New Years Eve

What're you doing tonight? Staying up? Going to sleep? Dreading school on Monday? (I reckon I'll do all 3.) At the moment, I'm listening to Striking 12, since it's a musical about New Years, and then I'm going to head over to the dance at the stake center and dance badly with Aileen and probably get bugged by Jen.

It'll be good times. :D

To get in the New Years-partying mood, here's some crappy art I whipped of me an' Nick

This is cool

Check it out.

I may put a dollar towards it. Not much, but it's what I can spare since I have just decided I desperately need the SAI paint program. (Look at what I made in like ten minutes of messing around: Click)

Anyways, back to the original reason... it seems like a very cool idea to me. At least check it out.

Reason for the Season

I love the people on dA that I watch who are Christian and not afraid to show it. One of them, pixarjunkie, drew this gorgeous Christmas picture: http://pixarjunkie.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d35t2yy

Needless to say, it was a welcome break from all the silly and/or skimpy Christmas pictures others have been uploading. Some of them are nice too, but something like that I just love.

I feel like a marathon runner

I've had a list of tag commissions on Wajas that I've been putting for various reasons (mostly homework, sometimes horseback riding). Two weeks after they were ordered, I'm like, "Shoot, a couple of these are Christmas tags, I need to get working."

I think, "Well, break starts soon, I'll have plenty of time to work."

Uh, no. Busy busy busy. Even though I've already finished all of my shopping. Katy wants me to get together with her. We go bowling. I watch a movie with a friend that we've been planning for a couple months but only just managed to get around to. I have to run tons of errands, feed the animals, bring BiBi to and from work, YW, etc.

Finally today I'm home, time to get to work.

4 tags, 2 hands, one tablet, some spazzy Internet. 8 hours later, I'm finally done.

Woo hoo! Sparra is caught up... and already has another tag order.

lC

I forgot about this.

I have an mp3 player, and one day for some reason I actually read through all the small print on the warranty.

I was so glad I did.

"Warrenty does not cover mp3 if hurt by an act of God."

I was reminded when I was hunting through the old quotebook on Shalights for something I will be presently emailing to a friend and ran into it. Oh man. I wonder how many warranties say that.

Codemeister

Weird messages on Wajas day again today.

It all started when a player messaged me asking if I had a pre-sale going (letting others order pups before the parents are made to earn money for the parents) and, if so, had she ordered from it?

I replied that I kind of did- the parents were made but were not yet fully dyed, and I'm still lacking in a Cheetah dye. No, she hadn't ordered anything, so I threw in the link just in case she were to decide that she did want to buy something. /good business skills here

She replied that she liked the final stage.

Alright, you want to buy one?

She didn't have the money, but she offered a pup trade. The Waja she offered to trade matched one I've been looking to get a mate for, so I accepted and put her on the waiting list. I think our transaction is done.

Apparently not. She asks me about how many pups her Waja ought to have in its next litter, and then tells me she thought the possibility was larger, which it isn't, although I do have some fun stories from back in the day when there were glitches with the Waja litters and they were bigger. Like my friend whose Waja had a litter of 13 puppies, one of which I still own. She wants to see it. She likes it, asks about one of the items on it, asks me if it's cheap (even though it's really easy to look yourself). Eventually that discussion ends. Once again, I think we're done.

A few minutes later she messages me again, asking how I put the link to my Sales cave in the description of my main cave. I've gotten a lot of people asking me about html in my time on Wajas, and explain it like I always have. She tries to do it for her own sales cave and fails.

So she messages me asking me to write out the code for her to put in her cave. Meanwhile, she has also apparently been searching through my sales and has found another Waja she wants, but doesn't want money for. In a separate pm, she asks for another trade. I like the Waja, I accept. I also send her the code to link up her cave.

An important detail here is that you can't type a "<" on Wajas at the moment because the site has a bit of a glitch, and if you type that it automatically thinks you're beginning a code and either deletes everything following it (because you "did the code wrong") or turns it into the code. In pms it just deletes it because you can't hyperlink or post images in them. So I have to send her the code with brackets in place of the greater than/less than signs, and tell her to be sure to replace them.

She replaces them, but on the <'/a'> part, she does the first carrot backwards so it's >/a> (apostrophes because Blogger doesn't like a half code)
Luckily the rest of the coding in her cave survives (I don't know how she got that there) and the link works, but since there was no official closing code, the entire cave description is the link.

I point this out and tell her how to fix it.

A couple minutes later I get a message back, "face palm look at my cave"

I look, and all of the cave description past her attempt at hyperlinking is gone. Several images, some text, etc.
I had forgotten to warn her that if you get a code wrong, everything past it is eaten. I apologize, and she says it's fine, but now needs me to help her get all the codes working again. I write them all out for her, with repeated reminders on how to work the <>s. She gets it all right this time around.

By this time I'm dealing with three separate messages. Every time I try to condense it into one she sends me a new one, splitting it up again. :P But finally we seem to be done. I putter around Wajas for a bit, dreading another pm, but none comes.

Phew.

This isn't to say that I don't like helping people out there. I've been on Wajas for years and get a lot of players asking me for help, and it's no problem. But some of them just take a long time to deal with. xP

Secretariat

Yesterday was my parents' anniversary and to celebrate they went to see Secretariat, and brought me and Thomas along as well.

That is a good movie. Even Thomas, who isn't very into horses and particularly not horse movies, really enjoyed it. I recommend it.

And coming from a horse lover... it is especially awesome. :D I sure do love to watch horses run, and those were some good horses. Secretariat in particular, of course. They picked the perfect horse to play him (...horse actors, lol). He looked so intelligent and was simply gorgeous... <3 (I have dealt with stupid looking horses before, and that would have been a sad day if they'd picked one of them, although... I don't think they would have.)

Penny was awesome too. I loved the press conferences with Sham's owner, she always got him. xD The groom (I never caught his name) was also awesome. I love the scene after "Big Red eats his breakfast".

If you haven't seen it, go.

Coffee Break

I feel like a bit of a failure as a Mormon when I find myself going onto the Starbucks website to study various coffee flavors so I can figure out what sorts my various characters drink.

Turns out Starbucks has non-coffee stuff there (even one ice cream that is not coffee/mocha flavored!). I may have to go someday just to get the feel, and some hot chocolate ice cream (hahah, oxymoron much?) and apple cider.

Whoah

So I just posted on my other blog (finally, lol) and I forgot to stick a title up there but it was just fine.

I think Madison pointed that out once long ago, but I had forgotten that titles aren't a requirement.

I don't think anyone reads that other blog (with good reason, since I posted on it once and then waited like a year or more to post on it again), but I was fascinated and thought I'd point it out. And I wouldn't mind if someone read that one, since it might inspire me to write on it more.

Just maybe. P:

Just adding to last time...

This has just always been an argument that has bugged me. Going along with my last blog, I also saw something about this on dA today and just seeing multiple relating items has got me thinking again.

Vegetarians. I don't mind them as long as they don't mind me. I have family that is vegetarian, and they're fine. I have friends that are, and it's fine. It's all well and good until they start telling me that I can't eat meat, or getting after me for eating meat and telling me I'm some cruel person because I eat meat.

Let's get this straight. I'm me, and am in control of my diet. I am not doing it to be cruel to animals. As I eat a steak, I do not think to myself, "Oh, it's so great that this cow had to go to the slaughterhouse and be bloodily slaughtered. I'm sure it was in a lot of pain and I'm going to take joy in that idea." No. No one does that. If they do enjoy the idea of animals in pain, they're going to go do it themselves, not eat a steak and think about it.

Here's a stupid argument I hear a lot: "Animals kill their prey quickly and humanely. Humans do not."

I never realized that pulling the guts out of a deer while it is still alive was humane. I did not know that giving a mouse a slow-working poison that dissolves it from the inside out was humane. The idea of laying an egg inside a beetle so that the emerging grub eats it until the beetle is just an empty shell and dies does not strike me as humane.

I'm quite sure, however, that quickly chopping off a chicken's head so that all that remains are a few nerve impulses is. Shooting a deer through the brain so that it's functions stop and it drops dead as quickly as is naturally possible is perfectly humane. Sending a cow to the slaughterhouse, where it is quickly killed and every part of it is used (some parts go to science, some go to dogs, but yes, every part is used), is perfectly humane.

Do not tell me that humans are not humane and animals are. There's a reason that "humane" is derived from "human" and that the word is not "animalane". Animals do not care.

"Oh, but people are so cruel to animals. They raise them just to eat them, and they don't even raise them nicely!"

Riiight. A wild guinea hen, like a domestic chicken, is born with eating in mind. It is also born with tons of animals having eating it on their minds. A wild guinea hen must survive on its own, digging up grubs and picking off seeds while struggling to avoid predators and trying to find a mate. Eventually, it will be killed, most likely cruelly. It will most likely feel body parts being ripped off while it is still living. It will likely gasp, immobile, through a broken neck and watch as a carnivore rips its unfeeling legs off.

A chicken, even a chicken that spends its entire life in a wire box, never has to worry. It has plenty of food and water, a clean nest of straw. All it has to do is lay an egg a day and life is good. When it starts to get old and stops laying, they humanely kill it and someone eats it. The chicken never has to suffer through old age. It never has to worry, except that split second when it sees a knife coming for its neck.

"But... veal!"

Those calves live in a small enclosure, but they get the very best food, company (albeit often human), and daily massages. If I were an animal being raised for food, I'd want to be a calf being raised for veal. They live the good life, and then are killed before they experience even the slightest hardship.

"They never get to live the life of a wild animal! Animals should be able to run free and wild!"

And what? Worry constantly about predators? Have to walk miles for a bite of food or a sip of water? Have to spend their winters standing in blizzards and their summers either caught in blistering heat or stuck in bug-swarmed shade?

The wild is not a wonderful place. It is not a land of freedom and joy. It's a land of constant danger, where even beetles and ants fight over food.

Know what you're talking about. There is a difference between raising animals and animal cruelty, a huge difference. Kicking a cat because it walked past you is cruel. Killing a cow so that you can eat its meat, when that is what the animal is designed for (seriously, what else? If it grows old and dies, you've got a fifteen hundred pounds of rotting meat that you are refusing to eat in your pasture and it's going to give you some damage), is perfectly normal.

Being a vegetarian is fine, but so is being omnivorous. Don't get after me for following what is also a very natural diet.

Hahah, fail

PETA's super comeback

To quote a certain well-known towtruck, "[PETA] is so dumb~"