I really should stop making icons, but I don't want to.

This post is, I admit, largely pointless. I'm making it simply because I want to use my latest icon and, in the process, pimp a little bit of digital coloring I've been doing in order to aid the whole icon-making process - though I am not, I admit, exactly the greatest at coloring images. All I can really manage is a sort of fake-ass 'cel shading' style beloved of adolescent Deviantart users drawing their Naruto Sues all over screenshots of Sakura Haruno and and precisely nobody else, which pretty much ignores damn near everything about tones and effective use of light and shade, but I do rather enjoy doing it for all that I kind of suck.

The issue is that uncolored, unshaded lineart just doesn't resize down very well for iconmaking purposes. Too much detail gets lost, the lines blur into one another and the whole thing just doesn't look very good. So, if I want to make an icon using an uncolored, unshaded image the best thing I can do is to shade or color the thing myself and then make the icon using the recolored image. Yeah, it does rather slow things down this end, but if it means I get a decent icon out the end of it, it's all worth it. That said, though, the time commitment of amateurishly recoloring a piece of lineart when you're not very good at it (and I'm not) does tend to mean that I'm not likely to bother in the first place if the image in question doesn't have Ken in it and-stroke-or can't be used to push my ridiculous fangirl-shipper agenda. No, I don't think I have quite enough Youji/Ken icons already, actually, why do you ask?

Needless to say I claim absolutely no responsibility for the linework in the following images: that's all the work of Kyoko Tsuchiya. I can't actually draw to save my life either and if I could maybe I'd have an actual reason to try and get better at digital coloring. But I can't. So I don't.

Anyway, enough of this nonsense and I shall now post the pictures. Of which I have two.

I originally wanted to do the first image in grayscale because I thought it would be quicker after the time I'd spent working on colorizing the Youji/Ken image. Hahaha NO. Lies! All the time I saved through not having to work in full-color I ended up spending on trying to deal with Ken's goddamn hair, which turned out to be way, way harder to color and highlight than I thought it'd be. I also did another version of the Ken with a scarf picture without the spot color, which is here. Personally I prefer it with the blue scarf as I think it makes for a more interesting image, but that's just my take on it and it is after all entirely possible that I am tired, not thinking straight, still cold-addled or just plain bats.

Incidentally, I am 27 years old and still can't spell 'amateur' without spellcheck looking over my shoulder to see that I'm doing it right, which I invariably am not... and I wouldn't even know how to spell 'unconscious' if it wasn't for the sheer number of times I've knocked out Ken.

Yeah, I'm still a little bit ick, but this doesn't seem quite as big a deal after an afternoon spent talking bullshit with rokesmith. Okay, so I'll probably pay for it tomorrow, but I really can't bring myself to care about that right now because dammit I am having fun here.

So, a quick news update: yes, I am still making icons and yes, they are for Weiss Kreuz because FANGIRL. I currently have forty... something. Ish. I want to make several more. The good thing about this is that it means that by the time I am finished I will have enough to post a decent-sized icon dump, which is something I haven't managed for a long while. Good news, I think: it would, of course, be better for the rest of the universe if I stopped making Ken icons for five minutes and concentrated on everyone else in the cast.

Anyway, on the subject of things I haven't done in a while: yeah, it's been a while since I did one of my lame-humor screendump selections. Since I somehow managed to find the others hilarious, I thought I'd go ahead and do another one.

The usual drill applies - it's image-heavy, most of said images are of Ken or feature him in some way because that's what my screencap collections tend to do, and there are a lot of rather dodgy sex jokes and a picture of Youji in bed with many beautiful ladies, because charisma is not just a dump stat. Well, okay, two beautiful ladies. If you find any or all of the following unappealing, you may care to look away now - though I really do have to wonder why, in that case, you're even reading this Livejournal.




"My name is Ran Aya Fujimiya. Son of a murdered father, brother of a comatose sister, and I will have my vengeance in this life or the next!" Well, nobody could say Ken hadn't warned them them this could happen if Aya watched Gladiator.

( Youji likes Ken very much. )

Yes, I know I probably got a bit carried away with this one but it's what happens when you come up with all the really good jokes after you've already finished putting together the image post. As there's no goddamn way I'd remember said jokes if I saved them for a hypothetical next time - and if I hadn't written them down I'm pretty sure I wouldn't even have remembered them half an hour after the fact - I just went with it.

Tune in next time when I may actually have some content in this space.

So, it's nearly two in the morning and John and I have got to the stage of tiredness where making dumb sex jokes about Ken Hidaka seems like a really good idea.

I don't know what it is about Ken. Maybe it's not him at all, it's just because the screencaps I'm using a very heavy on, well, Ken images. Maybe if I use pichi's caps next time I want to do one of these posts, I'll end up making a load of dumbassed sex jokes about Omi getting pounced by Schuldig. That might be it. No doubt, in the spirit of experimentation, I will have to try it next time. This time, though? Yeah, it's Ken. Poor kid.

Anyway, all the usual off-color humor follows pretty much the expected pattern and this post may not be entirely work-safe as a result. Then again, very little about this journal is that work-safe meaning that if I ever do get a job in an office I can forget checking LJ during my lunch hour because my own posts would be very much off-limits. That said, I wouldn't want to check LJ at work if I got a job anyway because I can really do without my screenname become common knowledge, and I really doubt that a few more absurd innuendos based on some of the badfic I've been exposing myself to lately will do anyone any conspicuous harm.

Speaking of which, it may help to know that a lot of these captions were influenced by this fanfic. If you can't bring yourself to read it (and I wouldn't recommend trying to, it sucks), the spork is here. If you don't even want to do that, well, all you need to know is that once again Schuldig comes up with a bizarre plan in order to help him get his nonconsensual freak on with Omi.

Of course, for my own amusement, I've made it Ken. I've just got more pictures of Ken. That being the case - onward.




"Dammit, I wish Aya was here... being shot instead of me. I'm gonna kill this fucking fanficcer when I catch up with them!" "Ken-kun, I think this is canon." "Oh, then we're just boned."

( ... um, someone here ordered flowers? Hello? )

Poor Ken. Someone hug him? I doubt he'd let me do it.

... okay, I don't know why the Hell I wanted to do this, but it just seemed important. An actual update of substance will follow at... well, it'll be here at some point and probably also concern Weiss Kreuz because that's what I post to LJ for. Alert readers may have noticed (though probably not cared) that there's one more screencap up here than in my usual 'lame humor and Weiss caps' posts. This is because I felt the need.

John may want his laptop back sometime, so I shall have to make this quick.

Long story short: I'm heading off to my parents' house for Christmas again sometime within the next few hours. My father plans to come pick me up at some absurd ho-hum hour of the night, and so as not to wake everyone at home by dragging suitcases down the stairs at Cinderella O'Clock, I'm waiting for him over at John's. I'm not exactly unhappy about this, but it does leave me with several hours to kill. So, I'm killing them by posting yet more Dodgy Screencap Captions.

As to why dodgy captions, I feel I deserve a bit of a break after spending all afternoon packing and wrapping Christmas presents. Okay, so I also had a pizza earlier and discussed why I think Ken probably didn't do it with Yuriko in the scene break, but still.

Of course, I do intend to carry on updating and such while I am at home, but I much prefer coming up with these things with John's help because he's funnier than me and doesn't just make jokes about buttsex. (He leaves those to me because I'm better at them.) Besides, I may actually have actual things to talk about when at home as I may actually be doing stuff from time to time there, and also hope to get some writing done which may (may) mean I have some fic updates to post. Hey, a girl can dream.

Anyway. Enough of this. Captions.




"... Youji, is it just me or is this thing playing--" "It's playing Linkin Park, Kenken, yes. Don't tell me he's hidden the media player." Youji and Ken discover Aya's secret Myspace page.

( You know the drill. )

Right, that's it from me - at least until the next time I can get online at home, anyway, and I have no idea when that will be. Oh well, at least I should be able to get some writing done in the interim. Well, in between being social and all the usual Christmas stuff, that is. I should have a tree to decorate sometime in the next couple days. Also, I'm getting the feeling I want to make gingerbread, and I really don't understand why. Oh well. Happy winter holiday of choice, I guess.

... dammit, no Firefox spellchecker. Well, I'm not using LJ's, it sucks. Yay, typos?

This, I guess, is what happens when I want to update but don't feel I have the time or the patience to work on one of my long-ass rants: I post yet more screencaps and hope that someone will laugh. It's either this or an update on my door situation, and does anyone else out there really care that I can't lock my door from the outside? No, they do not.

As far as rants go, not quite feeling that right now. I think that Gaia RP rant rather took it out of me, at least for a little while, so I don't really have the patience to carry on with the Youji Kudou Bad RP posts just yet. Too much like hard work what with rereading the RP posts of HORROR and hunting for quotations in old chat logs and all.

So, yeah. More screencaps it is, because I really do want to update today for... some reason, I have no idea what reason there could possibly be but there must be one - probably some anal-retentive thing to do with making pretty patterns on my calendar - and they seemed to go down well last time. Forewarned is forearmed: there's quite a lot of bad sex jokes in this batch. So, if you're underage or don't like Teh Ghey or have particularly delicate sensibilities why the Hell are you reading my Livejournal? you may like to just look at the pretty boys and ignore the snarky captions full of bad sex jokes and references to what I have come to think of as Ken Hidaka's Extremely Debatable Sexuality.




"Why does every plan you come up with involve me dressing up in drag?!"

( More of the same beneath the cut, of course. )

And that's that for this update. Thanks to my other (and rather funnier) half for helping out with these.

... much as I love the silly captions, part of me (a rather large part of me) wants to post a collection of OMG LOOKATHESUBTEXT moments between Youji and Ken, so that's something for next time, I guess. (Apologies to those of you who Just Don't See It, as I do and it's my Livejournal so yeah, probably gonna happen not just soon but almost immediately.) Don't worry, I will return you to your regularly scheduled Funny just as soon as the inner fangirl has been placated.

Life continues to heap small indignities onto me. On top of everything else I have to worry about, my closet doors won't stay shut without my tying them together, and I am sitting here in my room with the door open because I no longer have a door handle, and won't have until my landlady gets the door lock fixed.

The saddest thing about this is this is a considerable step up as I found out the door had gone West when I tried to lock it last night. Which led to my being trapped outside my room for about 10 minutes while my landlady tried to get the damn door open again without resorting to breaking the thing down. At least I can get in this way.

And so, partly because I want a distraction from the various perils that seem to come with Being Me but mainly because it's my Livejournal and I can, I present the second installation of random Weiss screencaps with stupid captions. Because Weiss are pretty and distracting and the first lot made me giggle, so with any luck these will do the same.




"Um, Youji? What did Omi mean, 'we need to get a room'? What's wrong with the basement?"

( Click here for further image-heavy idiocy! )

... sorry, boys, but you just make it so damn easy to mock you. I'll post a serious set some day, I promise.

Livejournal, PREPARE TO MEET THY DOOM IN A FLURRY OF BACKDATED POSTS. That way I can pretend I actually occasionally use this thing for reasons other than to stalk the suckers people on my friends list.

Okay, so I haven't been around because I've been sucked into the mad, mad world of... well... taking Weiss Kreuz screencaps on Youtube. Yes, I know, this makes me lame, and doubly so that I haven't actually finished yet. What can I say, Ken Hidaka is a pretty pretty boy and I refuse to believe that one can ever have enough images of him.

Yes, I know I probably mentioned doing this before, but there was a problem with the last lot I took - see, they were all on my poor, doomed old computer and I never got round to backing them up to Photobucket In Case Of Loss because my last computer was not net-capable and, well, there were an awful lot of them. This means that when I lost my old machine, one of the things I lost was an insanely large collection of screencaps involving Ken Hidaka standing around looking cute blank cute and blank. (I also lost a lot of doujinshi scans, but most of them I made myself and due to my scanner being a dead piece of crap there's no way to replace those yet. And I can, of course, always look at the doujinshi if I want to.) This, of course, would not do.

Thanks to pichi, I have managed to acquire a ready-made screencap collection, but pichi being pichi (and awesome, let me tell you) this was rather heavy on Omi caps and slightly less so on Ken.

I like Omi as much as the next Ken fangirl, but--well, you can probably see where this is going.

Anyway, as I have the caps and want to prove it, here is a brief collection of awesome caps of awesome which are also not very good-quality but hey, you try taking screencaps off Youtube, it's not easy. No doubt there will be more of these, so I've made my screencaps a special tag so that anyone who cares to view them read: me can do.

Most of today's images are just random screencaps I could give stupid captions to. THERE WILL BE MORE.




"... Omi, do I want to know what a 'brobdingnagian manstick' is or why Aya has one?" "No, Ken-kun, you do not."

( Image intensive. Well, obviously. )

... yeah. I think I'll let him have the last word on this one.

I can't find my tape of early-Nineties Chinese pop songs.

Don't ask me why I have (had?) a mix tape of early-Nineties Chinese pop songs. I can no longer remember. I'm pretty sure that my father gave them to me when I was a teenager, or maybe even before that. Why he had them is an utter mystery, but he did. I used to listen to them during my musically stunted teens, and I have one of them running therough my head and I wanted to hear it, but when I went to look for the tape I couldn't find it. It wasn't with the rest of my tapes and it doesn't appear to have been left anywhere. It's very odd.

Naturally, I searched for it. I looked for at least half an hour, with absolutely no joy. That isn't to say I totally struck out, mind. I might not have found the thing I was looking for, but I did manage to find a few other things instead. Ignoring dust bunnies and the crap I threw straight into the bin (old papers, some blusher - I never wear blusher these days - and lipstick, a couple of old pens), the haul of unexpected stuff regurgitated by the depths of my bedroom include:

• One crucifix earring.
  
• A full box of Apollo chocolate
  
• One hair tie
  
• Stray replacement silver fascia for headphones
  
• SIM card (T-Mobile)
  
• The National Service Framework for Coronary Heart Disease, 2005
  
• A pin badge showing Planet Earth
  
• Three back-of-envelope sketches of Abused!Ken
  
• A copy of The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler
  
• A copy of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
  
• Cat-patterned umbrella
  
• Self-recorded tape of City Hunter image songs
  
• Spray bottle of body cooling mist
  
• Three BHF heart ribbons
  
• An incense burner
  
• Pair of gold earrings with blue stones
  
• One half-full pot of Badger Lavender Sleep Balm
  
• Copy of Sim City 3000
  
• Copy of Manners for Men
  
• Tape copy of Alison Moyet's 'Hoodoo'
  

I'm still kind of pissed that I couldn't find the tape of Chinese pop songs, which has to be in there somewhere, but I was very glad to discover my crucifix earring. I wear those all the time, but after getting out the shower two or three days ago I realized that one of them had gone missing. I was quite convinced it had fallen out during my shower and I would never see it again, so to discover it behind a cushion having been knocked out during over-enthusiastic hairbrushing was a relief.

Going by that little list, it seems most likely that I'll rediscover the tape of early-Nineties Chinese pop songs when searching for my glasses or my Oyster card one of these days.

To make this update more interesting, here's Ken in his pajamas.

Because he's pretty.

Also because I have a cold and am currently way too sleepy to write and not have it be total crap, and it seemed like a really good idea at the time.

... boy, I am running on about my job applications a bit, aren't I? So, for all those of you who aren't even remotely interested in my adventures as a two-time college dropout in the wild wild world of the unemployed (and, let's be fair, I suspect that is quite a lot of you), here is your regular dose of Weiss Kreuz related fangirl lunacy, complete with appropriate icon.

Specifically, a picture of Ken in the shower.

High time I posted something appealing to look at after all that stuff about job applications, preceded by the top-quality art stylings of P. L. Nunn...

... no, it doesn't go any lower. Sorry.

I think that makes up for the nonsense about application forms.

Also, to all the college students out there who are actually making the grade, not wandering off to the wilderness to stalk prospective employers without so much as a degree to protect them: congratulations to all those of you out there who have made it through your finals in one piece, and good luck to all of you who may still be buried under your textbooks. I may have utterly failed to graduate, but I do know what it's like to endure final exams.

And does anyone out there know how to make Youji and Ken have sex on a table? Though everything tells me it is eminently possible, it appears to be defeating me at present. Gah, just HAVE SEX ALREADY, before I go back to the Powell porn!

This post is the inevitable consequence of my presently not having a lot of anything to say, unless being back in denim some five years after deciding that jeans weren't OMGGawthic enough for me counts. I am now not OMGGawthic at all and have been charmed by the discovery that 1. I can get away with wearing hipsters, somehow; and 2. denim makes my ass look good. I now wonder if perhaps I could get hold of a denim skirt, as well as more jeans.

Ironically, my reincarnation as a perfectly average denim-clad young woman has been timed to occur with my rediscovering Dir en grey.

I want to post, I have things on my mind, but I feel that for various reasons - mostly involving championship-level tiredness - I am not prepared to be eloquent and TL;DR enough to fight my corner at the moment. Certainly not as regards my embryonic post on Ran x Ken.

Consequently...



... I'm going to give in to national imperatives and talk about the weather. Is it just me, or is it a bit hot over here at the moment?

And yes, this is just another excuse to gratuitously picspam you all with another doujinshi image that happens to make me squee, despite the determinedly dressed status of both its inhabitants. Because when you can't think of anything much to say and desperately want to exercise your right to be a crushing bore on the Internet anyway, what can go wrong with pretty assassin boys?

Don't answer that.

Also, I am thinking of going back to my grayscale mood theme. If I can be bothered to edit out the red borders, that is. I have doujinshi, dammit, I must be able to scrounge up a few more images...