AB Travesty: Lizzabell on Damage Control

Ack! The worst possible thing has happened as far as AB is concerned. I have misplaced my entire AB folder. So all my sketches, drawings, printouts, reference images, etc. are nowhere to be found. I am currently in a state of concerned panic; where the crap did I put it?

This is what comes from traveling, having multiple bags, and using my office/library as a paper dumping ground; I am only reaping what I sew, and let me tell you it sucks. So basically my hopes to get up an AB today are totally shot. I will hunt like mad for it, but if I can't find it I don't know what I will do for an AB next week. I guess I will print off new templates and start sketching a totally new AB. Wolfram, Yamato, and Rukia will have to wait. On the plus side, it would give me an excuse to begin drawing Soi Fon or the ringlet chick from Utena. So more props to the ladies next week I guess. Pray to all that is holy and good that I will find it!

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I finally ordered my Pirates of the Carribbean t-shirt! Between my "Always Take Backup" tee from Glarkware, a "Kern" zip-up from Veer (free because I bought stock photo CD, woo hoo), and now this tee from Hot Topic, I have been on a web clothes shopping spree. And I am still coveting the Shakespeare tee from Threadless that I mentioned in an earlier post, and might work up the bravura to buy it next month. (Would love to have it to wear to the big local punk show next month and see how all the emo kids react, but really cannot buy any more clothes at the moment.)

So wierd, as I never purshase clothes online. Ah well. Big sale online at Hot Topic right now by the way, for all who care about such things. My pirates shirt was $5 off!

Very Not-So-Good-Things

Wow, lots of disappointments this week.

:: Pluto is No Longer a Planet ::

Not only does this mess up every space exhibit, science textbook, and "My Very Educated Mother..." pneumonic device worldwide, it is just very sad, as I always did like Pluto. But it has been classified as a minor planet instead, as will be the new celestial bodies of Xena, Ceres, and Charon. Don't know if I will ever truly give up thinking of Pluto as a planet, but I have consolation in the fact that Holst never got to write a sympony about the ninth planet, so therefore it was always of less prominence anyway. (The fact that Pluto didn't have the good sense to be discovered before his death makes no difference, it is not Holst's fault.) =) Though I bet if he had written a symphony about it, it would have been divine.

:: The Sad State of Strong Women in Love in Movies ::

I thought this was an interesting analysis by Time Magazine of the stereotypical roles currently being written for men and women on the silver screen. While I don't agree that that the antidote for the sad state of movie romance is to write more roles in which women must be saved by a good man to be happy (though it worked in Bridget Jones), or that witty banter is outdated, I do think a good point is made, that there is an overabundance of lovable male losers/slackers in movies and that more positive roles for men are in dire need. At least if Hollywood wants women like me (18-35, single, educated, moderate, middle-class white female) in the movie-house seats in the future (though my demographic is one they probably could care less about, to be honest.)

:: Ronald McHummer: Here's Your Sign, McDonalds, amd I Mean This Literally ::

It was bound to happen: A fast-food restaurant is giving away Hummers as a prize. I'll admit I expected something like this to come from a chain like Burger King instead, since they seem less apologetic about their fatty menu and make the creepy-odd commercials, but no, McDonalds takes the prize for asinine give-away of the year. But the good thing about this is that it inspired someone with tech experience to create a program with which we can make and send our own McDonalds billboards. If anyone has a good phrase they put on their sign I'd love to see it. I want to send signs to all my friends now.

:: Summer's End ::

School will soon be starting up again, so I guess it is officialy the last days of summer. Since I work year-round it is not such a travesty, but it means I will have a lot more student-oriented work and legislature stuff to look forward to piling up on my desk. However, I got a lot of the TV shows watched that I wanted to see over the summer, so that is excellent. Will do a post on all the media stuff that is inspiring me later.

:: No AB on Friday ::

Lastly, did not get AB up today because of work stuff. I said I would die trying; as work has almost killed me this week, I can honeslty say my threat almost came true. But I am coming in to work tomorrow to work on a new freelance job doing color palettes, and I plan on taking a break during the day to do an AB. So look for it tomorrow!

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I found this just in time for the mindless weekend web surfing: a list of the "25 sites we can't live without" from Time Magazine. And on the list are both Blogger and Flickr! V. cool. A lot of the sites I already frequent with love are there, with plenty of new ones to check out as well. Just thought I'd spread the love.

Speaking of Blogger, some stupid politician called my work number this week trying to win my vote. Would have been completely uninteresting, except I noted that the address of the blog she listed in her call had "blogspot" in it, meaning her blog is on Blogger! So that was cool, even if automated calling machines are not.

Comics Free from DC

This is very cool news, and shows how the comics industry is wising up to using, not ignoring, technology. DC comics is now allowing free downloads of the first issues of its classic graphic novels. So for a girl like me, who would like to read interesting comics but is too poor and doesn't know where to begin, this is a boon.

I've read three so far. Whitney recommended Y: The Last Man, and I can see why, it's well written and paced, and the drawing is pretty good. Am definitely going to read more. Sandman is interesting, very surreal but very gripping all the same. Fables is a brilliant concept, but the expositional writing, at least in the first volume, is very heavy-handed. Hopefully it gets better as the story goes on.

Story courtesy of Whitney from the Candy, of course. Oh, and she has podcasts now as well! The first one was short but excellent, and reconfirms what I've always believed: guard your story ideas as carefully as you would any tangible item of value, and you will never go wrong. TWIT's podcast was not up on iTunes this week, and am going through withdraw as we speak. Hope to hear them soon.

I will get an AB up this week or die in the attempt. And CafePress was still down as of yesterday. We will configure which items to put the stego on and get that up right away.

My Work :: Part 14: "Gao Gao" Stego T-Shirt

I am running off to the mountains this weekend, so didn't have time to get up an AB like I planned. So I did the next best thing, as not to leave anyone completely empty-handed: I designed a new t-shirt! Woo Hoo!

As I child, I was not obsessed with dolls or ponies, as any normal little girl can be. No, I adored dinosaurs. I collected all the dino books and figures I could, draged my fam to the Natural History Museum in DC where we lived, learned all the dino names and habits, etc. The very first job I ever wanted was to be an archaeologist. Needless to say that is no longer my greatest passion in life, but I sure do love dinos still and love hearing when a new species is found, that kind of stuff.

So when we watched the anime "Air," I knew it would have a special place in my heart, in spite of its bizarre but cute surrealism, which can be confusing. This is because Misuzu Kamio, the cute blonde with the impractically long hair, is also obsessed with my fave reptiles; she gives Yukito a stego shirt to wear and makes dino noises to express herself. In seeing a kindred spirit, a bond was forged between the two of us, the likes of which shall never be broken. =)

So of course I wanted to recreate the shirt! But someone at CafePress has already done that, and besides, the original shirt is NOT all that pretty, no matter how cute the stego on it is. So I decided a reddesign is in order.

Click on the pic above to see the shirt I designed. I took a pic of the stego shirt from off the web and traced the lines with the pen tool. Then I took those lines and the text and created outlines for both. (text: Type>Create Outlines; stroke: Object>Path>Outline Stroke.) The font is the same one I used for a logo for my cousin; is very simple yet contempo, and matches the whimsy of the stegosaurus pic. I put gao gao in quotes because I love when she says it, and put it on the back because I've been wanting to do a shirt at Cafepress with words on the back. I'm hoping that even if someone doesn't know it is from an anime, they will stil think it is cute. It's nice to get the inside joke, but I really hope the shirt's design, simple yet adorable, stands on its own.

CafePress is down at the moment, but when I get back from my trip I'm sure it'll be up and running again, and I will upload the tee for all to enjoy.

Next week I will get AB up and two other posts I have been working on. Till then!

On being an AB Tease and Designer Tees

Friday has snuck up on me again!!!!!! Suck. Sorry, I had to do emergency ushering, did a job interview, got my personal design web site up, and am going away at the end of next week to play but have had waaaay too much to do before then. Suck. I am not trying to be an AB tease, I just am one apparently at the moment.

But Elicia returns on Monday so yay!!!!! She will brave the Paris airport and liquid bomb threats to return to us. If she holds up the line because of questionable lip gloss in her carry-ons, I will laugh.

In place of this, the Candy had a great link which I will share: Threadless, a designer t-shirt site where you submit t-shirt designs and can get them graded by others and sell them as well. My fave thus far? A t-shirt which states that "Shakespeare Hates Your Emo Poems." Made me laugh out loud so must buy. Makes me want to come up with ideas to submit; should I just submit some of the designs I've already done? Will anybody at Threadless get them, meaning-wise and purchase-wise, if I do? Hmmm, decisions decisions.

Will get up an AB next week or will personally stick a needle into my arm tendons. ( Have a friend in a phlebotomy course; apparently this burns a lot, so is an appropriately painful threat.) Also will work on having enough willpower to leave friends' houses at decent hour and get some needed sleep. But the operas I have been ushering like mad for these past two weeks have fueled new passion in me to create, which is always good.

Have started but not published like three posts this week; hopefully I will get hem up this weekend or on Monday.

Hello Pus**

I passed my 75th post last week, joy.

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This is one of those posts you hope never to write. Actually, this is one of those topics that you never even contemplate writing, because the very idea of the topic envokes such scenarios as the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Ragnarok, and judgement day occuring simultaneously along with said topic. I can't avoid talking about it, because what is my blog for but to record such bizarre moments in japanese/chibi pop culture, but I desperately, desperately want to.

Before I start a soapboxy tirade, I will say that every company, big or small, has a brand, an image if you will of how they are seen by the world and, more importantly, their customers. Marketing campaigns change rapidly, but the essential idea of the company, its mission and goals, is usually constant from year to year, and hopefully decade to decade.

Hello Kitty, as a brand, has done remarkably well in its long and very cute career. I personally like it and when I have kids of my own will probably buy them all the Hello Kitty stuff they can stand; heck, it's better than having them buy a Bratz doll, after all.

So what does Hello Kitty do, to continue their legacy of cute, innocently hip, internationally known squishy chibis? They decide to do a Hello Kitty doll in the form of a pop culture celeb. And which celeb do they pick? Why, Paris Hilton of course, because what better celeb to represent the Hello Kitty brand than the very one who embraces such values as cattiness, sluttiness, vapidity, and misogyny? That makes perfect sense Sanrio, bravo!

It's true that in the past Hello Kitty has parodied celebrities—Elicia has a bobblehead of Hello Kitty as Marilyn Monroe, after all—but this is so awful, so incredulous that I can hardly breathe. And I can't blame the stupid American distributors, as the doll-spawn is only being sold in Japan; no, I have no one to blame but my beloved Japanese Hello Kitty makers.

As a devoted customer, I feel betrayed. As a designer, witnessing them chibi-fy a celeb who is the antithesis of all things Hello Kitty, thus sullying their brand, I am outraged. We can prevent a company from hawking dolls of the Pussycat Dolls, a burlesque group posing as the new Spice Girls, to little girls but can't prevent this? Sheer travesty.

Enough on this subject, I feel ill. If Hello Kitty makes a Cristina Aguilera or Olsen Twins Hello Kitty, we are so through.

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On happier news, work and home have calmed down significantly, so I can do an AB this week! Am very excited as have missed doing them tremendously. Not sure who yet but am thrilled.

Belated Friday Fun & Games

Ack. I originally wrote this post last Fri, but the fates conspired against my getting it onto the web. So here you go; a belated post on some of my current fave things.

AB is not looking good this week, by the way. Sorry to be such a tease about it and keep delivering empty promises, but it's beyond my control. NEVER let the president's wife of the university you sorta work for come up with a brilliant idea for your non-profit client, which YOU then have to implement in the space of two months; it will drive you insane, wreck all your other deadlines, and make you feel guilty when you take a sanity break, like I am doing right now. Just a word of warning to innocent designers out there; learn from my suffering and just run away, fast, when this type of problem springs up. You will be happier for it. Okay, rant over.

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No AB today. I had invitation deadlines, the cleaning of my house in prep for getting a larger bed moved in, newly planted thyme in my backyard to nurture, and a meeting in which I had to present all the printed materials I've put out in the past year. And all this in the same week! So my days at work and home were equaly frantic; poor lil' AB guys just couldn't compete. Next week should be smoother, I swear.

So to compensate, I will instead post some of my fave new and old links and stories I've come across that have been brightening my days lately, in the few spare moments I have.

:: Eddie Izzard ::

As I have mentioned in the last post (?), Eddie Izzard is my new crush. (I love his new look; he is one of the few men in the world who look fantastic with facial hair.) And typing in his name at YouTube reveals a plethora of fun clips. Some of my faves: 90's Eddie ruling the Ambassadors with floppy hair, Eddie doing a Monty Python skit with Alan Rickman, Eddie with the not-so-full Monty Pythons, Eddie being awesome on talk shows, and pieces of his great standup from his DVD's, listed below. (I love that he got the humor of Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" quote, the mistake in semantics which all people who have taken or speak German know, and has made it really funny. But instead of just calling it a donut I would call it a jelly-filled donut, as that is closer to the truth. Just splitting hairs here.)

:: The cunning use of Flags
:: Stars Wars Canteen
:: Ich Bin Ein Berliner
:: Religion
:: Comic Aid Stint

:: Warped Tour ::

I only attend punk shows with Leeshee, as she lends my punk/goth poser-ness some credibility, so missed it this year. Sad to not see Joan Jett and other cool acts perform, but will get over it eventually. The thing am saddest about missing? The tribute to the Ramones at Tent World and getting to talk to their actual creative director/designer.

:: My Chemical Comic ::

Speaking of awesome goth bands at Warped Tour, the lead singer of My Chemical Romance is jumping into the fad of stars making comics and is writing one of his own, which will possibly come out next year.

:: Harry Potter Podcast ::

Because there are about a bzillion of Harry Potter Podcasts out there, I have been waiting to subscribe to them until I find a good one. And lo and behold, Scholastic has a podcast of discussions with the big web site HP afficianados, in which they discuss and ruminate on the plots set up by book 6.

:: Adult Swim Fixes ::

This is a site I keep checking back to, because it is awesome. (I'm sure everyone has already ben here at least once, so I am listing it just to list it.) The preview podcasts at iTunes are funny (What's Inuyasha up to now?), and best of all you can preview shows early before they officially air.

:: Venture Brothers ::

While I wait impatiently for new episodes to air, there are great episode summaries and trivia explanations at the Wiki, clips from the episodes at YouTube, and of course great Venture stuff like wallpapers at Adult Swim. Make sure to download the MP3's of The Monarch's phone calls he placed while in jail, which are legitimate VB canon.

:: Jeeves and Wooster ::

This show is on PBS in the late-night British comedies section, and it is hysterical! (But I actually like British humor; those who don't will wince throughout the entire show I'm sure.) Not only do I get to learn where the Jeeves from "Ask Jeeves" came from (who I miss, btw), but get to see a young and very funny Hugh Laurie (he of "Sense and Sensibility" and "House" fame) being very funny, callous yet endearing as is his trademark style of characterization. It wasn't on this week, but I hope it returns soon.