I've been trying to work through the tail end of a Great Lectures series on the Vikings, but I didn't feel like rummaging through my art supplies basket to find my coloring pages, so I opened MS Paint instead and have been making little finger "paintings" loosely in the style of Bob Ross as my latest concentration aid.

They're actually pretty fun. :)


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I feel like I am slowly getting the hang of Bob Ross's techniques, insofar as that's possible when making finger-doodles with a notoriously shoddy digital art program. *wry*


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1. Wrote a tiny story (742 words) as an entry in the 2017 John Mosedale creative writing contest, which is run by the Loon (the annual newsletter/directory of the Star Island Protective League). I then ran it past Vicky for approval, since although the starting inspiration was my recent obsession with maybe purchasing a tiny fruit tree for my kitchen, it then veered into some stuff drawn from conversations I've had with her this past year, and I didn't want to just throw that out for anyone to read if she'd be uncomfortable with that. But she said it was cool, so I submitted it.

2. Shoveled my front steps and sidewalk AGAIN, because when I got home from work on Friday they were buried under a foot and a half of snow and ice, which had taken advantage of the lovely sunny afternoon to depart the roof en masse.

3. Baked brownies!

4. Helped Miss Cactus decorate the rental office counter for spring:


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The leaves are leftover shamrocks from our St. Patrick's Day display, which I did not bother to photograph since it was not terribly exciting. Miss Cactus and I reused them rather than cut out entirely new leaves to go with the flowers. Most of the flowers are colored paper with a bit of Sharpie marker in the centers to make them look a bit livelier and less monochrome, but a few were printed on white paper and given unique coloring jobs, because we could and because arts and crafts are fun. :)

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And now I think I will go to bed, because I am kind of brain-fried for no identifiable reason, and I figure sleep is more likely to help than staying up for another hour and trying to force myself into being productive.

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I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was stripping and repainting some picture frames as a birthday present to my mom. In the event, I was able to finish five of them before I headed down to NJ for New Year's. The sixth is kind of broken, in the sense that its support wire both snapped and tore out of the frame, so we agreed I'd do that one last; Mom will pick it up in February.

Today Mom sent me photos of the pictures rehung on the walls of the upstairs hallway. I think they look pretty good. :)

(The pictures themselves are various scenic parts of Rome, which my grandparents purchased on a trip around 1950. I am not entirely sure of the medium, but I think it may be a combination of colored pencil and some kind of paint -- watercolor, perhaps.)


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When I went to NJ to dognap Dottie in September, I dropped by the pottery studio where my friend Susan works and made two rather awkward pinch pots for an event/project the studio was doing. My latest dognapping venture (this past weekend) happened to overlap the sale days for those pots (proceeds to benefit two local charities), so I figured I'd buy them if they were still available, which they were. And now here I am with two new pots and no clear idea what to do with them.

I'm toying with the idea of trying to propagate new jade plants from my big tentacle-y jade plant, and then maybe giving them to people as gifts next year...?

But anyway, two pots! Susan picked the glazes; the designs, however, are all me. The first is just a geometric thing that looked nice to me, with no deeper significance. The second is a simplified variant of one of the infinitely extendable border designs I used to doodle around my notebooks in high school and college. I have included an example (sketched really quick in MS Paint) of the full design for comparison purposes -- as you can see, I didn't try to put the bubbles or the indication of sand/seafloor onto the pot.


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The pit of voles is being its usual link-eating self, so I am posting these here for reference and so I can make a single link pointing at this post instead of trying to make this whole damn list appear on my ff.net profile. :/

(Note: I am not sure all of these links are still live. I'll check them some other day.)

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Stuff various wonderful people have drawn for my stories! (Plus two of my own doodles.)

from "The Way of the Apartment Manager" and "The Guardian in Spite of Herself"
--mug shot of Ayakawa Yukiko, by me
--mug shot of Tonoike Naga, by me

--Yukiko as a chuunin, by gabriel_chaos
--Naga as a chuunin, by gabriel_chaos
--Uchiha Tsukihime, by gabriel_chaos
--Fuuma Seichi, by gabriel_chaos

--Naga with kimono, before the celebratory dinner in "Apartment Manager," by iponly (ETA 3/6/11 - I am told that this link may download viruses onto your computer. I can't reproduce the problem, but it seems polite to provide warning.)

--Yukiko, Iruka, and Naga, by toki_usagi

--Naga and Nagoyaka Kafunnokaze, by kazeko

--Yukiko and Naruto, by ellenlome
--Naga as a chuunin, by ellenlome

loosely related crack
--Uchiha Crystal Power, Make-up! i.e., Tsukihime cosplaying as her namesake, by gabriel_chaos
--Moon Scroll no Jutsu, Activate! i.e., Tsukihime summons a unicorn, by gabriel_chaos
--Sasuke the magical ninja, from "Lemonade," by gabriel_chaos

from "Secrets"
--Sir Vladislav, by iponly

from "Fixation, and Other Stories"
--the princess and the dragon, from 'Fairy Tales' in chapter VI: Something Completely Different, by iponly

One thing that happens sometimes at Not the IRS is that clients arrive for appointments with their children in tow. Company regulations forbid us to have much by way of kid entertainment in the office, but we DO have a box of crayons and a whole bunch of random line art that I've printed off the internet.

Another thing that happens sometimes is that I get very bored on slow evenings. This is the result. :)





(My scanner made both pictures look slightly more blue than they are in real life, but eh. Details.)

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Another podcast, another pair of coloring book pages. :D

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And I finally managed one that doesn't include green! Not that I have anything against green -- green is a lovely color, and obviously goes well with pretty much anything -- but I was using it at least twice as often as any other color and that was starting to get silly.

Now I am going to kill another fifteen minutes before heading off to my blood donation appointment. It was actually scheduled for 12:30pm, but the Red Cross had some logistical issues setting up (and getting a supervisor on-site), so I was told to try coming in a bit later and see what happens. So I suppose I will see.

ETA: They were still in the final stage of setting up when I arrived, but they processed people through pretty quickly so I was done by 2pm and left the snack table by 2:10. Now I am eating another small snack (plus drink) at home, and will shortly brave the ominous thunder and dark western sky on my walk to work, blargh.

Ah well, rain and wind won't kill me.

Done at last! Ever since I replaced my old desktop computer with a laptop, my scanner flips out when faced with images that are colored all the way to the edge of the page -- it basically can't read them, and just scans a random chunk from the middle. So I had to wait a day and use one of my local library's public scanners instead. I love libraries. :-)

I used only the beta kids' god tier symbols, partly because I didn't want to draw Hope or Rage, and partly because more than four symbols would have been conceptually crowded and difficult to arrange. From outside to inside, the rings are arranged in the order the kids are introduced: John, then Rose, then Dave, and finally Jade.

I drew this with Crayola marker and highlighter on printer paper, with some minor touchup in MS Paint to fix smudges and such. The Time symbol's circle and the outer circle around the Breath symbols were both traced from random kitchen equipment, but everything else is freehand.

( And here are the three WIP shots, just because )

December 21: mapping worlds and fandoms, cont'd (for joyeuce01) [Tumblr crosspost]

More maps, yay!

So okay, Firsthome. Firsthome is another world I dreamed up around age thirteen, but in this case my initial terrible notes (which included, IIRC, a legendary pirate and a mermaid??? I dunno, it was forever ago and the notes in question were, at best, one sentence summaries of concepts that need at least a thousand words to make any sense) were extremely minimal and I didn't get around to making maps until much later.

(Except for Yanomy, but Yanomy is a weird case I will explain in a bit.)

I first 'mapped' Firsthome verbally, and since then have been engaged in an off-and-on struggle to make those verbal descriptions of geography and climate into functional images. Like, there are seven continents in this world. Three in the northern hemisphere (Arina, Yanomy, and Tirith Ansam), three in the southern hemisphere (Nivenos, Kerabada, and Chida), and one that pretty much straddles the equator (Ohiyesa). Some of these names are, um, approximations in Common (aka the language of the Estarin Empire, which is still the common speech of Estaria, a big region of Arina) for names in the language of whatever people the Estarins happened to conquer first on a given continent. So Yanomy comes from the Sirinese (or Umestai) Yan hu'Komi, Chida is short for Chidantl, and Kerabada is an expanded version of Khrabda.

I have little verbal geographic sketches of the entirety of Arina, Yanomy, and Kerabada. I have about 80% of Nivenos verbally mapped, and maybe 20% of Tirith Ansam. Ohiyesa and Chida are very vague -- though I've actually written one ficlet each set on those continents. (Seduction is set in the city-state of Vinaeo, which is on the northern coast of Ohiyesa, and Clockwork is set in Besmodu, an as-yet-unmapped region of Chida.)

At one point I started a project to map the whole world by hemispheres, but I only finished the east; west, south, and north are all sadly blank. And the map itself is pretty sketchy and subject to future revision, particularly Chida and Ohiyesa. But here it is. (The scribbly bits are mountain ranges.)

( there are a bunch of large images from this point onward )

And that's all I have to say about Firsthome today, since the topic is maps rather than history or linguistics or children's games or religion or epic poetry traditions or any of the other things I have created and written down over the past twenty years. :-)

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December Talking Meme: All Days

Something I find fascinating about Homestuck as a fandom is the weird experiments it inspires me to try. For example, this fic, which I wrote... and then decided to format entirely as a series of images. Because why not? (Don't worry! The second "chapter" is not actually a chapter; it's just a text version for anyone who is using e-readers, is reading on a small screen, has trouble parsing cursive fonts, or just doesn't want to bother with images. You may want to disable the AO3 work skin, though, since I did use pesterlog formatting.)

Anyway, this fic is a combined response to two kinkmeme prompts. The major prompt, by random_gal, was for Jane contacting either Rose or Dave to assuage her doubts that Roxy and Dirk are actually related to them. The minor prompt was for Jane meeting either Rose or Dave in person and striking up a conversation about their child that they've never met.

Contact for Proof: Dear Ms. Lalonde, my name is Jane and I met your daughter online last month... [Alpha Timeline Fluff, obviously] (3,075 words)