For Holly, Photoshop resources 1 and Photoshop resources 2. There's gradients, bases, light effects, and a few other assorted things like masks and textures. This represents, like, eight years of saving things from various places, so that's why I had to split it up into two zipped files - it should do you, though, heh.

I thought I'd do a mini-tutorial on using them, since my early attempts at these kinds of things without actually knowing what to do led me to create monstrosities like this:



Like, I don't even know WTF I was going for there.

So, I did two different things for this icon. First, I took my base and topped it with a bright gradient layer:



I set the gradient to Pin Light at 80% to get this:



Then I put the following light base on top, Screen, at 100%, to get the final icon:



I'm a big fan of combining a texture and a light source, or a gradient and a texture, to get a variety of effects. I generally tend to use light sources on Screen, Overlay or Soft Light, but Pin Light or Hard Light can be interesting sometimes, too.

Here's another one. The base, and then the two gradients I used:



I duplicated the first gradient, set the bottom layer on Screen at 20%, the top at Exclusion at 20%; the second gradient I set to Soft Light at 100%. That gave me this, once I added a Selective Color adjustment layer to bring the blacks up a bit:



So not a huge change, but I find that fixing things like brightness and contrast work better with gradients, gradient maps, and flood fill layers set to different properties and opacities just looks cleaner than using the contrast adjustment layer, for instance. Then I used this texture, set on Linear Dodge 100%, and added a flood fill black layer set to Soft Light on 20% (this is my favorite way to bring up the contrast a little bit, because for me it's easier to adjust the opacity on that layer than to fiddle with the contrast bar).



Finally, if you use a light source like this one here, any of them from the folder "light effects" from the user awnp, you MUST set it to Hard Light - well, you don't have to, but it won't look right otherwise.



With this one, I had to put a layer mask on the light effect layer so that it wouldn't cover up their faces - I usually just use a black to transparent gradient to get rid of the part I don't want, but you could brush it out, too, depending on what you were getting rid of. Anyway, hope you get some use out of this, and hope I wasn't too pedantic or anything; I was going to upload my folder of icon tutorials I've saved over the years but it was over 500 mb so yeah.

Iconnnnns. Seriously though, I post these more for my own benefit and as a reference, and I know that none of you watch the show, so no big; feel free to skip, heh. Although number 11 is probably one of prettiest, if not the prettiest, icons I've ever made.

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

Instead of burning a mix CD and mailing it out, I'm being lazy and just uploading it. Tracks uploaded separately and as a zip. I don't know if individual files come with the album artwork, although I know you can just download it or whatever, but I made an album cover anyway because I'm bored. :D

1. Florence and the Machine - "Hurricane Drunk"

2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - "Heads Will Roll"

3. Klaxons - "Atlantis to Interzone"

4. Kasabian - "Empire"

5. P!nk - "Bad Influence"

6. Captain Ahab - "Was Love"

7. Joanna Newsom - "Autumn"

8. Laura Veirs - "Wide-Eyed, Legless"

9. Laura Gibson - "Come By Storm"

10. Joker's Daughter - "Nothing is Ever What it Seems"

Complete Album

In case Holly was interested, some various BSG desktops (or website banners I turned into desktops) I've made over the years. I think they're all 1024x768, so if you want different dimensions (probably bigger, almost all were made with my ickle laptop screen), shouldn't be a problem, just let me know.











I also have a couple that are just promo images that were big enough to slap up without needing to do anything else, really, so you should have those on the DVD, too. :D

This took a lot of time. Not so much with the Photoshop or even with the write-ups, but with finding episode-specific pictures and videos on YouTube, for which I was almost entirely successful (one I couldn't embed, which kind of threw off my overall plan, but it's no big). Here goes!

Favorite Episodes of Television 2009

10. Modern Family - “Run For Your Wife”



I started watching this show because Eric Stonestreet, who plays Cameron, went to my high school, although he graduated six years before I showed up. But it’s a great sitcom all around - I’ve enjoyed it more than Glee (blasphemy!). Funny, entertaining and with characters that - and this is sometimes rare in TV - I actually like. The show was funny before this sixth episode, but this to me felt like when everything really clicked into gear.



9. Star Trek - “Balance of Terror”



In which we first meet the Romulans. The original series is often can be campy, but this episode is deadly serious and tense; I read a review that likened it to a Cold War submarine movie, which is dead-on. Everyone - the actors, the writer, the director - brought their A-game.



8. Deadwood - “Sold Under Sin”



I feel like the appropriate level of praise I could bestow upon Deadwood would be taken as hyperbole, but it’s a fact that the level of quality in every aspect of the show is unlike most else in TV.



7. Big Love - “Come, Ye Saints”



The very large Henrickson family takes a cross-country trip, visiting the most important locations in the history of the Mormon religion as they do so. As one often sees in film, traveling lends an opportunity to strip characters down and allows them self-reflection in a way that can be difficult when trammeled in by their day-to-day lives. A beautiful, heart-breaking episode.



6. Fringe - “Bound”



I didn’t catch Fringe when it started. Then Alyssa wrote an incredibly scathing review of the second episode (scroll down to September 17) and I figured I’d not waste my time. Then, about three months ago, I saw this gif somewhere:



And I was like, I absolutely have to watch this show. So I checked it out from the library, and…this is one of those things where Alyssa and I will just have to disagree, because I love this show. No, the science isn’t real and it doesn’t make any sense, but I love the floating location tags, I love the characters and the actors who play them, I love the mood and the music and the funny. I picked this episode not just because it’s around when the show really started finding its feet - as well as defining its internal mythology - in season one, but also because of what came before it. The episode before ended in a cliffhanger as FBI agent Olivia Dunham was abducted. A lot of shows would have had that female character in peril all hour, finally to be rescued by a man. This show? Olivia rescued her own damn self before the opening credits. Awesome.



5. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - “Self Made Man”



Cameron is a Terminator assigned to protect John Connor. Terminators don’t sleep. So what does Cameron do every night? That’s the premise of this episode. What I loved about this show was how well it was able to expand from its basic premise, which we all know from the films, to create its own intricate and unique universe. While there were a lot of pure killing machines on the show, Cameron wasn’t the only Terminator to be a character in her own right, and watching her investigate with the dogged determination only a computer mind can bring to bear while being forced to interact with illogical humans made her one of my all-time favorite characters.



4. Dollhouse - “Belonging”



There are a lot of Whedon fans who seem to grudgingly watch this show, out of loyalty it seems, who don’t seem to actually enjoy it. It’s pretty common, when reading message boards or blogs about it, to see more complaints than anything else. Which I don’t get. It started off a little wobbly but don’t most shows? I’m very sad it’s been canceled, especially since the second season has brought us stellar episodes like this one, exploring the ramifications of the Dollhouse and how the dolls ended up there in the first place. Visually, this is one of the most stunning thus far. NB: This episode was directed by Jonathan Frakes.



3. Father Ted - “The Passion of Saint Tibulus”



Bishop Brennan asks Father Ted and Father Dougal, priests who have essentially been exiled because of their incompetence to tiny and remote Craggy Island off the coast of Ireland, to boycott a film that the Church has condemned. A film that no one on the island was planning on watching until the Fathers handcuffed themselves in front of the theater with ridiculous signs. I had to pause this episode three times because I was laughing too hard to live.

Video here - I couldn’t find one with embedding enabled. :(

2. Star Trek: The Next Generation - “Cause and Effect”



It’s a fairly straightforward SF premise, really: the Enterprise gets stuck in a time loop that keeps repeating itself, and must figure out how to get out and save the ship. The structure of the episode could have made it even more boring: each act repeats itself, with slight changes as the crew figures out what’s going on, but the basic action is the same. It’s also a bottle episode, so no big battles or special effects. It ends up being so fantastically fabulous that I have to give a lot of the credit to the director: that’s right, Jonathan Frakes! When you’ve got two episodes in my top ten, you’re doing something right.

I also should point out that I made nine icons from this episode. Nine. That means there was some prime Beverly Crusher action going on in here, and you know how I feel about that.



1. Battlestar Galactica - “The Oath” / “Blood on the Scales”



Okay, two episodes, but how could I really pick one? I’m not sure what I need to say about this two-parter. Action, tension, romance, lots of killing and running and even crawling the length of the ship. Roslin and Balter stuck somewhere together, bitching at each other. Starbuck holding her guns in a stupid, improbable way yet still being badass. The music when everyone joins Adama in the corridor. “I am coming for all of you!” Perfection.

I hope everyone had a merry Christmas. We had an interesting one, by dint of more snow than I've seen around here in awhile. After we finished opening presents, Laura and I cooked quiche for breakfast; we usually just do leftover dessert from the night before, so this was different. Then we went out and shoveled. Because the blue van and Marshall's car are parked on the street, right in front of our driveway didn't get plowed, so we got to shovel about five feet of the street, too. Then we went over to Grandpa's and shoveled his driveway and walkways and porches, not because he was in a hurry to go anywhere, but because he's stubborn and would have went out and done it himself. On our way there and back, we saw about eight cars off the road, and this is a stretch of only about four miles or so.

Pet Peeve: I don't understand the person who is well aware of how bad the roads are being as how he or she is driving on them - and they've been bad because we had a day of sleet first, so the plows haven't been able to scrape them clean - and also sees cars in ditches or snow drifts literally every mile, and not only is driving the speed limit, but is actually speeding and passing people. I don't even understand that kind of idiocy.

Yesterday my dad and I had to shovel again. Today I'm going to have to shovel again, and we'll probably go over and shovel Grandpa's again. Apparently, he was trying to go somewhere yesterday (where?!) and couldn't get out.

Not that we're usually clamoring to get out of the house on Christmas or even the day after, but it's different knowing that you can't get out. I haven't gotten stir-crazy yet, and I still have a lot of stuff I want to do today (list to follow), but tomorrow? I'll probably want to get out of the house, and probably won't be able to. Sarah's going to end up having to cancel her birthday party because we're supposed to continue to get snow through Tuesday

I didn't ask for much for Christmas, but I got some things I didn't ask for that were totally great. My parents got me a Latin dictionary for the computer, which I'm really excited about because paper Latin dictionaries are pretty expensive; they also got me one of those cushions that have little arms that prop you up in bed to read, and I've wanted one for years and years, so that was awesome. I also got a French press and a lot of different coffees, so I'm fairly awash in that. I was going to save my stocking chocolate for our post-Christmas movie day, but it's hard to say when we're going to be able to do that, so I may just eat it.

I had the time, so I was futzing around on Photoshop last night and made a new desktop, since I don't actually have that many. I don't feel as comfortable with a larger palette like that; I never know how to position the images and build up the background, so I have a lot of desktops I started and scrapped because they looked bad. But I was pretty pleased with this one, and I'm uploading it for Holly. :) (I don't recall Catherine squeeing over Picard and Crusher, so I don't think she'd be that interested, but hey, maybe she wants a hot pink shippy squee desktop, IDK!)



(Click for full size.)

To continue with the previous post's theme, I cannot find my disc for Photoshop. I can find every single solitary random mix CD I burned for my younger sisters ten years ago, but my Photoshop CD? I cannot find it. I can find the disc to install Windows 95 but my Photoshop CD? I cannot find it. I can find the disc for Tetris that came for free in a can of Pringles, but my Photoshop CD?

I CANNOT FIND IT.

GUYS, I AM GOING TO CATCH ON FIRE.

So, you should never buy a new computer. I'm just saying. The trials and tribulations ever since I bought that thing, it's like I was actively shaking my fist at Fate or something and he was like, "LET'S DO IT, AHA." First of all, since I've been using a laptop for almost five years, I had completely forgotten about the need for a monitor; I dragged in Marshall's old one from the garage, and I don't know what he did to it, but the connections were so jacked up; the screen was green and I couldn't change the contrast or brightness, it would randomly black out for up to a minute at a time, it couldn't run certain applications in full screen, et cetera. Today I finally got down to the thrift store and bought an old one for five bucks that while gigantic and cumbersome, actually works, so there's that.

Back to the day I set the new computer up. I thought, oh, transferring my files will be a breeze! I keep absolutely everything on my external hard drive! And I do mean everything: all my pictures, everything I've written in college, all my scripts, videos, my music, icons, everything. Everything.

Everything.

So when I plugged in my external hard drive and the new computer didn't recognize it, I was bummed, but not discouraged; I would have to burn DVDs on my old computer and that would take a while, but no big deal. Until I plugged it back into my laptop and that didn't recognize it, either. And I tried again and again, and turned everything off and turned it all back on, and safely removed over and over, and plugged in a few more times. It didn't recognize the device.

I sat downstairs and literally cried for ten minutes.

We took my hard drive to one of the computer tech places and they plugged it into a computer that was running Linux and everything popped up okay, and the guru literally had no idea why it would do that, but we took it back home and plugged it into my old laptop and it worked. So it wasn't a total loss, at least. In the end, it took 23 DVDs to burn off all my data. You can imagine how long that took.

Set up iTunes, and of course I didn't get to keep my play counts, my playlists, my date added, and all the rest of my meta data. Of course. I read, like, twenty different tutorials, and short of manually editing my .xml file, there's apparently no way to keep all that stuff when you transfer over to a new computer. Thanks, Apple! Also, my one hundred songs that I've either purchased, or gotten as a free iTunes download, or Laura has? Have to be authorized. Can you do that if you don't have a connection to the internet? Ha! So I have to go buy a twenty foot ethernet cable, oh yeah.

Thank God, my version of Final Draft still installed. I don't know what I would have done.

Icons! A bit more diverse a set than my last few; still a lot of Star Trek, but also some Terminator, a few assorted other shows, along with various actors. I experimented a bit with colors on some of these, and tried to wean myself off of just slapping a light texture on top of everything.

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

My favorites are 2, 10, 18 and 27. I think it's interesting that I generally prefer to icon women; I don't really know why that is, but it's something I've started to notice. Heh, and now all I can hear is Starbuck. "That's fascinating...you should write a paper."