Below are the most recent 15 friends' journal entries.

Monday, November 16th, 2009
dracoangelica	8:09a	Fangirling So many of you know that I have two sisters. One of them, the youngest one, is who I post the most about due to all her issues n' stuff. Yet my other sister is doing something QUITE cool. One of my favorite books series is The Circle of Magic series by Tamora Peirce. I met Mrs. Peirce at Dragon*Con 2008 and about melted in a puddle of goo. Well, Danielle, my art student sister, has a midterm this year that requires her to take a book series and develop art designs based off of the book. Danielle chose to do the Circle of Magic books! Here is some of the art that she's producing right now. This is the group line up of the four main characters of the series. From Left to right, they are Briar, Tris, Sandry, and Daja. Here are their close ups. Briar is, I think, Danielle's favorite character...its either him or Tris. He's a theif-boy who learns to control plant magic. This group of characters is from the first set of books. These are the quartet before the events of the second half of the series. This is Tris. We love Tris. Tris don't take no shit from no one. Its awesome. And of course Sandry. She's the noble girl in the group. She's pretty cool as well. Usually I despise the blonde, rich girl in a group, but then again, Tamora does a really great job of pointing out that sometimes a person can't help what class they are born into. She does a fine job of creating a rich girl they way they should be. This is Daja. She's a Traderkin. I liked her because again, she takes no shit from no one. Her story arc is pretty neat. She goes from being banished to forcing her old tribe to take her back due to her own kickassness. I like Danielle's design of her. Red is the color of mourning in Trader culture and since her entire family is dead at the beginning of the book series, the red was a good choice. Anyway, those are the people. Danielle also did work on their props. These are the magical objects of the book series: This is Briar's Shakkan. Its like a Bonsai tree but it hold all Briar's magic. This is Sandry's night light. In the beginning of the first book, she is trapped in a hidden room as her entire family dies from a plague. So, her friends create a night light for her so she will never be afraid of the dark. This is Daja's trader's staff. All trader's have one, but they have etchings and carvings on their staffs that symbolize their life. Daja's is blank because she is outcasted from her tribes. This is the cart that Lark and Rosethorn own. Danielle hasn't done their design work yet, but since she was working on the temple area and the cottage, she decided to go ahead and work up their cart. This is how the group gets from the Winding Temple grounds to the near by towns. Now for places that are important in the books! This is the tower that the group trains at with their teacher, Niko. Its really just a huge tower, but it later turns out to be one of the places that has great significance in the books. This is Danielle's rough designs for the Cave area. Its here that the four of them create a circle of magic that connects them through the next oh, eight or nine books. This is the final picture that I'll post up. Its the cottage that the characters live at. Again, its a central location within the first series of books. I don't know if Danielle will do anything with these designs after she finishes this particular class, but I know that I'm impressed. So, anyway, any Circle of Magic fans are sure to enjoy this. Current Mood: impressed Current Music: Big Girls Don't Cry - Fergie (Pandora Radio) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 14th, 2009
graphics [ ginaspider ]	1:04a	Made this logo for one of my favorite radio shows. Not quite satisfied with the hands but it's probably not going to get any better. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 13th, 2009
wondergirl_dv	11:38a	Thinking of stuff Like, it would be a lot easier to get a job if I was a web designer or developer instead of a lawyer. So I'm going to take a bunch of classes, but I'm not going to major in it because it requires a lot of science classes. ...although I don't really know what it does. It's not that I'm bad at science, if I applied myself or were more interested I probably would get a really good grade. Unfortunately, I am neither interested nor diligent in the area of science. I guess since it's called Computer Science, they felt obligated to add a bunch of science classes to the major. I mean otherwise, it would be a pretty empty major. Just a lot of comp and programming classes. I think I'm going to be taking the full load next quarter with the addition of the comp class. Yea, okay I guess. But I'm probably going to have to crash it because I have to wait until pass 3 to try and apply for it. (Our school has three pass times for picking classes and a lot of majors restrict the times to their own people so that they have more of a chance to get in.) I have a human sexuality midterm in a few hours. And I am reeeally not motivated. well I am, but I just can't get myself to move. Procrastination has been really bad this week. Got an 87.5% on history midterm. Urgh. It's my freaking major, why do I always do subpar on it? *bangs head on table* I just feel really burnt out right now. I'm looking forward to the end of this quarter, it's been a real drag. It's not the classes I guess, they're okay. No actually, they are really boring. Computer programming will probably be even more boring. Sigh............... But next quarter I can take upper divisions, so that means no more sections yaaaay. No unneccsary classes. Sections is like an extra hour of class every week, so if you have 4 classes you can imagine how much of a hassle it becomes to try and schedule your week with sections taking up your time in the day. that was a really weird sentence. ... Hmm. Do I know all the contraception stuff? Maybe, I dunno. Right now I don't really wanna look. The only thing I can think of at the moment is that Depo-provera is a shot you take every 3 months and costs 200-600 yearly. ...Why is that important to know. The teachers are a bit weird in that they have us memorize a shitload of useless stuff. And they have essay questions on the midterm. You see my agony. TDC-wrote a bit. I just realized why it's not moving along, it's because I reeeally am having trouble with my writing right now. I just don't like it. It's so...bad. TLG-well you know. same. (Comment on this)
graphics [ ginaspider ]	2:09a	is it just me or did this end up looking way too creepy? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 12th, 2009
news [ theljstaff ]	1:53p	LiveJournal Major Notes: Notes, Tweaks, Bug Kills, LJ_Cares! Notes augmented We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)! Product tweaks and bug kill In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed! If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)! If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins) New FCK fixes rich text editor! We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5 When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0 An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers LiveJournal Cares We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact. In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop. Papered in postcards A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor. Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits! Photos of the week We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile. You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump! ( Read more... ) Curtains We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week! (119 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
lj_maintenance [ dwell ]	2:00p	Network Maintenance: Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 04:00-06:00 UTC/GMT EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP. Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!! Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out! --- On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice. Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials. We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait! As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work. (39 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
umass_amherst [ mckenzie3nick ]	6:55p	en guard! Does anybody happen to know of somewhere I could learn to fence? Perhaps a community center? PREFERABLY within 20-minutes of Amherst? Also, I guess I'll need a fencing foil... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 7th, 2009
wondergirl_dv	6:16p	Naruto Fanfiction that you must absolutely read Okay. I realize that Naruto often invokes an involuntary response of horror and disgust. BUT. I think that while the series has sold out and that the people who follow it are some of the scariest I have ever met....there is a fanfiction writer out there who is brilliant beyond genius. GENIUS. MORE THAN ANY FP WRITER THAT I 'VE EVER READ. Characters, which are so important to any story. You may look down on her because they are not hers, but the thing is, she makes them hers. She brings a depth and complexity to them that really didn't exist before. The series is somewhat flat in my opinion of nearly all the character, sure they get their spotlight...once. Because you know, the series IS called Naruto, so yea. I really got tired of the formula for nearly each and every character with their boo hoo stories, getting their asses kicked by Naruto, and then turning around with a born-again attitude. She takes two characters in particular and gives so much life to them, they seem separate from their series counterpart. Not because they are out of character, but because they are so IN character. Does that make sense? They are more real than Kishimoto EVER made them. She creates her OWN characters, inserts them, and you would never even guess that they weren't part of the original series. That's how good she is. AND these original characters are bloody geniues in their conception and back story that they are equally as deep as the two main characters. WHY IS SHE A GENIUS?! Her plot is magnificent! It's hard with fanfiction to write because there is very little room and it restricts you. But she does it with the flexibility and grace of a ballerina and the raw strength of a martial artist. Her stories are emotional, they are human. They speak like people with lived lives. And best of all, 99% of her stories are finished or on their way to being finished. Who is this wonderful, beautiful, sexy person?! SilverShine Yea, you probably heard of her already, if you read Naruto fanfic, but she's really a rarity in original and fan writing. Her latest work, A House of Crows will MOVE you, MAKE YOU CRY, and LAUGH OUT LOUD. You don't even have to like or known about Naruto to read it. Okay, maybe just this: 1. Naruto has a monster fox sealed in him. 2. There are many of these monster things about, people have tried to seal them in other people to harness the power. 3. Only afterward, they are realy really mean to the sealed child. Because they're asses. this is pretty much the basis of Naruto. OKAY. And it's about Ninjas. So go to fanfiction.net right now and read it. You will not regret it, you're life will only be more complete. house of crows has one more chapter to completion and it's likely to be done within the week. you won't be left hanging. (Comment on this)
Friday, November 6th, 2009
umass_amherst [ o_wanderlust ]	8:34p	The Politician & the Journalist I'm a sophomore government major at Smith looking to possibly take Rep. Richard Neal's class "The Politician & the Journalist" in the spring. Am I correct that there are no prereqs? Is it a difficult class to get a spot in? If anyone here took it & has something to say about it, I'd appreciate hearing it as well. SPIRE won't let me log in as a non-UMass student fyi which is why I'm asking here. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
umass_amherst [ melissasays ]	12:13p	Winter Break/Spring Jobs? It's my first semester staying at UMASS for winter break and I'm looking for a job that will give me enough hours to support me over the break-- any suggestions? It would be great if I could work through the spring also. Thanks! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
graphics [ fefa_koroleva ]	7:19p	paper,ink, acryl, photoshop ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
news [ theljstaff ]	1:15p	LiveJournal Major Notes: Spam counter-attack, RSS feeds again, CSI Deadly Intent contest The empire strikes back In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal. RSS feeds again If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience. Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests! c_s_i If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here. Enveloped in postcards Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be giving ten random users paid account credits. Photos of the week If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too! ( Read more... ) (235 Comments |Comment on this)
wondergirl_dv	11:03a	Hiatus and damn poems I'm really tired of people telling me to read deeper in to a poem, because I think that there's really not much more to read into it. I told you what I think was the author's intent, metaphors, mood, and all that crap. What more can I read into it? Make things up? This is why I hate english. It's bull crap. You have no idea if the author meant that or not, god damn it. Don't tell me I'm wrong, because that's not freaking possible. What? You don't think the sun wasn't a metaphor for his self? Well I think it was! Stupid TA, full of himself. Lecturing us about complacency when he obviously hasn't done shit with his life. UGH. I need some tea. I think I'm just going to have hatred towards writing literature analysis for the rest of my life. This worries me because I like writing. I guess I'll just be a really shallow writer. And you know what, I'm cool with that. Because I'm pretty damn sure that a lot of what people wrote in the 1800s was not AT ALL what we think they meant. And that damn sun was put in there because the poet was a douche bag. Whine about being left behind and then write poem about it. Yes, I'm talking about this lime-tree bower my prison. Fucking poem. Sorry, I'm just really really angry. I didn't get a bad grade, I got a B. But the comments on it just made me want to shoot myself. In writing news, The Lost Girl Ch 2 is being drafted slowly. TDC even slower, although there is more written for it. I just have too much going on in my life. I didn't keep my promise of studying in the process of learning instead of cramming before a test. And now I have a test everyweek. you see where I'm going with this. On hiatus. pretty much. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
je_suis_katya	11:50p	friends only comment to be added (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
umass_amherst [ flyingmachine ]	2:38p	G gened; Does anyone know of courses or seminars that fulfill the "G" (Global) gened but are less than 3 credits? Thanks. (Comment on this)