Rat Creature's Journal

seriously, "Scones"??

2010-01-06T11:40:34Z

In case you wonder, I'm not baffled because of the tasty food, but because I encountered this pairing smoosh for McCoy/Scotty for the first time in the wild just now. I'm waiting for the inevitable "Scones & Spork" label on fiction with several pairings. It just makes you to want to eat it up, I guess, which the the boring "K/S, Mc/Sc" of the olden days just can't accomplish.

I'm just never getting used to these, am I?

fanart, Offworld Team Camping

2010-01-04T20:36:07Z

Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagan, Ronon Dex
Media used: pencil drawing, inked with fine liner pens, acrylic paint
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: This was my yuletart gift for Mashimero, originally posted during yuletart here. Mashimero asked for fluffy, happy team bonding scenes, and for gen or McShep, so this is a team scene, with very mild McShep cuddling. John, Rodney, Teyla and Ronon are making S'mores.
Preview:

a yawning rat

2010-01-04T16:33:03Z

I finally managed to take a photo of one of my rats while he's yawning, which is the cutest thing ever. Though on photos slightly less so than in RL, because it's the whole motion that is cute.

So last night I saw Leo and Noah yawning (yawns catch among them too), but of course by the time I had my camera they were just plain snuggled up again. Which is also cute, so I photographed that, but then I thought, why not try yawning at them while I have my camera in hand? And this worked. I'm not entirely sure it was due to my yawn, or how well rats can see such things, but I yawned at them, and Leo yawned back, and I got it on photo.

2009 art roundup

2009-12-31T11:11:32Z

There wasn't a lot this year, not even if I count all drawbles and icons and such, i.e. I can't even do the meme thing with the squares of one preview picture for every month.

January
a Numb3rs Don and Charlie ratcreature icon

February
Nothing. :(

March
Diricawl (Harry Potter fanart)

April
a fail! ratcreature icon

May
Five drawbles: 1-3, 4, 5
Robin (DC fanart)
Nightwing (DC fanart)

June
an Uhura ratcreature icon
a weird comment doodle for Kass' story Zygote (SGA/Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (but were afraid to ask) fusion fanart)
Star Trek Reboot art meme (Star Trek: Reboot fanart)

July
Nothing. :(

August
Nothing. :(

September
Nothing. :(

October
Nothing. :(

November
Nothing. :(
(I did work on my Yuletart assignment that month, though I only finished in December with an extension)

December
Twelve drawbles: 1-6, 7-10, 11-12
Santa!Cthulhu
and the not yet revealed yuletart art.

This is even less than 2008, and it's not like I was prolific then. I suck. :(

augh

2009-12-29T19:41:24Z

I don't really care much one way or the other about Epiphany caroling for charity. I mean this being a Protestant region it is not done as much, so usually I don't see any, but for some reason the Catholic church kicked of their charity campaign from my city this year. So they got a fair bit of attention. And they certainly manage to collect a lot of money for children's charity projects. But I really wish they would cut out the blackface in the Three Magi costuming.

a Santa!Cthulhu

2009-12-28T17:28:10Z

Fandom: Lovecraft, in a way
Characters/Pairings: Cthulhu
Media used: charcoal, chalk and black pencil on gray paper
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: This is a bit late, but I guess technically Christmas season sort of lasts until the 6th, yes? This sketch was inspired by the "Santa Cthuluclaus" LJ v-gift I've seen on other people's profiles, an idea which I found cute, only the clipart looks nothing like Cthulhu, not even the jokey cute renderings, but instead looks like a sad octopus with a santa hat, which for some strange reason is carrying flowers and a pencil. Which is just odd, even if you make a sad octopus stand in for Cthulhu. I've done cute Cthulhus before, but I doodled one with a santa hat this time. You probably shouldn't count on this one delivering any of the presents though...
Preview:

yikes

2009-12-26T13:13:15Z

I am not actually in the "adverbs and adjectives always suck" camp of stylistic advice or anything, but wow, I just tried to read a story in which the overabundance of them threw me right out. I don't think I've ever had that happen before. Not recently anyway.

I counted over twenty adjectives and adverbs in the first paragraph of six sentences with 130 words in total. And that was not including nouns being modified by other nouns in some sort of tacked on thesaurus, like if I wrote "the purple prose, this murky miasma of adjectives,..." I counted only the two adjectives, not the whole mess -- what do you call that kind of construction anyway? (The story didn't do it with alliterations though, I just did that in my example for humor, it was just two nouns, both modified with adjectives, saying the same thing, one after another.) That was even more jarring than the adjectives. The writer should just have settled on one of the two choices.

Merry Christmas!

2009-12-24T12:40:50Z

I haven't drawn any Christmas cards this year, but it's been a month since I last posted photos of my rats looking adorable, so I thought I'd use them for cute and happy content. And that's what online journals are there for after all, inflicting photos of your pets on the world at large. :)

happy solstice!

2009-12-21T14:09:36Z

I'm so glad that the days will now be getting longer again (in this hemisphere at least). Seven and a half hours of paltry, weak sunlight at best (usually much less with it being overcast) is just not enough.

random poll

2009-12-20T17:10:03Z

As another decade ends (I can't believe it's going to be 2010 in just a few days. yikes!) you see all the usual retrospectives etc.; also I've been editing fanlore (and you should too, the wiki needs more people /end shameless plug). This led me to wonder: if you've been in fandom a long(-ish) time, do you ever feel nostalgia for fandom how it used to be? ("Fandom" in this case intentionally vague as I just mean whatever form of fandom you were involved in the era you are nostalgic for.) And if so, for which time period? So I thought I'd do a poll.

The first is a question of whether you feel nostalgia, and in the second you can check tickyboxes to indicate for which time period you are feeling nostalgia. That I have split into two options for each period for an indication whether you actually were in fandom in that time period and feel nostalgia due to firsthand experience, or feel nostaligia because you have read or heard about that time and wish you had been in fandom then, because it just sounds more awesome to you than fandom now. I did give up to the early 2000s as options to feel nostalgia for, though I am a bit dubious whether you can call it "nostalgia" proper if it's less than ten years ago.

View poll: fandom nostalgia poll

random rat post

2009-12-16T10:22:12Z

Why is it that rats themselves can smell so awesome, when their pee smells just like smelly pee? Seriously, rats themselves smell very nice: If you bury your nose in their fur it is a pleasant smell, much better than most other animals I've smelled up close (admittedly mostly cats and dogs so the comparison sample is small). And yet -- they pee in their sleeping spaces where they then lie down, and they pee on each other anyway, but while I smell like gross rat pee when they inevitably mark me or my clothes, they come out smelling like roses. Well not roses, but a nice non-pee smell. I just don't get it.

it would probably be intrusive...

2009-12-15T07:25:40Z

...but sometimes I think it would be cool if journalling sites had a function to "suggest me a new journal to read" not a random one, but a suggestion based on your current subscriptions, interests, maybe on some kind of other fuzzy, internal data-mining (the aforementioned "intrusive" part). I'm not sure how these things work, but like what Amazon does when it suggests books to you (sometimes they even suggest me interesting things, though that one is hit and miss, even though I actually tried to refine it manually) or that online music thing, Pandora?, that tries to guess what your tastes music are (that wasn't bad, though I couldn't use it for long, because eventually these location blocks happened). Anyway, something more advanced than the "popular among your friends" feature that LJ offered (offers? I can never really find that on the site anymore), and you could refine its suggestions.

I got my Yuletart gift!

2009-12-11T19:58:39Z

The yuletart gift for me was just posted, and it is a very cute Spock/Uhura piece with a tribble. So check it out.

two more drawbles

2009-12-10T19:50:35Z

I didn't manage these two last night, so they got them today.

a brief rant

2009-12-10T15:38:18Z

This was triggered by the most recent Criminal Minds episode, but I noticed this in all kinds of shows: I find it really disturbing how on tv shows cops use prison rape as expected threat against suspects and criminals, as if it was condoned in the system as punishment following a crime. That is completely messed up and makes me dislike characters intensely, for being barbaric and inhumane rather than concerned about justice.

While it may not be true in practice, in theory prisoners are supposed to be safe from harm while locked up, no matter their crimes or what kind of scum they are, and not subject to random cruelty or punishment meted out by fellow inmates. That kind of thing, i.e. violence happening among inmates is a sign of a system broken and failing the prisoners that are its responsibility, and hero characters are not supposed to be okay with that.

more finished drawbles

2009-12-10T02:20:32Z

These are the last for tonight, the rest I will have to wait until tomorrow.

A giraffe in a Star Trek sciences uniform for Reginagiraffe:

finished drawbles so far

2009-12-09T23:19:34Z

"Aeryn Sun and Ellen Harvelle, being awesome" for Cofax (just imagine they are standing back to back because they are preparing for a fight, and the actual awesome action will soon follow *g*):

"John and Ronon surfing, or just handing around on the beach" for Telesilla:

"TOS!Trek characters making friends with a tentacle monster" for Shadowvalkyrie:

"Woolsey with some animal. Some alien little creature. His new pet." for Astridv:

"Lorne debating paperwork vs painting...with John looking hopeful for the former." for Seikaitsukimizu (I had no idea how to draw the debating part.):

"a rattie party, with hats and balloons" for Droolfangrrl:

drawble offer

2009-12-09T18:32:31Z

I'm in the mood to doodle and haven't offered drawbles in some time, so prompt me in a comment?

As usual, I'll do my best for any fandom I'm familiar with, or random stuff (monsters, steampunk machines, animals...) or I can just pick prompts from your interests. I don't draw porn though, and I'm not good at portrait likeness. Also keep in mind that these are quick doodles, so for a prompt that is a description of some epic scene you've always wanted to see realized in fanart the results aren't going to very satisfying for you (or much fun for me).

If you want to see the quality (or lack thereof) you can expect, look at the drawble tag. I don't make any promises for results or a timely delivery, but the past I've usually managed to draw something for everyone who prompted me for these non-demanding, open drawble offers. So this isn't limited to something like "the first X comments get a drawble" or anything like that, which is impractical with the crossposting in three places anyway. (However considering the broken state of the LJ comment notification right now, I'm more likely to notice your prompt quickly if you comment on DW or IJ. ETA: Except that IJ seems to be down completely just now. *argh*)

what is this with LJ lately?

2009-12-07T23:36:50Z

If I'm not responding to something, that is likely because notifications are apparently currently broken on LJ, though earlier I was still getting some at least for comments albeit with much delay (I haven't gotten any tracking notifications recently, but of course now I don't know whether that is because the journals/tags don't have new posts or because they vanished into some virtual bermuda triangle). This follows their Scrapbook and userpic problems earlier. Not to mention that the site is timing out on me more than usual still, though that has gotten better today.

On the brighter side of their technical difficulties, their glitch of making the snowflake v-gifts free (apparently that wasn't an intentional holiday spirit thing and they also managed to fix *that* of all their glitches) led to snowflake flurries across my f-list, and I also got some (thanks anon and devildoll!). Those are nice.

help for the clueless?

2009-12-06T23:18:59Z

This probably is a totally embarrassing n00b question, but is there some sort of trick or method to avoid your palette becoming a total mess when you color something or paint? Something that people who are not self-taught via trial and error are shown when they learn?

I struggled with this once again recently when I finished my yuletart assignment (btw Yuletart has started posting this weekend so remember to check it to not miss the cool art that is being posted). I can't seem to handle color mixing in an efficient way.

My method when mixing acrylics to color my lineart looks something like this: I usually use two palettes, one for thicker colors (which is not so much a real palette as a largish cookie tin lid onto which I put a layer of very wet paper towel covered by a piece of sandwich paper so that the paint remains wet) and a palette with several depressions for mixing in a more watery way. I also have two containers with water, one that remains clear for making the paint thinner for glazes without dipping the brush in (usually I use eyedroppers for that) and one to use with the brushes.

I put small dollops of the colors I plan to use for mixing on the first palette and start to mix colors and put them on paper. Because for the most part I use acrylic paint in thinner layers I tend to either mix on the first palette until I get the shade I want, put a bit on the second palette, and add clean water until it has the translucency I need, or I add layers of more basic colors over each other on the paper. Sometimes for gradients I also start with less water and then do a wash on the paper. But inevitably after a relatively short while this arrangement becomes a mess, i.e. I run out of spaces to mix or to dilute the paint or both. Am I missing some technique that will make this whole thing more go more smoothly and efficiently?

name smooshes: endlessly amusing, also less than clear for threesomes

2009-12-06T11:56:03Z

I have just seen a Kirk/Spock/McCoy fic tagged as "Mckick". Granted, on the story itself rather than the journal's tags it was written out, so don't know whether this was just for tag brevity or is really used as pairing name proper somewhere, but even with knowing the pairing it took me a bit to decipher what this tag on the post meant. Smooshes just get the more confusing the more people are involved.

sort of a kink poll...

2009-11-28T02:06:20Z

I've been reading a slash story in which a heated argument between the couple (who are also friends) results in punch being thrown, and then the one punched actually finds the aggression a turn on and it goes on to sex. Somehow this combination of sex and violence doesn't work for me at all, not even in fiction, where I'm not averse to combinations of sex and violence.

Like, I can go along fine if the aggression is against some kind of third party, and one character is turned on by the other being violent, or they are turned on mutually, say if they are both in a barfight or even slaughter others. I can also go along with non-con that involves violence with the victim not being turned on, but I as a reader like it. But if the violence is between the couple (and they are supposed to like each other), uncontrolled violence segueing into sex (rather than say rough sex that is mutually agreed upon) is squicky for me, more so if the violence is not mutual (the latter would be more fighting leading to fucking in some kind of hate sex, which I also don't like, but it is not as bad as one sided violence).

Most often this is shown from the POV of the character the aggression is turned upon rather than the violent character being turned on by the escalation, i.e. A hits B, usually after some provocation, then B somehow finds that aggression/violence (or sometimes the loss of control) hot, and sex follows. I have to admit that I find this particular combination of sex and violence to be surprising as a kink, and it always startles me, but I see this every now and then, and I'm wondering whether it is something that many people like in sex scenes.

So, a poll:

View poll: fictional sex & violence, when are they like hazelnuts and chocolate?

randomness

2009-11-23T18:31:15Z

I still had some leftover squash from the butternut squash risotto I made this weekend and with all the US Thanksgiving talk on my f-list I decided to bake a small pumpkin pie. So this was what I had for dinner... Well, it's not like there isn't a tradition of sweet main dishes and this even has a vegetable in it.

I've also been reading a lot of Star Trek and SGA Bigbang stories, though because of the ST Bigbang I haven't yet read that many of the SGA stories. I've been wondering whether I shouldn't do an extra Bigbang recs post for the stories I enjoyed that weren't AUs (those will of course end up in the next AU recs post).

My rats continue to be adorable. Linus in particular always wants to groom me, climb into my clothes, and even likes to cuddle and to be petted. He actually sometimes stays still for that, which is a great feat for a young rat. I could do without his love for the inside of my clothes though. And I do not care at all for two or three rats to start roughhousing while inside my sweatshirt. Their flailing limbs have too many claws for that.

BTW I don't know whether I mentioned this, but Linus looks kind of funny because he lost the tip of his tail in an accident when he was really tiny. The breeder thinks his mother somehow dropped their house on his tail tip so a bit got cut off. Sometimes rats just aren't the sharpest knife in the drawer. But it healed really well and he learned climbing with a shorter tail so it doesn't bother him, and it's not like I got them as show rats, but his tail is a few centimeters shorter than normal. It's somehow more noticeable now that he gets more properly rat sized though, rather than being really tiny.

SGA canon questions

2009-11-22T15:20:35Z

Because my memory is crap, do we ever see the team camping offworld, i.e. see what kind of tents they use and such, or is the offworld camping a pure fanon thing?

Unrelated, I remember the team sitting together in their mess hall in a couple of episodes, but I can't recall which those were. Argh. My memory, worse than a Swiss cheese.

young rats are exhausting

2009-11-17T22:12:46Z

It's not exactly that I had forgotten already how much energy and destructive initiative young rats have once they've gotten over their initial shyness, but there definitely was rose-tinted nostalgia blurring those memories. In any case I now remember why the free playtime outside I give younger rats has always been only an hour or two at most, whereas I let older ones out as much as they like as long as I'm home.

I also need to come up with more entertainment to occupy them now that they feel secure outside. Currently Noah in particular expends most of his not inconsiderable energy trying to get out of their play enclosure (simple wood panels held together with cable binders), that I put up for their safety while they are this young and reckless. Though even with the escape attempts, it still makes watching them easier. And the ferret climbing tree I bought for them has been a big hit, but clearly I now need to do some more landscaping to satisfy their exploratory drive.