Monkeys and keyboards aside, one Random + CSS still doesn't make poop.

To Do:

Post office

General inventory HOLY SHIT DO I HAVE A LOT OF STUFF.

Epoxy opalite drops, last necklaces, remaining resin pieces, a few amethyst points

Make another cuff or two

Fimo clay?

Count anklets; make more

Finish the pile of flowers on the desk

PAPERWORK.

Attach flowers to hair elastics; give them a shot, too.

Figure out what to do with these glass pieces.

Collect & pack supplies.

Collect and pack clothes, food

Write down directions, too. Just in case.

Somehow get bins & wheelies down the little snow tube and to the car.

Take an early and long nap on Thursday. Hope DC's methods of dealing with snow have improved in the last ten years.

(???)

PROFIT.

Upon further consideration, I don't want to take over the world. I want my own new planet, and I want the gate-entry test to include an extensive logic/spelling section.

That ought to be enough to weed out people like this:

okay so i read this. and i agree that is the crappiest excuse we (women through the ages) have allowed to exist. but i dont think we should crucify 1 guy sor exploiting it. in no way am i excusing Gabe, he can be an ass at times (okay alot of the time) but thats what makes Gabe Gabe. i love Cobra & thats that. i am by no means justifying Gabriel Saporta, his actions or his ideas of what he thinks is funny. i just wanted to throw my own opinion in the mix.

For reference: Gabe Saporta, the frontman for the band Cobra Starship, made a twitter comment about domestic violence being funny. newageamazon ranted a bit about the state of the music community and their "boys will be boys" attitude, and a handful of idiots came out of the woodwork to defend Saporta (and somehow, Chris Brown?) with their logical fallacies and gibberish. Add in the gleeful (also illogical) posturings of the Focus on the Family people (especially juxtaposed with CBS's rejection of an anti-homophobia commercial), the ongoing parade of idiots defending Roman Polanski (Now with more Johnny Depp!), the poor girl in Turkey who was buried alive for talking to boys, the people out to ban the dictionary & the children's picture book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, and the continued popularity of that moron Sarah Palin, and . . . Yeah, I just want a new planet. I'm really starting to think the only way to deal with all this shit is to strip it down to nothing and start over.

I'm supposed to teach a class in just over an hour. I'm also supposed to vend at a show in Pittsburgh later tonight. I'm not sure how any of that'll happen with snow up to my car's bumpers, untouched roads (even those in Pittsburgh), and no plows in sight.



Oni, though, is chest-deep in husky heaven--and I'm probably obligated to go play in it too.

ETA: Both the class and the show were canceled due to weather. I now have nowhere to be until Wednesday. *promptly goes stir-crazy*

ETA2: So rather than sit around and stare at the computer even more, I went outside and dug a path to the street. Then I dug a path to the mailbox, then dug my car out, then dug my elderly neighbor's car out, then dug half of zen_of_nihilism's car out, then dug out the front of the garage for the grandparents.

I'm sore. But tiny car can stop complaining.

I picked up a little green bottle of mana potion energy drink out of curiosity. It smells awful, like burning lime jello. I've had stinky energy drinks before, though--so in the interests of science, I took a swig.

It tastes worse than it smells. It's like nyquil cut with lime jello powder and melted plastic. The aftertaste is so awful that holding your nose doesn't even help. But I guess you can't expect much else from a drink that literally has 1600% of your daily value of B6 and 6667% b12. That isn't a typo. It has almost 7000% of your daily recommended B12.

And I must be getting soft in my old age, but I can't get enough of it down to say if it works or not. One tiny swig had me burping limey nyquil for a half hour; I'm afraid of what the entire bottle would do. I'd rather drink an entire warm glass of Jägermeister than try to drink the ounce and a half of potion--and that's sad.


At least I got my week's worth of B12, I suppose.

I just got around to sitting down and starting the Avatar: The Last Airbender series last night, and . . . finished s1 at 5am.

Why did I not start this sooner? By eight or ten episodes in, I was saying, "Hey, look, here's a twelve year old with super powers who acts like a twelve year old--and whose skills don't hinge on blind luck, social faux pas, epic retcon/Jesus fish no jutsu, or 'LOOK! BOOBIES!' And here's bad guys with motives more than 'I am super powerful! I am super crazy! I have a half-assed excuse for being a bad guy!' Here's female characters with depth and motive beyond their love interest! Here's show writers who actually researched martial arts*! Here's entire episodes without flashbacks, and fight scenes that don't have a single character stop and go on for ten minutes about their technique, what they're going to do, and how they're going to do it! Here's a plot that isn't a flimsy excuse for one one-on-one fight scene after another! And look: Angst, not waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnggsssstttttttt!"

Or, in short: Avatar >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Naruto. I loves it. I should buy it. I'm gonna be sad when it's over. But until then, I'll huggle my Appa plushie (Newfound love for Appa plushie!) and start s2.




*One of the little stupid things I'll probably never ever forgive Naruto for was "You can fight him just by watching his feet! Don't worry about what his hands are doing!" Seriously? Seriously? How fucking stupid can--here, watch this guy's feet!

Once upon a time, I jokingly told my parents I wanted a monkey for my birthday--and they responded by giving me a toy monkey every year for years on end. All together I've got stuffed ones, keychain ones, charm ones, at least one pirate one, and a slightly disturbing postcard with a cutey cartoon monkey on the front and monkey semen facts on the back.

I've just caught myself carrying on the tradition. Click for full-size:

As a response to the epic (and ongoing) trainwreck of Katsucon, we made pros_n_cons--a community for congoers, artists, vendors, and all that fun stuff.

I fear for the first Katsu-related post that goes up.


So yeah, I need suggestions now: more things for the info, if there should be a number rating system/poll per show, and how I should fix the fucking CSS. Unpretty comm just needs to take off its glasses and put on some lip gloss.

I just made a miracle!

The work area wasn't really that; it was more me piling all my materials--parts, rollies, displays, and bubble wrap--into the corner and pretending it wasn't there. In short, it was a complete fucking disaster.

Now, though? I still don't have enough deskspace to really work there--and besides, my computer's on the other side of the room for ease of netflix--but it's organized and I can actually get into it.

There's really no saving that couch--but Kabuki doesn't mind.


Also, I started fighting with resin again. wingedrivers is planning a steampunk wedding dude this will be uberfun and we've been talking custom jewelry. I already set her loose with a chocolate noms cuff--one of two in existence, since Oni ate the mold for those particular pieces--and am currently at work on other various neat things. Like this.



Or these.




. . . I'm cut off from posting pics now. >.>

I crunched my income numbers for the past year and learned that my little business, the one I started in May, made me $3k more than an entire year at my (mostly) full-time day job. That's both sad and awesome.

Expenses were a little brutal, but that's to be expected. And this year I plan to make out like a (minor) Mafia boss. (I only have four cinderblocks. A major Mafia boss would certainly be in need of more.)

This means getting etsy up around the 200 items mark, buffing up the professionalism and branding, working out some new things to make--and most importantly, keeping up with myself. This may also mean I stop lusting after the new metalsmithing section's pages of the Fire Mountain catalog and get to spending. But for now I keep ogling. It's like hideously expensive porn for magpies.

(Did I ever mention that I picked my first college because they had an option for a metalsmithing/jewelry-making major? The program head died and was never replaced while I was there, so I majored in English.)

I started the current Borders Make book, A Reliable Wife, after having made fun of it for a few days. ("If I sell A Reliable Wife, does that make me a pimp?" "Hi, m'am! Would you like A Reliable Wife?" "Yeah, there's Reliable Wives all over the store.") ( Guilt and condescension! Condescension and guilt! Gonads and strife! )

ETA: Okay, so I took it to weepingcock. It's worse than I remembered!

I finally got around to finishing Captain Blood. While the titular character didn't fart roses by the end, he did surprise me a little by suddenly dropping his Stu-ness and becoming--for a short while--a self-doubting and fallible character bereft of his moral compass.

The lead-up to this, unfortunately, is a mish-mash of social errors that could've been circumvented by the Captain's moral compass/lady love Arabella saying, "Oh, hey, I heard you're engaged and possibly a cold-blooded killer," and him saying, "I am not, don't be silly." Instead she goes on the offensive and calls him a thief and a pirate.

Captain Blood responds to this by angsting in a reasonable, recognizable fashion--then effs it all up by running off to Tortuga to sulk, where his natural propensity for excelling at everything he does easily renders him the most obnoxious emo kid to have bad hair, lock himself in his room, and whine about how no one gets him. His remarkably loyal crew(s) respond accordingly: a number of them split before he can start singing Linkin Park.

Thankfully a French guy comes in to boot Blood out of his funk. The next ninety pages or so of the book can be summed up thusly:

Frenchman: Hello! I am an incompetent dandy with a ridiculously long title. Your hair is awful and you smell funny.

Blood: I . . . wish to become a dandy again. *dandies*

Frenchman: That's great, you poser. As you and the rest of your scurvy dogs boy band crew are now working for the King of France and are under my command, I shall tell you about the royally sanctioned battles we're going to have against those God-awful Spanish.

Blood: Avast! For I am a changed man. I tire of piracy, and shall wax poetic of my misdeeds and well-wishes alike! I am forever grateful for this chance to fight the cursed Spanish in a legal fashion! . . . if you pay us properly.

*dickering over money*

Blood: All right! We are prepared for this non-piratical and royally sanctioned outing! So where are we going?

Frenchman: TO MURDER AND PLUNDERRRRRR!!!!1!

Blood:

The end, of course, remains predictable--he saves the day, gets the girl, and shows up the bad guys. But it was still a fun ride.

~~

I'm most of the way through Charlaine Harris's Grave Sight, too. The basics for this one: Harper Connelly, once struck by lightning, is able to locate dead bodies--so she attempts to make a living off it. While it's also set in the South and narrated by a first-person mid-twenties female character, it's a completely different beast from the Sookie Stackhouse series. The characters of this series are obviously faulty and their relationships are much more complex than Sookie's, and Harris's already having a few years of writing under her belt means her prose in this is a lot more smooth than in her earlier works. That being said, this storyline has neither the same type of humor nor the frequently headlong pace of the Sookie series. This is possibly because of the sheer volume of exposition regarding Harper's ability/past, and in part because of Harper's detachment; she's finding bodies for people she doesn't know or really care about, and it shows. It's not until her stepbrother gets locked up--towards the last fifth of the book--that things really start rolling.

(Harris skips straight over the sex scenes in this one; it's kind of refreshing. The more of them she wrote in the Sookie series, the more annoyed with them I became.)

~~

I went out yesterday to build a Calvin and Hobbes-style snowman, only to find the snow was so fluffy it wouldn't pack. This was greatly saddening--though I should be able to pull it off tomorrow.

In the meantime I'll . . . actually, I don't know that I'll keep watching Ghost Adventurers, aka Stupid Frat Boys go Ghost Hunting. It's like the movie where you're cheering for the moron protagonist to get eaten--but since there's a full season, I know that'll not happen. Boo.

Chances of my getting banned from the Katsu forum & Artist Alley just went up exponentially--especially if I give in and go at this as heavily snarkily as I really really want to. I'm not as hardcore a researcher as purplepopple but I do know how to pick my angles and my ground.

The last anime con that tried to shove me into the vendor room for being "too professional" was NYAF, and that show was a waking nightmare. Everyone in the vendor room had a terrible time--and everyone has been very clear about that: to other sellers, to friends, to customers and to the wilds of the internet.

You know how much fun it's gotta be to fill a dealer room after situations so bad that dealers have to take legal action against you? (I had a link once where someone talked about their numbers collapsing on themselves the following year, but can't find it--but this past year's show is definitely their last one. Goodbye, NYAF--I shall not miss you at all.)



*slouches off to i_wank*

ETA: I brought my rage mad google-fu postings to journalfen, only to learn that the AA'd already made clairvoyant_wank for another thread. It's like the wanna-be wank that just keeps dragging along.

From the Katsu forums . . .

If you are a business you are not allowed within the KAA. Period. The KAA as has been stated before is for amateur artists and crafters, NOT businesses. If you are a business you do not fit within the scope of this area and are not being fair to the amateur artists and crafters who are here for the love of what they are doing, and maybe to make a buck too.

Businesses should all apply to merchants@katsucon.org if you have not already done so. If we find out you are a business and have someone ended up in the KAA this year we will at this late date let it slide. However you will not be allowed to apply for the KAA in future years.

This is a hard line. Other conventions, as people have said, have other ways of running their Alley's, Markets, etc. At Katsucon we draw a very clear line between amateur's and professionals/businesses.

What I'm seeing here is them saying a full-time artist (2-D or 3-D) can't have registered as a business and be allowed in any variant of the Alley, a sole pro no longer counts as an artist for having registered (even if they make everything on their table by hand), that an artist's being too good runs them the risk of being kicked out of KAA, that my loving my job is mutually exclusive to my making money, that my table'd better not look too good, and that an artist is only valid as an artist if they're charging hobbyist prices.

Strangely enough, there is no nice way to post this.

I'm also seeing something that looks alarmingly like the encouragement of tax evasion. I registered to keep my own ass covered and I send out my little checks to various state comptrollers as need be. But Katsucon wants me to have not registered, or to take my registered bum over to the vendor area--no matter that mixing crafters and vendors is overwhelmingly a fucking disaster for the crafters, and that not registering leaves me open to a kneecapping by the IRS.

This con is really starting to worry me.

~~

Along the lines of stupid fucking ideas: Businessknowledgesource.com thinks it's a good idea to pay employees to quit smoking. You go right ahead, people--and in the meantime, your non-smoking employees will just get bitter and snarky because their coworker is being rewarded for being an addict.

Seriously--what non-smoker wouldn't look at Cindy the Chimney getting $500 or an extra few vacation days or whatnot and say, "Why the fuck am I not smoking? I'll start and then stop--how's that? Can I have $100 for smoking a single pack and then quitting? What if I just threaten to smoke?"

~~

Also, this kid is cool. So is the track.

Happy holidays!

Who wants to take a guess at the number of right-wing morons who buy the paperback anti-Sarah Palin book Going Rouge, thinking it's the official Sarah Palin book Going Rogue?

Even with the subtitle "The American Nightmare" on the front, with a different picture than Going Rogue (which is right beside it), and with how the actual one just came out in hardcover?






A better question, perhaps: Should I be this amused at the ignorance and/or terrible reading skills of Palin fans?

Me: Yeah, she's really bad. Then her boobs almost fall out, her pants start to fall down--
zen_of_nihilism: Going to play my game now!
Me: Come back! It's about to get awful!
zen_of_nihilism: No!
Me: And three . . . two . . . one . . . POON!
zen_of_nihilism: What?
Me: Come back!
zen_of_nihilism: No.


I'll admit, it was amusing for a little while--like, the first thirty seconds of her epically long video. And, as the situation is with many absurdly incompetent people, she appears unable to recognize her own failures. It's not that she can't dance, it's that people don't understand her artistic genius. It's not that her form is terrible, it's that she's the pioneer of a new bellydance system. And the people coming out to criticize her as she gets snippy? They're obviously just trash-talkers secretly jealous of the way she rolls around and smacks her face on the floor.

I'd feel bad for her, but it looks like she insists on not seeing past her little fishbowl, where she builds grandiose monuments to herself. Throw in some flouncing and we've got a result that weebles between annoying and embarrassing.

It really is a pity so few bad dancers are kind enough to drop a wardrobe on themselves.

Sarah Palin's twitter needs a fucking translator. Also, Sarah Palin needs to grow a goddamn brain cell.

Copenhgen=arrogance of man2think we can change nature's ways.MUST b good stewards of God's earth,but arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature
(link)

Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng
(link)

She's worse than Bush. I can't believe people pay attention to her let alone like her.

~~

Braincleaner for the day is silly Oni in snow, along with some of the neat shots I got this afternoon.



He stuffed his head into snowbanks for a good chunk of our walk, then dove straight into a big thicket of something. I was afraid we'd have to cut him out of it for a moment--or that he'd drag me in as well. Choppy film is choppy!

I read Ariana Franklin's Mistress of the Art of Death series again as braincleaner. It's working, and I'm glad she's writing a fourth one.

~~

I read Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby, finally. It's strange, yeah, but it's interesting--and also functioned as braincleaner. The main character finds himself in possession of a poem that can kill, then finds himself able to kill with a thought. What follows is a fairly convoluted tale of the corrupting nature of power, mixed with the clash between modern media's force-feeding style and a situation where an influx of information can be deadly, and then sprinkled with a heaping spoonful of WTF-gender-and-sexuality and studded with liberal pokes at the fourth wall.

Old George Orwell got it backward.

Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. He's pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.

He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.

And this being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world. (p.18-19)

I still really wish I'd been at the reading he did at my old college--the one where a number of people in the audience passed out.

~~

I went back and read chunks of David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and found myself more appreciative of its frequently overly-wordy WTF than I was in college. He was an oddball, that one, but his writing style's conductive to sitting down and concentrating on what's being said--something I needed.

~~

Mark Millar's graphic novel Old Man Logan wasn't as puerile and poorly-written as Wanted, but somehow was even less cerebral or well-plotted. The story opens up fifty years in the post-apocalyptic future, as Wolverine's non-mutant kids offer to sell their working x-box in order to pay rent.

If you can't get your brain around the idea of an x-box making it fifty years without bricking, this would be a good stopping point. It just gets worse from there. Om nom nom adamantium. Seriously: if I get started, I'll rip the entire story to shreds.

Otherwise . . . I'm not sure if Millar aims for transparent bigotry or just lands there anyway. The bad guys are a black man covered in gold jewelry, a Hispanic girl with too many facial piercings, and the (morbidly obese) Hulk's cannibalistic trailer-park-living kids/grandkids--an emo-haired punker, some rednecks, and a perpetually-publicly-breastfeeding female. The protagonists? All white males. The good women? Sidelined or fridged. The young, attractive women? Evil or whores. Then there's how Wolverine/Logan is a pacifist(!) who hasn't popped his claws in fifty years and who is stomped/stands by placidly as his friend gets beaten down--but he finally turns violent and almost stabs a random bar patron in the face when they imply that he might be gay. No, seriously. And of course, the work completely fails the Bechdel test.

Subtlety, thy name is not Millar.

But at least it wasn't Wanted. Few things can be as bad as a monster made of Hitler's poop or the closing line "This is my face as I'm fucking you in the ass."



For braincleaner from that, I might have to dig up the Wonder Woman comic written by Jodi Picoult.

~

The thing I thought would be novella-sized is going to top out at about 15000 words. Oh well. As long as I finish it.

Today I watched a very small child wandering about the store. He was about a head over knee-high--maybe three years old--and completely unattended. He toddled all the way from the opposite side of the store towards me, veered off down an aisle, meandered back to the main aisle, walked almost up to my counter, headed further into the store to look at a couple of little old Italian men drinking their coffee, turned around, walked back across the floor . . . and, with his parent still not in sight, headed straight for the automatic double doors and the road directly outside.

I bolted around the counter and caught him before he could get past the first set of doors, then herded him back in--which is the point his parent turned the corner looking for him. If I hadn't been watching, that kid could've been road pancakes. Some people really should just not be allowed to have children.

~~


WTF, Dexter season finale. WTF.

I cleaned the rabbits, then stacked their cages in preparation for company tomorrow. Sambunny is now in the window--and has been stomping for the past half hour. Usually it's not so big a deal . . . but since the cages are stacked, with his smaller one on the top, any stomp he makes fucking echoes.

I tried to be nice. I figured he was just scared of new elevations, in the same way he's afraid of the outside and/or open spaces. I went in and petted him for a bit; I fed him banana chips and told him it was all okay. I even got him a box to hide in--something that's always been guaranteed to make him calm down.

Three minutes after I left, he started stomping again. He isn't afraid, he just hates it--in the same way he hates grass, water not in a bottle, feet, and keys.

He keeps it up, I might eat him.



I think I want a Christmas tree. The question remains: Do I get a bag of dirt and replant the tiny sad one I have that I haven't watered in months, in hopes that it will recover? Or do I get one of those rosemary trees I've been ogling for the past few winters?

Things to consider:

The rosemary tree is expected to die in a few months.

Then again, so is anything plantlike that I touch.

Where do I put this bundle of holiday spirit, anyway? On Sambunny's cage?

All of this requires me to go outside, and it's god-awfully cold out there!

ETA: Rosemary was expensive; I picked up a couple Christmas cactus instead. :P