DXS Machina

So, I’m working upstairs because I got up early to feed my cats who felt rightfully that maybe I miss measured their food yesterday and are hungry. And I hear this really loud tapping against the side of the room I’m in. Tap tap tap! Tap tap tap! Long pause to let me wonder what the hell? Tap tap tap! Tap tap tap! Tap tap tap!

We’re not doing any house work today so I look out both windows in that corner of the room but there’s no ladder leading to the second story. I head down stairs and walk out the front door of my house and there’s a rather large woodpecker clinging to the side of the house (maybe this type of woodpecker? Not sure). I figure this guy is 8-10 inches, black spotted back with a red crested head… just hanging out to the side of the house. Cool as could be. I yelled, “Hey, cut that shit out!” and shake my fist at him.

To which he takes off… I have probably just hit crazy lady that yells weird things in the morning to my poor neighbors… Hopefully the birds won’t leave some flaming poop on my front porch to go with the knocking on the walls. =/ Still, huge woodpecker! It’s sort of neat to see one of those. Most of the time to only ones we have are the little tiny ones. This is the first time I’ve seen a big one. hopefully he won’t come back to knock on the walls though… that could be bad.

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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So, I wrote this huge huge rant and then I scrapped it. It was fun. =/ I do that all the time. It must be strange to talk to me at cons and get an earful of “shit, fuck, Diana has opinions!” No wonder I like making My Muse, it let me express myself a little better.

Well, sod that, you’re getting my second best version of this rant… a shorter harsher version, oddly relevant to the content.

Okay, Tokyopop got in hot water for their recent chatty poorly phrased contract and I don’t care about that because it’s been talked about all over. My rant is for a phrase that pops up just about any time bad contracts are discussed.

“Well, I don’t plan to give them my best idea anyway.”
“I’ll just give them something I don’t care about.”
“Ect ect ect.”

Don’t YOU just love it when people tell you they want you to pay out good cash for their “Second best idea that they don’t give two shits about”? Dude, I’m right there! Shovel that pile of crap right in my mouth. Oh wait, let me pay you for it before you start.

How about NO. You will receive my second best for your soulless abortion of a book… in that it will remain sad and unloved and unbought. I will also think some bad things about your mother and generally wish you ill will for the few seconds your book impacts my life. Maybe I’ll rant about it to my friends and they will roll their ideas and tell me to get a life.

Still, I do love collecting horrible comics now and then. Maybe I’ll pick it up at Half Price Books when it hits a dollar… or maybe I’ll wait for it to bottom out at a quarter. Or maybe I won’t buy it even second hand. So, good luck Mr. I’mnotgoingtotryveryhardbutIwantacareer. Someone will love your book but it’s not going to be me.

See, everyone talks about how good this is for the artist and the company! Yay, books. Yay, money Yay career built on sub par brain poop. But please, consider the audience, we’re the ones who truly suffer from your soulsavingcostcutting idea. Maybe those kids that sit in the book stores reading manga and never buying it don’t JUST want to freeload, maybe they’re also saying “Hey! Stop shitting in my mouth!” and no one’s listening. I find it’s really hard to voice your totally dislike of something by deciding NOT to spend your money on it.

At least lie to me if you plan to do this… here I’ll do it for you. “Ohhh, I want to work for “shittycompanyX” but I’ll need to make something SPECIAL just for them. Oh, I’ve got to think of something.” Beams!!! Look at that, doesn’t that sound better?

Yay, there’s my rant… feel free to heap scorn on me.

Tags: Art, News, Rambling, Sketches by Diana Sprinkle
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I’m tired of having to find this article every time it comes up, so here is a link to the sane write up on this bill so I can keep track of it: Orphaned Works Act on EMG-Zine

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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It’s been one of those weeks. I’m covered in work like stinging ants and I’m also trying to get prepared for A-kon in Dallas this weekend. I plan to have a good time this year or there will be blood. Thankfully I’ve stocked up on low expectations and artists that I really want to give money to and maybe hang out with. Along with selling lots of Shawnna’s buttons (gleeee!), low hotel cost, and generally great friends… I’m hoping it will lack the loud music, porn stealing kids, and hotel elevator time sinks that the last few cons have had. Dear convention gods, stop letting other conventions set up tables in artist alley and do nothing but look bored and play music super loud, thank you.

I’m sharing a table in the Komik Market with my friend Shawnna, under Bassanimation. We’re in Section E, table 11… supposing that something doesn’t happen and we don’t get shuffled around in a musical chair type way. Crosses fingers. I’ll have my print book (with new prints even), some badges… or bookmarks (depending on how my laminator decides to function), and a crap load of buttons. Shawnna will have her giant spread of awesomely cute anime button heads… but my small offerings are mostly adorned with cute cats and food p0rn… @_@ I’ll post some after the con.

The food P0rn is not really as bad as it sounds. Really. Swing by and take a look… some of the kitty images are new due to the fact that I keep finding kitties on my hard drives that I finished and then forgot to post anywhere. This image of kitties I made for Valentine’s day is a good example… hell, I even went and made a web preview of the image and then wandered away. Distracted by, I don’t know, a piece of string maybe. Possible an internet argument.

I should post that cute cat comic I made, oh, those many years ago… only this time I should un-crowd the ending a bit. I was trying to cram it into 4 pages and I think it needed a bit more space. Or maybe better pacing. =/

I’m still working on my website store/gallery. It’s shaping up well I just need a little sliver of time to really kick myself into gear. I just didn’t realize how much art I had generated over the years that needs to be moved over in a logical way. Right now I’m not sure how logical a “people” section that’s 98 images big is… when all the other sections are under 20 images. Meh, I’ll figure it out.

I made a rough for an actual painting, which is odd for me. Normally I don’t bother with natural media but this image… it seems to want to be large and painted. It looks rather good even at it’s strange “I’m a scribble in photoshop with lots of cloned and resized bits and bobs” stage that it’s in right now. But it doesn’t want me to refine it, it seems to want to be rough in a way that requires some paint. It’s a companion to the website banner with the sleeping kitty. You can see part of the rough at the bottom of my website design with the yellow fish and the blue kitty. Now if I can just find the time.

In parting, I leave you with a link to Polyvore a site that I think I will be using to figure out outfits for future characters. If I had the time, I’d fiddle all day on this site making outfits and jumping from collection to collection.

Tags: Animals, Art, News, Original Art, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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So, I finally finished my new site design! Yay, for kitties and um fish and other things. I need to start spending some time making another new designs for my site right now so that when I go to update the thing it doesn’t take forever and a day like it did this time. I’m still working on getting all the design elements on the wordpresses side working with the real version of the site.

There is a store but it’s going to take me a little bit to get it up and running. I have to go through all the posts and remove the art currently on them and shift it all over to the new Gallery/Store system I’ve got waiting in the wings. Hopefully this weekend I’ll get to work on that. YAY!

And the best for last, now you can leave comments on my posts! That people can see and things! Yay, so far I’ve approved over half of the 700 real comments I’ve accumulated over the 3 years I’ve had wordpress. But there are some that I’m not sure what I’m going to do with… mostly the one’s where people ask for porn or suggest that I should draw it very loudly with descriptors… ew. Also I have a small set of comments asking to buy things that may not end up on the site as I contacted those peeps through email or forgot and just feel ashamed of myself… And a small set of comments where my friends and others left contact info in the comment. Don’t worry I won’t display your phone number. Right now the comments are still set to be moderated but that should be eased up on over time as I get use to having comments on the page.

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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My new design for this site is going slowly but it’s shaping up. However next time I’m going to choose a wordpress theme to use that’s a little bit closer to the colors I plan to use. Check this out:

Before

After

I’m still tweaking bits of stray code on it so I figure it’ll be another week or two. That’s not taking into account having to go through all my posts to turn the comments off and then back on again, removing the art so I can post it in the new gallery-store section and other fun stuff. This is never going to end…

Tags: Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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Sigh, I’m gearing up to update my website and it’s going to be hell on Earth, I know it. I have a reasonable rough for the design of the site. Strangely I’m going to go back to a design similar to the one right before this one. Though with more color and art made for the design and a wordpress framework, so that I can update the thing easily.

I’m planing to pre-build a few different designs so that I won’t be sitting on the same look for two or three years. The main page will have my journal on it but it’ll only have image links or thumbnails. All of the images will be moved to a gallery system that I fear I’m going to break wordpress in half to make. Crosses fingers. On the other hand, I’m also going to add shopping cart buttons to all of the images that aren’t sketches so that I can maybe start selling prints of all this stuff I’ve made. Also having all the art and comics in the Gallery/store area will, I pray, make the site look more professional. As the images will no longer accompany posts with battering on, much like this one. =/

I’m also going to be removing some of the features that I thought I wanted when I started using Wordpress. The main one I’m tossing out is the calender… and the sidebar and the category links (well not completely they just won’t be formated the same way) and maybe some of the ads. Considering just how many posts I have on this beast of a site, the joy of fixing everything, is not something I’m looking forward to. Also I’m probably going to turn on comments and display them which means I have to hide a bunch of the comments that I already have and or edit some of the ones with personal info, or the ones that ask me for porn… or curse me out in Spanish. =D

But here’s some of the art that I’m working up for the site design.

“People think that cats dream of running hard and fast just to feel the ground move under their feet. But Snowy dreamed of waves and ripples and swimming in the sea with goldfish, gliding gracefully with the current. The fish made it all sound so amazing, he didn’t know why his human kept throwing things at him when he tried to go swimming.”

Or there’s always the alternate write up for this image of: “Diana likes cats! White is easy to color! I R good arter!” O_o

Tags: Animals, Art, News, Original Art, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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Pushing that other post off the top of the page. So last week I battled a losing battle against spam bots… In the end I banned a large set of ip addresses from Turkey… sorry Turkey. I figure some of you guys will be happy that the spam robot using some part of my site to send email is no longer able to send stuff. Or something. I don’t know I’m still poking around my site trying to figure out how to really block the bot and find and close up however they are getting in… yet I still don’t know what’s really going on. =/

Also somehow someone had come in and inserted hidden spam in the header of my wordpress theme. Somehow. Which blows my mind. I have no idea how long it had been there either. Maybe half a year. I was using an older version of Wordpress for a long time. Thankfully no one coming to my site got spammed by it since it was invisible but poor Google sure saw it. (Edit and I think Google was punishing me for it as well… LOL my hits from Google were all but choked off for the last month or so and now that I’ve taken off the stupid spam they have resurged close to where they were before. So, thankfully that means I’ve probably only had the spam headers from maybe the beginning of April when I had the huge spike for April fools.)

I really want to change the design of my site. The hard part is that I have so many needs. I want a journal but I also want a more simple gallery structure but I also would like to put my comics up on here. So that’s like 3 different things… oh and also I want a shop. Damn that’s 4 things. The figuring out how to get all of that stuff to work together is killing this pretty good. I can figure out how to get two of them going maybe 3 if I use a paypal wordpress plugin but the comic bit, that’s the tough part. I think I could do everything with Wordpress and comicpress and a paypal plugin but then I’d have to make a theme that could display it all nicely and find the time to probably repost all of my site so that the comic posts and the picture posts were separate from all of the journal posts. Nargh.

Maybe I should just start over… hmmm.

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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Must not post! Must not post! Must not! Shit… okay, so that ill made and poorly thought out Open Source Boob Project? Right that thing, hmm here’s a link that doesn’t make me want to kill everyone: http://www.journalfen.net/community/unfunnybusiness/9338.html

So that thing showed up and the SFF part of my LJ friends list have already carved it up good, and then burn the body, poisoned it, kicked it into a well, plugged the well, dropped a mountain on it… with dynamite, and burned the town next to it and three quarters of the villages nearby.

See though, I’d love to have the ability to put in clear words the feelings I get reading the *responses* to this ill made and poorly thought out project but OMG I run screaming. It’s like the energy, the essence is just the purest wail of high emotions rung like a bell made from the torn rib cage of someone’s back with no skin on it so every sound, voice, and word is a hammer… and I feel that ringing sound from the farthest away that I can get…

I can’t deal, my personal pet peeve is a silence of conversation. I can’t take it. I feel like I’m drowning in an ocean of voices that has been carpet bombed by completely understandable highly personal pain and suffering that chokes out all voices. A piece of death and bile of something rotten in the still black water. Fuck and I’ve gone into hyperbole or however that’s spelled. Note to self, find out how it’s spelled before posting.

But yeah, Complete death. It makes me want to post and yet I know that it’s courting everything I hate because I just don’t have the right words when every word means something it’s not. I can’t say anything cause the sharks have come and any movement is an acceptance of some hurt, a finger that points, that this pain, this horrible pain is deserved even asked for even though that’s never what I feel people in the later comment areas that I have muddled through want to say (I didn’t touch the original post figuring it was dumb and probably more choked and deathly to my particular quirk).

I can’t speak in that sea so I stay as quiet as I can but I want to express just this piece of me without any of those charged words. Here, in my area of the net. I want to point to this poison I want to say in my small voice that I don’t like that the conversation dies. I’ve never liked it. I don’t want to spread the fear or pain but… but… opens hands. I don’t know.

Meh. Sorry about this. I just don’t want to write post after post that I never actually post.

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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Well, that was interesting… see first I got sick. Really sick, I spent all day sleeping on Wednesday and it’s still making me cough today. But thankfully I’ve got it on the run and feel pretty good. Now being all sick and messed up my hours were even weirder then normal…

I ended up catching a robot using my old wordpress image uploader to send txt files to my tmp folder on ghostcircles. I noticed it because in the wordpress admin control the image uploader was pointing to a completely different folder then it usually does. So, I freaked out. Cause wow, not good. I reset the upload folder and my password and spent the rest of the day wondering what was going on… then I checked my email and “hello” bounced back spam originating from my webserver using my email address.

See this happened before like um… 6 months ago and I was all “OMG who got my email address and spamed the crap out of people??” And damn it it’s all coming back to me. This is when I learned that yes indeed there are still people who think they should respond to spam as I got one email that just said “Bitch.” in it. It amused me greatly even though I didn’t send this um… crap. This time I think I cut off the upload in the middle by changing back the upload folder to the normal folder because I only got 260 bounce backs instead of 1200. Whee.

I was using the old version of the “iimage-browser-plugin” for wordpress from 2005 so if any of you are still running that you might try seeing if there’s a new version that DOESN’T allow you to set you upload folder to the very top area of you website. Cause yeah security risk and such. Also the newer versions of wordpress have a pretty nice built in image uploader that is much more secure. You’ll need a newer browser to use it like firefox but hey it’s free and stuff.

So yeah, I upgrade to the newest version of wordpress which was incredibly easy. Smoothest 10 version upgrade I’ve ever done. I still need to update my poor site design though. I’d like to put in a shopping cart system to buy prints and comics and stuff and I’d like to put my comics up which I could do with Comicpress but I’d like to keep my journal as well… and that just seems to be one too many things to fit into one site. =/

I’m just going to have to find sometime to really think about how to cram all of that stuff in there and still make it easy to look at and buy things. I mean I have enough room I could set up a shop as a stand alone but it’d be nice to have it all be one site.

Tags: News, Rambling by Diana Sprinkle
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