Rat Creature's Journal

looking for some English help

Mon, 12 May 2008 17:43:07 GMT

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?

looking for a piece of HP fanart...

Sat, 10 May 2008 07:43:36 GMT

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.

this week's Supernatural

Fri, 09 May 2008 11:33:10 GMT

Aaaah, I was so squicked by this ep, not because of the maggots, though those were vaguely gross too, but because of the eye stuff. At least they didn't go for actually drawing Sam's eye out on screen a bit via special effects, which after all in itself wouldn't cause the eye to be damaged permanently, so they could have escalated the tension even more. But either way someone doing something to your eye, especially while you're awake, is very much a scary horror for me. I feel huge anxiety even before plain eye exams. When they operated on my retina they offered to do it with just a local anesthesia while I was awake or with a full anesthesia-- you can easily guess which one I picked, anesthesia risks or not. Does really anyone want to be awake while they fix something in their eye from the back of the eyeball?!? ::shudder:: Sam's eyes being forced open and then the scoop thing coming closer was bad enough. I had to look away, hide under my blanket, and fast forward a bit.

When it comes to the end of the MOTW, I thought they should have tried dismemberment or a shredder or cremation or something like that to kill the doctor before deciding that the only solution is to bury him alive because he can't be killed by being shot, having his neck broken or heart removed or other regular methods. I actually wondered why John didn't cremate him after removing the heart. Being buried alive doesn't seem that secure over the long haul, also kind of cruel, even if he is an awful killer, I'm not sure he deserves this.

Otherwise I'm not fond that they gave Bella an abuse victim background, though that she had also made a deal and time was running out for her was a good twist. And I liked how desperate Sam is becoming. I wondered though how this kind of organ replacement immortality would help Dean to get out of the demon deal. I mean, it's not like he was in danger of dying without the demon. So would the hellhounds be unable to get at him in a newly improved Frankenstein body, thus eliminating the method of him going to hell? I didn't quite understand that.

fanart, Sheppard & Steampunk!Puddlejumper

Thu, 08 May 2008 21:25:31 GMT

Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard & Steampunk!Puddlejumper
Media used: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint
Rating/warnings: G
Notes/comments: I did this for the prompt "Victorian steampunk AU" for the SGA fanart fest paintedspires. Admittedly mechanical pterodactyls aren't the most efficient way for a flying machine, Steampunk or otherwise, and not a very likely or even possible path technology would take from an SF standpoint, but this way was much cooler visually than merely changing the puddlejumpers with pipes or gauges or whatever. I mean, they more or less look like flying lunch boxes. Not really realistic technology, but this is Stargate after all, and I'm pretty sure John would think that mechanical, flying dinosaurs were cool.

The original is 30x40cm, so unfortunately I had to scan it in two parts, and you can see a slight line where I merged, because I fail at digital manipulation and didn't know how to make the two parts fit completely seamless.

Preview:

And because you can't see Sheppard that well in that size, here's a larger detail view:

If for some reason you want the whole image in a print resolution in its original size, I uploaded that as well, however at 300dpi and 30x40cm the file is over 4652x3500 pixel / 4mb: look at it in a really huge size in high resolution

another random pet peeve post...

Wed, 07 May 2008 06:42:54 GMT

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?

tv pet peeve #5697...

Fri, 02 May 2008 07:47:31 GMT

The latest incident of this I've noticed was in this week's CSI: New York, but it's not really specific to that ep, so I don't think it needs a spoiler cut. So once again they examine photos taken by bystanders on their cell phones for evidence, and this is related to that weird "endless zoom and image enhancement" phenomenon in procedurals (and wow, do I wish photos and video really worked like that, that you somehow could extract all potential information rather than all actual information recorded, because then if you had a reference picture of an object and needed to see the detail of some part of the mechanism rather than the whole thing you could just zoom instead of cursing about how few easy to find photos there are just showing a small part of a thing in great detail), but I don't mean that exactly, though it is also a pet peeve of mine. It's that on top of the endless detail it never seems to happen that a significant portion of their relevant photos just suck too much, like maybe blurry because the person wobbled too much, completely over or under exposed, etc. This somehow annoys me because random tv people are apparently much better at taking snapshots than actual people, even if they are just using cell phones, are in a crowd, and not all sober.

Also, I suspect that it isn't remotely realistic that they'd get a complete 3-D room view to zoom through even if all the people took photos a lot, because at an event with stuff happening on a stage and a crowd taking photos, almost everybody taking photos will take photos of the stuff happening on the stage, so there ought to be "blank spots" in their reconstruction in the other areas even if they extrapolate, unless the stage was in the middle of the room and people standing in 360° around it, like for a boxing ring, but that wasn't the case here, iirc, but the stage was set up at one end.

SGA AU recs

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:08:15 GMT

To My Destiny, by Kodiak Bear. Gen. (ca. 8,800 words)
In this AU Janus convinced the Ancients to allow the use of his time travelling technology and they took Atlantis into the future, to present day Earth, when they continue the fight. It's an interesting premise and the Ancients here are just the right mix of ruthless and creepy but not actually bad guys.

Guardians of a rare thing, by Livia Penn. Het, Ronon Dex/Samantha Carter. (ca. 6,200 words)
This goes AU from Return I: Ronon comes to Earth rather than stay in Pegasus. Ireally like this take on Ronon at the SGC, and his perspective of Earth.

The Great Pegasus Train Robbery, by Sholio. Gen, team. (ca. 10,500 words)
This humor story casts the team as train robbers in the Old West, and they aren't very good at being bandits, but their efforts are very entertaining.

Knights Errant, by Sholio. Gen. (ca. 5,300 words)
So this is a Knight Rider fusion, with Rodney as the car, John as the driver. And okay, the story doesn't really have much of a plot beyond the setup of John meeting the car, but well, I think the scenario is awesome. (Don't judge me, okay? I liked the series as a kid...)

Bright Wings, by Snarkydame. Gen. (ca. 7,000 words)
In this AU Pegasus cultures are squatting in Atlantis, rather than it lying abandoned. It goes further AU than that because the expedition members are among the residents too, with the team running a salvaging operation looking for bits of Ancient tech in the older, submerged parts of the city, but the story still mixes in enough elements from canon Pegasus cultures and Ancient and Atlantis tech that the scenario isn't just some generic fantasy type of city.

Mona Lisa Box, by Tzzz. Slash, Rodney McKay/John Sheppard. (ca. 14,000 words).
This is a fusion between Terminator: The Sarah Conor Chronicles and SGA, and it is a rather creepy love story, with a great twist on the origin of Skynet. I was a bit bothered by the implications the ending had for Rodney's characterization (I don't want to spoil it by being more specific), but apart from that I enjoyed it.

Almost All Grown Up, by Xparrot. Gen, team. (ca. 5,900 words)
I really like AUs with John as a Pegasus native, and making John a Genii, but tell the story from Teyla's Athosian POV, when we as readers know there is more to the Genii, was a narrative ploy I really enjoyed.

this week's Supernatural

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 06:33:34 GMT

I liked this one okay for a humor episode, which often aren't my thing. Like many others I'm not thrilled that the gay guy was the one who had to die, but at least I found this less hard on my embarrassment squick than it could have been with this type of humor, though some of it made me cringe. Overall it wasn't as awful to the geek boys (and girl) than it could have been. They were kind of in over their head, and very focused on the whole tv thing, despite the danger, but still likable.

I didn't find the episode scary, but it had its funny moments, though I might have gotten more out of it if I was familiar with whatever they were doing a parody of. Still, I liked the outsider POV and the fake tv series trope, though sometimes the jerky camera and scrambled picture was too disorienting for my tastes, and I also liked how Sam and Dean took care of destroying the evidence. (Well at least the tv footage, I assume there is another dead body going to be found with their fingerprints all over the house, and I doubt the remaining geek troupe will volunteer for any testimony or take the blame.)

I really wish I hadn't ended up with their stupid fake Ghostfacers jingle in my head for quite some time, though.

fanart, Junkie!Roy

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:08:37 GMT

Fandom: DCU (Green Arrow)
Characters/Pairings: Roy Harper (back when he was Speedy)
Media used: Wacom tablet in GIMP
Rating/warnings: PG, I guess, for drug use
Notes/comments: This took me a really long time, and I don't just mean that I first had the idea for this in 2006. I have no idea what I am doing wrong that digital coloring takes me so long, isn't it supposed to be efficient? I suppose it's one of the pitfalls of being self-taught. Anyway, it's Roy during the famous heroin addict story line. As always, feedback is very welcome.
Preview:

And two details showing parts of the image in the original size/resolution. (I drew it at 3100x2540px.)

random creepy things you learn from the internet...

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:09:14 GMT

I follow Dark Roasted Blend, because it often has cool photos and links, however yesterday it featured parasites, which is kind of gross, but okay, so I read about a bunch of parasites.

And this is apparently old news, only I still did not know of this cat parasite, toxoplasma gondii, that also uses humans as intermediate hosts, and is known to change behavior in rats and mice (making them loose their fear of cats, so that they get eaten by the final host the parasite needs). It's apparently still speculative whether the toxoplasmosis disease caused by this also affects behavior in humans, though some scientists apparently claim to have observed correlations showing this, but still. The prevalence of humans with antibodies to this parasite, i.e. they either were infected or still are, is really high, actually over fifty percent where I live (more widely spread than in the US where it's a bit over twenty percent according to what i read), it is kind creepy. I mean, it's more likely than not that I was or still am carrying parasites that potentially can make cysts in your brain to change brain chemistry... Maybe the Goa'uld are less science fiction like than I though. Eeep.

Daredevil: Without Fear (issues #100-105)

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:15:56 GMT

Well, at least Milla isn't dead, so that is something, but really the girlfriend storyline is kind of overdone with Daredevil.

I freely admit that part of why I like Daredevil is that its genre, besides superhero crime fighting, is more often than not what would be called "whump" in fanfic parlance: He just gets hurt over and over again, both physically and psychologically, and there is plenty of angst and so on. So I'm not really objecting that he seems to never get a break, but did it have to be by hurting his wife again and taking her out of the picture? Out of sight in a mental hospital with violent delusions is not really what I wished for Milla. I like her character.

Also a central key to the plot, that Matt apparently could work through this gas in a few hours, but for everyone else the effects are apparently forever, well, that didn't make a lot of sense to me. My best guess is that we are to assume that somehow his immunity is tied to his senses making him more resistant because he's more aware, iirc it was something like that with Lily Lucca's body chemistry, but still. I didn't find that very satisfying.

Cranston worked well as a really creepy villain for me though. Even though his prison guard date rape setup at the end sort of squicked me.

looking for book recs...

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:23:41 GMT

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?

that's an odd haircut for Superman...

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 18:19:40 GMT

I was perusing DC's June solictations, trying to decide whether I should get Trinity or not -- on one hand I quite like Busiek, and also like stories featuring Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, otoh it's another weekly title from DC, so that's a lot of additional comics to buy -- when I got stuck on how Superman's hair looks on that cover: As if he was channeling Wolverine (well, minus the cool claws, but still).

Two Lumps icons

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:05:39 GMT

It's been a while since I've made icons for others to grab, but I just spent some time catching up with the webcomic Two Lumps: The Adventures of Ebenezer and Snooch by J. Grant and Mel Hynes, and thought while reading that some of the images would make good icons. Also, if you're like me and somehow missed this webcomic, you should check it out.

Just comment if you take one (or more), say if you're willing to share, otherwise the icon belongs to the first person to claim it, and of course you can modify them any way you want.

Some examples:

01. 02. 03. 04. 05.

06. 07. 08. 09. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

To keep the comments by people taking them in once place despite x-posting to two journals, I've disabled comments in the IJ post and enabled anonymous/Open ID comments for the LJ post. Sorry for the added inconvenience for people only or primarily using IJ, but more people are reading my journal on LJ.

fanart, illustration for Trinityofone's Dæmonology

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 20:49:35 GMT

Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis / His Dark Materials
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard, Teyla Emmagan, the team's dæmons Nioke, Keho, Tykallita, and Imara
Media used: pencil, fine liner pen with waterproof indian ink, acrylic paint, a little bit colored pencils
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: This is an illustration for Trinityofone's SGA/HDM story Dæmonology, John and Teyla and their respective dæmons are sparring with each other, while Ronon's and Rodney's dæmons watch (these two themselves are somehow offscreen). The story itself is McKay/Sheppard slash, but the picture is very much gen.

The faint, yet still annoying line in the middle where the colors don't quite match is there because the paper of the original is of a larger format than my scanner, so I had to scan it in two parts, and didn't manage to make them fit perfectly.

astridv helped me fix some perspective and relative size and positioning problems in an earlier pencils sketch of this. The illustration is much better for it. Any remaining problems however are my fault.

Preview:

so that SUP interview...

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:17:36 GMT

While I'm less than thrilled (to put it mildly) with the views that SUP official expressed in that interview (I read the translated version here), I'm mostly boggled that they let someone say these things openly in a press interview. In a way it is refreshing compared to the totally vapid phrases in places like the most recent news post where they try to pretend they care about the users without saying much of anything.

Aaargh.

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:23:19 GMT

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.)

Peanuts/Watchmen fusion rec

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 07:55:20 GMT

Not fanfic, but art: Charles Schulz's Watchmen by Evan Shaner. Go look, it's great.

argh, LJ increasing its level of fail yet again

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:03:37 GMT

So LJ discontinued the option for new Basic, i.e. ad-free accounts. Without announcing it beforehand, or even saying so outright in the actual news post (they used advertising speak describing this as "Other changes you may have noticed are the logged-out homepage and registration process for new users. We streamlined and simplified things so that now it’s faster and easier than ever to create a LiveJournal account." *snort*).

Considering how they pressed ads into more and more places and made them harder to remove also for paid users ever since the "no-ads" policy was first softened with the "Plus" account, like ads on the main site standard pages rather than just journals, this persistent snap.com hassle, all the "sponsored" communities and v-gifts, the "partnership links" like to MSN, and so on, I'm not surprised, but that they don't even realize that this is a major change for the site and its culture is disheartening.

And I've seen in comment threads a response "well, you can't expect a business to let you use up resources without anything in return, so it's no wonder they finally discontinued the ad-free accounts", but that completely overlooks that free users on a site like LJ aren't *leechers*, like say non-registered downloaders on a free file storage site, they provide the content that makes other users (some of those paying) and casual visitors (some of those seeing ads when browsing elsewhere on the site even if they enter the site through an ad-free LJ) come to LJ in the first place.

And maybe they did a cost/benefit analysis and decided it's not tenable to have free accounts anymore (not that they communicated that anywhere I could see, they seem to assume their users are too stupid for three choices in the sign-up and thus one needed to be removed), but it is just not true that they don't get anything in return for their services from free users. It may or may not be "enough" in their financial bottom line, but if all the free users connecting on LJ around a topic decide to go to elsewhere for whatever reason (better features, less ads, whatever), it's not as if the paid ones into that topic would stay either. For example, even while I'm not into fiber arts and crafts, even I noticed how many knitting-related things moved to Ravelry, and I suspect a ton of users who were on LJ mostly for knitting may have gone away completely, so now casual site visitors on the look for knitting stuff like a pattern, won't land through Google in some LJ comm and look at LJ's ads, but on Ravelry's site. A social site is nothing without user content.

This doesn't affect me much in practice, because I haven't created a new LJ account since I got my first one, and I surf with AdBlock on anyway, but it is still aggravating.

I'm curious how you organize your reference stuff

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:10:14 GMT

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?

I watched the SGA season finale

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 16:40:20 GMT

I've mentioned it in my comments elsewhere that one thing that bothers me about this (besides the bothersome stuff others lay out much better of the way Teyla's story is handled, how everybody but the white guys dies in the alternate universe and so on), is that once again an alternate timeline we see is worse for *everyone*. Just like always. As if there was some kind of law that the main universe timeline has to be the best possible world except for insane bad guys, maybe. It's not just Stargate which does this, but it is certainly prominent, and I'm getting really tired of this.

I understand that for storytelling reasons the alternates kind of have to be dystopian so that there's the impulse to "fix" things, and as you may know Sheppard is my favorite character, so it's not as if I think the SG universe would be better off without him, rather the opposite, but for once I'd have liked to see that with alternatives usually some people loose, but others gain, especially in the long term. There are very few events that have only negative consequences in the long haul. Not even horrific things are all bad, say take the Black Death, horrible death toll of more than half the population, iirc over 70% in some areas (incidentally way higher than the SGA Hoffan virus), and yet, who knows whether the Renaissance would have happened if there had been no pestilence to destroy the structures of society in many places?

So I would have liked it better if it they had made it so that the alternate sucked for Rodney, Atlantis and Earth and so on, but went great, or at least okay, for not just Evil-Overlord!Michael but for the Pegasus populations. Like if they had made it so that the improved hybrids were less a "zombie army" and Michael killing most humans in the process, but say instead he eventually had developed an improved formula with less mortality that was then welcome as solution to the Wraith problem in Pegasus. And for Teyla's horrible fate they could have chosen something like having her converted into one of Michael's new people. Then Atlantis still would have faced a loosing battle against the new "alien menance" of human-wraith, so it would have been sufficiently dystopian, but at least more of a sense of that some people loose but others gain with every alternative.

Maybe then in the "real" timeline Sheppard wouldn't only have had to try to save Teyla, but also preserve the oncoming future "Pegasus Renaissance" that had come at such a high cost to Atlantis, and he would try have to try to get both. Hm, now I really want someone to write an AU like that.

On a rather random note, I liked Atlantis in the desert quite a lot, though I wondered about Sheppard in that sandstorm. I mean, I have never been in one, but shouldn't his skin have been more irritated or even abraded, especially since he seemingly didn't tuck his hands inside his sleeves or protected them, but still used them to shield his face?

Anyway, despite the less than ideal setup of the alternate timeline I enjoyed the Sheppard and McKay angst, Ronon and Todd's scene was fun, and if they killed Sam, at least she died heroically on a cool new spaceship, which is more than they allowed Teyla. I liked Rodney trying to make a life on earth with Jennifer too (and I kind of want one of Rodney's futuristic gesture controlled white boards).

Totally unrelated to SGA I learned a new piece of trivia today: I've always been vaguely puzzled by the color name "ivory black" because it seemed contradictory (ivory not being black and all). Then today I happened to look at the label on the back of a tube of acrylic ivory black, one that went into all kinds of technical detail that I have no idea what it means (it has some kind of numbers for hue, value, chroma and codes for the pigments and symbols for opaqueness and lightfastness and so on) but also had a list of ingredients and apparently that black is made from charred animal bones. Hence the name "ivory black".

And I get that historically, though I'd have thought that by now the color would be synthetic. I mean, it's not they are still grinding up lapis lazuli for ultramarine (well, I guess there might be people who are into restoration and such and make their colors themselves from scratch with pigments or specialty producers who still do that, but usually it's synthetic these days). So it's kind of gross that they still use animal bones, but that what the tube says in its ingredient list under the "vehicle: acrylic polymer emulsion" there's "pigment: amorphous carbon produced by charring animal bones". So I'm using the same pigment as my prehistoric ancestors, I guess, only in a prepared polymer solution rather than charring some hunted mammoth's bone myself. Still in my mind "gross" kind of wins out over "artistic connection across millennia of history".

Gmail problems...

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 03:21:07 GMT

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?

drawing book rec

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:37:45 GMT

A couple of weeks ago I borrowed Drawing and Painting Fantasy Beasts by Kevin Walker from my library (or rather the German edition of this), and I found it quite useful and interesting overall. Basically it's just a bunch fantasy creatures drawn as examples, but each creature comes with about four pages of step by step process description of the techniques used, and the different sketches and stages that went into the final work.

Initially I got it because I had never painted with acrylics, but generally found hobby painting books about acrylics my library had rather useless and boring. I mean, it's not that painting with some new medium was like repairing a motorcycle or any of the other things for which you really need either direct instruction or a book rather than just muddling along, and there's only so much variation to the theme of "you put color pigment on a surface" anyway, but this book has a neat introduction section that just lists different techniques with a little picture of how it looks, which makes it easier to try things than unguided trial and error and I'm lazy like that. Also I wanted to do dragons anyway, and this has examples of fantasy art done with acrylic paint (other techniques too) with step-by-step pictures, so that seemed like a good match.

The first part of the introduction is just the usual list of drawing and painting materials, and rather pointless. Frankly I wonder why nearly every such book feels the need to recap materials in a generic manner at the start. I mean, if you pick up a specialized drawing book you are most likely aware that there's a difference between watercolors, gouache, acrylics and oil paint, and that pastel chalk is different from oil pastels and so on. It's not that I haven't picked up some useful general info from skimming these chapters, because every now and then one will mention something I hadn't know of before, but overall I find them superfluous. Still, the list introducing the materials used is only four pages in this book, so it doesn't dwell, and then the introduction gets more specific with the neatly ordered examples of actually using the materials.

The main part is sections with fantasy beasts sorted by regions in which they supposedly live, and realized in a variety of techniques, both traditional and digital, though most involve acrylics or acrylics mixed with other media. I suspect that if you are already really experienced this book won't tell you much new, but since I've only started using acrylic paint it was useful to have illustrated examples like this for achieving different effects and textures, and getting ideas on what to do, though I have only tried a couple so far.

I've scanned a couple of pages to give you an idea of the way the process descriptions and illustrations look like, though obviously if you don't speak German the text of these scans that explain what was done in each step won't do much for you.

an SGA question

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:02:22 GMT

So when Rodney says to Teyla that he has encountered not one, but two different versions of himself, which are the ones he means? Obviously one is "Rod" from McKay and Mrs. Miller, but which is the other alternate self he has met? I mean, iirc the one in the timeline from Before I Sleep just died and he was told about it by Elizabeth, and I don't recall Rodney meeting his other self in Moebius nor during The Road Not Taken either? Or did he? Argh, my memory is like a sieve.

SGA rec

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 08:30:43 GMT

I just read an awesome SGA story posted for the Second Verse challenge on SGA Flashfic:

Games of Chance, by xparrot. Gen, Rodney McKay. (ca. 12,000 words)
It's a great take on precognition/multiple universes/timetravel in the SG universe, and I loved the frantic, desperate pace of it. I was slightly confused at the beginning, but that turned out to be a very deliberate story telling choice, because it starts right in the action, and it all came together in a very cool plot.