Rat Creature's Journal

At least I'm fairly sure that I didn't just imagine its existence. It was drawings of HP magical creatures, but done in a style of an old bestiary, i.e. the art was faking to be excerpts from an old book about magical creatures from the HP universe. The art looked like old vintage prints and there might have been bits of text too, though I'm not sure about that. At first I suspected it might have been one of gnatkip's pieces, but I haven't found it there, so that doesn't seem to be the case.

Does anyone know which fanart I'm taking about? For all I know there could be several with this premise, as it seems a really obvious thing to do, and in that case I'd like to see any variations on this theme too, but mainly I want to look at the cool fake-bestiary again that I seem to remember... And if I somehow hallucinated this and it doesn't exist, why on earth not?? Really there should exist HP bestiaries with vintage pictures.

This is what happens if you don't tag compulsively, you never find things again. I really should start again to tag all art I look at, just like I do with fic.

Also, and this is a totally random topic shift, I got a tiny tomato plant yesterday. Not that I have a garden or anything, but I thought that maybe I could attempt to grow one in a largish flower pot in my kitchen, which is really sunny and there is a good spot for it near the window where it isn't in the way. I suspect that even with the large pot I choose to put it in it probably won't grow as well or as large as it would in a garden, but I thought it'd be nice to see something grow, and I'm not really a flower person. I mean, if it does lead to some fresh tomatoes that would be great, but it wouldn't be a big loss of an investment if it turned out that tomatoes really need an actual garden with real beds, after all it was only 60 cents for the plant, plus the 80 cent for the bamboo stick I also got with the optimistic anticipation that it might grow successfully and I'd have to bind it to something, like all the tomato plants I've seen in gardens are. I guess I'll see how it goes soon enough.

Aaaah, I was so squicked by this ep, ( spoilers for SPN 3x15 )

Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard & Steampunk!Puddlejumper
Media used: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint
Rating/warnings: G
Notes/comments: I did this for the prompt "Victorian steampunk AU" for the SGA fanart fest Painted Spires. Admittedly mechanical pterodactyls aren't the most efficient way for a flying machine, Steampunk or otherwise, and not a very likely or even possible path technology would take from an SF standpoint, but this way was much cooler visually than merely changing the puddlejumpers with pipes or gauges or whatever. I mean, they more or less look like flying lunch boxes. Not really realistic technology, but this is Stargate after all, and I'm pretty sure John would think that mechanical, flying dinosaurs were cool.

The original is 30x40cm, so unfortunately I had to scan it in two parts, and you can see a slight line where I merged, because I fail at digital manipulation and didn't know how to make the two parts fit completely seamless.

Preview:
( The image and a higher resolution detail are behind the cut. )

When people link to their journal posts containing stories or art, some link not the "plain" entry, but to the "reply mode" version, i.e. you get an URL with "?mode=reply" at the end, a comment form below, and don't see any previous comments. Also, and that is the main reason why I hate the practice, the title of the browser window will be "Post Comment" rather than the subject line of the entry, which commonly is the LJ name plus the title of the work. I get the idea behind linking to the reply form-- people think it encourages comments to have the comment field right there, but the downside is, one, that if you open links in tabs (like when you click several potentially interesting links on your f-list while scrolling down) you can't see in your tab what you have open to easily click the tab to pick it to read, and two, even more annoying for me, if you bookmark the page you won't get the subject line as link text but will have to edit that link text line manually, and edit the URL manually to get the plain one, though that is quicker as you just have to delete a bit.

I bookmark almost every story I finish reading and tag them. Normally I can highlight the summary, click the bookmark button and get the right link text (provided the author didn't put "yay! fic" or something random in their fanfic subject line, which is another annoyance) plus the highlighted summary as description, and just add the tags, whereas with the reply mode link, I highlight the summary, click the bookmark button, then get the wrong link text, have to edit the URL to get a plain bookmark, click back to the window itself to copy the subject line, click back to the tagging dialog, delete the "Post Comment" link text and paste in the right subject. So it is two clicks, two deletions and one c&p action more effort, which, unless the story or art was very nice, puts me in a frame of mind to skip the commenting this was meant to encourage.

Is anyone else annoyed every time they land on a reply page when clicking a link rather than the journal entry proper?

The latest incident of this I've noticed was in this week's CSI: New York, but it's not really specific to that ep, so I don't think it needs a spoiler cut. So once again they examine photos taken by bystanders on their cell phones for evidence, and this is related to that weird "endless zoom and image enhancement" phenomenon in procedurals (and wow, do I wish photos and video really worked like that, that you somehow could extract all potential information rather than all actual information recorded, because then if you had a reference picture of an object and needed to see the detail of some part of the mechanism rather than the whole thing you could just zoom instead of cursing about how few easy to find photos there are just showing a small part of a thing in great detail), but I don't mean that exactly, though it is also a pet peeve of mine. It's that on top of the endless detail it never seems to happen that a significant portion of their relevant photos just suck too much, like maybe blurry because the person wobbled too much, completely over or under exposed, etc. This somehow annoys me because random tv people are apparently much better at taking snapshots than actual people, even if they are just using cell phones, are in a crowd, and not all sober.

Also, ( and this is a bit more specific so I cut, )

To My Destiny, by Kodiak Bear. Gen. (ca. 8,800 words)
In this AU Janus convinced the Ancients to allow the use of his time travelling technology and they took Atlantis into the future, to present day Earth, when they continue the fight. It's an interesting premise and the Ancients here are just the right mix of ruthless and creepy but not actually bad guys.

Guardians of a rare thing, by Livia Penn. Het, Ronon Dex/Samantha Carter. (ca. 6,200 words)
This goes AU from Return I: Ronon comes to Earth rather than stay in Pegasus. Ireally like this take on Ronon at the SGC, and his perspective of Earth.

The Great Pegasus Train Robbery, by Sholio. Gen, team. (ca. 10,500 words)
This humor story casts the team as train robbers in the Old West, and they aren't very good at being bandits, but their efforts are very entertaining.

Knights Errant, by Sholio. Gen. (ca. 5,300 words)
So this is a Knight Rider fusion, with Rodney as the car, John as the driver. And okay, the story doesn't really have much of a plot beyond the setup of John meeting the car, but well, I think the scenario is awesome. (Don't judge me, okay? I liked the series as a kid...)

Bright Wings, by Snarkydame. Gen. (ca. 7,000 words)
In this AU Pegasus cultures are squatting in Atlantis, rather than it lying abandoned. It goes further AU than that because the expedition members are among the residents too, with the team running a salvaging operation looking for bits of Ancient tech in the older, submerged parts of the city, but the story still mixes in enough elements from canon Pegasus cultures and Ancient and Atlantis tech that the scenario isn't just some generic fantasy type of city.

Mona Lisa Box, by Tzzz. Slash, Rodney McKay/John Sheppard. (ca. 14,000 words).
This is a fusion between Terminator: The Sarah Conor Chronicles and SGA, and it is a rather creepy love story, with a great twist on the origin of Skynet. I was a bit bothered by the implications the ending had for Rodney's characterization (I don't want to spoil it by being more specific), but apart from that I enjoyed it.

Almost All Grown Up, by Xparrot. Gen, team. (ca. 5,900 words)
I really like AUs with John as a Pegasus native, and making John a Genii, but tell the story from Teyla's Athosian POV, when we as readers know there is more to the Genii, was a narrative ploy I really enjoyed.

( spoilers for SPN 3x13 Ghostfacers )

Fandom: DCU (Green Arrow)
Characters/Pairings: Roy Harper (back when he was Speedy)
Media used: Wacom tablet in GIMP
Rating/warnings: PG, I guess, for drug use
Notes/comments: This took me a really long time, and I don't just mean that I first had the idea for this in 2006. I have no idea what I am doing wrong that digital coloring takes me so long, isn't it supposed to be efficient? I suppose it's one of the pitfalls of being self-taught. Anyway, it's Roy during the famous heroin addict story line. As always, feedback is very welcome.
Preview:
( the image and high resolution details are behind the cut )

I follow Dark Roasted Blend, because it often has cool photos and links, however yesterday it featured parasites, which is kind of gross, but okay, so I read about a bunch of parasites.

And this is apparently old news, only I still did not know of this cat parasite, toxoplasma gondii, that also uses humans as intermediate hosts, and is known to change behavior in rats and mice (making them loose their fear of cats, so that they get eaten by the final host the parasite needs). It's apparently still speculative whether the toxoplasmosis disease caused by this also affects behavior in humans, though some scientists apparently claim to have observed correlations showing this, but still. The prevalence of humans with antibodies to this parasite, i.e. they either were infected or still are, is really high, actually over fifty percent where I live (more widely spread than in the US where it's a bit over twenty percent according to what i read), it is kind creepy. I mean, it's more likely than not that I was or still am carrying parasites that potentially can make cysts in your brain to change brain chemistry... Maybe the Goa'uld are less science fiction like than I though. Eeep.

( cut because of spoilers for a fairly recent storyline )

My to-read pile of actual books is getting rather smallish. I mean, I still haven't read Water Logic by Laurie Marks, and Amazon assures me that my copy of the newest Dresden Files will get to me in the near(ish) future, but I'm looking for recommendations what to read after that. And since my f-list is much more widely read than me, I thought it can't hurt to ask.

As for what I'm looking for, the most important thing for me to enjoy a book is that there is at least one likable main POV character to identify with. Generally I can't stand books where the hero is a jerk, or you end up hating everybody. I also dislike ambiguous endings. There are exceptions to that, but in general I prefer plots to be resolved when the book ends, unless it's setup for the sequel. Also, I prefer there to actually be a plot with stuff happening rather than all internal and relationship conflicts. And for the plot to make sense and have not too many holes. OTOH I can overlook slightly clunky language (see the above example of the Dresden Files, though the later novels aren't quite as bad as the earlier ones). I guess I'm rather lacking in avantgarde sensibilities...

As for genres, I like sf and fantasy, unless the worldbuilding sucks, but I also like mysteries, though not so much the serial killer genre. Thrillers rarely do anything for me, nor does romance as the main plot. Another of my quirks is that I don't cope well if a ton of characters are introduced in quick succession. I have nothing against an epic scale in principle, if characters are added slowly, but I don't remember names easily, something which results in me being confused a lot with a certain kind of mystery for example, where you'd be introduced to a dozen people over a few pages.

So do you have any suggestions for me?

I was perusing DC's June solictations, trying to decide whether I should get Trinity or not -- on one hand I quite like Busiek, and also like stories featuring Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, otoh it's another weekly title from DC, so that's a lot of additional comics to buy -- when I got stuck on how Superman's hair looks on that cover: As if he was channeling Wolverine (well, minus the cool claws, but still).

It's been a while since I've made icons for others to grab, but I just spent some time catching up with the webcomic Two Lumps: The Adventures of Ebenezer and Snooch by J. Grant and Mel Hynes, and thought while reading that some of the images would make good icons. Also, if you're like me and somehow missed this webcomic, you should check it out.

Just comment if you take one (or more), say if you're willing to share, otherwise the icon belongs to the first person to claim it, and of course you can modify them any way you want.

Some examples:


( all icons behind the cut )

To keep the comments by people taking them in once place despite x-posting to two journals, I've disabled comments in the IJ post and enabled anonymous/Open ID comments for the LJ post. Sorry for the added inconvenience for people only or primarily using IJ, but more people are reading my journal on LJ.

Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis / His Dark Materials
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, the team's dæmons Nioke, Keho, Tykallita, and Imara
Media used: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint, a little bit colored pencils
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: This is an illustration for Trinityofone's SGA/HDM story Dæmonology, John and Teyla and their respective dæmons are sparring with each other, while Ronon's and Rodney's dæmons watch (these two themselves are somehow offscreen). The story itself is McKay/Sheppard slash, but the picture is very much gen.

The faint, yet still annoying line in the middle where the colors don't quite match is there because the paper of the original is of a larger format than my scanner, so I had to scan it in two parts, and didn't manage to make them fit perfectly.

Astrid helped me fix some perspective and relative size and positioning problems in an earlier pencils sketch of this. The illustration is much better for it. Any remaining problems however are my fault.

Preview:
( the image and high resolution details are behind the cut )

While I'm less than thrilled (to put it mildly) with the views that SUP official expressed in that interview (I read the translated version here), I'm mostly boggled that they let someone say these things openly in a press interview. In a way it is refreshing compared to the totally vapid phrases in places like the most recent news post where they try to pretend they care about the users without saying much of anything.

I'm so frustrated. I'm in the process of drawing an illustration for Trinityofone's SGA/HDM story Dæmonology, and it has John and Teyla and their respective daemons sparring with each other and you can see Ronon's and Rodney's dæmons watching (these two themselves are somehow offscreen), and it's been an exercise in frustration.

There's the two humans fighting in the background plus a snake and a mongoose in action in the center, a wolf and a mouse watching in the foreground, with their relative sizes dependent on perspective, then there's the stupid foreshortening making everything harder, and I've been trying to get the rough pencils finished for *days* now. (Yes I'm that slow/inept.)

I suck at perspective. I tried constructing their relative sizes in relation to the eyelevel, and so on, but it never quite works. I've done all the different elements several times now, I have like twelve pages with sketched people and animals by now, sometimes everything, sometimes just one part, and I think I arrived at something that doesn't look too horribly wrong, though it doesn't really fit completely with my perspective help line constructions either, but now I'm wondering whether I should just proceed or go to find some knowledgeable artbeta opinion pointing out the errors.

I mean, I'm not sure if I'd have the motivation to start over yet again, if it was seriously wrong. I just want to finally get to the fun parts of drawing the details, and then inking and coloring it, because I am sick of mentally rotating cubes for foreshortening and to figure out relative sizes and such. This is supposed to be fun, right? Who cares about perspective... (gah, I'm starting to sound like the people posting their fanfic without a spell check. *cringes*)

I hate perspective and foreshortening so much. (I know I would probably hate these less if I practiced more, but I'm lazy.)

Not fanfic, but art: Charles Schulz's Watchmen by Evan Shaner. Go look, it's great.

So LJ discontinued the option for new Basic, i.e. ad-free accounts. Without announcing it beforehand, or even saying so outright in the actual news post (they used advertising speak describing this as "Other changes you may have noticed are the logged-out homepage and registration process for new users. We streamlined and simplified things so that now it’s faster and easier than ever to create a LiveJournal account." *snort*).

Considering how they pressed ads into more and more places and made them harder to remove also for paid users ever since the "no-ads" policy was first softened with the "Plus" account, like ads on the main site standard pages rather than just journals, this persistent snap.com hassle, all the "sponsored" communities and v-gifts, the "partnership links" like to MSN, and so on, I'm not surprised, but that they don't even realize that this is a major change for the site and its culture is disheartening.

And I've seen in comment threads a response "well, you can't expect a business to let you use up resources without anything in return, so it's no wonder they finally discontinued the ad-free accounts", but that completely overlooks that free users on a site like LJ aren't *leechers*, like say non-registered downloaders on a free file storage site, they provide the content that makes other users (some of those paying) and casual visitors (some of those seeing ads when browsing elsewhere on the site even if they enter the site through an ad-free LJ) come to LJ in the first place.

And maybe they did a cost/benefit analysis and decided it's not tenable to have free accounts anymore (not that they communicated that anywhere I could see, they seem to assume their users are too stupid for three choices in the sign-up and thus one needed to be removed), but it is just not true that they don't get anything in return for their services from free users. It may or may not be "enough" in their financial bottom line, but if all the free users connecting on LJ around a topic decide to go to elsewhere for whatever reason (better features, less ads, whatever), it's not as if the paid ones into that topic would stay either. For example, even while I'm not into fiber arts and crafts, even I noticed how many knitting-related things moved to Ravelry, and I suspect a ton of users who were on LJ mostly for knitting may have gone away completely, so now casual site visitors on the look for knitting stuff like a pattern, won't land through Google in some LJ comm and look at LJ's ads, but on Ravelry's site. A social site is nothing without user content.

This doesn't affect me much in practice, because I haven't created a new LJ account since I got my first one, and I surf with AdBlock on anyway, but it is still aggravating.

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it would be you need to realize some vague idea. Or at least it is like that for me, so if I come across something that is visually stunning, unusual, interesting, seems like a good inspiration, or a possible reference for something I might draw some day I keep it.

Like, if I'm at a used book store, I habitually look if there's a bin of old cheap National Geographic or other travel magazines and leaf through them to see whether any have cool photographs, if I see an interesting picture on the internet I will safe it, and so on.

Obviously after a time this results in an organizational problem if you ever want to find anything again. So I'm wondering how others deal with this.

It's not so bad with the books, I just have a shelf with books I got for their pictures, like for example collections of photographs from the 1920s, 30s and so on, books of animals, places, people, cars, design... It's harder for the magazines because things like National Geographic aren't topic specific, so I never know whether I decided to keep some issue for pictures of some place or some animal, or even whether it was in the title article. Which makes finding things again a bit harder.

Digital stuff is the least problematic in some respects, because I have created a bunch of folders labeled by topic for photos (reference for buildings & cityscapes, landscapes, actions, clothing, animals, plants, objects, symbols, textures,... with some having subfolders) and some other folders for art by other people, and yet another set of folders for fandom character reference, so it's not hard to find which folders to browse. The main problem is that I don't always know where I got some image from, because it's so much easier to just save a picture than to save it and add something to its meta-info field. That isn't a big problem if I just use it as inspiration or reference some parts of it, but if say a landscape photo was to serve as main reference for a drawn background I might want to acknowledge that, yet often by the time I use something I have no idea where it came from anymore.

Photos I've taken myself before having a digital camera are more of a mess, because those are mostly in big boxes, and most are kind of boring holiday photos with some cool landscapes and animals scattered inbetween. But the worst are the boxes of, well I guess "junk" fits, i.e. stuff I've kept for because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Much of that is also paper, like exhibition catalogs, flyers that looked interesting, clippings from newspapers or magazines, posters, but there's also stuff like feathers with a nice pattern, stones, tins, even some bit of metal that rusted in an interesting way, and so on. I mean, I try to keep the non-paper junk down to one box or so, because I really don't need to go down the road of people who end up smothered by their packrat piles collapsing on them, but well, I'm not a very tidy person to begin with, so it's an uphill battle. I guess what I really need would be del.icio.us tagging for RL objects and/or a physical search engine, but I fear that level of virtual home and computer merging is still a way off into the future.

So, how do you deal with organizing your reference and inspirational collection so that is actually useful for you rather than a pile of messy clutter? Do you have some kind of system? Or just really good spatial memory?

( spoilers for SGA 4x20 )

Totally unrelated to SGA I learned a new piece of trivia today: I've always been vaguely puzzled by the color name "ivory black" because it seemed contradictory (ivory not being black and all). Then today I happened to look at the label on the back of a tube of acrylic ivory black, one that went into all kinds of technical detail that I have no idea what it means (it has some kind of numbers for hue, value, chroma and codes for the pigments and symbols for opaqueness and lightfastness and so on) but also had a list of ingredients and apparently that black is made from charred animal bones. Hence the name "ivory black".

And I get that historically, though I'd have thought that by now the color would be synthetic. I mean, it's not they are still grinding up lapis lazuli for ultramarine (well, I guess there might be people who are into restoration and such and make their colors themselves from scratch with pigments or specialty producers who still do that, but usually it's synthetic these days). So it's kind of gross that they still use animal bones, but that what the tube says in its ingredient list under the "vehicle: acrylic polymer emulsion" there's "pigment: amorphous carbon produced by charring animal bones". So I'm using the same pigment as my prehistoric ancestors, I guess, only in a prepared polymer solution rather than charring some hunted mammoth's bone myself. Still in my mind "gross" kind of wins out over "artistic connection across millennia of history".