Feeling sorta crappy lately, but notta new there. Everything's sort of plodding along. I went to the game day at the Panera this past Saturday and it was a pretty laid back affair. Nothing all that exciting and I held up pretty well. I think I've really hit on something that helps out a lot. If I just don't sit, I don't have as many inflammation problems. At least that's the way it seems at the moment. It's hard to tell since everything goes in cycles and it's incredibly hard to figure out if things are getting better, worse, or just fluxuating up and down.

I've spent the past few days watching Deadliest Catch. I've caught a buncha episodes here and there but I've never had the oppertunity before to see complete seasons in order. For instance, I never knew that each season covers both King crab and Opilio. I had always figured that it was one or the other. The only thing slowing me down is the rate of the download. It started at a fairly good clip but ever since the third season, it's been inching along at a crawl. It'll likely be at least another day before the files all finish and I can see the last season.

The show's pretty amazing really and it's a pity that they weren't able to capture more of the rally style of the old days. When it was the days of every boat for itself, I'm sure captains made all sorts of sketchy decisions in trying to maximize their gain. No wonder so many people have croaked at this profession. That's not to say there haven't been deaths since they've moved to a quota system, but at least now the captains know they can hide out from a storm or take a break without risking their income. Not that they do much of the latter now, but at least they know that the crab is still theirs, even if it takes a little longer.

It's impossible to watch this show without wishing for a seafood dinner. I'd love a mess of snow crab legs and I don't think I've ever even had king crab. I'm pretty sure I've never even seen a crab in person that's been anywhere near the size of some of the monsters they pull up.

Oh, I made another political icon btw. I chopped bits from the most recent JibJab animation and spliced it together. Not exactly the easiest thing to do working with nothing but MS paint. One of these days, I've really got to learn how to use photoshop.

Welp, the start of Dexcon could have been worse. As the time was approaching that I really had to leave in order to get there on time, the pain wouldn't go away. I kept popping pills and even went on to swilling what was left of the vodka but still had issues on my way there. I think that's the main difference between my life now and my life back around 6-7 months ago. Back then, I knew the pills would work. There was no real uncertainty in it and the only decision I had to make was whether or not I wanted to take one or if I thought I could muddle through and endure without it. Nowadays, there are times like last night where no matter what I do, I just can't get a handle on things. I ended up popping 4 codeine and downing a quarter of the bottle of vodka as a chaser and still felt terrible. I took all of this on an empty stomach and was anticipating more of a kick than I got. I managed to limp my way to the hotel and things weren't going horribly until after I had eaten and the opening ceremonies were close to ending. All of a sudden it was like I was hit by a drug-induced freight train. I was heavy headed, nauseous, and have never felt so 'stoned' in my life. I ended up on my knees, sprawled across a chair in the corner for the next 45 minutes. I can only assume that all the drugs had a real delayed response and chose to all kick in at once. My main goal was just to not fall asleep and also try to not redecorate the floor. Eventually, I staggered my way over to a game of Alhambra and perhaps it was the mental activity that helped to sort me out. By the end of the game, I was feeling better and while still a bit heavy headed, wasn't apt to fall over anymore. I decided to stay on for a quick game of Gloom and then made my way home, getting back a little after 1am.

I had planned to head back today at 2pm, but ran into the same problems with the drugs again. They just didn't seem to be doing anything and I was pretty incapacitated. Since there was no dire need to get to the con, I decided to just wait it out this time rather than running the risk of the drug induced coma I was fiddling around with last night. It's only now that I'm starting to feel somewhat like a functioning human being and I've already missed all the afternoon slots. The next games won't begin until 8pm and so I'm twittering my thumbs until then.

To entertain myself, I decided to make a new icon that I thought would be funny. I figured that if nothing else, it would drive hippies insane, and that's always a bonus no matter how you slice it.



I'm really sort of proud of the effort since it's likely the only icon I've ever made that another person might want to use as well. I wonder if I should find some political communities and offer it up to the participants?

I normally wouldn't trust you lot to tie your own shoes without pitching over (especially after that whole watermelon fiasco) but since there's no one else about, I need your opinion. There was recently an icon thread in a community where someone filtched a bunch of those Mr Men and Little Miss covers and made icons out of the lot. Now, I'm sure you've noticed that I've had my own Mr Grumpy for quite a while now. I liked some of the others that were posted and I'm trying to decide if I should upgrade to the new Mr Grumpy.

The one I have right now is the one I remember from when I was a kid. At some point someone no doubt thought that the illustrations could use a bit of touchup and the more recent printings are different. What I'd like for you lot to do is pick which Mr Grumpy you think I should go with.

As for my own personal take on it....I like the newer, brighter colors of #2, but he looks like he's constipated rather than pissy. #1 is a bit faded and pedestrian in comparrison, but I can just imagine him saying 'And what the fuck do you think you're doing, asshat?' and that's spiffy.


....Grumpy #1...........Grumpy #2

Poll #1187153
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which userpic do you prefer?

Damn zoloft blob is not cooperating. I've been trying to capture stills to animate the sigh at the beginning of the commercial but I just can't seem to do it right. My blob looks like it's sneezing.



Welp, it's not exactly what I was trying to do, but I guess it's close enough.

Welp, the strikers are trying to figure out if they had any impact at all, and the numbers don't look all that helpful. The real problem though is that they're likely to be conflated with the fact that they picked a friday before a holiday. Posting content always falls on fridays as opposed to the rest of the work week and always on the days right before a holiday weekend. That basically means that there's no good baseline to work with. If you compare it to the thursday before, they're claiming that there was a drop of around 13%.

It makes me wonder a little if it was shrewdness or just happenstance that they picked this friday to do it. A decline, based on past data, was inevitable and it'd be impossible to say for sure how much the strike contributed to the drop. So, even if no one participated in the strike, you could declare victory because they would be a decline from the day before.

My guess though is it was just surrendipity. This fiasco didn't seem to be all that well organized and thought out. I just don't understand why, if they're so unhappy with LJ, they don't move on to greener pastures. They should know by now that the people owning LJ will not change their policies to the degree they want. It's obviously a very autocratic company that's purchased LJ, and thinking that you're going to turn them into a democracy of some sort is just not going to happen.

Frankly, we've all seen LJ lose ground to myspace and facebook and god knows what else the tweens of the world are fucking with nowadays. You might as well bail out now while the bailing out is still good. Profits clearly aren't all that impressive if they had to eliminate basic accounts and I can't see that trimming some of the deadweight isn't a good idea.

BTW, yet another new icon. It's my new sads icon. I'm trying to decide whether I should animate a couple of the zoloft blob too.

So the strike is over and thus, my anti-strike as well. I've spent the past hour or so fiddling with Adobe and getting pissed. I've been meaning to work on a new userpic for a while now but needed to get an editor to fiddle with the fonts. I finally loaded up a copy of photoshop but I can't figure out how to edit the text. Each time I try to fiddle with it, I just end up adding more text. It's driving me bonkers. There's no good way to see how it actually looks on the background.

Anyway, until I sort it out, I put a quickie together of how it'll eventually look but hopefully with better font on the text.



Spiffy, no?

Man, selling those Wii's on eBay has been the gift that keeps on giving. Earlier today I got a message from someone who had purchased one last sunday and was wondering where it was. I sent him a response telling him that his item had been sent by USPS priority mail, and that according to the delivery confirmation number, it had been delivered earlier in the day. I got the following in response:

from Kevin Grilliot <mwcs@bright.net> to Me
date Dec 15, 2007 11:49 PM
subject Re: You've received an answer to your question about item NIB Nintendo Wii Console + 14 Games +Super Mario Galaxy

you mean to tell me you racked me $40 for shipping and just stuck it in the mail. What'd that run ya, ten bucks. rip off

I just jotted off a response that I'll reproduce here verbatim:

According to my receipt, it ran over $20 after the cost of insurance. I also realize that in your self-obsessed delusion, you might have failed to realize that shipping costs may be greater for other parts of the country farther apart than Ohio and New Jersey. While it cost me $20 to ship your package, I've payed over $35 to ship the same exact item to other locations. It was flat shipping, you knew that going in, and you got what you payed for.

About all I did manage to self-censor was the final sentence concluding he was an asshole. So, what do you think? Should I write a book on how to ebay or what? I can title it, How to Win Friends and Positive Feedback.

Seriously though, what a whiny cunt. Overall, I was just lucky I didn't end up having any people purchase from California, Hawaii, or Alaska. I'm sure that would have pushed the total cost of shipping over the rate I charged. As it was, getting out to some parts of the country already came pretty darn close. Since the USPS changed their entire shipping cost system to take distance into consideration, it's become another level of gambling uncertainty as far as selling crap on ebay. The difference can often be stark. Sending to people a state or two away only ended up costing around $15 and change, less than half as much as freighting it out to the hinterlands. I'm sure it all averages out in the long haul, but for most of us small and infrequent sellers, it can have a huge impact on profit margin.

I'm currently selling a bunch of Vera Bradley bags that my sister, Connie, picked up through some online sale. She got around 20 of them for around 60% off all told. She had no intention of keeping them all and so it automaticly became my job to take pictures of these ugly things and put them up for sale. I'm not exagerating either when I affix the ugly label to these bags. Take a look for yourself. The fabric is quilt-like and the pattern resembles something that someone's little old grandmother would have for their living room upholstery. My sister assures me that they are all the rage, however, and I can only conclude she must be right because the damn things have actually been selling. I listed a total of 17 of them a couple of days ago and 6 have already sold. There's simply no accounting for taste if you ask me. On the offchance you too are one of the masses with dubious taste and want one of these ugly bags for yourself, let me know and I can kill the auction and pass on the reduction in ebay and paypal fees.

On a sidenote, I made a new LJ icon which I figured fit this entry pretty well.

Ever notice that it's often when you can only have a limited amount of time to sleep that you find you can't get to sleep? I ended up laying in bed for a hour or two and just couldn't manage to doze off. I came back to the computer and fiddled with some stuff and just spent another hour or so working on that animated cookie puss icon. It came out pretty spiffy and is probably about the limits of my skill at the moment. I ended up playing with a whole bunch of functions to try to get everything to work out right and it seems pretty good. Of course, it's now 5am and I have to be up in around 3 hours to head back to the con and run games. Feh.

I finally got to see the second half of Hot Fuzz earlier today. I'm not sure exactly what reminded me about it last night but I found a bittorrent for it and finally got to see what all the fuss was about. It's the only movie I've ever walked out of a theater during and I always felt a little gypped about the whole thing. I was also a bit baffled since I've heard so many people tell me how much they loved the movie. Frankly the first half of it had bored me to death. It figures that I would have missed all the interesting parts. It also set for a nice contrastic between the agressively boring beginning and then the absurdly action packed ending.

In commemoration, I made a Hot Fuzz icon. For the squemish out there, don't worry, the character survived just fine. He went on to eat lotsa of Ith Cream in the prison hospital, no doubt. On a related plus side, it's because of my experimenting with this icon attempt that I finally figured out how to snag screen captures with the programs I have avaliable. I'm thinking about going back and making that Satoshi, Eater of Souls icon now.

Well, not really. Not yet, anyway. I'm afraid that this entry didn't exactly begin with much content in mind. It was simply a cheap ploy to get people to look at the garfield icon I just put together. Someone over in a community provided some bases from the old garfield halloween book and I decided to mod it a little. A very little really since this whole icon making buisness still confounds me. I never realized how much of a problem it is find a font color and style that is visable across a smear of different background colors. I already started and then gave up halfway through on trying to get a couple other different icon attempts to mesh together.

Anyway, I guess if you've slogged through all of that crap and ramble you deserve something with content. Ummm. I still remember reading the garfield book when I was a kid and I think that I still have the book somewhere in my closet at this very moment not 5 feet away. It's amazing how even little snippets of pictures will bring back something you had forgotten about for years. I seem to recall that there was even an animated version of the story because I have this clear image of garfield opening his mouth and candy raining into it.

Aha! Found it. Thank you again youtube. So now you have interesting content with which to entertain yourselves and there can be no complaints.

I keep feeling this urge to make additional icons. The entire thing is sort of addicting really. It's also cumbersome and a monumental pain in the ass sometimes. I don't have the right programs or tools to make it easy and the process is like trying to paint a picture using finger paints. I end up making a mess half the time and simply wasting time.

Still, it is sorta entertaining when it works out.

Right now, I'm listening to The Fifth Elephant on audiobook again and I found a really great picture of toast cut into soldiers with egg. The entire turn of phrase had baffled me at first but a quick google search cleared it up. Now I'm trying to think of what sort of icon I could make with the picture. I've also got a spiffy imagine of the ankh-morpork city watch seal I'm trying to work in too. Hmmm.....

Updated:

Okay. I finished up something. Let me know what you think:

For some reason I got it into my head to take a look at those old Carvel commercials on youtube. The very first one I clicked had something I never recalled seeing before, a cupiepuss. You have to hand it to the people at Carvel. It was amazing the number of ice cream cakes they could churn out from 2 stinking molds. Fudgie the whale was also santa claus if you turned him 90 degrees. Anyway, to celebrate the newfound discovery of cupiepuss, I decided to make an icon out of it. If I were more skilled, I guess I could try to animate the whozit. It might be sorta spiffy to have it flying out from space like in the commercial. For now though, I have a cupiepuss icon.

Update:

Alrighty. I just made my very first animated icon from scratch. It's notta fancy and god knows I had some crappy video to work with, but I think it's pretty spiffy. What do ya think?




An Ode to Cookiepuss:

Cookie puss is the only reason I hope that there is extraterestrial life. The idea that there might be delicious visitors from outerspace who come and share their chocolate crunchy goodness with all of mankind gives me the warm fuzzies. There is almost nothing on earth that cookie puss cannot vanquish with his special attribute: deliciousness.

Now all I need to do is find a group of people who worship fudgy the whale and start some sort of clan-war. We all know that cookiepuss can kick the everloving crap out of fudgy.

How much pr0n makes something not work safe? I mean, everyone's computer has pr0n, right? Even if you never go searching for smut, it's impossible not to end up with it just from popups and whatnot. I was searching google image search for IUDs (Don't ask) and stumbled over a picture I just turned into a userpic for shits and giggles. I'm thinking that there's almost no way I can ever use the sucker because it's not exactly optional for anyone else to see it when they look at my entry or comments. I'm almost certain this is not the sort of picture you want to be found in your image cache no matter who's looking through it. Still, I think it's funny in a WTF sort of way.

As it stands, there's no way I could selectively censor the image. Though I guess if this were Japan I could just fuzz out a few pixels here and a few pixels there. I'm pretty sure that won't fly in the US for most people. Feh. It's just sorta sad really. I guess I could use it in comments if I flagged the entry as having NSFW stuff in the entry, right? Erm.

Alrighty, I'm sure some of you are dying to see it now that I've given it a buildup. The new userpic is here if you want to sneak a peek. Standard disclaimers apply.

The great icon hunt continues.

Ever since buying a perm LJ account, I've gotten more userpics allotted to me. I think it's something like 130+. Since then, I've been adding new icons whenever I stumble over something interesting or making my own when I find a spiffy picture. Since all I can really do is crop and resize, my efforts haven't been anything spectacular. mock26 had suggested making a userpic out of little george riding the jackalope and it was something I had been planning to do anyway. I also have a new 'no hippies' icon and one from a 'twisty' sign I found online.

I still feel like I'm missing a few things though. My userpics often to adequitely express in image form what I'm rambling about in the entry. The problem is that I never remember to jot down what I'm missing and then when I try to come up with a list, like now, I can't think of a damn thing.

Icons:

• A 'happy' one: Yeah, I know it won't get all that much use but I should still have something. I've got a few neutral ones but it might be nice to actually have something positive.


• More insulting ones: Never can have too many of these. Always comes in handy when you're in a slapfight with someone in a community.


• Review/Analysis: It might be spiffy if I could find something that fit for when I do movie or book reviews or whatever.


• Anti-Frog: Always nice to have. Not that I've gone on many frenchie-bashing tirades lately but you never know.


• Con icons: I wonder if it's worthwhile to try to snag an icon for each seperate con. Seem sorta overkill but I've got over a hundred slots to fill.


• Fantasy art: I'd like to get something that won't look like crap upon miniaturization.


• Pr0n Icon?: Hmmm...I wonder if I should just haul out that peniscorn I made for jeanie3.


• LJ related: Oh, and an icon for these sorta LJ entries might be spiffy.