...is going to kill me.

ADGFKDJFHSDFGKJLHERTKJHRSKJSDFKJHSGKJ

I just spent no less than 6 hours staring at a spreadsheet of the stimuli for my experiment. AND I'M STILL NOT DONE!

I want to cry. ;_; I NEED to start collecting data this week or else I'm dead in the water, since I'm presenting at SEPA (a regional psychology conference) in only about a month. I'm praying that I can blow through the transcription with ease. It will probably just devour my life though....

</academia rant>

Where did the month of January go? I really have no idea....

Anyway, I've been spending a lot of time on Furry-Paws which is why I haven't been posting here as much. For shame, I know. =.= I haven't had much energy or inspiration for personal art lately. I'm taking 22 hours of classes and have a major paper I'm presenting at a conference in a couple months, so that's where most of my energy goes. All my artistic energy goes into commission work at FP these days. One of these days I promise I will just kick back and draw whatever the heck I want just because. c:

But in the meanwhile I have soooooo much work to do. xD I'm happy though, which is a big plus.

I kinda miss dA, not gonna lie. I will come back to you, one day.

So how has everyone been? Tell me something fun about your life. Or not fun, if you feel like being a party pooper. xP

I got my 500th watcher a few hours ago. I'm not a huge stickler for keeping track of special numbers, but I still think that's pretty cool. I never would've imagined being able to amass 500 followers when I started out on deviantArt almost 7 years ago. Now let's see how long it takes me to get to 1,000. xDD

Thank you to every single one of my watchers! You guys inspire me to keep working hard and improving every day.

Soooo I made a Tumblr because every day in 2013, I'm going to strive to create at least one new drawing. Sometimes they will be polished pieces, most of the time they will just be rough sketches. If you're interested in following my progress, you can check it out here: [link] The more people I have following me, the more I will be motivated to keep to my goal, so I appreciate any support! 2013 is going to be a year of big improvement for me and I'm determined to make it so.

[link]

Working on a ref for a commission today. :3

I have had an FA account for a while now but I forgot to let people on my dA account know about it. xD If you have an FA account and want to add me there, here you go: [link] I upload mostly the same art here and there, but sometimes I'll upload things there that I won't upload here and vice-versa. In any case I always appreciate the extra support!

Because I have a lot of fun buying point commissions so I'd like more points. xD I should note that this time I'm taking COLORED commissions too and not just sketches. All coloring will be digital, since I need a lot of practice and it will give me a chance to experiment, in addition to being faster than traditional coloring. For a sketch with colors, it's only an additional 30 points, and for a lineless colored drawing it's an additional 70 points. All in all pretty cheap if I do say so myself. Full information is listed in this journal: [link] You can leave a comment on either journal or send a note if you're interested! Unlimited slots for now.

You can watch me paint a image of Trixie in SAI here: [link] My eclectic music choice will be playing in the background so you might want to mute.

Hey all, I want to do something special for Christmas this year and offer some free art to any one of my watchers. All you have to do is be one of my watchers and comment with a link to a picture or ref of the character you would like drawn. On December 8th I will use a random number generator to pick someone, and your picture will be done by December 25th, which is also when I will notify you that you were chosen (it's a surprise!).

Now here's a little twist. If you want to increase the odds of being chosen, you can comment twice with either the same or a different character if you do one of the following:

-Make a journal which links back to this journal OR
-Offer a Christmas raffle of your own (you can make up your own rules as long as it's still a free raffle).

Please provide a link to the journal in your second comment or else it won't count. This way we can spread holiday cheer together.

...who thought King Sombra was a disappointing villain? He seriously had almost no lines, just a randomly evil shadow unicorn wreaking havoc for the lulz or something. Really no character development there, which is a little sad because a lot of the other MLP villains have been great. If his character design were amazing, it would offset it more, but even that was pretty disappointing in my opinion. It kind of ruined the season premier episodes for me, to be honest. =3="

Anyone else have thoughts on the first two episodes of season 3?

I have a bunch of points stored up now which originally I was going to use to buy a premium membership, but now I'd like to use them to buy commissions. It would be great if people could do a little self-advertising and link to their commission info so I could check it out and possibly buy some commissions! Don't worry if you think your commissions are too expensive or too low quality, just put your work out there and I'll decide for myself. You may be surprised. xD

I feel like I've had enough of a break, so I'm going to go ahead and re-open commissions while starting to work on the list I've accumulated. There's a few changes this time around though:

-I will NOT be accepting point commissions anymore. I used to want a premium membership, but my desire for one has since waned. After I finish the point commissions I have accumulated, I won't be taking anymore for a very long time, or maybe never again! I will still do point adoptables from time to time, however.
-Colored pieces now start at $10. This is a little bit cheaper than before, since I've gotten very fast at coloring traditionally with markers. If your character is very complex, it will be a bit more expensive because it will take longer to complete.
-I am going to start doing digital commissions. Here are the kinds I will offer:

Lineart for $8+.
Flat colors for $10+.
Full colors for $20+.

These will become cheaper as I get faster at them, but for now I need more time to complete them. Eventually they will probably be faster and cheaper than traditional commissions.

That's about it! Please contact me if you are interested in a commission, either via comment or note. I can be sure to set something up. In the meantime, I will be churning out owed art.

My depression has been hitting me very hard for the past few weeks, but finally I have something to look forward to. I love visiting foreign countries and exploring new languages and cultures, so studying abroad has always been a dream of mine. Now it finally looks like I'll be able to do it! I've been researching Korea University's Visiting Student Program and it looks like a great fit for me. They have linguistics and psychology courses taught in English, and I could pick up basic Korean too! This would also count as my intercultural credit for my home university, as well as fulfilling some of my much needed psych electives and taking courses I could never take at home. I would get all this for a price that is MUCH cheaper than going to my home college, since I wouldn't be going through my college's foreign exchange program and would only have to pay KU's tuition which is less than a fourth of my school's tuition. Even with the cost of airfare and living expenses, my family would be saving money. All I need to do is get the courses approved for transfer of credit by my school, and then I can go!

Even better, living in Korea for semester would give me a chance to visit other Asian countries as well. Right now, my plan is to fly from the US to Nagoya this summer to spend a couple weeks with my friends who are living there before flying into Seoul for the school year. Hopefully I'll also have a chance to visit Shanghai and, of course, Jeju. Best of all, my parents are fully supportive of the idea, so I know it's a real possibility and not just a fantasy.

All in all, I'm pretty excited about it. It has given me something to research and work towards instead of wallowing in sadness. >.< I'll definitely post updates as things get finalized. I'm aiming for going next summer/fall, basically as soon as I can help it.

Hey all,

Random request, but are there any good basic (like absolute beginner) Photoshop tutorials that anyone has used before that you think might be of some use to me as someone who is just starting out in digital art? I have a nice tablet but stopped using it after I got frustrated with the digital learning curve, but I would really like to stick it out this time! If you think I should be starting out using software other than Photoshop, what software and could you link me to some good tutorials for it?

I realize this is something I could probably accomplish in a Google search too, but I wanted some suggestions from real live artists. Thanks!

My mom had to put my cat to sleep today. He was so sick that the vet said he wouldn't last for more than a few weeks. I wish I could've seen him one last time, but maybe it's for the best that I wasn't there to see him put to sleep and buried.

This month has just sucked so bad. I really can't wait for it to be over....

My 21st birthday is in less than a week. I feel so old. ._.

School is crazy hard. We have a linguistics prof now though so that's amazing. She's like my new best friend. I've also found some other students looking to go into linguistics through her, so I now have more people to geek out with!

My drawing has been suffering lately because I'm on mood stabilizing drugs. They make me loopy and drowsy about 85% of the time, but they lowered my dosage so I've been feeling more lucid for the past few days. It's so hard to concentrate on drawing, so my sketches are very sloppy and more caricatured than usual. Hopefully I'll get more adjusted soon.

And that's about it that I have to share about my life. I just wanted to get my uber happy and optimistic journal off the main page because I definitely don't feel that way anymore. It's a struggle to get out of bed most days, but I do it! Fighting!

My drawing "I Do it for the Wub" was featured in Equestria Daily's Drawfriend #538 today: [link] Maybe this isn't a big deal for most people, but I'm really excited about it! I've never made it into a Drawfriend before and I didn't think I would be able to for a long time coming. Hopefully it won't be the last! Thank you to everyone who favorited and commented, and also to whoever submitted it (wasn't me haha!).

The bigger news is that I'm leaving for college tomorrow, which could mean a lot less dA for me. My college Internet has a habit of randomly blocking and unblocking dA. Usually it's blocked at the beginning of the year and then becomes unblocked within a month or so. o.O I really dunno why, but it's been that way for the past two years. Anyway, if I can't upload my NATG entries here anymore, I will still submit them to EQD and just submit them here after the fact. When September rolls around, I WILL get back to work on my commissions and hopefully finish a lot of them. If I can't post them, I'll send the files to commissioners privately and upload them later when I can. Once I get through more than half of my accrued commissions, I'll open up commissions again and post a journal notifying everyone! If you've already contacted me about getting a commission while they've been on hold, I'll contact you personally.

That's about it! Hoping for a good semester for everyone.

Random mini-rant time, in which I am going to sound like a pretentious snot....

It really bothers me now when people randomly include Sinitic characters (hanzi, kanji, hanja etc.) in their pictures for the sake of looking cool. One, because most of the time the characters are wrong/gibberish or are written wrong, and two, because most of the time it looks really tacky. =.= This didn't really bother me much before but now that I can actually read characters and tell the difference between traditional and simplified hanzi and kyūjitai kanji and shinjitai kanji, it's much much worse because I don't see cool-looking "Asian symbols" but instead actual words.

It's bad when someone uses simplified hanzi or kyūjitai kanji (obviously without knowing what it is) or sometimes even hangul and labels it as Japanese. But the downright worst is when people mix traditional and simplified hanzi and/or kyūjitai kanji and shinjitai kanji in the same piece. I mean, they might as well throw in some pinyin and romaji in for good measure. The only upside is that sometimes there's funny hidden messages in people's writing without them knowing it. For example, if your tattoo design consists of a wolf with the characters 英 and 貴, the first thing I think of is a wolf complaining: 英國菜太貴了! ("British food is too expensive!") Not a "brave" and "noble" wolf or whatever you were going for, since the other meanings are more common in normal speech. And also, using 氣 as the "Japanese" word for "spirit." No. Read this blog post and you'll see why: [link] If you can't read it, don't write it. Rules to live by.

_{AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Well, at least I got my other depressing journal off my main page.}

Because right now, I feel like crap about everything. -.-

It's kind of gotten to the point where I feel guilty looking at my art because I despise it; I feel guilty about everything, actually. I feel completely inadequate in everything. Usually, sharing my art has been a good source of motivation and encouragement for me, but recently it's just a source of pain and struggle. I really need to get my act together before I will feel good about coming back.

I'll still check my messages once in a while, mostly to talk to friends who I contact primarily via dA. But I won't be doing much else for a while....

If you want points refunded for unfinished commissions, feel free to note me and I'll set something up. I'm not leaving permanently, just for an unknown amount of time until I feel more confident about myself, so nothing I owe will truly be cancelled (as in, I don't plan on ever finishing it) unless I post another journal and contact commissioners saying so. It's just I can't give an estimate on when things will be done... it's possible I will send owed art privately instead of posting it publicly, but I really don't know.

I really just need to get over myself and grow up a bit... who knows how long that'll take.

I don't normally do these things but I'm seriously bored out of my mind today. xDD Anyways, I was tagged by

1. You must post these rules.
2. Each person must post 10 Facts about themselves in their journal.
3. Then Answer the questions the tagger set for you in their post,
and create eleven new questions for the people you tag to answer.
4. You have to choose 10 people to tag and post their icons on your journal.
5. Go to their page and tell them you have tagged him/her.
6. No tag backs.
  
Facts about me:
1. I'm a lefty but I can also do a lot of things with my right hand like write and paint.
2. I'm 1/2 German, 1/4 English, 1/4 Scottish.
3. My bedroom is Totoro-themed, not really intentionally but because I have SO much Totoro merchandise!
4. My favorite languages are Finnish and Korean.
5. Right now I'm supposed to be writing an algorithm for a box packing problem....
6. Tobuscus is my favorite Youtuber.
7. I'm the only girl in my department at college (the computer science department bahaha).
8. My favorite mythological creature is the griffin.
9. I think Lee Minho is possibly the most attractive guy ever. xD
10. I have over 600 birds from 4 countries on my life list.

Tagger's questions:
1.Do you like cats? Yes, I own one!
2.Do you wish to travel through time? Only with the Doctor. Otherwise, I would probably just make the universe fall apart ahaha.
3.Would you prefer Da points and popularity over a schoolarship? If you mean "scholarship" then scholarship all the way. My schooling is extremely expensive and important to me, especially over fake money and popularity on a website. >.>
4.Do you have an iphone? Nope. I laugh at people who have iPhones, actually (this includes my boyfriend).
5.Do you think an android phone is better than iphone? I like them better, mostly because they're open-sourced and Java-based which makes them very programmer friendly, especially to me whose best programming language is Java. iPhone doesn't even support Java or Flash either and probably never will. :/ I'm not a huge fan of Apple products in general, especially their security policies which are a disaster waiting to happen.
6.Do you like cookies? Not as much as cake. xD
7.Do you like pandas'? Yes, I went to see some in Ocean Park this summer.
8.Would you ever accept a trip to japan? Definitely. My boyfriend and I are seriously considering moving there after graduating from college.
9.Are you an emo?If so do you cut yourself? No and no. I'm a very emotional person though haha! But more of a sit-around-and-eat-ice-cream-and-cry-while-watching-a-cheesy-K-drama kind of emotional.
10.Do you prefer vampires over werewolves? Heck nah. I love werewolves!
11.Do you like the hunger game more than twilight/harry potter? I don't really like any of those, to be honest. I've yet to read the Hunger Games because it didn't seem like a very good series. Generally, books that become super popular these days usually aren't because our culture has a hard time distinguishing entertaining books from GOOD books.

My questions:
1. What was your favorite TV show as a kid?
2. If you could go anywhere right now for free, where would you go?
3. What's the song you're listening to right now or the one you listened to last?
4. What's your favorite animal?
5. Where did you go for your last trip or vacation?
6. Who are you missing right now?
7. Procrastinator or planner?
8. What was the last book you read?
9. Dragons or dinosaurs?
10. If you could have a mythical creature for a pet, what would it be and why?
11. What languages do you speak (or are learning)?

I tag... anyone who wants to do it. xDD Yeah, I know it's cheating, wanna stop me? :3