If you've just stumbled across this journal through another user or a community, or come here looking for new artwork between updates of my website, I am sorry to say that this journal is friends-only due to repeated privacy issues. If you'd like to be added as a friend, add me. I usually get around to updating my list every few weeks. I don't like to censor what I say here, so chances are if you're under 16 I'm not going to add you back unless I know you.

• 14:14 Stuck in traffic on I-80 east of Rockaway. This sucks. #
• 14:24 Looking forward to Otakon & Katsucon.Trying to get lots of new arts done. #

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• 01:56 Just posted the saga of Ohayocon 2009 in LJ & devart. Felt good to get that out. #
• 02:01 Making meatloaf with Italian flavored breadcrumbs since that's all I have - hopefully it'll taste like delicious meatballs! #

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...or, how to abuse your position in a non-profit organization for maximum personal gain.

The first convention I ever went to was Katsucon 2003. In six years of attending conventions, almost always in the artist alley, never once have I been told I was breaking the rules. No stickers at your convention? They get left at home. No adult work at your convention? I don't even bring the binder. In fact, I wrote a tutorial on attending conventions as an artist, reminding everyone to follow the rules as they were laid out. I should have listened to my friends who said that Ohayocon was rife with problems.

This was the first time I'd been to Ohayocon – with an eight hour drive, venturing into an unknown is always a risk, but I submitted my product list (prints, buttons, stickers, and bookmarks) and portfolio (links to my deviantart account and my main site at ghostfire.net) to their jury for consideration and made it in, so I was excited to give it a go.
( Incident the first )
( Incident the second )
( This is a joke, right? )
( Incident the third... god damn )
( the aftermath )

• 21:55 $14 for two burnt coffees that I didn't want (how could they be out of ice??) and two inedible salt bagels at Dunkin Donuts.. Not impressed. #
• 21:55 Finished my ACen Doujinshi Central piece awhile ago, just sent an extra colored piece in for the hell of it. #

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• 21:29 Living with a left-handed boyfriend has taught me how bad it is when gaming mice are right prejudiced without a flip available. Stupid Razor #
• 21:30 Me choosing hummus over cheese? Perish the thought. #
• 21:30 It was snowing earlier, but then it warmed, and the streets are ankle-deep in sloppy slush. #

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• 13:52 I have four things on my "to-do" list today. I wonder how long I wait for Mark to wake up. #
• 23:53 Why do keyboard trays even exist, and especially with raised lips?? My arm always kills me when I spend a few hours online. Stupid nerves. #
• 23:55 So much love for The Office. I seriously tear up whenever there's an especially emotional scene with Jim and Pam. #

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• 23:13 The thermometer says 70 degrees, but I swear it's lying, because I'm freezing. I'm mostly better, but now Mark's sick. Ohayocon = miserable. #
• 23:13 I hope all of my NJ friends are doing okay after that minor earthquake. The ground's not supposed to shake there except due to anger. #
• 11:27 Lately I get very tired about an hour to an hour and a half after waking up. It's seriously I want to go back to bed time. #

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Or wobbly legged kitten, as the case may be. This cold or whatever it is has moved from being mostly a sore throat to lodging deep in my chest. I was really hoping it'd be nothing, and I'd be all over it by now. It's a shame that work and housework don't wait for anyone to get well. I've had to temporarily suspend the diet again - trying to calorie deprive oneself while sick just makes you sicker and I don't have time or energy to wait to get well.

Yesterday I felt a little thirsty and weak all day. Today, my throat is sore, and I'm stuffed up. This definitely nixes any hope I might have had of seeing wynndfae, ladyofthesea, and alphadeus. The last thing they need is to get sick or carry any germs. Maybe instead of taking a load to Mark's parents, I'll stay home today and try to take it easy. I could still kick this thing if I play nice with myself instead of pushing it.

It seems that, for the first time in six years, I won't be attending Katsucon. Not by choice, mind you, but simply because I failed to get a spot in the Artist Alley. :( I booked my room at the Hyatt ages ago, but now I can't use it. Anyone interested?

Anyone else attending Nekocon and looking to share a room in the Embassy Suites. We actually do have it booked for 4, with 2 double beds, Thursday-Sunday, and still only have the two of us.

This got #1 most popular today on SheezyArt, and diddly on DeviantArt. :P



Also, I forgot about this one entirely:


Yes, I'm still around, sorta.

Not as painterly as my usual style? Blame it on finding out, about 36 hours before the convention, that I'd be going to AnimeBoston after all. Not that a waitlist table opened up, but someone decided to up and give me theirs, having only gotten half of one and deciding he wasn't ready for selling his work. (I managed to upgrade that to a full table on Saturday, but that's getting a bit ahead of myself.)

I've only ever last-minuted one con before - last year's AnimeNext. I can safely say that I'm a lot more prepared than I was then. Despite so little warning, I was able to get everything together and be successful... not that the convention itself helped all that much. If you don't know the story, AnimeBoston is, perhaps, the worst-run convention I've ever been to. ELEVEN HOUR LINES, PEOPLE!@ You can't possibly run a convention double the size of Katsucon, fast approaching the size of Otakon, and not have some degree of flexiblity when your system goes utterly and completely awry. Fail fail fail! I arrived at 9:30am on Friday, having to do the regular registration line for, again, the first time in a year. Getting there that early, nimgrim and I, along with our friend Eric (I can't remember your livejournal!), waited a mere six and a half hours in line! I'll entirely grant that sometimes screw-ups happen, and something you thought would work great actually turns out to suck, but wow... someone should have taken it on themselves to start fixing it either Thursday night or Friday morning!

Whew... that being said, I can't fault most of the rest of the convention for the horrible nightmare that was registration, I guess. Artist alley was well run, and the staff there was nice. I was told that panels and such were enjoyable, at least on Saturday when a good portion of the people had gotten though the line, then come back rested. The convention center was also great - I can see the convention continuing to expand for years there.

( And now, a tremendous timeline - twelve years of my art... see the progress! )

Yeah, I've been quiet for awhile. I have no good excuse.


( pencils and inks for that one here )
( L's version of heaven, pencils only )
( Arash - nimgrim's RP character )
( naughty Zelda pencils - worksafe preview )

If you enter the coupon code "springbunny" at my store, you get $5 off any order of $30 or more.

The slightly leaky toilet that has caused intermittent grief for over a year is finally being repaired. I don't think that would have happened had our hot water heater not given out, though. It'll be nice, after they leave, to enjoy a long, hot shower after two days of lukewarm to frigid bathing. At least the house doesn't look quite like the disaster area it did 20 hours ago - no matter who's coming over, I always clean up, even for repairmen. I think it's part of a paranoia that both Mark and I share, though he seems to have it worse than I do. Right now they're chipping through the cement subflooring for some reason I'm not equipped to fathom. Likely, this toilet hasn't been serviced since the apartment was built and thus has 30+ years of badness lurking beneath.

Conventions, Good:
(My list for the year, thus far.)

Katsucon
February 15-17
Omni Shoreham Hotel
Washington DC

Castle Point Anime Convention
April 13
Stevens Institute of Technology
Hoboken, NJ

AnimeNEXT
June 20-22
Meadowlands Exposition Center / Holiday Inn
Secaucus, NJ

ColossalCon
June 26-29
Hilton Cleveland East / Beachwood
Cleveland, OH

ConnectiCon
August 1-3
Connecticut Convention Center
Hartford, CT

Otakon
August 8-10
Baltimore Convention Center
Baltimore, MD

AnimeUSA
October 10-12
Hyatt Regency Crystal City
Arlington, VA

Zenkaikon
October 17-18
Valley Forge Scanticon Hotel and Conference Center
King of Prussia, PA

Nekocon
November 7-9
Hampton Roads Convention Center
Hampton, VA

Conventions, Bad:
(To which I direct my rage.)

AnimeBoston
March 21-23
Hynes Convention Center
Boston, MA

Conventions, Explanation:

First of all, at the moment, AnimeBoston can bite my ass. True, I don't have enough pride to not go, should the opportunity arise, but damn... I was sitting on their website the moment registration opened and was one of many who were shut out because of an error on their site. Since the Artist Alley filled up in 23 seconds despite this, I'm sure they don't care about those of us who missed out, and certainly I haven't seen any apology to anyone for it. Immediately after, I sent an inquiry about a dealer's room table, even though their information wasn't even posted yet, and got no reply. When it was posted, about a week later, nearly all of the tables were filled before that was posted. I sent a second inquiry, only to get a reply yet another week plus later to say that the tables were filled. This pretty much leaves me with nothing between mid-February and late June. RAGE

I wish I could go further afield, but I just can't figure out a way to get two people, our stuff, and our stock from point A to very far away point B and back in a timely and reasonably inexpensive manner. At least inexpensive enough to make the trip worthwhile. What I need is advice from artists who travel the country for their convention appearances. Are they all attending as guests and getting their tables/rooms/registrations comped?

Room Sharing

Right now, the only conventions where we have a full room are Otakon and Katsucon. Anyone attending the others, we're open to room-sharing, especially with other artists. For most of these, it'd be a maximum of two other people. The exceptions are Connecticon, where we have a room, but it's a king bed (we can bring an inflatable mattress or ask for a rollaway), and Nekocon, where we're in the Embassy Suites with two double beds and a pull-out sleeper sofa, meaning possibly up to four. For AnimeNext, we have a room in the Embassy Suites right next to the convention center, but only for Friday and Saturday nights (not Thursday), and it's a King Suite, but two others could take the pull-out sleeper sofa. We're especially interested in a solid, two-person roommate situation for AnimeUSA, as we're right in the convention hotel for a change.

Otaku Diet (see this post)

I've got a lot of thoughts on this one - looked into printing it as a t-shirt and a poster. The problem is a very risky and expensive initial layout, at the very least for the posters. No one seems to want to pay the $20 for the 13x19 poster I can print here, but in order to bring the price down to $10 or $15 for a 13x19 or 18x24", I'd have to print a run of at least 500. That's a tremendous amount of faith on a single picture. The situation is even worse for t-shirts. No one, simply no one, wants to wear a white t-shirt. I'm willing to give it a try again on using iron-on transfers for dark cloth, but in the past they've always been tricky at best and shirt-ruining at worst. I've hard a hard time stomaching the idea of ordering 500+ t-shirts and laying out several grand to get a halfway decent price per shirt. Introducing t-shirts into the sales mix would also be a stocking nightmare. Can you imagine the space a stack of 500 shirts would take up? Then how would I move them to cons, let alone have table space to sell them? It's quickly getting to the point where I need dealer's room table space.

----

Right now I wish I were napping, or at least working. I can't do either of those things with strange people in the house.

Spending a couple of hours at Mitsuwa on Sunday was enough to inspire this one.

I haven't written for a month and a half now. The New York Anime Festival was uneventful enough to not bother with a convention report, though meeting aimeekitty was nice. I did reasonably well on my diet up until Christmas, at which point things kind of fell apart. I'm scared to look at the scale, so I probably won't until I've been good for awhile longer. I did manage to lose more than 50 pounds last year, though. Now I just need to do better. Both Christmas and New Year's were a lot of fun - it was nice to spend time with nimgrim's parents for one, then ladyofthesea, alphadeus, and many more for the other.

Medical Woes of the Now

Unfortunately, the whole month, and continuing, was marred by health issues. Just after the NYAF, I went to the doctor for what I thought would be a routine prescription renewal. This lead to a saga that had me in for blood tests immediately after and an ultrasound the next day (the bills for these coming to about a grand). It turns out that the excruciating pains I've been getting are neither me being a wuss nor all in my head. I have gallstones - lots of them, and really need surgery to have it removed. A few days ago I had a brief appointment with the surgeon who basically said it needed to be taken out as soon as possible. He sort of nodded, then was replaced by a nurse or assistant or something who cheerfully said, "Let's get this set up!" Then continued with the dread words, "What insurance do you have?"

Of course I said none, because I'm a poor artist bitch who's sinking in debt. Rarely have I seen an expression alter so comically. She went from bright eyed to deer in the headlights/what do I do now, and replied with, "Ooh. I'll just get 'other person'," and scampered from the room. Other person explained that the surgery would have to be paid up front since I had no insurance. If it's done at an ambulatory care facility, the surgeon's fee would be $1500, but she wasn't sure how much the rest would be - probably five or six thousand dollars. If I wanted it done in the actual hospital, it'd be $14,000 or so. Mind you, this is apparently a half-hour procedure and, despite it being fairly major abdominal surgery, you don't even stay overnight unless there are complications. I wish I could charge nearly thirty-thousand dollars an hour for anything I did. That's somewhere up there with printer ink being over $1 a milliliter.

I feel so helpless over everything. Every step I take, I feel like life in general tries to push me back. I'd like to get into a running stride every once in awhile, you know? A solid plan, solid work, a solid future... At least helplessness is making me angry rather than depressed. That's good, isn't it? It gives me strength to keep trying. That, and Mark. He believes in me, and I believe in him. Somehow, this will all work out.

The Post Office can bite my ass

It's bad enough that in this tiny little speck of a town, there is no mail delivery. Whenever I want to pick it up, it's uphill both ways (a steep valley lies between us). What's worse is the string of blunders that have been happening recently. The first I may have already written about, and happened awhile ago, which my first payment to the New York Anime Festival going missing. I still need to get in touch with the police about that. Even if it's only $80, that's still a lot o me. The second - a small package I sent several days before Christmas has not yet made it to its destination in England. Perhaps if I'd sent it standard mail I could understand, but I sent it not Priority, but Express. According to the tracking information, it disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic. Third, and most bile-raising, rage-inducing, they've apparently lost about two weeks' worth of our mail. Between Christmas and two days ago, I simply didn't have a chance to get to the post office during its ridiculously short hours. Under normal circumstances, they'd bundle the mail and put it in a locker, leaving either a key or a yellow "pick this up" slip in the actual box. When I did get a chance to pick it up, there was a yellow slip, but no one could find our mail. It's entirely likely that my Nekocon art show check was in there, as well as who knows how many bills, letters, credit card applications... It's probable at this point that they put the key in the wrong box, and someone else has all of our mail. What can be done about this? Nothing. Wait and hope, I guess. Either they find it, someone returns it, or... who knows?

Unseen Arts

Just a couple of commissions that I haven't put up because they were commissions. Sorry about the smallness and watermarking.

( full images behind the cut )

( Political Matching Quiz... results not shocking )