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Things Toby (and I) Have Said While Playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth

Marvel as Cloud Strife pushes a Zamboni!
Thrill as Cloud Strife turns a valve!
Watch as Cloud Strife lurches slowly through a burning village!
We paid $70 for this shit.

(no subject)

Humble Bundle has a bundle for a one-year license to Clip Studio Paint and a bunch of other assets for $30 (or more): https://www.humblebundle.com/software/clip-studio-creativity-collection-paint-draw-illustrate-software

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art,
art class

I've been frustrated at my art abilities recently because, like many things I do, I've skimmed past a lot of boring fundamentals and picked and chosen what to focus on, so while some things I do look good, I struggle with other things. Much like I did with lots of academic subjects, really. Probably ADHD--if I'm not interested in something I find it VERY HARD to make myself do it. Math and other science homework was much like that for me. I was quick to pick a lot of things up that carried me until I hit a wall (which was calculus and chemistry in highschool).

So continuing to do basic gesture drawing, practicing things I'm deficient on (HANDS), etc. has shot me in the ass too many times. I finally realized that right at this moment, since I deliberately have not been soliciting clients* for book covers because of the house-buying and move, I have time that I could devote to remedial art education.

So I bought a course on cubebrush.com--I didn't want to join one that was live online because showing up at a certain time and sitting there for a specified amount of time isn't great with all the things that have to be done with the house--and have been poking at it for the past three-four weeks. Have I been steadily working at it for 3-4 hours a day like the creator suggests? Oh hell no. Have I at least been managing to sit down and either watch a video, do exercises, or both 4-5 days a week? Yup.

(Have I started to get a clue what the Curves adjustment layer in Photoshop actually does? YES.)

Anyway, I usually ask for no constructive critique on art I post because it's DONE and FINISHED and I won't go back to it, but these are all learning things, so feel free to crit (unless you're a "I tell the HONEST TRUTH and if it's painful SO WHAT" type of person, in which case you are kindly invited to go elsewhere because combative attitudes are not actually constructive.)

( Gesture and figure drawings cut for large images and artistic nudity )

[*If you are an existing client, feel free to contact me and book something! If you are not one, contact me anyway but I may schedule you several months from now.]

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Group stock photo BackerKit campaign

AdorkaStock (formerly SenshiStock from back in the day) and three fellow stock artists/models have put together another fundraising campaign to produce group stock photos. I backed this one and their previous campaign and it's well worth it, if you need pose reference.

Find the campaign here

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squirrel

(no subject)

Here’s the 32-second video of the squirrel playing with a stick in our back yard, with music from the YouTube library over it to hide the clatters and clanks of

myrialux getting food for the cats plus the yowls of a small cat who is CONVINCED she will not be fed if she doesn’t scream her head off.

https://youtube.com/shorts/VzQM3TOIwmc?si=cSPq_e2xgHk9lyxy

Ha!

There’s a squirrel outside playing with a stick! Got about 20-30 seconds of video and I’ll try to remember to take it off my phone and upload it when I get a chance.

What I didn’t manage to film was the pair of bunnies that showed up a couple of minutes later, one big one small. The squirrel chased the big one away from its tree but once the bunny got about 3-4 feet away the squirrel went back to its stick.

The bunnies are better at spotting us peeking out through the curtains so it’s harder to catch them on camera.

Also the day before yesterday there was a flock of blue jays in the back yard screaming at D.Va sitting in the window and at us, when we wandered over to see what the fuss was about.

This is one of the reasons we went for this house specifically—windows in the living room and kitchen that overlook the back yard. The previous house didn’t and I always felt like the back yard was a foreign country that we occasionally visited instead of an extension of the house.

Sent from my Apple ][e

(no subject)

If anyone wants to sign up to

fandomgiftbasket they’ve extended the signups by a day.

https://fandomgiftbasket.dreamwidth.org/84651.html

Fandom Gift Basket

My fandom gift basket request has been posted! If you want one of your own, you’ve got a few hours to scrape one together. I found out about this last-minute myself. :)

Edit: I posted from my phone and screwed up the link with smart quotes. Try it now.

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bujold

(no subject)

New Penric and Desdemona book out as of June 30. (Amazon affiliate link)

I no longer read RSS feeds (that was a killing-time-at-work thing) so now I only find these when Amazon advertises them at me.

(no subject)

Caught in the Spectrum internet outages caused by Beryl taking out infrastructure. And my phone (but not

myrialux) is always spotty at getting data connection when it’s on cell. Bah.

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signal boost

Signal boost

labingi is asking questions about building a better book search, focusing on characteristics readers would like to search for that aren't usually available.

More power to them, I say. Back in library school I had a class on search algorithms taught by a prof that was building his own algorithm (i.e. his algorithm was used as the example for every aspect of the topic!) which was interesting, but my ADHD-ass self noped out of the subject in favor of digital imaging and web design.

@myrialux has a cold

So I made a hot toddy. Commence argument in the comments about what makes for a proper hot toddy. (It appears to be regional, really.)

This hot toddy—they basically change depending on what we have—was:

1 Constant Comment teabag. Constant Comment specifically because it’s orange and cinnamon flavored. I’d have to dig in still-packed boxes to find the cinnamon sticks, and also we have the decaf version (I drink it before bed) so the drink isn’t both uppers and downers.

Squeeze of honey to coat the throat

Small spoon of brown sugar to replace the carmelization you’d get if you used bourbon

Generous dash of vanilla because one of our bottles of homemade vanilla was at hand and also it adds notes that might be in bourbon

Squeeze of lemon juice

2 ounces Penderyn (Welsh whisky) because this and tequila were the only bottles of spirit I have unearthed so far and a tequila hot toddy is too far even for me

Fill the rest of the large coffee cup with just-boiled water, let steep 3-4 minutes before removing the teabag and plopping a lemon wheel on the rim as we are at least 10% class here at Casa di Telophase.

Sent from my Apple ][e

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house

Ew.

myrialux decided to change the A/C filter at the new house today.

What you are looking at is an A/C filter that (a) used to be white and (b) has two Yankee Candle air fresheners clipped to it.

Hopefully they were the cause of The House Smell.

myrialux never could smell much other than knowing there was a faint unidentifiable smell. I could definitely smell…something. Due to my current smell/taste situation, when there are smells in the air they all smell the same, if I can detect them at all. If I put my nose right up in something I can often get an identifiable smell but not more than an inch or so away.

So I have been smelling something vaguely like latex paint when we come into the house, enough so that a couple of times I opened windows and turned the fans on, which cleared it out of the house for a few days. I assumed it was the new paint job on the walls plus whatever else residual smells had been wafting from various surfaces.

I did not smell it when we came back in from picking up groceries, so fingers crossed it was those air fresheners. I did not want to put my nose anywhere near that filter to check so I won’t be sure for a few days!

Entry tags:

akicilj,
house

It’s a small chance, I know

Would anyone here be able to point me to curtains that have a pattern similar to this wallpaper, ideally with a dark green background?

https://paintedpaper.com/collections/black/products/tina-floral-wallpaper

I like the art style and spacing between the flowers and the general scale (so you don’t see a small repeating pattern when you step back) and the delicate tracery of the stems between the flowers and the dark background. This would be going into a moody, dark green office area and a light background wouldn’t work for me.

One request: if you’re going to suggest something general like “Have you tried Etsy/Amazon/Wayfair/Spoonflower?” then suggestions for the search terms would be more helpful since yes, I have indeed tried those sites and a number of others but haven’t been able to find anything that hits my buttons. (edit: also, Pinterest is overrun with AI-generated crap so difficult to search.)

In other news, we’re living in a sea of boxes at the new house and have one more trip back to our former city to pick up the last straggling items that didn’t make it onto the moving truck.

Snort report

Quick post since we’re overwhelmed with unpacking at the new place now, but I did scootch in a visit to an ENT the day the movers were loading the trucks, and I now have a scent training regimen to follow with essential oils.

More on that later except that tonight I accidentally touched the bottle of clove oil to my nose and while normally the constant scent of cloves would be annoying, it’s (a) SO MUCH BETTER than the weird constant smell I’ve been getting today and (b) it overwhelms the slightly-rancid-soap top note I’d been getting when eating some things so I am currently stuffing my face with mini Reese’s Cups that for the first time in 4 months actually TASTE like Reese’s Cups, albeit like Reese’s Cups I’m eating while standing in a Christmas store.

Sent from my Apple ][e

Entry tags:

house

(no subject)

In the throes of moving. The packers were here today and WOW OMG so worth every fricken penny.

The cats are confined to my (former) office, and spent the day mildly stoned on meds the vet gave us while also in what my former coworker calls cat condos (wire dog crates) to prevent them freaking out at each other or hurting themselves while the strangers were making noise in the rest of the house.

I went in after an hour to check on them and D.Va had pulled the towel off of Sora’s condo, dragged a corner of it into her condo and was sitting on it!

Unrepentant criminal:

I separated the crates a bit more and re-covered Sora. That's a Feliway dispenser plugged into the wall socket, and paper taped on the wall above because it does leave a faint oily residue over time.

I also packed a few more boxes before the packers finished enough other areas that I was just in their way, and this is one, which contains cat toys (the ones not in with the cats right now) and D.Va’s buttons, with a warning because there’s a flopping fish in there and thanks to stuff inside shifting, when you put the box down it asks for pets.

Tomorrow the movers show and load everything into the truck, and we drive down to the new house with the cats. Friday the cats get confined in their condos in the main closet (it’s very big) while the movers move all our stuff in, and we can then spend the next two years unpacking. We’ll have to come back to the old house to pull nails out of walls and get stuff we had to leave behind, and talk with whatever real estate agent we go with, but the big stuff will be DONE.

I also have an appointment tomorrow afternoon with an ENT physician’s assistant to check my nose and rule out the scary stuff, because why not add more things to my life right at this moment (I didn’t want to spend days and weeks finding someone in the new city so got my doc to refer me to someone here). But we’ll see.

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Two photos taken during the eclipse today

We walked to a local park for the eclipse, and of course snapped photos like everyone else. My best one, taken at totality (phone of course tries to lighten the image), featuring the sun, the moon and a planet.

A yellow flower of some sort, caught in a crescent of eclipse light produced by a natural pinhole camera formed by tree leaves.

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ahem

THE DRAGON HAS EATEN THE SUN

Sent from my Apple ][e

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The gas

I said in my previous post that we had no gas because of forgetting to change the end—of-service date. Turns out that:

(A) we still had it because they hadn’t flipped the switch yet

(B) the phone call to straighten it out took all of 10 minutes and there was no creating of new accounts or anything like that

(C) the rep even waived the $19 setup fee.

In conclusion: gas company 1, ISP minus several million. We’d use them for the new house but alas they don’t service it, instead it’s a propane area (cue Hank Hill jokes) and the company seems to be run by one guy who’s laidback and ok with texting so there’s that.

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And we’re back!

It only took two more phone calls to the ISP but internet was restored last night! Yay!

Of course now we have no heat or hot water because with all the internet mess going on

myrialux forgot to call the gas company and update our move-out date, but that’s understandable and MUCH LESS IMPORTANT than the sweet, sweet internet. :)