So lurkers, delurk! Stop in, say hi. Let me know why you read, if you read, how did you find this site, posts you enjoyed, what should I write about, anything!

But now I’m feeling like I actually want to do this thing again. However, I need to either find a template I like (ew; don’t get me wrong I have nothing against premades it’s just that part of the point for me is making my own) or making one. The latter is something I’ve had a big fat ZERO number of ideas for lately. I am going to consciously think about it now and see what I can cook up.

So, for the meantime I will continue to update twitter and flickr.

Edited five minutes later when struck by a certain thought. There CAN be an elephant in this post! Proof:

This fellow hung out at the Renaissance Fair I went to a few weeks back. When he would stop to pick up more riders it seemed like he looked this way to see if there was anyone to take his picture.

There is something semi special about today. It’s my half birthday! I think the fact that I am excited about such a non special thing is evidence of just how long of a week it’s been. Sometime on Monday I thought to myself “Thank goodness it’s almost the weekend. I’m ready for a break.” Can you imagine how disappointed was when I realized that it was ONLY MONDAY?? Last week at work was pretty killer and this week wasn’t much better. I find it a little amusing that I’m having to try very hard to convince myself that it is indeed Friday and that I won’t have to get up early in the morning. Of course, I have a habit of waking up about the same time anyway but I don’t have to get out of bed and get ready for work. There’s a difference.

One other thing that I realized since it is my half birthday is that I have had my D60 for six months now. SIX MONTHS. It’s crazy. I’ve learned so much since I got the camera but there is still so much that I don’t know. I also need to practice taking more pictures of people but I need some willing participants. I know I sound crazy to most people (I’ve accepted that fact a while ago) but talking about cameras and things just makes me so excited! I’ve been kicking myself a little because I think I may have bought the wrong camera, mostly due to wanting to get some compatible, auto focusing lenses. There’s some technical things involved but I’m trying to figure out the most efficient and inexpensive way to get some new gear. There are soooo many options that it’s a little difficult to figure out. And of course nothing is cheap.

They both began working on a painting of a picture of a hollyhock I took last year. I had to search for about 15 minutes to find out where it was on my hard drive so they would have a reference. (Another sign of my highly organized system.) During that time I finally found my acrylics and decided to start painting… something. I only got as far as covering the entire canvas with a background color. See, I haven’t used the acrylics since my sister gave them to me, oh, over a year ago. Everything kept glooping together and made mixing the color I wanted a little difficult. It often turned into a vomit green color and I had to start over. But that’s all part of the fun, right? Also part of the fun was deciding that yes, we are all crazy and that just makes life more fun. I was also able to document some of their painting process. More photos after the cut.

Not long after this shot my sister, who had successfully mixed the color she wanted, yelled “THAT’S CAUSE I’M SMART.” Sure. We believe you.

And for some random updates I have finally switched the site over from the “ugly” url structure. Some links on the site still use it but thanks to a redirect plugin I can be lazy about fixing those. I have also successfully installed the Lifestream plugin. I’ve got a few feeds added already but since I’m not quite happy with the look of it I won’t be linking it just yet. But progress is progress, yes?

I will talk about it some now, though, planned post be hanged. (I really just looked that up to see if I should use ‘hung’ instead.) I used to never have a problem with separating my online life from my personal life. No one in my social circle was into the “design” thing way back when and for others… what they didn’t know didn’t hurt them. If I had something to say that I didn’t really want out in the open I had a protected journal to post in. I still do, actually. I’m fully aware that one is not entitled to any level of privacy if they decide to post something online without placing a password on it or some other sort of security. Of course, someone you let in to your confidence could betray you but thankfully that has never happened to me.

Things are a little bit different these days. “Social networking” seems to be the buzzword of the year so far with the rising popularity of Facebook and other sites like that twitter thing. (Really, it’s fairly entertaining to hear non twitter users talking about twitter. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve heard say “I don’t want to read about what you ate for lunch so why would I use twitter?” or something similar. Twitter can be used for much more than that.) I have been rather surprised by the increasing numbers of older users on Facebook. Please don’t take offense; I’m not trying to say that some people are too old to use the internet or make derogatory comments about people’s ages. I’m sure there are some kids who would say that I’m the old fogey here and what am I doing on their interwebs!? Still, one really wouldn’t expect that one’s parents would be on Facebook but it’s happening.

Where am I going with this. So many sites now allow you to bring in content from other websites. I do so with my blog and my twitter account. Facebook will allow you to connect to all sorts of sites including any site that has an RSS feed. All of those stories can be imported and published to your news feed. You can add your own websites to your profile and all kinds of different things. Since Facebook is intended to be used to connect to people you know online and offline life start to blur. In reality this shouldn’t be a problem. A person should be able to be the same online as they are offline and vice versa.

So maybe I’m not really going anywhere with this; I’m having a hard time explaining what I want to say. In a way this whole internal mess I’m trying to straighten out has to do with more than just what a person posts online. I don’t even know who, exactly, reads this. This site is linked to from some of the sites I’ve already mentioned so it could be any number of people I know, both online and off.

I guess what I really want to ask is where do you draw the line between doing what you feel is right for yourself and doing what makes people you know and care about happy? What happens when you come to a time where the two are completely incompatible? Several people have told me that you should do what makes yourself happy but how do you reconcile that with the fact that you know you are disappointing others or that they will never accept that you are doing those things to help yourself?

That is, I read them once I finally got copies of them. They are never on the shelf at the local library and I was not going to buy them due to the number of people who have said they are absolute rubbish. I will admit that I was fully prepared to give the same denouncement because I knew about the sparkly vampire bit. Sparkles? Really? Are the going to dazzle me to death with their sparkliness? I tried to put that out of my mind and read the books. Warning: spoilers ahead. Lots of them.

Conclusion? They aren’t quite rubbish or trash but they are not the most amazing books I’ve ever read. I really worry for people who are so caught up in them that they want to find a guy just like Edward. I’m not going to go as far as saying that Edward and Bella have an abusive relationship but it’s almost there. Fandoms, in general, scare me but this has to be one of the scariest fandoms I’ve seen. How are there so many people who seem to have no serious ties to reality?

I have to say this: I don’t think I have ever disliked a fictional character as much as I dislike Bella. She constantly puts herself down, thinks that there is nothing special about her, and is always on the verge of killing herself, someone else, or both due to her klutziness. She’s portrayed as such a martyr for going to live with her dad so that her mom can have some freedom and continues with the “nobody likes me” attitude even though she has guys falling over her on the first day of school. No, the only thing she can think of is the marble-like god and why does he hate her so much? Then, when she finds out why he hates her she willingly sticks around even though he may kill her at any moment. She never accepts that he likes her for her and always points out how unperfect and normal she is and how she doesn’t deserve to have him. Then she starts on the “I want to be a vampire so I never lose you” spiel. That really bothered me until I read New Moon and found out that if she didn’t become a vampire then the Volturi would kill her. Then the “I wanna be a vampire” thing made more sense. The whole four months of depression in which she does nothing? No one is worth making yourself that miserable over. Even when Edward does come back to her it’s not all hunky dory because she fell in love with a werewolf shapeshifter. The whole thing of wanting to keep her half vampire baby is weird but then you find out it isn’t evil so it’s not so weird. But even when she finally does become a vampire she won’t listen to anyone that tries to tell her that she is special and has special powers and is so lucky to have Edward and Renesmee. She’s pretty much living the perfect life but she focuses on how she still is not worthy to have her Edward forever and always.

Edward doesn’t seem much better. He’s moody and contradictory. I’d love to know how many times he said he should leave for Bella’s own good but is instead a “masochistic lion” and stays around, which nearly kills her several times. And then he starts punishing himself for putting her in danger and always looks pained. I don’t see why anyone would want someone “just like Edward.” Justifying that by saying he’s hot in the movie (which was rubbish) just doesn’t make sense to me. Robert Pattinson isn’t that hot and his acting was terrible. He and Bella were so stiff it wasn’t even funny. I know it was a low budget movie but man was it terrible. Hooray for $1 Redbox.

Also, don’t get me started on the sparkly vampires. I fail to see why that is their one drawback to coming out in daylight. I know it would make it obvious that they are different but one might assume that they’re just wearing body glitter. Do you see how ridiculous this sounds? And they can’t be staked, only burned, and crosses have no effect on them. I know the writer can make up her own world but I really don’t like her characteristics of vampires. They’re all perfect and modelesque.

The final big “What the hell just happened?” moment is Jacob imprinting on Renesmee. Really? A newborn half-vampire baby? I see how it works out for Jacob to still have some part of Bella and I suppose since Renesmee is half-vampire, and presumably immortal, Jacob will be able to stay immortal as well since vampires are what trigger the werewolves shapeshifters abilities and they don’t age while they can still phase. Or something crazy like that. (Also, what kind of name is Renesmee? And the whole going psycho bit over her being nicknamed Nessie? Craziness.)

I think the series had a great premise. The vampires are able to control their killing insticts without being cursed with a soul. (Guess who’s been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer?) Some are even able to live peacefully. Some of the vampires have special supernatural abilities, albeit it seems that so many of them have abilities that it’s not really that special. The idea of a ruling body for vampires, aka the Volturi is an interesting concept, as was the introduction of the Romanian vampires. There are other interesting and semi-unique ideas. In the end I think the ideas were poorly executed. I nearly burst out laughing when in the first 10 pages I found the phrase “had been belonged to me.” Seriously, how does something like that get through editing? The rest of the writing was fairly mediocre. I also have nothing but contempt for Bella. I know that’s harsh but really girl, get a brain!

I’ve read several books since then, which I will catch up on in another post. I’ll just say that I’m also fairly upset about the one I just finished because it’s too perfect. I also plan to tinker with the site some, maybe redesign it, but I’m going out of town this weekend so it’ll just have to wait.

My host did make an announcement about some nameserver updates but since it really only applied to customers using nameservers I wasn’t supposed to have to do anything. Support had me to manually flush my DNS cache but when that yielded no favorable results they asked if I could change my nameservers anyway, just in case. I was able to for the neglected site but then I remembered: this domain was registered through Netrillium. A few days ago I got a message saying that Netrillium would be merging with AxisHOST. (Aside: I am so tired of businesses and products that are like LowercaseALLCAPS. Do they have any idea how annoying that is to type, especially when you have to refer to them often in typed communications?) As of Wednesday, all domain updates would be handled through the AxisHOST control center and if you didn’t already have an account you needed to request one. Of course I would need to try to update my nameservers on the day they made the switch and I didn’t already have an account.

Honestly, I don’t want to bother with changing nameservers. But, since the company says everything is fine, I don’t have many other options. I’m able to access everything now but I suspect that this is due to my using a different ISP at the moment. If it is something to do with my ISP there isn’t much I can do about that; they’re my only option for cable.

So. Entry on books to come later. You should take a look at my books page to see how large the list has grown in the meantime.