Okay. So. I was looking into LJ groups, and the ones that LJ recommends for me are… well, not ones I’d expect. Like, comms for furries and… smut. And erectile dysfunction. I am looking at my interests, and I’m going “…?” Here are my interests. Do you see it?

accounting, aesthetics, antiques, art theory, ball-jointed dolls, bjd, blogging, canon rebel xt, casting, cerberus project, children’s rights, chinchillas, cooking, customizing, dolls, feminism, figure kits, finance, gachapon, gaming, gears, haute doll, nintendo ds, painting, photography, pinky st., pocketwatches, sculpting, series 66 exam prep, sewing, steampunk, sushi, the great gatsby, volks, wii, women’s rights, writing.

No furries, no sex. So…. okay.

I want groups where I can post drawings and discuss aesthetic theory. Does anyone have suggestions? I just don’t think I’m made for LJ.

I keep meaning to post on Conceptart.org, but it is just too intimidating for me.

We have caught up now on all the DVDs that are presently out for Avatar and eagerly awaiting the release of the #3 of season three.  I didn’t get into the first DVD of this season as much, but I enjoyed the second a lot.  Serious Aang/Katara squee!!! :)  Serious squick, though, with Zuko and the monotone chick – where the hell did that come from?  That’s a match made in hell.  Happy to see Aang bald again too…

I spend too much time in meetings at work.  And… I need for senior management to stop announcing at staff meetings that I’ll be calling meetings and organizing projects without telling me beforehand.  I generally keep a pretty straight expression, but sometimes I just sort of blink, then smile and say I’ll be sending out the meeting notices shortly.

I feel like for the last month or so, I haven’t really been myself.  I’ve been making mistakes at work… not necessarily huge mistakes, but ones that I haven’t made in the past… and ones that when I find them, I don’t know how I made them.  I’m not really that type.  I’m always careful…. and because of that, mistakes really unsettle me.  Lately I feel like I can’t trust my own work, and I can’t trust that I’ve done something right.

I mentally recount my day before I fall asleep, and I can’t account for large blocks of time.

I feel like I’m not being a very good friend because I don’t think I’m responding appropriately half the time… and a lot of my responses are kinda non-sequiteurs.  I am listening and thinking, but when I talk I just can’t seem to say what I’m thinking, or I don’t reply as thoroughly as I feel like I should.  I dunno what’s wrong with me.

Maybe I have some kind of mineral deficiency, or I just need to get more sleep or something.

It seems like cleaning took the whole weekend! Crazy. The apartment is much cleaner, though, and that is a source of happiness.

I also watched more of Avatar, and I am enjoying it. I am also delighted because I realized that Toph’s dad was voiced by the same guy who voiced Die Fledermaus on The Tick. He even used the same voice mannerism. Kinda weird. We just finished season 2. I’ve decided that since I can’t get figures of all the characters, I’m going to make them as Volks 1/6ths. I haven’t done 1/6th in awhile, but I think it would be nice… lots of sewing, though. It’s a back-burner project for when I finish everything else. I had a hard time figuring out which models to use for each one…. it’s not ideal, but I think it’ll look okay when they’re all done. If nothing else, all the characters are distinctive enough that even if the dolls aren’t perfect, they’ll be recognizable.

I also want to post some pics of Fawn. I haven’t done too much on her, but since I haven’t really even posted her here… thought I’d take a moment. :)

She makes me happy, even though she’s not perfect.

You can also see Percy sitting on the little shelf in the background, overseeing everything.  :)

Whenever I read about things like this, I feel just a little bit more skittish about posting anything I care about online. The fact that foreign companies do this, and there is no economically feasible recourse for artists, is the sort of thing that makes me worry that the pendulum is going to swing back in the opposite direction… and instead of being a place for communication and sharing, the internet is actually going to scare artists into keeping their work to themselves. I know this happens already, but… stuff like this coupled with the fact that the copyright laws only protect the people with the money to take others to court make me worry.

I read a post on DoA and felt like smacking someone, and I’m taking this as a clue from my hormones and histamines that the onslaught of spring allergies is at hand and my period is probably going to hit soon.  For that reason, I’m setting my lasers to stun myself inactive on DoA for a couple days… I’ll still be working on stuff, but I probably won’t be a very visible presence online till mid-next week.  (Either that or I will have a sudden frantic binge of posting, I never know how I’m going to be. Delightful.)

This weekend I will…

• Clean!
• Start looking again for a pet-friendly apartment!
• Continue modding Surprise Package #1
• Finish Surprise Package #2?
• Repaint Kit
• Add to the back of Fawn’s head
• Cut Fawn’s head open
• Sleep in…

I upgraded my Wordpress.  I’m not sure I like 2.5   It feels clunky.

I’m relatively new to the Avatar: The Last Airbender series…. but I am really enjoying it and I was planning to add a couple of the figures to my toy collection on the bookshelf.  Specifically, I want Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko.  So I went to Amazon.com, Toysrus.com, and finally eBay.  I found cool figures of both Sokka and Zuko, but I am really getting a little miffed because there don’t seem to be ANY figures at ALL of Katara.  I have found a plush of her, but no action figures or anything.  On looking further, I’m not seeing figures of any of the female chararacters.  They have all sorts of random fire warriors, Appa playsets, missile launching rhinos (?)… but… no Azula, Katara, Yue, etc….?

So a question for those of you who  may be more familiar with the series and the merchandise – was Nickelodeon really so sexist that they completely excluded the female characters from the merchandise lines?

Emotional blackmail is highly unbecoming.

Terror, right?  But Mandy had a great idea, so maybe it’s terror with potential.  In fact, I think it might be the best mod ever.

Now that is a weird rabbit/d I could get into.  (For the non-gamers and those who have been living under rocks: Ravin’ Rabbids).

I was remembering someone the other day – a girl I knew peripherally in high school who was a fantastic artist. As 17, she could draw better than a lot of professional artists… and had a very fluid, gestural quality to her drawings and a certain intuitive knowledge of human musculature that was far beyond that of the average high schooler. I really looked up to her, though I think at the time I was foolishly competitive. In retrospect, it was foolish to compete because it would sort of be like trying to outrun the wind.

Out of curiousity, I looked her up online to see if she had become a famous illustrator. So far, it seems that she has the beginnings of a website, but nothing linked yet but a blog.

I took a peek at her blog and saw a recent entry about her feelings toward an artist that had been picked up by a local gallery, and how this artist had been picked up and backed by this gallery because she had money rather than talent. The tone of the post was full of both hateur and despair. And while I wanted to reply and tell her that I was sure she’d get picked up by a gallery and that she’d been a very influential person to me and would no doubt be to others… I couldn’t bring myself to think that she might in turn remember me, and in her new bloom of ego, laugh and privately deride me as she had this other young artist who she felt was below her.

So I have quietly closed the browser, turning my back on her again until she resurfaces in my memory and only feeling slightly disappointed by what I found.

I’ve been thinking a lot about art and artists, the million births and deaths of aesthetics, and the human need to create. I’ve been finding myself drawn again to reading aesthetic texts, writing again, and considering theory. Deep loves, all of them. I have no room in my life to try to make contact with an egoist, however talented she may be… I need to re-find the art in my own life.

Percy got some new shoes. They’re the only article of clothing he has that are not borrowed and they may still get stolen by Lacey.

Poor little Iremonger.

The list of people not to let handle my dolls just got longer….-_-;;;
http://www.denofangels.com/forums/showthread.php?t=207508