A Slight Delay... [18 Dec 2009|08:50pm] proplady I'm afraid my video on resin gemcasting will have to be delayed for a short time while I figure out Sony Vegas Pro. I've discovered, sadly, that Microsoft Movie Maker is only slightly more useful to the art of digital editing than removing my computer harddrive and repeatedly hitting it with a rock would be, so I've finally become sufficiently irked to try and learn a whole new program. On the bright side, I think I've finally figured out where to position my microphone for maximum voice quality. Not that it helps me to sound any less like a robot reading a list of stock quotes, but at least I no longer sound like a robot reading quotes while standing at the bottom of an empty grain elevator shaft. I have to do some vacuumforming in the near future and I wanted to take some footage of myself doing it. I don't know if I'll be able to position my webcam close enough to the stove to capture anything useful. The best you'll see is me in dumpy clothing, puttering around a crate with a plywood board on top of it with a vacuum hose attached. (It's also hard to take still pictures of the process since vacuumforming is a two-hand job at all times. Boy that sounded dirty, didn't it?) I'll try to figure something out, if I can. post comment

WOO HOME. [18 Dec 2009|06:05am] toastersix Had a super cool last few weeks, both literally and figuratively! So, to start off with the furthest back, I had my sorority's semi-formal in which I got all dressed up and enjoyed a glorious open bar. My homegirl bartender knew I wanted rum and cokes after the first four or so. Oh my god it was so much fun. Since this is my third formal, I decided to go with more of a "hot" dress this time rather than cute, which is usually what I do. There are photos on facebook for anyone interested in seeing it. It's a Neiman Marcus dress regular priced at $400 that I got for $50! YAY! Saw the AWESOME Princess and the Frog film at midnight because I'm too cheap to pay for the pre-screening despite living 2 seconds away from it. I thought it was truly wonderful and I absolutely loved the music. Keith David/Mass Effect's Captain Anderson = <333 This past Friday, Kate came up to visit. We met up with Angie and went fabric/trim shopping and then met up with Leonard at Kenka followed by an adorable little café where we all just sat and chatted for 1000 years before Angie had to head out. Then Monday we went to Kinokuniya where we met up with Leo and chilled for a bit before Kate had to catch her bus. UGH IT IS SO GOOD TO BE HOME. I'm so tired of doing work and dealing with sorority drama. It's especially bad now that I'm the panhellenic council president. For those that don't know, the Panhellenic Council is the governing body that oversees all of the sororities. They run recruitment and set the rules for all sororities. Soooo.. I'm gonna have so much work to do next semester. UGH! At least it looks good on a resumé. Been biz planning for the upcoming convention for me as well, which is Ohayocon. I'm not posting what I'm bringing. I'll just post pictures after. That way if I don't get something done, no one will know. Hahaha Also... if you guys haven't heard Timbaland's new single.. omfg. GO LISTEN TO IT NOW. It's called,"Morning After Dark." Omfg omfg I love it. It's SOOOO catchy. Another very catchy song is David Guetta's,"Sexy Bitch." Check that out out too. I'd upload them, but I'm way too lazy. They are both on youtube, however! OMG GUYS MUSE. I AM SEEING THEM IN MARCH. WORDS. SIODGHSIODGH We bought some really fucking nice seats. They kinda broke the bank but.. dammit if we don't have some of the best seats in the house. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE MUSE. ♥♥♥♥♥ ...So yes. I think that's it. Oh! Xbox people, can someone run though the campaigns on L4D2 with me? I haven't completed any of them! D: 16 comments|post comment

Sometimes it seems I'm on the raggedy edge. [18 Dec 2009|01:20am] techiecl [ mood | tired ] Work has been hell for a long time. Just got notice that it's going to last longer and possibly interfere with my New Year's Eve plans...yet career wise this year has been a fantastic string of successes carving out my place and status in the company. All built and excruciating pain and agony that's pushed stress into my mind even after hours, when I spent so long compartmentalizing my life from work/career. *Sigh* The mantra was make it to New Year's. Now it's a kick in the gut to change it to. Make it to the Thailand Trip (Jan 14th). My gut hurts thinking about those extra two weeks of work-hell. post comment

Cool. [17 Dec 2009|08:36pm] proplady I've made a new discovery. Cool Jewel ice cube molds are great for resin casting: I was worried that, since it as made of what looked like foodsafe silicone, it might not work, creating gems that were sticky or dull. I've only used clearcast epoxy resin with it so far and don't know how well it would work with polyester resin. (Which I'm NOT testing since Polyester resin smells like a bear's bare ass on a bad day.) So if you want to make faceted gemstones, this ice cube mold is definitely the way to go (although you should NOT use it for ice cubes once you've poured resin into it. ) I think I've discovered the problems I was having with my microphone--I was sitting too close to it. I'm still splicing together the video for my Cast-ravaganza tutorial so I hope to get that edited and finished in the near future. Stay tuned.... 4 comments|post comment

BEACH TRIP!! [16 Dec 2009|05:23pm] ainobethie [ mood | happy ] The beach house is reserved for June 5-12. We will be spending the first half (or so) of the following week in Lexington, visiting with my parents. On the drive up, we'll stop in Tennessee to visit one of Nathan's friends and perhaps Illinois if I nag him enough. :) LET THE EVIL SCHEMING COMMENCE!! 7 comments|post comment

I Gots a Microphone. [16 Dec 2009|02:02am] proplady It doesn't work very well so I have to record my dialog with my webcam and then split off the audio. I've made and posted a sound test on Youtube in which I gibber some nonsense two times in a row. The first recording is unaltered. The second one has been run through Audacity's Noise Removal Filter. The Unaltered audio has background nose and scratchy "s"'s. The Altered audio has no noise but is very tinny-sounding. Does anyone have any advice on how I can improve the audio quality? (I throw myself on your tender mercies, internet!) Thanks to everyone who's tried to help me thus far.... Oh Oscar the Grouch. You channel my soul.... Okay, I probably don't hate Christmas as much as he does, but I might be inclined to like it more if I didn't take such a financial hit this time of year. (You know, what with people losing their jobs just before it happens and having to cancel costume orders, and with people having to use all of their disposable income for Christmas presents and with my having to stand in long lines at the post office to get anything mailed out.) I mean, I want to be all sparkly-eyed and full of wonder, but... I'm a bit stressed right now. I hope I don't come through as a grouch in my writing; I don't want to bring everyone else down. Sheesh. *jams hands into pockets*) 4 comments|post comment

Being a hermit does not help.... [15 Dec 2009|04:03am] proplady ...when it comes to public speaking, or recording a voiceover for cosplay how-to videos. My un-exercised, un-practiced voice is already reeling from the shredding it's gotten, just from recording a few paragraphs of information. (I'm drinking lots of water, but if there's another, more effective way of lubricating one's throat, I'd be happy to hear it.) Also, is there any way to make myself sound less like a newscaster recording video for hard of hearing ESL students? I'm trying to sound natural and conversational, but I can't stop en-noon-see-a-ting everything, or sounding like I'm reading from a block of text, (which I am.) I have terrible memorization and recall (thanks, fibrofog) so I don't see how I'm going to be able to record this audio withOUT having the text right under my nose, scanning every word that goes by. Oh well. I'll think of something. In all other respects the project's going pretty well... Hooray! Youtube has the original Sesame Street Christmas Special! Nostalgilalicious and 100 percent Elmo-Free! 4 comments|post comment

Drag Me to Walmart [13 Dec 2009|04:48pm] proplady I was at a friend's house watching the Rifftrax version of Drag Me to Hell when, in an ironic coincidence I can only describe as cosmically epic in nature, I actually found myself in Hell a couple of hours later. Yes, that's right. I went to Walmart on a Saturday night. I needed to get some sewing supplies and all of the other stores were closed. Now before you say "Well, you should have waited until tomorrow and gone somewhere else to get them" let me tell you that it would not have been any easier or less hellish to wait or go elsewhere because, you see, our City is in the grip of a horrible plague. A plague I call Christmas. Not to sound Grinchy or anything, but I hate Christmas. I hate it with the kind of repulsive, all-encompassing, hate-the-very-IDEA-of hate I normally reserve for child serial killers and murderous Third World dictators. Now ironically, I don't hate the concept of Christmas itself and I'm rather fond of the pageantry and pretty lights. But I DO hate what Christmas has become around here--a big, bloated corpse of commercialism that lays itself down over our fair city for a full month; its putresence sinking into every aspect of daily life, making even the smallest, most insignificant shopping trip into the kind of ordeal that would make Moses' travels in the desert seem like a day trip to Disneyland. Our city has become a crucible which melts the spirits of the weak into a quivering, traumatized mass of humanity, which can only cry and cling to each other until the Post-Christmas sales when the Darkness shall finally pass. Let me tell you, Sam Raimi, Hieronymous Bosch and David Lynch even at their most deranged couldn't conjure up a landscape as nightmarish, as bereft of hope as that of your typical December Walmart on a Saturday around midnight. Picture two lines each filled with about twenty people--all with carts full of beer, plywood furniture and screaming devil children. Picture the hollow-socketed doom-filled eyes of said people as their lives slowly ebb away to the chorus of a hip-hop Christmas carol. Now picture dozens of Walmart employees just milling around said people, ignoring their plight with the kind of drudging indifference that only they and the demons of Hell can know. Oh SURE, they could stop fiddling with their boxes and coat racks long enough to open up a few more registers, but they refuse to. They have long since ceased to care about the people to whom they hold the only keys of deliverance. Deliverance from this mephitic realm of failed dreams, torn t-shirts and toothless trailer people. "Oh," they say, their lips curled into a sneer, "So you thought that, by coming in at midnight, you would avoid the ghastly throngs that cram themselves into this realm by day, didn't you?. HA! FOOLS! WELCOME TO HELL! MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" Yeah, I'm not in a good mood today. I have a lot of projects that are on the verge of being done that I can't seem to finish (and others that have just gone awry and that I have to do over.) It's just a bad time of year and that whole "Yay! It's Christmas! Celebrate by buying tons of shit and rubbing your prosperity into the faces of the poor!" thing really isn't helping any. I am trying to work on a couple of new tutorial videos and I'm finding out just how much fun it is to try and synch a voice track to edited footage. (Let's just say that I'm probably going to sound kind of weird in the first few vids, provided I'm ever able to get them done.) 6 comments|post comment

Blog Updates and a New Video... [08 Dec 2009|05:32pm] proplady I've posted banners to my new Etsy Store and my Styrene Store. If you have any questions about anything you find there, just let me know! ^_^ Okay, now I've done something different. It's my first prop video in a long while and it's a time lapse (or whatever the heck you call it--sped up video) of my making an Advent Children Cloud Shoulder Pauldron. (Complete with annotations!) I can only wish I REALLY worked that fast. Sigh... I hope it will be helpful to people who've wondered about shaping and putting together their own armor --specifically, about how to achieve a rounded shape using a flat plane. I really want to revamp my automail tutorial which is nothing but a loose collection of clips that aren't really tied together well. Perhaps the next time someone commissions it from me, I'll film the process. (Perhaps not in the same way I filmed this pauldron tutorial, but I'll try to find some way to make it helpful.) 1 comment|post comment

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