Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I had a great morning today at Nefarious’s school — I was called in to read to the class so I spent about an hour half reading a mix of favorite books from both here and the school’s library. Tomorrow I’m back at school to help out on pizza lunch day. If I wasn’t 99% sure that my tattoos would preclude me from employment I’d really consider early childhood education as a job — not that I have any regrets… I just love dealing with kids of that age.

I started painting on the Kubla Kahn series for the mini-book project… I’m doing them big, which will let me work much, much faster and more freely. I’m going to do the Abyssinian Maid first (scene eight of ten in the series).

In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

Anyway, I’m just beginning to rough it out.

I know it looks amateurish but it will become much more as time passes. There’s going to be a lot of post-processing (a la Fool’s Mate) so I’ll have to be sure to use a drop cloth… Although one of the good things about this apartment building is that every time someone moves out, they redo the floors, so I can literally destroy them if I feel like it. That said, it’s also a bad thing, because right now they’re redoing the apartment below us, and it reeks of solvents in here.

Now I think I’ll go pick up Nefarious at school and see if she feels like sledding…

Edit: No f’ing interest… she’s too obsessed with her “Littlest Pet Shop” figurines… I suggested to her mother, who’s headed on a trip to Italy this weekend, that she take one along and snap photos of it along the way and then give that all to her as a special present… I think she’d get a huge thrill out of it.

It’s far from a “Photoshop Disaster“, but I was a little amused when this image (from the comic about the Chrome browser) still had the “ONLY FOR REVIEW” watermark on it… Ooops… I guess because of the light print getting a proper for-print image slipped through the cracks. Haha.

Things I like a lot…

This Oasis “Anitoxia” drink, a mix of grape and pomegranate that tastes a lot like blueberry juice is by far my favorite juice… I highly, highly recommend it. I assume it’s healthy, but either way, it’s delicious. I’ve drank gallons of the stuff. That said, I’ve also drank gallons of my second-favorite drink, TANG, so who knows, maybe my advice is not to be taken.

I’ve been unusually sore the last half-week — practically bedridden, so I’ve been doing very little so as to conserve my energy so that I can give 110% for the times that Nefarious is here (ie. not at school)… It’s always my priority if I’m feeling down to save what I have for her, which makes me feel bad because I don’t have enough left for Caitlin but it’s a lot easier for her to understand and wait for a better day than for a five year-old. I think I’m doing well enough now for sledding or skating after school tomorrow — we’ve been playing a little too much Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe!

Anyway, I played some ROCK BAND earlier today to keep my mind off the pain, and I really have to reiterate that the recently released Country pack is brilliant — it’s a lot of fun to play, sufficiently challenging, and a nice change from rock and metal tracks. Even if you’re not a Country Music fan (and I suspect that few who read this are), if you enjoy ROCK BAND this really is one of the better track packs. I hope they release more of them.

Speaking of guilty pleasures, I think listening to Country music really makes me miss a sort of romanticized version of my childhood (note: as a teen I was a huge Skinny Puppy fan and wouldn’t go anywhere near country) — I was driving a combine before I made it to high school, and as far back as I can remember I was getting up before the sun to milk the goats and feed the cattle… Summers spent tossing hay bales and chopping wood.

If I didn’t know I’d end up in court for putting Nefarious into that environment (I think it’s safe to say that the court-appointed “review the family” dude had a serious anti-rural bigotry and me agreeing to stay in the city made a big difference in the decision to have Nefarious living here*), I’d be living on a farm already, because as much as the workload was brutal, it was a paradise.

* Seriously, that’s a story for another day, but what a headache that was to go through for everyone — dealing with a reviewer that had serious reservations about tattooed people, so he basically came into the process with a hate-on for both myself and Nefarious’s mother (and said some really unpleasant and invalid things to each of us)… Ack!

Some things were written “officially” on BME/ModBlog today that sort of bugged me… As you know, when I was forced to sell the site, one of the first things that happened is that all of the “history of BME” pages were edited not just to reflect that I was no longer with the site, but they actually completely removed or downplayed my historical role (as well as other staff that had fallen out of favor). I guess it’s not unheard of for a founder to be edited out of history documents, so that’s fine, but it does bother me when outright lies are told… Most recently;

Shannon didn’t post more than Roo and Roo didn’t post more than Jordan

Well, I posted a lot more content; anyone can look at the historical archives and see that. I aimed for 7-10 posts per day on ModBlog. The fact that BME’s traffic/popularity ranking has significantly dropped since I left, while other sites have continued to rise in popularity should show there’s a difference and that people can see it.

…meanwhile poor Phil has been behind the scenes picking the photos for what was originally Jordan’s pet project when he was interning for BME back in the “good ole days”. … PHIL picked out the images for Shannon to post.

Suggesting that ModBlog was somehow “Jordan’s pet project” is completely silly. Until this year under the new management, he rarely posted to the site… I think less than a dozen posts out of the thousands of posts that I made? ModBlog had been running for years on my personal blog (long before Jordan was an intern), mixed in with my personal content, and the shift to a dedicated name was an obvious evolution so as to have the content available to people who didn’t want to read my politics posts, and so as to better promote the site… It just seems so ridiculous to suggest that I was just some puppet under Jordan’s control.

As to Phil picking the images, that’s also totally false, and a lie that I hear way too often. Part of his job was filing interesting submissions into a “potential” folder. I did a second scan of the submission queue to fill it out and catch what was missed. Then from that queue, I selected what was posted and wrote the attached text. His role was to save me some time, but in no way was he responsible for any of the content.

Bodytwo was something that was started to try and redirect traffic away from BME.

Bodytwo was started because I love writing about body modification. When I was locked out of BME, I needed another place to write. Simple as that. If I thought I could write about it now without getting sued, I’d still be writing about it. But unfortunately I don’t have a series of rich boyfriends that I’ve convinced to finance my personal vendettas, so c’est la vie.

Anyway… taking my name out of the history of the site is one thing, but writing a completely false history where others are given credit for my work is BS.