So I wrote an article. Then I submitted it along with a cover letter (with mucho help from mah friends D and B, <3) to a newspaper editor in hopes of it getting published. Mostly to start some sorta portfolio. Vague hope of having people offer me money to write for them. (ha, like I can count on that...)

Yay?

But I think I'm getting there step by step.



And now, eljay, I go to sleep forevers zzzzzzznnnsnszzz.

As per wished expressed in this role play challenge, here is a snippet of about a half of this evening's short session in the RDI.

It's been several months with very few role play sessions. I am rusty and I tried my best to keep up with people. I type a lot and am awfully slow. I imagine that puts a lot of people off from role playing with me. ::shrug.::

( The log of the beginning of the night. )

A half an hour after that, I had some script issues which booted me out of the room twice in a row. Coming back, I had found that one person had left, several others were lurking, and another was engaged in a conversation with another character.

As much as I love interaction, when someone seems really into talking to whomever they are with, I don't feel like that's a sign to bug them, y'dig? So instead of role playing with myself further, I hopped on out.

I am almost dreading the post of this log. I am pretty certain that several people who interact with this character not knowing who the player is, won't after now. I suppose I'll manage. :p

rachaelwynter I haven't forgotten that promise a long time ago to send you something hand-made.

Unfortunately, I have periodically let it fall to the back of my head because I don't know what to send you. I was thinking about an 8 x 11 print of a picture I've taken but...I dunno if anything that I've taken is something you'd be interested in hanging on your wall. :/

Would you be an antelope and pick something from my deviant art gallery or lemme know what kind of pictures you'd be interested in?

Also: who wants to be my sent-notes-random-post-cards-cards-whatever-old fashioned pen pal?

Also, also: I forgot to thank you guys for your comments to my mother's tribute and the reactions there of. It really was amazing and made me all happy-tingly. Thank you!

In her email to me, Tara Rynieyn addressed the very thorny issue of Dragon's Mark roleplayers spending too much time OOC in The Lobby instead of roleplaying in IC rooms. She touched on the problems with multi-character syndrome. More importantly, she expressed her concerns about closed-off cliques, insular storylines, and roleplaying in a cocoon.

These are all concerns that have been voiced by many disheartened roleplayers lately. Unfortunately, the response to these concerns has often been, "I don’t see the problem." I've ranted about these issues before, and I do see the problems, but the solutions escape me.

In the interest of finding a possible solution, Tara has posed a challenge.


Read the rest at life in the garden of eden.

I'm in a totally blah mood at the moment. Just frustrated with.. things.

Frustrated with art, because I just tried to make a video of me doing random sketches and I hate ALL of the sketches. Though I'm still putting it up cuz I went through the freaking trouble to take the video. (Which I do with ZD Soft Screen Recording software, btw. Which is very much free!) I think it'd be easier for me to do that if I had more RAM. Yay still only having 256 MB of RAM.

Frustrated with RP, because... I dunno.. I guess tonight it just wasn't working? I wasn't feeling it? It just didn't work. And then I was all "Oh hay, I'll go play in the RDI for a change! But.. wait! I look in the list and I see the name of someone who I've pretty much given up RPing around. No, it's beyond giving up RPing with them. If I wasn't RPing with them? That'd be fine, but it goes beyond that. This person has to steal every spotlight for themselves, this person just always has to be the ... well I don't want to be too specific here. But it's to the point I don't even feel comfortable playing in the same room with them. That it's just a waste of my time, especially after trying to talk to them about my concerns (on more than one occasion) and pretty much receiving a "Yeah, whatever." Attitude.

Frustrated with everything else. Life feels monotonous. It's the same thing every day. Every day. Makes me feel like I'm going to crack sometimes. Nothing's changing in the near future either... so it's just.. more or less the same thing all the time. And people like to make it seem easy. Oh yes... They toss a sentence of advice my way and that's supposed to solve my problems! That's supposed to be the quick fix! When life sucks all we have to do is wave a magical wand around and BAM, fix'd!!

Don't have a job? Wave that wand! You have one now!

Feel depressed? Wave that wand! Now you're happy!

Being screamed at? Having people walk all over you? Well, duh. Do I have to say it? *nudges the wand*

I may do something strange and totally out of my comfort zone soon though. Just.. to do something.. different. Spark change. It involves a submission of writing to a newspaper. Possibly. I'm not getting my hopes up though. After all, L is obviously stupid and has no idea what she's doing simply because she doesn't have a college education. Without some degree in writing I may as well be a monkey bashing my feet into a typewriter.

Which brings me to yet another rant. Next time someone acts like I'm totally horrible or stupid or less of a person SIMPLY BECAUSE I haven't been to college, and you know, DON'T WANT to go to college? I'm going to possibly rip their face off. Especially the people who went to college and now have dead end jobs. Yeah, did them lots of good eh? I really hate it from *strangers* most of all, who are trying to make casual conversation.

Them: So, you going to college?

Me: Nope.

Them: Oh.. *sympathetic and/or judgmental sound/look*

Me: *seethes*

Okay, so before I go and wig out too much more, here is video of crappy sketches for your viewing displeasure. Yey..

First official "best" first photos taken with the Canon!

















PS, half of our area of Florida seems to be on fire. Awesome. There's smoke billowing in the distance from our backyard. It's close, but not close enough for me to feel too panicky.

I asked Shawn's father, "Should be worry about packing up, or starting too? Just in case?" And he's like, "Yeah, when they knock on the door and tell us we gotta go."

Okay.

I guess the good thing is, if things turn really ugly--I can totally take some awesome shots of it.

(In the long run, homes, computers, clothes, and belongings are not as awesome as not being burned to death.)

WHAT IS THIS IN THIS CANON BOX?



OOOH, IT'S BRINGING SEXY BACK!

Some of you may remember my post a while back about Raven, our getting-elderly-pee machine.

The issue wasn't that Raven was going outside the litter box purposefully, the issue was it seemed to be such a struggle to get into the box, she'd hang half her ass off the side (because she'd only go as far as RIGHT at the front) and then pee. Without squatting. So of course, there she'd be IN the litter box, peeing...out of it.

We've mostly solved that issue with a random find at a local pet store. This experiement has been running since a few days after asking advice and I gotta say, it's been pretty kick ass.

This dog litter box.





Yes. Dog. I am so far behind the 'pet times,' I guess. I hadn't a clue that they were making dog litter boxes. The one we have as pictured above is roughly as deep on the back and sides as the largest cat litter box, but without the huge wall of plastic at the front for Raven to jump over.

In fact, I'm not sure if you can tell by the picture, but there's a little plastic piece that fits over the opening that can be removed too--forming a lip that's nearly flush with the floor. Maybe no higher than an inch or two. Essentially, any cat with joint problems or too old to jungle-gym all over the place just to go poop can waltz right in and go.

With the old litter box, I was cleaning up her pee on the mat (a little blue mat that picks up some of the litter from their paws) four or five times a day. Now, with the newer, lower doggy litter box I might catch her having an accident once a week. With the added bonus of the puppy training pads around the front, I have even less clean up than before.

This dog litter box was a large--apparently you can order much, much larger ones. This will set you back $30 dollars, but, for Shawn and I, that really wasn't much to ensure our ol' kitty comfort and ease. Flora took to it in seconds too. So that's one worry out of the way.

It's heavy duty plastic and really durable so far, even with all the scratching and clawing. It's surprisingly light and easy to pick up when empty and clean. I really, really, really recommend this instead of the usual cat litter boxes if you have room for it and don't mind the fact there's no cover for it.

In other pet news: Some of you may recall that I was trying to move Nugget from a mostly seed and some pellet diet, to an complete pellet diet. We figured out what was wrong with the first set of pellets: they came in three colors, two shapes. Red, green as little beads and yellow/beige as banana shaped as well as smelling like fruit. He would eat all the red and green and leave the banana. So when he ran out of the little round red and green pellets he'd behave as if he were starving to death, tweeting and chirping and chirping and tweeeeeeting--leaving the 'naner shaped ones. So we didn't get it at first, as his food bowl would still be pretty full.

Eventually, we caught on and changed him over to Zupreem pellets. These pellets are round only with pieces of real dried fruit mixed in. He eats all of them without issue and we haven't fed him any seeds at all for over a week and a half. I'm very relieved we figured things out, as we realized that seed diets were simply awful for birdies.

And that's it on the pet front!

For the tl;dr crowd: Cat's peeing less due to a doggy litter pan and the bird's now eating an all pellet & fruit diet. Mel's a crazy animal lady. Blahblahblah.

P.S RANDOMRANDOMRANDOM: MY CAMERA WASN'T DELIVERED FRIDAY SO IT MIGHT COME TODAY AND I'M STILL EXCITED OH LAWD.

Thank you for the six am's wiping up baby puke, patting backs and warming bottles with one slipper on and one slipper off.

Thank you for silently crying along side us when we wouldn't stop at four in the morning.

Thank you for changing 230293023920392039203 diapers full of poop.

Thank you for cleaning the snot from our noses.

Thank you for taking warm, clean face cloths to our filthy little hands and wondering with much amusement what you'll ever do with us.

Thank you for the tears hidden behind closed doors or turned backs and all the, "Mommy'll be there in a minute, she just needs a few seconds."

Thank you for sacrificing decades of your life to make sure we don't grow up to be monsters.

Thank you for second chances--either mine, for being an idiot child, or yours--for whatever reason. Raising a child is never easy, nor is being human. Some times we make mistakes with our lives. Bad things happen, but you're our mother and it's hard to hate you.

Thank you for letting us make those mistakes with those friends you knew were bad news, that boy you saw right away that would break our hearts, or letting us date that girl you tried to warn us was going to be bad news. Letting us fall and stumble for the first time must have been so very hard for you.

Thank you, most of all, for being a mother.

Thank you, Mom, for being my mother.

By the way.

I stole a dragon's egg.

Sooo...

I sketched an elf, and also made video of said sketching of said elf, blah de blah. Video is here. "Finished Product" is here.

I'd say something here to make this entry worth posting, but I can think of nothing. Anything on my mind is stuff best said not quite so publicly, so yeah.

I have entirely too many links in my bookmarks folder so I'm going through and deleting a lot of them. However I did find something that might be lolz for you all.

World's Worst Metaphors

Oh, and here's something nice for the artists!

Art Tutorials Wiki

You will need one microwave, one packet of microwavable oatmeal and either the amount called for of water or milk found on the back of the package, (your preference) for making your oatmeal.

Step 1
Blearily search through packets of half-opened angel hair pasta, push aside those odd long bbq matches and shove the macaroni out of the way. Find oatmeal box.

Step 2
Remove one packet of oatmeal and haphazardly replace the oatmeal box in between the mess of crap you just dug it out of.

Step 3
Straighten out all the boxes that have now fallen over.

Step 4
In my case, I like milk in my oatmeal instead of water. So I shuffled off to our fridge to get the milk. You may of course, shuffle off to your nearest water source here, instead.

Step 5
Open all of the cabinets in hopes of finding a measuring cup that is clean.

Step 6
Find measuring cup but realize it is dirty. Wash it. Dry it out.

Step 7
Fill it with suggested amount of water or milk. Pour in a--

Step 8
Get a bowl.

Step 9
Pour milk in bowl.

Step 10
Open up oatmeal package and pray to the geek gods you don't jerk it open spraying dried oatmeal all over the place. Pour into milk. I like to stir it a bit before putting it in the microwave.

Step 11
Read instructions. Instructions say 1 to 2 minutes. Now, I like my oatmeal thick. Watery isn't my thang, and the last time I made it, it turned out this way. So, I choose 2 minutes.

Step 12
During the two minutes, I like to take this time to put everything away.

Step 13
Open microwave door. Notice swiftly after two minutes there is oatmeal plastered to the ceiling, the sides, the glass dish, cooked to the edges of the bowl and literally none in the bowl itself...

Step 14
Wash out bowl. Wash out microwave. Trudge back to the fridge for milk and get another packet of oatmeal. Measure milk, so on and so forth.

Step 15
Pour milk into bowl, except this time, pour too fast. Notice that there is hardly any milk in the bowl but milk all over the kitchen cabinet and dripping onto the floor.

Step 16
Clean up milk.

Step 17
Remeasure milk. Pour again. S l o w e r this time.

Step 18
Open packet. Except, not really. The strip you've torn off the top didn't open the packet.

Step 19
Search utility drawer for scissors, not trusting yourself to try to open it again due to common issues with flying oatmeal after suddenly opened container.

Step 20
Cut open packet, pour in.

Step 21
MICROWAVE FOR ONE MINUTE. ONLY.

Step 22
Remove from microwave and resolve never to make oatmeal again. For at least a month.

How has your morning been? :D

As I said before in a previous entry I was going to take some really old writing and rewrite it with my current skills. Well... my old writing is really terrible and hollow and insubstantial so already I've managed to take a few lines and expand that to a few paragraphs. I may or may not (probably will) continue, but I think I have enough now to show a difference.

Alright, and this is actually pretty embarrassing for me, so I ask that you not be... awful, in regards to the old writing. You can laugh, but don't be cruel. I was 13-14 at the time, I didn't know what I was doing, the characterization was bad, there's no description, it's all cheesy dialouge, and anything you point out about it? I already know. I've already laughed at it and had my soul cry some because of it. :D

The re-written stuff, which doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the scene, especially since I'm essentially having to revamp it all, you are more than welcome to offer constructive criticism to. After all, this is an exercise in improvement in writing.

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kinokofry
Art and comics by Rebecca Clements

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All about Mario Kart Wii: challenge, chat & have fun

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Post and peruse Polaroid photos