RatCreature's Journal

Currently I jot down the expiration dates for foods I buy in a notebook every time I put away new groceries, because I figured it would be easier to notice foods that are close to expiration date by looking through a notebook every now and then rather than going through my pantry shelves. But this method isn't very convenient either.

I don't use a spreadsheet, because I want to do the entry in my kitchen as I put away groceries. So I don't want to do tedious data entry afterwards. But it occurred to me that doing this with a phone app could possibly work with scanning codes, and not take that much longer for the entry, and get me to a sortable inventory with expiration alerts.

However I do not want an app that collects and monetizes my grocery shopping data with their company and then shows me personalized grocery shopping ads, or tracks my shopping habits and then sells data about pantries or such (even in aggregate or "anonymized"). I want an app that keeps a database of my food strictly on my phone and doesn't use it for anything. I don't intend to manually do the work of a surveillance "smart" fridge for anybody.

Are there such apps? The popular ones like "Out of Milk" seem to be the convenience in exchange for consent to surveillance type...

My output this year is barely worth summarizing as I don't even need one full hand to count, but I've indexed every year since 2006.

This year there was only one piece of art, two drawbles/doodles, one icon and eight months entirely without art, compared to 2012's three pieces of art, nine drawbles/doodles, no icons and nine months entirely without art. 2011 it was six pieces of art, 36 drawbles/doodles, seven icons, and three months entirely without art. Not a good trend. Well, maybe 2014 will be better.

January
a fashion meme drawble (XMFC)

February
a doodle for Beth H's Third Time's...the Charm? (Avengers)

March-October
Nothing :(

November
an Iron Man ratcreature icon

December
Steampunk Maria Hill/Steve Rogers (Avengers), my Yuletart drawing

Like many people I collect some pieces of fanworks as chapters of a single work, to avoid horrible, horrible clutter on my works page. In my case it is drawbles and doodles, but others do it with written snippets. That is of course due to the lack of a Scraps feature like dA has, where you can separate less polished stuff from the rest, which I bemoaned here before. Unfortunately you can't mark chapters as gifts to someone to let them get a notification either.

And before anyone points to the series feature, I already collect drawbles in a twenty part series, with the works being divided by fandoms, and some of these have over 40 chapters. If I made each picture a "work" these would totally swamp the art I want people to notice in any fandom.

I have just doodled something that originally I wanted to post for the Secret Mutant Madness, but didn't get around to before Christmas, even though I liked my idea for the prompt. So now I just wanted to post it anyway, and alert the prompter. But I can't do that and put it with the other Marvel sketches.

So now I have a dilemma, in that I can either mess up my whole organization by posting a sketch as a work, or I can't let the prompter know.

I've started to post a bunch of my fanart on AO3 even though sadly you can still only embed art, not upload it, so it's not truly archiving yet. But the advantage is that many of the stories I've illustrated are there and thus I could take advantage of the associations, and also I like having tagging options.

Anyway, I've wondered what to do about drawbles, which for me outnumber "regular" fanart more than 2:1. On dA I put them in the scrapbook so they don't swamp the rest of my gallery, on my website they are in a different section, and in my fanart blog and journals are mostly bundled in a couple of drawble posts after the prompt rounds. But what do you do in an archive like AO3?

On the one hand I'm a completist in the sense that I want to have all my stuff in the places I pick (my personal website shows drawings I did in elementary school -- it's a thing), OTOH I naturally want the art that took a lot of effort to be somewhat more prominent, so that the first impression for visitors is not that I do only sloppy, quick doodles, when they browse my works in a fandom.

So how do you resolve that problem? I assume writers must have similar issues when deciding how to archive quick prompt response fic, drabbles, meme fic and the like. Do you bundle several into a single work? If so by which method? All of one fandom? Or maybe bundle chronologically somehow, like all you did for a prompt post? Some other solution? Or do you just let your other stuff get swamped and trust the audience will sort it out via tags? What's your presentation strategy?

There wasn't a lot this year, not even if I count all drawbles and icons and such, i.e. I can't even do the meme thing with the squares of one preview picture for every month.

January
a Numb3rs Don and Charlie ratcreature icon

February
Nothing. :(

March
Diricawl (Harry Potter fanart)

April
a fail! ratcreature icon

May
Five drawbles: 1-3, 4, 5
Robin (DC fanart)
Nightwing (DC fanart)

June
an Uhura ratcreature icon
a weird comment doodle for Kass' story Zygote (SGA/Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* (but were afraid to ask) fusion fanart)
Star Trek Reboot art meme (Star Trek: Reboot fanart)

July
Nothing. :(

August
Nothing. :(

September
Nothing. :(

October
Nothing. :(

November
Nothing. :(
(I did work on my Yuletart assignment that month, though I only finished in December with an extension)

December
Twelve drawbles: 1-6, 7-10, 11-12
Santa!Cthulhu
and the not yet revealed yuletart art.

This is even less than 2008, and it's not like I was prolific then. I suck. :(

Though I don't draw professionally or even all that often, I still have a habit of collecting interesting visual things for reference or inspiration. Even with libraries and these days internet image searches it is not easy to find the exact kind of interesting picture you need when you need it, or sometimes you don't even know what exactly it would be you need to realize some vague idea. Or at least it is like that for me, so if I come across something that is visually stunning, unusual, interesting, seems like a good inspiration, or a possible reference for something I might draw some day I keep it.

Like, if I'm at a used book store, I habitually look if there's a bin of old cheap National Geographic or other travel magazines and leaf through them to see whether any have cool photographs, if I see an interesting picture on the internet I will safe it, and so on.

Obviously after a time this results in an organizational problem if you ever want to find anything again. So I'm wondering how others deal with this.

It's not so bad with the books, I just have a shelf with books I got for their pictures, like for example collections of photographs from the 1920s, 30s and so on, books of animals, places, people, cars, design... It's harder for the magazines because things like National Geographic aren't topic specific, so I never know whether I decided to keep some issue for pictures of some place or some animal, or even whether it was in the title article. Which makes finding things again a bit harder.

Digital stuff is the least problematic in some respects, because I have created a bunch of folders labeled by topic for photos (reference for buildings & cityscapes, landscapes, actions, clothing, animals, plants, objects, symbols, textures,... with some having subfolders) and some other folders for art by other people, and yet another set of folders for fandom character reference, so it's not hard to find which folders to browse. The main problem is that I don't always know where I got some image from, because it's so much easier to just save a picture than to save it and add something to its meta-info field. That isn't a big problem if I just use it as inspiration or reference some parts of it, but if say a landscape photo was to serve as main reference for a drawn background I might want to acknowledge that, yet often by the time I use something I have no idea where it came from anymore.

Photos I've taken myself before having a digital camera are more of a mess, because those are mostly in big boxes, and most are kind of boring holiday photos with some cool landscapes and animals scattered inbetween. But the worst are the boxes of, well I guess "junk" fits, i.e. stuff I've kept for because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Much of that is also paper, like exhibition catalogs, flyers that looked interesting, clippings from newspapers or magazines, posters, but there's also stuff like feathers with a nice pattern, stones, tins, even some bit of metal that rusted in an interesting way, and so on. I mean, I try to keep the non-paper junk down to one box or so, because I really don't need to go down the road of people who end up smothered by their packrat piles collapsing on them, but well, I'm not a very tidy person to begin with, so it's an uphill battle. I guess what I really need would be del.icio.us tagging for RL objects and/or a physical search engine, but I fear that level of virtual home and computer merging is still a way off into the future.

So, how do you deal with organizing your reference and inspirational collection so that is actually useful for you rather than a pile of messy clutter? Do you have some kind of system? Or just really good spatial memory?

Since I am now crossposting on three sites, and have already backed my old entries up to GJ and intend to do the same to IJ eventually, it is a real hassle to update the SGA thematic list I maintain (the one listing stories with alien Pegasus cultures and new non-human aliens) directly as journal post, so the thematic list itself is now on a separate webpage. It's very bare bones, because it was annoying enough already to reformat it and to convert all the lj-shortcuts. I didn't even bother to replace them with "proper" author names if the pseuds differ, because there's well over a hundred stories on that list by now. But it should be serviceable enough, and I'll have to add stories in one place only instead of two or eventually three. Of course the original LJ entry is still there and now links to the webpage, so if you have for some reason linked my thematic list, your link won't be broken, though people have to follow an extra click.

On a slightly more fun note, I've posted another, slightly belated monster for amarin_rose, who asked for a "Purple People Eater":
( beware of the monster lurking behind this cut )

It surprised me that I've been quite productive fanart-wise by my (admittedly sloth-like) standards in 2006. Here's the complete list:

January
Tim as Avatar from Te's Intimates series (DCU - Batverse)
Platypus!Harry and Platypus!Harry fighting Voldemort, both drawn for Nimori's Animagus Challenge (Harry Potter)

February
Illustration for the epilogue of Beth's Snape/Kingsley story In From the Cold (Harry Potter)

March
Nightwing and Arsenal Show, an illustration for sister_wolf's Nightwing/Arsenal ficlet (DCU - Outsiders)
36 drawbles from the drawble meme I did, many of which are fannish (I should probably add a content warning here, because the drawbles were using the requesters' interests as prompts, so while most are harmless and just deserve a silliness warning, there's also stuff based on interests like "gay vampire snuff porn + zombies".)

April
Watership Down/SGA fusion crack (Watership Down/SGA)

May
illustration for Petra's Squandered my resistance, drawn for Comica Obscura (DCU - Batverse)
Storm (Ororo Munroe) (Marvel - X-Men)

June
Ginny Weasley (Harry Potter)

September
Tim in a visibly armored Robin costume, based on Te's request in illustrate_me (DCU - Batverse)
several Muppets/DCU fusion pieces, i.e. Kermit the Frog (as Superman) and Miss Piggy (as Lois Lane), Fozzie Bear (as Jimmy Olson), and Gonzo (as Nightwing) (DCU/Muppets)

December
Buddy Baker advertising Tofurky (DCU - Animal Man)

That's fourteen drawings, not counting the drawbles, which isn't too bad considering I only drew three in 2005 and none at all in 2004. Not exactly prolific, but at least I don't feel utterly ridiculous making a list.

Also, I tagged most of the fanart I've looked at on LJ this year, which isn't really production, but you can conveniently search and sort the links to over 2300 pieces of fanart by character and pairing (mostly comics and HP, though there's some other fandoms too), and I thought it can't hurt to mention my indexing effort again:
http://www.simpy.com/group/161

I've spent a couple of hours tagging fanart for the LJ fanart link sharing group brown_betty helpfully created at simpy.com. This method has the advantage over LJ memories that you can tag with more than five labels, also the tags of the group are searchable, and you can rather easily merge and edit them (something that turned out useful when you notice you tagged half the "Tim/Bart" "Bart/Tim"...). The only thing that bugs me is that with group tags is that there doesn't seem to be an option to just list all used tags, it just shows the most common.

Anyway, besides the fandom (mainly DC art so far) I tried to tag like the dcfic_index for characters, pairings, gen, slash, het, and femslash, sometimes team names in ensemble pictures, and in addition to that included tags like elseworld, and crossover, as well as "animated" if one or more characters were the toon versions. Also if the picture was labeled NWS or clearly showed a sex scene or character pin-up with nudity I tagged it NWS as well. So far there's 280 links, which should be enough for you to check out whether you find this system useful for searching for fanart:
http://www.simpy.com/group/161

Thoughts, opinions anyone?

After over two months of not adding anything to my Batman site (yeah, I suck), I started writing the entry for Detective Comics #785 tonight. I like rereading the issues with an eye for detail and references. I like looking into other comics and to search the net to find references, contradictions, stuff in general. It's a fun (though fairly unproductive) way to spend many hours. You notice things like that Batman's statement in DET #785 that he never fought together with Green Lantern I in Gotham is contradicted by the backup story in Gotham Knights #10, Guardian, which tells a version of their first meeting that shows them fighting together in Gotham (although they are far from at ease with each other then). I learned that the guy in the background of the GL Grundy flashback is called the Fiddler and was a member of the second Injustice Society together with the Sportsmaster, however I couldn't find other references for if/when he worked with Grundy. I mean, I would have never noticed all that without indexing. (It's up to you to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. *g*)