Rat Creature's Journal

My elderly rat Emil (now two and a half) who had a remarkably robust health until now, has started to develop the usual awful breathing problems of older rats. He's now on the second antibiotic, after the first did nothing, and we've been playing out a daily drama with me trying to get the disgusting stuff into him.

The first antibiotic was at least only a small amount (0.2ml) but with the second I have to give 1ml. Supposedly this one is designed to be given orally to pets and tastes okay, but it smells disgusting. I have never given this before, and I got a drop on my t-shirt that Emil spit out in his struggling, and the mere smell is horrible. Sort of like a fake not-vanilla, only chalkier. It's really hard to describe. As this is a rat who notices fruit starting to go off way before me, it's not wonder he's resisting. Yesterday the vet got it into him, but that was with two people, i.e. the assistant immobilized Emil, and the vet squeezed the antibiotic into his mouth. Living alone I don't have that advantage, and Emil is also much less intimidated with me. On the bright side he didn't pee on me like he did with the vet's assistant either, so in that sense less terror is good.

Still, I got a reasonable amount of the stuff into his mouth and held him upright a bit afterwards so he had to swallow instead of being able to spit it out or wipe it off, and I hope it'll be enough, and that it works.

I'm beginning to feel oddly understanding about the stupid "sex kitten" poses female characters are so often stuck with on covers and such. It's not that I'm getting fond of the sexism, but it is frelling hard to come up with engaging poses when you just want to draw some character, portrait-like I mean rather than some scene with an inherent action. And while the message isn't great, at least the stripper body language says something rather than having the character stand around dumbly, looking very boring.

How do people who are good at portraits figure out how to arrange the character? I totally fail at this. My attempts always look stiff or stupid or both.

Is it me, or is the Kirk/Spock archive down? I was trying to follow some links in a recs post, but it is just not working for me. Wraithbait neither. It's an anti-archive conspiracy. :(

I hate, hate, hate when supposedly water resistant ink turns out to be not water-resistant at all when you use it. I know, I know you should test every contingency, but I unwisely (very, very unwisely) assumed that when I put that black ink on paper with paint (the goal was to then scratch in the black ink) it would then be possible to paint some water-soluble color on top of the scratched off areas.

However it turns out that this black ink will get liquid again when painted on if it is painted over other paint. So the black seeped back into the areas that I spent hours carefully scratching and crosshatching a picture into with a razor blade. It was a Robin portrait that looked rather cool with the white on black, and I just wanted to give it some red and yellow color highlight effects. Now it is a blotch. Well, not completely a blotch, I may be able to rescue something, but it certainly won't look like I wanted it to... waaah!

Of course I should know by now that it always comes back to bite you if you are too lazy to actually test how different colors react onto each other, and just assume that they behave in a certain way, but still.

At first I thought it was just Gmail that had trouble loading for me, but their search engine is timing out on me as well. And I seem not alone. I actually found twitter useful for just about the first time and searched there for Gmail and Google complaints happening right now, and it seems I'm not alone with this problem.

Does anyone on my f-list speak French and could tell me why this LJ entry has one of my HP drawings hotlinked? (It's one of illustrations I did for Beth's In From the Cold.) I noticed this a couple of days ago when I looked at my website referrer logs. Unfortunately my webhost doesn't let me disable hotlinking in the usual ways you see in anti-hotlinking tutorials, and so I tend to just ignore the occasional random hotlinking from outside fandom (usually it's some jerk that includes my stuff in their "ew, someone draws superheroes gay" lulz, so there's no hope of fixing that) but this seems to be from within fandom, and somehow that makes it different for me. So two days ago I commented there and asked the poster in English to not hotlink my artwork, but it had no effect so far, and they posted in their LJ after this time, so presumably it's not a matter of internet absence over some prolonged holiday break or something. Sigh.

From what I gather the entry seems to be some sort of meta fiction in which the poster talks to the characters about a WIP and the poster is using my art as some sort of story illustration? But I'm not sure. (Gah, why has all my French knowledge vanished? I guess that happens when you don't use a language for a decade.) Anyway if it's used as fiction illustration it would be doubly annoying, because I drew this specifically for Beth's story, and don't really want to see it with random fanfic, meta or otherwise. Also, it's just rude to hotlink.

I guess I could move the file, but that would mean fixing links in at least four places (my own website, LJ, IJ, and my art blog), and that is annoying. The profile has messaging enabled so I could try that on top of my comment, or would that come across as nagging and I should just give more time? OTOH it can't take two days to get an LJ entry edited.

Anyway, this makes me cranky. I'm not even mentioned by name or got a link in the entry, so besides my sig on the art there's no credit given either, nor any way for me to hear if people who see my art there like it. *disgruntled*

Sometimes fanfic is really weird. See, I've been reading an X-Files story, which started normal enough. It was a Profiler!Mulder story with an X-Files twist in that Mulder forms some sort of psychic connection with the killers and victims, and so on, cue to Mulderangst. Which was the kind of story I wanted to read. Only then suddenly out of nowhere some green, winged horse shows up and brings Mulder to a blue anthropomorphic cat shapeshifter alien who starts talking about fighting interdimensional demons. What? Just, what? I have no idea how this continued, because the story rather lost me at that point.

What irks me most is was that I read over half of this long novel, which I thought was one thing, and then without warning it turned into something completely different. It had a summary and warnings for all kinds of things which indicated that this was a serial killer story with child molestation, but nothing mentioned mystical furry aliens fighting evil on psychic planes. Gah. What a waste of time.

I've barely gotten used to the deviantArt site arrangements (I whined about my problems navigating dA before), and now they changed their profile page layout and added new modules and widgets and stuff. Meep. It's not that I think it's worse than before, actually I haven't used it long enough yet to decide whether its functionality improved or not, it's just that I had a hard time with the site to begin with, and now they changed things on me, when I've just mostly knew where what was.

OTOH you find cool things there, like this comic page by ursulav, an excerpt of a hypothetical comic from a children's book. I now want this "Empire of Feathers" comic about "an alternate universe where birds ruled the world, and it was dark and gritty and had lots of battle scenes and intrigue and poisonings and magic, and a clan of rooster assassins that wore cloaks made of their victim's feathers" to really exist so badly. Assassin roosters!

I'm so glad I finished, scanned and submitted my yuletart picture last night, even if I stayed up until 4 a.m., because today my desktop (the computer of the mysterious, intermittent hardware problems that don't materialize in the repair place) crapped out on me again. Incidentally that is also the computer with which my scanner works. Anyway, while my desktop fails to work once again *curses the stupid piece of crap*, at least I was lucky enough that I completed my assignment before.

Coloring the yuletart thing is taking forever. I've started yesterday and been at it for hours today, and I'm still not even half finished. How can this take so long? Granted, I'm layering for livelier colors so I have to go over every area many, many times, but still.

Also, I need to learn to sit more ergonomically or something. I have this unhealthy tendency to hunch over when I do details, because I'm very shortsighted and somehow it works better to look at details without glasses, but with my eyes that means the paper being less than two centimeters away from my nose tip. Obviously my back does not thank me for that.

Yikes, I haven't updated in over two weeks. Where did October go??

Well, I did watch some tv, among other things also Heroes, but I have a real problem keeping track of things. ( some general spoilers for the third Heroes season so far )

Unrelated to anything: I was woken up this morning shortly after seven by some awful mixture people rearranging furniture and power tool noises (the walls in my place transmit sound really well) and they were *still* at it with the noise until around ten in the evening. Talking really loudly too. WTF is wrong with people? Can't they limit this to reasonable hours? Like start after eight and stop at night? Well, I guess technically they did with stopping at ten, but still! I hope whoever is moving in or renovates or whatever is causing this racket is done with it soon. </whine>

Why do they now have a tag limit?? Worse, the delicious FF extension doesn't inform you of this, it saves the tags properly and you see them if you look at it in the extension (so not cut off like too long notes), they just don't work for the tag searches, meaning I didn't notice while tagging via the extension and have no idea for how many of my bookmarks the tags don't work properly and which one I'd need to edit down to the more essential tags without going through them manually. This sucks. *grump*

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?

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.)

When I had trouble accessing Gmail yesterday afternoon I soon chalked that up to the more widespread problems accessing any Google service around here for a couple of hours, at least if you have the German T-Com as your ISP.

Okay whatever, my ISP broke their internet, it apparently happens even if they still can't explain what exactly caused the glitch. Though it is very annoying to have all Google services (not just the search engine and Gmail, but everything including Blogspot, YouTube and so on) return with DNS errors for you -- the internet looks very broken all of a sudden. Not to mention that this came on top of LJ's problems yesterday.

But a few hours later in the evening Google's search engine would load again for me, same for most of their other stuff, and I can get even to my mail through POP, which is something at least, but the Gmail webinterface still stubbornly refuses to load for me, just giving a DNS error.

This is very annoying. I also find it baffling -- how can everything be up again with the rest of the Google website, and my email be there too somewhere, seeing how I can get it through POP, but the two sides won't come together as webmail?

Gah, I hate clothing folds so much. Maybe even more than foreshortened limbs, though it's a close call. Also, why did I bother to waste ages trying to arrange these limbs and body parts correctly when it's all buried beneath all this cloth anyway? I have resorted to draping rags over a wooden puppet to see how folds may fall, and it is not even helping.

Next time I'm trying to do a slashy sketch and figure out how to make the heads and limbs fit together, it's going to involve Plastic Man. Seriously, this would be so much easier, if I could just stretch out one person as needed -- longer, shorter, thinner, whatever -- to fit the other body. And you could avoid all these annoying issues of foreshortening and perspective and bulk hiding parts of each other. It would be easier to make the pose look dynamic too.

Too bad I'm not into Plastic Man. Sigh.

Also, I fail at finding suitable reference pictures, no matter that everybody says the internet is made of porn. Of course the problem might be that I'm not looking for a sex position, but for a picture of one person restraining another against a wall with the arms held overhead by one hand, the other caressing the head, while there is ear licking going on. And from a certain viewpoint too. My google-fu it failed me. These are the moments I'm cursing descriptive writers I'm trying to illustrate.

I did find a rather cute picture of two ear-licking polar bears (unfortunately also pictures of dogs with some sort of icky skin disease -- ew). Meanwhile I tried to figure out the logistics via sligtly fleshed out stick figures, but not with great success.

I think I'm going to give up on trying to make stick figures fondle each other, and rather play another round of Samegame Hexagonized...

Sigh. I know why I like coloring digitally. I think I shouldn't have gone with turning the background dark. I thought the red Iskierka would look more dramatic against a dark background, kind of like on the book cover, but I don't think it really works. However-- no undo for coloring with acrylics. Woe! :(

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>

I just woke up from my throat and tonsils hurting. I don't feel that sick (*crosses finger that this stays so*), so maybe my tonsils will still manage to pull off some self-sacrificing immune system thing, and the cold will remain as a sore throat. Either way right now swallowing hurts. Well, I guess that's one way to keep overindulgence in sweets and food over the holidays in check. :(