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[18 May 2008|05:31am] dethtoll post comment

Elements - Earth Glass [18 May 2008|02:11am] silverblue Earth 1 Originally uploaded by steampunktoy It appears that having had some practice cutting glass that I am much faster at it now. This is 'Earth' - aside from four or so pieces cut last weekend, these were all cut in about two hours, including the curved sections. The clear sections are a pyramid glass, a clear glass, and a yellow bar to represent that horizontal stretch 'Earth' has in the greek symbology. It's rather hard to see on paper, but numbers 26 and 27 and so on are an almost entirely opaque grey. There's gold for precious metals in the line, and red, purple, green and opal for stones. I purchased a set of running pliers on saturday. They're essentially a plastic set of pliers with a curve away on one side, and a nodule on the top, so when you gently squeeze over a score, they snap the glass. I have noticed that they increase my speed considerably with the cutting - essentially, when I snap with my fingers, I suspect I'm always worried I'll slice into them (and since I have previously, that's fair enough!) so I am slow and tentative. These make things much faster. Well, that and this design had many, many less curves than fire. 1 comment|post comment

dnadsbhkb [18 May 2008|09:01am] reaperfox [ mood | tired ] I really need to get out of this 'go to bed at 4-5 AM and get up at 8' routine. I miss creating art like this: I know it's only furry shit, but I felt like a 'real' artist when I had the watercolours out and a huge block of Bristol Board. I miss it a lot, but I really don't know if I'd enjoy it anymore given how badly my art seems to sell. Today had better be quiet at work. I've got Blackpool on my iPod now and I'd really wather watch that all day than serve burgers. 1 comment|post comment

6 years of life on a tiny chip [18 May 2008|12:27am] tugrik Major, major props to waywind, who was kind enough to point me at a service called LJBook.com. It's the tool I've been trying to find for years now. In short, it takes your journal and makes a very well constructed PDF backup of it. It lets you pick the date ranges, what security levels, how much of the media (pictures) to include, and so on. Then it bundles it all up into a .PDF file with a full table-of-contents, broken in to date-wise chapters. All comments are included, as well. The end result is wonderfully readable, unlike countless other LJ-Backup tools I've tried. Turns your journal into a PDF Book. LJBook (gads_ljbook) (yes, that's their official 'plug' code; I felt it was only proper to include it.) I feel a lot better now knowing that my journal is backed up in an offline fashion that's still searchable/readable. I've put a huge amount of my life's last six years into this journal, and if it all went away one day without warning I'd be crushed. As I type this the data is making it to physical media and remote storage. I'll re-do the process every few months, breaking it down into year-wise .PDF booklets at the year ends. The current stat: 4800 pages. 60Mb. Just... duuuude. That's a lot of stuff for "oh, I think I'll just keep a journal for a while and see how it goes." The nifty thing, though, was to take the MobiPocket reader (which I have to run under Parallels, but no worries there) and convert the "My LJ as a Book" result into the .mobi format. The reason: my Kindle can use .mobi natively. I've copied the result over to an SD card to sit alongside the big collection of sci-fi, fantasy and trashy romance novels I keep in the little e-paper device. Even after the double-conversion, it looks great. All the pictures show up. All the comments are there. Every link, every tag, every note. The chapters all work as do the search indexes, letting me quickly scan for things I've written years ago. As an added bonus, every link is still clickable due to the Kindle's EVDO connection and built in browser. The active linking helps keep the 'alive' nature of the original online journal. It may be silly, but it's kind of neat to see this little leather-bound book (which is what a Kindle looks like when closed) sitting here on my desk, knowing just how much of my life -- and comments from my friends about that life -- it contains. What will it look like to me when I go back and read it in 10 years? 20? 30? 3 comments|post comment

YOU WIN THIS ROUND, SAMSUNG [18 May 2008|12:22am] senotay Oh sure, we can make a 24" LCD flatscreen monitor. But we sure as hell won't make an RGB cable with long enough screws for you to be able to use it. Also, you will be cursed with seeing just how rasterized and pixellated the internet really is. 1 comment|post comment

[17 May 2008|08:40pm] coyoteseven I have only a few clear memories from 1979, when I was nine years old. One of them was when my folks took me and my sister to the Grauman's Chinese Theatre to see both The Black Hole and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, both of which were playing there. You see, at that time, Mann's Theaters owned The Chinese and they'd recently constructed two extra theaters to turn it into a sort of multiplex. The Black Hole was thusly being played at one of these auxiliary theaters and Star Trek was playing on the main screen. We saw The Black Hole first and then went to see Star Trek. Though I did and still do like The Black Hole, I was very much more in awe of Star Trek. At the time, I was really really clueless about the whole nature of Trekkies, and what a fanbase Star Trek had. So I was surprised when, for the very first time that Captain Kirk appeared on the big screen (in the scene at Starfleet Headquarters), the whole audience cheered. But I did think that was fun. post comment

I feel like stuff got done. YES. [17 May 2008|08:03pm] straya [ mood | accomplished ] [ music | Ali Dee and the Deekompressors - "Go Speed Racer Go (Inst)" ] Friday afternoons are usually about the same... I wake up and leave my brain/mouth filter in bed, head to work and by the time it's time to go at the end of the shift, one of the leads is ready to toss me straight out the door for being a smart ass for the better part of the night. This then leads into Saturday morning, of course...very early Saturday morning as I don't usually get home until 2:30 or 3am. I come home, eat, shower, check the pets, check email and all that junk...and then generally fail to go to bed again until around 6am. Then I wake up at 9:30am because Transformers Animated, Spectacular Spider-man and Quest effin' own me...and proceed to get through the remainder of the day on approximately three to three and a half hours of sleep. I'm kind of an asshole on Fridays and for part of Saturday. Ha. But I'm decently proud of m'self and mah roommies right now. Ants started coming into our second story apartment by the fireplace the other day, so today began a major effort to clean and organize...and boy did we ever. The entire main room has been vacuum cleaned thoroughly, even to the point of pushing the couch, coffee table and everything but the bookcases around to get under them. This was after I performed surgery on said vacuum cleaner to clear a pet hair clog. Ick. We went out and returned a non-working used game we got earlier this week to Babbages at the mall and got lunch from Chik-Fil-A. Then we went grocery shopping at Walmart and I got the folding table I wanted to set up my studio area in the apartment. And it is mostly set up, now. I wish the printer weren't also taking up one corner, but I'll find a better place for it later. There are also a few more boxes of old sketchbooks and such under the table than I'd like, but I'll get that remedied in due time as well. Right now I just want to have a place where I can pull up a chair and say, "This is my work area and that is all it is... I make art here." Hopefully having this area will goad me into actually making art again, seeing as how I haven't drawn anything in weeks. Part of me wouldn't mind trying to take a commission or two again at some point later this year, but if I can't even manage to draw things for me, drawing for others is going to be excruciatingly painful even WITH money involved. So anyway...yeah. For the first time since living in California, I have a dedicated art area. Finally, before I forget... amethystlight can has job! YAY. She starts this upcoming week with training and it's within very easy walking distance, so even though she'll be sort of opposite koh4711 and I on some days, commuting won't be an issue. PS: Someone take the Speed Racer music away from me...it's like crack. I can't stop. 5 comments|post comment

Thanks Mr.Awesome [17 May 2008|09:03pm] neogeen "People who own emerald green automobiles, it turns out, have the most positive attitude about the course of their own lives." - What-Your-Car-Color-Reveals-About-Your-Psyche My confidence quota is also 5.5% above average. I'm putting that on my resume. ;3 6 comments|post comment

[17 May 2008|08:03pm] sapphire_d Just finished day 5 of the Basic Art of Living course. There's so many people I know off paw who should take this at some point. :) post comment

[17 May 2008|06:57pm] haikujaguar Only one new sketch today, but I like it. Geez, these take me forever. Anyway, now I begin scanning for the Retrospective, which I hope to have up by Tuesday. I definitely got enough money to scan all the good stuff from Sketchbook 18...!

[17 May 2008|06:07pm] dethtoll apparently people treat you nicer if you have AIDS than if you have an unpopular opinion. i give up. brb finding some of these guys 10 comments|post comment

Take two! [17 May 2008|02:21pm] klandagi Made a few small changes/fixes to my icon sketch for maui in OC, which I also want to get now ... FEEDBACK/CRITS WELCOME! ( Hopefully this is a little bit better...? ) 2 comments|post comment

*does a happy dance* [17 May 2008|01:13pm] almalthia ( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. ) 5 comments|post comment

LiveJournal Books [17 May 2008|01:14pm] waywind In the interest of preserving information, I've taken a few of the LiveJournal communities that I maintain, and backed them up to PDF. In this file format, you can download the sum of all entries and comments in one go. Then you can read it offline, or even print it out as a book and read it under a tree. If this website is someday no longer here, you can still keep this. My tools were these: I used LJBook.com to back up the journals to PDF. So far as I can tell, it's a trustworthy service, although I did take care to change my password after using it. I appreciate that LJBook cleverly translates links into footnotes, so a deadtree print is still usable. I'm disappointed that LJBook doesn't mention who made a post, only the names of the commenters. I suppose that means it wasn't designed with communities in mind. I know of no other way to back up a LiveJournal community. LJ Backup only works for personal journals, not communities. To complete each book, I made some additional pages in Word-- a title-page and a copy of the user-info page-- and exported these to PDF. I used the FoxIt PDF Editor to insert these pages into the main document. Here are the LiveJournal community books for you to download. The Therianthrope and Otherkin Book Club (t_o_book_club) is backed up as t_o_book_club.pdf. The Book of Days (thebookofdays) is backed up as thebookofdays.pdf. The LiveJournal community for discussing my comic, Theri There (therithere) is backed up as theritherelj.pdf. I encourage other LiveJournal users to do the same. I would love to have a PDF of your journal (or a community that you moderate) to keep and read offline. I've seen wonderful websites, journals, and fora disappear without a trace, and many times, I've wished too late that I had a backup of them. This is a quick and easy way to guard against that. 2 comments|post comment

0(2). The Fool [17 May 2008|11:23am] shatterstripes [ music | Barry Adamson's The King Of Nothing Hill : That Fool Was Me ] Leaping into the unknown. Again and again. So here we have another bit of strangeness for my deck: there are to be three Fools. This is taking a page from the way there are three Magicians in some printings of the Crowley/Harris Thoth. However, in the Thoth, these three Magicians are there because they weren't satisfied with the first two (or so I gather), and some publishers decided to use the extra images to fill out the full sheet of cards to a nice round 80. In mine, this is quite intentional; my notes on doing this show up about a dozen cards into the sketches. This is the third fool, number 0(2). It is the old fool, the Crone fool. This Fool has gone along the "Fool's Journey" narrative of the Major Arcana more than a few times; she knows the road and knows the observers. She's playing for the camera a bit as she dives headlong into the future. I'll talk about the commonalities between this card, the other two Fools, and other cards in the deck once it's all done. Also I need to remember to post this to the VCL once it's working again. Print available on Artspots. 10 comments|post comment

I have no life! [17 May 2008|08:01am] acy [ mood | excited ] Most of my free time now is taken up by two things: Gardening and GTA IV, when I can manage to wrestle the controller away from my bro. So, it's more gardening. This morning I passed the tomato "tipping point" when I looked in the fridge, and found tomatoes. We now officially have more tomatoes than we can use by just tossing one or two of them into a salad. So we have to start thinking of new ways to incorporate fresh tomatoes in what we're cooking and eating. My eventual goal is to have way too many. Is there such a thing? No, not really! Real tomatoes are seasonal, and limited to what can be grown nearby. I'm sorry, folks, but those tomatoes you see at the store that claim to be "vine ripened" with the little bit of vine stuck to them.. They're not the same! I want to have enough to have a couple of "processing and canning days." Canning yourself is great! You know what's in the jars, and food can be stored without the energy needed to keep it frozen or refridgerated. The other thing I want to do is make something I only had in my childhood, which my grandmother would make every summer. It's simple. A ham sandwich. With garden tomatoes, and ham that came from locally raised pigs, cured and smoked by someone who lives right down the street. Maybe with homemade bread. A little mayo and mustard, fresh lettuce, salt and pepper. That's it. Oh yeah, I'm making my own mozarella cheese this afternoon, too! I'll take pictures this time, I swear. 5 comments|post comment

Pie [17 May 2008|06:55am] bluedeer 7 comments|post comment

Alive, but covered in nerdy.. [17 May 2008|03:22am] staticstealer Guh, I've been bad at updating here as well as getting drawing/writing done. Outside of work (which is pretty nerdy work as well, data recovery) my brain has completely overloaded on upcoming geekery. Listed amongst the things that are currently making me lose bolts and causing smoke to come out of my ears are: * New Indiana Jones movie (This is my pulp-movie nirvana) * New Iron Man movie - admittedly sort of old news, but a good flick even for people not into superheroes much like myself. I enjoyed it quite a bit! Here's hoping Downy-whatsits can stay off the DAMN DRUGS already since he's a very gifted actor. * New Narnia movie - Centaurs... Seriously. You expect me to miss this flick which has high fantasy in it? * Keep on the Shadowfell - Intro module to D&D 4e. I admit that I want to plunder it for ideas of how encounters are set up more than anything. * D&D 4th edition - That big diamond on top of Nerd-hill (tm). Yes, I'm a convert. I've got so many campaign ideas that were trashed in the last edition that they're starting to leak out of my eyes now. * Did I mention Indiana Jones? Yes? Well its here again. So, yeah, the next 30 days is going to be like geek utopia for me I think. I'll try and check in now and then, but don't expect much more than freak-out movie/game reviews when each happens. By the way. I realized I haven't mentioned cabbage in a while. So: Cabbage. 2 comments|post comment

Mah Jong Quest III [17 May 2008|12:17am] dingybatty [ mood | excited ] Mah Jong Quest III is live on iwin.com!! This is the game I did a lot of work on.. I did character designs, user interface (the main game screen and buttons, which were all optimized by Jan later), and.. well I did a lot of stuff for it. I guess you could say I helped establish a lot of the game's look and was even able to give some feedback on game mechanics. My friend Amie did the level backgrounds and my friend Chris did the comics. You can play for free for an hour I think! 4 comments|post comment

konami has officially run out of ideas. (NO KELL OUR CONVERSATION WILL CONTINUE TO BE ABOUT COCKS) [17 May 2008|03:11am] dethtoll i've said it before and i'll say it again: you're not allowed to like silent hill until you've seen jacob's ladder. oh well. at least i have afraid of monsters. 26 comments|post comment

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