Been very busy with some tough, highly experimental projects this month (not to mention preparations for AnimeDetour). I still do look at my e-mail and I'll try to answer it all as soon as I can.

(By the way, props with moving parts = PAIN.....)

Please ignore my recent ravings. Things should be back to normal within a week or two. I'll answer my e-mail as soon as I can.

My life is being consumed by tights again, only this time instead of trying to paint an intricate design on (and risk having the paint crack when the fabric is stretched), I'm making the design out of two different kinds of spandex, cut into shapes and sewn together. It's been slow work, and the tights look like wrinkly ass until they get filled with leg and stretched into their proper size.

Sigh. This winter sucks hard. Even if I had time to ski I couldn't as it's always either below zero or 40 degrees and slushy. (The weather can't even make up its mind which way to suck. Feh.)

I thought I had all of my printer problems solved. I bought a brand new, still-has-some-of-the-wrapping-on-it Hewlett Packard printer off of Craigslist and was attempting to set it up. That's when my my OS - Windows XP64, the Queen Douchebitch of operating systems-- decided that, because the software hadn't been specifically written to be compatible with HER, that she wanted nothing to do with it. I tried looking up workarounds on support forums and at the HP website, but I found nothing that would work. I even livechatted with an HP support guy named Pedro for an hour, but even that proved fruitless. Fucking Windows XP 64. Why would you write an operating system that's compatible with NOTHING? (Let me just say that it was not MY choice to install a 64 bit operating system on my computer. And if I mention the guys who did do it, I'll probably launch into yet another 8-paragraph tirade against their store, so I'll just let it go for now.)

A friend of mine gave me an old computer of his, but it has no harddrive, and I don't have the 60-70 dollars lying around to get a new harddrive for it. I suppose my only option is to sell this new printer of mine on Craigslist and try to find a printer there that's XP64 compatible (although I wonder if it's worth the headache at this point.)-_-

Well, I went ahead and reformatted my computer, opting to wipe it clean rather than remain in dread of some subtle, lurking terror hiding in the bowels of my machine waiting to spring out at some random future time. I'm pretty sure my e-mail archives and addresses came through the wipe intact and I've reinstalled AIM, but if I have any future trouble communicating, I'll let you know.

Man, if there's ever anything that would make me turn to the Dark Side of the Force, it would have to be Malware programmers. Before I owned a computer, I never know what pure, teeth-clenching hatred could feel like. Before I owned a computer, I would never have considered myself a violent person; indeed, I never thought the day would come when I would carve a Glascow smile into a person's face and dance in a geyser of blood and curdled screams around their soon-to-be corpse, but if I were ever to meet the person who assed up my computer and forced me to spend 12 hours getting it back into order, I'm pretty sure that's a close approximation of what would happen. The hatred that Captain Ahab felt for Moby Dick would seem like mild irritation in comparison to the hatred that I now feel for malware authors. The dark, tortuous, betentacled horrors that Poe and Lovecraft wrote of would seem like a Sunday walk in a scented garden compared to the horrors that I would unleash upon the people who created the Vundo virus. Is writing a few lines of browser-hijacking code in an attempt to trick someone's grandma into buying some shitty program that doesn't work, REALLY worth the price of eternal damnation? Because I can't imagine that karma is going to let you guys off lightly for this. (Whatever your ultimate fate might be, I can only hope that it will it involve some combination of the words "gangrene" and "genitalia".)

Ugh. Sorry you had to read that. I've been having a bad weekend. I hope it's all out of my system now...

My computer got crapped on by a browser-hijack virus that disabled my system restore and is preventing my e-mail program from working properly. I threw all of the anti-virus, anti-spyware stuff I had at it, but I still can't get things back to normal so I'm going to have to reformat. I'm going to try and save my e-mail folders and addresses, but if for some reason, I lose any info, I may ask those of you who recently sent me e-mail to re-send it. Sorry for any inconvenience that may cause. -_-

Why oh why did I buy an Epson printer? I suppose I was dazzled by all that talk about bright, vibrant, photographic color and I thought at some point I might use it to make some art prints to sell from time to time. What I didn't realize though was that Epson had a policy in place whereby you must sign over your mortgage and the souls of at least two of your children if you want to replace your ink cartridges. Okay I'm exaggerating, but only a little. Seriously, what's the deal with not letting me refill the printer with just a black cartridge? Why did you make the printer so that I have to replace all of the color cartridges If I want to use the black one? I've never before had a printer that stuck a gun to my ribs and forced me to do this. (And yes, I literally consider this a form of highway robbery, making me buy 60 extra dollars worth of ink just so I can get my printer functional again.) Oh, and nice job with the whole "putting a fuse on the empty cartridge that burns out so I can't have it refilled" trick. That's a diabolical turn worthy of Satan himself. Do you realize that if I want to print even ONE more page, I'm going to have to shell out more money for the ink than I paid for the damn printer itself? Why didn't I do any RESEARCH before buying this inert, overpriced, diabolically engineered pile of fecal matter?

So what are my options now? I could try to sell it on either ebay or Craigslist, but I'm guessing I'll get only a pittance for it since I have no ink to offer with it (and since most people are pretty wise to Epson's shit by now.) I'd also either have to put up with packing and shipping the thing out or having strangers come to my house to pick it up.

I could also just buy a Continuous Ink System and hook that up to the printer, but most of the ones I see on ebay look as though they were made out of straws, pixie sticks and kool-aid, and cost about 50 dollars. (And I can only guess at how well they'd work long-term.)

What I'd like to do is sell this printer off and use the money to buy a nice, cheap scanner/printer that takes #1 Lexmark cartridges (or #2 or #3, something that would be easy to fill.) Does anyone out there have any advice on what kind of printer I should get (or how I can unload the printer I have? ) Any help would be appreciated...

Okay. Time to play another game of "Guess where this is from":



It glows in the dark too (although not as brightly as I had hoped. That glowpaint I bought looked supernova-bright in the ebay pictures, but wasn't all that impressive in real life. (It looks even less impressive in pictures taken with my ghetto camera.)



It looks better with the aid of a blacklight, though:



Too bad I couldn't just slap el wire or reflective tape onto this baby. Oh well...

Tights....Dear God, I never thought it would take me an entire week to make tights. (Well, not just tights, but also bootie-things with straps and shoes attached. The design is deceptively simple but man, putting it all together so that it will fit something resembling a pair of human legs sure eats up the time...)

I have some new projects that I should add to the cosplay webpage but I've been so busy with my projects that I barely had time tonight to slip over to a friend's house to eat some stew. (Yay free stew!)

I'm battling a cold now (I always seem to get sick after the holidays when my willpower has been ground to a tiny nub.) I'll take my current fatigue and sniffles over the violent intestinal explosions I dealt with LAST year, post-Christmas. Yeesh.

I will try and get all of my e-mail answered by tomorrow. This has been another one of those weeks where I'm surrounded by projects that are just on the verge of being done, but just seem to continue on off into infinity for some reason. Bleh.

This has been a crap week. It's time for kittehs!

Actually, my main rantings are about el wire and el tape. The person I made the light-up swords for has been having some trouble with them. It seems even soldering the damn wires together isn't enough to keep them from pulling apart and losing their connectivity. The wires are so damn delicate that they really can't be handled at all (which is a problem if one designs a sword handle in such a way that the battery box has to be pulled out of it in order for its "on" button to be pressed.) The swords are being sent back to me, at which point I'll examine and fix the wires and most likely cut open some sort of side flap in the handle that can access the button on the battery box without either the box or the wires being moved in any way. (The only time the battery box would need to be taken out of the handle was when the batteries needed changing.)

Gah. I hate when things go wrong (especially when I've done everything in my power to make them go right.) At least YOU can profit from my troubles--if you ever want to incorporate electronic lights into your projects, be sure to position them in such a way that their on buttons can be pressed without having to move any boxes or wires. (Seriously, though, I thought the wires I bought for this project would be of sufficient quality to be able to stand up to a little use. I mean, what use is an electronic device that goes "kerflunk" if its battery box is moved two inches?) I'll just have to figure out a way to work around this, as those are probably the highest quality wires that I can get.


I'm now finally making the mold for my homemade ball-joint doll. (I've already poured the silicone for the first part of the two-part mold that will cast the face part of the doll.) Sadly, it seems that, no matter what I do, I just can't eliminate ALL of the air bubbles from my silicone. I've even tried the "pouring the silicone from a large height so it stretches out into a thin stream that pops all of the bubbles" method of pouring. Short of getting a vaccuum chamber (which I'm NOT getting since they cost hundreds of dollars and I never have that much free money at one time) I don't know what to do.

I really really desperately need one of these for my doll project:



It's a 16mm eye beveling tool. (Sold here.) Unfortunately Volks doesn't take Paypal and I don't really want to spend ten dollars in shipping to get a ten dollar item that probably weighs 4 ounces at the most. If anyone out there is planning to order something from http://store.volksusa.com and would like to tack this one thing onto it, I'll be happy to reimburse you for the cost of the item and the cost of shipping it to me.

Oh, and Papi, thanks again for the gift certificate. I used it to buy some Dulces En Fuego Smooch, which not only leaves my skin smooth, but it makes me smell like a cookie. Mmmmmm. Cookies.....