cleolinda: (katniss)
1) Bella Swan: vampiring better than you since *checks watch* 2008. This is the same teaser that ran in front of The Hunger Games, so you may have already seen it (stop poaching Katniss's deer, BELLA). Read more... )

2) Meanwhile, shit got real: The Hunger Games' box office crushes the Twilight movies. All of them.

3) I seem to have hit a hypomanic upswing; mine, as I've explained before, are pretty mild. The only thing someone would really notice from the outside is that I'm a bit more upbeat, enthusiastic, and talkative--but when a movie I've really been looking forward to comes out, that doesn't seem out of place. (Honestly, I've started wondering--as I've said before--if you can trigger manic moods. If nothing else, I think it suddenly being SUMMER IN THE MIDDLE OF MARCH gave me an overdose of natural light, and that may have caused it as well. As I recall, my most pronounced upswings are almost always in the spring and summer.) Otherwise, I'm outwardly calm, but as I've gotten older, I've been edging further and further into mild mania, and the happy creative bursts have been "evolving" into something less comfortable. The upside at the lower hypomanic end is that I feel happy and creative (verging on hypergraphic); at the high, verging-on-manic end, I feel overcaffeinated, impatient, and irritable, I have all these ideas but I can't concentrate or focus, I have a hard time sleeping, and I don't want to eat. I have a sample of BPAL's Safari blend, and a dab on the back of each hand (so I can smell it while I'm typing) seems to have centered me a bit. Once I was able to actually focus, I got 1600 words written in a couple of hours last night (there's your hypergraphia), but it took me all day to be able to concentrate that long.

On the other hand, you get wackadoo flights of fancy like the mandatory Panem TV schedule, and like this:

@cleolinda: WHY IS THIS STILL HAPPENING RT @NikkiFinke: Hugh Dancy To Star In NBC Series ‘Hannibal’

@cleolinda: Look, save some time. Modern-day Sherlock Holmes hunts Hannibal Lecter. In a dystopia. With a vampire. An alien vampire.

@cleolinda: The alien vampire is on the run from a beauty pageant to the death. Also, Sherlock is a werewolf. His brother is a steampunk faerie.

@writingfreak88: No alien ninja turtles?

Read more... )



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cleolinda: (Default)
1) Bella Swan: vampiring better than you since *checks watch* 2008. This is the same teaser that ran in front of The Hunger Games, so you may have already seen it (stop poaching Katniss's deer, BELLA). Read more... )

2) Meanwhile, shit got real: The Hunger Games' box office crushes the Twilight movies. All of them.

3) I seem to have hit a hypomanic upswing; mine, as I've explained before, are pretty mild. The only thing someone would really notice from the outside is that I'm a bit more upbeat, enthusiastic, and talkative--but when a movie I've really been looking forward to comes out, that doesn't seem out of place. (Honestly, I've started wondering--as I've said before--if you can trigger manic moods. If nothing else, I think it suddenly being SUMMER IN THE MIDDLE OF MARCH gave me an overdose of natural light, and that may have caused it as well. As I recall, my most pronounced upswings are almost always in the spring and summer.) Otherwise, I'm outwardly calm, but as I've gotten older, I've been edging further and further into mild mania, and the happy creative bursts have been "evolving" into something less comfortable. The upside at the lower hypomanic end is that I feel happy and creative (verging on hypergraphic); at the high, verging-on-manic end, I feel overcaffeinated, impatient, and irritable, I have all these ideas but I can't concentrate or focus, I have a hard time sleeping, and I don't want to eat. I have a sample of BPAL's Safari blend, and a dab on the back of each hand (so I can smell it while I'm typing) seems to have centered me a bit. Once I was able to actually focus, I got 1600 words written in a couple of hours last night (there's your hypergraphia), but it took me all day to be able to concentrate that long.

On the other hand, you get wackadoo flights of fancy like the mandatory Panem TV schedule, and like this:

@cleolinda: WHY IS THIS STILL HAPPENING RT @NikkiFinke: Hugh Dancy To Star In NBC Series ‘Hannibal’

@cleolinda: Look, save some time. Modern-day Sherlock Holmes hunts Hannibal Lecter. In a dystopia. With a vampire. An alien vampire.

@cleolinda: The alien vampire is on the run from a beauty pageant to the death. Also, Sherlock is a werewolf. His brother is a steampunk faerie.

@writingfreak88: No alien ninja turtles?

Read more... )



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cleolinda: (Default)
I have a ton of catching up to do, but I slipped into a research/rewrite/productivity rabbit hole and didn't want to come out for a few days. So, here is several days' worth of linkspam, although I tried to stick to the essentials: Read more... )


I cut several news items for time (space?), but I'll see if I can't work them into the next spam, assuming one happens in a timely fashion.



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cleolinda: (Default)
I have a ton of catching up to do, but I slipped into a research/rewrite/productivity rabbit hole and didn't want to come out for a few days. So, here is several days' worth of linkspam, although I tried to stick to the essentials: Read more... )

I cut several news items for time (space?), but I'll see if I can't work them into the next spam, assuming one happens in a timely fashion.



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So sleepy

Jul. 19th, 2011 10:27 pm
cleolinda: (galadriel helpful)
The linkspam is up a bit later than I had planned, but I had some very important business today.

@cleolinda: House of Bark CBO at a business breakfast http://twitpic.com/5simcd

@cleolinda: BARK BARK BARK RT @LJmysticowl: Chief Barking Officer?


House of Bark CBO at a business breakfast on Twitpic


Read more... )



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cleolinda: (black ribbon2)
From Saturday: New Secret Life of Dolls, in which a sparklepire finds out exactly for whom the bell tolls. Looking at my calendar, I'm thinking we'll have the next installment on Saturday (as usual), and then we'll skip the next week, because that's Harry Potter and I have a podcast to do on Saturday and I don't think anyone will be paying attention to anything else anyway. Unless there are unexpectedly high number of Potter non-fans here who want counter-programming?

Meanwhile, I fell into a gigantic plot hole over the weekend and realized that the central premise of the first half of the novel (the first Black Ribbon novel) doesn't make any sense. I won't get into specifics, but it came down to an anguished writer-wail of "Wait--but--why wouldn't he tell her? OH, FFFFFFFFF--"

The thing is, I'd been sitting there trying to jam together puzzle pieces that didn't fit for--I don't know, months, probably. I just kept telling myself that I had all these nice, shiny scenes I had created--some of them independent of the others--and that if I just thought about it hard enough, my Powers of Logic would force them into place. And then I finally ran into the one failure of logic that made the whole thing collapse. So I'm opening a fresh Word document (I save every variation of everything, so it's not like I lose anything by experimenting) and just talking it out. So far, it's... actually going really well. I got something like 4000 words done today, and about 2000 on Saturday. It's kind of liberating, in fact, to just be like, "Fuck it, I'll just start over." I mean, there are older bits that will get absorbed into the new as I go. But at least I'm not trying to pound the same square pegs into round plot holes anymore. So... I've got that going for me, I guess.

Linkspam! Read more... )



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cleolinda: (Default)
New Secret Life of Dolls thataway. And when you're done, here is the back story on [spoiler].

Meanwhile, I didn't quite grasp this fact the last time I mentioned it, but [personal profile] foresthouse is having her keratoconus eye surgery on Thursday, not some vague indefinite "soon." If you've ever wanted to send me money for writing about movies or dolls or linkspam or what have you--please think about sending it to her instead; her PayPal address is emilyesse @gmail .com (take out the spaces). I mean, there are so many of you here that five dollars would help, if you could. If you'd rather send me money, I'm dailydigest @yahoo .com (and I will turn around and give it to her). And [personal profile] foresthouse herself writes[profile] ask_deadpool, she co-founded and works on the North American Discworld Convention (NADWCON), and she's my agent and she needs to be able to see to do these things and I don't know what else to do. Except "write faster," maybe.

... I've just now found out that my other grandmother is in the hospital after having been in a car accident. It sounds like she's going to be okay, but she did break some ribs, and they've put her in ICU because of her age.

What's that, Tiny Tim? You need a new crutch? I'm sorry, all I have tonight is linkspam. It's a lot of good stuff, but pretty much without commentary because I'm a little wrung out at the moment.

Read more... )




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cleolinda: (galadriel decipher)
New Secret Life of Dolls thataway. We've had three new entries so far and the read-through is updated, if you need to catch up on those (Christmas II is the first of the new ones). I'm trying to decide which day is best to update on--I'm trying to space them out with some kind of regularity. I was doing them on Saturdays, but I'm not sure if people actually see them on the weekends. Monday seems like a terrible day because, as someone suggested, people are busy catching up. Tuesdays, maybe? Although... if people learn to expect them on Saturdays, maybe it's not a problem. I don't know.

In case you're wondering, it's not that I got tired of the series or forgot about it for nine months. It's that I had a massive block as to how to make those last three entries work. I would sit and pick at the drafts every other week or so, and just... nothing. That last one, I pretty much ended up rewriting the entire thing from scratch the other week. It happens. And if I have to wait nine months for something not-crap to occur to me, well... there it is.

The good news is, I have the next seven entries either written or mostly written, and shit, as Mark would say, is about to get real.


Meanwhile, it's an "I see this working out well for you" kind of day on the movie news front: Linkspam! )



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cleolinda: (Default)
I spent yesterday gleefully researching, and today, I... crashed a bit. Mood is high, though. I'm just kind of sleepy and scattered.

So, instead, I went and read through Mark Reads Harry Potter--the Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire blogs, at least. I'd kind of vaguely heard of it back when he was doing Mark Reads Twilight, and--God bless, but I was a bit Twilit-out. ("Even you?" ESPECIALLY me, people.) And quite honestly, it's way more fun to watch someone enjoy good books chapter by chapter than it is to watch them be appalled by bad ones. (Wait, is it? Then what have I been doing? Sudden existential crisis is sudden.) He's blogging a chapter or two of whichever book each day, so basically you're watching him read it in real time, and--well, the way I described it on Twitter was, "It's like Horrify the Twilight Noob with something that's actually good." Because someone linked me to it the other day when Mark got to the Third Task in the Triwizard Tournament in GOF and his head summarily exploded (complete with Gary Oldman gif), and that's the floor I came in on. And was rewarded when, later that day, he hit the Riddle cemetery and What Happens There. Never have the words "CEDRIC WAS A HUFFLEPUFF" carried so much despair. So basically, I laughed my ass off, but it's also great to relive the experience of reading the books for the first time by watching someone else do it. The most recent chapter blog, actually, is a very profound explanation of what the Harry Potter books have come to mean to him personally.

Also, he's on Twitter, and was very happy to see folks I sent over there. If nothing else, go start where I did, it won't take you long.

Also-also: Don't you dare go spoil him. Not even "I can't wait for you to get to chapter ##." I want him to be destroyed by the next three books the way the rest of us were: properly.

Linkspam! Read more... )


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cleolinda: (Default)
A few things of interest (or not):

The Christmas village on the back of our piano


A less artistic overhead shot

A darkened street

My festive sleeve, which I managed not to set on fire or trail through the dip (you can also see my moonstone ring)




@alliancesjr: @cleolinda This makes me think of pre-1960 attitudes towards women and body parts. One of these days you're going to show us an *gasp* ANKLE

@cleolinda: @alliancesjr http://twitpic.com/uvgzt  

@queenanthai: @cleolinda You HOOR.


Lucy at the party

What I got at the swap:




The little china cup is actually a strainer that goes in the large cup; that's a wooden spoon sitting in it. The three teas are jasmine, green, and black, and there are little compartments in the box for the teas and the metal strainer. All of this is pleasing to me, particularly since I've been drinking my tea out of a coffee mug.

And for those who asked about "movie that will be made of certain book I was buying," I gave Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (movie version to star Natalie Portman), plus a guide to zombie survival.


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cleolinda: (lolcat)
It's been a bad week, in terms of the depression thing. I'm just at a point where I'm afraid to talk about it. I finally let my mother in on the severity of it, and she immediately went into I JUST WANT TO FIX IT mode. And she knows she did, and she knows she can't. BUT OMG IS THERE ANYTHING SHE CAN DO TO FIX IT? NO REALLY, IS THERE? I've made about six different attempts at this paragraph and backspaced them all. My inner Elinor is flaring up and I'm afraid to say anything about how I feel now, because mostly I feel moldy and selfish and unmotivated on the best of days, and hellaciously cranky/stupidly weepy on the worst. And I am so, so afraid that if I don't post regularly enough (mmm, aged news! Delicious), readers are going to wander away, but I know I have to hold off if that's what I need to do. And meanwhile, I want to talk about this the way I usually talk about depression, but I just--can't. I don't know. Maybe I'll do a voice post or something--I feel like y'all would need to hear from my actual tone of voice that I'm not falling to pieces over this. It's just... heavy.

And please know that even when I'm not posting, I'm flagging stories for later, not all of which I even end up using. So really, I am keeping up with things, and if I don't compile a linkspam, you can still see what's going on there, if you want.

Re: Tonner SDCC exclusives: They're apparently going to be selling whatever's leftover on the direct site, so I think I'm going to try that (or eBay) rather than ask an unknowable number of readers to try to track down a slightly variant Tonner Edward. As much as I appreciate y'all offering--and, I mean, I did ask--I'm just not sure how that would not end up being a total clusterfuck, since no one would know if anyone else had managed to get one, and we'd end up, with, like, seven.

Also: they're going to have a Black Canary exclusive as well.

Also-also: I think I have found the Uhura I want.

Linkspam: Yes, I *did* hear about the getting kinda-hit by a cab thing )


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cleolinda: (reiko)
Re: the SDCC exclusive Tonner Edward variant: I think my problem here isn't OMG IT'S A TWILIGHT DOLL I MUST HAVE IT; it's that I love incorporating stuff into the Secret Life stories. And "stuff" often gets expensive, although not always--some of the best bits have been small reader gifts (The Littlest Cowboy Hat, for example), or stuff I found around the house (the dessert fork for pitching the ponies' grass), or old toys from my closet (the ponies themselves). I mean, there are dolls I want for myself that I haven't bought because I couldn't justify the cost (even crazy-fantastic bargains) by thinking of a way to incorporate them--but I see something that makes me go HOLY SHIT I HAVE TO PUT THAT IN THE STORY and it's like my brain just shuts down. I mean, I saw Super Special Exclusive Legolas with Cloak on eBay and fought for that thing to the $40 death AND STILL GOT IT FOR HALF WHAT IT USUALLY GOES FOR, SUCKAAAAAS. It's kind of my equivalent of "SQUIRREL!"

But I am trying to talk myself down off the Gratuitous Edward Variant ledge because: Alice. I have to have Alice. I can't not have Alice. I have to bring Alice's awesome to The Shelf. I can't blow this kind of money on a character I already have in a slightly different shirt and afford an Alice. So there's that. I... I'll have to see a picture of the variant Edward, I guess. *hangs head*

Oh, by the way, we have a reader question about dolls--where to find good sites for accessories for 4" figures?

Oh, and my mother has found someone who wants to buy the plates. Not the mugs yet, though.

Linkspam )


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cleolinda: (Default)
I feel really crappy, probably because the weather's been hideous for several days now, but it's sunny now, so here's an early linkspam so I can go recharge my epidermal solar panels.

(Re: Yesterday's Secret Life: There are a ton of awesome reader-made icons sprinkled through the comments; The Littlest Hat is courtesy of MaggieCat; and TLE is not technically napping [sparklepires don't sleep, if you will recall], so he has actually stopped for a Q-tip snack break, if you look closely. Also: Let's have a big hand for Squeakers the Cat-Toy Stunt Mouse.)

Linkspam )


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cleolinda: (galadriel decipher)
A few things:

I think I gave the wrong impression when I talked about my closet the other day--it's not Confessions of a Shopaholic up in there; it's filled with fifteen (or more) years of cheap junk. The "purses and handbags" are, like, $20 woven satchels or totes from a couple of local places, not $1500 Prada bags or something. And I have a habit of stashing away old odds and ends--the scarf nobody wanted, the ribbons from opened gifts or old dresses, the old green vase cluttering up the kitchen counter, the beads from the necklace that broke--and so most of the accumulated stuff didn't even cost me anything. And many of the "boxes of clippings" are shoeboxes, not gigantic crates or anything. The list was more of an exercise in "Wow, when you put it in words like that, I really do have a lot of ancient and pointless crap I could stand to get rid of," not "Look at my decadent materialism!"

However, if you were interested in the historical costume coloring books, they are from Bellerophon Books and roughly $5 each.

Re: Yesterday's Secret Life: The rocking chair (sitting unheralded in the back of one of the pictures) was one of the smaller reader gift/mail items that I've been holding onto until I can work them in. Also, I don't know why Anna's arm kind of looks jaundiced in the picture. Also-also: two icons!

(I TOLD YOU GUYS The Littlest Edward was tiny, didn't I?)

Catchup linkspam! )


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cleolinda: (serafina)
<---- New Secret Life of Dolls thataway.

(Okay, twelve hours later, and I am still GLEEFULLY proud that I scored something rare-ish on eBay for half the usual price. Number of dolls I am keeping secret from you guys: back up to 2.)

Linkspam! )


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cleolinda: (marie sleep)
Thataway: The Package is REVEALED, and the responses are cracking me up. (I love how the predominant sentiment is, "He's an asshole! YAY!")

(Hello, new unlurkers! A few folks mentioned getting LJ accounts so as to comment on that entry, so welcome aboard and enjoy your stay.)

Meanwhile, I am hearing disturbing rumors that NECA might not put out The Littlest Bella until JULY. Y'all... I am gonna be so screwed if I have to tread water on this for another three months. I am trying very hard not to email them like a wingnut and plead for information.

Meanwhile-meanwhile, I've been clenching my jaw again, fnarr. Got a lot of work done today, though (which is probably why).

Linkspam! )


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cleolinda: (eowyn)
Since it's kind of a slow news day, I wanted to ask--about the Secret Life thing. I can't quite put my finger on when, but it's like it suddenly exploded a while back in terms of people getting really, really into it. I mean, I had some passing references to the dolls doing stuff as early as 2003. For whatever reason, I got whimsical last September and started writing about them on a more regular basis, so the series as you know it has been going on for like six months now. What happened? I mean, I'm curious to know from y'all's perspective--I know a lot of y'all kind of roll your eyes sigh indulgently and scroll past when I go on about them again, but for the people who have gotten invested, what was the tipping point? Was it when I started adding pictures? Was it a particular entry, a new character, a plot development, a specific storyline? I just don't know--I feel like interest increased a lot very suddenly, but I can't figure out why.

(While we're here--it looks like it's now going to be two more entries until The Package, so five entries total, rather than the four I had thought I would need instead of three. Uh. Sorry about that.)

Actual linkspam: Nerd Herd, Nerd Herd! )


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cleolinda: (Default)
Early linkspam so I can go take some pictures for something I'm a bit behind on posting. Cough.

Re: the previous post: Okay, you know me. I love me some Tonners. That is not a factory fresh "original" Tonner Jacob. Now that I've gotten a good look at it, you can't convince me that it is. I know for a fact that the other two are repaints, because I know what the originals look like. That is just not a Tonner paint job, and you cannot tell me otherwise. ETA: Aha! Solved.

The new Made of Fail podcast is up, for real this time.

More linkspam )


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*flop*

Mar. 30th, 2009 08:55 pm
cleolinda: (marie sleep)
Oh my God, I am so behind on everything and I pulled a leg muscle moving boxes yesterday so I took some Aleve and a nap late this afternoon and I woke up feeling loopy and tireder and I kind of arrgh. So I have a number of things to get to, but I think I'm going to mention them tomorrow so they don't get lost in the shuffle.

(Happy clouds. Peaceful, happy clouds.)

And happy birthday to [livejournal.com profile] sweetdragon (Dayna at Made of Fail)!

Linkspam: Read more... )


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