Another Gilt City event, which meant we got free cupcakes, free champagne, and free arm/hand massages. Again, the planning of the event could have been better, but at least they've learned that people show up EARLY and had a proper place for people to wait.

Now the movie! When I saw the free screening, I pounced on it as quickly as possible considering I wanted to see it for the eye candy, but it was something that I didn't actually want to spend money on. Which on the whole is a good assessment of the movie. I went in with very low expectations, so the movie was more enjoyable than I thought it'd be. But don't really expect much of it. Also, if you're going just to see Matt Bomer and Joe Manganiello, you may be disappointed as they don't show up in the movie as much as you'd think with the top billing they keep getting in all the ads.

The two who get the most face time are Channing Tatum and Alex Pettyfer (the latter we were pleasantly surprised with) and their characters are interesting as two sides of the people who get into stripping, their reasons, and their attitudes towards it. It would have been more interesting to have gotten more sides of it by building up the supporting cast of strippers as well. You never really get to know why they're there other than the fact that they're fit and one has a huge dick. But then considering this was supposedly based on Channing Tatum's experiences when he was 19 and stripping in Tampa, the background characters might have been so one dimensional for a reason.

The plot had more depth than I thought it would and was more realistic than I expected. But then, it had its truly ridiculous moments and because of the depth it had, I almost wanted more out of the story. To see more of the repercussions of the life style they live, especially having a 19 year old stripping, drinking, and doing drugs, plus just the presence of drugs. There was also a lot of hetero-normativity with all the strippers appearing to be straight as well as the club only having female clientele. There was a moment early in the movie where we thought the club the guys stripped at was actually a mixed club (having both female and male strippers) and we were disappointed when that didn't turn out to be the case.

I know, far too much thinking on a movie that is really for the eye candy. I did spend a good deal of the movie going 'Man, people won't be able to wait to cap THIS scene' from a fandom point of view. There is a lot of ass and a lot of abs and even a penis shot (which was funny to see everyone's reaction when they realized that was a penis in the foreground of the shot). There were also interesting cinematography choices in camera angles and lighting choices that made it feel more realistic and less Hollywood glitz.

So, if you like the guys it in, it might be worth a DVD rental or a cheap matinee. Good visuals, an alright story, but nothing ground breaking.

Thanks to finding the right channels over here in Boston, I've been going to a few screenings. I keep thinking about doing reviews and since my mind keeps circling on this one, I figured I'd give it a shot.

Now, if you watch cable and don't fast forward through commercials, you've probably seen a LOT of commercials for What to Expect When You're Expecting. The dudes' club. The hilarious things guys get up to when they have to take care of their own kids. The Hangover with babies and no alcohol/drugs. Hilarity like that. And after seeing the movie, a horrible representation of the movie in order to get guys to want to go see it. The Dudes' Club plays such a minor part of the movie that there are likely going to be some people pissed off that they didn't get the movie they were promised with the previews.

The movie is actually about many different couples and how they deal with their pregnancies in a Love Actually sort of structure. It shows all the different sorts of pregnancies that can happen. The planned and unplanned. The hard and easy. Plus there are of course the issues that each individual person needs to overcome as well. And when I saw every sort of hetero-normative pregnancy, I mean every sort.

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It was an enjoyable movie, but if you go and see it, keep in mind that it isn't the movie they're advertising. And since I haven't been pregnant, I'm not sure how triggery it would be to that part of the audience demographic.

Sorry for everyone that is getting spammed by this, but I'm trying to be good about the self-promotion, even if it's a cute, silly contest.

I entered three designs into the Sock It To Me contest and one of them got chosen as a finalist! My design is the phoenix/firebird. The voting is over on Facebook here. Please vote for your favorites!

Because of this list about first lines and the emphasis put in class about opening lines making or breaking a book, I got curious (again), but thought to make a game out of it. So, I'm just going to list a bunch of first lines from books (for everyone's sake, I'm limiting myself to children's aka middlegrade/YA books) and everyone can make a guess of what's what. Granted, some of these are 'classic children's books', so bear with me with the 'but that's not a kid's book!' thing. Also, I seem to be at a loss of a bunch of first books in series (this is what happens when you lend books to your mom).

1. When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news.
2. Night hung black and heavy about the old barn.
3. The last thing I wanted to do on my summer break was blow up another school.
4. It was a dark and stormy night.
5. Wind howled through the night, carrying a scent that would change the world.
6. Unearthly humps of land curved into the darkening sky like the backs of browsing pigs, like the rumps of elephants.
7. George never spent any time wondering why he wanted to belong.
8. High up on the long hill they called the Saddle Back, behind the ranch and the country road, the boy sat his horse, facing east, his eyes dazzled by the rising sun.
9. The stretch of road that leads out of the city, past Hazy Harbor and into the town of Tedia, is perhaps the most unpleasant in the world.
10. The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.
11. Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.
12. Once there was a dark, stormy night in spring, when, deep down in their holes, the wombats knew not to come out, when the possums stayed quiet in their hollow limbs, when the great black flying phallangers that live in the mountain forests never stirred.
13. It was little more than three miles from the Wall into the Old Kingdom, but that was enough.
14. A wild, ringing neigh shrilled up from the hold of the Spanish galleon.
15. Twilight was gathering, and Orpheus still wasn't here.
16. Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.
17. "Too many!" James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.
18. If someone had asked Jared Grace what jobs his brother and sister would have when they grew up, he would have had no trouble replying.
19. From his perch behind the clock, Hugo could see everything.
20. It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.

Good luck!

Let's see if I can actually get fic written. Not that I know if I'll have time, but maybe an idea will keep me busy in the car rides this holiday season.

Give me a set of characters and an AU prompt, and I'll do my best to scribble a wee bit of a ficlet about it. Here a quick set of AU scenarios if you're stuck, but feel free to be as weird and specific as you like. For crossovers, fandoms I know decently well (or at least well enough to write in) are Temeraire, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter (duh), X-men, Heroes (first two or three seasons), A Song of Fire and Ice (first two books), Hunger Games, a bit of Amber, and New Who/Torchwood. There are likely more that I have completely forgotten, but those are the easy ones of the top of my mind. Have at it!

Meme time! Maybe it'll help with process or something. Just remember to put which incarnation. Although depending on what game, it might blend all together anyways. _-_

Name me one of my characters, and I'll tell you the inspiration(s) behind their initial conception, whether they be real-life people or fictional characters.

Finished up the answers on the last round of the meme, so I'm going to do this meme again since I really did like it when we had to do it in game. Actually, I think I'll post two memes, so please say which one you want answers for.

1. The Offspring Meme
Reply to this post with the name of one of your characters and one of my characters and I'll give you the following information about their first offspring. It doesn't matter if it's not biologically possible, I'm sure I'll find a way.

1. Name
2. House (where it's relevant)
3. Circumstances of Conception
4. PB
5. Three Random Facts


2. First Kiss Meme

Give me a character of yours and a character of mine, and I'll write a ficlet about one time/the first time they kiss (even if it's a hypothetical situation).

Crossposting because I can. Meme time:

PICK 1 OF MY RP CHARACTERS & I WILL TELL YOU

1. why I played this character.
2. my favourite moment in canon for this character.
3. my favourite piece of headcanon for this character.
4. Something about this character which makes me laugh.
5. Something about this character which makes me cry.
6. One of your characters that I think would get along well with them.

Avatar being the Airbender and not the CGI blue people. Thanks for making things more confusing Hollywood.

With it coming out today, it's been in my thoughts, between reading other people's commentary and just seeing the ads plastered on television. I am a big fan of the animated TV show (and now that I know there's an art book on it's production I'm so buying that). I'm a fan for many reasons. For one, I'm a fan of animation and anime and it held up a good number of anime themes. Asia has also been a big part of my personal culture as I grew up on Okinawa and so even though we lived on the military base, from first grade until eighth, Asian aesthetics and artwork were a big part of my visual and personal cultural background. My visual education was expanded when I did an East Asian Studies minor in college. I loved seeing all that influence that was in Avatar, that you could see where they were taking each element from, where they were combining elements, and even influence from anime itself. The attention they paid to the martial arts, that they HAD a martial arts specialist to help them as well as someone to help with the kanji. That they PAID ATTENTION to the kanji and how using different kanji that make the same sounds can completely change the meaning of it (main example is them changing the kanji for Zuko's name depending on his point in the storyline). I also loved that while they took the culture seriously, they could laugh at themselves in regards to plots and characterization.

So I was excited about the live action movie because as a very visual person and an artist I was salivating at the level of detail that could do into in a live action movie that you can't do in a cartoon because otherwise you have your animators quitting very quick. All I could think about was the level of detail that we'd get to see and the research to go into it. The cartoon at Lord of the Rings level and oh the art books to come. And then the casting came out and I lost my enthusiasm. The commercials tried to tempt me with the shiny, but my faith in what sort of research and accuracy for costumes and setting has been shot down and I'd rather spend my money supporting the original series than the movie.

Which brings me to the main point of writing as it's been bugging me since reading it. I've read some of the complaints about 'shut up about the casting' and the one that stuck with me is the person who pointed out that it 'wasn't Asian' because there were swamp hillbillies, 'Arab' sand benders (someone please inform them that that area is part of Asia), and sun worshippers which were not Asian at all. Of how it could be an Asian inspired world if there were Central American inspired sun warriors in the middle of a Japanese inspired Fire Nation.

First off, sun worship isn't restricted to Central America. It exists all over Asia and Japan is known as the land of the Rising Sun, not to mention that the Imperial line is said to be descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu, and all three of its Imperial treasures are linked to the sun goddess. Not to mention sole worship of her was known as the cult of the sun and samurai wore sun symbols into battle. So there not being the concept for sun warriors in Asian culture, considering that's just a little of what occurs in Japan is bullshit.

So, maybe it's the architecture that makes them think this. As with the first, 'pyramid' architecture is also not restricted to Central America. Especially when you look at the details that are put into the structures. Even if they happened to take the pyramid style from the Mayan temples, the details are Asian from the etchings to the dragons along the stairwell to the motifs on the walls and floors. And then there is the fact that there are pyramid structures in Asia.

Ok, but the face make-up and costumes have to be only Central American. Nope. It can easily be inspired by Pacific Island dress and costume.

And I'm losing steam now, so that'll be it. I mostly needed to vent out my frustration of the matter. Granted, I'm not the creators, so I can't really say what they were thinking when they created these 'un-Asian' parts of the world.

In progress are in italics with links and finished ones are crossed out with links.

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( oc_art100 table: InvicemCollapse )

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( Illustrations IdeasCollapse )

Thanks everyone for your suggestions on the art topic request post I did a few days ago. Just reading them made me smile. And here are the pictures the topics spawned! Apparently I just needed to draw cute stuff and didn't know it.

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And now to start working on school work. _-_

So, Children's Book 1 is putting me in a bit of an art funk, so to get out of it and get other stuff on my mind, I figured I'd do an art meme sort of thing. So, just comment to this post with something to draw and it shall be done (probably as just a 5 minute sketch or something). Hopefully this'll get me out of the funk.

Meme time picked up from ponderosa over on IJ.

The first three people to comment in this post get to request a SIMPLE sketch of a character of their choosing from me. In return, they have to post this in their journal, regardless of their drawing ability level.


I'll go easy on the actually posting this in people's journals as I wouldn't want to add extra stress to people who don't want it. ;D Please leave it to fandoms I know and RPs I've actually been in.

Since I have lots of time to burn now, I finally really went through all the stuff I won and decided what to keep and what not to keep. So, here's a list of stuff. I'm giving you all first choice of what catches your eye. Just also for mention, according to the boxes, the big ponies are ages 3+ and the small ponies are said to be 4+. I've also included links to the main Hasbro pages to people who want a bit more information. These are of course gifts for free. Depending on shipping, it might be nice to get a few bucks to help out with that, but as I'm not sure how much it'll cost, I can't really say much on the subject.

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Just drop a message here if you're interested or if you don't feel comfortable with that, feel free to PM me or email me at jenzaquinn (at) gmail (dot) com.

Also polymexia, I have the Toola Roola pony set aside for you if you're still interested in it.

Alright, immlass was helping me with this yesterday, but I figure I'll open this up to other people as well since a new 'symptom' has shown up.

My computer has been acting oddly since yesterday, mainly in the internet browser department. It is taking a super long time to load pages and it's the same regardless of using IE or Firefox. It's too the point where I start to worry that some of the tabs have lost their links because it takes a few minutes for them to pull up the urls in the address bar. There were also instances last night where none of the buttons within the webpage would work (I was on the hasbro webpage and when I hit the submit button, it looked like it was going to open the page and then nothing would happen).

Everything else in the computer is working at a good speed it seems. I haven't tried big programs like Photoshop Photoshop is working perfectly fine as well, but little things like looking through pictures and music and videos works and the external harddrive program worked well.

I restarted it yesterday the first time it was being cranky and at some point in the restart, it Bluescreened. I hard turned it off and winced at the harddrive made a weird sound that it made last time the harddrive crapped out. The computer turned on fine after that and I backed up all my files. I've restarted it later when the website buttons weren't working and it stalled at the windows screen, but when I hard turned it off and back on, it started up super quick. I turned off the computer for the night and when I turned it back on, it froze at a black screen along the way, but again after turning it off and back on, it started up at normal speed.

A new development is that when I google search and click on a link on the page, it takes me to a completely different page than the link I clicked or says the page doesn't exist. However, if I type in the url and hit enter, I get to the page perfectly fine.

I've run my ad-aware software two times so far to make sure it wasn't any of that crap affecting my computer. I'm just thoroughly confused. Any suggestions of what to do other than calling techsupport? Also, does anyone know of a good free virus scanner?

More updates: Ok, so photoshop worked fine while working on battery power, but once I plugged the computer back in, it started doing a high pitched squeal that then settled into blips, and the blips are now so quiet you can only hear them if you put your ear down on the computer. *sighs*

Since my last three eggs died, going to post these here instead of just on my profile:

Alright any techies out there. I've been meaning to do this for awhile, but as no money was coming in for awhile, really didn't have the means to do it by. Anyways, the all in one printer we have is not cutting it as an actual art scanner for me. It's alright for personal silly stuff, but considering my classes and also that my pencils are better than my inks, I need a better scanner. Having extra tax money and a place to set up a permanent station soon are making me itching to buy. I've been looking around at a few, but want some opinions as well. Here are the basic things I'm looking for:

16 bit grayscale (external)

48 bit color (external)

larger than 8.5 x 11 (although I've noticed this tends to put the scanner price in a range I can't handle)

capability to scan at at least 300 dpi

Extras: negative scanning would be nice, also a function that would get rid of the gradation on the page that happens because of how my sketchbook lies on the scanner.

I'm looking somewhere in the $100 range, but depending on how nice it is, might be willing to go as high as $300. Thanks everyone!

Also, recs for good art printers will be appreciated as well to look at in the future. ^-^

Not sure if I'll be able to do this as long as I had hoped. I'm getting overly critical of my work, which of course, makes it harder to finish. This didn't turn out how I wanted, but still cute.

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I was originally going to color this, but sadly, I don't have the patience. But here at least is the line art for the annual Dru/Michael Christmas picture.

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Left un-locked for a certain someone so he doesn't have to actually log in. ;D So, the videos! Please excuse the quality of them. I was getting bumped a jostled a lot near Government Center between the giant standing in front of me, the other lady trying to tape it all, and the small boy who kept throwing his hands up into my face. _-_ Enjoy! Oh, also, some are sideways as I don't know how to change the orientation on a video file.


The parade starting to roll out of Fenway to the bullpen band. ^-^

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They come up with the greatest and most cracktastic game shows.

For tryslora's quote a Joss Whedon show day! I leave with a few quotes.

Giles: You might have let me in on your plan while he throttled me.
Spike: Oh, poor Watcher. Did your life pass before your eyes? Cup o' tea, cup o' tea, almost got shagged, cup o' tea.

Andrew: I-I bet even covert operatives eat curly fries. They're really good.
Spike: Not as good as those onion blossom things.
Andrew: Ooh, I love those.
Spike: Yeah, me, too.
Andrew: It's an onion... and it's a flower. I-I don't understand how such a thing is possible.
Spike: See, the genius of it is you soak it in ice water for an hour so it holds its shape. Then you deep-fry it root-side up for about 5 minutes.
Andrew: Masterful.
Spike: Yeah. Tell anyone we had this conversation, I'll bite you.
Andrew: Right.

Just embedded media from YouTube that's more sound bites of the 1812 Overture and the Jesse McCartney concert.

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( Jesse McCartney at Six FlagsCollapse )