Note to self:

BUY MORE BOXES

123D

As easy as this was to create, posting it was a whole other level. I made a few of these, but the one I am showing turned out the best and most even. I had a few issues altering the image, then I realized those tutorial videos were there for a reason. 123D is pretty easy once you get the best shots, I think I took over 300 photos before I began using profanities and pulled out my tripod. Uploading became a problem, I ended up loading onto youtube in order to share it here.

`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door - Only this, and nothing more.'

Now Tagxedo was a little slow to start, but once I figured out how to work the text it went smoothly. I figured all cats need birds, so in a round about way, this also follows the theme of my lovely little blog. I used Poe's The Raven and found the shape of a bird, I think it turned out pretty neat. I can see using this in the future. It was a bit slow, but I understand why. I liked the different types of font, orientation and shapes you could use. The color schemes where impressive as well, but I wanted to stick with something simple, plus I'm not a huge fan of the color brown.

Grumpy cat will change your mind about political parties.

In keeping with the cat theme of my blog, I chose Felix and Grumpy. GlassGiant's ASCII Art generator and Text-Image were super easy to use, I almost thought I was doing something wrong. I adjusted the font size a bit and figured out I like the font smaller. I tried horizontal and vertical images both and had no problems. For the first image I went on search for a clear stencil, it worked better than an image with background. I tried white on black originally, but it was too much for my poor eyes. For the second image, I saw the colors allowed and immediately found Grumpy cat.
And to continue on with your viewing pleasure, this beautiful interview I discovered while combing the interwebz last night :

 Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise...  Okay so Flame painter is awesomely fun. Almost too much fun. I made probably about 10-15 different pictures and had a hard time choosing which ones to put up. Playing with color was a lot of fun, playing with saturation was a bit boring though. I felt the whole point of this was to play with color so I maxed it out and went from there. Adjusting the speed made it feel less my work and more the programs, but too little speed made it difficult to get that special "oomph" that is the flame painter. If I was using this to add to a photograph, low speed and high focus would be key. If I wanted some sort of misty/overcast/fog attack feeling, the noise option would be fantastic, especially if I adjusted the opacity

Scribbler Too

 Well, Scribbler Too Seems a bit more stubborn. As much as I zoom in or out, I'm not able to use the entire area is shows you when you save it.With this first one I left it as is, no cropping to fit.
I tried for depth with this mountainous scene, it worked a bit but didn't allow for all the shading that I would have liked.

   For something that went along with my blog theme, I decided to fuzzy up the "Because Cats" just like my cats fuzzy up my clothes. I had to adjust the brush to increase curviness and fuzzyness while decreasing size and opacity to mimic what I was thinking and dealing with on a daily basis. I wanted to keep it relatively simple and I did crop this one.

Scribbler scribbles lifeforms

 Scribbler is my new favorite doodle site. My son's also. I had a lot of fun figuring out how it works and the rhythms it follows. I used a lot of different line transparencies to create the image I wanted, but I kept the line thickness the same because I thought it looked better in every attempt.  I also kept the "scribbliness" about the same just because I thought it looked better too. The skeleton took a bit of work and a lot of adjustment before I came out the way I imagined it.  The tree was more of an attempt to show that I played around with the different settings. My overall favorite bit was definitely the line thickness. It aided in shading the pictures.

I had a bit of a problem making sure the grid and photo's were even and still the size required for the assignment. Since I used my Nikon, my original pictures were 3872 x 2592 so it took a bit of trimming.  Even with a tripod, human error made sure I wasn't always centered and it's surprisingly hard to photograph your thumb. Since I set myself up, I didn't have to do much adjusting. I used the same background, light box, shutter speed and about the same aperture for each picture.
I would like to add, that I am absolutely ecstatic that Windows 8 has this nifty auto save feature since my lovely toshiba fell off my lap and somehow restarted itself. This saved me from losing a 4 page research paper, this blog post, serious research on exactly what qualifies a person a "cat lady/mister," and directions to the closest farmers market.

I'm pretty boring if you know me in real life...

If you know me in real life, you know I'm pretty boring. This is pretty much my day. I enjoyed trying to figure out ways to make it more interesting. I decided on sticking mostly to macro and altered the photos just enough to make them more cohesive. I reduced saturation and changed the hue a bit along with adding some contrast (it's my weakness). I was a bit confused about the whole iCloud thing, but the google slideshow was really easy to maneuver around. I felt some of the images may have been confusing so I included a kind of description with each picture.

As much as I disliked my music clip, I enjoyed making this video mashup with it. I turned this 25 minute informative mining video into something that worked well with my altered sounds. I enjoyed the overlay of the video as well as the "effects" and animations that it involved. I kept parts silent on purpose to (hopefully) lead to a bit of suspense as to what may be coming next. I wanted to keep it simple, since the first two mash ups I made seemed horribly cluttered and way out of the ball park. It's not always the smooth transition that I wanted, but I think it became something fun and interesting once it was finally put together.
I used a mix of windows media player and FileLab to create this thing, it was a bit rough going at first, which is why this third and final bit are what the masses are going to be able to see. I played around with a lot of the transitions but didn't care for any of them until I accidentally overlapped my video, immediately that was my favorite and I kind of stuck to it. Timing with the music was a little tricky, but as I said, by round three I figured out how I wanted it to mash like.
I would definitely use this again if I ever wanted to make another video. It takes time and patience for sure, but it's definitely a fun thing to do. I even think I'll bring my boy in on the next one :)

Yes...yes it is...

There is this analogy that glitter is like herpes, you cannot rid yourself of it. Well, some genius out there came to this momentous conclusion regarding cat hair. I immediately jumped to thoughts of a Ke$ha concert meets Gwar surrounded by a moat full of cute cuddly kittens. Yeah. Admit it, you just imagined it too.

Gettin' creative..

OOOOOOH Boy... You are sure in for a Deutsch filled treat. I could say that I had fun with this, but I'd be lying. It was the worst 5 hours of my life and I wish I could take it back. I am not a musical person, I couldn't even play the triangle right in grade school. It comes up a bit short from the minimum required length and by the time you get that far you'll be grateful. Now, it's not like the brown note from south park, but in any case, I wouldn't play it for a crowd. The only part I liked working with were the voices, seeing as I've taken German, it was nice to be able to add them in. I enjoyed being able to incorporate background noise that seemed to go along with my creepy, kindergarten garage band vibe.

This is a nice way to help the neighborhood strays.

 This is so perfect I cannot put into words how much of amazing an idea this is the only thing I could do to possibly make this better is start a list of names that I'm going to give to all the new additions as well as try as hard as I, grammar nazi, can to create the worlds longest run on sentence because the amount of excitement at the shear possibilities this sign has create I've already got names flowing out of my ears George Meowchal Montgomery, Felix the 2nd, Meatball, Juicebox, Astrid bubblegut, Mimi the Moose, Frank, Leonard, Tom Puuuuurvo (Tom Servo, don't get nasty guys, just watch Mystery Science Theatre 3000), SaraSpockcian the Vulcan dinosaur Kitty, Alf (come oooon its funny),  Baron Von Poopypants, Admiral Snuggleworth, Mr. Tiddybomboms,  Hotdog the mystical raccoon, Nixon, Archie the Magical Rhino, Jimmy the Robot, Prince Humperdinck, Zaphod Beeblebrox, Bob, Mr. Nincompoop, Pedro Megatron, Sir Odd-Face, Bojangles, Frag Schnaggler and last but not least, little mr. Schrodinger

Make your own slideshow with music at Animoto.

For my lovely little 30 seconds, I used the super 8 option from Animoto. I enjoyed how its setup suited my pictures. It was super easy to use and since it all happened so fast, I'm beginning to second guess myself, nothing every runs that smoothly... but I digress. The song I used was Apocalypse Lullaby by The Wailin' Jennys. I really like the overall feel of the short and wish I had an opportunity to make this into what I know it could be. It's meant to be a mellow depiction of real life, without the extreme emotions. I was thinking simplicity, I'm hoping that's how it comes across.

something puuurdy

Heading into down town Toledo from Broadway, there is a ton of amazing art created by locals. It brightens up an otherwise run down part of this fair city. I enjoy the overall look of this photograph. I increased the contrast to bring out the dramatic lines of the building. I then lowered saturation because there was no plane ol' black and white option.  Last I used the color splash to add a touch of color in the local art. 

There is someone out there for everyone...

The caption says it all:

So this toy exists....

probably just for people like me.

It's along the lines of Business Woman Barbie and Firefighter Ken, giving the next generation something to look forward to as an adult. It makes me wonder if there is a crazy cat gentleman suitor as well. I would hope so, I couldn't imagine that every single crazy cat person wouldn't have a soul mate out there with a matching calico obsession.

What can I say? If it weren't for my darling husband I would probably be the cliche cat lady, defender of all that is cute! I would also most likely be that woman at the end of the block that all the little children avoid when it's Halloween, even though I'd have the best candy around. 
As is stated in my quick little side introduction:  
I'm not weird, I'm eccentric. It still stands that you cannot touch my hair. I enjoy long walks on the beach and I want my funeral to have an open bar. However, my child-like determination and attention span has changed- I no longer wish to rule over the tree house I found on Pinterest. Now I have my heart set on a mobile home that resembles the Bat Mobile (all rights reserved, yada yada).