anagram of brat

Back at work today after leaving early on Wednesday and calling out yesterday. I still don't feel exactly 100% (more like 60 at generous best) but money has to be made and it's not like I get sick time on this gig. Not that the time home was entirely a wash. The great thing about the 21st century and having a tech oriented job is that there all kinds of devices you can crawl into bed with and continue to be productive on, even if you feel like leftover poop. Which is good. I'm still playing a horrifying amount of post-holiday catchup, money-wise.

Every morning I agonize over whether to bring the Hatemonger out with me. Usually when I decide to leave him home is the day when there's something FANTASTIC to photograph, of course. Goddamn Murphy's law. This morning someone had stuck a manniquin painted and dressed to resemble to jolly green giant in the Haigis Mall bus shelter. It was so fantastically WTF that I'm going to be kicking myself for leaving the camera all day.

I've put off rereading The Hunger Games for a long ass while, despite head58 treating me to the hardcover box set for my birthday. I guess I was terrified that it would lose something in the reread; its immediacy maybe, or my initial engagement with the characters, I don't know, I figured something would jump out at me that would make me not like it as much this time around. Since I'm falling behind on my 75 book challenge and needed something to do that wasn't staring at a screen last night (and since I haven't paid my library fines yet) I finally pulled out the first book and have been happy to find that a year and a half was about the right length of time between readings. Even though I know how it ends, it still has me quite firmly by the gonads.

People have spent so much of my life telling me I would grow to hate snow as I grew up, learned to drive, got older. I'm pleased to report that at 33.5 that has yet to become the truth. A good part of my morning indignance at being awake and moving at such an early hour was erased by the weirdly fun sensation of fresh snow creaking as it packed down under my boots.

No plans for the weekend other than finishing the recovery from this last round of uck, housecleaning, making some OJ chicken, and doing some work for job #1. Also working on Sqwrrl, as I've been neglecting that a bit this month in favor of Real Work (heh) and shoring up some gaps in my PHP knowledge. It may necessitate rewriting a fair bit of code but I think the game will be better for it. I also need to bite the bullet and start looking at books/tutorials/classes for smartphone app creation. Speaking of which, thank you for all the suggestions for Boston books.

I guess, TGIF, eh?

I already posted the pic of Lily and the iPad a few days back, no need to repost it, right?

( pictures behind cut )

So far last week I've learned that the Hatemonger and I have become a little estranged - I'm no longer used to the calibrate, focus, take picture routine, and so mistakes happen, like the other day at Burton and a little later on in the week when I found that the white balance on a bunch of pictures was profoundly messed up. Need to kinda spend a little time relearning the camera, how to accommodate light levels, etc etc.

meantime I've taken two shots for this week with Sikudhani and I've pretty much decided that it sucks for still photos. So. Much. Grain. I swear, the camera on my old sony ericcson phone was a crapton better. Between that and the price point, I'm certainly thinking twice about the whole iphone thing. Any insights on any android smartphone camera quality, internet?

The fun thing about life changes for me is that I suddenly am filled with the hunger to DO ALL THE CREATIVE THINGS. Which is hilarious, because generally when my life takes a shift like that, it generally means that I have less time for creative stuff, not more. But for the little while where I have the shiny happy New Thing Energy*, I get ideas for projects and desires to do things. Granted these rarely come to any sort of fruition due to a lack of focus, but for a few weeks at least I actually want to do stuff as opposed to just feeling meh about everything.

I've got creative stuff on the burner, of course. I still have to cast The Witch off the loom, and soon because I want to start the next project and it needs to be done by Kidzilla's birthday, and that's not including her other birthday present which I've started working on as well. But on top of that I've been feeling the fever. I want to dance again, like not just go dancing, but go back to belly dance class and start really working on that again. I want to take moar pictures... and of other things besides trees, cats and kids. I'm finding I miss having someone willing to let me point a camera at them on a regular basis that's well over the age of seven, but considering the grief people have given me in the past for wanting to take their picture and my own lack of confidence in my abilities/camera, I'm kinda too self conscious to ask anyone I know about taking pictures of them (though I do seem to remember standing offers from aersi and htl_1126, which I'll have to cash in on sometime).

Oddly enough, something I've been turning over in my head is a partly overheard conversation between a few members of our company before burlesque about acceptable male body types, where it was posited that there are in fact only two that fit the criteria of "pleasing" either the skinny willowy gothboy type, or that insanely jacked cut-muscle beefcake type. See Joe Manganiello from True Blood or Chris Hemsworth from Thor. I think I know one guy that looks like the latter, but he's a dancer and is in the gym or the studio quite literally all damn day. I know maybe one person that conforms to tall willowy goth boy, but again, there was a lot of overzealous gym work to maintain that. (Being in the Air Force don't hurt none either.) Pretty much the rest of my male associates have/have had every single body type in between, though for the most part they tend to burliness of varying density. Some are widely considered beautiful, as it applies to guys anyway. Others aren't quite but have either a combination of compelling features overlaid with a cubic shitfuck of charisma. Still others still have something about them, but have alas been relegated both by outside voices and internal monologue to the ugly box. All this said, I can't think of a single person I know personally (that includes all of you reading this, by the way) that identifies as male that didn't have something I considered beautiful/aesthetically pleasing about them. A lot of you are handsomer than you realize, you know.

It was very much a concept that stuck in my head while watching the burlesque show, actually. I was on some level paying attention to the crowd reactions to the various acts and I've pretty much concluded that boobs seem to have universal appeal, no matter the size and shape. The two acts by the male guest performers, as expected, got somewhat less of a crowd reaction, considering the straight male contingent of the audience for the most part seemed awkward about expressing... appreciation? for their acts, and if they did it was for the humor of them and less for the physical attributes of the men performing. (Not that there was anything wrong there. Sirlesque ain't exactly my type, but they were pretteh.)

I don't know, I'm sure there's an argument for masculine body types/image, but it's gonna take someone far more eloquent than I to express it properly, I think. The entry got away from me a bit, honestly. At this point I kinda want to go watch The Full Monty in a fit of pique though.

I did have a greater point here, tying back to my whole CREATIVE EXPRESSION = VERY YES thing, but what I'd love to do is both find and take pictures of men. Not "models" or the type that Planet Fitness cheerfully derides as "lunkheads," just regular, real guys that still have a whole lot of a certain something that someone managed to catch on "film" or is willing to let me try. Alas, I'm quite sure the former is ridiculously hard to find, and the latter, well. I have yet to meet one of you male-identified types that wasn't also viciously camera shy, for all of the reasons poorly expressed above. Also see the part where camera = nerd repellent.

Eh, it was something twirling around my brain today, since I did promise yesterday that I'd post about it at some future point.

In other news, its cold and rainy in MA today, neither of which I'm complaining too hard about. Rainy means happy tomatoes, cold means happy Andee that doesn't mind getting glomphed at night. And the fact that it's this cold in August feels like a rare delicious treat. Also I had to nip into Target for a moment today and MY GOD IT IS BACK TO SCHOOL SEASON BAN ME FROM STAPLES NOW FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY.



* Its actually not entirely unlike New Relationship Energy actually - the spillover effect is much the same.

( 2 more )

While I understand why they're doing it, I'm kinda sad D&D's making the transition to tokens rather than figures. Less opportunity for silly game board tableaux.

We took the bus down to Umass today to feed the ducks at the pond. There were a LOT of ducks. As in we were completely mobbed by waterfowl.



I think I successfully dodged Kidzilla's question as to what the original lyrics of that song are, lol.

We're home. I'm exhausted and feeling every second of my going on 33 years. Ow.

Good time was had by all. Here, have some pictures.

( Oh hay a slideshow )

No witty captions I added some, but y'all can see avalon616 and cell23 being nerds in action, and there was some really good cosplay happening all over that I tried to get pictures of. In return I a LOT of compliments on my hair, so the ego boost was definitely a plus. Did not really buy anything other than overpriced and occasionally terrible con food (some of which violently disagreed with me later), and most of the free swag I got I gave to others in the Squire gang that were in attendance.

I was gonna write some reviews on the two panels I attended but I think I covered my opinion on both via Twitter. Sorry about the #pax flood, y'all know how I get when I'm excited about something. Anyway, the parenting one was kinda ehhh, but I got a few board game ideas to play with the kids and met some fun people on the line and after the panel, so it wasn't a wash. The second one was much better and made me wish I'd attended the Females on Female Characters earlier in the morning.

Crashed and burned HARD at the end of the night, 14 hours straight of noise, crowds, blinking high def screens and just walking around and around the con eventually took its toll. Not sure how I would have survived a 3 day pass this time around, but since I plan on attending next year I can use this experience to better allow for burnout and overstimulation. Thankfully there were some quiet pockets of the convention center that I remembered from SIGGRAPH that had outlets, so I was able to periodically withdraw from the craziness and recharge, literally and figuratively.

Much as cell23 has gotten the GM disease in him now after his day of running delves, I came away from the con with my brain going into overdrive not for GMing specifically, but for terrain design. Yeah I know WTF? May poke around with that later on this weekend/week, see if anything fun comes of it. Also NOTE TO SELF stop being shy about actually joining games. I had no plans to actually play any of the offerings for tabletop, but got sucked into playing cell23's last delve of the night with most of the gang and ended up really enjoying it. Really need to let go of this "I'll make an idiot of myself OH GOD" fear and just play. I mean, it's not like the monsters we're killing are judging you. Especially not if you get to stab them until they die. :)

And now I'm going to fix myself a monster sandwich and crash for a while. :)

So I finally offloaded the pictures from the Hatemonger, which is doing nothing for my desire to spend the remainder of my life in the Rose Reading Room, cause GOOD GODDAMN.



Just... jesus christ, guh.

( lookit this sweet ass motherfucking library omg. )

The rest of the album is mostly just subway nerdage, but feel free to check it out if you like.

In no particular order:

• Hanzo still regards snow as no big thing. What snowbank plowed behind me? VROOM.
  
  
• That wind was CRAZY ASS SHIT today. I am honestly very surprised we didn't lose power at all. Also days like this, thermal underwear is a positively delicious thing.
  
  
• My intestines hate me. I need to be nicer to them until New Years.
  
  
• Watched the DW Christmas Carol this evening. ( non-spoilery teal deer: I enjoyed it. )
  
  
  Rest of season? CAN. NOT. FUCKING. WAIT. River Song and the whole I'll be in my bunk aside, Matt Smith may bring sexy cool back to the Stetson.
  
  
• I got accepted into stepmoms today. I'd honestly forgotten I'd applied at the beginning of the month. Extra support and "no you're not crazy" always welcome. :)
  
  
• Tonight's experiment in chicken seasoning ended up an unexpected success. Been trying to vary it up from just breading and baking it. So far so good. I'm surprised and honestly a little appalled by how much I rather like getting dinner together several times a week. Domestic? Me? who'da thunk it? Buh.
  
  
• Need to stop 'crastinating about a few things tomorrow and get down to some brass tacks. Also my resolution list for next year is getting CRAZY. I need to prune it down so that my goals are actually achievable.
  
  
• Habari Gani! Kugichagulia! No, I don't celebrate Kwanzaa, but the second day of it has meaning to me - not so much as self-determination (though goodness knows I could use some of that on a personal level), but as a reminder of an interesting time now way in my past. Also it's wicked fun to say.
  
  Yeah yeah yeah, I know. Like I even HAVE a Black card anymore.
  
  
• Got the pictures off my phone (it's still good for that at least) and my camera for the last month, so I'm caught up reasonably with my 365 project. I haven't kept up with it nearly as well as I'd have liked, and I note that the chunks of time I missed pretty much directly correspond to my bad patches of anxiety and whatnot. However the project did get me into the habit of taking pictures of things that catch my fancy and got me out into the big wide world on occasion with the Hatemonger. Also I have a good handle on what needs work in terms of technique, the limitations of the Nikon starter lens, and under what conditions I can get better than decent pictures out of my phone camera, so I won't count it as a total failure even if I wasn't consistant with it.
  
  Also? I don't think I can complain about not having a constant human subject anymore. Kidzilla and Lovebug have filled out that role VERY nicely to the point where I definitely have to roll over their picasa album come January first. It's just crazy to me how much they've grown up in the year and change that comprises that album, I can't even.
  
  But I digress. I don't THINK I'm going to attempt project 365 next year, but I will be taking lots of pictures nonetheless. Just not strictly one per day. And I'm thinking a small goal to save for this year is some more camera equipment. Like holy balls of hell, can I buckle down and get a motherfucking tripod already? Sheesh. But I also would like a better zoom lens and some filters. Also want to actually take the DSLR class at Iris Photo one of the times it rolls around next year.
  
  
• little bit of a heads up, I'm going to be doing a little temporary friends pruning. Not a cut, because I'm not defriending anyone or dropping people from filters or nothing, but my default reading list has gotten overwhelming and one of the things I want to do in 2011 is step back a bit from the interbutts. Since I'm not really announcing who I'm filtering off, I'll just say if it's important, shoot me a comment/message just to make sure I see it, and I'll still be reading everyone, just a few of you won't be getting read quite as often as, oh, every three minutes.

The highlight of my evening, though? Getting pinged by chirping_monkey because Kidzilla wanted to Skype and tell me all about her new dragons. XD What have I done to this poor child? LOL. I was having a bit of an iffy day emotionally, truth be told, but fifteen minutes squeeing over holiday eggs and pretending to pinch the camera and getting the Christmas breakdown with a very giggly six year old? Yeah. Dear fates she looks adorable without her bottom teeth, lol.

~~ (hers)

So um yeah. Shower and book time now.

Attended two major shindigs today - the first being Scott and Juli's wedding, which was beautiful and classy and fun and all the food was delicious and holy crap fastest actual ceremony ever. Like, short short version fast. O_O like for serious, bridal party walked in and three minutes later they were recessing and cocktails had STARTED. But yeah, fun and wedding like and wow okay the whirlwind season of holy crap three weddings in two months is OVER and while I love weddings, oh man am I glad.

Second all that need be said are three words: "Halloween at Atramoria."

I will say that both my planned outfits worked out splendidly, especially since I was aided in the second by bringing my own, er, rabbit to the party. Rabbit being cell23 dressed in white thermal underwear and a t-shirt with bunny ears, a tail, a cigar and more than a little surly. I had a very pleasant and at turns drop dead HILARIOUS evening and at some point tomorrow I will dump my camera drive when I'm not freezing and exhausted out of my mind. But now, crawling into my nice, pre-toasted bed, dear gods.

Oh by the way? no I am not drunk. Designated driver back from the wedding, didn't feel like more than one cocktail at the party. I will say this though - orange soda, vanilla vodka and Rated X coctail? Decadence. Nom.

I went for a bit of a walk before bells, mostly because I wanted to catch a few pictures of Mt. Sugarloaf and the bridge before all the leaves fell down.

( Sunderland Autumn )

I also went back to the bridge after practice to take some after dark shots. I once again bewail my lack of tripod.

Between that, a good bells practice, coming home to cell23, 30Rock and stew for dinner, cheddar apple scones via deliriumdeva in a few minutes, and looking forward to kicking back with my favorite grown-up drink before bed, I'm in far better spirits than I was this afternoon.