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. :(

My stupid rats chewed on the cable on my wacom tablet, and it now won't work anymore. Unfortunately the cable is fixed to the tablet, so I can't just use a new USB cable, also with the many finicky small cables making up the cable I can't just fix it myself like I could with a power cord. I tried reconnecting the strands, but didn't manage to get it working again. :(

Why can't they make standard cable insulation bitter with some added chemical rather than letting it remain sweet as it is now? Surely it's not just pet rodents who love the taste of cable better than many actual food stuffs, that has to be a problem in buildings and such at least sometimes.

Argh. I guess my yuletart entry will have to be completely traditional media, because there's no way I can afford a new tablet right now, not even a cheap one like mine was, not least because of the same destructive rodents' vet bills. Gah, I haven't inked or colored on paper in ages.

In slightly better news, when the vet removed the remaining stitches from Krümel's eye on Monday he said it healed quite well. There's still a hematoma in his eye that'll have to heal, and he still has to take an antibiotic daily and eyedrops several times a day, but the chances are better now that he will be able to keep his eye. I have to come for another check in a week, or rather it ought to have been a week from Monday, but that's in the middle of Christmas, so I'm going to take him on the first day after, i.e. the 27th. Meanwhile Krümel seems mostly okay, though for some reason he keeps that eye squinted almost closed most of the time, but from what I can see of it, it doesn't look worse or infected, so I figure it's just because it's still healing or something, and hope for the best.

So my desktop computer, which is fairly new but not under its six month warranty anymore, has a problem. Sometimes it won't boot when I turn it on. It doesn't even show the BIOS screen nor the graphics card notice. The on/off switch diode lights up, and the case fan works, however I don't see the hard disk diode blinking.

So when it happened the first time out of the blue (there weren't any signs of incipient failure the last time I had turned it on) I thought the worst, tried the turning it off and on again once to no effect, and then pulled out my computer, intending to check all cables, then open it, see whether the processor fan starts, and whether maybe just some connection is loose or too much dust had accumulated or anything. So I pull it out, wriggle all the outside cables, try once again, and miraculously it starts before I even open it. And the computer worked fine, no errors, no freezing, or anything.

So I thought that maybe it was nothing after all, clearly going with my hopes for a best case scenario, because I really don't want to spend money repairing or replacing it fully or in parts. Also seeing how it is still fairly new I didn't anticipate any such extra computer costs, I'm still recovering from buying it this spring, no matter that it was a relatively cheap one as far as computers go, but it was still a big expense for me. (I did however backup the data I hadn't already.)

But then today it fails to start again. So again I try a couple of times, futilely hoping that it might resolve itself on its own like before, then pull it out, open it, and all cable connections I can see seem fine, so I try starting it while open, and again it suddenly works, and now seems to run okay. It did give me BIOS notice that I had pressed the cold reset button too often in sequence, so clearly something registered even as the computer didn't seem to do anything.

Does anyone have any idea what produces behavior like this?

So in an attempt to start relying less on LJ's ScrapBook gallery functions I just spent the last few hours uploading all my drawble artwork (over 60 images) to my webspace, created thumbnails (thankfully I found a shell command automating that step), coded them to display on my page for assorted sketches, complete with the annotations that used to be gallery labels showing as mouseover, i.e. for whom I did it and what the prompts were.

Then I changed at least the posts for the most recent drawbles to link to these images instead of the LJ hosted ones, that in *three* places, what with the crossposting. I do not look forward to do that for the rest of the drawbles, let alone all the entries showing rat pictures, and scans, and what not. Gah. It's not that I'd be that thrilled to pay them again as if nothing had happened, but I could have read another SGA Big Bang novel in this time, you know? And at least this part led to some vague improvement in that more of my art shows on my site, editing to relink most other other content won't do anything of the sort. *feels conflicted* Maybe I should consider letting posts just break...

Anyway, I feel like drawing monsters, which I haven't done in a while, so if anyone's interested and maybe wants a monster drawing, you could prompt me with a description or some features. I do somewhat cute monsters better than truly scary ones, but I can try to be scary.

I have a killer headache, my throat is scratchy, my nose stuffed, and I woke up from a nightmarish dream where I was chased through tower structures during some kind of flooding event, that was damaging them, so I had to scramble over waterlogged, bloated corpses (no idea why they were already bloated when the flooding was happening just then), nearly drowned in some pipe/tunnel thing next to one, and all of that somehow was happening as I was trying to get through an excruciating (and general anxiety inducing) family dinner thing at the place. There were other horrible things too. Thanks a lot subconscious!

I just decided to be finished with my drawing of Bob and go ahead an post it (see my previous post). Considering how much time I spent on it, it kind of sucks, partly because I tried new (to me) things, like surface textures, gradients and such digital stuff. It's not horrid or anything (well at least I don't think so) but just now I had the urge to put some disclaimer thing in the notes, i.e. listing all the things I know that are wrong with it like "I know the lightening doesn't look like firelight and the shadows are all wrong for that! and that the various metal textures suck! and the wood too! and that the candle light is all wrong, that that one candlestick turned out a bit too small and the other candle a bit too large..."

But I suspect that kind of thing doesn't go over any better for art than it does for fanfic. I myself quite dislike it when an author tells me at length all the ways their story sucks, and often I won't read it then, and with art I'll probably still look, but inevitably my attention will be drawn to all that is wrong (in the artist's mind) with the drawing, so that doesn't improve its impact any, though depending on how the artists talks about it it can be interesting from a technical viewpoint. Obviously I could have just not posted, but I spent hours on it and it's not that bad.

Beyond just being sick of the drawing after spending many, many hours on it, part of the problem is of course that I lack the skills to correct what I see is wrong with the drawing. I mean, okay, the size issues of that candlestick I could have easily corrected had I noticed earlier, not just towards the end, but it is far easier to see that the lightening and shadows don't look like what you want than to create the effects you want. So I get the urge to say that I know of the problems to not appear stupid/inept/oblivious/whatever to technical issues and give a "better" impression (well in theory, even if the realization lacks), but it's not like that makes the drawing any better, and in fact may even influence perception of the drawing negatively. Though I'm not sure whether people mind notes like that for art as much as for fic.

Anyway, I compromised by dumping my disclaiming in an extra LJ entry afterwards. And out of curiosity, a poll:

Poll #975503 The "I know it sucks in such-and-such way" author/artist's note...
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

What do you think about a creator distancing themselves from their work like that?

Unfortunately my new icon is rather appropriate...

First, I woke up at an ungodly hour (around seven) sicker than yesterday, with a headache and chills in addition to the cough and sore throat, that also hurt more and my voice was hoarser too, and a number of irritating other stuff like that my nose started bleeding with the slightest provocation (like, say, *blowing it*) and for some reason my tonsils actually *itched* despite being not even all that swollen. Anyway, general ickiness abounded.

Now after I took some paracetamol and drank some tea, and then went back to sleep for a while, all that improved slightly, and I actually thought the day had taken a turn for the better. I stayed mostly in bed, watched the new Criminal Minds, read some fanfic, cuddled with my rats, doodled to make new icons, and it seemed things were looking up.

However it turned out that the mainboard of my desktop computer gave up the ghost completely. My desktop is quite old for a computer (I think with this mainboard it's been working since 2001? and some other parts were older) and it had problems for a while, like sometimes it wouldn't boot or it booted only to show the BIOS screen to explain the hardware problem (something about the processor voltage being below the acceptable range IIRC), or randomly rebooted, so this wasn't entirely unexpected, but it still sucks. Especially since for some reason that I never managed to figure out, my USB scanner won't work with my laptop.

Since the desktop finally died while I was about to scan some doodles I had drawn to turn into new icons, I only managed to scan and transfer the "woe!" one, but not the Rodney!RatCreature I've drawn to complement my SGA set. Anyway, because right now the laptop is my only working computer (*hearts working laptop*) I can't scan stuff anymore. Hence: Woe!

( You can look at the pencil drawing behind the cut... )

BTW, does anyone know what happened to smittywing? I've noticed that the LJ has been deleted?

The sound coming from my heater is driving me insane. Not because it is loud or clanking or gurgling or anything, but because it is a very quiet sound, just on the edge of my hearing. It took me forever to even figure out that what I hear comes from the heater or is transmitted through the pipes or whatever. At first I thought it must be all in my head or something because I couldn't figure out where that noise was coming from. It's a very odd mechanical kind of sound, like a quiet droning from a an old belt in a motor or something like that (without the motor sound, just the friction from the belt rotation), and actually I still have no idea why the central heating might produce this noise that doesn't really sound like anything to do with the water in the pipes. And I don't know why it is bothering me this much when it is lower than both the rather quiet fan in my laptop as well as the muted car sounds from outside, either. Argh.

I'm just about ready to consider turning on some quiet music to maybe block it out, even though I dislike having background music on when I'm trying to concentrate on something else (right now I'm coloring some Animal Man fanart). *headdesk* *headdesk*

I ordered this awesome rat cage (though the doors of mine are all like in the upper module of the picture) so that when eventually another two rats move in with Ben, my currently lonely rat, as planned, they will share a new, bigger cage together. Now as you can see this awesome rat cage is large and made of metal. Yesterday the shipping company called and asked whether they could deliver today between 10 and 13h, and I said sure, I'll be there. However they arrived over an hour too early, meaning I was still in my sleep clothes, but I would have overlooked that had they at least delivered to my door. But they didn't. They delivered to the door of my building, and when I asked whether it would brought up to me, I got the frank reply that it was too large and heavy for that, and the delivery guy even kind of bitched at me for having to come up to my floor once to inform me of their delivery.

So I ended up with an industrial pallet dumped outside the building front door. I had been prepared to tip the delivery people generously for having to carry this stuff five flights of stairs. Obviously I didn't as I just spent well over an hour unpacking the crate to break up its heavy weight into manageable portions, and carrying heavy, unwieldy metal parts up my long, narrow stairwell a few parts at a time. I think it was about nine trips or so. At least it hadn't started raining yet, so I didn't get soaked while unpacking outside.

Now once my muscles have stopped trembling I will have coffee, a shower, and then check with the shipping list whether at least all parts have been delivered.

I woke up at an absolutely ungodly hour this Saturday morning (yes, even earlier than now *grumble*), because my frelling nose is completely stuffed, and I have a cough that doesn't do much to dislodge the annoying viscous phlegm (I know that nobody is interested in reading about other people's phlegm, but that comes with the LJ territory now, doesn't it?), but just makes my throat feel even scratchier. Worse, both these things have prevented me from falling asleep again now for well over an hour. And neither the nasal salt water spray nor the soothing tea made much difference. It's not that I'm feeling particularly ill, there's no fever (at least not yet), nor any aches, however that I'm feeling icky rather than miserable doesn't make the lack of sleep any better. Anyway, I see some chamomile inhalations and the like in my near future to help me get rid of the gunk that's attempting to take over my respiratory system.

On the bright side (and so that at least the readers of this LJ may get something out of this entry that's not gross and/or boring) I read a cool short Firefly/various crossover fic just now, Eight Crazy Pilots Serenity Didn't Keep, by tassosss.

Did I forget about some frelling Christian holiday again? The obnoxious bells of the nearby church (well, two blocks away from me, but it's not as if they weren't designed to be heard widely) have been loudly ringing for some time now, but it's Saturday, not Sunday, and usually the only bells I on Saturday are for the evening service, and that bell call is shorter too.

Gah, the double-paned, noise-reducing windows I have cope well with the traffic noise, but church bells always come through loud and clear. *headdesk*

Why is there so little Daredevil fanfic? I'm fairly sure I lamented this sad state of affairs before in my LJ, but absolute dearth of it is still stunning. Every couple of months I check around anew, hoping that there's been new stuff posted, but as usual my hopes are crushed. :( I don't get it. I can't be the only one who'd love some Daredevil emo-porn of any variety.