Okay, I'm sure this thing is buggy as all get out--and I know it doesn't look right in IE, get Firefox already all you weirdos--but LOOK WHAT I DID. Well, frankencoded. I'm not too far from being able to make my own stylesheets, I think, but I've gotten a bit out of practice recently and dA strips SO many coding capabilities...

This is me testing it out, lalala. My resolution is kind of massive--1400x900px, widescreen go--so I'm afraid it'll look funny on smaller monitors, but I did scale things down to about 1024x768 and it still looked okay. I hope it actually works and it's not just dA lying to me.

Anywho, away from that--the computer I've been using up until now, property of my mother and my next-youngest sister, has recently kind of exploded. There was a massive power surge that blew out half the city's power for about half an hour, then it came back for sixty seconds exactly before going out again for another twenty minutes. After it came back again following that outage, the computer refused to finish the boot cycle and we have since pulled the hard drive and sent it away to be cared for by some of our loving local computer techs. (Nashies are decent with computers, but some of this stuff is totally out of their league and this particular problem is one of them.)

This little mess means that I am on my own computer again! My old tower, untouched for six months, has been plugged into the spot where the other one was and is now humming happily away. This means that the artwork I was working on on the other computer may be gone forever. This is...less distressing than I feel it should be, but I'm a lot less nervous about losing my work now than I used to be.

I can recreate it now. It will be a little different, but I can do it anyway. And it will probably be better, because I'm always trying to improve. I'm not as good as some, maybe not as good as most, but I'm good enough to be happy with my work now, which is pretty new to me. I don't feel inadequate next to Blu's art anymore--and it's weird, because the person I have to thank for that really doesn't deserve anything of the sort from me.

But...I feel a lot better anyway. So thanks, she'enedra, for giving me a thicker skin and a better understanding of my work. I know that's not what you were going for, and I'm sure you or someone close to you is reading this and wondering what's going on, but thank you.

To all the rest of you, I'm thinking of putting together a sketchdump just for want of something to submit, but I don't know yet. We'll see how I feel about that a little later on.

_{This journal layout is based on the GIMP.org CSS by =ProSI.}