pumpkin time...

The link will take you to the downloaded image, which actually shows what's going on on the pumpkin. (Here's its actual page.)

So this is this year's pumpkin, featuring the Marauders in their Animagus forms (plus one werewolf). Images from left to right: The back, which says "Up to no good"; the full Moon, Wormtail, & Prongs; Prongs & Moony; Moony & Padfoot; & what it looks like from the porch, thanks to the street light. Roughly.

And here's last year's pumpkin.

Also, if you don't already know, i put up a Marauders Halloween fanfic that is apparently mildly creepy, if nothing else. You can read it on any journals by going back to the entry before this, or you can read it here, as well as on Fan Fiction.net (i've been neglecting it, so i put it up there, too). So please read it & let me know what you think! (Please.)

Think i may try to be Janet for Halloween, from the poem Tam Lin. I do not have a mantle green, nor fair hair (i think that's mentioned?), but it's appropriate & i could kind of maybe do it... I mean, come on, i don't have a Tam Lin either, now do i? :P

The discussion concerning Los Angeles on last night's (Thursday's) new episode of Ace of Cakes worries me. Don't leave Bmore, guys...

I swear, if Food Network ships them out in the middle of the night in a Mayflower truck... HA HA. Not. :|

Towson's theatre company is doing The Crucible. Hopefully Kayleigh & i are going, & will stifle our giggles from every single inside joke ever spawned from that play. "Come down, Mary!" "You're raising up a whore!" And Kate said she did all the bonnets, as well as Ann Putnam's dress.

Was absolutely spacy in Japanese yesterday, & was horrific in German Wednesday. I think i'm worse at German than i ever was at Italian, which is saying a lot. Speaking of Italian, lost my "Ciao!" pin from senior year. No idea where; if it was Philadelphia or the Walters on Sunday. It makes me really sad. Damn pins falling off all the time.

Also went over to the Center for the Arts to look at shows. Stupid me for not going to the Korean one until the third to last day of its showing. Wanjin Kim's work is really, really brilliant; think it's assemblage. She uses a lot of antique things, like antique Korean rice cake stamps. I got close enough to sniff one, which sounds odd, but it smelled really good. In the vein of smells, the smell of Maggie's house followed me all day, i swear. I think it was my pants, which sounds horrifically wrong & laughable, but i couldn't really trace it, even then.

Anyway. I don't think she's on the internet, though, which is the annoying thing about nearly all the shows in the CFA: you see something that makes you essentially go "omg," & then the cards don't have it on them & it's not on the internet anywhere. So yeah. No real way i can show her work, since she has no website. If you put her name into Google, you get someone's Facebook account; if you go to images, it's just pictures of other people with a similar name.

The MFA thesis show & the one in the "Art gallery" (that's its name) changed, & i don't know when that happened, so missed their openings, obviously. The MFA one now is interesting. The one upstairs in the art gallery runs till November 8th; should go see it. It's called Particularities and Abstractions, & features the work of three artists. They're really very amazing.

And, wonder of wonders, at least one of the artists has a website: Christine Gray. Look at Oracle Four; it's amazing. Though moreso in real life. It's so shiny & smooth, probably half because it's on wood & probably half due to whatever medium she used. But seriously, if you can get to the actual show, you should. I kind of stared at all of them. Meanwhile, the girl watchung the gallery was in an argument with someone on the phone concerning the Presidential debate. Forget politics! Look at the smooth art. The other artists, besides Gray, are: WC Richardson, Erling Sjovold (amazing color), & Fiona Ross.

This video & its song keep getting stuck in my head, but they're both really awesome. Does anyone have the song that i could download, maybe? Or Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars"? Maybe? But yeah, now i keep drawing people with their faces obscured by their hair floating/flying around it. It's just brilliant; wonder how they did it. It gets firmly lodged in my head, like during History when i was falling asleep.

So tagged along with the parents because i needed to buy a new wallet. Have been using an old one from when i was little, with an Asian (Korean?) theme to it, but the wear & tear is really taking its toll. The amount of coins already ripped the zip compartment for them, & now, the outside-- think it's silk?-- is really beginning to fade. So i went to Five Below & got a cheap Gryffindor wallet that just barely holds all those coins. Also got a pack of mechanical pencils, just in case. The cashier didn't pay attention to me; the two of them were discussing her new cell phone.

Had gotten a Best Buy gift card in the mail for filling out a quick little survey ($25), so then went there, since it was right next door, & ended up getting two CDs. Saw In This Moment's new CD ("Dream," i think?), & kind of guilted myself into getting it? Also got Beach House's "Devotion." So i have sixty-something cents left... i'm horrible. Consumer.

So, haven't truly listened to "Dream," but... it feels different from their first CD, & i kind of don't like it. Their first one felt like Metal, & Maria (i think that's her name. Cannot remember names) went back & forth between singing smoothly & grating, gutteral, growling singing, as well as screaming that wasn't shrill, but still growling. On this CD, it feels too light, not as heavy. I skipped through song after song, & finally, on the third to last, found a song with the growling. I was alone in the car, so i went, "Yes!"

I mean, granted, i've yet to listen to it all the way through, but... it just doesn't feel like it has the same "oomph" that the first CD had. I really liked Maria's ability to switch between smooth & gutteral, which seems to not be showcased as much on the newest CD. Just a lot of smooth singing. And the instruments sound lighter, not as Metal-like.

As for the Beach House album, keep listening to the entire thing over & over, now that i've ripped it. They're a Baltimore-based band, so that doubled my interest. They're classified as "Alternative," & maybe one could draw parallels to other bands/singers/&c., or similarities. They make slow, quiet, realxed-sounding music with a airy, soft vocals. Slightly akin to Private Eleanor? A tiny bit like Regina Spektor or Tori Amos at times, vocal-wise? I know it's undesireable to list such parallels, but figure i may as well get there before anyone else does, & says it in a negative way. (Maybe a bit like Cat Power? Almost got one of her CDs, too; don't know why i didn't. Oh well.)

But it's really very nice. It has a nice feel to it, which is reinforced by the art & design of the CD & tiny pamphlet. Kind of reminds me of her work.

Have been keeping DB waiting; very bad of me.

But we who have need
of those huge mysteries
we who can sometimes
draw up from
wellsprings of sadness
rejoicing and progress
how could we exist
without them?

Rainer Maria Rilke. From Duino Elegies, the very first Elegy.So not only are there no jokes in heaven, but i'd assume no art, as well. Unless you like pointless, sappy, pasty, Kinkadean kind of junk. If heaven is supposed to be the aspiration & hope of mankind on earth, then why does it seem more deplorable & pointless than hell?

And read about this today:

Late, but:

He is the one named Sailor Koon.

Third time giving blood; fwee. Into a baggie it goes.

Meanwhile... DeviantArt is mad. Seriously. Someone suggested that maybe there's a group of people just going around reporting Deviations, & i'm inclined to agree, although it'd be nice if the artists were given a moment's notice, maybe to defend their work? Last i checked, we had freedom of fucking speech.

The most recent thing that happened was the deletion of yet another thing that was already under a mature content warning, & marked as sexual. (Question, DA: What's the point of that option if you delete everything with sexual content in?) It was a comic of Calvin & Hobbes, only in the future, with Calvin & Susie making out, & the idea was they were obviously going to do it, but even moreso was that Calvin had obviously lost touch with Hobbes. It was a little disturbing, but really very sad.

Long story short, it got deleted. Now, i understand the whole "minors" thing to an extent, to try & deter pedophiliac freaks, but they get off on a picture of a little girl fully clothed, so. But apparently, one cannot depict a fictional character who never comes of age in the original storyline, or who only does so in the last episode. Which is ridiculous.

Amd let's be honest: the people we consider "minors" are fucking. There it is, blunt & vulgar. Fourteen-year-olds are having sex; wake up. I'm not saying that's completely right or whatever, but far be it from me to police anyone else's life. The fact of the matter is that puberty hits & guess what! That means your body can become sexually active! Imagine that! And when does puberty typically hit? Hm, let's think...

Fine, it makes sense with the pedos. But on the whole, it doesn't make sense in reality. A pedo is going to get off on anything related to their thing, & you can't really police them. There are, apparently, people who get away with posting entirely unartistic photos on genitalia just for the hell of it. Oh, & people who do pictures with masturbation in them that DA doesn't take down, despite their rules. It's like they decide what to ignore or not. Fine, ok, they can't be everywhere; they don't know it exists unless you report that. I know that. My point is, the rash of recent deletions have largely been undeserved. They were tasteful, or not showing anything. The Calvin one-- it was all implied! He wasn't raping her; they were doing it willingly! They looked like high schoolers, & by then, you know, quite a few people have had sex. Older people may still consider someone a child until a certain point, but that doesn't change the fact that, really, by middle school, you're already thinking about certain things, whether you act on them or not. Come puberty, it's largely inevitable that you are going to start thinking about sex, unless you are asexual (& then you don't care).

So really, they're being extremely unrealistic about this whole thing. You can't police the freaks. You can't keep people from having sex. You have to realize that people aren't going to wait till they're "legal" to have sex. Welcome to reality.

And what if someone wants to use it as commentary, how they feel about things? Do they get reported & screwed over (HA) too? Sex & art kind of end up going together; maybe it's just post-Freud thinking, but they're very much intertwined. Not all those nude paintings were pirely artistic; men would buy them & show them to their male friends. Painted porn, essentially. Hence the feministic approach in art of challenging the male gaze. And then there's people who explore that sort of thing, or the nude, & they get screwed over (ie Scott G's senior show), because people can't distinguish, they get up in arms, they can't handle the fact that people do these things. Instead of going after the crude things, they go after the things that really aren't that bad at all.

And yes, i realize that it all comes down to individuals & differences are legion. I still think it's pathetic, childish, & infringes on freedom of speech. To quote Anonymous (they come up with good quotes, don't they :p): "Censorship offends me."

So i've been anxious about this, because am just waiting for someone to report it. And so i probably won't put up Toriko's drawing when i finally send it to her, because of the sexual overtones in that. (My god, it makes us RuFeg shippers seem like such pervs, doesn't it?) Nevermind that it's two consenting adults, it's implied, & you don't see a thing. I could probably put it under a mature content filter & it would still get deleted, & i'd have no opportunity to defend it. Because that's what's been happening. Who cares about the history of art; who cares about it being implied, &c. &c.? Can't take it, don't like it, must censor it, must get rid of it; bad, bad, bad. Pathetic.

come find me
i am very sad


The reply:

I found you.
Please don't be sad anymore.
I am giving you a hug (on paper).


Something like that. :)


....thank you. I wanted to take it with me, but decided against it...