Hey people! I'm back in the saddle again and trying to get back my bearings in real life. I showed up to work an hour later than usual because my alarm clock, I realized when I was about to leave, was still on California time. ^^; Whoops.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I bought a domain yesterday, to use for Muse. At the webcomics panel I went to the other day, people suggested that we should be aware that some connotation is associated with the webcomics collective we join.. No names were mentioned, particularly, but it was suggested that, basically, you shouldn't be a part of a collective who accepts just anybody, or that surrounds you with tons of crappy manga artists (yeah, they said that). I know I have a site all ready and set up on CG, but I'd been contemplating getting a domain for Muse anyway, so I decided to go ahead and do it. I bought it through GoDaddy (which is who I have my art site bought/hosted with), and decided to try hosting it at 000webhost, which my brother recommended. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, the next suggestion was to try ComicPress, which is a plugin for WordPress and therefore requires the WordPress software to be installed on your website. This is unfortunate because I know less-than-nothing about MySQL, PHP, or anything more complicated than basic HTML. I spent two hours or so last night trying to figure out how to get WordPress onto my website, without success. I tried to download the folder of files and then upload them onto my website, but I'm not sure I put it in the right place. Furthermore, I can't even follow their directions of setting up a database, because I don't understand them. Also, the autoinstaller program on 000 is being updated, and looks like it has been for some time.

Has anyone mastered this process and could give me the WordPress-for-Dummies version of their super-easy installation procedure? I'll try more when I get home and can mess with the FTP. (PS~ I'll tell you what the site is once I've got it figured out, don't worry.)

-> I have finished the upper armbands on my costume, and spent 3 episodes of Stargate Atlantis sewing 3 buttons on each of them, and also sewing a total of 12 buttons on my pants. Next is the gauntlets, but they'll be tricky because the red fabric I have left from the vest is irregularly shaped. I can do it, but it will take a little ingenuity. Or another trip to the fabric store.

-> Surround sound speakers on my computer are very cool. Roommates, sorry about the subwoofer. I promise not to use it after 2am.

-> I spoke with my manager and have gotten permission to extend my housing contract through August. This allows me to not stress out about landing a new apartment and packing before SDCC. Also, it prevents me from being homeless like Fi and Ki for two weeks between contracts, in case I can't find one to fit my needs that's available any sooner. (The homeless people are still welcome to stay with me and stow their stuff if they need to, when the time comes. Best case scenario: I find a contract that starts *beginning*ish of August, and can spend the month moving leisurely, which means that there will be room in my new place for you[r stuff]. Will keep you posted.)

-> I am officially rewarding myself for the first 50-point milestone in my art chart. While I'm monstrous behind on Artslam (because of laziness and working on my costume), I tallied my points from January through June and came out with 63 (half of which were in June itself). My reward is a $15 iTunes card, because it's the only actual prize in my grab bag so far (I thought I had gotten more. Oh well), and because I want to buy some music.

-> You are all awesome. Thank you.



-> OH!! Also, new camera! I mentioned I want to get a nice Nikon digital SLR, but the timing's still not right for it. I want to make sure I pay deposit/etc on housing before I make a hefty purchase like that, for one. I also don't want to get a supernice camera and put myself (and it) through a trial by fire at SDCC, when I will need to use it and won't know how, and where it could get lost, broken, or stolen. Also, it will be heavy and bulky, and I'll already be laden with swag. So I went with a lighter, more compact, cheaper alternative and got this to use in the meantime and for my less serious photography needs. It's pink, it's cute, it fits in my purse/pocket/whathaveyou, and it's easy to use.

-> As you were.

This post is brought to you by my very own REANIMATED COMPUTER, Calliope!! She has a new brain! ^_^ There are still some kinks to work out (I'm having trouble with the WoW downloader, for instance), but I can't tell you how good it feels to have access to this machine again. Ahhhhhhh...

You know what's interesting? I put some stickers on my art chart to fill in the time I was working at my other desk, and I've noticed something of a pattern:

Apparently I don't draw during the first two weeks in the month.

Weird.

I wonder why? Is there general craziness at the beginning of each month, and it takes me a couple weeks to get everything sorted out enough to concentrate on creativity? I don't know. But whatever it is, I hope to fix it. I need to be drawing more regularly in order to get this stuff off the ground.

And I need the random papers and mail and junk to stop piling up cuz I need desk space to work and I don't know what to do with it all.

Also, I have a problem with buying books that I want, and not reading them. Not helpful.

Brother One spent 2.5 hours putting in my new motherboard last night (he hadn't done it in a little while), and at the end my computer was behaving exactly the same as it had before. We hooked up the power, and when we flipped the switch in the back of the machine, you could hear electricity flowing (you know that little whining noise), but pushing the power button on the front still did nothing. He double- and quadruple-checked that the pins were all in the right places, and we tested the power source by bridging wires (just like with the old mobo), and the fans worked..

So the story is, my computer isn't fixed, and we don't know what's wrong with it. Sanzo has graciously offered to do more testing tonight, to try to narrow down the problem, but besides that, I only have a couple of options. I can find somebody local to look at it - somebody at work, somebody at Church - or I can just make do with my laptop for the next month and a half, until Brother Two (who we had on remote tech support several times during the process) comes up for Brother One's graduation and can get his hands on the machine for real.

I'll probably be fine either way. My biggest concerns are that I can't play NWN (boohoo, I know, but sometimes you need to feel like you're making progress in life, even if it's not real life), and that I need my scanner for Muse very soon. I will probably just install the scanner/printer on my laptop when it comes to that point, but I'm not excited about the rigmarole of hooking it up every time I need to scan something.

First of all, next-to-nothing was accomplished this weekend because of Sanzo buying Guitar Hero World Tour.

Second, happy belated birthday to phoenix_melody!

Third, we had stake conference this weekend, at which they released our old stake presidency and announced a new one. At which they POACHED my bishop and installed him as the new stake president! GRRRRRRRR!!!!!!! I appreciate that he can do a lot of good there, because he's amazing, but I'm also (still) very sad about losing him and having to share him with everyone else. We'll almost never see him anymore. He was a very special bishop, and I'm going to miss him a really lot. ;_;

Yesterday I also discovered that my motherboard has died. I had to spend an entire Sunday without a computer, and being stake conference, Church was shorter and earlier than usual, so I had *more* time to not be on a computer. Now that Isaura's back in town (I let her borrow my laptop for the weekend), I can use it when I need it, but it's going to be several days before I can get a new motherboard, so there will be decidedly less computer time.

It is sad. But it might also be a blessing in disguise. ( I've been struggling a lot lately. )

So hopefully I will be able to make the most of this no-mobo situation and cut out more distractions for a while. Since I had nothing else to do yesterday, I ended up clearing off my whole sewing/art desk, fixing two pairs of pants that had needed minor sewing attention for the last six weeks, and finally sat down with my sketchbook and my iPod and a couple of reference books for a while. That's what I should be doing. Like, every day. (Especially now that I've got another Leading Edge commission due in a month or so. And a wedding gift painting that's several weeks overdue.) I'm still feeling insecure about Muse, but decidedly less so, and I recognize that I won't start hearing from super excited fans until I actually start posting it on the internet for them to read. So I need to be patient and just work on making pages, and the rest will come.

Can anyone tell me why, when I play WoW on my newly-reWindowed machine, the graphics keep doing things like this? And what I can do to fix it? I'm getting really tired of this.

( Picture under cut )

Faerie003: Also!! I moved my important files from my main harddrive to my second one, before I reinstalled Windows... and somehow all of My Documents were erased from the second HD as well, upon reinstall.
SanzoHoushi: ;_;
Faerie003: I had backups of my files from November (when we rebuilt the machine), so most of the important stuff was there.. it's just the last six months that were in question.
Faerie003: But that included my pictures and art and website and comic files...
SanzoHoushi: I'm sorry a lot.
Faerie003: Guess how many comic pages I've done in the last six months.
Faerie003: Two. And both of them are on my jump drive, cuz I did them on my laptop.
Faerie003: :D
Faerie003: Who would have thought that being semi-inactive would be such a blessing!!
SanzoHoushi: Phew!
Faerie003: There are minor things gone, like all the screencaps I took of John and Hot Uncle from the Sarah Connor Chronicles, that I wanted to draw...
Faerie003: but that's just another excuse to go back and watch the episodes again, right?
SanzoHoushi: Totally.
Faerie003: I probably lost some photos from my camera that I put on there between November and now, which are well and truly lost.. but it could have been so much worse. So I think I'll take it.

By the way.. It's been a while since I made a real post, so I thought I might give you a little update.

My favoritest older sister, Hayley, came to visit this weekend from Arizona, Thursday through Sunday, and it was really good to see her. She's pregnant, so she didn't feel great and didn't have much energy the whole time, but she and I and Parker (our brother who's up here at BYU, next in family rank after me) spent some time together and enjoyed just being together and sharing our lives as adults. It's an interesting phenomenon, this growing up thing. Also, our little sister graduated from high school last week (egad!), and she'll be up here in the fall, as well. We have high hopes for her awakening to Real Life and for the personal development she'll undergo.

Hayley asked me about Muse, and it spurred a resurgence of momentum and energy into the project. It's been driving me pretty hard this weekend, to the point of just itching to get my hands on paper and actually get started. But I still have a ways to go before it's ready for that. I'm still working on organizing the story into arcs and chapters and scenes, on one hand, and I've been reading Scott McCloud's Making Comics for foundation, on the other. There are some great tips and points in there on things that I struggle with, like choosing which moment to capture, and how expressions and gestures convey meaning just as much, if not more, than the dialog. There are *tons* of things in the book that I struggle with.

In addition to Muse.. yesterday I woke up with the costume bug. I went to Jo-Ann's and bought some fabric, washed and dried it, and was all ready to start arranging and cutting pieces for my Alliance Gryphon Master costume. (Then I answered a distress call from chibidrunksanzo, and when I got home, since WoW gave me another flood of error messages, I decided to work on debugging my computer. The memory diagnostics I ran it through last week were all clean, and the hard drive diagnostics I ran it through last night all came out clean.. so I think I'll have to just buck up and reinstall Windows after all. I was pretty bummed by this, but after going through my files, I realized that the software I'll have to reinstall isn't that big a deal, and all my files are pretty much on my second drive, so it's not as hard a decision as I thought it was.) The costuming can continue in the next couple of days. I've got some tricky bits to figure out - how is it that the brown back is *over* the red/yellow in the back but *under* it in the front?? - but I'm optimistic. (Sanzo and Duo, I'm going to ask you for ideas on the shoulders.)

BTW.. pudges and phoenix_melody - if you've changed your minds about getting Ballroom tickets, matinee on Saturday the 12th, let me know ASAP so I can tell my brother. I haven't gotten them from him yet, but I will next time I see him. They're $10 each.


In other news... I haven't been using my desktop lately for anything but listening to music, because the monitor's getting so bad (and it doesn't want to play WoW.. but that's a different story). I'm finally looking into replacing it, but I thought I'd ask you people if you had recommendations.

It seems really difficult to find CRTs anywhere, but based on the comparisons I've read tonight, it looks like CRTs are still preferable over LCDs for graphic output - color capability and resolution handling is still better than with LCDs. And they're cheaper. The one I've got now is a 16", I think, but it came from an eMachine, which is not particularly... cutting edge..

If I went with a CRT, it seems Sony or ViewSonic would be the way to go. (This one seems pretty nice....) Thoughts? Anyone care to defend the side of the LCD? (I use LCD monitors at work, and it would be really nice to have more space on my little desk at home, but I don't know..)

And tonight we're spending some time getting reacquainted. This will probably include installing NWN2.

Unfortunately, because I'm a moron and didn't realize that I didn't have any basic software myself, we have to spend the next few days working with minimal software. Sure, I have my games, and art software, and stuff, but the actual *functional* stuff? Yeah, no. I could say more, but I'll stop there in an attempt to save some semblance of face. ^^; When I go home for Thanksgiving, Calliope will be going with me, and there my dad/brother can get her back up to performance level. Since they're the ones who have the software that I had before.

This means I will be downloading a trial version of Office (Word, particularly), so I have something by which to NaNoWriMo.. ^^;;

However, I did sleep much better last night. I think I had been missing that gentle lulling of computer buzz, and so my last couple nights were fitful. I have no other explanation.

PS~ Last night's installment of the process was the best yet - While Sanzo worked, Isaura and Duo and I watched, and we all hung around and laughed. And then my brother came over and joined us, and there were Deep Thoughts and "Doing it Wrong" and fun times.. And TOMORROW'S FRIDAY!

First of all, IT'S ALMOST FRIDAY!!!

My iPod is having issues, so in the attempt to solve them I had to restore it to factory settings. Now I have to put all my music back on. It's kind of irritating to not have a "master" version of all my music.... Sigh. Oh well - if that's what it takes to make it work, I guess that's what we'll do.

Computer Update:
Calliope has been successfully transferred to her new body. The new case is *very* cool, black with silver accents, and *green* LED lights everywhere.. there's even an open panel so you can see the workings inside! All the guts seem to be okay, but we're having some trouble with the monitor (the monitor did have some trouble before..), so we didn't get to start working on the software yet.

The operation will be continued tonight after work. I'm still excited to be able to play NWN2, and especially to see what differences I'll see in the capability of my video card. ^______^ I bet even Photoshop and Painter will surprise me!

I had been thinking, since Calliope really has gotten a complete overhaul with the exception of the old hard drive, maybe it was time to rechristen her.. Maybe even a sex change. But after researching the muse, I decided "Calliope" is still the perfect name for my computer. And now that I think about it, I don't have a "muse" for my art or my writing - maybe I should personify Calliope in illustrative form..! That sounds like fun!

Also, "Pushing Daisies" and "Bionic Woman" are on tonight, yay! (Even though ABC.com has *still* not put last week's "Pushing Daisies" online - GRRRRR!!!!!)

Also also, the main reason I wanted to post today was to spread an article I saw: Marvel Comics finally puts comics online for viewing!!!!! I've wished for a comic library for ages, because I'm certainly not going to invest in 40 years of back-issue comics just so I can *read* them.. Hopefully this plan will be a good move both for them and for us. :)

OH! One last thing: Might any of you happen to have Mercedes Lackey's "Heralds, Harpers, & Havoc" music CD, and be able to upload it somewhere? I've had it since high school, but I've misplaced the actual CD, and I've been wanting to listen to it lately. I seem to have the cases of several of my favorite albums of which the CDs are missing.. DX

My boss is in a meeting with our art director, finalizing all sorts of stuff that we finished yesterday, and I have nothing to work on. :D I should be writing. Or reading. And I'm irritated that I can't even watch last week's episode of "Pushing Daisies" because it's five days overdue on the website and still hasn't been uploaded! Grrrr!!!

Computer Update:
The parts I ordered came yesterday, so I arranged for chibidrunksanzo to come by after work. (She works for cookies, fyi.) Calliope went into surgery just after 6pm last night, and Dr. Sanzo spent about three hours with the screwdriver and the bubble wrap, but at the end it was determined that the case is unsuitable and we need to transplant.

Calliope is now on ice, and Dr. Sanzo will continue the operation tonight, after we select a new, more appropriate case from a local computer store.

During Calliope's downtime, I've had to find new and unusual ways to occupy myself. Last night I talked to my family on the phone for an hour and a half, trimmed my fingernails, vaccuumed my carpet, and spent half an hour reading a book that I borrowed several weeks ago.

This morning, in the absence of Calliope-induced distraction, I attempted to curl my hair using the new hot rollers my mom gave me for my birthday. I've determined that the large rollers are more or less ineffective, and the medium ones are okay (I have yet to try the small ones), but even with hairspraying each strand before rolling it up, the curl was essentially gone ten minutes into my work day. :( Back to the drawing board. Surely my hair's not too long to hold a curl....

There was some other confusion this morning, where I somehow ended up with THREE contacts in my contact case.. (!?!??) I'm pretty sure I only have two eyes, and I changed out the last pair of contacts a couple of weeks ago! It's a good thing I'm the same prescription in both eyes, but really, I have *no* idea how that happened. ^^;;

And I thought I was a spendthrift yesterday...

Yesterday I took the day off work, partly for a mental break and partly to spend cleaning the apartment for our cleaning check, which is happening sometime between 9 and 5 today. But our third roommate is sick at home with strep, and I didn't want to vacuum while she was asleep, so I thought of other things I needed to get done in the meantime.

I had a few errands to run, the first of which was getting new ink for my printer, which I hadn't used in a very long time, and also getting a new flash drive that's better than my 5-year-old 128 MB one, some blank DVDs with which to burn anime and stuff *off* of my computer, and perhaps look at scanners while I was there.

So I went to Best Buy, and the first thing that went into my hands when I got there was a copy of Neverwinter Nights 2. ^^;; And then after finding DVDs and discovering that my printer is so old that they no longer make ink for it, I left the store (after running into chibidrunksanzo and rurounigochan quite out of the blue, as they were buying new phones) with a new Canon printer/scanner/copier combo on clearance for $55. It's beautiful. It scans pencil lineart like a dream! (I rescanned Blackheart, and the picture's gorgeous by comparison!) And the copier function is pretty convenient, too!

NWN2, however, presented issues. After spending two hours installing it and downloading a boat-load of patch updates, I discovered that Calliope's video card is on the "not supported" list. I should have known. That stinking on-board video card has been the bane of my gaming existence since I got the computer!

But no longer!

Because I have now spent even more money on components for rebuilding a gaming- (and art-) appropriate computer. Based on recommendations from chibidrunksanzo and my brother aadon_g, I'm getting a new 160 GB hard drive (to use alongside the old), 2 GB of memory, a new motherboard, a 2.2 GHz dual-core processor, and a 256 MB GeForce 8600GT video card.. all shiny new from Newegg!

And now I'm poor. DX And slightly sick. (Not being able to sleep last night doesn't help that part.)

But excited at getting a shiny new computer, faster, prettier, bigger, and able to run the games I want to play! Maybe when I play KotOR again, I'll actually be able to see the reflections off the Sith soldiers' uniforms..!! Aughhh!!!!!!! By Thanksgiving, I should be able to tell!!!