(mia)^n

Finally got around to importing some pics from the new digicam.





Two experiments in clay and acrylic. They're supposed to be pendants, or pins, or refrigerator magnets... something, I haven't decided yet.

I hope you don't mind if I show off my cats--



Peaches, the evil overlord. You should see him in real life. He manages to be fat, muscular, and sleek, all at the same time. He gets away with ordering me around, which is unfair, but he's so good at manipulating people I invariably let it slide.



Cream, the good twin. He's doubly adorable because he still acts like a kitten despite being eleven human years old. His meow is so heartmeltingly cute he gets whatever he wants without even trying.



An acrylic on illustration board piece I did tonight. The text order is a little wonky -- it's very easy to misread -- but I had to do it that way because otherwise the letters wouldn't fit. The poem is:

Is it true that the meteor
was a dove of amethyst? (Pablo Neruda)

I learned a couple of very important things while doing it, namely:

1) Marie brand acrylics suckkkk.
2) It's very very hard to do small, detailed calligraphy with acrylic and steel nibs. (Should look for silver ink.)
3) Calligraphy felt-tip markers go well with acrylic! I should do more calligraphy paintings :D The next one I'll do is "Be ahead of all parting" from a poem by Rilke.


--

I have a new art tablet, but I'm not installing it tonight. I'm still a little high on paint fumes and I want to focus on the traditional media stuff I'm trying to finish. I'm a little frightened, too: a few days ago I tried drawing a certain character, but no matter how many times I sketched and re-sketched I could not make the face look like his. The proportions were wrong, the eyes were wrong... it was upsetting, since I haven't written/drawn that character for years and he's someone I never want to forget. Ever since I got sick I've been slacking off on anatomy and sketchy stuff, so-- serves me right, I guess.

Ooh, but I'm excited. I'm almost done with Phyllis! Can't wait to color it!

I'll also be installing an Oekaki board at likhain.net :D I'll post here when it's up. Come mess around with color!

I CAN HAS ART TABLET NAO

*dies*

Because you've wounded me so deeply
I will stab your heart in turn. By this
you will know: I love you.

--

Sick, lonely, limping, sick sick sick, half-delirious, vomiting, sick sick siiiiiiiiiiiiiiickkkkkkkkkk--

I think I should go draw. Then sleep.

--

Gaiz, Paraluman submission guidelines up, plz looky and posty. Mwah.

(I like my desktop :D)

Just made my first two hand-painted, hand-rolled clay pendants/keychain things (haven't decided yet, haven't attached any bails or loops).

They're very pretty. I think I like painting jewelry.

Finally found the time (maybe I was just looking for things to distract me?) to customize my Multiply layout:

(mia)^n

Credits: the text is from one of Rilke's poems, patterns from http://patterns.ming-ling.net/, assorted brushes. Base picture by me: Murasaki, colored.

Base CSS: Outburst.

Last night I was good and actually accomplished something, wow.

http://likhain.multiply.com/

Fixed most of the CSS, uploaded images, etc etc. The sidebar is a pain in the neck! I'll tweak it later, I think.

Also installed WP at Paraluman. And uploaded a new theme for Miamor, which I'll edit extensively over the next few days.

I may also edit my personal Multiply once I get back home. The thing with me is, I absolutely hate starting a new webdesign-related project, but once I start I can't stop. A few more days of this and I'll be obsessing over my LJ layout, rly.

And yes, despite all my irritation and frustrated ranting, I really do have fun editing styles and layouts. It's the challenge of it (like -- well -- inventing classes to style a certain element, trying to figure out how to format something when I have no idea how it works, hoping I won't break anything... that kind of thing).

One of these days I'll add actual tags to entries so I can find my recipes more easily. One of these days, fo realz.

Two recipes. The first one is something I just finished baking; I got the original recipe here and tweaked it a lot. Uhm, it's very rich and may clog your arteries. (It's worth it, though!) Not good for anyone who cares about calories. You have been warned.

I might bring this to the next RoD meeting, along with peanut butter cookies. Haha.

Caramel oatmeal bars

3 c flour
3 c quick-cooking oats
1 c packed brown sugar
1/4 c sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

1 1/2 c butter

3/4 c butter
1/2 c sugar

1/3 c butter
1/4 c sugar

caramel (you can use the full amount if you want it really rich and sweet, or you can cut it by as much as half)

Heat your oven to 175 C.

Start by combining the first six ingredients. Add the 1 1/2 c butter to the dry mixture (it will probably be easier if you let it sit first), and mix well. The mixture will be crumbly.

Cream the first butter-sugar pair and add 3 1/2 c of the oat mixture to that; make sure to mix very well. Pour into a rectangular pan and bake in the oven for 10 minutes or so, until the edges are very (very very) lightly browned.

Meanwhile cream the second butter-sugar pair. Add the remaining oat mixture to that.

Spread caramel over the baked stuff in the pan (sorry, my head's running out of nouns right now). Top with the mixture made from the second butter-sugar pair. Make sure the caramel and the topping have been spread evenly over the uh baked oatmeal crisp.

Return to the oven and bake for 10-15 minutes, until the top is bubbling and the topping has evened out (no longer looks that crumbly).

Let cool completely before cutting into squares.

--

This one is one of my made-up comfort foods:

Chorizo and mushroom cream sauce

1 can mushrooms, drained and sliced
1 can green peas, drained (optional)
1 bulb garlic, minced
1 bulb onion, minced
1/2 cube chicken or pork broth (optional)
1/2 c water
2 chorizos, sliced (please note: this works much better with the not-sweet, salty orangey kind)
250 ml cream (I haven't measured how many cups this is, sry! But 250 ml = 1 tetra-pak of Nestle All-Purpose)
1/3 c Bega cheese (the "strong and bitey" kind), chopped

Seasoning:
Salt
Basil
Thyme

In a saucepan over medium heat, saute the onion and the garlic in olive oil until onions are transparent and garlic is starting to turn golden brown. Add mushrooms and green peas; continue cooking until the garlic has been browned.

Dissolve the 1/2 broth cube in water and add to your saucepan (or if you prefer to omit the broth cube, just add water. To be honest the best thing to use for this is real chicken stock, but I don't usually have it so I just make do). Simmer until the liquid has been reduced by a third, then add the sliced chorizo. Continue simmering until the chorizo has begun to color the liquid (or the liquid tastes chorizo-y enough, really).

Add cream and simmer over low heat. When the cream starts to bubble, add the cheese. Continue cooking until the cheese has melted enough to thicken the sauce.

Remove from heat and serve with pasta (preferably spirals, ribbons, or penne, because they're cuter).

I've been trying to write IxH (Iryoki/Hikaru, original characters) fic for the past few hours but I keep getting interrupted, agh. So far I have... one and a half sentences. I think I'll take a break and watch anime.

Aside from that, I have a couple of poems lined up for calligraphy, but for some reason or another I can't start. Which is a little worrying, since I do have deadlines.

Also I need to fix my bookshelves since I have fifty or so books scattered around the house whose covers are getting dusty and tattered, but---

And I even haven't updated my "books read in 2008" list -- I've finished thirty or more since the last update -- and am afraid I'll forget everything and have to start all over again...

Gah.

</whine> (cheese plz)

Anyway:



I remembered a birthday, yay! (Though it was mostly because I paid attention to my flist greetings this time. I suck at dates, srsly.)

Oh look, it's a recipe!

Basic caramel
1/2 c unsalted butter
1 c sugar
1 1/4c cream

Cook butter and sugar over medium heat until golden-brown. Slowly add cream (slowly because if you dump it in all at once you will get scalded) and let it cook for a minute or so, stirring constantly, until you reach the desired thickness.

I had to experiment with this (and even now you'll note the temperature info is not that precise) because summer heat affects the cooking time and even how high you should have the fire.

You can use this caramel to: cook fruit in (bananas and apples especially), top ice cream and other desserts, glaze pastry, etc etc.

Right now I need cheering up, so I'm going to cook it and use it as cookie filling. BBL.

Ten-minute sketch in pencil and (very sucky) brush pen. Mmh, need a new brush pen.

Might be Gokudera Hayato, might not be. Haha. He's supposed to be wearing a vest over a long-sleeved shirt, but...

The dark part is because I did it in a notebook-type sketchbook and couldn't lay it flat on the scanner. I'll rescan it once my brother's PC stops acting up.

Meme and assorted stuff! (Will add after I wake up; for now, have a meme)


From : These are the 106 books most marked "unread" by Librarything users.

boldface = Read and finished
italics = Started, didn't finish
+ = Liked (more than the usual)
++ = Recommended (and liked, of course!)
- = H8!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell +
Anna Karenina -
Crime and Punishment ++
Catch-22 +
One Hundred Years of Solitude ++
Wuthering Heights -
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel ++
The Name of the Rose ++
Don Quixote ++++++++
Moby Dick -/+ (it depends on my mood)
Ulysses
Madame Bovary -
The Odyssey +
Pride and Prejudice +
Jane Eyre +/-
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov +++++++++++!!!!!!!
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace ------ (haha)
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife (want to read, have no money)
The Iliad +++++++++++
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway +/-
Great Expectations
American Gods -
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius +
Atlas Shrugged --------
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books ++
Memoirs of a Geisha +/----- (sometimes I like it, sometimes... SO MUCH H8)
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera ++
Brave New World - (hu~h)
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum ++
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo ++++++ (one of my favorite books to read when I can't sleep)
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King ++++++
The Grapes of Wrath -
1984 -
Angels & Demons (happy I haven't read it, really)
The Inferno ++
The Satanic Verses ++
Sense and Sensibility +
The Picture of Dorian Gray +
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest +
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles -
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables ++
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time +
Dune +/- (eh, it's difficult reading something you've already read so much about)
The Prince ++++++
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things -
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon (read this and promptly forgot it, so I guess I didn't like it that much to begin with)
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything ----------------
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being +
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita ++!
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame +++++
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything -/+
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid +
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow +
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Call of Duty 4, Hardcore Sabotage. As usual, my opponents got severely pissed off because they kept dying; after a while they started calling me names. But the thing is, when you call a girl gamer "gay," she doesn't find it offensive at all. So I continued killing them happily -- it was very fun.

We won a game without much trouble and started a new game in a different map. This map just so happened to be our opponents' favorite map, and then... well, the trouble started. They started getting really, really mad.

[dialogue rendered in decent English]

Them: Fucking campers!
Me: LOL
Them: You're only winning 'cause you're camping!
Jake: New game, our clan versus yours.
Them: Naaaah you're all just campers!
Me: If we're camping how come we keep on planting the bomb in your base?
Them: ...

When the game was almost over (just one point needed to score) they kept trying to vote for a map restart. LOL.

A while later my brother (one of our team's bomb planters) and I were talking about the game and our opponents' clan in general. He noted that our opponents actually camped more than we -- technically, me, since I was the only defender on our team -- did. I remember there was this time I was playing against them and one of my teammates scored two points for us in under 5 minutes. The next round all of them (no, srsly, all of them) were holed up in their base waiting for us to rush them. Over ten people in a single building, haha. Camp much?

Honestly though, I don't understand why guys find it so damn wrong to keep dying to me. For some strange reason I keep pissing people off when I play, but... I don't see any problems with my gameplay; after all, I play to win, which means killing enemy planters and assaulters and whatnot. I don't think it's unfair: it isn't that hard to kill campers, I do it myself when I'm in bomb support mode. Also, one-man defense -- since I'm usually the only defender -- is very easy to counter. If I get 20-kill streaks is it really my fault? Besides, what do they want me to do, roll over and die?

--

One of these days I'm going to write an essay on sexism in competitive games. One of these days.

Last night I dreamed I'd written fic and someone I didn't know commented on it. She said some of the stories had real potential, but that she had some criticism regarding the characterization which she'd posted on her LJ. I followed the link and read something about shallowness and not exploring potential character depth, how irritating it was, how she longed to read intelligent fiction.

But then, I thought, after I'd woken up and had breakfast, shallow was not always wrong. Sometimes that was all there was, and the wrong lies in inventing demons where they do not exist--

In any case, it was only a dream.

Earlier this morning I spent half an hour fixing the Call of Duty installation in Paradigm: some PCs had been completely reconfigured to accommodate new games, and because the person who'd done the reconfiguration had been careless CoD levelled all multiplayer profiles down to level 1. Haha! Cue panic. It was a very satisfying fix, though. There's a new game in Paradigm: Assassin's Creed. It is all kinds of awesome and watching someone else play it feels like watching a really cool action movie set in Jerusalem during the Crusades -- that is, until the (awful) future tech storyline pushes its way back into the picture. Anyway. I'm going to learn it, roar. So uh will be busy over the next few days, sorry Paraluman-- No, just kidding.

Initial post plus the basic guidelines is over here. For now I'll be posting updates for the project on this journal, which is a rather cumbersome way of doing things, but... no more basic accounts. Crai. We need contributors, editors, proofreaders, artists, and webdesigners. Please comment either here or on the original post if you're interested in any (or all! haha) of the roles.

-- So far: : editz : anything (I'm guessing editz? and crack?) : editz/proofread : proofread/webdesign (ILU DAI <3) : !!!* : !!!* I'm thinking "edit" will include both screening submissions and actual editing. "Proofreading" will be going over the final copy, approving it for web upload, and then going over that uploaded page. Something like that. Plz to note that you are free to contribute even if you're an editor; your submission will just be screened and edited by other people. Anyway, gaiz, please take a look at the guidelines over thar and provide feedback, kthx. * XDDDDD -- Oh yeah, plz to post YM IDs please for crackfic chat confs and stuff. (Actually just because I'm always looking for more people to bother.) -- And yeah, the black text behind the pink curvy letters reads, We may be high on crack but at least it's pretty. Quotable quote from Kristel.

My PI100 professor made an offhand comment earlier that struck me as absolutely brilliant: "The Noli and Fili are very open-ended," he said, "so you can imagine all sorts of endings for the characters. For instance, what if Maria Clara and Basilio had a child?"

My classmates tittered, but I sat bolt upright in my seat, thinking madly: Oh man, it could work.

--

We went to Game Crab Cafe earlier and-- GAIS, YOU SHOULD GO. I mean it -- computer games are great but sometimes it's even nicer to actually look at your opponents' faces as you pound them into bloody wrecks... Uh, anyway, it's on the second floor of FBR Arcade, Katipunan Avenue (just above Paradigm, haha) and it's a really nice place, cheerful decor, friendly staff, really cool games. I ate two meals there today and fell in love with their Elvis sandwich. For P50... there are no words, srsly. It is IMBA.

Also played a board game there with my friends and hurt my throat laughing. Fun fun fun. I think I'll go there more often, like whenever I want a break from Call of Duty and DOTA (and Dungeon Siege 2, and Universe at War...).

(Two "bang"s, because the gun I use doesn't usually kill in one shot)

I like Call of Duty a lot.

I wish we could have Hardcore Sabotage tourneys! ;__;

I miss my other clanmates ;________;

Want to plaaaaaaaaay ;_____________;*

--

* I didn't really enjoy my games today. Either they were ridiculously easy wins, mind-numbing wins, or... just mind-numbing (didn't finish the game, but we were winning it). The thing is, usually I only had one or two other clanmates in the same team and the rest of our team wasn't very good** so most of the time I was stuck guarding the bombsite.

Which I did, but guard duty/pure defense is reaaaaally boring. I prefer the primary defense/secondary offense (support) role. T_T

** Okay, with one or two exceptions. Still not enough to turn the tide in a 16v16 match.

As long as there's love, a little poison is nothing. Gokudera Bianchi

This is what I do in class. Ink on sketchpad paper.



Pictures of the crystals have been uploaded here: http://ephemere.multiply.com/photos/album/3/Swarovski_crystals_loose_stones

The focus was a bit off (so was the lighting, I took the pictures last night -- couldn't upload them though, no internet) so I'll take new pictures once I finalize the pricelist, and upload the new pics + prices sometime soon. :D

Will write up proper image post later, have to run~~~~~~