Shapeshifting

I spend some of my time exploring Oak Hill Cemetery in Evansville, Indiana. Every time I come back I find something new and it is always beautiful there.

There is a willow hanging over a koi pond and a picnic table in this cemetery. This place never fails to inspire me.

Wisps of willow leaves fall into the water and spill over the earth, sweeping over the entire place, saving it from time. The tree’s roots twist into the ground, anchoring itself into the heart of sorrow. A koi kisses the surface of the lake and a frog sings a dreamy tune as thousands of stone listeners watch.
I walked to this place by passing through many people, their names etched into stone after stone. Cicadas encase me in an ear blasting sonata. The wind blows like it would anywhere else and the birds sing pretty little songs, but no living man would rake the leaves in this world. No living man would build his life on this land. Here it is always twilight.
Ants run over the picnic table under the arms of the weeping willow tree. Who would picnic here, in this twilit realm?

Who would sit and eat with the dead?

( Read more... )

I have a crap load of messages in my inbox and LJ message thingy that are in need of a reply. Unfortunately my weekends are crazy-busy and I fail at email on them. Add to that the fact I have to write a lot this weekend (catching up on my poem a day challenge, NaNo and a group project I'm in) and it means there is no way I'm going to be able to respond before Monday. I'm sorry about that, but I just wanted you all to know I'm not ignoring you.

Team status as of Thursday is:

Erato
684,695 words
15/31 on pace to win

Clio
632,985
13/31 on pace to win

Calliope
548,709 words
12/31 on pace to win

Looking forward to seeing what the word counts look like at the end of the weekend :)

Share your day fourteen word counts and excerpts here once you're done writing for the day, and don't forget today marks the start of a weekend word war, and tomorrow is the mid-way madness sprint. ZOMG so many prizes!

November 14 & 15
Weekend Word War Take Two
Write as much as you can between 12:01am Saturday the 14th and 11:59pm Sunday the 15th.
-Person with the highest weekend word count will win a knit beanie or scarf (donated by caitak )
-Everyone who writes over 5,000 words over the weekend will have their name entered into a draw for free registration of a domain name for one year (donated by stayawaystar )

November 15
Midway Madness
Are you at 25,000 words?
-Everyone with a word count of 25,000 words or more by 11:59pm on the 15th will have their name entered into a draw to win Fingerless Gloves (donated by dogzilla30 --> http://www.exofficio.com/product_details.aspx?item_cd=3052-5023 )

The results for the Clio vs Calliope word war from last weekend are in and the winner is:
Clio's weekend total was 257,237 words and Calliope's was 211,333. Congratulations Clio! Your team won a copy of the desktop version of Write or Die, donated by kibet. Once you figure out who on your team is going to receive it, be sure and drop him a note to arrange the details.

In other team-related news, the team status' as of Monday were:

Erato
502,604 words
15/31 on pace to win (48%)

Clio
451,741 words
14/31 on pace to win (45%)

Calliope
416020 words
20/31 on pace to win (65%)

Now I'm waiting on word counts for up to 11:59pm Thursday night for the teams so we can see some updated progress and be good to go on the word war this weekend. Please don't make me wait past today, it will make me grumpy. Rhonda@jofigure.com

It's Friday the thirteenth. Do you care? Why not share why or why not when you comment to this post to share your word counts and excerpts? It could give us something to talk about aside from words, if only for a couple seconds LOL

That's right, this is the place to share your word count when you're finished writing for the day :)

Don't forget there is a weekend word war between Erato and Calliope starting today, and a two-day word war for the entire community starting tomorrow.

This week's Friday playlist goes a little off piste, from our usual diet of Spotify music, Navigator and Reveal Records present a compilation of 30 tracks of the finest new music around, all free to download. Download the whole album below, or listen to, read about and download individual tracks on this page. The track descriptions have been written by Tom Rose, who's in charge of both Navigator and Reveal Records.

1. I Love The Sun / Jon Redfern
2. Love Has Left The Room / A Camp
3. Tin Drum / Dead Air
4. Nothing I Can Do / Gramercy Arms (featuring Sarah Silverman)
5. Harvest Gypsies / Kris Drever
6. Red Flowers / Mascott
7. Fever Dream / Nels Andrews
8. The Ride / Joan As Police Woman
9. Call America / Madam
10. Dont Worry / Jon Redfern & Becky Unthank
11. Muddy Water / Boo Hewerdine
12. Sand In My Shoes / Dean Owens
13. Whispering Grass / Heidi Talbot
14. Into The Blue / Kris Drever,John McCusker ,Roddy Woomble
15. 23A / The Martin Green Machine
16. Roll Her Down The Bay / Bellowhead
17. The Gardener / Rachael McShane
18. Albion / Chris Wood
19. Beads & Feathers / Sandy Wright (exclusive track from the forthcoming album)
20. Ghosts / Angel Brothers
21. People Like Me / Alyth
22. Will I See Thee More / John McCusker's Under One Sky (feat. Jim Causley)
23. Sea / Aidan O'Rourke
24. Tears Of The Sun / Inge Thomson & Martin Green (exclusive track from the forthcoming album)
25. The Rains It Rains / Spiers And Boden
26. The New Deserter /Faustus
27. I Am The Song / Mawkin:Causley
28. Under Their Breath / Jon Boden
29. Horizontigo / Lau
30. Hard Earth / Kris Drever (exclusive track from his forthcoming album)


To download the whole compilation, right-click here and click "Save target/link as"

I dyed my hair a dark forest green color. I mixed a blend of Special Effects hair dyes. I filled a mixing bowl with half Sonic Green and half Fishbowl Blue, then added a streak of Iguana Green through the concoction and got this color.

I was shooting for Aprella's hair color and didn't even come close! But I still like it. I'm interested to see how it will fade...

Two pics under the cut. You should be able to click on them and make them larger, unless I suck at computers...which I usually do.

( See Pictures )

lets see so shortly after i redyed my hair with napalm orange and hicolors red hot i chopped all of my long hair off
( way image heavy )

I really miss the length but my hair was getting so long it was just knotting into something unmanageable.. so now im just kind of sitting and waiting for my hair to grow out. my family says the purple looks bad on me but i kinda like it. should i fuss with it or just let my hair grow and the purple to fade out? also i dont know if anyone else has had this problem but now that i have shorter hair it is 50x more annoying/hard to straighten.

Can I mix hair dye together to get a brighter or different color? I want to use L'Oreal Hicolor and I went into Sally's and I didn't think the red I wanted was bright enough irl compared to the sample online. So I was wondering if I can mix a highlighting color from the same brand to get a better color?

Thanks!

(cross posted)

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

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. 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
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. 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)!
5. 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
6. 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!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. 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!

...is the longest week ever!

I want to be done. Sunday cannot come soon enough.

Feeling discouraged by the crazy-high word counts some people have? If you're one of those insane word count people, shoo for now. Really, over there, we're not going to spread rumors about you, but this post is not for you. It's for the rest of us. Those of us who are writing our 1,667 words, give or take, everyday. We're not pumping out 10,000 words a day, we've not passed the 50k finish line and we're certainly not aiming for 200,000 words. We think your goals are fantastic and worthy, but they aren't ours.

Our goals are different. We are trying to set a routine where we write every day regardless of the word count, or we want to reach 50,000 words in 30 days, or maybe we just want to make it to the end of the month with our sanity intact. These are all fantastic and worthy goals. No more or less awesome then the other goals people have. The problem with our goals is that we can become discouraged when we see other people's progress if it seems greater than ours.

In prison they say you do your own time. In NaNoLJers I'm saying, you write your own NaNo.

Competition is only helpful until it's not.

Sound lame or confusing? Bare(bear?) with me.

Partly, it's about proportion. If Fred has a word count goal of 200,000 words for the month of November he needs to write 6667 words a day. If your goal is 50,000 words you need to write 1,667. That means every one of your words is worth four of his. So if Fred writes 5,000 words and you write 2,000 you've made more progress toward your goal than he has.

How do you know what his goal is? You don't, that's why you need to write your own NaNo.

If you can use people's very high word counts as inspiration, please do, but if they are making you discouraged that's the opposite of helpful, so ignore them.

Seriously.

Sacrificing your own NaNo to tell someone with 150,000 words on day ten how great they're doing is stupid. They know they are doing great, if they don't, nothing you say can change that. It's okay to be selfish sometimes, and NaNoWriMo is one of those times.

Write your 1,667 words a day, or your 500 words a day, or whatever. Write your own NaNo and I'll see you at the end of the month. Whether you cross the finish line or not, I'll still buy you a virtual beer and we can talk about what we'll do differently/better next year. Because, there's always a next year.

Crossposted to nanowrimo.

Is there anything ONLINE that functions like yWriter? Meaning, that allows you to skip between scenes and edit them together later?

I'm not able to use my personal computer now so it'd be nice to have something similar online.

Thanks for the help.

(p.s. normally I'm natane. I'm on the journal I'm writing in. Haha.)

In order to save your friend's list I'm going to try to combine a few posts into one here LOL Please at least skim read it :)

First of all, congratulations to alienatedduck who won the Remembrance Day sprint with an inhuman total of 21,026 words. Remember kids, don't try this at home. 'grats dude, that's awesome. You won user icons for a year or 6 months of paid LJ time (donated by bdwilson ) I'm sure she'll be in touch, she tends to be 'at the ready' :)

Next, I'm still waiting for word counts from Clio from last weekend's word war with Calliope. If I don't have them by tomorrow morning, I'm sorry but I'm going to have to declare Calliope the winner by default. There are prizes that need to be awarded.

But wait, there's more!

This weekend sees two more word wars. One for individuals on Saturday and Sunday and one over Friday, Saturday and Sunday between teams Erato and Calliope.

November 13, 14 & 15
Word War Two: Team Erato vs Team Calliope
The team with the most words written between 12:01am November 12th and 11:59pm November 15th wins. Last year Calliope won by a hair, will they be able to have a repeat performance this year?

Team reporters I will need your numbers (individual and team totals) for up to and including Thursday night. Clio you too please :) I know you're not in this word war, I need the numbers just so we can see how everyone is doing in relation to one another.

Please share your word counts and excerpts for day twelve here once you've finished writing for the day.

This is one I took while on vacation in New Orleans. I'll try and post some more later. Thanks

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )

I found this on another NaNoWriMo community and I must say it gave me some things to think about.  Think it's time to write.  :)

Forest Lawn is one of the oldest, largest, and most beautiful cemetaries in Nebraska (A close second to Wyuka.) Last Sunday, I spent several gorgeous hours there.

The four apostles


Have a lucky day

( down the path )

All photos copyright by the photographer. Please do not reproduce without permission.