Due either to distractions of the holiday season or cuz I'm just brain dead (or both), I forgot to note that I am the subject of a cartoonist survey at David Wasting Paper. Like yours truly, David is in his forties, draws, and plays guitar, all with the forbearance of a long-suffering wife. He has some other great surveys, including one with Bill Griffith.

Also cuz I yam braindeded, I mis-identified my choice of brush pen. It's really a Pentel, not a Pilot. Like you give a shit. But somewhere in this infinite universe it matters. Some child's cancer was cured. Some lonely man found love. Some woman found the missing mate to her hand-knitted sock. All thanks to the right choice of brush pen.

Originally published at mooreroom.

renaissance2010
Turning to photography as a creative outlet during a valiant fight with breast cancer at age 34, renaissance10 survived and set up a photo contest to help raise funds for the Lavender Trust, a nonprofit that provides information and support to younger women with breast cancer. In the first two years, the competition brought in over £65,000 (that's $107,260.73 U.S.!), with entries from 130 countries last year. Renaissance10 recently joined LiveJournal to meet other passionate photographers and find supportive friends.

curiouscupcakes
Holy buttercream frosting! If you have a sweet tooth for sugary goodness or a wandering eye for whimsical confection, this is pure ecstasy iced in deliciousness. Hailing the beloved cupcake as the artisinal canvas of choice, you'll enjoy recipes, photos, and bountiful tips to bake up a batch, whether your taste leans toward French classics or funky and flavorful.

mission101
With New Years in the offing, it's an ideal time to reflect on past accomplishments, make peace with disappointments, and refocus the lens on future goals. This community welcomes you to create a bucket list of 101 things you plan to accomplish in the next 1,001 days. Offering support, guidance, and inspiration, this is a great way to jumpstart those pesky resolutions.

Been working hard to finish up my projects. I have a bunch of cartoons that I've been submitting to the New Yorker which I might collect together in a book. The Bible Project is coming along nicely. The kids book is drawn and just needs to be colored. I have a bunch of dirty comics that I did for the Onion that could make a good little book. And if the Too Much Coffee Man Omnibus is finished - just a tiny bit of polish and it'll be printed.... lots of good stuff. In the meantime

New cartoon.


and my stupid LJ account expired again.

Calvin & Hobbes debuted in 1985. At the time, Calvin was either six years old, or he turned six later that year (and every subsequent year, until the strip ended a decade later). Taken literally, that means the latest his birthdate could possibly be is December 31, 1979. Which also means that, as of this coming Thursday, we can be sure that Calvin will never see his twenties again, much less his childhood. Welcome to your thirties, Calvin.

In other news, I recently read a review of a translation of Beowulf, the medieval adventure story. The reviewer complains that this version is "not for a child," explaining that,"I bought this book for my son because he wanted to read it after having seen the movie. Definitely wasn't at a level he would be comfortable reading." So it's apparently too sophisticated for kids. However, the movie which sparked the boy's interest in the story was rated PG-13, "for intense sequences of violence including disturbing images, some sexual material and nudity." So, this parent deems his kid mature enough to enjoy a film featuring sexual content and intense violence, but not mature enough to read a book with big words in it.

The years may pass, and Calvin may age, but at least his thirst for violence and disdain for learning will live on forever in the hearts of our youth.

In case you were wondering:

If you have made an assay at banana frosting, but have managed to use a disproportionate amount of bananas and butter in relation to the amount of powdered sugar in the house, resulting in a texture not remotely similar to frosting, if you:

Add flour, baking soda, and spices of your choice, then

Bake the concoction at three hundred fifty degrees for a half an hour or so

…you will come out with something remarkably close to a banana bread pudding.

And if you are, for the first time, roasting a boneless turkey breast on the theory that it will be easier and less messy than a whole bird, but have managed to miss that the recipe you are allegedly following is in fact only for half a turkey breast, thus rendering details such as the stated cooking time wholly inaccurate, you can:

Roast it for a while longer, basting assiduously

Check it with a meat thermometer and see that it is still nowhere near 165 degrees

Cut it in half and roast the halves further

Realize after having taken them out of the pan and put them on a cutting board to rest that they are still alarmingly pink in parts

Put one half back in the oven

Dice the other half into bite-sized chunks

Sauté them in the gravy you’ve been making from the pan juices

Microwave a package of the extremely convenient Trader Joe’s Organic Brown Rice

Throw the rice in

and call it good.

Probably I should make some analogy to the writing process here. I suppose following a recipe is not unlike following an outline, though I’d like to think I pay more attention to outlines (once I’ve painstakingly constructed them) than I apparently paid to the recipes above. But it is certainly the case that even when I’m following an outline, scenes and characters shift in surprising ways, resulting in a story that in parts bears little resemblance to the initial conception, so maybe it’s a fair comparison after all.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.

I hope you all had a good Christmas Eve and Day... I did, with two parties incorporating loads of food, gifts, odd music, friends, and Pushing Daisies... great fun watching the first season episodes that I haven't seen since they were originally broadcast. Watching a bunch of them all in a row is a real workout, though - so much dialogue, so much plot, so many colors, so much pie.

Today will be spent rewatching the rest of Heroes S4 on Hulu... I've already watched the first three episodes, a couple of weeks ago :( but today I'm going to watch the other 9 all in a row. Yes indeedy. It'll be great... except that it means that I won't really have use of my computer while that's happening. Watching Hulu videos on my teevee set is awesome except for that fact. It's for the best... though I am itching to get more writing and revising done. (I have the next 4 chapters tentatively outlined! Yay me!) I'll do it late tonight after I'm out of show.

It was a good year for gifts - a Snuggie (in blue; not the animal print, so quit asking!), a book (Lorrie Moore's Birds of America), a bottle of bourbon, a Netflix gift sub (YES!!!! Angel, you are mine), a Spongebob wrist warmer and some assorted small action figures, lots of chocolate, a cool-mist humidifier, lovely socks... etc. I don't even have a good inventory of prezzies. As it should be. I hope to give more gifts soon, but the pre-holiday shopping was just too terrifying to contemplate.

Mostly I just wanna take it easy, nom my leftovers, maybe take a nap, pet the cat, drink lots of tea. I deserve at least one day of almost total downtime. Hopefully tomorrow I'll go see AVATAR, and please stop telling me about everything that's wrong with it. I'll be the judge of that. As much as 80% of TITANIC annoyed me, I still wish I'd been able to see the scenes of death and destruction on the big screen. Maybe I could have theater-hopped until the ship hit the iceberg.

5 questions jillbertini asked me 5 questions. Here are my answers.

1 - how did you pick teen librarianship for your area?

I was exposed to really great teen services when I was a teen. I assumed all libraries had such services, and was very surprised to find how rare they were at the time. I considered other avenues, but I noticed when I talked about teens stuff, that is when I got really passionate and fired up about things.

2 - what is the furthest you've traveled from WA state?

I believe that would be Budapest. I was there in 1993 for a few days in July and really loved it. It was incredibly cheap and filled with movie theaters. You could stay in a youth hostel for about $6 a night and eat great food for nearly nothing. I met one British fellow who lived with his mom back in England and had a somewhat pathetic life, but once a year he went there and lived like a king for a few weeks. He took me and my friend on a carriage ride. One of my favorite memories of that city was watching Singles on the 4th of July when I was feeling particularly homesick.

3 - what is your favorite yoga pose?

Savasana! I know that is super goofy, but I love love love it. After all that work and stretching and concentration, it feels so good to finally just lay there and rest. And I appreciate it so much more for the work I've just done. If I was ever asked to pose for a yoga calendar, that is the pose I would choose :)

4 - other than WA and Illinois, have you lived in any other states, and for how long if so?

I lived in Oregon for a year, between college and grad school. I temped the whole time and lived in a crazy group house, and wouldn't want to do that again, but I really like Portland and would totally move there if the right job opened up.

5 - what is your favorite thing about living in Seattle?

I love how wet it is. Every time I visit Eastern WA I feel parched and out of my element. Back in Seattle I breath easier. Admittedly the long gray wet winters wear me down, but warm spring rains rejuvenate me like nothing else. I just wish we had more thunderstorms in the summer.

Let me know if you want me to ask you 5 questions, or if you have 5 questions you would like to ask me.

Originally published at Nick Bertozzi. You can comment here or there.

Why am I blogging on Christmas Eve? To warn you.



Don't let it in the house. And merry Christmas.

Originally published at mooreroom.

Originally published at Nick Bertozzi. You can comment here or there.

Holiday debuggery

We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:

• If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go.
• If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account.
• If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate.
• If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase.
• If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help!

Tweaks

• There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out!
• Some of you reported formatting issues using the Rich Text Editor (i.e., line breaks were being removed incorrectly). We've implemented a fix! Thanks so much for your patience.

Give a little extra!

We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity.

Celebrate with holiday vGifts!

Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends.

Photos of the week

We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics!

For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!

In the news this morning, two things that won't end with the closing of the Decade from Hell:

a) Gitmo - It will be another year before the ObamAdmin can get the funds to relocate the illegally held prisoners to a stateside detention center. So many local jobs in Illinois depend on these violations of human rights and international law. In this economy, can't we do better?

b) Britney's conservatorship - You think KSM has been tortured enough? Consider what this poor single mom has been enduring, just because she shaved her head. Can't we get a new level of silliness at least, instead of this same old story of family greed and celebrity haplessness?

House everyone at Guantanamo Bay over at the Spears mansion and name her father as the prison warden. Call it "Britmo."

Here be Frank Zappa with the last word on all that.

Originally published at mooreroom.

Click that image to visit a Christmas wonderland of joy and love.

I finally got around to uploading more photos to Flickr.  Popular subjects include architectural detail, street art, window displays, public transportation, the really cool hotel we stayed at in Rouen, the beach at Saint-Malo. Also: occasional evidence that Steve and I were present.

Originally published at sararyan.com. You can comment here or there.