phr00tie

She's checking out a bird perched on the coniferous tree. :)

Moar Chaco goodness:

Puppy contemplates the season
Puppy celebrates the season
Looking cute on the lawn
0.02 second after taking this picture, I was SLAMMED IN THE FACE by her nose. It didn't seem to hurt her, but I was in pain. XD

She's growing up very fast -- she's twice as longer and taller compared to when she first arrived here. That's more than 2" of growth per week, on average. She's like a bamboo shoot!

Oh oh oh! Look at the new art I made! I'm VERY pleased with it. In fact, it's my favorite pic ever, even though it's not as popular as some of my other works. Click on the image to see the pic on my deviantART, and download a larger version.

The squeaky ball is about to meet MASSIVE CHACO PAW OF PULVERIZATIONAL DOOM.

Moar pix:

Enjoying a shady spot! This picture has been cropped, and I also edited the leash out because it caught some light and looked like it was GLOWING. Highly distracting.

Checking out tiny fruit cluster

Chaco has gained a level! Her new level-up removed the status Floppy Ears.

In other words, her ears are up now. :) Took her a bit longer than we expected -- they went more or less up last Friday or so, with the tip of her right ear looking just a bit floppy, but now they're 100% uppity up.

I took some pictures today. I had to hold the leash AND operate the camera simultaneously... Maybe that accounts for the horrendous image quality:


Probably my favorite pic of the batch, but Chaco is totally out of focus.

Roughhousing with her buddy, a household member. That's a VERY TALL guy in the picture, by the way (especially considering he's only an 8th grader)... If you knew how tall he was, you'd be able to tell how big Chaco got.

Super blurry

Relaxing for a moment before lauching off after a squeaky ball

I SEE SOMETHING!

Her tail is ridiculously massive and beefy, though you can't really tell from the photos. Seriously. @_@ It reminds me of a dinosaur's tail.

Today I finally figured out why Chaco digs sometimes: to look for earthworms to snack on. I don't even let her go near her favorite digging spots, but a certain member of the household is an x-treme proponent of raising dogs the "natural" way... which would be a lot more feasible if we lived on a farm. Here in the suburbs, you can't let a dog do whatever nature tells her to do. Not without inviting disaster after disaster.

~~~

Chaco eats everything. Citrus fruit is supposed to be icky to dogs, but she's eaten clementine sections.

Except limes -- the only edible substance that she has encountered and HASN'T eaten so far. We have some sort of a lime tree between our back yard and our neighbor's; in early fall, the fruits fall down. They give off a strong, citrus-y, herbal-y, bitter smell that drives Chaco nuts. They're too bitter to eat or even to hold in her mouth for long. So she bites them, tosses them in the air, jumps around while making "damn you, unsavory fruit-balls! I WILL CONQUER YOU" noises, and repeats the cycle.

~~~

Today we took Chaco to a Pet's Mart for the first time. She's a surprisingly shy girl, easily intimidated by new people and new dogs. Considering that, she did pretty well. :) She accepted treats from the staff (which she didn't when she was at the vet's a couple of weeks ago), met an older, larger dog and licked his nose, and enjoyed browsing through the toy section.

Mocha was also a scaredy cat as a puppy. But she wasn't just afraid; she HATED them. She hated other dogs, and she disliked strangers who were "rude" to her (meaning, they tried to pet her instead of standing perfectly still so that she could examine them). Chaco, on the other hand, seems to want to befriend new people and dogs. Hopefully with regular exposure to friendly strangers, she'll become a little more outgoing.

~~~

( And this one is not so little -- in terms of word count, at least. )

...Damn, I miss having more time for art. Chaco really does eat up everything, including (and especially) keiiii's free time. This needs to change, and change it will -- I just don't know how soon. XD;

Chaco is growing up very fast! Almost 9-week-old now. :) I think both of her ears will be completely up by tomorrow. Every morning I wake up to find her a bit bigger than the day before.

Oh, and this happened a couple of days ago...



That's the same mattress from these pictures. No, she doesn't sleep on it, although she does rest or play there sometimes. Another mattress-related Chaco comic strip is coming soon!

Puppyhood is fun, but for me, the real beauty of it is the reward that awaits at the end: a strong, well behaved adult dog that loves her mommy. Sometimes, when Chaco is asleep, I take a magnifying glass and put it over her face (can't do it when she's awake... she'll want to chew it up). It makes her look huge and bulky! I pretend I'm looking at future Chaco. XD

Here, have one more pic before I end this entry.

I haven't posted on LJ in forever, so you guys might have forgotten my username. This is keiiii. :B

As I mentioned on my dA, Mocha passed away very recently. ( Depressing stuff here. )

And that's how Chaco happened. She's our new malamute; she will be 9 weeks old this Sunday. We drove all the way up to Maine last Thursday, and the next day, picked her up and drove back home.

Click to enlarge:



...That's actually a composite photo. I love that quaint little corner of our back yard in that photo, and wanted to take a picture of Chaco there. But she just won't stop moving! I removed Chaco (who was moving) and my mom from the original photo, and put Chaco from another photo in there.

More pics, including the one where the Chaco in the above pic is from:

pic 1
pic 2
pic 3
pic 4 -- no, that's not my house, that's the house next door.

She grew up a lot over the past week here. Here's a pic from a few days ago. You can't really tell the size difference since there is no point of reference, but you can see how her face was more baby-like.

She's very cautious with people. She loves me and my parents, but keeps her distance from everyone else in the household (my bro, for example). When she's not taking caution, she's extremely playful and energetic. She is, in fact, THE most energetic puppy I have ever seen. That's saying something. My parents both have a lot more experience with dogs than I do, and even my dad has only seen ONE other puppy that was as playful as she.

She loves to bounce and roughhouse around. Just yesterday, we taught her that she's not allowed to bite people. She stopped biting almost completely in just one day, but you can tell it's taking tremendous amounts of patience and effort from the little pup... She stares at my hand, and I can practically hear her thoughts: "don't bite the hand... don't bite the hand... don't... bite... must... resist..." then she goes "ARRRRGH!", jumps up and down, and rolls.

She's very expressive and vocal. In that regard, she's a bit like Noobie. Mocha was very subtle with the way she expressed her emotions and needs. This girl ain't subtle by any stretch of imagination. Like most malamutes, she doesn't bark much but does a lot of non-barking noise making.

She's also very smart. But with a typical malamute's stubborn streak, raising her into a well behaved dog will be a challenge -- one that I'm looking forward to :) She may be stubborn, but at least she doesn't have the alpha complex that Noobie had, and I managed to make HIM behave.

I'm alive.

*spams your friends page*

Been a while since I visited LJ. Interestingly, the contents of my friends page look pretty much the same as they did back when I was on LJ a lot more often. Changes are inevitable, but I guess at the core, many of us are still the same people.

So I'm a huge fan of the Fire Emblem series. Recently I've undertaken the FE100 challenge, in which I'll be producing one hundred fanarts of the series based on the list of one hundred prompts. Even if you aren't familiar with the series, you might find something to like about these pictures. Click on the thumbnails~


Most recent, and my favorite, is a picture of Tibarn the Hawk King from FE: Radiant Dawn (well, he's also in Path of Radiance, I guess.):



And this seems to be viewer's favorite. Lyn from FE: Blazing Sword (the first American release on the GBA).



And a homage to FE: Mystery of the Emblem, a really old installment on the SNES.



More from the FE100 series here. :o

[x-posted on mechapenguin]

x-posted on mechapenguin



Speed painting, between 60-80 minutes. I COULD have spent more time on it (and would gladly have -- I've gotten very attached to Soren, the character being hugged) but the blurry unfinished look seemed to work for this particular picture. You may want to view this piece on deviantart here. It has extended commentary on the piece as well as the characters :)


I'd like to apologize to those who commented on my previous picture entry. X_X I did not mean to make you feel ignored, but real life kind of exploded on my face, and I got distracted. I want to let you know that I read every comment and appreciated you taking time to post them.

x-posted on mechapenguin~




Click it to enlarge :B

For a while, I had no life. I'm about to get it back, though. Or so it feels like, at least.


On an unrelated note~

Some of you may have known already, but I started posting stuff at deviantart. The account had spent enough time collecting dust (I registered years ago to report art theft, back when they did not allow art theft reports from anyone other than the artist infringed). I might start posting some pictures here, too, if there's demand?

And there's Haru-Sari too, of course.

First my chair breaks,

then my semi-expensive headphones snap in half.

I consider myself blessed, though -- those are among the worst complaints I have lately, and that's not too bad.

http://news.deviantart.com/article/28572/

I do not condone animal cruelty. But if the destruction of one life can awaken people and stop other acts of cruelty such as wars -- ultimately saving other lives -- then it may be a worthy sacrifice. (Of course, I don't think the movie is nearly as effective as it needs to be, so the point is moot in this particular situation.)

Can the end justify the means? Well, that's not the issue I'm trying to approach here. For example, if you're a psycho and you kill someone for pleasure, and the victim's death somehow ends up saving other lives, you are NOT a hero. You still need to be punished for what you have done, and for why you have done it. "Justification" and "positive (or perhaps 'less negative' to be precise) net effect" are not necessarily the same thing...


...Ugh, first LJ entry in months, and this is what I have to write about!?

I updated cozypaper, guys. D:

Those of you who watch mechapenguin have already seen the new art, though.

This is going to sound astonishingly stupid, but...

For a long time, I had forgotten that colors do NOT have to be realistic to look good.

I'm not sure how I forgot it in the first place. It's so obvious! I feel liberated. By thinking that I had to go for a realistic color palette, I had shut myself from the vast world of Pretty Fake Colors.

My next color piece (that I do for myself) will be pretty interesting. :) Don't expect it anytime soon, though.


PS. Raise your hand if you keep up with my webcomic.

Facial massages = OW

They should use anesthesia for this. O_o

No fanarts allowed in Otakon artist alley!

While that should help cut down the number of people trying to get a table, and thus improve the chances of ME getting my space... uhhh... I dunno.

The first few pages of Chapter 4 is up. Check it out and make me a happy Keiiii! =D =D =D

... *crickets chirp*

EDIT: "pages ... is up"? WTF. Broken grammar! Proof that I should've been sleeping.

I had a dream in which Sasarai was a homunculus, but his Philosopher's Stone was stolen by Luc and Sarah. Sarah then lost it somewhere. The stone was picked up by a 10-year-old Chinese boy with a permanent Thunder Rune.

Father brought the de-stoned (haha) Sasarai and they discussed how to get the stone back, while having a good family bonding time. Father was gigantic for some reason; he had Sasarai perched on his shoulder the whole time ^^

I think I was Hohenheim in that dream, doing out-of-character stuff...

My dad does electrician/ construction/ building maintenance works at various locations. Last night, he happened to have a shift doing maintenance at a ShopRite. Only five people were there: the ShopRite manager, a janitor, my dad, and two others in his team, who shall be called T and D.

Apparently, they have this machinery/ electric room in there that's got this Xtreme Lock, which keeps the door Xtremely Shut at all times. In the middle of the night, however, the door just opened by itself.

Then it closed itself, almost immediately. In front of their eyes.

They freaked out. The manager ran outside in panic and started calling everyone he knew. The guys in my dad's team did the same, and my dad called my mom. I'm not sure what kind of a lock or a door they have in ShopRite, but judging from the level of panic, the incidence must have been quite creepy.

One of the people the manager called was the former manager or some sort, who told them someone died in that room three years ago. Another person advised that if there's a ghost in there, they have a way of confirming it: call out to the ghost, record the sound, and you'll hear the voice on the casette even if you didn't hear it during the recording process. (^^;;;;)

So T got out his tape recorder, called out "hello! Anyone in there!?? Who is it!?" or somesuch, and they all listened to the recording. And they all heard a faint, eerie "iiiiiit's meeee..." on the tape.

T freaked out even more, saying he was going to copy the tape and send it to everyone. Then something happened, and everything on the tape got deleted somehow. D: More panic ensued. They asked my dad, the calmest one of the bunch, to go inside the room and sit in there alone for five minutes. He did just that, and nothing happened.

You wonder if the lock was broken... that's unlikely, since they couldn't get the door to open (without unlocking it properly) no matter how hard they tried.

I don't know about the others who were there, but my family agrees that things like this are good for spicing up one's work life. :)