My uncle gave me a ride on his Kawasaki Vulcan softtail cruiser this afternoon. I've only gotten to ride on someone's motorcycle a couple times, but each time I remember why I want one so bad, or want to make friends with someone who has a motorcycle so I can bum a ride occasionally.

There's something about knowing you're not going any faster than a car at highway speed, but at the same time you just feel like you're omg four feet from screaming death, and the world is hurtling by you on all sides and not only are you feeling it on your arm and shoulder and cheek, you're feeling it on your hips and shins and forehead and eyes.

Also, I held tiny kittens, and hung out with an uncle who reminds my wee five-year-old memories of my grandfather. I hate to play favorites but... now that I'm getting older, he is definitely becoming my favorite uncle. I should pack up and head back to the apartment now, but my brother's asleep on the floor in front of me, and we've been bingeing on LOST episodes, and I feel safe. I don't want to go home yet.

I am rockin' the Italian, yo. One of my (early) birthday gifts was Rosetta Stone: Italian, and I've been working my way slowly through the basics. This is such an incredibly lyrical language, and it makes me appreciate more the patterns and rhythms in English.

I can vouch for Rosetta Stone's effectiveness. When I see the word mela, I don't think 'apple.' I don't have to parse it into English.

For the record, "Lei che cosa fa?" translates to "what are you doing?" In this case, the appropriate response would be "Io scrivo."

Well. At least until I learn how to say "I am writing," rather than "I write."

I've been busy as hell for the past two weeks, and loving every minute (er... well... almost... work has sucked off and on) of it. Got some new art plans, and some exciting new stuff going on for me, and woot, pretty happy at the moment! Bills are paid for the month, my car's almost paid off, and even better:

It's FRIDAY.

In case you hadn't noticed. :)

Now if only Lookouts would win the Penny Arcade comic vote.

And so for my birthday, have a handful of my favorite YouTube Videos!

Today's Solstice Day - don't do anything I wouldn't do. ;)

( Onwards to the Videos! )

You like icons? Of all kinds of things?

shalowater

Ran across this icon journal by accident. These are random, funny, brilliant, and most of them are Relevant To My Interests. The retro tee-shirt icons made me go "DAMN why didn't I think of that?" But even if you don't end up saving a bunch, you'll probably still enjoy sifting through. Everything's really well organized and she's good about putting teaser icons of all the different categories she's got under the cut. As icon journals go, shalowater is a really, really nice one.

Plus, brushes!

Dillon just reaffirmed my love for him.

I mean, there first there was this and this (last one is NSFW),

And then there was this,

But now this... this just cracked me up. I believe it. I really do. Dillon's devious plan is "wanna make out?" And you know, it'll work, too.

The weather is beautiful, it stormed last night, and here's to hoping this week is as good as this weekend was. I brought my mama peonies, checked on my radishes (still not king done), and pruned the oregano before it took over the entire garden. We made pizza, my brother and I went to see Star Trek, and I got to just sit and paint.

Even better, my cold didn't turn into the Cold From Hell that I was expecting it to.

Happy June, everybody!

I'm a sucker for bubblegum pop with latin overtones. XD "Where Do You Go" by No Mercy is eating my brain.

I don't have a dancing icon. Why the heck don't I have a dancing icon?

There was something else I was going to post here. I forget. Oh! Wrote some F&F fic. If you want to see what I've been writing, it's on bardic_fic and it's also over at Dreamwidth. Still working on my vid. Almost done!

In spite of everything, I feel pretty good today. Brought home lunch for my brother and I, and the fixings to make pizza for tomorrow so mum has at least one meal covered without having to worry about it. I wanted to just bring home groceries, but I don't think that'd go over too well, so to account for everyone's feelings I like to bring home 'special' food on the weekends - like Chinese, or fajitas, or pizza, things like that. I try to keep it healthy and homemade if at all possible, and we're all happy.

My radish bed is growing like gangbusters. Also my snapdragon plot is doing really well.

(Where do you go, my lovely?)

Still alive! I was happily on vacation for most of this week, and while I had my laptop with me I just felt very little reason to go update it. I'm on a computer for 90% of my life anymore these days anyway, it seems, so it was a nice change to go 'unplugged' for a while.

Been working on art occasionally, some vidding a little bit at a time, and some writing but not all that much. It's hard to sit in the house and do sedentary things when what I really want to do is be outside in this beautiful weather. FINALLY, spring is turning into summer! I have all the windows open and I can hear birdsong over the sound of my radio.

I finally got my hair cut. It doesn't look exactly how I wanted it, but I like it the way it is, and I've been having fun playing with Axe paste and making it all chunky and messy. It's SHORT, at least in back. I think this is the shortest I've ever had it, and I really like running my fingers through the back. I've got kind of a 'duck butt' in back like Sasuke, though not quite, but the front hair is down to my chin. I showed my stylist what I wanted (which was pretty much what I had last year around this time) but she suggest something else, because she said it was dated. I trust her, and the result is very different but it's growing on me.

Going to see a movie this weekend! It's... sad how much I love going to the movies just for the popcorn and Icees.

Also, I bought removable tattoos at Perkin's last night on a whim (hoping I'd get the unicorn or the tiger) and I have a pink-and-purple stylized hibiscus (with glitter!) on my shoulder. The other tattoo was a unicorn head (also with glitter!), so I'm saving it for later.

...I kind of like this tattoo, oddly. It's not something I would have picked for myself, but I'm finding that I like purple and red-violet more and more.

While on vacation, I seem to have caught a cold. But that's pretty typical for me. It'll suck if I end up with a cough all summer but... whatyagonnado, eh.

Oh, Rudd. You've suddenly found yourself with a house full of adorable kittens. I swear, between Derringer, Kitty, and now Paolo...

I heart Derringer. So much. He had me from his introduction. :D I'm going to miss this comic when it ends this summer. One more month! Yeeergh!

Quickie thing from checking my email: THIS was being advertised at the top of my gmail.

Manage my reputation online? Whut? I suppose for a business this might be useful, but I'm pretty sure this is geared more toward personal blogging and such. The video is a hoot, by the way.

Seriously, my alarm goes off and prior to that it was relatively quiet. But just as B-town rolls up the sidewalks at 10PM sharp, they all wake up at 7AM and the good lord help anyone who might still need to sleep.

I'm sitting here updating my journal while the jackhammers at work on the overpass reverberate up the hill. Someone just drove past with "I'd Settle For A Slowdown" blaring on their radio. Then the downstairs neighbor started playing classical piano music, which I can hear because he's got his window open. Then the neighbor across the alley decided that hey, a quarter to eight is a PERFECT TIME TO MOW.

I'm not complaining, because I do have to get up at 7AM if I want to sit here and update my journal before I go to work. But I really feel sorry for anyone working the night shift in my building who's just now trying to go to sleep.

This town may stop sleeping at 7, but I know there are night shift people. They all work at Hy-Vee and Taco Bell.

I'm sure the rest of the fandom knows about these two vids and has known about them forever. BUT. They are a brand new source of ROFLMAO for me!

Cameron and Cuddy do their scenes in Valley Girl Speak. This is awesome

Clip One

Clip Two

About to take some painkillers and go to bed though. I had a long, but satisfying afternoon with my hands in the dirt and then up to my elbows in soapy water as I gave my little car the wash and wax of his life. I picked up earthworms today, it was epic.

I just finished a major defriending run on my journal. Don't worry, if you've updated recently you're still on my list - I just realized how many dead journals were sitting around on my list, and it was pretty unmanageable at the size that it was. I also left a metric fuckton of communities. Places I intended to participate at but never found the interest, places I used to frequent that have been pared down to a shadow of their former selves. I can't make myself defriend temps_mort because a part of me is praying that group comes back to life someday, but I'm not interested enough in writing anime slash right now to try and resuscitate it. If anyone else wants to try, please do. I even visited it earlier today for a writing prompt when I was itching to write and just couldn't figure out what to write about. That place was just fantastic while it was still breathing, and a ton of my stuff is archived there.

I don't know, lately I've just had this overwhelming urge to clean stuff out, toss the stuff I'm not using, sell it, recycle it, etc. I could probably find a psychological meaning to it all, but I'm not interested in asking myself The Probing Questions.

Finished watching The Chronicles of Riddick on Friday afternoon. That movie is great with chips and good salsa, I've discovered. Not so good with Triscuits. And now that I know that Vin Diesel played D&D, watching his tour of the Riddick set has a whole new color. It's obvious how geekily thrilled he is with the fact that he now has the capacity to bring his uber magical fantasy worlds to life. This is like, if I could ever get good enough to animate Scylla as the lead in a feature film. I would grinning as hugely as Vin in that tour.

Icon is appropriate. If you believe in telekinesis, please raise my hand. At this point, I seriously doubt my own ability to do so. More ibuprofen before bedtiem, plzthx.

I admit it. I was wrong. I'm not about to jump ship over here, this is my personal journal and I won't change that. But hee, okay. Not only was I wrong, I was wrong about more than one thing.

It's fun to admit I suck! :D

I was cautious about DreamWidth, mostly because I was afraid of what happened the last time a bunch of livejournalers jumped ship. *points at the fact that Greatestjournal no longer even comes up* I saw that I couldn't get a free account at DreamWidth and test the waters, and I wasn't sure I wanted to pay for an account when I wasn't sure how the site was going to handle the load and whether or not it was even going to stick around.

But then I started reading. And reading. And thinking, and reading. And doing some more thinking. I stayed up last night for a while thinking about it, weighing whether or not it was worth the money to go over there and pitch a tent. I read a few more things today at work. When I found myself thinking about usernames, I realized it was a moot point, but I held off anyway. Then the clincher - I found out that some of the fandom I want to follow has also pitched tents over there. Bing! The scale stopped tipping even. Not only do they sound like good upfront folks, but they also sound like they're planning for the long haul, my registration was easy, sleek, there were absolutely no timeouts or errors, and the site didn't crash today under the load of new users. Damn good start.

My primary journal ain't goin' anywhere. But I like that site's policies and ideals, and I also like that it's got a lot of things in common with Journalfen, but with a different attitude. An attitude I feel like I could be comfortable with as a fandom refuge. So I'm going to make that my account for Fast & Furious fandom.

What was the other thing I was wrong about? Oh, right. The username.

See, it didn't bother me that someone else might, for some unfathomable reason, pick up 'bardicsidhe' over there. But then I started investigating other available usernames. Tigerbalm? Yeah, okay, I could, but really... it's not something I want to have as my active blog name. Then... I hit on one. One I (yes, Em, it totally mattered) got growly about the possibility of someone else taking. My territorial lizard hindbrain reared up on its scaly tail and went "RAWR." So now I have my own beautiful, simple, delicious username. I am the one, the only Cuda.

Oh yeah.

Well hello, boys.

I've been working on these characters Dom Toretto and Brian O'Conner from The Fast & The Furious franchise since, oh, about two weeks ago. Geez, has it been that long? If you know me and my fandoms well, you know that most of them I love to watch, love to read fanfic, but rarely enter into as an active contributor. I think that's primarily because there's already a lot of work done on that fandom, there's whole sites devoted to its fanfic writers with references and summaries and all the homework's practically been done for me. There's no interest to write because most of the things have already been done. That, or the characters are so straightforward that - while interesting - they don't prod me to study them.

There have been only two fandoms I get...for lack of a better description... 'that' feeling about. Both of them offered a wealth of openings for inference, opinion and study. They made the writing interesting. I feel rewarded when other people read my work in those fandoms and say 'yeah, that's totally right,' or better yet, 'Wow, I never thought of it that way!'

If you've been with me on some of my more singleminded and kind of scary romps through the Internet looking for clues (like our roadtrip through the auto databases of the web looking for a Cadillac with just the right tailfins to be Duke's car from the series, falsechaos), you know that I can go to some odd lengths for a fandom I'm hardcore committed to. I don't get that feeling too often - in fact, I've only had it twice.

Actually. Make that three times, now. I've been doing my homework, and I've got 'that' feeling again. The one that previously drove me to think, write, draw, live and breathe a character or set of characters.

( This is where it gets long, boring and obsessive, folks. )

Also, I've got a couple quick ficbits posted over at bardic_fic. I've hidden all the porn, but the genfic is still publicly accessible without friending the journal.

In case you didn't know, here's some commentary on it. I'm linking this vid because it seems to have one of the most complete reports on the basic information available without jumping right to the commentary:

( Youtube Young Turks Vid )

Favorite line: (read this with a tone of amused sarcasm) "Yeah... but it's those arugula-eating, Volvo-driving Iowans, yeah, with their tie-dyed shirts and their liberal policies and their hatred of the military..."

I'm so proud of my state. You go, Iowa!

For the record, I've known about this for a while, but I haven't seen anyone note it here, so I'm gonna be the first, because hey, I wanna revel in it and haven't had the time to post it.

CNN Report | Time Magazine | MSNBC

Trying to cool down after watching Fast & Furious for the second time. I'm such a happy Vin Diesel fangirl.

The same guy's been trying to pound down my mother's door for the past three weeks. I think my father's finally serving her divorce papers. I just hope he's not doing this because he thinks she turned me against him. The timing would add up almost to the day coinciding with the last day I spoke to him.

But she didn't. She didn't need to. He did that all by himself. Congratulations, dad.

Happened on this entirely by accident while looking for source photos for one of the many art trades that I only recently got back the will to work on.

Wikipedia article on the book and the play.

Youtube preview vid of the play.

So this is a horse's perspective story that I haven't read yet? And here I thought Black Beauty was it for horse-eye-view literature. I would be all over this play if it were in the states, but unfortunately it has yet to announce any US engagements, and I can't imagine how they'd ship those horse puppets overseas. But the horses are fabulous. The design, the handling, somehow they seem at once real and symbolic with their wooden frames.

Maybe I'll get lucky and they'll cut a DVD of it. As of right now I can buy the soundtrack and the book - and tee shirts and pencils (yes, pencils!) if I go buy directly from the National Theatre site. But yanno, screw that. I want to get up close to one of those beasties, or learn how to operate the different parts.

Warning: Puppet!Baby!Joey is cuteness overload. Watch the video at your own risk.

This Easter is not turning out how Easters typically run in my family, in fact it's the very first that it's played out like this. I spent part of it completely alone, and most of it not in the same general vicinity of my family. Given everyone's absence and the cloud of bad things happening to this family right now, it doesn't feel like Easter at all and it's a little hard to stay upbeat. Given how things have just been going lately in most aspects of my life, however, it's appropriate.

I guess this is an appropriate time to link this vid I found while I was doing research for a character. He's just going to be an NPC, but I feel like I can't roleplay his daughter unless I know him, since they're going to be interacting a lot. Right now I can hear his voice in my head but let's face it, I'm not a minister of any faith nor have I ever played one, and it's not the kind of phrasing I typically use.

This was the find of an offshoot search related to him but more directly related to his mates.

Things I love about this vid:
There's a direct tribute here to Sister Act 2.
Every good gospel choir needs a crazy Tina Turner.
The stage is lit like a disco. Disco Jesus!
It's effin' gospel. For which I have a prevailing weakness. Even if the message isn't one you share, the raw power of a good gospel choir's voices beats the pants off of any other vocal power, up to and including opera - and when those opera folks sing at you, it's like getting hit in the face with a pillar.



I'm goin' home.

Wow, has it been a while. I blew the dust off this puppy with a new layout. The base design was entirely created by premade_ljs, and the recent journal layouts just rock, in my opinion. They're cleanly coded and they work nicely with IE or Firefox. I liked the original Rihanna layout graphics but I was already planning to do something Rascal Flatts-oriented, since those boys have grabbed my heart with both hands.

I can say I was a Flatts fan back when they were known for "Prayin' For Daylight" and not much else. When that song was on the charts, I mixed it on CD's with "Breathless" by the Corrs and the friggin' Pokemon Johto League theme song because I was a dumbass and I thought it was catchy. I still do, but on the same lines as Caramelldansen. They disappeared for a while, actually a long while, and then when they came back, dude, they got game.

Oddly enough, although I know he's not the most conventionally handsome man in the trio, I did and still do find Gary (middle of the photo, lead vocals) the most attractive. Even now, with a few more years on him and a bit more weight, I still think he's pretty darn hot. Except the last time I saw him in concert, but he just looked flatly miserable under those hot lights and I wondered then if he was possibly a little under the weather.

I picked up their newest album today while wandering around Target. It's... different than their previous stuff. When I first listened to Nickelback's Dark Horse album, the amount of feelgood and straight sex on that disc made me wonder "damn, which one of you got a new girlfriend?" Likewise, Rascal Flatts' Unstoppable album makes me wonder "damn, which one of you just broke up?" With the exception of two or three songs, the music is four parts grief to two parts gone, and while once again the boys have put out a fantastic set and I love the album, it just wasn't what I was expecting with a name like 'Unstoppable.'

In other news, I have officially placed Taco Bell on my do-not-eat list for keeps now. This is the fourth or fifth time that having lunch there resulted in me being sick an hour later. Tasty nachos are not worth the backlash. Pity, because I like their food. But at least I can still go get the lemonade slush things.

In other other news, the Penny Arcade/PvP Dungeons and Dragons podcasts wrapped up yesterday. I want more.