majic13

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mood

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annoyed

]

Then five minutes later, going to the dining room cupboard for a plate, I stepped in a different pile of cold, squishy cat puke that had been planted right in the doorway. It became apparent that the stuff outside was merely a decoy to lull me into a false sense of security.

The foe is more wily and cunning than first thought. I must not underestimate her again. ¬_¬

majic13

[	Tags	|	art	]
[	mood	|	hungry	]
[	music	|	Regina Spektor - That Time	]

( AXEBEARD BEARDAXE. )

Yeah, it's a dwarf. Or dorf, in the vernacular. I was trying to come up with a look that was a little different from the straight-line polygons of 4e D&D, without just making them into quasi-Vikings with the knotwork and so on. I think I went a little bit samurai, though.

( I'm the Tarrasque! Krie! Krie! )

This one came out of a discussion with James about how the design for the Tarrasque (basically a creature designed to be the biggest baddest motherfucker in the entire Monster Manual, enough to challenge even the cheesiest and most powerful of PCs) kind of sucks. It's goofy (imagine it shouting the subject of this post). The slightly revised design for 4e is a bit better, but still lacking something. Sooo we put together a list of Tarrasque traits from the game mechanics - the claws, and the tail, and the teeth, and the carapace, and the hugeness - and went from there. The sketch above is the outcome of that, trying to come up with a pleasing body shape and posture and all that kind of thing, and the final design's the big one at the bottom - borrowing elements from sloths (big fuckin' claws) and komodo dragons (tough hide, stocky limbs) and armadilloes (armoured carapace) and stuff like that.

And, uh, that's quite a ramble, so. I'll stop. n_n

majic13

[	Tags	|	the plan, website	]
[	mood	|	sleepy	]

• Make it clearer - It needs to be absolutely clear what my site's about from the very first glance. This also means that I should probably choose a niche in which to specialise, since "artist" is apparently a bit too broad and vague nowadays - it's all divided up into environment artists and character artists and creature artists and so on.
• Make it more focussed - At present my site's somewhere between being personal and professional, which isn't really the way to go. There's stuff for prospective employers to look at, but there's also some goofy stuff that's not exactly appropriate in tone. If it's going to be something I pimp out as a sort of online portfolio then it needs to focus on that.
• Consolidate the "WORK" and "ART" sections - With the previous point in mind, having two separate galleries is unnecessary. At present it's got my general art stuff and a separate portfolio section, which is kind of confusing and redundant. Instead I need to just pick out my best work as an example of what I can do, and drop the rest as irrelevant to the site's purposes. Culling is required.
• Reorganise images by medium - This is instead of dividing them into "finished work" and "sketches" categories, as that's selling myself short - like saying there's "good stuff that I'm pleased with" and "rubbish stuff that I'm less pleased with but show anyway". I've gone through the SQL table that organises my gallery and divided the images up into "digital" (for pixel-painting and 3D stuff), "paint & ink" (for watercolours, acrylics and the better ink pieces) and "pen & pencil" (for the sketches and scribbles and such which generally aren't polished pieces). So it still starts with the super-shiny digital art stuff that I'm most proud of, but is more positive in tone.
• Make the "ABOUT" section more professional - This needs rewriting and reworking until it's more like a mini-CV, with additional attention to talking about how great I am and stuff. Also put my CV link and contact info in there rather than on a separate page. Maybe even put the ABOUT stuff on the front page, as at present it's got... uh, instructions on how to navigate around the site and how to click on links and stuff, which should be blindingly obvious to even the most blithering of idiots. So that needs to change, as it's inane and pointless.

Otherwise the site's design is apparently pretty good - he liked the style of the navigation icons and the simple layout, which is gratifying, so most of the work required is to do with working on the content and putting stuff in the right place. Should be easy enough. At least until I get some kind of awesome idea about how to make the site pant-wettingly fantastic but which requires that I get entangled in PHP coding and stuff again. Because I can't leave well enough alone.

majic13

[	mood	|	full	]
[	music	|	Jonathan Coulton - The Future Soon	]

Next I went into Reading and hung around for a few hours - mostly lurking in the library and listening to several episodes of Fear the Boot that I'd downloaded. It's a podcasts based around tabletop RPGs and suchlike dorkiness, and is pretty entertaining and informative. Podcasts are kind of tricky, though, because listening to an actual discussion/conversation for most of an hour can prove taxing, and sometimes I find myself zoning out or getting distracted and losing the thread of what's being talked about. Attention span plz.

In the evening I met up with people from Eclectic Games and had a "thank you for helping us move shop" dinner at Zero Degrees, which is a restaurant/microbrewery that's really rather good. The peri-peri chicken pizza was delicious (and face-searingly spicy), the chocolate fudge cake was decadent and awesome, and the beer was particularly nice. Or at least, I liked it. I'm not exactly a beer connoisseur, and if I'm not drinking cider my usual drink is Fosters or Heineken or some other variety of cooking lager - I really dislike bitters, which is why I tend to stick with the pisswater lagers. But last night I had a number of pints of a rrrrather good elderflower beverage, so I may have to experiment more in future. I'm not sure if it was an ale or beer or what, but it was good. Apparently you can buy it by the keg if you find a variety you like.

Tonight I was going to go to the Friday night games night, but sloth won out and so I'm home instead and vaguely prodding at my website. I'm going to need to remind myself how this PHP thing works, I think.

emygination

[	Tags	|	belle, charlie, crazy, faire, family, friends, good times, hermy-ness, knitting, lists, pets, rico, school, silly, work	]
[	mood	|	okay	]

• Belley is still depressed. We have not gotten another dog yet. More on that later. Aside from being depressed, she also decided to get sick a few weeks ago. She has had occasional GI issues this year that flared up again. She started acting really quiet (even more so than she has been lately because she's depressed), had diarrhea and vomited a few times. She's better now, and everyone at work laughed at me when I brought my "sick, lethargic" dog into work, because she was so happy to be there she was bouncing like the big doofus that she is.


• Charlie definitely has cancer. Our vet re-ultrasounded him three weeks after his first ultrasound, and his kidney had grown measurably in that short of a time. Thankfully, aside from one day, he still has not been acting sick at all (but he scared the crap out of me that day -- I called into work more than ten times trying to catch the vet between surgeries that day). Besides being skin and bones, you wouldn't know he's sick. He's even been coming upstairs despite Belle's presence (probably because she's been quieter than normal). I do have to torture him on a regular basis -- he gets injections of famotidine twice a day and subcutaneous fluids once a day. One of the reasons (besides lack of time on weekends) that we still haven't gotten another dog is that I don't want to stress him out more than necessary.


• My grandmother was here for most of a week last month. She was here long enough. :) I love her, but she tends to start to drive me nuts after a while.


• I graduated. Of course, I'd already had my diploma for a couple of months (take note of the "Summa Cum Laude"). The keynote speaker was even interesting. :)


• I got stood up. Royally. :P


• Rayna turned 8. Don't ask me how she got that old.


• I've been knitting a fair amount. I knitted one (and have started the other) of the coolest sock I've made so far (it's for Jason). I started knitting a sweater, and then frogged it (too big!). I liked the pattern, though. I've been plugging away at my shawl . At this rate, I'll finish it in a year or so (I kid, I kid!). I started (and have almost finished a marketbag. I've even done some work on the interminable scarf.


• The first day of the Bristol Renaissance Faire was Saturday. It was fun. :) I got a new dress like the one mom is wearing in this picture. Mom got a new bodice, and dad even got some garb.


• I've been working a fair amount. I've even not been overly annoyed by work lately. For the most part, anyway. ;)