Rat Creature's Journal

So, I started reading the second part -- though I'm not that far along yet -- and I really don't get how this vampire reaction to blood is supposed to work. Apparently even a little blood, like from a paper cut, taxes their control, unless they have lots of practice like Carlisle. Okay, whatever.

But how does that work while they are in a school where half the students will bleed three to five days per month?? Granted, it's not a lot of blood, but more than from a paper cut, so they must smell that. And it's not like they growl a lot at random girls from what I gathered. Is this explained somewhere? Did I miss something? Does menstrual bloood smell icky? What? I don't get it.

Over time my AU recs page has grown somewhat large and unwieldy. Since an update is due soon, I've been wondering whether users would prefer to have my AU recs broken up in separate fandom pages, i.e. all fandoms with say more than twenty stories recced would get their own page, the rest would stay on a page for other fandoms in their own sections, as it is now. The main AU recs page would become an index linking to the fandom pages/sections, and have a "Recently Added" summary for the last update, like the update posts I do to my LJ, so that people wouldn't have to click further than the main page for the just latest recs. It would mean more clicking to see all recs, but smaller pages.

So which option would you prefer? After all, I'm not the one using the page.

(There's a poll over at my LJ, because I can't do polls here at IJ, so you can either vote over there, or just comment here.)

I want to expand the bowtruckle drawing I posted a couple of days ago into a series, because I like drawing creatures, and I think it would be fun to have something like multiple plates from this imaginary old encyclopedia from the HP universe, especially ones with slightly more obscure bests that you don't see that often featured in fanart. But I'm undecided which beast to tackle next, hence this poll over at my LJ to help me decide. (I can't do polls here at IJ, so you can either vote over there, or just comment here with your favorite creature.)

It's for a little bit of text for a HP fanart I'm doing. You remember how in my previous entry I was looking for a piece of HP fanart I remember seeing, that was drawings of HP magical creatures, but faking to be excerpts from an old book about magical creatures from the HP universe? Anyway, I still haven't found that again, but I've decided to do my own version of this, because I like drawing monsters and think it would be cool, and the underlying concept is general enough that I don't think it would be perceived as copying someone else's idea if I did another version.

I've decided to go not for a medieval bestiary, but a later style of the time when there were fledgling natural sciences and the first real encyclopedias like Diderot's with plates of observed plants and animals, a more 18th century feel. The necessary style is quite a challenge for me, mostly because I really never draw in b/w ink with lots of crosshatching which is pretty much non-optional if I want it to look even remotely reminiscent of copperplate engraving. So I spent much of today trying to get used to crosshatching, but then again, I guess artistic challenges are good even if you fall on your face, it's not like you can improve without trying. So I'm not too worried about that, even though the end result probably will not look authentic, there will be b/w pictures of magical beasts at least.

However there is another problem, and that is the text. I guess I could do just illustration plate pages on their own, but I'd rather have a little bit of text beneath. My idea was to just change the small basic information texts from "Fantastic Beast & Where to Find Them" into a more old fashioned style and remove or change the concepts cropping up that would be anachronistic for the 18th century, e.g. mentions of allergies, but I have really no clue what style and words were common in the 18th century, much less 18th century English.

Thus I wanted to ask whether there would be anyone willing collaborate with me in this, and to edit a couple of these texts to transform them into something that could be from the 18th century. Or write different ones that would work as something from an 18th century work, I'm not picky. Based on the length of the entries in FB I'm thinking that the final page layout would be the illustration plate with the bit of text beneath because the typical text there is under 100 words, but if someone wanted to write longer 18th century style articles on magical beasts, I can also imagine posting this as a true fanart/fanfic collaboration, though I'd probably still only format the first bit of text in the art itself, and then we'd post the whole as actual text along with it or something, because I think longer texts formatted as graphics are not reader friendly.

The drawing I'm currently working on is the Bowtruckle, and I might do more if this one goes well, though I haven't decided which ones, and am open to suggestions.

So, does anyone want to help create excerpts from a 18th century reference work on magical beasts?

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.

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?

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?

( a small spoiler for Kindred, part one )

Back in ancient times (okay, three years ago or so) I used to have my website setup in a way so that images like sketches or fanart and such displayed in a new pop up browser window, because personally when navigating thumbnails that just open an image, not a real page, I like not to go away from the gallery page. However I then did a a poll on this topic, and the vast majority preferred thumbnails to open the image in the same window. So I changed my site to match that preference.

However now I just found a neat javascript thing, Lightbox JS, that displays images in an overlay on the same page. If you surf with javascript turned off it'll behave just like before, so it doesn't break the basic navigation or anything like that, it's just an extra. And I'm considering to switch my site's picture galleries to this. To show the effect I created a copy of my fanart page using the script, so that you can see the effect. Just click on a link to a piece of fanart, and if you have javascript enabled, it ought to show the image in an overlay with the page underneath darkened (and please tell me if it doesn't work for you for some reason, or if there are any display problems, like distortions or whatever).

So given this alternative to the images simply opening in the same window, and having to use the back button, which do you like better?

(I have a poll over at my LJ, so you can either vote there, or just comment here.)

ETA: Just to clarify, this script does not prevent you from opening the image in a tab with a different click (at least that still works for me, it was the first thing I tried), nor does it hinder saving images or any of the other annoying things some image display gadgets will do.

Does anyone have tips or links to a tutorial or something that shows how to make things look not just wet but kind of slimy?

See, I'm attempting to draw some Temeraire fanart, namely the freshly hatched Iskierka. And I mostly have the dragon as a pencil drawing now, half out of its eggshell, though a bunch of spikes are still missing and I figure it ought to look a bit slimy still from hatching. Which somehow is harder to realize than I imagined.

This whole thing is turning out to be so much more trouble than its worth: first it took like a dozen or so thumbnail tries to get the posture not to suck completely, not to mention two attempts to make a small one work larger that failed, and I had to resort to a silly, foldable dragon wing model I made from bits of wire and paper, because I just couldn't visualize what you'd still see of the stupid wings (and they don't even show that much, though I guess that's part of the problem). Argh. </whining>

Does anyone know what happened to the reversathon.com domain? I just tried to reread a McShep Match story (for those interested, Wolf in Sheep's Clothing by ras_elased) and was cruelly thwarted by a link leading from the community into the ether of an expired domain. Did that site move? *hopeful* Or just vanish? :(

In the eternal struggle to procrastinate cleaning my kitchen, I've been thinking about redesigning my website. Because starting a complicated, complete overhaul is more like actual work, I decided to just make my very bare-bones crossover recs look a bit nicer. Currently it's all in one column, first the list of fandoms linking to the sections below, then come the actual recs. I thought it might look nicer in two column, with the fandom list to the left, the recs on the right, like this. However before I commit to this, I thought I might solicit opinions, on which you like better.

I have a poll over at my LJ, so you can either votethere, or just comment here.

I'm sure there must be a LibraryThing for music collections somewhere, so that you can tag your music to search for stuff, browse your friends' music tastes, rec things, and all that social network stuff. Especially considering that somehow exporting music collection lists from media players has to be easier than to input books. But somehow I haven't seen people link to anything like that for sharing lists of their music collections online yet. So where is that site, or which is most popular if there are several?

So my desktop computer, which is fairly new but not under its six month warranty anymore, has a problem. Sometimes it won't boot when I turn it on. It doesn't even show the BIOS screen nor the graphics card notice. The on/off switch diode lights up, and the case fan works, however I don't see the hard disk diode blinking.

So when it happened the first time out of the blue (there weren't any signs of incipient failure the last time I had turned it on) I thought the worst, tried the turning it off and on again once to no effect, and then pulled out my computer, intending to check all cables, then open it, see whether the processor fan starts, and whether maybe just some connection is loose or too much dust had accumulated or anything. So I pull it out, wriggle all the outside cables, try once again, and miraculously it starts before I even open it. And the computer worked fine, no errors, no freezing, or anything.

So I thought that maybe it was nothing after all, clearly going with my hopes for a best case scenario, because I really don't want to spend money repairing or replacing it fully or in parts. Also seeing how it is still fairly new I didn't anticipate any such extra computer costs, I'm still recovering from buying it this spring, no matter that it was a relatively cheap one as far as computers go, but it was still a big expense for me. (I did however backup the data I hadn't already.)

But then today it fails to start again. So again I try a couple of times, futilely hoping that it might resolve itself on its own like before, then pull it out, open it, and all cable connections I can see seem fine, so I try starting it while open, and again it suddenly works, and now seems to run okay. It did give me BIOS notice that I had pressed the cold reset button too often in sequence, so clearly something registered even as the computer didn't seem to do anything.

Does anyone have any idea what produces behavior like this?

Winter is upon us in the northern hemisphere, which limits the selection of affordable vegetables. Cabbage in several varieties (mostly white, red, savoy and kale) however is still plentiful and reasonably cheap here, so it features somewhat prominently in my current menu choices.

So for variety's sake I thought I'd ask my f-list for your favorite cabbage recipes. Provided the ingredients for them besides cabbage are easily available and also in my price range. I mean, cabbage with truffles and the like may be tasty, but it kind of defeats the whole point of it being an affordable vegetable.

I'm vegetarian, so any dish that absolutely relies on meat is out. Dairy is okay, though the recent soaring prices for milk and its products worked better than my ethical qualms about animal exploitation to turn my diet more vegan, so vegan would be a plus.

Is it just me, or is Dexter somehow less creepy this season? I still enjoy watching it, but season one felt creepier to me.

Because I'm still sick and feverish and break out into shivers as soon as I leave my multiple blankets, and can only sleep so many hours a day even when sick, I've been amusing myself with online games.

So far I've played the BBC mystery games Death in Sakkara and The Seven Noble Kinsmen, Grow Island (I'm pretty sure I've played all earlier grow versions as well previously), Escape from Octilien, DayMare Town and a few other escape games I found linked from jayisgames.com, like the Submachine series.

I'm looking for more entertaining games, that work under Linux (i.e. most Flash games will be fine, Shockwave otoh won't work), aren't too hard or frustrating and don't require mouse dexterity or being fast with clicking and such (I'm using my laptop with a touchpad while in bed shivering so having to navigate some arrow quickly while clicking on things is pretty much out). Do you have any recs?

I just went to the Google News site, and it loads, but doesn't aggregate anything, i.e. the modules displayed but there's no news in them. Is this just me? Like maybe I accidentally changed some mysterious setting or something? Or do others have this problem too?

Since my f-list doesn't seem to have many Avatar the Last Airbender fans on it, I didn't see any mention that the third season was finally airing, and only noticed with a couple of days delay. Anyway I now watched 3x01, and am really glad it's back. The season opener seemed mostly about setting the stage, and recapping where we at, which was fine by me. Anyway, yay for Avatar being back!

I also watched the Heroes second season premiere, but I'm not really fannish about it in the sense that I read fanfic or discussion. I think that's because while I like the characters okay, I don't really have a favorite I could identify with, which is a prerequisite for me to feel fannish, even for ensemble shows. Besides the Heroes cast is so large that it is hard for me to really identify with anyone. I mean, in one sense it is cool that the universe isn't claustrophobic but I don't get as invested emotionally.

Anyway, about the season two premiere, ( cut for spoilers )

Finally, I've seen some people talk about that new show, Reaper, and they seemed entertained, but I've been wary of giving it a try because it's comedy, and my embarrassment squick often has problems with setups like this. For example I couldn't get into Psych when I watched the pilot and the first episode, because the whole premise was leading to situations that just made me cringe. So has anyone on my f-list watched it and could tell me whether the humor relies a lot on socially awkward situations/misunderstandings and such? If yes, there's not reason for me to even give it a try.

I'm terribly uncreative. :( I'm not even decided whether I should go for a simply practical and descriptive name, say "drawingpractice" (luckily still barely within the 15 character limit) or something more whimsical like say "slothsdraw" (I feel a deep kinship towards sloths in my drawing habits...*g*)

Feel free to offer names even if you are not interested in joining.

poll @ my LJ