Lost: A Sense of Proportion

So, Nef's been a bit anxious about scheduling and everything she needs to get to today. As we walked the dog this morning, she was telling me about the dreams she had last night.

Nef: Yeah, we were just running around like crazy, trying to get everyone where they needed to be, and I had to drive the guys somewhere, but I never had the van when I needed it... It was so stressful. It was basically real life.

Me: Huh. I, uh, dreamed about Bucky trying to escape from Hydra, racing around in a building hiding in different rooms, trying to find a way out without getting caught.

Nef: ... Well. Apparently one of us is worried about something.

So, over at great_tales there's a variation of the "Ice Bucket Challenge" going around. (Details here - no donations to charities or actual dousing with water, just a bit of fun. Within 24 hours of being nominated, you need to post a fic or piece of art involving an ice bucket, set in any fandom you choose.) As goldvermilion87 nominated me... here I am. :)

LOTR may not be the most obvious choice, but eh, it was the first thing that popped into my head. Also, it has a way of reigniting my enthusiasm for writing.

( Ice Bucket Challenge fic! )

I wanted a Sherlock wallpaper for my computer, but couldn't seem to find anything with the sorts of quotes I wanted. So, naturally, I asked my super-talented sister to make me one. And she did. And it is lovely. :D


(This is a cropped, downsized part of it, for better viewing on LJ.)

Sadly, it appears that I may be headed for impending dual hard drive failure. The figurative kind - I seem to be coming down with the same thing Nef's had. And the more literal variety - after my brother completely wiped and re-installed everything on my computer and confirmed everything was free of viruses and shiny and running correctly, everything seemed to be going great for a while. Unnntil I had another crash, much weirder than the ones I'd had previously. It didn't just lose things that I'd saved immediately before the crash, or was working on at the time, but separate files that I'd saved to the desktop some time earlier completely disappeared as well - it was like the stupid thing had amnesia regarding everything that'd happened for 3-4 hours before that point. Scanning confirms still no viruses that could be causing weirdness, so... I dunno. I'd hoped to get this laptop to last another six months to a year, but... starting to really doubt that's gonna happen at this rate. 

Between one thing and another, I'm really starting to get that itch for new technology again. *g* I'm actually seriously contemplating getting an Apple laptop this time around, much to my own surprise. I got so aggravated with our Macs when I was younger - I thought for sure I'd never want to go back to them after I got my first Windows laptop. But seeing how shiny Nef's Mac desktop has been, and looking at a few of the laptops in the store... hmm. 

On a totally unrelated note, a question for my various friends who live in other states/countries (which would be, um, all of you, I guess XD). I've noticed a growing trend of people who leave "to be" out of their sentences when writing. That is, they would say, "It needs fixed." or "It needs changed." The first few times I noticed it, I figured it was just an odd typo. But I've been seeing it more and more, even from people whose writing is not otherwise riddled with errors, and it's just... odd. And has been kind of driving me crazy. So I'm wondering if you all have any ideas. Is t just a particularly common mistake? Laziness? Or could it be a regionalism that I'm not familiar with? (scarvenartist, I think you mentioned a similar quirk in the way people talk where you are, but it seems to me that you said it was a bit different - i.e. that people would say "It needs wash." instead of just leaving out "to be." Or am I remembering that wrong?)

One of the things I've always enjoyed has been my brain's tendency to take whatever I've been reading or watching recently and mash it up into some really fun dreams. There was the Lord of the Rings/War of the Worlds crossover. The NCIS/Temeraire fusion. The LOTR/Star Wars mashup. (If you can imagine a city with architecture that blends Coruscant with Minas Tirith... it's gorgeous.) And the dream I had after seeing Inception was certainly fun. *g*

And then there was last night's dream: a combination of Berkeley Square (older BBC series, about some nannies in 1902), London Blackout Murders (movie made in the early 40s, about a guy who kills people during the London bombings), and... The Avengers. Yep. A truly bizarre and entertaining bit of randomness. 

Now why can't my brain be that creative and cooperative when I'm actually trying to write? There are so many things that I want to finish right now, but I just can not do plot. (For myself, that is. I've had plenty of ideas to help out with Nef's story woes.) Probably because my brain's going and flagrantly wasting all my creativity while I'm asleep. *sulks* And everyone wonders why I stay up so late... It's because I'm trying to ambush my brain and grab some of those ideas when it thinks I'm asleep, but I'm actually still awake enough to do something coherent with them. 

These things also make me wish that I was a better artist. Because I can still see all these awesome settings so clearly, but I just... can't... *flails* 

I am starting to figure out some techniques to improve my detail work and backgrounds, though. I was playing around with some new brushes in Photoshop the other day, and managed this little doodle:

I may have mentioned once or twice my recurring frustration at being unable to manage decent fanart, because I Can. Not. draw people? And my tendency to deal with that frustration by... turning characters into dragons? 

Yeah. Have Dragon!Captain America and Dragon!Iron Man.



Kinda rough, and I ran out of paper space, but it was fuuuun. So fun I now want to do proper polished versions. And the rest of the team. And maybe Fury and Coulson too, because I'm a dork like that.