Just made a batch of taselby's banana oatmeal muffins, they're so unbelievably awesome! *sighs happily*

Been pretty insanely busy with wedding/work/family stuff lately, but through a discussion with a friend about my Japan posts, which are the whole reason I started this LJ, I realized that I'd never backed any of it up o_O For anyone who ever needs to download their entire LJ in a browseable form to their computer, LJ Archive is a pretty nice tool. It'll download all comments people have made too :)

Through this though I also discovered that getting rid of The Griffin's Lair a few months back broke all of the photo links in those posts. Oops. I have all the original files though, so when I get some time I'll try and restore the links.

So recently I had a case of art theft on DeviantArt (which I wrote about here, http://calger459.deviantart.com/journal/30641787/#comments) bad enough where I finally decided to take my original website, The Griffin's Lair, down. I created the site way back in 1997 when the internet was still kind of ass (AOL and chatrooms were still the big thing. Ah memories...) and free hosting sites like Fortunecity and Geocities were slooooooooow and very buggy. I tried Fortunecity to make my site first, then moved it to Geocities which ran much better. The site lived there for a couple years, during which I taught myself HTML and basic web design and learned how to use a scanner to put my drawings up on the web. It led to a lot of good things, including my first commissions! Then a guy came along who liked my work and offered me free hosting on a fast, non-buggy server. I gladly took the offer, and The Griffin's Lair started its long, happy run :)

When this ridiculous art theft occurred (by some kid calling himself Digi-Poke-NarutoKid of all things) I actually hadn't updated my original site since 2004; that was about when I finally invested in my own domain name and paid hosting service to create Entis Animation for my professional work. With that site, there was no need for The Griffin's Lair anymore, but I kept it up because, well, it was being hosted for free and it was nice to get the occasional email from people who'd discovered my work on that site and liked it, or who'd found the Japanese/English dictionary I'd written up for my anime shrine and thought it was really useful. I'm going to miss those emails, and I'm genuinely bummed that people won't be able to browse those old drawings anymore. I have to take steps to protect my work better though; things I upload to Entis Animation are fairly low resolution and embedded in Flash Gallery which makes it harder to steal, and any piece I complete now has my logo watermarked onto it. That wasn't the case for any of the work that was stolen :/

So, in a nutshell the guy who hosted The Griffin's Lair for so long kindly put a redirect that'll bounce anyone automatically to my current site, and will be deleting the old files at his convenience. Goodbye Griffin's Lair, you will always have a special place in my heart. 1997-2010, 13 years!! Not a bad run at all :)

...good lord, I've been on the internet for 13 years?! I suddenly feel old...

Proof the my boyfriend's cat Danger is one of the most awesome creatures ever, he'll just sit in your lap like a teddy bear while you do whatever. I helped him make art tonight ;)



He held the tablet pen and I steered his paw around. It counts!...right?

Having a lovely weekend so far, I hope the rest of you are too ^_^

Hooray, some awesome person recorded our koto concert last month and posted one of my favorite pieces, Tsunae ("sand") on Youtube. I'm in the back row in the green kimono :D

Looks like they also posted "Akogare" (translation escapes me at the moment), which is an advanced piece. Hard to play, but very cool :)



Life continues to be very busy, but good :) Thanksgiving coming up soon, yay!

Hello LJ! I completely failed to announce my koto concert last weekend, my apologies, life has been crazy and I haven't been able to keep up with LJ at all :P

So! Catch-up time. Sadly my koto teacher is moving back to Japan at the end of this month, so the charity concert we originally were going to have in November (benefiting Children's Hospital of Columbus) got moved up to October 11th. This created quite a scramble to get ready, we were having 3 hour practices twice a week for over a month :P In the middle of all this we got a new member! Another American actually, who was also in the JET Programme and lived in Japan for a year also. Her mom took some awesome photos of our performance, here's the link for those interested :)

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2663226&id=12409620&l=259dbd9ad5

I recorded the concert audio-only but I haven't had a chance yet to check how it came out. I'm hoping I can put together a sort of mp3 download set soonish.

We actually had a fantastic turnout, the hall my teacher rented seated 100, we actually ran out of chairs! It was pretty awesome :)

The status of Sakura Group is a little fuzzy now that my teacher is pretty much gone. The rough plan is there will be more than one instructor now, one for people who can meet during the day, and another for those (like me) who can only practice in the evenings. My teacher actually nominated me to be that evening leader since I'm one of the most advanced people in the group. She didn't ask me if I wanted to, mind you, she basically ordered it. Part of me is honored and is like yay! and part of me really doesn't want the responsibility :/ Bascially leading the practice is helping to choose and teach the music, organizing practices and performances and all that, which is actually quite a lot of work. The good thing is we'll only practice once a month, so it might be doable. We'll see how it all plays out.

Yay koto :)

Wow, so I got a check in the mail today, from CafePress. "CafePress?" says I, "Oh yeah I made an account there like...two years ago. You mean I actually sold something?"

*opens it*

$26.50

Me: O_O....WOO!

Yeah, only 26 bucks I know, but still, it's like free money! And the way their commission system works, a t-shirt that costs the person 18 bucks makes you around 4, and I have some stuff that's cheaper than that in my selection, so it seems I average $1.50 a sale. It's taken this long to accumulate 26 dollars...goodness. Still, this is encouraging, I didn't think I'd sell anything! :D I'd always meant to do some more t-shirt friendly designs, now I finally have incentive to do so! Link for the curious:

http://www.cafepress.com/griffinstudio

Go me! :)

Hey everyone! Back from Comic Con obviously, I will do a post on the trip with photos, I swear! It's just been a busy week ^^;; That and I've been sick with a cold since Monday, ugh :P At least it's Friday! In the meantime, check out this kid:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1203226/Pictured-Incredible-watercolour-paintings-boy-aged-just-SIX.html

I am insanely jealous, I wish I could have drawn like that at six o_O I seem to remember Van Gogh drawing these amazingly lifelike dogs when he was six. Could we have another prodigy of that level on our hands? I guess only time will tell!

So, some very nice person has sent me When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions DVD set, presumably for my birthday on Monday - there was no note or packing slip in the package with the DVDs. Unfortunately though...I already own it, I bought it months ago. I must have forgotten to take it off my Amazon wishlist, I think that's who this DVD was ordered through. My apologies to that person...if you see this, would you mind telling me who you are so I can thank you, and ask permission to exchange it?

In other news for those who don't follow my Facebook, Sakura got declawed this week, it was time. She had a good four years with her claws intact, but now she is the Clawless Wonder, aka Pegleg Pete (Ben insists on calling her Pete for some reason, and oddly, it suits her). I'm hanging out with her today while she recovers, she seems vaguely annoyed and confused by her sore feet, but otherwise fine. My kitty's a trooper :)

This is the last weekend of my 20's...wow, odd feeling. I'm officially taking it easy and doing very little :) Cheers, everyone!

Edit: Best parody of TF2 EVER: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/502975

Hysterically funny, and great animation, too!