beccastareyes

Finished up the meme.

Alphonse Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist for yuuo
Jeff Andonuts from Earthbound for eiviiaru
Mirrim from Dragonriders of Pern for allicapri
Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek for padparadscha

Name a fandom and I'll sketch my favorite character from it.

I just downloaded Sketchbook Express, and I want to play with it.

A friend over on DevART is doing an original character-centric art contest, patterned off of the various American-Idol-structured art contests people apparently do over DA-land*. I'm trying to decide which character to enter -- one of my favorites, but also someone who I need more art of.

Tempted towards Melisan, if only because I have him poking around LJ RPs so... well, icons.

* I was in one. Basically a case of 'everyone has a character, a theme, and two weeks to draw something'.

What I didn't get done on my last to-do list:

+ An email to people I might want to talk to regarding jobs
+ Fixing the figures in one of my papers so it can go to my Adviser for proof-reading
+ Sunday cleaning
+ Landlady discussion about subletting the apartment (getting done today)
+ Manga reading (but I read a lot of books)
+ Posting a book review

I did get two pieces of art colored, finished a set of 31 stories, and started two stories that I needed to write. Plus started some crochet projects and got my code working on real data. Then found some problems that need to get fixed.

Adding the following to it:

+ Retool my stellar occultation model to fix some of the geometric assumptions I made and better handle multiple particle size (don't worry, this makes sense to me).
+ Decide what I'm taking from the ag_over_18 swap box and post it to the community.
+ Make the horribly late post about the fabric swap box (tonight, so no one gets confused).
+ Mail out the swap box
+ Do the lineart for my MAX drawing.
+ Finish making granny squares for the vest I'm working on. (I have six or so done, the vest takes 11 full squares and 4 half-squares.)
+ Write 750 words per day, or about 5000 words this week. Of those, about 3,000 need to be on my big bang story.
+ Start the contest on my DevART site.
+ Upload at least some of the art on my personal site and post it to invoking_urania

Don't ask me why, but it does. Maybe because tonight I have two pieces of art to finish before I'm allowing myself to sign on to RPGs and such*. So I'll probably be on Skype for company.

Also, for my doll-collecting/customizing friends: I learned today that trying to take off the lipstick on a Lagoona Monster High doll requires care or you end up staining a lot of the face vinyl with a slight pink tinge. (It doesn't look that bad, since it ended up mostly in the cheek/nose/chin area where a (red-blooded) person might be a bit pinker anyway, but worth noting.)

* Except SLT. Why can't I quit you?

Anyway, I've set my goal this week as 'clean the apartment before I go away for two-three weeks for Christmas'. Which will probably mean spending at least one weekday at home scrubbing things. But, hey, such is life.

Also, for those of you of an artistic bent and who have original characters, just opened a new site, because anke, our admin, is an amazing programmer who made us something very shiny. I have a lot of fun on this every month -- basically you sign up and put profiles of your original characters*. Then, every round, you get assigned another artist to draw for and you pick one (or more) of their original characters to draw for.

I mention it because we've kind of got down to the same handful of regulars, so seeing some new faces would be nice. And I know I have artist friends here.

* I've seen RPG characters (tabletop, online and avatars on MMORPGs), characters from original fiction, original characters from fanfiction, characters from webcomics, anthropomorphic animal alter-egos, and probably other things. Basically, if you created the character, regardless of the medium and setting, it's fair game. You do need at least some characters to have reference art, but some people will post their text-only bios as well.

So, have some fail that has nothing to do with whose butts are in the chairs in DC (or Florida writing racist laws).

Fiction Ally, a HP fanfic archive, writes a grant for charity Includes such lines from the admins as "I've done the research and I'm here to tell you that there are far more sources of funding available to starving children in Africa than there are to fan-oriented websites." (Later edited out because most people were like 'Yeah, that's because feeding the hungry is more important than (over)-paying for your webhosting'.)

DeviantART displays massive ignorance about genderqueer/intersex folks... on Spirit Day Basically an almost willful misunderstanding about why someone might not want to choose 'male' or 'female', and that even the 'don't show gender' option still shows as pronoun usage. Someone seriously needs training on gender issues. (Also, seriously, it does not take much coding options to program in an 'Other'/'Unspecified' and have some (ugly) 's/he's and 'him/her's -- no one's asking to go down the list of third-gendered pronouns on Wikipedia. A small thing that creates goodwill with folks outside the gender binary.)

Cooks Source Magazine are Copyright-Violating Content Thieves Basically, writer writes an article on apple pies for her SCA site. Cooks Source takes it and publishes it, without permission or payment. Then the editor claims that anything on the interbutts is public domain (hint: it isn't unless it says it is) and she should be grateful for the exposure and that they didn't just slap on someone else's name (hint: you can't do that, even for public domain sources).

And, as a palate cleanser, have a story about my mother's cousin, who coaches high school football and is up for Boston.com's Coach of the Year. Because having his football team mentor a kid with Downs Syndrome is happy-making. I can also find you some kittens and bunnies, I guess...

Just dumped a lot of art to invoking_urania -- mostly 6 months of exchange art. I still have some fanart I drew for au_bigbang, and a ficlet I posted to fma_fic_contest

Also realized that I have proved to myself that I was suffering form mild allergies -- at least I didn't take my pill in the morning, felt unusually stuffy, so I took it and now am fine. It could well be that it was from the nap I took, and it wasn't a rigorous experiment, so I may have to repeat it. Just not on a day I plan on working.

I got The Language Construction Kit book, which was a bit overwhelming to read, but really inspired me. Darynese is pretty much mature enough that I can't tack on more major structural elements, but I have a few more things I could do -- expand the dialects and clean up my notes. Starsailor never was set out besides some basic principles, I mentioned Interling before but I have a feeling that needs me to be a better linguist to design, and there's also Nemean, an auxlang constructed from English and Mandarin* but designed to be speakable by humans and Starsailors.

I could also do something with Hinode and Hinoiri. Both would have a global language**, but probably one based on some strange reflection of Earth languages from the names. A lot of the history of the two places would be folded into languages and dialects.

* Possibly with Japanese influences (and also probably some touches of the Romance languages and the languages of the Indian subcontinent in the vocab) -- the idea was that vocabulary came from spacefaring cultures.

** Or at least a lingua franca. Delwyn's ancestors at least nominally brought most of the planet under control, so their language would probably be used much like any empire's -- as a business and trade language, even if the locals kept theirs. And the spirits' tongue would be too useful to dismiss as a trade language, since people all over Hinode would learn it. You'd get a lot of dialects and loan-words springing up, but it would let people talk to one another.

So, I mod a DeviantArt group -- it's a small group mostly set up as a fanclub for a certain series, specifically 'shipping certain characters. Aw, hell, naming names -- I mod the Slayers-TRAD group which is mainly geared towards Lina/Gourry and Zelgadis/Amelia, but allows for other ships that do not conflict with these two*. I recently affiliated our group with other Slayers fans-clubs on DevART, so we got a bit more attention.

Today I log on and have to clear out ten pictures, three or four of which are 'Here is my original character, who is Zelgadis's true love, and here is their child together'. Which... you know what? That's great if you want to draw your character, but she's off-topic for this group. And of course, because I am but a single mod, other members notice before me and I get a polite 'um... what?' from one of them.

And most of the rest of the new pictures posted today are single character shots, which are nice, but there are other spots to archive them.

* No one's asked about polyshipping that doesn't break up one of these two pairings. If someone draws or write this, I'd be for posting, but I'd probably agree to abide by a vote.