cat who passed away at the beginning of the year). What I ask is that you forward the email notification/screenshot of your donation to me (at nekojita (at) gmail (dot) com). Feel free to blank out whatever personal information that you want. When I receive that, I'll send you the zipped file of Storm Warnings. I'm hoping this won't be a problem at all for any international fans, but if so, please let me know and I'll see about working something out. NONE of the money will be going to me, obviously - this is both a fanfic and it's meant to be a donation to a great charity. I don't get anything out of this other than the feeling of warm fuzzies over the donations. And the story will get posted eventually, so it's not as if you *have* to donate to read it. It'll just take a little longer for it to all get out here. I'll start sending out the fic on Friday, so you don't have to donate now. Still want to go through the story again and try to catch the obvious mistakes before I make it sorta public. I'll post a reminder then. Current Mood: hopeful Current Music: zan - bleach ost (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
nekojita	1:22p	the best possible use for pumpkins May I just say that MM's pumpkin margaritas are made of yum. YUM. Pumpkin, cinnamon, tequila, oh how I adore you. Mac, you need to visit me just to try one. ^__^ I need to figure out how to be at MM every day for the rest of the month (it's a monthly flavor) to savor the drinks. It was a very nice night w/ the NB, the awful traffic to get to his place aside (the two ways to get there involve going past a very large shopping area. not good). I mean, I figured people will be out en masse next week for the bargains, but this weekend? Ah well. Visited the grams and did a little bit of laundry (saving the bed linens until Thursday - will use my mom's washer/dryer since I'll be there for a few hours). Poor Hoshi will be deprived of her favorite game -dive beneath the descending sheets/blankets and wait to be attacked. She's my silly, precious furball. Ume-chan continues to do the nest in the papa-san chair/discarded clothes thing, which is utterly adorable (and probably a little warm). I have lots of editing to do today. Maybe next week I'll be able to get back into writing. I must admit, I'm excited about posting SW and seeing what people think. Season finale for True Blood tonight. Have I mentioned lately how much I adore the manga Asterisk? Why can't she crank out the chapters faster? It's not even smutty, dammit, but I just love Kio and how clueless he can be. Fraw just needs to make a few things very clear to that particular angel (preferably in a manner involving ripping off of clothes and lube). Yes, it's random as all hell and no, haven't had any of the margaritas yet today. *pouts* Current Mood: thirsty (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 20th, 2008
system	4:46p	S2 Layout Issues Hi, Guys. I know a good many of the S2 themes are kinda hosed right now. Something changed with the LJ migration to their new data center. The Bloggish and Style Contest themes have their CSS hosted at LJ. That's by LJ's design, with how the code is distributed. The code is set to use LJ's CSS proxy to handle the access and display of the CSS settings. Since LJ's move, though, the CSS proxy has been kaput. But the CSS itself at LJ is still working. Until we can find a way around all this, a couple users have a way that you can use the Custom CSS in your customization area to get your layouts pretty damn close to the original for that layout and theme. You'll enter two sets of code in that area. The first one would be the code from this URL: http://stat.livejournal.com/sixhtml/themes/common/base-weblog.css Just go there, copy it, and paste into the custom CSS box. And the second set you enter will be from the direct CSS URL for your specific theme. You can locate this URL by viewing the source of your journal in your browser (View Source code). If you scroll down to the <link rel="stylesheet" section of the source code, you'll see the direct url to your theme's CSS at livejournal. Go there, copy that code, and paste it after the base-weblog.css code above. Make sure you have "No" selected to use the included base code (it's a dropdown), and that the URL field above the custom CSS box is empty. Click to save changes, and your theme will display much as it is supposed to. There is occasionally an element like a border that doesn't come through, but it's pretty close. As an example of the CSS URLs, this is the one for the Baby theme for the Bloggish layout: http://stat.livejournal.com/sixhtml/themes/lilia/theme-baby.css The CSS URLS will be start with http://stat.livejournal.com/sixhtml with the rest varying by theme and layout. I'll still be looking for an alternative to having to futz with custom CSS, but in the meantime, that method of applying the CSS will get your Bloggish and Style Contest journal themes put back together pretty well. Thanks, Robin