tuesday 06 july at 11:27pm
subject: cats and boys and stars
listening to:ok, it’s alright with me <3 (eric hutchinson)
feeling:somber, but productive
Stuff, stuff, stuff!
Yesterday was sort of a rocking day for my creative juices.
First, I spit out a layout that had been sitting in my head because of the background I had been using on my desktop. No point to it; it’s far too small to ever be functional for oms’ content, but it’s oh, so pretty! <3.
Then, I did some more revisions on RE before giving Margaret a grueling list of demands for her slightly reluctant edit of it.
Then, I got this sudden urge to create a real, quality layout for the Myoku information page within the stories page. Then I had to adjust the stylesheet for the pages.
That didn’t REALLY leave me much in that regard to do today, so I putsed at some more pages of the new manga version of RE (really gotta commit to a new project…looks like I should go back to The Catcher soon).
But so then my Hoshi was being sort of flaky today, which resulted in all sorts of fun for her and I…and one such encounter resulted in a little one-panel comic featuring her.
bathroom cat by ~n1kkeisat0 on deviantART
‘Cause like, she’s never done anything remotely interesting in the bathroom before. Except maybe lick shower water. But she was sitting on the back of the toilet when I walked in and gave me this look like she was totally entitled to be there. Later, thinking about it, this line dropped into my head, I got a kick out of it, and I had to draw it instantly.
I put it on dA for the fun of it, and it ended up getting more comments than any of my deviations in like a year (…with a grand total of…er…two).
Since this is like, the third short comic I’ve done featuring my cats (the first was Hoshi waking me up, the second was Misty’s freaky death glare), I sort of started thinking about putting up the other two and starting a casual series of short cat-related comics. Usually featuring interactions with myself. Oh. I remembered another one I did. Looks like I might have a project for tomorrow, dot dot dot…
thursday 01 july at 11:08pm (flyleaf <3)
(why I chose to add this one to my entry as opposed to the make-out one that I just finished is beyond me…I just liked this quick thumbnail one more than the one that I spent time developing…wtf…)
So my obsession with Ingrid and Danyil (omnomnom Danyil’s suit)has been bleeding into my revisions of RE.
I’m glad because I like them, and they deserve a little more development so at least Ingrid’s dependency on Danyil is believable/earnest, but…well, I just hope that I’m not getting carried away with it. There were some subtleties to things before I went and added that mentioned scene (it…might be a sex scene.
…But I swear, it’s beautiful, not smutty. And it’s the kind that would make a smutty romance novel reader snarl at me because it lacks vulgar details)
and then thought I would emphasize their relationship even more…
It might be fine; it’s really hard for me to read the whole story from beginning to end and thus to get a good grip on it (11:11pm make a wish).
It’s too bad Margaret hasn’t volunteered to read it or something.
😛
wednesday 30 june at 4:13pm (believing in myself)
So, I went to the Eclipse midnight premiere last night with my best friend, because I do stupid stuff like that for her. And, really, I wasn’t very impressed; the plot was so jerky it was hard to really enjoy, and Kristen Stewart’s acting was positively apalling. ):
On the up side, I am currently enjoying the WONDERFUL SEQUEL to Kate Griffin’s “A Madness of Angels”, called “The Midnight Mayor”. She has a surprising sense of humor for being otherwise so literary, with her plots and illustrative, atmospheric writing style. Case in point, a conversation takes place between our hero, Matthew Swift (<3) and one of his love/hate relationship friends, known as Oda. He's a sorcerer, and she's a crazy religious magic-killer.
“You’ve seen Star Wars?”
“Seen it and denounced it.”
“You’ve denounced Star Wars?”
She looked me straight in the eye and said, “Hollywood shold not glorify witches.”
“I think you’ve missed the point…”
“I also denounce Harry Potter.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Because…”
“…because literature, especially children’s literature, should not glorify witches.”
“Oda, what do you do for fun?”
She thought about it, then said, without a jot of humour, “I denounce things.”
“Let’s forget I asked.”
Again – if you know this book, then you know where my writing style comes from. Haha.
Anyway…what else. I feel like I was going to mention something.
Well, I was just working on Redefining Evil the manga the other day. Pooped out like ten pages, inked and everything. It was fun. Then I came up with a good change, which I applied to the novel then, which launched another vigorous revision of it and a 15-page added scene.
Woot.
friday 18 june at 10:01pm
Movie rant time. ^_^
Today I went to see Toy Story III with my parents. It’s been 11 years since Toy Story II came out, and I don’t remember being too thrilled with the second one. When I heard rumors about the third one early last August or something, I was skeptical, but hopeful. The first thing I made sure was that they got back all the original voice actors, because that’s a good indication of whether a sequel will blow or not.
Anyway, by today I was really excited to see it – and I was not disappointed.
I had said all along that this film had to be aimed at my generation, given that Andy had aged 11 years and was now an upcoming college student, like me (or like I was last year). That was definitely true. While the film could still be enjoyed by kids, I heard more adults in the theatre laughing than little kids guffawing. The plot itself remained true to the previous movies, in that they were trying to stay with Andy despite his moving on. The toys they encountered were darker than the toys of the previous movies, and the adventures they went on weren’t as simple – they were full of setbacks and frustration, and things kept getting worse, and worse, and worse for them. By the final climax, I felt like I was watching an animated toy version of the Lord of the Rings finale in the Mountain of Mordor, and the characters didn’t react in a typical kids movie way. The personalities of the toys were SO consistent with what they were, ranging from Woody’s team spirit leadership and Mr. Potato Head’s New Yawker cynicism.
Andy’s character stuck out to me, though, for a number of reasons. First – he was cute.
But more than that, I understood what he was going through so well. Learning to grow up and move on sucks, but by the conclusion of the movie, he became a vicarious model for doing so successfully. I was also bawling in his final scene. Woody (*slight spoiler alert*) finally spoke to Andy directly – sort of, and their interaction pusehd the final plot development into place.
I think the main thing is that I believed this movie entirely. You’d think that with a kid’s movie like this, cheesy moments were bound to show up. But from the earnest emotions of the toys and humans, to the complicated plot and the bittersweet ending, this movie was heartfelt.
I’m so happy that Pixar was so successful with this film – all the props in the world to the writers and whatnot. This is a must see, especially for my generation. It’s everything that I could have hoped for, and then some.
Oh. And one more thing.
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.
(I found this on We Heart It, but I was laughing SO HARD when the dog rolled over Woody. xD What a charming usage of time progression!)
sunday 13 june at 6:37pm
>:|
Hahah, I just really really wanted to make that emoticon. I updated a bunch of new Nikkei pictures to the pictures page because I found a bunch on an old disk (and there were also some Trojan viruses on the disk…hoping they didn’t sneak into my computer. But that explains why the computer that the pictures were from crashed…(a long time ago).), and I laughed at all the Eripmavs because that was his set expression in like 4 pictures – 😐 xD As compared to Danyil later, who is quite expressive.
Anyway, I also have another picture that’s a sketch I was doing during a good sermon at church (about inheritance and generations – to prove I was listening xD). It’s illustrating a moment from the story that I mentioned in the previous entry. I had been thinking this, and then Margaret suggested it, but if this story finishes well (I’m stuck at the climax…*cough*), I might add a series of illustrations to it, as opposed to converting it into another manga. At the same time, I’m thinking that the story would make a good manga, because there are a lot of visual elements to the story. (I hate that it still doesn’t have a name.)
Anyway, I have been going on an elevated red levels stint lately, so I messed with it and it was an easy way to make it look sepia-toned. Check it!
Andrew is on the left, and that’s his niece Evelynne, who made her premiere in my story “Rebels”. Andrew looks gooooood, and I love that Evelynne’s kinda fat. Haha. Yay.
ARRGHHH. I don’t know what’s going on with my website. My images keep getting corrupted like this. A handful of the ones I uploaded today did; others didn’t. I don’t know if my internet connectivity winks out and interrupts the upload, but that shouldn’t happen every time, after I move the files. It’s really freaking me out. I’m worried I did something to my computer, but I’ve been running Avast scans all day and it’s clean…(Update: Firefox has yet again let me down. FireFTP was corrupting my images. ): Dreamhost‘s FTP client saved the day. Yay!)
What else. Nope that’s it.
No, I decided! Here’s a clip of how Andrew appeared in Nikkei. xD It must have been the birth of is non-YGO-style bangs. And…well he might have been a panther. HAHAHA.
That was when he still smirked a lot. XDD
Oh man. Dealing with all the stuff from Nikkei has made me SO. NOSTALGIC.
But mixed with anticipating the 21 hours that I’ll be working in the next 4 days…nostalgia of a day when I could spend hours drawing, even at school, leaves me feeling very strange.
Oh, here’s a doodle I did of Myoku, Shani and Nikkei on Friday.
monday 07 june at 11:25pmWHOOOOOOOOOO! Doing a new layout is SO INVIGORATING.
I must also tell you that I am rocking out to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Courtesy of Abass. Classical music is ironically refreshing. O.o;
Let’s see. I won’t ramble too much about the layout. It’s one of those that I struggled with on and off for a few days, and then when I went at it today, it just fell into place. Mostly because I decided not to take the lazy way out, so I hunted down the iframe tutorial I used last time I did one, and image mapped the links. FELT SO GOOD.
I’ve been slowly digging myself out of my artistic rut. I did an awesome new Myoku poster on the spur of the moment, and it fits him PERFECTLY.
I cleaned out my drawings drawer and pasted a bunch of random old but good pictures around my room. I actually sit down and draw just for the sake of drawing again.
I also have a new story that I’m working on. It has my web manager Margaret’s stamp of approval (though she keeps comparing it to a book that we read for school which I HATED). I happen to be basing it on a huge number of works I’ve enjoyed. I am approaching my hero in the same antihero way of Matthew Swift in “A Madness of Angels” by Kate Griffin; I am looking to “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” by Susanna Clarke for guidance in the realm of all things fairy; I occasionally thought of Diana Wynne Jones’ book “Dark Lord of Derkholm,” which I just finished; I’m thinking of the way that the elements are manipulated in “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” I’m thinking of Van Helsing’s emotional turmoil from the movie starring Hugh Jackman; and Emma Bull’s “War for the Oaks” (which takes place in Minnesota!) — among MANY others, which I have written down here or there.
To give you a taste of it, here’s a snippet from it:
The girl blinked wide blue eyes up at him, then turned and tottered away.
“It’s okay, I think she’s older than that,” Karoh assured him. They stood near each other in the miserably cold breeze that rustled the trees surrounding the graveyard. The party was beginning to break up and turn from the fresh mound of dirt in the ground. White roses had been scattered across the little plot.
Andrew nudged Karoh in the ribs. “Get home and make sure the house looks presentable. Cover up my gear and lock the cabinet.”
“I already did,” Karoh grumbled, fixing Andrew with his fierce gold-flecked eyes. “All items of magical property have been made to look perfectly ordinary. She won’t suspect a thing. At least, not right away.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Anybody with half a sense will wonder if you’re hiding something. We’ll just make sure she decides you’re not.”
Hehehehe.
I have a weird crush on Karoh. It’s weird because I created him, like, two weeks ago, and I’m already quite attached to him.
I had some other things I was going to update about, but it’s late, and I want to work on said story (tentatively called “The Catcher”). I will possibly update again tomorrow.