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tammaiyaHmm, so much for that faithful meme-driven updating of LJ. My big problem is that I keep thinking - as I do with many things in my life - "oh, I'll do it before I go to bed". Of course, by that time, it is ridiculously late (or early, depending on your point of view) and I have devolved into something about one step up from primordial sludge. Updating LJ is too much effort. orz
But it's the middle of the afternoon - well, okay, it's 5pm. but it's still very sunny - and I just got home from the hair dressers and haven't actually gotten distracted by anything else yet, so now seems like a good time to update LJ. Particularly since I'm going to Sydney tomorrow morning.
Anyhoo, in the past few days I have been moderately more active than usual. I had a check-up with the podiatrist on Tuesday (oh the joys of being a diabetic with flat feet) and then went to hang out at Mari's place, which was as always a lot of fun. Yesterday my mum decided we HAD to go clothes shopping, slightly disrupting my plans for the afternoon. I achieved a graduation dress out of it - it's lovely, navy blue and form fitting to about the knee with white trimming and a white bow around the waist - but not shoes. Either shoes to go with the dress, or sandals, which we started looking for after I complained that my right knee ached and the rest of the leg was going numb (orthotics do not fit in my current, VERY FLAT sandals).
Basically, I hate shoes because shoes hate me. I get shoe envy, not because I want the shoes other women are wearing, but because they can wear them. On top of having big feet - which is actually getting to be much less of an issue these days - I have very narrow feet, particularly around the ankles. Much as I wouldn't want big wide feet, this rules out a lot of shoes in terms of fit. Then, on top of having long, narrow feet, they are flat. Even better; this leads to the problem described above with sore legs, back, etc. Ideally for comfort my orthotics should fit.
Then, of course, the crowning glory is this: I have incredibly sensitive skin, especially on my feet. For example, I cannot wear thongs (flip-flops for you Americans) if I actually expect to walk more than a few steps, because even when they are a brand that everyone says is incredibly soft leather, comfortable shoes, even when I keep wearing them again and again hoping they'll wear in or I'll build up calluses or something, every time they will rub the skin raw between my toes. Or the sandals I had in highschool - I loved them to death, literally wore them out, but despite hoping eventually my feet would adjust, the strap around the ankle never failed to leave open wounds on the backs of my ankles. It's like the Princess and the Pea, only despite what fairytales may have you believe, this is not in any way a good thing. I am doomed to a lifetime of only ever finding sneakers and maryjanes comfortable, and even then only to a certain extent!! So basically I've just resigned myself to the idea that if I want to wear nice shoes I have to also accept that pain will follow and try not to move too much in them, but I'm not sure how this is going to fly once I start work. I can't wear sneakers in an office. D:
But anyway, after the semi-successful shopping trip, I went to uni to meet up with this year's negotiation/arbitration team to see how they were faring. I don't envy them their problem, ours was much more interesting and better drafted. I said I'd look over their finished memorandums for them, though I'm not sure how much help I'll be.
As for today, this afternoon I went out to get my hair done for the first time in months. It's pretty long at the moment, as previously mentioned, but the colour was growing out a lot (and every time I think maybe I should let my hair be its natural colour, then I get roots and remember what a horrible mousy brown it turned when I hit puberty. Used to be a much nicer chestnut-ish colour) and I had a lot of split ends so it was a bit straw-like. Now it's actually kind of fabulous, or at least I think so. My parents are less convinced, especially my dad, but he never likes it when the colour is darker. I kept the length and didn't cut in a fringe this time - I'm going to think more seriously about the cut next time, maybe find some reference pictures - but the colour is a dark reddy-brown, more reddish on top where it was my natural colour before, and the hairdresser curled it for me, since I'm going to a party tonight. :) Photos further down, below the cut!
Further plans of course involve the party tonight and Sydney tomorrow, where I'm staying with Leareth on Friday night, then with my parents on Saturday night - the original purpose of this trip was my cousin's 21st birthday party that night - and back with Leareth until the Tuesday, in time to have my wisdom teeth out on Wednesday at the crack of dawn, joy of joys.
In fannish news, there have been a number of fic posts since I last updated, all One Piece, all spoilery for recent chapters (lightly so in the case of the first two). These are FML, gen humour fic poking fun at Sanji's life sucking; Life On Venus, a porntastic Zoro/Sanji sequel to FML; and Chaos Theory, an ensemble time-travelling hijinks fic where they go back in time to Roger's ship. I've also been playing a bit of Lost Odyssey... which brings me to an odd phenomenon I've noticed with Xbox360 games, namely that the more discs they have, the shorter they paradoxically seem to be? I mean, I know it relates to the power taken up by graphics, but you'd think they'd at least be the same length as a one disc game. ToV was an 80+ (definitely plus in my case, I clocked like 100 hours) game; Last Remnant's second disc was incredibly short, and even with 4 total discs, when I'm hitting disc 2 at 10.5 hours in on Lost Odyssey (seriously? SERIOUSLY? disc changes in PS-era FF never came that quickly!) I have to wonder. Assuming every disc took around the same amount of time, that's still less than 50 hours total. Hmmmm.
Meanwhile, going over to Mari's always reawakens my drawing impulses. This time I tried to tackle one of my greatest achilles heels in drawing: colour. Usually I take either a slapdash paintbucket approach or a colour-by-hand/scan approach, neither of which work very well. This time I bothered to look up a tutorial on the internet, and found some very useful functions in Photoshop I'd never noticed before. It was surprisingly successful. I may have semi-overcome this problem! Although I still need to figure out how to get a more watercolour look, I don't always want bold lines and colours.
Unfortunately my other achilles heel, backgrounds, will not be so easily overcome. The problem is not so much that I can't draw backgrounds; that's something I could improve with practice. It doesn't even reach that stage. When I image whatever I want to draw, positions, colour, light and shade, they all come automatically. But I almost never envision the background. It's like it's not important to my mental landscape, although I certainly appreciate pictures with elaborate backgrounds far more than blank nothing. I never really think about where they are. Even if the position necessarily involves some kind of furniture, I don't think of the detail of it. And it's incredibly hard to draw something when I have no mental image of it. orz
Oh well. Moving on, meme is below the cut, as is the picture of Chloe from Tales of Legendia. [Editorial: I know I promised photos of the hair, pics or it didn't happen etc, but I'm going to have to upload some other Sydney-related photos and it's late and if I don't post this now, I never will, SO.]
Like anyone who's ever played Ocarina of Time, I'm going to be totally predictable and unoriginal and say Navi. I'm not even completely sure if she's really that annoying, if any character can in fact be as annoying as my memory and urban legend suggest Navi is, or if she's just attained this quasi-legendary status that has exceeded the actual reality, but years and years later I still think immediately of her when the subject of annoying characters comes up.
Mimmy from Tales of Legendia gets an honorable mention, because her childish voice and speech patterns and behaviour all annoyed the CRAP out of me but she might just be sticking in mind because I played the game only recently.
I'm sure there should be loads of others, but I honestly can't think of any. There are a few characters I can think of that I was annoyed by at the time, but have come to tolerate or even like as I get older. For some reason, they're all female. I'm sure there must be male characters I find grating, but somehow I can't call any to mind. Huh.
PS: Okay so I didn't finish this post and it is now after the party, which was very enjoyable, and I have to pack. But I just had two very worrying thoughts/realisations:
1. I have apparently not updated BBX since APRIL LAST YEAR? oh my god, kill me now. orz NEED TO GET ON THAT STAT.
2. Have I called a fic Chaos Theory before? I have that sudden feeling and I don't know whether or not I'm just being paranoid. This is tragic, I don't even remember my own fics. <-- I subsequently had a moment of paranoia and went through the entirety of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
insaneidiot. Somewhat miraculously given my propensity for one-word titles (especially starting with i, it seems?), I have not ONCE doubled up, not even with the drabbles. I am kind of amazed and impressed by this.
ETA WITHOUT ACTUALLY POSTING: So I didn't get this posted before going to Sydney, where I currently still am, and I haven't had much in the way of time to update LJ and finish the entry, but it was practically all written, and it's too long and will take forever if I try to add to it now, so fuck it, I'm posting it as would have been complete originally. <___< It is an accurate reflection as of last Friday? *hides*
But it's the middle of the afternoon - well, okay, it's 5pm. but it's still very sunny - and I just got home from the hair dressers and haven't actually gotten distracted by anything else yet, so now seems like a good time to update LJ. Particularly since I'm going to Sydney tomorrow morning.
Anyhoo, in the past few days I have been moderately more active than usual. I had a check-up with the podiatrist on Tuesday (oh the joys of being a diabetic with flat feet) and then went to hang out at Mari's place, which was as always a lot of fun. Yesterday my mum decided we HAD to go clothes shopping, slightly disrupting my plans for the afternoon. I achieved a graduation dress out of it - it's lovely, navy blue and form fitting to about the knee with white trimming and a white bow around the waist - but not shoes. Either shoes to go with the dress, or sandals, which we started looking for after I complained that my right knee ached and the rest of the leg was going numb (orthotics do not fit in my current, VERY FLAT sandals).
Basically, I hate shoes because shoes hate me. I get shoe envy, not because I want the shoes other women are wearing, but because they can wear them. On top of having big feet - which is actually getting to be much less of an issue these days - I have very narrow feet, particularly around the ankles. Much as I wouldn't want big wide feet, this rules out a lot of shoes in terms of fit. Then, on top of having long, narrow feet, they are flat. Even better; this leads to the problem described above with sore legs, back, etc. Ideally for comfort my orthotics should fit.
Then, of course, the crowning glory is this: I have incredibly sensitive skin, especially on my feet. For example, I cannot wear thongs (flip-flops for you Americans) if I actually expect to walk more than a few steps, because even when they are a brand that everyone says is incredibly soft leather, comfortable shoes, even when I keep wearing them again and again hoping they'll wear in or I'll build up calluses or something, every time they will rub the skin raw between my toes. Or the sandals I had in highschool - I loved them to death, literally wore them out, but despite hoping eventually my feet would adjust, the strap around the ankle never failed to leave open wounds on the backs of my ankles. It's like the Princess and the Pea, only despite what fairytales may have you believe, this is not in any way a good thing. I am doomed to a lifetime of only ever finding sneakers and maryjanes comfortable, and even then only to a certain extent!! So basically I've just resigned myself to the idea that if I want to wear nice shoes I have to also accept that pain will follow and try not to move too much in them, but I'm not sure how this is going to fly once I start work. I can't wear sneakers in an office. D:
But anyway, after the semi-successful shopping trip, I went to uni to meet up with this year's negotiation/arbitration team to see how they were faring. I don't envy them their problem, ours was much more interesting and better drafted. I said I'd look over their finished memorandums for them, though I'm not sure how much help I'll be.
As for today, this afternoon I went out to get my hair done for the first time in months. It's pretty long at the moment, as previously mentioned, but the colour was growing out a lot (and every time I think maybe I should let my hair be its natural colour, then I get roots and remember what a horrible mousy brown it turned when I hit puberty. Used to be a much nicer chestnut-ish colour) and I had a lot of split ends so it was a bit straw-like. Now it's actually kind of fabulous, or at least I think so. My parents are less convinced, especially my dad, but he never likes it when the colour is darker. I kept the length and didn't cut in a fringe this time - I'm going to think more seriously about the cut next time, maybe find some reference pictures - but the colour is a dark reddy-brown, more reddish on top where it was my natural colour before, and the hairdresser curled it for me, since I'm going to a party tonight. :) Photos further down, below the cut!
Further plans of course involve the party tonight and Sydney tomorrow, where I'm staying with Leareth on Friday night, then with my parents on Saturday night - the original purpose of this trip was my cousin's 21st birthday party that night - and back with Leareth until the Tuesday, in time to have my wisdom teeth out on Wednesday at the crack of dawn, joy of joys.
In fannish news, there have been a number of fic posts since I last updated, all One Piece, all spoilery for recent chapters (lightly so in the case of the first two). These are FML, gen humour fic poking fun at Sanji's life sucking; Life On Venus, a porntastic Zoro/Sanji sequel to FML; and Chaos Theory, an ensemble time-travelling hijinks fic where they go back in time to Roger's ship. I've also been playing a bit of Lost Odyssey... which brings me to an odd phenomenon I've noticed with Xbox360 games, namely that the more discs they have, the shorter they paradoxically seem to be? I mean, I know it relates to the power taken up by graphics, but you'd think they'd at least be the same length as a one disc game. ToV was an 80+ (definitely plus in my case, I clocked like 100 hours) game; Last Remnant's second disc was incredibly short, and even with 4 total discs, when I'm hitting disc 2 at 10.5 hours in on Lost Odyssey (seriously? SERIOUSLY? disc changes in PS-era FF never came that quickly!) I have to wonder. Assuming every disc took around the same amount of time, that's still less than 50 hours total. Hmmmm.
Meanwhile, going over to Mari's always reawakens my drawing impulses. This time I tried to tackle one of my greatest achilles heels in drawing: colour. Usually I take either a slapdash paintbucket approach or a colour-by-hand/scan approach, neither of which work very well. This time I bothered to look up a tutorial on the internet, and found some very useful functions in Photoshop I'd never noticed before. It was surprisingly successful. I may have semi-overcome this problem! Although I still need to figure out how to get a more watercolour look, I don't always want bold lines and colours.
Unfortunately my other achilles heel, backgrounds, will not be so easily overcome. The problem is not so much that I can't draw backgrounds; that's something I could improve with practice. It doesn't even reach that stage. When I image whatever I want to draw, positions, colour, light and shade, they all come automatically. But I almost never envision the background. It's like it's not important to my mental landscape, although I certainly appreciate pictures with elaborate backgrounds far more than blank nothing. I never really think about where they are. Even if the position necessarily involves some kind of furniture, I don't think of the detail of it. And it's incredibly hard to draw something when I have no mental image of it. orz
Oh well. Moving on, meme is below the cut, as is the picture of Chloe from Tales of Legendia. [Editorial: I know I promised photos of the hair, pics or it didn't happen etc, but I'm going to have to upload some other Sydney-related photos and it's late and if I don't post this now, I never will, SO.]
Like anyone who's ever played Ocarina of Time, I'm going to be totally predictable and unoriginal and say Navi. I'm not even completely sure if she's really that annoying, if any character can in fact be as annoying as my memory and urban legend suggest Navi is, or if she's just attained this quasi-legendary status that has exceeded the actual reality, but years and years later I still think immediately of her when the subject of annoying characters comes up.
Mimmy from Tales of Legendia gets an honorable mention, because her childish voice and speech patterns and behaviour all annoyed the CRAP out of me but she might just be sticking in mind because I played the game only recently.
I'm sure there should be loads of others, but I honestly can't think of any. There are a few characters I can think of that I was annoyed by at the time, but have come to tolerate or even like as I get older. For some reason, they're all female. I'm sure there must be male characters I find grating, but somehow I can't call any to mind. Huh.
PS: Okay so I didn't finish this post and it is now after the party, which was very enjoyable, and I have to pack. But I just had two very worrying thoughts/realisations:
1. I have apparently not updated BBX since APRIL LAST YEAR? oh my god, kill me now. orz NEED TO GET ON THAT STAT.
2. Have I called a fic Chaos Theory before? I have that sudden feeling and I don't know whether or not I'm just being paranoid. This is tragic, I don't even remember my own fics. <-- I subsequently had a moment of paranoia and went through the entirety of
insaneidiot. Somewhat miraculously given my propensity for one-word titles (especially starting with i, it seems?), I have not ONCE doubled up, not even with the drabbles. I am kind of amazed and impressed by this.ETA WITHOUT ACTUALLY POSTING: So I didn't get this posted before going to Sydney, where I currently still am, and I haven't had much in the way of time to update LJ and finish the entry, but it was practically all written, and it's too long and will take forever if I try to add to it now, so fuck it, I'm posting it as would have been complete originally. <___< It is an accurate reflection as of last Friday? *hides*
