active_apathy

Today, I interrupt your flist to bring you art behind a cut. It's from a scan of a page in Wicked, which I was linked to by lesslikeyou for possible source images for my reworked layout. Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape, Safari, Konqueror and IE/Mac users, the Time Dragon background images come from the same place.

The scan was B&W, and sharp all over in the way that drawings are. The following image has been coloured in, 'mounted' on a purple wheat thatch backing, has had some film grain added, and a fake depth-of-field effect applied to mid- and backgrounds for a more photographic feel.

( Picture behind cut [450x600px, 68 K] )

This is part of a greater plot to enhance my Photoshop skills. So, if there's imagey-things you think would be good or that you'd like done, say so. Photomanips or maybe even restoration could be fun, too. *nods sagely*

Much love for anyone who writes the Rime of the Not-So-Ancient LJer.

But! That's not why I'm here. No, dear readers, it's time for me to post all the stuff I've been meaning to post since my PC went all splodey. I keep waiting to feel like posting, and that kind of post's probably never going to be posted so I might as well just go all posty now and then post postworthy things in posts once I've cleared my backlog of possible posts to post.

So, on to today's entry.

Son of a Witch is, according to rumour reality, the sequel to Wicked (which is now my favourite book ever, but not very far ahead of Messrs Gaiman, Nix and Pratchett). Oh, and, lesslikeyou, I meant to offer reasoned discussion along the way, but got rather addicted and read the rest of the book.

Still! Release dates for SoaW run thus:

• United States: October
• United Kingdom: November
• New Zealand: December
• Australia: OMGWTFsequel?

This is upsetting for obvious reasons, hence my sneaky, sneaky plan. I'm going to order a copy from the US in October, which will doubtless be cheaper than buying it locally anyway. So, HAHAHAHAHA. ha.

The next item of news is also to do with Wicked. Consider this passage:

Elphaba had a bad case of what Galinda called the reading sulks. Elphaba didn't curl up - she was too bony to curl - but she jackknifed herself nearer to herself, her funny pointed green nose poking in the moldy leaves of a book. She played with her hair while she read, coiling it up and down around fingers so thin and twiglike as to seem almost exoskeletal.

Gregory Maguire,
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,
p. 73

There's a lot of introduction for a very simple point: A few minor details aside, like my not being green, that's pretty much exactly how I was reading the book at the time - something like curled up, nose poking into clean, new-smelling pages, playing with hair.

Next: a new gamepad! It's got two thumbstick thingies, and arrow-button-thingies, and buttons all over the place. It cost me all of $AU10 (a bit over $US7). There are some slight issues, though: One is that the thumbstick-thingies are very sensitive, but that can be fixede yay. The other bit is that the games I've reinstalled so far (notably Thief II and MW4 don't want to play nice with it. Is there a simple solution to make uncooperative games get used to the idea of having 4 axes and a horde of buttons?

Next thing is that, quite obviously, I've decided to add a couple of my icons_at_random icons to my little assembly of lj-iconage. I'd tell you to fear the wobbly doll, but that's not terribly likely.

And this brings me neatly to the subject of LJ comms. I've made a new one, though haven't actually done anything to it. It's called apathy_games, and it's for sorting out, then eventually playing, the RPG. Expect to see me working on that there soonish.

And! Since there's new people here, I'll introduce you to my community addiction. I'm somewhat (or entirely) responsible for the existence of comms_anon, adjectinventive, blue_sun_region (which was to be for a NationStates region) and metaicons. These need members, but Blue Sun probably isn't quite the place you're looking for if you want a bit of a casuaal <lj-chat>.

Which reminds me: I've probably got a rather large pile of issues waiting for me. Sounds like fun.

The only other thing I can think of is my short trip through Wikipedia's Bad Jokes And Other Deleted Nonsense pages again last night. I bring to your attention two links, but first I'd like to mention a couple of amusing bits: That is, the Vote-for-Deletion of Votes-for-Deletion, and the Main Page VfD, which dates back to last year's April Fools' Day.

And now, the links I wanted to share:

• The Hystricognathi article is perfectly correct, absolutely accurate, and incredibly unreadable. Some 'experts' want to 'fix' it, but it's been preserved simply for the sheer density of technical terms.
• The page entry Engrish in version not up to date was Engrish written like. It make funny much to read but, preserved not has been. Words unreadable can be but it good a pointy thing makes.

Last, absolutely random and completely funny is an odd glitch that iTunes (my music library management tool of choice) has come up with. This fun error resulted in one of my MP3s assigned to a new artist - which I realised with a quick glance at the taskbar. This discovery went something like:

What I need is a good defenseOMGWTFU2!?

Which amused me, at least, before it got fixed.