Fic Rush 48

Well done! :-)

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victory! victory!

There IS much rejoicing!

Also, ninja turtles.

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*is a ninja, yes* XD

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carodee.livejournal.com

*g* Busts out laughing!

Ninja turtles vs. sloths! The epic battle of the century and we do mean the entire century. *ba-dum-bum rimshot*

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Whoo hoo! Confetti and ninja capybaras for you!

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carodee.livejournal.com

Thank you! I just googled capybara and OMG they're cute. Guinea pigs with legs. I'll take one. *pets its adorable confettied fur*

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Are we doomed so soon? It's not even our final hour!

I made a text icon (it had 7 words - my count for today therefore being 11 words on 2 icons).

But go, fic_rushers, go!

I'm off to contemplate adding sparkles to Sapphire and Silver (or not), and then probably to bed, but I may pop back briefly. Or not. (It's like a cliffhanger thingy).

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Don't feel bad. I've had a word count of about 1000k, but it will all be ceremonially dumped in a couple of days, methinks. I don't like how it's built, I don't like where it's going, and I don't like how it sounds.

And for the past 2 hours I've been translating a paper... I could use some sparkles!

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*waves wand*

Here be sparkles:

Aw, I hope you don't dump your 1000 words, or you know, only edit them to greater genius. But translating a paper is even more impressive (to me; I could passably translate a few words of simple French, but anything else and I'd be lost).

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WHEEE! Sparks! I still want to see them on Spike, though!

I think the words will have to be dumped. It is their destiny. Maybe some will be salvaged... but I don't want to give them false hope.

(As for translating, I guess that's the benefit of living in a non-English speaking country! If we want to communicate with the world, we have to learn to properly navigate that evil language of yours :) I'm actually translating Hebrew to English so it's probably not as good as my English-to-Hebrew, but I think it's decent... it's just that the paper itself is so... well.)

Sparkles! Sparkles!

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Our language was developed purely to confuse everyone, including the English. I have no proof, but it's the only real explanation for everything. :-) I always regret not having done more languages, but I like written stuff and it always focuses on spoken, which I am sadly inept at. (That's my excuse, lol. Although actually true in that I apparently had the weirdest result for the French A/S I took of anyone - A+ for the written and, um, since the total was and E or an F, I don't like to speculate on the oral and listening. Although I really think making us listen to stuff about plankton in the North Sea in French is the outside of enough).

And I apologise for the waffle. All I meant to say was, I iconed sparkly Spike for you. (Or for today's 'naart' anyway). Over at my LJ now. ;-)

And you are v v clever, don't try to deny it, just get an extra big hat and wear it with pride.

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Have you considered iconing Silver to the phrase "a shiny one-man band"? It's originally applied to Q (in the Spock Vs Q audio thingy - which is an adorkable object), but Q and Silver have a lot in common really.

(I meant to ask Beth to put "a shiny one-man band" on one of the Q icons she had at that time not yet made for me, but I fergitted it. O_O)

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Heh, no, but any excuse to icon Silver, lol! :-D

Actually, I have this ongoing issue with iconing S&S caps, in that they come out (aside from the merely pretty ones) as a series of pics seeking entry into a crazy caption competition... and I can't think of witty captions. I mean, take this one:

Fic_rushers, text please? (Sorry, feel free to ignore/delete slightly OT posts, but anyway. Captions needed for my witless mind.)

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Something along the lines of "we see what you did there"? I am also fail at captions, sorry.

(...I thought I had a S&S icon. Where is my S&S icon? *goes poking your icon posts*)

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Yes, it's awful how the mind goes blank. "There should be some really witty text here. I'm darned if I know what, though." *sigh* But that could work, yes... :-)

And, yes you did before, you had a Steel one (not one of mine) - you must have shuffled it out or something.

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Yeah - I'm never quite happy with the icons I made, they're always a bit fuzzy and the lighting is generally bad. (I have an extremely low-end graphics program I don't really know how to use.) But Steel is so pretty I keep iconing him anyway.

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lolmac

Bad lighting can be fixed with a good graphics program -- I have to relight most of the Stargate caps and almost any Mac cap that isn't outdoors. But fuzziness is much harder to fix.

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Fuzziness depends - the two main causes are older caps (S&S are particularly bad; I've noticed through doing it and also something else recently that old ITV video is worse to work from than BBC of the same era). However, the main cause I had was simply this:

saving the file as a .jpeg

So, save it as an .png (or a high quality .jpeg) and instant end of fuzziness forever, except when you mess up the icon! :-)

Someone had to point that out to me after I was going mad about the fuzziness of every icon I made.

If it's the cap, you can do things with using layers, especially soft light, but I find that with older video caps that can just lose you detail.

icon_tutorial is very useful for tips - and searchable. Obviously a snazzy program helps, but mine is quite old and not photoshop. It's decent enough to have colour selection, but it's only something I got free, and people do lovely things with GIMP, so the program isn't the main issue, I think.

But save as .png, that's the main anti-fuzziness technique!

(And, aw, look my icon! :-D I can still never quite get over people actually using my icons.)

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Also sharpening, of course, but that can make things be grainy if you're not careful (and use the unsharp mask, not just sharpen. But, sharpen, sharpen, sharpen!!)

:-)

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And also, I'm still rarely happy with an icon I made, anyway. I think when it's yours, you see everything you did to it, where the textures are, where you lost detail, etc etc... And look at other people's shiny icons (I mean how do people go so tiny and stay so clear? I can't do it) and sigh. So I think that's a general thing, anyway!

(Sorry, excuse the spam that came of me answering this before fully switching my brain on.)

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lolmac

Hmm. Possibilities:

There's one in every diner.

How much longer till my order gets here?

the Silver plate special

using the best Silverwear [spelling intentional]

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Thanks for the suggestions! I think, maybe OT3 now, Steel? Please... Or maybe that's just my brain.

(Also, re fuzziness - what do you save your icons as because a simnple anti-fuzziness act is to save them as .png files, not .jpegs. And careful sharpening, of course. I was ready to give up icon-making until someone responded to my fuzziness rant with that advice. Excuse me if that was too obvious to mention. If it is other things,

icon_tutorial can be really helpful, with tricks you can do with layers and things.)

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lolmac

I work entirely in bitmap, and only save the end product to jpeg when I'm done.

The fuzziness issue hits me harder because most of what I do are LOLs, and I use a standardised height of 450 pixels for the final product -- much larger than icon size. If the source file is poor quality, all the sharpening in the world won't save it at that size, although you can do enough sharpening to get a good icon.

I actually spend more time doing careful blurring to reduce pixelation.

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Well, when you've finished, for icons (it won't affect your larger images really), try saving them as .pngs instead of .jpegs at the end. It made a huge difference when I tried it - but maybe that's just how rubbish I was generally at the time! (I had no idea what I was doing - still don't much now... But you may find it helps.

And, yeah, all the lines/pizellation and stuff you get with old screencaps - I know! Again, with icons, a lot gets lost in resizing, so you can get away with more, but a little bit a gaussian blur does go a long way with some of them! :-)

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sid

I've brunched most splendidly and have been chattering away with my book club since I got home. Now maybe I can get to some writing of some sort, or fashion, or type.

Barring ninja wolf attacks, naturally.

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You could always set the ninja penguins on them!

Wolves don't stand a chance.

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sid

You're right - that seems to have worked! 139 words has finished up what began yesterday with 96 words. \o/

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I shall try to write more fic! I think I have an idea for my Scotty drabble; I just need to find a proper ending.

I think there are now (halfway through Hour 45) 3.5 hours left.

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go, go! *waves pom-poms* *scatters sparkles* *promises to hoover them up later*

:-) You can do it.

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The end is, of course, that he's giving it all he got! :)

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She won't be able to take anymore, Captain!

(Although my absolute favorite Scotty line was in an episode of TNG: "You mean you told him the truth?)

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My favorite Scotty line is from this icon. It makes me dizzy, but I keep it around because SCOTTY. HOW SO AWESOME.

(OT: I am getting to the point where I probably need to make a spreadsheet of all my friends just to tell who knows which of my fandoms, LOL!)

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No SGA for me, but I do know Star Trek! Although I'm sketchy on Enterprise as I stopped watching that one.

A spreadsheet would be useful, but then you wouldn't get the unexpected fandom-knowledgeable comment! Those are fun.

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Work thing is done! Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In the meantime, I just got an email requesting another work thing. But it doesn't have to be done right away, so I am ignoring it. Hopefully I will not put it off for two weeks like the thing I just finished. Naw, I would never do that, right?

I am now off to the bank and to get lunch. Then, it's on to the cover letter!!

One of these days, I'm going to have to go back to using fic_rush for writing fic. But in the meantime, it's very helpful for motivating me to do other things that I have to do!

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YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY.

Well, we want you to write fic, but earning money is also necessary. I'm not quite sure why, but there you go. :)

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