Between the good and bad, that's where you'll find me, Reaching for Heaven

Reply with "Icons!" in the comments and I'll pick six of yours for you to talk about.

( Cut to save f-lists )

Today, Sept. 29th is the Catholic feast of the Holy Angels, plus it's also a Tuesday, which is traditionally the day of the angels... and I got my book on the Grigori or Watcher Angels in the mail! Just a coincidence? I don't think so...

Also: Another GIP, this time featuring my "Enniel Prussot" icon (Yes, yes, it's Muraki from 'Yami no Matsuei', but since the image fits I'm running with it).

Also there's a bit of an argument brewing over on the Eva Geeks forum, when someone decided to start tossing around some ideas on whether or not an Angel in human form could impregnate a human. One person got irritated about how an idea like this strays from canon (Like some of the weird things that have been posted in the section for fanfiction and fanart don't?!). Of course I stuck up for discussing this very topic (hey, it's one of the cornerstones of the third part of my current project), as well as being a bit suspect of the term "canon": the more I think about it, the less I like it, since it smacks of treating the fandom (or maybe the mythos is a better word for it) like a religious dogma or a sacred text that has to be rigidly adhered to and any other slant on it is heretical. I paraphrased a few lines from Shinji's inner journey in Episode 20:

"There is the Evangelion that exists in Hideaki Anno's mind, the Evangelion that exists in the producers' minds, the Evangelion that exists in the Eva Geeks' minds and the Evangelion that exists in your mind. Yet somehow, all these are the same Evangelion."

Snitched from madra_liath

1. Reply to THIS post, and I will select four or five of your userpics that I like.
2. Make a entry and talk about the icons I have chosen.
3. Other people will then comment on your entry and you will do the same as I have done for you.
4. Thus creating a NEVER ENDING of icon squee.



ANTI-Dan Brown: I made this using a shareware GIF animation program, at the height of the "Da Vinci Code" nonsense. The images are obviously culled from a publicity shot of Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou as Rober Langdon and Sophie Neveu, with some snarkage added, including my rip on the tagline "So dark the con of man".


Morrigan: A clipped-down version of a lovely, fearsome painting of the most awe-inspiring, terrifying, and just plain bitchy goddess in the Celtic pantheon. I have a close affinity for her: I believe one of my ancestors on my dad's side of the family may have been a priest in her cult waaaay back when, and when I catch my Irish temper getting the better of me, I describe is as "going full-on Morrigan" on someone or something. She's also one of the obvious inspirations for Morraeon, the feisty, moody, aggressive, hard-partying Exile-code eating Exile character I play on the Matrix Online.


Christianity as a fandom: Not my creation, and I've seen it around LJ, but it's one of my favorites... and it is so true on so many levels. Plus, it's hysterically funny and true at the same time...


Crusnik: From the anime "Trinity Blood" (Which I need to find some more YouTube'd episodes of...), the warrior angel-like aspect of Abel Nightroad, revealed only when circumstances oblige him to drop his gentle, goofy aspect and bring on the heavy, vampire-slaying artillery.

Finally fixed the timing problem on the anti-Damned Book icon and I also discovered I needed to compress the animation to make it fit on the site. LiveJournal can be pretty picky about file sizes which gives me a heads up on the next project I decided to break up the last frame into three, which makes it somehow more dramatic. Here's one for the biggest literary con artist of all time.

In and out of Lowell the past couple days: yesterday, I was bringing back some overdue CDs (ouch) and today I had an appointment with my therapist. Also (yesterday) I nipped into Larry's Comics for my once-a-month-therabouts visit and picked up the May issue of "Hellblazer" and an odd volume I hadn't noticed before, "Neil Gaiman's Midnight Days", featuring several stray DC/Vertigo items that Neil scripted, including an odd issue of "Hellblazer" (which was reprinted with the comic version of
"Constantine", but the little introduction that they added for this collection was clever, so I don't mind having the same story in two different books), a few stories from the "Swamp Thing" series (which I'm not familiar with, aside from the Swamp Thing's cameo in "Black Orchid" and aside from the knowledge that John Constantine first appeared in the "American Gothic" story arc of ST), and a mini-series from the "Sandman Mystery Theatre", in which Wesley "the Sandman" Dodds of the Golden Age of DC Comics briefly crosses paths with the King of the Dreaming, from a certain series that helped launch the Vertigo line...

(Which reminds me, I took it into my head to animate my Vertigo logo icon so that it spins. Don't ask me what posessed me to do that -- maybe the mischievous part of me wants to make you, my readers, dizzy. I may or may not upload it. We'll see...)

Ugh... I've just been insanely busy at work: There's been a lot of cleaning fluid and mops come down the conveyor belt, so I'm assuming everyone's gearing up to do their spring cleaning.

Thus, it takes me a little while to cool down once I get home, thus I haven't been up to much beyond work and that Live Event in the MxO this weekend, which explains why sieges has been updating a heck of a lot more than I have the past few days.

Well, I've been reading Arthur Golden's "Memoirs of a Geisha" during odd moments; haven't seen the movie yet, but that's on the list of stuff to rent soon. Wow... what an exquisite book! Makes you realize how tough it is/was to be a geisha, and it only makes these lovely women all the more priceless in my eyes.

Speaking of books, a shipper of the Damn Book showed up in my workplace. I didn't see it until after I'd punched out for the day, on Wednesday, and it was all I could do to keep from accidently-on purpose catching my cloak on it and knocking it over. But I restrained myself. I *did* however come up with an idea for an anti-Damn Book icon, and it might just be an animated one: a pic of Tom Hanks as the Gary Stu, captioned "IM GARY STU!!!!1111", a pic of The French Girl, captioned "JE SUIS MARIE-SUZETTE!!1111", then a panel saying "So Dumb The Con of Dan". I just gotta download the animated GIF-making software.

Paradigm Shift entry to come...

I've been chasing buses all afternoon, after a long night of fighting with the maddeningly rattly window in my bedroom (I finally started wondering if a demon had decided to have its idea of fun with the window, so I sprinkled the panes with some holy water. Oddly enough, that seemed to work. I'll have to check and see if the St. Benedict medal I had hung up over the frame might have fallen down...). But, I seem to be having a better day, in spite of it: I nipped downtown to see if the Pollard Library might have a better book on Macs, but no such luck. I caught myself muttering under my breath, "Is there some rule in this library system which states that all books relating to Macintosh computers must be no newer than five years old?", and I'd somehow taken on Flood's South London accent. I wasn't even conscious that he'd started fronting, and I hadn't even engaged the link to his psyche... wierd. So I took a look in the Barnes and Noble, and found just the book I need: only catch is, it cost $30 US, so I'll have to wait till I get my paycheck before I get that book.

Plus, I discovered that one of the newer computers at the library has MS Photo Editor, so I had some fun making LJ icons ( Take a look, take a few if you like )

Edited to fix broken HTML tags

My eye-catching entry subject/title comes from Larry, of Larry's Comics, when I showed up this morning looking for the next issue of the comic book version of "Neverwhere", which has started to grow on me, despite the fact that it's completely different from how I visualized it. He was also intrigued that I got the next issue of "Hellblazer", but I admitted that I got interested in the series after seeing "Constantine". I guess I'm the resident DC/Vertigo geek; someone's gotta balance out the Marvel boys/gals and be the wierd dark one.

On Puck's reccommendation, I got the first volume of the manga version of "Fullmetal Alchemist", and I *almost* got a manga adaptation of Tim Burton's "The Nightmare before Christmas", but the artwork was nowhere as good as the original art design.

Bad news: The computer lab at Middlesex Community College is closing next week, which means no more free printouts until September. Ah well, I'll manage.

Wierd news: As of next week, the bus schedule is changing -- they're adding more buses on the Tewksbury route. The outbound (going *to* Tewksbury) will be leaving at the top of every hour, which means there's gonna be a two pm. bus, so if I miss the one-o'clock bus, I won't be stuck downtown for two hours.

( Iconage )

And then I discovered I was running out of Alavert, the stuff I take for my dreadful nasal allergies, which meant going to WalMart this evening, while my folks were grocery shopping. I went poking around in the DVD section, the way I always do, and discovered they had a two-disk special edition of "Constantine" (complete with a mini-book of "Hellblazer" issue # 41) which I wasn't even aware of. *Headdesk*. Ah well, I'll keep the single disk version because I like the artwork on the case.

((Posted from MCC's Computer Lab))

I've been twiddling with the settings a little, as you can see from the changed backgroud (a "Matrix" fanart entitled "Furious Angels"; love it! Wish I could find the full-sized version and use it as a wallpaper), and changing a few other little details.

I need some help though. Can anyone tell me how to change the layout for pages behind the lj-cut? I've just discovered that on my page, the default layout for lj-cut pages doesn't show up. It's got the same layout as the main page, and thus, you can't see my spiffy icons (Like the one I made of Flood, from the MxO and/or DegSep, which I'm using on this entry), unless you've seen the entry from your LJ-friends page. I've got some readers who aren't on LJ, so I'm afraid they're missing out on half the fun.

Edited to Add: Hm, you can see the icon if you click on the "Post a Comment" link, which I changed to "Call the Operator".

Edited to Add, June 11th, 12.50 a.m.: Figured out how to force the new layout off the comments/LJ-cut pages. Thanks, Eastpath!

::Points up:: I made that some weeks ago, based on a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe, but when I tried to use it on here, I discovered LJ won't take Bitmap files... so I had to take the pic into Lowell to reformat it as a JPEG file. But it's lovely, no?