Becca Stareyes

So, this week I have the following I would like to do:

-- Finish my drawings for MAX and mrcaex
-- Finish Winry Rockbell, Martian Space Pilot! (a Fullmetal Alchemist AU) for scifibigbang
-- Put together two Halloween costumes. I'm going as the Virgo Cluster as a Museum of the Earth volunteer and as Tetra from Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker for CJAS's Halloween party. I might also repair my Amelia costume for CJAS Costume'd Kareoke on Friday.
-- Clean my apartment.
-- Help with some RPG stuff and get my activity for the Museum event ready.

Work is slow, and the thing I really need to do there (besides grading) is sit down with my adviser and have a 'Let us plan where I go next so I can get my PhD in a timely fashion'. He's out of town for Tuesday and Wednesday, so I could get away with taking that time off for home (and grading) if I finish everything in my office tomorrow.

Next month, I'll haveyuletide and yuletart, doing some art for scifibigbang, and slayers_request. Plus, finishing Christmas gifts and ag_over_18 will probably do a Secret Santa.

I wonder if maybe I should take a break from NaNo and maybe just do something like mekosuchinae is doing -- pledge to write every one of the 31_days prompts, which still gets me writing, but lets me work on other projects. Plus, I have one unfinished NaNo already, that doesn't suck and isn't fanfic. (I have three in total: the one that needs massive editing to salvage (if it can), the fanfic which needs its third part, and the one that really just needs a second half and some editing.)

But, that does kind of make me feel left out, since I really like the NaNo community. I like going to write-ins and such, and it would break my winning streak. But on the other hand, I don't want to win just for the sake of 50,000 words and a cute banner and certificate. I want to turn some of my scribbles into things other people can read. (Well, they can read them now, but it would make me cringe.)

And doing scifibigbang is making me realize that my writing has gotten somewhat more stable -- in that, a lot of my older writing from several years ago doesn't look like it sucks. For a while, I was improving fast enough that reading my old writing was painful. Now it looks like a lot of my drafting skills are stable enough that drafts look good when I re-read them, even years later. Which might mean I need to take more risks and start editing to see if I can improve myself more.

What I did today:
-- Polished my presentation for the Division of Planetary Sciences 2009 meeting based on comments I got from grad students on Friday.
-- Did two sketches -- one for MAX, one for mrcaex. I'll see how they look tomorrow before coloring them
-- Cut out all the pieces for my exchange gift for ag_over_18
-- Finished a fic for fma_fic_contest
-- Finished reading The Mermaid's Madness

What I'm going to do now:
-- See how many words I can get on my fic forscifibigbang before bed

What I would have liked to do:
-- Grade the dozen essays I have to do tomorrow.
-- Go over a report to ask a colleague for help.
-- Do my dishes

I just finsihed a Slayers fanfic about Xellos -- pick your poison, Insanejournal or Dreamwidth. (Also, FF.net, Mediaminer, Ficwad and Skyehawke, and a link in TheSlayers@LJ -- I crosspost like a crossposting thing.)

"The Weight of Secrets", my Zelda fanfic for areyougame, is done and at the beta *waves to yuuo*. Also, I just realized I forgot to name some minor characters. Oops.

As for my SciFiBigBang@LJ project, it's barely out of the prologue, but I have a Plan. Like many plans, it may change as I write. But, here. Have a graphic.



For the more artistically inclined, I have some exchange art that I finished:



Just realized that TRALLT's Harper (left) looks a lot like how I draw my character, Zack Marshall. Aside from both being blond Americans born in the latter half of the 20th century and being somewhat athletic, they don't have that much in common. Oh, and maybe having an embarrassing first name -- Harper is an Ashley, and 'Zack' is technically a middle name legally changed at 18. (Zack's full name is Francis Zackary Peter Marshall.)

Went to the department barbecue, where the traditional dish is butter-soaked potatoes and half-chickens grilled over a firepit. Seriously -- they have these metal grates with handles that are like, 2' x 3', and there's like five of them loaded up with chicken halves and they grill for five hours covered in marinade. And they are delicious and filling -- I ate at 3 PM, and am not especially hungry now. Of course, it might have also been the salad, couscous, and desserts (Laura brought chocolate-chip cheesecake to the picnic!).

( My life, so stressful. )

In something less stress-inducing, I did some Slayers fanart!

Grad student barbecue. I have a bunch of extra veggies that need to be eaten, so I figure I'll bring kebabs*.

* Ithaca is unusual in that even the carnivores like having grilled veggies at their meat-eating parties. It seemed all the barbecues I went to in Nebraska involved 'burgers and hot dogs and maybe a Boca Burger for Jenn'. (I knew one and a half vegetarian -- my sister and (for a while, and not including fish) my dad. Technically now my brother-in-law is on a low-meat diet thanks to digestive problems**, so that might add up to two.)

** Plus, he's an observant Catholic, so 1/6th of the year he's semi-veggie anyway.

I should be making them (read: cutting up the peppers and zucchini and sticking everything on skewers), but instead I'm updating my website, DevART gallery and art/fic journal. I have mastered the art of doing exactly what is most useless at the time.

I'll go make them now, and then get back to this. Expect an art post later. Or you can check out invoking_urania at either Inksome or IJ.

Okay, I've got Invoking Urania over on DW (here. Mainly because I decided I prefer a place where all my friends are for blogging, and I can tell it to crosspost things to InsaneJournal anyway -- overall, since more people use OpenID to leave comments, since IJ is a bit of a ghost town, it doesn't make much difference. If things work out, I'll get a paid account and start crossposting to Invoking Urania on LJ again.

Plus, there's nesting tags. Look at this. Snazzy. (Yes, I still have a default layout. Give me time, folks.)

I still miss my icons, though. I care less in fic journals, though.

All the content over there is stuff I've already posted to the Internets. Except a trio of fanart pieces, which have been up on DevART and Elfwood and my site and various LJ comms and... okay, I don't know if anyone's seen them, but here . (I'm not gonna start posting my massive backlog of original and exchange art there, but I'll do it as I go.)

In other news, I have taken custody (legally -- I was sworn in on my Slayers Premium DVD and everything) of the CJAS anime archive. This means I have half a closet (a big closet) of anime, mostly from the 1980s to mid 2000s. (About when people started downloading anime). Plus a VHS and Laserdisc player. Yes, you need that to watch some of the stuff in the archives. There's also stuff like several projectors, a table and chairs, the Weekly Get Rid of It! box*, raffle (well, ROFL) prizes, and our banner.

* Filled with free stuff anime companies send us that we regularly give away to members.

Star Trek tonight! Yay for Star Trek!

So, I still owe people art from January. And I want to actually color them, even if the meme only calls for sketches. So, I'll post what I have and get the finished versions up when I can.

( Images beneath cut -- you have been warned )

Somehow I accidentally got signed up for the MAX art exchange when I'm supposed to be blacklisted until I finish my previous exchange. Hawk probably pushed the wrong button or something, since I'm a regular. Or else the fact I was half-blind for most of the round made him do an override. That means I have to work extra hard to get both done to my high standards. Yay!

Oh, yes or no question -- should I post thumbnails of my drawings to this journal? Or, rather, would all of you like to see them, since I know how to use a LJ cut.

Speaking of, my glasses are fixed. I even skipped anime club to pick them up, as I was sick of eyestrain and blurriness.

I'm also the archivist of the anime club for next year. Which means I need to clean my closet to hold the anime club's archives. This may mean that I take advantage of the bad weather to clean my apartment. It's a bit of a dump right now. I'm hoping I can get to the 'writing code that takes forever to integrate' stage, so I can justify staying home to clean.

As far as resolutions go, I've lost about 25 pounds of weight. This is probably about a third of the amount of weight I want to lose, and a ninth of my starting weight. There's a math problem for ya.

I was vague about birthday gifts this year, so I now have $120 of gift cards to Barnes and Nobles, and $30.00 from Mom. Shopping time!

Gave a presentation today. Note to self: you are NOT talented enough to give a research talk off the cuff. Next time, practice more. Also, redo it so you have plenty of canned slides for next time, so you can just recycle three quarters of them, then spend your time practicing.

In astronomy related news, today a 100-meter asteroid passed 1/6th of the Moon's distance from us. We knew about it in advance, and knew it wouldn't hit. But I'll bet Arecibo got some kick-ass radar pictures of it.

So, remember the art request meme? I'm making progress! Here's 1 of 4.


Request: Zelgadis and Filia for dqbunny

I have about an hour left to work. I can't leave early, because there is a grad student meeting at five. And, yet, there's nothing for me to do right now -- I have a lot of ideas, but want to bounce them off of my group, and everyone's been out of town for the last couple of weeks. I could be writing up my notes on the scheme Matt suggested to me to measure light scattered off of the rings, since that's looking to be nearly publishable. (Huzzah!) Perhaps I'll do that after I post this.

Still working on an Science! post. Might finish typing up that tonight. I've been keeping a list of things to do in the evenings, lest I end up vegging out in front of the computer. Or worse, taking a nap after dinner and then end up staying up til one in the morning. Already I've been sleeping in later than I normally do (8 AM) because it's nice to get up when the Sun is shining. If the Sun is shining, I mean. I do live in Ithaca.

Anyway, I think I've been actually doing stuff in the evening, besides Final Fantasy IV and RPing online. Like, art and writing and stuff. I'd like to continue that.

Oh, I replaced my DDR game at the game store, so now I'm exercising. And my mother is going to me for diet advice, which is weird. Mostly because we started on our health adventures at about the same time, and I'm doing better than her. (Well, she'd always say that one should get to a stable, healthy weight when one was young, since one's metabolism drops as one ages. I don't know if that's true.) Mostly in my case it's 'don't eat pounds of sweets' and 'don't eat a whole bag of pretzels in one sitting'. It does remind me that I need popcorn salt -- air-popped popcorn tends to be the distillation of two of my 'Snack Food Groups', 'crunchy stuff' and 'salty stuff', while not having that much else to it.

I sometimes wonder if I should practice my science blogging skills by writing up the weekly colloquiums that my department holds, or at least the ones I don't fall asleep in. So far, it's been a good semester, despite both presentations being on interstellar dust. Then again, the first presenter was a researcher from our department with a good speaking style so he can make something like 'crap in space'* interesting. The second guy also had a good send-up and it was partially interesting to me since he was using some of the same techniques that I use for Saturn's rings on the Interstellar Medium.

* This is my friend Cece's nickname for the Interstellar Medium back in undergrad. We had a whole semester talking about it, thanks to Nebraska offering three astronomy courses, all of which an astro-focused person needed to take. Well, technically four, but the fourth was removed from the coursebook my freshman year after they realized that no one could teach it, and that had been the case for years. So everyone took 'Stellar Atmospheres and Interiors', 'Galactic Astronomy' and 'Physics of the Interstellar Medium' after they did the 'Astronomy for Majors' and 'Astronomy Lab'. It wasn't that bad, since you can get a lot of basic astronomy out of what's going on, and meant that I've had more repetitions of radiative transfer than any sane human being really wants.

So, anyone want to hear about what I learned about Crap in Space? It's interesting, I promise.

Writing is going well. I got back some concrit on the Cordelia/Aral story, and want to take a looksee at the story for editing. I'm also breaking a normal habit. Normally, I write drabbles in a universe first before I try to do full-length fiction. Well, except for Yuletide, where I don't get a choice, or when I crazily sign up for a ficathon. But, now I'm trying to write my first Firefly story, when I haven't ever written for that fandom before. Mostly because it came out of the Random Fanfic Prompt Generator I wrote. It's weird.

(Speaking of Bujold, the latest book came out on Tuesday. I need to go to the bookstore and pick it up.)

Also drawing. I have two exchange pictures due, then I promise I'll start work on those meme pictures. I haven't forgotten. Expect an art dump soon.

The first five people to comment to this post get to request a sketch of a character of their choosing from me. In return, they have to post this in their journal, regardless of their artistic/writing ability. If you absolutely can't draw, you can offer drabbles or icons or something instead.

Five for here, and five for LJ -- I'm feeling generous.

The reason why I'm glad I've taken up watercolors and not oils is that I have a tendency to treat my mouth as a third hand for holding/shaping brushes. (I do this when sewing too.)

All are exchanges

The first I sadly can't link to since it was for Yuletart (Like Yuletide Treasures, but for fanart and not reserved for rare fandoms (though there is a 'no Harry Potter' rule).)

The second is here, for MAX.

The third is here, for MRCaEX on LJ.

I also have a picture for myself and one for mirisa_ardruna in the works.

The Yuletart picture has seven named characters and a bunch of extras. The MAX picture has two. The MRCAeX has three with a background. The one for me has six, and the one for Kim has two with a real background. That's a total of 20 characters over five pictures, many of whom aren't just standing there. (The picture for me does, but people are at least waving.)

I have gone insane. At least I was told on the MRCAeX pic that my art had improved markedly over the last year or so, some of which is because I try not to draw people standing there looking at the camera with their typical expressions. It makes me miss webcomicing, since that was an excuse to make myself do difficult poses, since I had to tell a story with the pictures.

(In other news, writing Yuletide fic. Ended up writing for a fandom I nominated and had on my wanted list, for a couple I asked for. It makes me want more fic with them, except the fandom is essentially one page on the Pit of Voles. Also makes finding a beta difficult if I want one to check fandom-specific stuff.)

So, I have two finished exchange pieces and the hat I promised to make for Live Long and Marry, a fandom-related fundraising event to fight California's Proposition 8. (Something to make same-sex marriage illegal, and to annul all the existing same-sex marriages). The exchange pictures were just my normal exchange things.

( Here's the hat! )

( Exchange picture 1! )

( Exchange picture 2! )

Things are a little crazy, since school starts this Thursday. I might be taking a class -- there's a seminar on comets that may help me, as I also study small icy things in the outer solar system. Also, there's a grading position open, and I acquired a reputation for being a fast grader, but I'm not hurting for money, so I might hold off.

Anime club looks good this year. I helped do the chalking today. A common way of advertising anything at Cornell is to get sidewalk chalk and a busy spot and get to work. Meghan, one of the members, draws well, so she brings a picture from something we're watching, and gets to work. The rest of us help with lettering, flats and that kind of stuff -- things people who can't draw well can be trusted with. So, if you go in front of the school store, there's a nice shot of Youko from Twelve Kingdoms. There's a Yuuko from XXXholic somewhere on North Campus. If the club site puts up pictures, I'll link them.

Also managed to nearly lose my ATM card at the store. Thankfully, in the time it took me to search my pockets, return my purchase to the shelf, head down to the bank, and ask the teller what to do, a customer found it on the floor, gave it to a store clerk, who took it to the bank in the store and asked them if they could find me. Seriously -- the teller was asking a coworker if she could get through to VISA when the coworker asked if this was the card she was trying to cancel. (Awesome people for being so prompt.)

Unfortunately, I spent most of today hunting down why my website wasn't working. Turns out I let the domain name registration lapse*, so I have a site, but no way to get to it besides through IP address. I ended up getting a similar name (.com instead of .net), and now just need the nice folks at my webhosts to tell me how to hook A into B, when I don't know how to get into my site to tell it 'okay, we need to point here'.

* Because the email it is linked to no longer exists, and I remember nothing about how to get into my billing account. I am brilliant, I know.

I got markers. Once the tea** kicks in, I'm gonna color this evening. ^_^ The internet also appears to be working again -- it was being spotty. Not enough to not work, but enough that I couldn't stream music or stay in a chat room.

** Jasmine green, third brew. There's enough to give me a bit of a pick-me-up after work, without keeping me up past bedtime.

So, it's been a twenty-four hour period since I burned my thumb on the baking tray. The burn hurts when I bend my thumb too far, which is why it is staying bandaged -- a bandaid wrapped around the joint of my thumb immobilizes just enough that I can't bend my thumb far enough to hurt. I did take a peak under the bandaid today and got a bit worried. So, I read that first degree burns are dry and red, second are red, can be wet, and blister, and third tend to be dry and black or white. Currently the burn on my thumb feels like normal skin, except I burned off some of the indentations. It also is red around the edges of the burn, but is a paler sort of pink in the center.

On the other hand, third-degree burns aren't supposed to hurt like hell -- I kept my hand under running water for ten minutes, because taking it out meant that my hand felt like someone had run it over. (And not just because cooling the tissue ASAP is generally a good idea to stop the damage)

Really, it's mostly that I don't remember enough about first aid. I need a refresher course -- the neext time the Fire Station near where I live offers first aid and CPR, I'll sign up.

Well, that and I am such a hypochondriac when it comes to injuries.

I wrote about 600 words this morning, and did some crocheting. I also promised myself I'd pick up some DevArt drawing memes and work on those for practice. And got more ideas for the Avatar AU fic idea that is building into another albatross. I'll wait until after this week to do anything on that -- no sense starting anything when the finale is so close. And maybe I should finish my Slayers albatross before that -- at least write the third part of the trilogy and get the first part ready for beta-ing. (Damn, am I going to start calling every novel-length work of fiction I write an albatross?)

Speaking of Avatar, I wonder how iTunes is going to handle giving me the episodes they owe me, since Nick is airing the last half-season over a week? Which... well, it's nice that I don't have to wait, but it's a bit unusual to say the least. (I guess they found the flaw in finite series -- once it's down to the wire, people don't want to pick it up, but they need to finish it or else they get lynch mobs.)

Not that I don't prefer finite series to the never-ending cartoons of my youth. (Or rather, I like having both the kind where all you need to know is the premise of the series, and the kind where it is telling one story in episodic form, and anything in the middle.)

So, I set the date of my A-exam (the date where I take an oral exam to get my Master's Degree and the right to start my Ph. D. dissertation) -- July 1. I've started reading up for it, and soon will send around the form that tells the grad school I'm taking it.

In happier news, I got a Tegaki-E blog, so see web-doodles

Wrote 400 words on In the Shadows of the Flames. Unfortunately, most of it was rewriting Chapter 2 (which was now part of Chapter 1) since the muse decided it wanted only one POV (except it wanted to keep a first-person Celena prolog), and most of the scenes worked from Allen's POV. Knowing my luck, I'll get halfway through and the muse will change its mind.

I also need to work on some fanart for ides_of_march.

I am back in New York. I apologize for not updating, but it's hard to do on a dialup connection with an ancient HP machine* -- it finally occurred to me to use a journaling client my last week there. Yeah, I know, but Mom always complains I break the computer when I visit, or infest it with spyware. This time, though, I only visited journaling sites, gmail, Gaia, and Yuletide's site. So we know who to blame if I broke my mother's computer.

* If a Moore's Law turnover time is a generation, this thing would not only be giving 'back in the day' speeches, but would be complaining that the 'young whippersnappers'' 'back in the day' speeches weren't as good as its 'back in the day' speeches. My comparison, my laptop is approaching its midlife crisis, which probably explains all its duct-tape repairs, and the fact that it needs a new battery. Working for me is apparently the equivalent of a career as an NFL linebacker for a computer. (Maybe naming it 'Fullmetal-Alchemist' was not the best idea, even though it is silver and wee**.)

** "Who are you calling knee-high to an iPod?"

( Long Ramble on my life, books I've read, fairies, and New Years )

Crud, it's work time. I better go get dressed and make my lunch. Expect Fanfic Rambles after work.