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[10 Oct 2008|09:14am] |
Reasons absentee ballots are awesome and everyone who is voting should get one (which you still have time to do:)
- No standing in an hours-long line on election day
- Infinitely more time to carefully consider each candidate, including having access to Google or whatever else may be needed so that everything can be a carefully-considered decision, rather than "oh hell there are like 13 keep/dismiss whatever judge votes and I have no idea who any of these people are and people behind me are probably getting pretty angry by now."
- If you live in one of those states that uses paperless electronic voting machines or whatever, absentee ballots are their own paper trail. Use them if you want your vote to count. :D
In 2006 I put together a ballot with well-researched opinions on everything down to who I wanted to be on the freaking water board, then on election night I watched a local news story about people who were standing in line for five hours and I pointed and laughed because I had already voted two weeks prior, and was in bed watching TV. :D
I just filled out the first of three columns on the front side of this ballot (President, federal-level Senator and Representative, and some state-level Senators and Representatives and a couple of district judges.) I'm going to call that a good stopping point for now and come back and do some more work on it later, because I can do that.
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[09 Oct 2008|08:33am] |
| My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul |
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| kjorteo goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as a greater Fuzz Elemental. | | cilich tricks you! You get a scratched CD. | | davidn tricks you! You get a clothespin. | | dr_dos tricks you! You get a toothbrush. | | its_a_trap gives you 9 yellow watermelon-flavoured gumdrops. | | jacel gives you 11 orange blueberry-flavoured pieces of bubblegum. | | ravenworks gives you 1 yellow coconut-flavoured gummy bats. | | slither gives you 6 light green grape-flavoured jawbreakers. | | terrana tricks you! You lose 9 pieces of candy! | | xaq tricks you! You get a piece of paper. | | yiffyraptor tricks you! You lose 5 pieces of candy! | | kjorteo ends up with 13 pieces of candy, a scratched CD, a clothespin, a toothbrush, and a piece of paper. | | Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern. |
God damn it, Yiffy.
Edit: :D
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| My impression of the Biden/Palin debate |
[03 Oct 2008|06:38am] |
Palin: Marge Gunderson accents are folksy, don'tcha know.
Biden: FACTS, FIGURES, AND 30+ YEARS OF SENATE EXPERIENCE.
Palin: Well, gosh darn it all to heck.
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[28 Sep 2008|08:41pm] |
Then.
Now.
You know, not to make Vanilla Ice into a shining example of pop culture as a whole or anything, but sometimes I miss the '80s just because they weren't afraid to be positively goofy like that if it was at least fun.
Then again, maybe that's why I like a genre of music that's largely filled with people who apparently didn't get the memo that dignity exists these days.
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[25 Sep 2008|08:16pm] |
This is is the best response in a political debate forum I've ever received.
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| Completely unrelated-to-anything music trivia |
[24 Sep 2008|10:29pm] |
When [Tormented, Staind's debut album] was released, friend and confidant Fred Durst reportedly burst into their dressing room before a show during their tour with Limp Bizkit, threw the album on the floor, and started screaming at them, offended by the cover art. Reportedly very religious at the time, he asked if they were a Satanic band.[citation needed]
Please tell me I'm not the only one who has serious trouble envisioning Fred Durst as "very religious."
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| More Furspots stuff |
[23 Sep 2008|04:42pm] |
| [ |
mood |
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 surprised |
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Oh my God, when did Furspots start letting you keep the full-size non-shrunken versions of pictures you submit for your characters? You can go under "Show all" for the pictures, then for each picture there (even if there's only one,) the blue hyperlink caption actually takes you to the full-sized version! Did they stealth-add that without announcing it, or am I blind and just never noticed you could do that?
Anyway, with "can allow full-sized large images like reference sheets and such" crossed off the list, there is now nothing left on my list of why Furspots can't be the one-stop spot for absolutely all you need to know as far as character info. Kjorteo's page already has a separate description for kinks/fetishes/preferences/etc. so I can just use the URL with a "go here and read this" note instead of having to spell it all out when I'm on Tapestries. Now it looks like I can do the same for commissions. I foresee the day when I want someone to draw me, and they ask for references, and I can just say "http://kjorteo.furspots.com , use the "Show All" button on the descriptions and the pictures" and that's that. :D Which is easier for everyone, since I know some artists out there get intimidated when you send them a 3,000-word essay directly in the commission e-mail.
Furspots is awesome. You guys seriously need to get in on this if you want to keep track of your characters and stuff. ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) inaki apparently finally hit critical mass on invites for the alpha so you can't sign up until the more open testing stage, I guess, but keep an eye out for that and get in on that when you can, because this is good stuff.
Kjorteo Kalante
Sara Kalante
Barius Tulari
Ahrashace Bladescales
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| Commissions: Yes/No? |
[16 Sep 2008|04:40am] |
Writing Confirmation was a tremendous deal of fun, but I feel that particular series has reached its natural conclusion (or at the very least, that I can't continue it without ruining everything.) I really love to write, but I don't have any ideas of my own as to what to write -about.- Also, I like money.
Opening myself up to writing commissions seems to be the logical answer, but it's all very nebulous right now. Or, at the very least, I don't want to irrevocably commit myself to the idea just yet or anything. Consider this an attempt to gauge interest on an "I'll think about it, depending on what kind of response I get" basis: would you guys want Kjorteo writing commissions?
Assume for the sake of argument that my prices would be more or less based on what Hellkat (that's Hellkat on FA, Von Krieger on Yiffstar, if you haven't heard of him then put this journal down and go check him out right now because he's awesome) currently charges, maybe a little cheaper (say $5/500 words without that $40 minimum?) That is absolutely not set in stone, and even if I go through with this and actually start taking commissions, I absolutely will reserve the right to raise or lower prices if I feel that the balance in what you're paying vs. what you're receiving is off. There would also be a standard will/won't depict list I'd have to hammer out, maybe some negotiating might have to happen for idea-pitching before I agree to anything. (I don't care if space battles aren't even remotely adult, let alone an explicit fetish that would run afoul of the eventual list--I'd still have trouble writing about them just because they're silly.)
As you can see, it's all very in the air right now, but that's why I'm soliciting feedback!
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[14 Sep 2008|02:22am] |
Awesome.
Slow Wave, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is a comic where you submit your dreams, the guy picks the most interesting/amusing ones, and draws them.
A while ago, I posted this to my dream journal, with a note at the end that I submitted it to Slow Wave just for the sheer hell of it. I wasn't really sure if it would actually go up or not.
It did.
In my dream, I kind of remember the cop reacting to my explanations more with "I've never heard of these strange concepts of which you speak, please tell me more" and less with that sort of stunned silent D:, and I wasn't really coming on to her as seems to be the implication in the last panel here, but that's fine. It says right on the submission form that "submissions may be edited for clarity, brevity, or plain whimsy," and it is funnier this way. Also, that's about the best rendition of real-life me ever. Anyway, thanks to aplsos for pointing this out--I had completely forgotten.
Edit: New icon. Slight touching up in GIMP. Apparently GIMP's "Selective Gaussian Blur" filter for JPEG artifact removal/repair is nothing short of magic.
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| Haven't done one of these in a while. |
[11 Sep 2008|07:52pm] |
Time to see what amusing summations everyone's favorite hentai mailing list, DLsite, has thrown my way.
( Oh, Japan. )
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| This is vitally important news you guys |
[06 Sep 2008|05:12pm] |
I just deleted sara-kalante.furspots.com and remade her at sara.furspots.com.
I had been debating whether or not it was too presumptuous to take the obvious name instead of going straight for the qualifier, but having Sara itself remain open and unclaimed for that long was just too tempting. Besides, if I checked back later and found it was taken by something lame like "Sara is one of the minor characters in a story I'm working on, she's the innkeeper's sister and has two lines in the fourth scene ^_^" then I never would have forgiven myself.
MY SARA NOW. That's just what I get for being cool enough to be in the alpha. :D
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| Confirmation |
[05 Sep 2008|12:17pm] |
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mood |
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 accomplished |
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Hey, everyone who liked Seduction, guess what?
I made a sequel. And it's well over twice as long! D: It weighs in at barely 34 pages (there's one small paragraph on the top of the 34th page) and 17,062 words, counting the foreword and such.
The theme of this one is plot and character development, and dealing with the consequences of their actions. Sara and Teo crossed a line, and there's no turning back. Now what? Where do they go from here? Read it and find out!
Kjorteo.net mirror
FurAffinity mirror
YiffStar mirror
As of when I'm posting this, the story is currently still pending moderator approval on YiffStar, which means that link might not work if you follow it before it's actually fully up. That will be the link when they approve it, though. Approved, YiffStar mirror works now. :D
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| Kjorteo is a camwhore |
[03 Sep 2008|12:40am] |
It has come to my attention that the last picture of me I've been using on the internet everywhere is somewhere around three or four years old, and thus badly in need of updating. So yeah, here you go.
You can see, but you can't unsee
My The Mountain wolf shirt is obviously the height of respectability and fashion. I've sort of been considering upgrading a little (especially when I noticed how Falconer's drummer looks more or less like what would happen if I was just a little bit less of a dork, though even I know that the torn jeans are ridiculous,) but I seriously wouldn't know where to start.
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| Furspots |
[25 Aug 2008|09:54pm] |
So Furspots is in technically-closed alpha now (inaki appears to be shoveling out invite codes like free candy in his announcement post, though.) The easiest way to describe it at this point is that it appears to be some sort of profile database for everyone and all their characters. They even get their own pages. I made three so far (all thrown together relatively quickly just to test the alpha, so quiet): Kjorteo, Sara, and Barius.
I find myself wanting for a great many features (fortunately, that's open for discussion as well,) but I really like where they're going with this. I see this potentially replacing the in-game cinfo and such and maybe even the Rabbit Hole profiles for my Tapestries characters, at least once it's stabilized enough that I don't have to worry about them randomly nuking everything and they've added some content filters so I don't feel awkward uploading sultry "preference" description and x-rated reference pictures and such.
It may even become a cool bio site for characters in general, which means yiffyraptor and raptorianone should probably check it out.
Tentative verdict: Shows obvious signs of still being an alpha, but it's on the right track!
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| Music news |
[12 Aug 2008|02:31pm] |
Making another entry about ten seconds after the previous one, but they're not quite related enough to edit one into the other, and hey, this is interesting.
In one of my older music posts about Edguy, I said this:
"After Mandrake and Hellfire Club, they [Edguy] underwent a bit of a genre shift from typical high fantasy epic power metal to an affectionate "'80s hair bands were awesome, let's do that" vibe, turning their Scorpions influence into the more-hard-rock-than-any-sort-of-metal Rocket Ride. As that is their most recent album as of this writeup, whether it was a fluke or if the change is permanent is yet to be seen. However, lead singer Tobias Sammet is also the mastermind behind Avantasia, and comparing their old work (The Metal Opera, both parts) to their new (The Scarecrow) reveals that, at the very least, Rocket Ride alone didn't get all the glam rock out of Sammet's system."
Well, check this out.
"For the record: Musically, we don’t go back to the roots. It's not the "Legacy of Mandrake part 2" and it’s not a little brother of Rocket Ride either. It's a new album and we’ve set off to new horizons once more! The stuff sounds really broad, very anthemic, heavy and ballsy. We've kept our trademarks and still there are a lot of elements that are different to anything we've done before."
That sounds promising. I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out, then.
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| Music post |
[12 Aug 2008|01:57pm] |
I was wondering which band would get the distinction of being the first one I featured more than once. It was an inevitability, of course, since there are only so many bands out there, and quite a few have more than one good song, and if I keep this up, I'm eventually going to overlap. Not that I'm out of good bands, of course (there are at least four amazing ones off the top of my head I haven't featured yet, more if you give me a minute to actually think about it,) but I'm just doing these in the order of what songs I want to share, so....
Artist: Avantasia
Album: The Scarecrow
Song: The Toy Master
Visuals: Random pictures
As stated before, Avantasia is a side project masterminded by Tobias Sammet of Edguy, known for its wide variety of guest singers and musicians. Its first two albums, The Metal Opera parts I and II, were literally just that, an actual rock (or metal) opera featuring people including but not limited to Kai Hansen (Helloween, Gamma Ray,) André Matos (Angra, Shaaman,) David DeFeis (Virgin Steele,) Sharon Den Adel (Within Temptation,) and Michael Kiske (Helloween, SupaRed) Ernie, each with their own distinct character (Kai Hansen was Regrin the Dwarf) and lyrics that were more or less just their lines.
After a long hiatus, Sammet decided to do Avantasia again, and it's sort of the same idea--lots and lots of guests, a coherent story throughout a heavy concept album--though it's slightly more obfuscated this time in that the songs are a little more metaphorical and can stand on their own, they don't actually name characters by name, etc. Were this the Metal Opera, the lyrics to this song would be an unambiguous tale of how the confused protagonist meets an evil record producer who corrupts and seduces him with the world of rock star fame and fortune at the cost of his soul. As it stands, it's more or less a song about Alice Cooper being creepy.
Which is actually precisely why I chose this song: it's Alice Cooper being creepy. Alice Cooper. In a power metal album. There's Sammet recruiting guests from the power metal scene (other participants of The Scarecrow are more typical picks like Jorn Lande, Roy Khan, and Michael Kiske again,) and then there's a song that's a 25/75-or-so-ratio duet with Tobias Sammet and Alice Cooper. And the most amazing thing is that it works so well. I was baffled when he was announced to appear on this album. Starting about three words after he actually starts singing, I immediately couldn't see a song like this happening absolutely any other way.
Also, this album is beginning-to-end amazing and there were a ton of awesome songs I could have picked instead of this, making this an incredibly difficult decision, and one I may very easily supplement by going back and featuring the others someday soon. (The Scarecrow, Shelter From the Rain, Carry Me Over, Another Angel Down, Devil in the Belfry, and Lost in Space come to mind.) I cannot possibly recommend the entire album more highly. It's a beginning-to-end masterpiece.
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