Wow! Photoshop is amazing! ... and kinda freakish ಠ_ಠ

In one of my design classes, I'm learning how to use Photoshop to manipulate images in different ways: resizing images without cropping them, removing wrinkles and spots from photographs, completely editing out entire objects or persons, etc. It's fun! lol. And it's really cool, but I'm also starting to feel like it's kinda freakish. ಠ_ಠ Every time I finish one of the practice exercises in my textbook, I'm simultaneously excited and shocked. I know it's 2012 and computer technologiez are so advanced and whatnot, but I still can't wrap my head around some of the stuff PS does.

Wow. I guess I really am an old lady when it comes to these things... ??

Technology duck: Get with the timez, granny. *tosses hair* *sneers*

Me: I thought we were kindred spirits... *crawls away*

Self-portrait

I feel accomplished!

I finally finished working on my website. It is a project for one of my classes; I have to summarize a certain essay from an author, and then select ten sentences from the essay and make a separate page for each sentence, as well as find pictures that sort of correspond to each sentence. Well, it sounds really simple and easy, but I had to build it from scratch using (x)html and CSS, and when I first started the project, I knew next to nothing about working with those languages. (ﾟДﾟ≡ﾟДﾟ) I started looking up bits and pieces of information, like how to style a paragraph's font and color using html, but everything I did was very patchwork and... stupid. The way I was going about it would have made for way too much work for myself in the future. In class, I learned how to make a website fully and smartly. Mama always tells me "Don't work hard, work smart," so I somehow felt happy that I was able to learn and finish everything in a better way.

Poupeegirl OOTD

Flower girl

Poupeegirl OOTD

I haven't posted one of these in a while...

Oh noo, pink chicky is being stepped on... D:

Interwebs wars? oAo

Wowowowoooo!

Right now, even as I type, there is a war of the interwebz going on between hacktivists (hacker activitists) and the U.S. government. In response to the U.S. Department of Justice shutting down Megaupload.com for copyright infringements, thousands of hackers in the group "Anonymous" are now shutting down important government and corporation websites. According to Anonymous's twitter, there are about 5,635 hackers participating in this whole thing, and so far (at the time I'm writing this), they've shut down the websites of:

1. U.S. Department of Justice
2. Recording Industry Association of America
3. Motion Picture Association of America
4. Universal Music
5. U.S. Copyright Office
6. Warner Brothers
7. FBI

It's really exciting to watch everything play out on the twitter feeds! I feel half in awe of Anonymous and half kind of scared for them; they can really get into a lot of trouble! -A-

Apparently, at one point, #OpMegaupload was trending on Twitter, but Twitter quickly censored that. 

Twitter feed of the Anonymous group here.
NYT's coverage of the U.S. DOJ vs Megaupload owners here.
Gizmodo's coverage of Anonymous's work here.

+/- ?

Lately, I've been feeling gloomy and pessimistic a lot. It's hard to pinpoint where exactly all of this negativity is coming from, and in a way, I think it's actually a combination of many things/factors/events. If I had to make a list of what's been bothering me recently, it would look something like this (descending order):

1. having to go back to school.
2. the negativity on the websites I've been lurking around.
3. feeling like I'm not excelling in writing poems/stories or drawing.

2012!

Happy New Year!