I’m re-reading Pride and Prejudice (for no particular reason than it came with my Kobo, and I thought I’d read it without having to analyze it for my OAC English final project). It’s a bit of a slow start, mainly because every time there’s a scene with Mr. Darcy, I keep picturing him as an adorable Jack Russel Terrier:
Amirite?
Wishbone was a really cute show.
Also, my Kobo rules.
I had a lovely weekend.
I got some costuming done with
Watched the next-door neighbours try to build a deck. When I got home on Friday, they had wood and gravel in the driveway, and a bunch of their buddies and a guy who was presumably someone’s dad. They got a good start, but then it rained.
Until Sunday morning.
Fortunately, the deck they were building was small, and with the help of every scrap of daylight available, managed to make it look like a deck. No railing or anything yet, but they can put chairs and a BBQ on it, and really that’s all you need for now.
Josh and I went to the OSCS for some archery. It’s been well over 10 years since I’ve picked up a bow.
I knew I shot backwards as a kid, since back then my weak little girly arms didn’t have the strength to pull back with my non-dominant (left) hand. However, my dominant eye is, for some reason, my left, so I should have shot lefty in order to aim properly. Since it’s not like I have ingrained shooting habits, I chose to try shooting lefty. May as well, eh?
Seemed to work ok. It feels like I have an easier time aiming, but it’s been a while and I don’t really know how to do it the “real” way, so time will tell.
What I do know is that I’m not very good yet. As seen on tv the internet.
Turn your elbows out, people. If you think it’s out enough, it’s not. If it is out enough, it will twist back in on its own. See above. I managed to hit myself with every third shot or so. I am just that awesome.
Now the back of my left arm aches and my right thumb is sore from supporting the bow improperly. Also from helping Josh drag a big heavy lateral filing cabinet into the house yesterday. 😛
I have fencing practise tomorrow night, and I know I’m totally going to get stabbed in my bruise.
I really want to keep going to archery, but I also have to get costumes done by Anime North, which is now less than 3 weeks away! Ack!
Yesterday was Opening Day for my mom’s store in Kincardine! It’s called J’Adorn, and it’s across the street from Becker shoes (across the street and a few doors down from Fincher’s). I’d post better landmarks for those of you who are from Kincardine as well, but as you know all the downtown stores seem to play musical chairs every few years, so practically nothing downtown is in the same place as it was back in 2000. Except Fincher’s and Becker.
The Grand Opening isn’t until August 7th. Yeah, yeah, kinda far away, but she wanted the store open in time for tourist season, and then my brother is getting married in July so everyone will be focusing on that, which leaves August as the time for a Grand Opening.
Loads of people came in to see and it was really busy all day. A very nice start to what I hope is years of good business in downtown Kincardine.
I am pleased with how the website came out.
Took this test. For two questions, it’s scarily accurate.
Your result for The Quick & Painless ENNEAGRAM Test…
Thanks for taking the test !
Questioners are responsible, trustworthy, and value loyalty to family, friends, groups, and causes. Their personalities range broadly from reserved and timid to outspoken and confrontative.
How to Get Along with Me
• Be direct and clear.
• Listen to me carefully.
• Don’t judge me for my anxiety.
• Work things through with me.
• Reassure me that everything is OK between us.
• Laugh and make jokes with me.
• Gently push me toward new experiences.
• Try not to overreact to my overreacting.
• being committed and faithful to family and friends
• being responsible and hardworking
• being compassionate toward others
• having intellect and wit
• being a nonconformist
• confronting danger bravely
• being direct and assertive
What’s Hard About Being a SIX
• the constant push and pull involved in trying to make up my mind
• procrastinating because of fear of failure; having little confidence in myself
• fearing being abandoned or taken advantage of
• exhausting myself by worrying and scanning for danger
• wishing I had a rule book at work so I could do everything right
• being too critical of myself when I haven’t lived up to my expectations
Renee Baron & Elizabeth Wagele, The Enneagram Made Easy. Discover the 9 Types of People.
Harper: San Francisco, 1994, 161 pages
You liked the test? so S P R E A D I T ! tell everyone!!!
(copypaste the HTML-code from below to your profile or blog!)
you wanna know MORE? so check out, what Wikipedia says about your type… …even more you’ll find in Google
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How does it work, exactly? Mostly it works hard at confusing me. It gets even more confusing in Canada, where our parody/fair use laws are not as broad as in the States.
How does fanart fit into everything? I know Disney cracks down on any non-approved commercial use of their characters (to the point where Artist Alleys at anime cons will ban Disney-based fanart so they don’t get jumped on by Disney). The fact that Disney can do this implies that they have the law behind them, otherwise they’d get a big collective bird flipped at them. Ok, I understand up until that point.
But what about stuff like this? Or this?
We can all agree that it’s epically awesome. But how can it be legal for the artist (and Threadless) to sell for profit? The artist did the concept and the drawing, but Hanna-Barbera (Warner Bros.?) owns the characters. Fanart tend to be as popular as it is because it appeals to people who already know/like the character, so it’s using the property of the originator in order to make a profit.
It can’t just be an international case of “if the copyright holder doesn’t find out & crack down, it means it’s ok” or “if you are small-time, the copyright holder won’t bother pursuing legal action“, can it? Given how quickly these social media pillows spread through, well, social media, I can’t possibly believe that Twitter (and MySpace, FaceBook, Gmail, etc.) don’t know that these pillows exist. Heck, Gmail specifically has a rule that if you host your company email through their Google Apps, if you upload your own logo, your image cannot contain the Gmail logo. So if they don’t want people who use their services to use their logo without permission without any personal gain, it doesn’t seem like they would be A-OK with some chick selling (admittedly awesome) pillows of their logo.
Heck, I would happily own both the shirt and a Twitter pillow. Not so much because I like the original way they are presented, but because I like the character/item portrayed. Therefore, I’d be buying it because of the copyright holder’s marketing and popularization. I would likely think this zombie-hunter shirt was awesome if it showed two completely original characters, but I probably wouldn’t (want to) buy it without that extra push of “I already know and like those characters!”
Gah. I don’t get this.
Con-G 2010 was awesome!
We had 530 people this year! *happy dance*
About 350 people attended in 2009, and our estimated attendance (based on numbers we pulled from our ass) was 500, so we are very pleased. Very pleased indeed.
Highlights:
Lowlights:
Most technical failures have been discussed and solutions/workarounds for next year have come up. ^_^
Here are some photos from Con-G the my parents took (like I had time to take photos):
We made some graphs to show the attendance from a number of Canadian anime conventions, starting from their first through fifth years. Our 50% growth over last year places us at the high end of average in terms of growth.
Should these we continue to follow the same trends as the other cons, we’ll likely end up with over 700 people in 2011.
Yes, this is what happens when a bunch of science nerds run a convention.
We’re aiming for bigger and better in 2011!
We’re not sure how big Con-G will get, eventually, but convention space is limited in Guelph. We have a feeling the con may become self-limiting before we have to impose a registration cap, which would be nice (’cause capping is lame). We’re not in Toronto, so we won’t ever end up as a 30k+ person convention or anything crazy like that.
I always know when I’m really anxious/nervous about something when I start destroying my fingernails like crazy.
FIFTEEN DAYS UNTIL CON-G PEOPLE!!
I had thought I was being pretty good about Con-G this year. I’m totally excited for it, and I’ve been working hard at being as calm as possible about all the last minute work we’ve all been doing.
I’m also, apparently, really freaked out.
My fingernails are so short it’s starting to hurt when I pick up objects.
Sitting down to think about it, I can come up with all sorts of reasons that I’d worry this much about Con-G. But none of them are things I’ve been consciously thinking about.
Thanks a lot, subconscious. Now my hands hurt because of you.
What’s the point of carefully developing a huge healthy Ego for 28 years if it can’t shield me from an overactive Id?
It’s getting harder to sit still at work. Con-G hovers in the back of my mind (even though I still dream about being a dinosaur researcher – that’s a scientist that is a dinosaur, not a scientist who studies dinosaurs – instead of conventions).
Con-G is awesome, fun, and scary as hell.
FIFTEEN DAYS!!!
Ack ack ack!
Since I haven’t yet fleshed out my Evil Master Plan (Hey Lindsay, this is one of the things I want to chat about if we ever get around to sitting and talking about life) this isn’t really an update. But it is a cataloguing of things that are helping to advance my “become internet famous” goal.
If you don’t already know, I write a blog called ClutterCubed. It’s an organizational/decluttering blog, and my spin on it is that I’m not some professional organizer who lives in a house that fell out of Martha Stewart Living, and instead I’m a person who actually struggles with clutter herself (do I ever). Yeah. I started it a couple years ago, but I wasn’t very good about keeping it up, which made me frustrated, which made me less good at keeping it up, etc. Anyway.
A couple weeks ago, I had a guest post published on Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog that I read. There was a request for guest posts of reader stories, and I submit the tale of how I kicked my mortgage’s ass. I worked really hard on my GRS submission article, and I’m pleased with how well it turned out. ^_^
Anyway, the point is that my article was selected to be published, and GRS has a readership of over 70,000 people (based on RSS subscription numbers). My article received 121 comments to date, and that made me feel awesome. My traffic spiked that day (I got 12x the traffic I usually do), and the effect had a long tail (the jump in traffic is tapering off, but slowly, instead of a sharp decline back to “normal” levels).
My own RSS subscribers jumped from ~130 to ~230 that day, and over the past couple weeks has steadily climbed to over 330 where it sits today. 330 people read what I have to say, twice a week! 😀
This also turned into a positive feedback loop; the more subscribers I got, the more I wanted, so the more I’m trying to get out of my little anti-social shell and reach out into the bloggosphere (and the Twittersphere, or whatever) and actually interact with people I don’t know. This is a big thing for me.
More things have helped advance my goal, but I’ll just list them here:
Things that help my EMP goal:
1. Article published on GRS
2. Listed in a “Bloggers to watch in 2010” list (by a person who found me through GRS – their blog has about 250 RSS subscribers)
3. I was featured in a before/after post on Live it With Less
4. My own “bloggers to watch in 2010” article was linked to in an article on ProBlogger (“the” blog about blogging, with 138,000 RSS subscribers). It was just a “here’s a list of people who wrote “bloggers to watch in 2010″ posts”, but still. I got a link on ProBlogger, guys!!
These are not in step by step order yet, this is more of a rough draft solo brainstorming session. As such, these are pretty verbose and kinda awkward.
1. Stop being a Wage Slave
This doesn’t mean quit your job, it just means having the freedom to stop if you want to.
I consider myself very fortunate in that I genuinely enjoy my job. It is interesting, and it has a good balance of challenge and routine. I understand that my job will grow and progress and change form over the years, but I’d like to get to a point where if I somehow end up in a position I hate, I will have the resources available to stop doing it. I’d like to develop multiple streams of income, as well as focus on my (awesome) main molecular/micro biology career. No golden handcuffs for me!
2. Be invited to conventions to speak as a guest
Not a very universal goal, but I’d love to do it. I love speaking, and I love instructing on topics that I know about. I don’t have a lot of detail on this one (for example, the reason anyone would invite me as a guest *cough*), but it’s on my list because I want it to be.
which brings me to
3. Become Internet Famous
Again, I’m not entirely sure what for. I’m not an artist, and I’m no longer a business owner. I’m a blogger, and while that’s picking up steam, I don’t know if it’s what I want to be known for. It would be nice, yes, but is there something else that I’m better at maybe?
Even though I don’t know what I’ll magically be famous for, I have an idea of the level I’d like to achieve. I’d like to aim for somewhere in between NeonDragon and Wil Wheaton (pre-recent TV appearances, just when he was starting to break out of being known as just Wesley Crusher), though probably on the lower end. I certainly don’t want to be Hollywood style popular. A kind of “I’m a geeky person, doin’ my own thing and oh, hey, people like when I do that, and give me some money for the things I create while doing it” would be lovely.
4. Grow (and grow with) Con-G
Con-G is one of the most awesome things I’ve ever done. It’s fun, and it’s freakin’ hard work, and I love it. It brings joy and entertainment to others, it helps out local charities, and yeah, it’s a big ego boost. “I did this” is an amazing feeling.
I want to nurture it and help it grow, and I don’t mean necessarily in terms of attendance. I think the spirit can be maintained, while polishing and refining other parts of it, so that when people hear “Con-G”, they’ll think “the best damn Canadian con outside Anime North”. I don’t actually like that as a target – AN isn’t what I feel we should be comparing to, but I can’t think of anything better off the top of my head.
So thats the EMP rough draft so far. I’d love thoughts an opinions, but you can keep it to yourself if you just think the goals themselves are dumb. My goals don’t have to be your goals, and all that jazz.
I have vanquished the previous tragedy!
This won’t be in play format, though, because I’m lazy.
I brought it home and put the print into it. It fits perfectly!
Maybe a little too perfectly, as when I say perfectly, I mean the edge of the frame aligns exactly with the edge of the print. Right now it’s a tiny bit crooked, as the print wanted to remain being rolled up when I was putting it in the frame, but it’ll flatted out after being in the frame a while, so I’ll fix it later. You can’t really tell. ^_^
Minor downside: We went right after work, and I forgot to bring the “12×18” frame to work that day, so I didn’t get a chance to return it. Plus side: they were both 50% off. Unless I make it out to Michael’s again soon, I’ll just keep it and get a smaller print to go in it. Maybe I’ll see one I like at Con-G!
The other day I was talking to
I keep forgetting hers exists until she mentions it again (sorry!), so I hadn’t thought to try to put my many goals into some kind of cohesive plan. And guest what, friends, you’ll get to hear my ramblings about my own Evil Master Plan soon enough.
Since deciding to start crafting an EMP (hrm, maybe it needs a new name if it abbreviates to EMP), I’ve felt really awesome. Happy, focused, and eager to get going on it. And this is before even making the Plan! Just thinking about putting all my ideas down onto some all-encompassing form is awesome.