Wheel of Time characters

Posted on by
Reply

As I’ve been reading the Wheel of Time series, of course I’m trying to picture what each character looks like. That has sometimes been tricky because my brain can’t come up with enough variations of “pale, dark-haired female” for all the women Robert Jordan created that fit that description. I’ve gathered some photos and drawings I’ve found online that I think fit with particular characters. Keep in mind I’m not trying to plan out my ideal for a cast for a Wheel of Time movie series or anything, I’m just trying to match faces to names, and solidify my own mental images of what each character looks like. Some of the photos I found are of people a bit too old or too young to really match a character, but have the right appearance otherwise. I went with a couple sketches, too, because I couldn’t find a photo of someone who fits for Rand or Mat. For Perrin, Egwene, Lan, and the others, I couldn’t find a photo or drawing that fit the mental image I have.

I’ve seen other collections of photos around the web of what people think Nynaeve, etc. look like, and some of those are really far off from my own imaginings. I saw Natalie Portman come up a lot for Nynaeve, and I don’t get that at all; the same goes for Angelina Jolie. I picture Nynaeve with a constant stern expression, maybe with pursed lips and slightly furrowed brow. Laura Mennell above has the perfect expression for Nynaeve, she just needs to have her hair in a braid. I picture Moiraine as looking older than Katy Perry does in that photo, but I thought the hair, expression, and clothing looked very “Cairhienin nobility”. I think Faile/Zarine Bashere should look younger, but the nose, eyes, and hair fit how I imagine her. Solitarium over on Deviant Art imagined Mat and Rand pretty much how I did; he’s the artist behind their sketches above.

new layout: Bud

Posted on by
Reply

After completely changing my layout idea from yesterday, I put up a new layout today using this photo of an Easter flower. It looks fine in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and even IE 9 displays it very nicely. IE 8 is another story of course, mucking up the rounded corners, transparent backgrounds, and text rotation. The plaid background is one I created over at COLOURlovers, and it’s available for you to download there. The Twitter icon is from Icon Dock. After banging around with a couple different WordPress plugins for displaying Google +1 buttons on entries, I finally just used Google’s simple JavaScript. The WordPress plugins either didn’t obey their settings–small image, no count–or didn’t even offer configurable settings. Google’s code for adding a +1 button with a particular look for a particular URL was extremely simple, so I don’t even know why there are dedicated WordPress plugins for it.

Let me know in the comments if you have any problems with the layout, please.

Lion and TV

Posted on by
Reply

I got my Air! I’m typing this from it now. :) I’ve had fun organizing and configuring everything, and I’m finally settling in to using it for some real work. Well, not work as in someone’s paying me to do it: I’m just working on a new layout for this site and my portfolio. I bought Acorn from the Mac App Store and am using it for my image editing, with Komodo Edit for my HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Here’s a screenshot of my primary desktop with Mission Control showing my apps:

screenshot of OS X Lion

I’ve gotten accustomed to the differences between Leopard and Lion pretty quickly. The “natural scrolling” that I thought would take a while to get used to was actually a very quick transition; I found myself scrolling the opposite direction of what I intended today at work while using the mouse wheel in Windows. I’m also loving the gestures to flick between screens (three fingers left or right) and to go back/forward in my browser history (two fingers left/right). I’ve started using Alfred as a launcher program instead of having to look through my Applications list or the Launchpad. I probably could have used that in Leopard, too, but only found out about it recently. That would’ve saved some time anytime I dug around my Applications folder, which was fairly frequently.

I’m using Safari as my browser right now because Chrome isn’t as nice in Lion. I can’t have full-screen Chrome for one, and full-screen apps are surprisingly awesome. I wouldn’t think getting rid of the task bar and Dock would help so much, but it’s actually great. Also, Chrome doesn’t have the two-finger swipe for back and forward, except in the Dev channel where it happens to be reversed from what Safari offers. I hope they fix that, and add in a full-screen option. I’ll be glad to get back to Chrome and its nice extensions, as well as the lovely Inspect Element menu option.

Jon and I have been watching Six Feet Under again, after seeing mention on Reddit by several people about how it has the best last episode ever. We had started watching the series several months ago but just got bored with it, stopping near the end of season three. We’re now a few episodes into season four and enjoying it again, though the characters often piss me off. Like most TV shows, they can’t let people stay happy because I guess that would get boring, so the characters get in these contrived situations and always make the worst possible decisions. That’s why I finally gave up on Grey’s Anatomy: things would finally be okay, so one of the characters would suddenly become fickle and wreck her life again.

On slightly related news, those Nielsen people are serious about their TV ratings. I had completed the brief TV survey they sent in the mail a few weeks back, since they gave me $2 in the envelope and I felt guilty. I also told them I’d be interested in taking other TV-related surveys in the future, so a few days ago I got another big mailer envelope from them. It sat on my table a few days until I remembered to open it, and what falls out but $30 cash! They want me to keep a week-long TV diary of what I watch, what times, which TV in the house I use for it, etc. Fine by me; that $30 buys several lattes.