Black Dog Blog

Archive for November, 2008

Featuring Green, a dragon.

Reclining Green (800×600, 133KB)

For reference, her body (disregarding the neck, etc) is as big as this bullock.

(Oh, and the dog isn't a self-insert. That would be an Irish Wolfhound up to trouble. This is a spaniel cross.)

Notes to self:

• How about if all yowels (or all except one or two overlaps, probably including au) make alternating sounds depending on the word (i.e. consonants') gender?
• I'd have to change some pronunciations, but at least not spellings again.
• This is not a hard/soft vowel distinction, but some cultural crap, just like e/o.

Consonants phonetic and yowels not? Works for me. They don't write in Latin anyway – the yowels are written something more like J/T^J-T and WvSWvS\L. (For v read an upside-down caret.)

These are NOT final, but are approaching how he should look.

Weft sketches #1 with shading, trying to show how steeply his face narrows, going from the back to the front. I'm finding it impossible to get the sharp corners, the width (at the back) AND the femininity into his chin/jaw all at once.

Ideally he should look older and more battered. His middle-agedness is mostly visible in the skin texture because his species doesn't wrinkle much, meaning it's hellish to portray. I can't go for jowls because he's kept thin and very fit. I suppose I'll probably cheat by adding small wrinkles as well as sink the eyes in and go for general hangdog (well, hangkitty) demeanour. I don't know. Ideas welcomed!

Note to self: their skulls are SO wide that the "neck as wide as head" thing really can't apply here. Make it narrower; about as wide as the skull'd be if it didn't expand after birth?

I like riddles. The final one written for that roleplay thread.

My first begins a Song,
my next's the end of time;
my third's in neck and scratch,
my fourth in sword and prime:
a comb upon its side;
a headless scarecrow-frame;
now put my parts together
and you shall learn my name.

(Be wary of the comments in case the answer's given there, of course.)

Herm Baskerville wrote:

[of an HTML form page] P.S. Thom, you have my inf^H^H^Heternal goodwill for including an "Other" option for gender. Hit one of my pet pedantries on the head, that did.

Fiona Burrows wrote:

Curious, pray tell exactly -what- did you put into the text box?

Herm Baskerville wrote:

"Neuter-creature from the planet Zog", naturally. :)

Fiona Burrows wrote:

Mystery solved!

Herm Baskerville wrote:

Teehee.

And more seriously (not that I don't seriously identify as neuter, although AFAIK I was born in Chester, UK, Earth), "gender" on forms really is one of my bugbears. It's just so… silly to use it as a polite word because, ooh dear, we don't want to say "sex" on government forms! ;) Inaccurate, too, because in modern usage it's a distinct term (e.g. one dictionary gives it as "sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture") and there are more than two options out there.

Of course, formwriters really can't win. Even "sex" isn't as simple as it seems, because what do you go on? Body parts – well, some folks are born intersexed. Chromosomes – lots of minority conditions there too, Klinefelter syndrome for example (XXY chromosomes). (Aneuploidy truly is a fabulous word, even though it can cause less-than-pleasant conditions.)

Oh, and I'm not on a campaign or owt; I just find this stuff, without wanting to sound too patronising, really goshdarn fascinating.

(quotations end)

Sorry to all activists, all right, but I have no intention of playing the mouthy, humourless "you must all be educated and stop being narrow-minded RIGHT NOW" gender animal. The above's the most you will get, and more than I intended to say.

Moral: On the internet, nobody knows you're a neuter-creature from the planet Zog. (And yes. That really is the phrase I use when asked. Except in more serious contexts, when "neuter" will suffice.)

*collapses in embarrassment*

Sketching this evening.

Weft eye reference (current as of today's date)
800×600, 94KB

I'm the very last person who should be trying to draw inhuman faces, because I am congenitally, clinically, registered disabilityishly unaware of what a human face looks like. ;) Weft's features are meant to look both feminine and alien. Have I hit those? Feedback welcomed.

He has huge eyes and an extremely wide skull. He's both angular and feminine. It gives actual artists trouble, so no wonder I've never managed to set him down to my satisfaction. Getting closer, maybe…

(Thanks are due to Angelina Jolie's makeup artist and a bunch of cats on Flickr.)

1.5 kilos down this week. Hurry up, man! I wanted to be under 80 by now. (I'm 80.45, so very close really.)

Seriously though, meatcarcase, can't you find more fat to drop? Because let me tell you I don't need an atlas to find several handfuls, if you know what I mean.

Ha. Also, I am going to start eating greens and protein. I'm too desperate for them¹, and if you're careful you can do this and still stay in ketosis (aka mega weight-drop area, aka starvation). So says a friend of the family who has flirted with this diet several times. (I could draw sarcastic conclusions about its long-term efficacy in her case and her resulting qualification to give advice, but she successfully drops weight every time, and that's all I need to do. I don't do the yoyo thing too badly, not judging by holding steady for almost a year in this interval.)

Oh, and I finally have my prescription refilled as of this morning. Luckily my mother and I are on the same dosage of the same med, so there can be intercaninenecine pill-scrounging. The delay, as it turns out, is that they wanted to speak to me before refilling it, so I need to make an appt. Which means getting there and taking time off work, both of which cause me bearable anxiety.

I spent all weekend gaming round at my unbrother's house and I have surprisingly few regrets about that. Although I'm ready to make myself some art and code now. Speaking of Art with a capital A, aka Tet, I think his deadline on the art exchange is today, so I may or may not bother doing the quick sketch I'd planned. He's popular because he admins the server, so lots of ass-kissers will have given him pictures. ;)

More microformats today. I've finished converting a huge "useful contacts" table from bad HTML into better HTML plus lots of span class=vcards. My eyes are now crossing. And I've forgotten what I was actually supposed to be changing about it in the first place. Wahoo!

¹ At least, let's optimistically assume that the sustained intense urge to rip apart people/trees/Quorn roasts and gorge on their insides signifies a craving for protein and roughage. Let's have no more gentle games of rough-and-tumble with the cat only to pause and realise I'm chewing his scruff rather enthusiastically, or anything like th…
…not that I've ever done that, you realise. It was a random example, haha. Erm.
Plus, maybe I can finally stop dreaming about food. The whole "oh noes I broke my diet by accident" stress dream archetype was never cool or original, and it's looking pretttty hackneyed by now.

SPOILERS FOR: Christmas, Eragon/Eldest by Christopher Paolini, Resident Evil 4, The Sally Lockhart Mysteries by Philip Pullman.

1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters whose names begin with that letter and post their names and your comments on these characters in your LJ.

Anke, possibly foolishly, gave me the letter S. However, because I'm not feeling contentious enough to follow either my obvious first impulse to mention Satan, or a fleeting idea of mentioning Susan Pevensie because frankly she has no character beyond an Enid Blyton caricature of The Worried One Who Tries To Be Grown Up, so we're safe on the atheist score.

Read the rest of this entry »

Drupal NW user group meeting last night was pretty good.

I wouldn't say I'm entirely sure how to go forward, but that'll come in time, and meanwhile someone did a good demonstration of using views in 6.x to do just about anything. I'm still at the "planning how to organise data" stage just now. To that end, I got an answer to my "how do I add y/n options to a node" question (surprisingly complicated). So, first I'm upgrading my test install to 6.6 and then I'm playing!

It'll be such a relief to drop Discus with their secretiveness and complete lack of release schedule. Drupal, apart from being FOSS and far better supported with a large contributor base, is much more geared to community sites anyway; with all the modules on offer we may be able to do just about everything we want within the CMS.

Could we start a pie-in-the-sky wishlist? Maybe I'll start a topic for it on the boards. Yep, done. Comments disabled, so please post on the boards.

(It amuses me that a search for Discus 5 turns up a thread on how to migrate Discus to Drupal. From the thread: Discus 5 is coming out in mid-Feb [2006] (I hope!:) ) Looks like I'll be strictly on my own migration-wise.)

Can you make a living from art?

One Adelaide man FINDS OUT when his utility bills become due!

But the true answer is… yes!

Then again, they won't necessarily pay.

Today my time has been fought over (not quite literally, because one of the parties is in London; pity, I'd like to have seen it come to blows. Religion vs. Independents Commissioning, ding ding!).

It's an evilly satisfying feeling.

This is all still fallout from going home ill on Friday, which meant I couldn't get all the stuff done for Commissioning that needs to be done. And needs to be done by me.

What's particularly satisfying is that I really am the best person for the job.

Which sounds weird, because I'm officially but a lowly Web Assistant and don't have amazing expertise in any one area, but for this—replacing text, cutting images, a fine eye for proof-reading, italicising titles and linking to mentioned webpages when appropriate, along with improving the general HTML coding and making things cleaner and sharper with low-key CSS messing—I couldn't explain it all to someone else, let alone expect them to remember it, and I'm dashed sure nobody else in this building would bother to do it.

And I'm pretty accursed fast, for all that needed to be done to these pages, to fit it into three days and still make time for a few extended search-replaces to remove out-of-range characters. Honestly, I don't think many others would have been able to do everything I've done to this standard in this time.

It's… weird.

And fortuantely, because my fingers have been flying these three days with barely a break, I have a smart partner in London who's picked up on all the errors I missed.

Google has a bunch of LIFE Magazine photographs, including these handsome pangolin shots.

As far as I can tell, they're just for prettyness; I can't see any licensing information or usage terms.

The night before yesternight I dreamed we had a Rottweiler and two chickens. Evidently I was already getting the hens well trained, because I picked one up and she behaved herself.

In general, I've been having more of the non-crazy, stupidly domestic dreams. My head even bores myself. Dreaming I had held a conversation I hadn't, or dreaming I broke my diet by accident. OK, the latter's a stress dream, and I certainly remember it from last time I was on the non-eaty regime.

It's just bloody confusing, though, and I'd rather get back to stuff I can easily distinguish in my head from reality. Bring on the disturbing semi-metamorphoses, seeing pandas in my back garden or running around gunning stuff down! Frankly, I want to see some head-pyrotechnics. I feel I'm owed this sort of wacky stuff. I am taking my meds like a good pup, after all.

(This entry brought to you by the letter "waiting for a Homesite Extended Search and Replace to finish" and the number 81.8.)

I'm just getting into Merlin on BBC One, Saturdays. I'd taped a few (what turned out to be almost the whole series, apart from the first ep, I think) and hadn't got around to watching them. Over the weekend I watched three or so to free up drive space.

It's pretty ok for what I take to be a children's series. (No idea if it is supposed to be a children's series, but if I read it as such I don't get offended by being dumbed down at or by the main characters being young teens.)

The dialogue is jarring in places (a few Americanisms, lots of modernisms).

There is Dragon and because I missed the first episode or so, I don't know what its deal is. Dragon has a trendy chain and is suitably Dragonlike (in a sense Suitov would recognise, no less): mysterious, knowledgeable, given to talking in riddles and not always prepared to help directly.

There's a lot of heavy-clawed foreshadowing about Merlin and young Arthur and their shared destiny. I bet the fanshippers have been licking their chops over all that.

The magic is the real fun and I'm seizing at the little systembuilding details with pleasure. Hoping the 'magic language' they talk in is good old gobbledygook and not Celticese. (I strongly dislike Celtic stuff of any description. Too many trendy idiots get squiffy over it.)

All in all I'm enjoying the series surprisingly much, given that it's no exaggeration to say that the Arthurian mythos and derring-do with swords are two of my pet loathings!

It's probably a lot to do with who they've got playing Uther Pendragon. (DRAGON GEDDIT LOL? I sure did, an episode or two in…)

Dragon wallpaper and all sorts of other stuff on the programme website. (I don't know if I'm missing a gene or something, but despite working with and on the web constantly, I never really bother visiting programme support sites.)

Dude. I could sell these. I mean, I won't, because I'm too disorganised. Still. Dude.

I want to buy this. And I don't even like 'collectibles'.

Considering I'm not buying or eating food just now, that lunchtime was more expensive than I thought. I now have some Xmas presents for both parents.

Our site for The Passion has won an RTS award for Innovation in Multiplatform.

Extreme Pilgrim (one of those series with the crazy CofE vicar going round doing $FAITHist things for the camera) won Best Documentary Series.

At time of writing, their website hasn't updated with the winners. I can't find any mention on the BBC, either, so for now you'll have to take my word for it.

I'm pretty cynical about awards, to be honest, but my teammates are excited. It's quite cute.

MASS VANQUISH continues! I'm below 82kg this morning. I'm only overweight now, not obese, according to this.

It'll be a long, cold road to Xmas, but I have the willpower. It's just rather annoying that this isn't as easy as last time. I'm ravening and my cravings are flickering over the range of caninely-edibles faster than plasma tendrils in a little glass ball.

I don't know how much of the problem is depression, mind. I always was a comfort binger.

As long as I have enough electronics to keep me distracted I'm ok. The problem comes when there isn't an internet connection, console or video recorder, and I'm alone with my cold, unhappy mood and no dog. That's when I want to attack a point cabbage/bag of cashew nuts/Quorn roast/pot of natural Greek yoghurt…

I could combine the first three with some onion and be a very very happy alpha. Nevertheless, I do have the willpower. Good to know I still have, I suppose.

The plan remains! 60kg or until so ill I'm told to stop! Woo! (Actually, mid-60s is more sensible, because 60 is on the low end for someone as short as me. Either way, like all right-minded people, I want to bid the 70s goodbye.)