...Or rather, pictures of sketches taken with the digital camera because the scanner would take to long to set up. I haven't put any artwork whatsoever on my journal even though I've been making lots of it. So, here's some sketches/doodles!

( 5 images )

The rest I have needs to be scanned in because the camera makes the pictures too dark...


----

And questions that I need suggestions for: How can I send someone a 132 image mood theme that is not in a .zip file and so they don't have to download each picture individually? Is it possible to send and unzipped folder? There is a person who is having trouble with my .zip files and for some reason the person doesn't get the entire theme when they download the full version .zip file and sometimes the animations are screwed up. I'm at a loss for answers right now...

Today I tried playing DDR on the Nintendo Wii for the first time. And I conclude after an hour of playing that I suck horribly at it. I could get the foot patterns for the slower songs, but the wiimote and the nunchuck keep missing on the screen for the hand controls so I could never get high combos. And when I put the song selection on random mode, I kept getting a song called "99 red balloons." Egad! That was murder for a total beginner like me O_O

Hopefully in a couple of months I will make another post saying that I've improved a lot.

--

Today when I logged into my Sheezyart page, my inbox was filled with messages because someone took some time and favored all the artwork I put on there so far, even the totally crappy ones. O_o That is so weird.

I went on a short road trip with my family yesterday to visit Waimea, a place we would pass through often but never actually stop to visit. We went to visit scenic points on the way there. The trip left me exhausted although it was only one day long!

Like usual, I took a crapload of photos, but I won't post most of them because I don't want to bore you all ^^ so...

( 4 really large pictures- NOT dial-up friendly )

Well I didn't get as mad as the title indicates, but this morning as I was driving to my dad's apartment I stopped to let a car turn left into the opposite lane. At the time there were NO cars in the opposite lane, and I had at least 10 cars following me, and I stopped and waited to turn, but the other drive didn't turn! The person just waved back and sat there and even when the cars from the previous traffic light starting driving down the left lane the person STILL didn't move. With all the drivers getting angry behind me, and since the left lane was full of cars so the person couldn't turn anyways I decided to just leave that driver there, and as I took my foot off the break, the driver took their's off the break and was going to go too, but I saw that and stopped, and the driver stopped too and I was like WTH?! And the driver didn't move again, and so I just took off and then the driver turned in front of the car behind me since by then the opposite traffic broke a little.

I was so tempted to yell at that driver out the window but that would be pretty pointless.

Yesterday some children were playing outside of my dad's apartment window, and they kept hitting the glass louvers of the window with their ball. My dad didn't want the louvers to break, and so he told them to stop hitting their ball against the window. The children went away a half hour later and right after the children left, two women were outside my dad's apartment "calling him out" by talking trash. I have no idea what the children told those women, but they were outside the window talking really loudly saying things like "oh he's so tough when we're not around, but now that we're here no one's coming out" and "why don't he just come out and say it to our face?" Their efforts were futile as my dad was sleeping by the time they came down, and he would never bother fighting with people.

Some people here are incredibly immature! I can't believe the adults here would stoop to such a low level as to solve everything by fighting, and this behavior is passed on to their children, who show it to the world without fear. I don't know what the women's problem was for just telling their children not to hit a window, and they shouldn't have been standing there only now, they should have been watching their children the entire time! The two women outside the apartment were the same two that have been causing trouble for everyone in the apartment complex and they have been stealing my dad's parking spaces when he is taken to the doctor. Most of the fights here involved at least one of those two women, and they usually pick physical fights with men, and when it gets really bad and the police come, they start playing the "innocent victim" that was unfairly picked on. They got a couple of men arrested at the apartment doing that. They also have the children that like to pick fights with other children around the complex and they swear and talk trash about people just like their parents.

Most of the time the adults choose to fight after 6pm, because the manager of the apartment complex is gone by then. The police is called at least once a week here and since my dad has moved in, we have seen about 6 families evicted from the apartment for fighting so bad the police had to be called. I think the rest were evicted for not paying rent, which is another rediculous thing. The rent at Hale Hualoa is incredibly cheap compared to the other apartments in the area, but according to some of the workers at the apartment, some tenants are behind on their rent by over 4 months and those people said they have very little money, and yet, these same people have enough money to smoke a pack of cigarettes a day. Well I can just tell how much they value cigarettes over the rest of their lives. They can trash themselves all they want, but they should know how to behave with other adults. If I am correct, since their plan A has failed, they will probably start to spread rumors about my dad being some trash talking person who said blah blah blah about so and so and so... But their problem with that is that we talk to no one in the apartments except for the manager, and no one really has talked to us. They could very well start gossip about us, but we don't care at all since we don't have any interest in establishing a "social life" with anyone there, and we probably will never hear it, unless the women purposely stand in front of the window and talk really loud, which makes them look silly and deaf.

Blah, still feeling a little sick. Found out that my computer doesn't trust hotlinkfiles.com anymore and won't let me access the site because it thinks it's a virus or something, or it is a known source of viruses (probably because of what people tend to upload to it). I may just end up signing up for a new file host.

The mamegoma theme is finished although none of the angry themes were animated, it started out as a non-animated theme, but I went back and animated most of the files, so now it's a predominately animated theme. Perhaps pixel theming them was not the best idea, I should have gone with a resized version for smoother lines.



I wanted to do a just-for-fun animation that had nothing to do with mood themes and so I drew a little fan animation of Nick's ninja cat:

( short little .gif battle )

The mini donkey theme has been posted! click here to go see it :) --> Mini Donkey Theme

I hope hotlinkfiles.com didn't go down or anything, I haven't been able to access the site for several days now :/ I used it to host my admin file versions of my mood themes, and I liked it because it showed how many people downloaded each file. I use two file hosts, one for small mood theme files (aka custom mood theme version) and the other for large ones. But I also signed up for two in case one site went down, such as in this case.


----

It was very voggy today, and my eyes felt very itchy from time to time. The wind blew all the volcano smoke to Hilo for the third day in a row, and this morning it was particularly awful. At least it cleared up a bit by the afternoon. Still it was very humid and hot today, a paradise for mosquitoes.

The dirty, voggy rain left brown water spots on the windshield of my car, and I have to wipe it off with a paper towel because it's dried on. I just washed my car for the very first time about two weeks ago T_T and I swear it is dirtier now than the 7 months I didn't wash the car.

My brother wants me to play a really hilarious videogame called "Lego Star Wars" with him. It's a Star Wars video game made out of lego characters :p I'm going to go play with him for the rest of the night and see how much mischief we can get into.

Question asked a thousand times: Do the creators of fan art have any legal rights to the fan art they create?

One of the reasons I dislike making photo mood themes is because of the copyright issues associated with taking pictures that I didn't personally create. Some people say it's okay and you can't get in trouble because I'm not doing it for profit, but there are those who vehemently argue that you can't take images or make fan art of anything without the creator's permission. I don't feel happy or okay taking pictures from movies or such and I did not want to make that Lady and the Tramp photo theme for the reason that the images were created by someone else. Well, the only exception is making the Maple Story dragon, I wanted to do that one, but I got rid of the download links and most images within a week. And I know 90% of mood theme communities on LJ create and distribute photo themes without troubles.

On the other hand there are issues with the creation or use of fan art and if you are legally able to do anything with it. I consider my pixel made mood themes to fall into the same category as fan art, and I haven't put any disclaimers or anything stating the obvious that I don't own the anime that I'm making the pixel art of (when I'm doing one based on an anime), but I think I'll start sticking in a little text file with the disclaimer. A certain person told me that it is not okay to make fan art period, some say it's only if the creator okays it, but they can still sue if they want to. I assumed that if magazines and mangas published people's fan art, then the creator okayed the creation of fan art. And I thought that creators were thrilled to see fan art because it showed that they have fans, although some have gone too far and got sued.

I just got into an argument with someone over this and now I want to hear some people's opinions about this. I still want to draw mood themes, but I guess I'll just have to slap disclaimers all over the place.

------------------
Speaking of mood themes...

The mamegoma pixel mood theme I've been working on keeps crashing the video card on my 7-year old laptop. Right now I've made about 100 of them, and when I have them displayed in table format on my internet explorer, the video card freezes and my laptop has to be rebooted. The laptop was fine until I hit 80 mamegomas, and then the display started freezing up. I guess I'm going to have to hide portions of the table so not all of them are displayed at once.

I only make pixel themes on there because the images were small and I only made about 55 max per set without any problems. My laptop does not connect to the internet anymore because when it used to it would be very slow and my sister's husband killed it when he had it. It's a Windows XP with only SP1 now because it lost SP2 when the laptop had to be restored to factory settings, so I can't really install any current programs on it because they need Xp SP2 or higher. It can't even run my current version of Paint Shop Pro! But I use it to make mood themes during the day because no computers at my dad's apartment have PaintShopPro on it.

I've finished the mood set for the Tokyo Marble Chocolate Mini donkey theme, now all I have to do is finish duplicating the files for the admin counsel version and it should be posted by the end of this week.

Panda Express opened here 10 days ago, and it has some tasty Chinese food, although I'm sure it is not genuine Chinese food. There is a giant inflated panda in the parking lot that I took a picture of.

( two pictures )

Today I went outside to try and get some more photos of birds, but it started raining every time I stepped outside so the birds would fly for cover and I couldn't take pictures of them. Instead I offer a picture of my two-headed pineapple plant, because plants can't run away so easily...

( pineapple )

I also spotted a female anole lurking on the vine covered bush, and so I took pictures of that as well. I have gathered a nice collection of anole pictures, some which I have posted on deviantart, but many are on my computer as picture screen savers. It seems as if every time I have a bad time getting bird photos, the lizards come out and hang around as if to say "take pictures of me instead!"

For the past two years my little vegetable garden has been a disaster due to one thing after another. If it's not slugs and snails, then it's grasshoppers, mildew, drought, flooding, birds, cats eating the leaves off, aphids, and weeds. I've spent so much time and energy trying to deal with all of those things and still my plants would die.

Well since December I haven't been doing much with my garden at all, and I left my half-dead onions in the ground next to my poor cherry tomato plant and just called it quits until the weather turned more favorable. The weeds are very high and I'm sure there are African Snails lurking around.

But you know what? My plants are actually doing better now that I left them to fend for themselves O_O. The cherry tomato plant is creeping along the ground through the weeds instead of in it's tomato cage, yet I have never seen so many cherry tomatoes on a single plant I've ever grown! And no slugs have eaten a single tomato even though they are lying right on the ground. And my sweet onions are alive and strong and are the biggest I've ever seen them, and I have three papaya plants dumping papayas on me. And my biggest shocker was when I found two pineapples growing out of my pineapple plant. TWO! Although they will be much smaller than the store ones. My rosemary plant that I swear was dead came back to life somehow and is now three times bigger than when I last remembered looking it. And my parsley plant that a cat nearly killed is a monster now.

I'm totally perplexed by this. Perhaps I should have abandoned my garden from the start ^^

Dear xstasea,
I don't really know how to tell you this, but our horoscope doesn't match.
I think I realized it when I quoted Santa under the bus and I saw you carve your initials into my avocado plant.
I'm sure you're mongolic enough to understand that Extreme Home Makeover sucks.
I'm returning your old lottery coupons to you, but I'll keep your grades from college as a memory.
You should also know that I never liked a new life as a clone.
Go burn,
-Yvonne-


( O_O Before you kill me... )

I meant to post this last night, but the thunder was right over my house and I didn't want it to fry my computer if a lightning bolt hit the house (I didn't even finish my post last night) Oh well...

I finished my fruits basket wallpaper that I said I was going to color sometime back in March. It's the same one I posted on DA two days ago XD

( pic )

-----------------------------------------------------------

As xstasea reminded me, the civil defense actually made a color code system for the volcanic fumes, and yesterday it was code "purple", which was supposed to be the highest alert. Usually it is code red/orange around volcano which is about mid range on the chart. The atmosphere is MUCH better today because it rained all last night (probably acid rain though...)

-----------------------------------------------------------

Okay, off to help with more tax work! I get to learn how to fill out amortization and depreciation forms today (form 4562).

The sulfur dioxide coming out of the volcano (or rather, the side vents) has become so bad that the civil defense evacuated all towns that are in the direct vicinity of the volcano and vents. The wind is also blowing the vog towards populated areas. My sister lives in Glenwood, which is not too far from Volcanoes National Park. Although Glenwood has not been evacuated, she must be hit pretty hard with the vog and poison fumes.


Horray for the random thunderstorm that hit today!

Today was the Merrie Monarch Parade, which concludes the week of Merrie Monarch festivals and contests. My younger brother is in the Hilo Intermediate Band and he had to march in the parade today, so, we left the house at 9:15 to go drop him off at the parade meeting place and then we found some parking and waited for the parade to start at 10:45.

There were so many entries in the parade this year! The parade was supposed to end at 12:00 noon, but it actually ended around 12:40. I took over 200 photographs on my digital camera and I think I got sunburned standing in the sun for two hours. I didn't take photos of all the entries in the parade, but I took lots of pictures on the Merrie Monarch Royal court that rode on horseback. The weather was being its random self and it rained in the morning but by 11:00 am, it was sunny and hot.

We had a hard time getting out of the parking lot after the parade, and we were stuck in a traffic line for 20 minutes in the court parking lot because everyone was trying to leave at once. We didn't arrive at my brother's pick-up place until 1:15pm, and we didn't get home until 2. We passed the parking lot that the horses were being kept in after the parade, and the parking stalls were covered in horse poo! Really smelly!

I spent a couple of hours on the computer so far organizing the digital images. I'm going to discard the photos that suck, and I'm going to crop the ones that don't suck, and later post them in my LJ scap book for people to look at if they are really bored :) (I'm sure parade pictures don't interest most people)

Basically the only way off Hawaii is to take a plane. Earlier this week Aloha airlines shut down due to bankruptcy, and that left many travelers scrambling to get tickets for another plane. The other dominant airlines here that go to the mainland, which are ATA, Hawaiian and Go! airlines picked up the slack, but today ATA airlines shut down due to bankruptcy as well, and now there are hundreds of people stuck in the airports trying to get to and from the state.

I feel so bad for them because most of the people there lost the value of their tickets, and it's not cheap to fly to and from here either. Plus the Merrie Monarch Festival held in Hilo every year depended on the airlines to carry the hula groups over. Luckly most of the groups made it here without trouble, but the tourists attending the festival most likely have to fight the crowds to fly home :(

I passed many grouchy touristy people here lately and I'm wondering if it's because of the airlines.

In addition there were hundreds of jobs lost this week due to the airlines shutting down, and with many of the cruise ships pulling out of Hawaii in May, I have a feeling the state's economy is going to be hit really bad. As if stuff here wasn't expensive as it is, and enough people are out of work -_-

Back in the beginning of March, one of the hardware stores had a really good sale on lawn mowers, but they were all sold out so my mom took a rain check. Our lawn grass was starting to get pretty tall since it started raining again, and the guys at the hardware store said new shipments would arrive within a week (we didn't mow the lawn since January, but the drought stopped the grass from growing for a while). But a week passed, then two weeks, and no lawn mowers were brought in.

The lawn got so tall over the last couple of weeks that I stepped on a cane toad in the grass and I didn't know it was there until it wiggled under my feet and hopped away! O_O Not to mention that the cats could actually stalk birds across our lawn without being detected.

This past Tuesday which is about 4 months total of not mowing the lawn, my mom finally gave in and just weed-whacked the entire front yard. And then yesterday (Wednesday) we got a call from the hardware store saying that the lawn mowers came in. My mom was pissed to say the least. She's been holding out on weed whacking the front lawn since the day she rain-checked on that lawn mower and the day after she decides to do it, the darn thing comes in.

Isn't it funny how some things happen that way?

Blah, I don't want to get into it. Title says enough -_-

I'm going to bed, comment to you all tomorrow!