2012-06-17 02:06 pm

Anime Central 2012 Photos

It only took me what, a month and a half to get them uploaded? I need to find a photo workflow manager I like for Linux that doesn't forcequit on me all the time :c Mostly select Getbackers, with some Gintama. Featuring me as Gintoki and Juubei, [profile] shingetsu as Takasugi and Kazuki, [plurk.com profile] arrshley as Sakamoto and Sakura, [profile] akatonbo as Toshiki, and [profile] pantswarrior as Makubex. Full gallery, which includes a lot more shenanigans, here.

Behind the cut because lots )

2012-05-22 06:30 pm
Entry tags:

Observation

I started documenting my cosplay stuff on Tumblr because of the ease of posting short posts and mixed media posts (text and pictures, for example). And then I started actually writing about costumes and costume-making and it basically turns into GIANT ESSAYS and then I think I am maybe missing the point of Tumblr.

(do I have a thousand-word draft of working with plastics saved to finish off at some point? Yes I do.)
2012-05-22 12:12 am

On Being A Grown-Up

You know you've reached some strange new pinnacle of adulthood when you are really proud of figuring out how to enter all of your accounts into GnuCash, and make plans to sync the accounts regularly (I'm thinking every payday, which is every two weeks for me).

You know it's up to you to decide what that means when you realize you should probably subdivide the 'Hobbies' account into 'Cosplay' and 'Merch' as this is pretty much everything you put in it. Also when you consider renaming 'Supplies' to 'Shit For the House' because that's what it's ended up being.
2012-05-20 11:30 pm

Further Technological Adventures

So, I have mentioned the previous misadventures of me and my media server. After much debate and discussion in #dw (I seriously ♥ you all for putting up with my annoying tech-support-ish questions, seriously), I came to the conclusion that the reason I've had a ton of boot issues is because my main, big drive on the machine was having problems spinning up adequately when the machine was started, which lead to it failing to various points in the boot cycle (depending how much it had spun up). Between that and SpinRite finding a bunch of sectors it couldn't fix, I decided these were signs that while the drive was not dead, it was probably on the road there, and that it would be better to replace it before it actually died.

So I went out and got a 3TB WD Caviar Green from NCIX, my local parts chain (on sale for $30 less than NewEgg had it before shipping, no less), and set about recovering files from the bad drive, reinstalling Xubuntu 12.04, and configuring all the drives to automount. There were a few hitches along the way, but the only unsolveable one is that it turns out my salvaged memory card reader is incompatible with Ubuntu versions after 9.10 or so, due to updates in how the kernel handles USB devices. So when I have some money, I think this thing finally deserves an IR reciever and remote, and a new memory card reader that's actually USB 2.0 compatible.

I also renamed the machine and all it's drives, as [profile] azurelunatic made me realize that naming a machine after a city that gets blown up is almost as inauspicious as naming devices after crazy villains (I named an mp3 player Sephiroth once. Bad idea). So my FF7 naming scheme has been laid to rest in favor of a Gundam 00 based one, because... nerd. So:

- Veda - my sleek little Alienware laptop (it has been Veda since I bought it, actually)
- Celestial Being - The media server
* Setsuna - boot, programs and docs drives (because he's the important one)
* Lockon - Games, comic scans, RPG books, misc Fun Stuff (because you know Lockon is the one with the most normal concept of 'fun')
* Tieria - the 3TB drive for video files (because Tieria is the master of GIANT GUNDAMS)
* Allelujah - music (...because it needed a drive. Sorry Alle, I really do love you anyway)

When I have some free time to dig into files, I'm going to try to make a skin for XBMC that looks like the Ptolemy's computer interfaces, I think.

Also, in the category of 'this might be a sign', I started up RhythmBox, imported my collection of roughly five thousand songs, put it on shuffle - and this is what I got first. Yes, Gundam 00 music. And this is what the desktop looks like when not cluttered with windows.
2012-05-19 11:55 am

A brief rant

I am sick and tired of being sick and tired with no explanation. I'm tired of the near-constant brainfog, of wanting to sleep twelve hours a night, of coming home from work and not having the energy to do anything but sit on the sofa and stare at the internet. None of this is new. This has been the last eight years of my life, with increasing severity.

What's new is that I've lost twenty-five pounds in a month and a half, without changing what I eat or how I exercise (in fact, I've been eating more). My fingernails have started breaking all the time. I sweat in my sleep.

I've had piles of tests done. I could give a laundry list of things that aren't wrong with me, because all of them have come back normal. And GPs just look at me and shrug and say things like 'it's probably stress' or 'you need to exercise more' and it's just... no. Something is wrong. And nobody knows what it is, or has the decency to straight-up say 'yeah, there's something wrong here but I can't tell you what' instead of making me feel like a paranoid hypochondriac, which, by the way, is a really shitty thing to do to someone with anxiety disorders.
2012-05-08 05:24 pm

(no subject)

For [profile] pantswarrior's amusement, Ashley and I were discussing plotting plans for our Fuuga OT3 (Kazuki/Toshiki/Juubei):


Her: I also think that at some point, they should all have bathtime.
Me:..........does the Mirage have a hot tub?
Me: because if so they should take it over and fill it with bubble bath (LOL)
Her: lmfao
Her: yessssss


(and to everyone in general, I swear I really truly will have con photos uploaded this week. Once I reinstall the OS on my laptop. Yes, again. I probably could have fixed this one, but trying to swap from Ubuntu to Xubuntu without a clean wipe, after upgrading Ubuntu from 10.10 to 12.04 in one day, was making it's own share of problems, so I decided to just go clean.)
2012-04-24 05:39 pm
Entry tags:

We Are Now Experiencing Technical Difficulties

...Or, Adventures of a Human Fuzzer (because [profile] geekosaur suggested it and it sounds better than 'Guys, I Think I Have Gremlins')

So, anyone who hangs around me for a long enough time knows that I love technology. But sometimes I love technology too long, or too hard, and then technology fails to love me back. Which is a nice way of saying I am really good at breaking things through either clumsiness or aforementioned human fuzzer status. The last few weeks have been grand adventurse in new and exciting ways of breaking technology, which are best summed up as bulletpoints, because otherwise I'll be writing all day.

The Laptop
- Buy more RAM for the laptop, because 2GB isn't cutting it
- Decide, well, if I'm going to do more RAM, I should sit and wipe my Win7 install, too, because I never use it, and having my storage partitions split up is a pain
- Make USB boot key of PartedMagic! Get into it successfully! Hooray!
- ...delete the wrong NTFS partition: the storage instead of the Windows one
- realize that while it was mostly just a download dump, I had ALL my photos from the con on there (along with some nice photos I took in lab)
- spend roughly three hours trying to run partition recovery via Testdisk, guided by the very patient [profile] sophie
- Finally give up, accept that I have a better chance of running file recovery on the camera's memory card for the con photos, and that the rest is write-off
- Go to clean up the other partitions, because dual-booting Win7 means having really messed up boot set-ups because Windows Updater eats other bootloaders
- ACCIDENTALLY DELETE THE PARTITION WITH MY KERNEL ON IT
- Bang head against metaphorical wall and wail at the wonderful denizens of #dw for a short while
- Go to reinstall my root file system, being very thankful /home was on a separate partition
- ...Install 32-bit Ubuntu on 64-bit machine, causing it to only recognize 2.4GB of my nice shiny 4GB of RAM
- Facepalm
- Reinstall 64-bit OS and reconfig files.
- It is now six am.

The Tower
- Tower fails to boot. Again. (this is a fairly regular occurrence)
- Decide to actually play with boot settings instead of just reinstalling OS like I usually do.
- Get boot to work!
- Give in to the nag window to upgrade to 11.04, thinking 'it should be fine now, right?'
- Upgrade!
- Tower fails to boot again :| (this has happened every time I try 11.04 on any of my machines, I think it's cursed)
- Sigh, reinstall 10.10, decide I will work out why boot keeps failing on the main disk another night.

The Nook
- Fail to write the disk images needed to root the Nook repeatedly
- Disk image writer attempts to summon elder gods
- Fail some more.
- Finally succeed! Nook is rooted.

The Razr
- Get shiny new phone!
- Discover rooting shiny new phone is surprisingly easy!
- Gleefully start deleting Motorola and provider apps I don't need
- Discover the hard way that BlurEmailEngine.apk? Controls display text message notifs
- Oh, and BlurEmail.apk is necessary for contacts to works. Thanks, Motorola.
- Try factory reset. Accomplish nothing other than deleting all my apps.
- Attempt to reinstall system apps from other people's dumps. Fail.
- Attempt to install Brazilian stock ROM, because nobody bothers ripping the Canadian ones. Also fail.
- Give in, find replacement apps (to the good people behind the GO suite? I love you)

...and there has been some shenanigans with both my camera memory card and J's camera memory card, but file recovery ran okay and format worked, so those aren't worth writing up. And this is why I don't have con photos up yet.
2012-03-26 04:40 pm

Updates, what are those

...Things I forget about, obviously. I guess general status update - I have a job! It is basically a trained monkey job, but it's fulltime, and may have benefits (I started as a temp but am being switched to perm). It's also kind of a gongshow right now because it's a new facility so stuff isn't 100% online and they got kind of flooded with business, which in the long run is good but in the short run means I worked like a 44hour work week last week, and that was with finishing early on Friday.

April is con month! After a lot of waffling, I decided that yes I am going to Sakuracon, mostly to hang with [profile] inoru_no_hoshi and enjoy Seattle. Costume line-up:
-Gintoki (Gintama) for Friday
-Ukitake (Bleach), with Unohana and Kyoraku for Saturday (YAY old captain group)
-Hakkai (Saiyuki) for Saturday night and Sunday. Maybe, idk.

And then ACen at the end of the month which I am SUPER EXCITE about:
-Gintoki (Gintama)
-Juubei (Getbackers)
-Hakkai (Saiyuki)

OTHER THAN THAT, I have been cleaning more, which is good, and have a terrible headcold right now, which is bad. I called in sick to work for basically the first time ever because I woke up at seven this morning with a fever and a headache that's been there since Friday. I feel kind of guilty but on the other hand fuck, I couldn't handle an 8+ hour day of lifting and walking and LOTS OF NOISE like this. So I'm going to hide in my house with tea and maybe cook some. Home remedies for terrible headcolds with bonus sore throats appreciated, this is an awful feeling :|
2012-02-19 09:24 pm

That Thing I've Been Working On....

So I think at this point all of the regulars in #DW have been hearing about my (mis)adventures with Drupal and PHP. Basically, after many years of waffling around I am finally building a cosplay website, and because apparently my mindset is 'go big or go home', I've been designing it to be multi-user scalable.

Because I am only one person and cannot remember what I want half the time until the exact moment I want it, I would love some feedback on what it could use. I should also note my intent was to make it a cosplay site, ie, mostly geared at people doing media recreation costuming, but I think most of the functionality works for other types? But I may have to try and classify by things other than just character and series.

This is the site!
What's still on my to-do list:
-being able to add links to accounts on other sites to user profiles DONE! (current list is dA, DW, LJ, Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, and ACP; other input welcome)
-Add good search functionality. I've got some modules for it, but I'm still working on the set-up.
-Making the links to a given user's content easy to find on their user profile (costumes and tutorials are in the sidebar, but they're hard to find with the nav links there)
-Styling.

Specific feedback I'd love would be on whether the fields provided for tutorials/costumes/profiles are adequate, what other sites people would like, and... well, anything else you can think of.
2012-02-07 08:36 pm
Entry tags:

The cosplay community and content management systems

This was born out of a Skype conversation with [livejournal.com profile] nique a few weeks ago (by way of the Dewey decimal system, incidentally). Basically - being a design nerd, I ended up going off on a long rant about how basically every cosplay community site (ie, places you can join rather than an individual or group's personal cosplay page) has the worst interface ever (or absurd arbitrary rules for joining, for the few I haven't tried), and are terrible at actually sharing information about costumes and process, which is ostensibly what they are about. And she replied that in the cosplay community nobody cares about process, so why would they bother? Which, honestly, is completely true, and kind of depressing.

longwinded rambling within )

Unfortunately, getting a community site off the ground is a lot of work, both in coding and in attracting enough users to make it a viable community. My smaller goal is to maybe code an easily deployable content management system (like the blogging software for your webserver. Hopefully someone other than me actually knows about those these days....) that would make adding costumes easy. You wouldn't be able to interlink things the way you could on a community website, but you could do everything else, and have skinning functions, too.

Of course, first I gotta learn Perl *g*
2012-01-23 04:51 pm
Entry tags:

Cosplay + Tumblr

So I made a cosplay tumblr so I can stop spamming the shit out of Plurk and my blog with WIP photos and ramblings and tutorial links. Is there any interest in me setting up a syndicated feed account for it on DW, for non-tumblr users?
2011-12-28 04:49 am

(no subject)

Just a bitty note - I'm shifting people who crosspost from being friended on both LJ and DW to DW-only, just to clean up the duplicates on my reading lists :3
2011-12-25 06:24 am

This is a gratuitous testing post

[plurk.com profile] momijizukamori
[ravelry.com profile] momijizukamori

(And if you want to friend me either of those places, be my guest)
2010-06-02 04:43 am

4AM Thoughts

I really want some Jyuushiko/Retsu...well, not necessarily porn, but shippy goodness, at least. I mean, I like Ukitake/Unohana as is - their personalities mesh well together - but the genderswap adds a whole new layer to it. Jyuushiko is someone who struggles sometimes with reconciling her strength and her femininity. She's a little bit of a tomboy sometimes, and she had to pose as a boy to gain her strength (well, didn't have to, but she felt she did which is what matters). So she looks up to Retsu, and admires her a lot as someone who does seem to manage balancing being very traditionally feminine with being strong and in charge. And they have a really cute dynamic even just as friends.

I think the fact that the only femmslash I can remember writing is mediocre-to-crappy Tomoyo/Meiling fic that still resides deep in the bowels of FF.net means I should probably do this, though I kind of need to get better at writing Unohana first.
2010-06-01 02:42 am

(no subject)

I have a laptop power cord again! Oh my precious, how I have missed you ♥ Finally I can have all of my bookmarks and my addons and my saved passwords, which I did not want on the shared computer. I also have a terrible bout of insomnia, care of job hunting and visiting relatives, which has my 'flight' reaction cranked up to about ten. So I'm sitting around awake testing out a new Unohana journal on a Minazuki who is apparently also an insomniac (or lives in futureland).

I also actually signed up to write something for Springkink - Shunsui/Ukitake genderswap. Fic on a deadline, let's see if I can actually pull this off! But Jyuushiko topping Shunsui was just too damned tempting.
2010-05-30 02:54 pm

O Life

The last few days have felt more like a week - all of my immediate family flew out for graduation, plus my grandparents from Florida, so Thursday and Friday were a lot of driving around and panicking and what not. Graduation itself was well done - kept things organized, and all of the little speeches were good. I'm not sure if it makes me a huge nerd or a social outcast (or both) that I knew more of the faculty on stage watching than the group I was actually graduating with. Now begins another round of frantic job searching, as it turns out my grocery store fall-back option may not have hours for me, and I won't find out until next week. Ugh this week, etc. I am also kind of stoned on Benadryl right now - but at least it works wonders on the itchiness.
2010-05-26 01:25 am

(no subject)

I was going to say 'man everybody is going to have way more awesome weekends than me', and then I realized that I'm graduating on Friday and that should be way more exciting than an anime con, but...mostly I'm just stressed about my Florida grandparents being here for a week - they're not bad people, really, but they're loud and Florida and I live in a city that is pretty much entirely hippies and/or Asians, so things are going to be...tense? I am also still all hive-y - still unknown what I'm allergic to (made an appointment for next week to get a referral), but the prednisone the walk-in clinic prescribed me works awesomely for about twelve hours and then they start coming back. So I just made a one am run to Shopper's for some Benadryl so I don't wake up at eight am because I am too itchy to sleep. Right now I'm playing the 'which will kick in first, the anti-histimine effects or the drowsy effects' game.

...Yeah this week is well into crazytown already :|
2010-05-24 02:56 am

Ugh

So apparently my body decided Friday contained too much awesome, and decided it had to do something about it - I woke up Saturday covered in hives which Claritin and hydrocortisone cream did not put much of a dent in. This morning was even more unattractive, as they had spread to my arms and legs, and I looked kind of like I lost a fight with a fryalator. Luckily Ced had some prescription betamethasone cream which actually did help (still splotchy, less itchy though), although I'm going to go to a walk-in clinic in the morning, because best guess is that it's a reaction to something I ate, and...I don't actually have any known food allergies. And I'd really like to avoid a repeat of this.

Also, my laptop power cord finally died. Yeah, a week and a half after finally getting a new battery. On the plus side, I finally am on my way to achieving my Eeveelution team! And I am 99% sure I don't have measles (it was actually a worry, apparently there's been an outbreak in the GVRD).
2010-05-22 02:14 am

Meme from Skuld

Name 5 bad-ass female fictional characters and tell me why. Try and use as many different canons you can!

I think 'bad-ass' has connotations that aren't necessarily part of my perspective looking at some of these (mostly because to me it implies 'awesome in the sense of fighting' and...not really the focus for some of these), but eh. I actually realized, when I stopped to think about it, that I can think of a bunch, though some of them are canon overlap. So - sticking to one per canon and going for some more out of the way ones.

Retsu Unohana, Bleach - At first glance, she seems like yet another Yamato Nadeshiko. And then you discover that the batshit crazy fighter division are terrified of her. She has a giant flying manta ray. She has a quiet strength that I am absolutely in love with (see: various posts of me going 'ajlskdfjlksf ♥' over her interactions with Jyuushiko). (PS Kubo Tite, WTB moar old captains appearances)

Yuna, FFX - The one people will probably disagree with me for! I know the reactions to her are seriously mixed, but I love Yuna. See much of this post as to why, but - she's idealistic without being incredibly naive (she's a little naive, at the beginning, but she really does grow through the game), and she chooses her own path freely. I mean, she agrees to marry Seymour - so she can get close enough to Send him. And when that plan fails, she already has a back-up in place, and jumps off the city onto Valefor to escape. Also, FFX: proving that white mages can kick ass and take names too!

Mazikeen, Lucifer - She is the consort of the Morningstar, the war leader of her entire people, and basically a berserker demon-blooded warrior. She would do basically anything to protect those she is loyal to - and that's something she only gives out to a respected few. She was raised to be fierce and strong and independent, and she is. Also, when Lucifer pulls his epic dick move at the end of the series (I still say that was a dick move, really), she has no qualms about giving him hell for it, despite the fact that he's, you know. One of the firstborn of the Almighty.

Mitsuru Kirijo, Persona 3 - She won't hang out with you until you prove you're as smart as she is. She learned to summon a Persona when she was teeny because she wanted to protect the only family she had left. She owns, and rides a motorcycle (you get to sit in back). Also, just...her crit animation

Yelena Rossini, Transmetropolitan - Short, flat-chested, bitter as hell, can probably smoke like three packs a day. She's also an absolutely brilliant writer, and along with the other two of the Transmet trio, is willing to be put on the hit list for daring to try and take down a corrupt President - through the power of free speech.

(other awesome female characters not appearing on this list - much of the female casts of aforementioned canons, the women of Resident Evil, Samus Aran, girl-Turks, half of the Endless)