bookish dreamer

If you're waiting around for graphics from me, and have some spare cash lying around, please consider bidding on my work at help_pakistan ! The comm bidding is underway but it's not been publicized as much as it could, and the people in Pakistan need help too....

Interested? click on the banner to bid ....

Ok, first off, if you missed the posts about LJ turning off media embedding for a while (it's back on now, but it was because of an attack), you may want to check your privacy settings on old posts and make sure they're correct.  Check news for more info [ here's a link to the direct post ]

wesleysgirl and janedavitt wrote an absolutely beautiful addition to their Act of Nature verse (Giles/Xander, Adult) called To Have and To Hold, and they asked me if I'd do a banner for it, so ... I did! check the entire thing out here (and leave feedback for the authoresses here)

If you haven't already seen it, cmk418 is asking prompts for the Giles/Xander Fabulous Fall Fest right here. The idea is that you prompt up to 10 things you'd like to see (from Gen to NC17, from art to icons to whatever) and then pick and choose from the prompts there and do some of them to make happy-fun-Giles/Xander time!

and i was gonna do more with some Merlin links, but ... it is bedtime!

My horoscope for this week (and for all you other libras):

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): This is an excellent time to celebrate the pleasures of emptiness . . . to extol the virtues of the blank slate . . . to be open to endless possibilities but committed to none . . . to bask in the freedom of not having to be anything, anyone, or anywhere. Are you smart enough to need no motto to live by? Are you resourceful enough to rely on nothing but the raw truth of the present moment? If so, you will thrive in the coming days.

Delicious

So gray_ghost finally bullied me into updating my delicious account.... I've now uploaded ALL of my bookmarks, and am slowly going through and sharing them to the world.

Damn I bookmark a lot. 

If you're bored and you want to make an account, delicious is a way you can share your bookmarks to other people in your network (and keep 'em online for access from any computer, I suppose).

If you get on, and want my weird bookmarks (really, they go from obscure japanese anime to all my graphics resource websites to poetry to math to ... yeah, i bookmark a lot), I'm (not surprisingly) katekat1010

LJBook

I don't know if anybody else occasinally freaks out that LJ is gonna go down and you're going to lose all your entries.  Maybe it's just me.  But there's this totally free way to actually create a PDF book of your live journal.  For all of my entries it took about 3.5 minutes and now I have a pretty document that even captured thumbnail versions of most of my art! 

Check it out!

Hey y'all. This won't come as a surprise to most of you, but I'm *so* not a supporter of the Iraq War (conservatives, don't stop reading - i think you'll agree with this thing at the bottom too). A friend of mine, who recently had a crisis of conscience -- a moment where she realized she was absolutely against every thing they're supposedly fighting for (and everything it seems obvious they're fighting for) -- called me up and asked me what she should do. Because we know protesting doesn't work. We know writing to our congressional leaders doesn't work. Most of 'em are lone voices in the spiraling mad whirlpool I like to call the downfall of democracy. Talking to friends doesn't help either, because we're all of the same opinion, and it's not like she's changing minds one person at a time.

Since I couldn't actually give her any help on what to do with all that fear and anger her realization caused her, she found something on her own. Some way to positively deal with a situation that is just insane. And here's the way.

Regardless of what we think about the war, there are a bunch of people over there who were ordered to be there, who are trying to do the best they can with what they have. And there's a couple of websites out there that try to support those people, that try to allow them to make individual requests and address individual needs - to help the *people* who are forced to fight a war they may or may not believe in.

If you have a couple of minutes, take a look at this site. It's called Any Soldier.com. Some of the requests are so easy - some soldiers simply haven't heard from home, and are on their own for the first time since high school, and would love to receive a letter. Some would like beef jerky and movies. Some of the female soldiers want things we simply take for granted, like razors and deodorant. It was hard for me not to want to respond to them all. But I know this - I will respond to some. I will take all this frustration at not being able to do *anything* about a situation I hate and try and help some others who need it.

This is what they say about themselves:

Sergeant Brian Horn from LaPlata, Maryland, an Army Infantry Soldier with the 173rd Airborne Brigade was in the Kirkuk area of Iraq when he started the idea of AnySoldier to help care for his soldiers. He agreed to distribute packages, that came to him with "Attn: Any Soldier" in the address, to the soldiers who were not getting mail.
Brian is no longer in Iraq but Any Soldier Inc. continues with your support.

Any Soldier Inc. started in August 2003 as a simple family effort to help the soldiers in one Army unit, thus our name. However, due to overwhelming requests, on 1 January 2004 our effort was expanded to include any member, of any of the Armed Services, in harms way.

ok, now back to your regularly scheduled programming.