Of Coffee and Whiskers

Hi thar! In this journal you will find doll ramblings, as well as inane rants about my day-to-day life. I'm actually a giant dork, to be honest. I also post pictures, most of which can be found on my dA but some of which don't exist anywhere else. Comment to be added, and let me know a little about yourself  and where you found me so I can follow you there too :D

I'm cutting this down because the wall of text was driving me up the wall. Everything I've said and linked to can be found HERE in a much shorter and sweeter list of links to images that Radiotrash and co have put together. I don't have the time to keep up with this whole thing and I'm sure everyone else that has read this journal is keeping up with the story elsewhere :)

My opinion still stands that Mijn Schatje has plagiarised not only the photographs of dolls she has traced in her 'art', but also the images by other artists such as Audrey Kawasaki and copyrighted icons by Studio Ghilbli, and even rubber stamps. I predict that all of the imagery in her 'art' will have been traced from other source images, mostly without the express consent of those who made the original image; and that nothing in her images save perhaps the occaisional gumby limb will have been originally drawn by her.

On Thursday I decided that I had had enough. So I took the bus to Wishart Rd, picked up some Aquasoil Malaya from the emporium of my dreams and decided to do a whole rescape.

What I started with:


Yeah elodea is a damned nightmare and a half. Never ever EVER am I touching that stuff again, it looks horrible, it grows too fast, it is devil spawn!


^ Bucket of plants to keep


^bucket with fish and elodea to keep them feeling safe...and the filter, to keep it alive :P


^What happens when i misjudge the amount of water in my tank...anything capable of holding water gets filled!


^result of first day. Looks like shit still lol.

So I went shopping, bought some hairgrass, some lilaeopsis, and vals, I got two vals and two pots of hairgrass, but they only charged me for one of each! And also got new driftwood. Tied ferns and some moss to driftwood, hairgrass attempted to get separated and planted as foreground, lilaeopsis is a kind of mid-background thing, and corkscrew vals were shoved up the back. The result:


^I borrowed my newly returned flatmate's camera for this shot :D

Hairgrass will be trimmed in a few days. When lilaeopsis gets going, I'm thinking of planting a few in front of the vals to soften it up a lil.

Damned happy with it so far, can't wait til it grows in :D

I am the big fish in the pond. I eat the little fish, the algae and the weeds and the little crawling, flying things that fall in.
I am the big fish. I devour what I can because I am opportunistic. Tomorrow may not be so fruitful.

Even though I don't eat a lot of meat, I'm not a vegetarian. I love meat, a lot. I just can't afford to buy it, and I can't cook it very well. But I can afford eggs and I can cook those pretty well. I can afford tofu, and all I have to do is cut some off and slather some soy sauce over it and it's done.

I eat far more grains and greens and orange and yellows than I do flesh.

I think sometimes, people get caught up with the idea of animal cruelty and find it a wonderful cause that they can join in. It's nice for them, I guess. As long as they don't bother me about it.
In the end, veganism and vegetarianism seems to be a religion to me. A thing of not sinning and proclaiming the good word and to shun the disbeliever. I really don't care. Nothing you will say will make me feel bad. What you do say, however, annoys me because it's filling up my internet/ears/television whatever. It's like having JWs knock on my door at 8am on a saturday. Or like having telemarketers call my phone at 8am on a saturday.

I am the big fish. I have inherited the pond. I have conquered it - or at least my forefather fish have, and so I inherit it.

I don't want my meat to be tortured. I don't necessarily want sadism played out on my meal. Playing with your food is bad manners. If an animal dies horribly, I'm sure that the tension and fear chemicals, the epinephrines and so on, would make the meat quality poorer than an animal that went off without knowing it was going to die, without knowing that the endless black was coming for it. Without knowing, you cannot struggle.

Of course I'm missing the greatest horror. The fact of the matter it, meat is a piece of dead animal. Hacked off its dead body. Sitting on your plate. I don't mind this because I'm into that kind of macabre thing, just like I love the idea of eucharist, even though I'm not a christian. The kids that cry at you that a cow died so that you could have a hamburger, this sounds so detached. It's like saying your forefathers died so that you could live in freedom. Yes, a cow died for the hamburger, maybe we should have a memorial day for cows, and allow the ones who manage to slip by the slaughtering machines to march down main street.

No, a cow did not die so that you could have a hamburger. The hamburger is the damned cow. There is a piece of cow between those buns. We are putting it in our mouths and chewing it with our teeth and swallowing it.

Think about it a little bit.

People should not bash me for eating meat. They should fear me for it. If I am capable of watching hens be slaughtered, to pluck feathers from their still warm eviscerated bodies, then to eat their flesh once cooked in an oven, a vegan who worships animals should fear me. I am what drives their nightmares of animals dying in horrible ways (please note, a chicken having its head cut off is the same as the thousands of people that had their heads cut off in France in the 1700s. They are dead within 3 seconds and won't feel a great deal of pain at all, if any. Chickens being smaller animals, they probably last less than three seconds beheaded anyway.)

I really really like meat. I like it pink inside. I like it warm. I also like it with a heap of mashed potatoes and steamed greens and boiled carrots.

I think people get caught up in the meat thing a lot. It's not the only thing people eat.

The evangelists of veganism should realise that most people are omnivores and don't eat meat as a staple.

As for those of you who are vegetarians or vegans who truly do it for yourselves and not to show the world how cool you are by protesting or just to have something to stand for because you can't think of anything better, kudos to you. I like quiet vegetarians and vegans. Those of you who don't find it necessary to proclaim to everyone and to convert everyone and to shun the disbeliever, I like you. You act like a normal person, who won;t go out of their way to proclaim how omnivorous they are.

It's not fair.
Life isn't about being fair.

I went shopping today for retail therapy and ended up with a bunch of nice new plants for my tank; some elodea, an amazon sword and an anubias attached to some driftwood. I put the elodea in front of my internal filter to hide the damned thing and also to break up the current.



 As a result, I can now run the filter on full without creating a maelstrom, but Adrian is a little dickhead and wedges himself in the elodea to surf the current.
See that pink blob in the above picture? That's his head, pushed up against the glass. You can't see the rest of him because it's all tangled in the stems of elodea. He panicked a bit when he was like that, wriggled, flipped, stopped, wriggled some more, stopped, then finally wriggled out. I don't think he'll be trying that again any time soon.

I shifted around Adrian's tank again today to fix up my silk atrocities that were blocking out my real plants. As a did so, a whole heap of detritus crap came out from under the gravel. Hmm. I don't know where it all came from, it's not like I have a thousand creatures living in there, just little Adrian.
I would post pictures of the cleaned up tank, if I hadn't left my phone at Matt's. Matt has his bio exam today, so I might visit him after it and retrieve my phone while I'm at it.
I don;t know why this LJ thing is still not really working for me. I think I need to change the layout or something so that it will actually load on my screen. I wanna see what my page looks like, y'know? Must fix this.