I hope you guys didn't mind.

Har har har, April Fool's Day is over. Telling from the hitcounter at the bottom of the page, I'd say my AFD joke worked. I had something much better in mind, but was too lazy to execute it in time. So I made up the "Google stole my web site" page as a quicky. It fooled at least a few people I'm sure. As for the joke I wanted to do, I'm not going to say what it is. Should I remember what it is by time of next year, I'll do it then. It has something to do with the blooper that is my site's domain name. When I first paid for web hosting and opened my site under it's own domain 4 years ago, I had a bit of frustration keeping a certain group of people out of my site. That's all the hint you get to next year's AFD joke.

Time certainly flies. My site's been operating on the hosting solution Onedollarhost.net for a little more than 4 years now, but my site's technically been around since 2001 (when I was using AOL hometown as my site's host, bleh). Come May, Lexi's Lounge will have been on the internet for 6 years. Go, me! It's been through lots of changes, from content to layout to hosting solutions (free hosting solutions). I believe this current layout should be version 8 or 9 by now. I've learned quite a bit about web site design since my first time trying to learn HTML years ago. I still prefer simple over busy-looking designs. I spent a year with my site on hiatus, because I was planning on how I wanted to present the newest version of Lexi's Lounge.

I wanted for it to still be "my personal space" where I can blog about whatever I want and post whatever art or design I can come up with no matter how risque some people may judge it (half-naked womyns, lol). But I also want it to be a place where I can promote myself to potential clients/employers, showcasing what I can do when it comes to design, art, and communication. I want to be me; I want my site to present me as who I am today and what my abilities are as a graphic designer, illustrator, and general fine artist. Admittedly, I've worked more on getting my site to work than updating my art galleries, but they're updated little by little. Eventually, everything that I want in my offline portfolio will be online for viewing by companies that view my online job profiles.

Speaking of my online job profiles, I hope someone will get back to me soon on the jobs I applied to. Only one employer has, so that means people are at least looking at my resume. It's a shame most job sites only upload Word doc-formatted resumes. I'm planning a nicely designed printed version and would like to upload it in Word format if the software used will recognize the images and type used within it. PDF would be even better, but I guess I can keep that for my own site. I have a lot I want to say, as usual, but I'll save the thoughts for later. What's the point of blogging when you jot everything down in one entry? :P

Another year completed! Whoohoo!

Happy new year, everyone! I couldn't get out, because my car's still messed up. Even though there was work done on it today, the mechanic told me my car has a bad valve. Go figure. My throat's been sore since this morning, but I feel a little better. I guess I should be glad I didn't go out; too many sick fuckers (with colds and flu, that is), and it's supposed to rain in the area tonight. Not to mention the shooting. Oh god, better duck.

I got some more work done on the gallery. No new entries, but I updated the image viewer script.  Now there are fields where the name, date, medium, and description of the art submitted will be. I changed the way it reads the flat files, so that I can use the likes of Microsoft Works Database to do the dirty work of formatting the entries for me. I haven't played with Perl in a long time. I'm still somewhat newb at it, but I'm proud of what I can do. I learned to implement some new stuff this evening, and frankly, it's gotten me a lot closer to my future plans of creating admin controls such as image upload and description adding/editing. I need to go ahead and invest in a more in-depth book on Perl, like O'Reilly's. That'll have to wait until most of my major money woes are taken care of.

I think those idiots have started shooting already. I'm going to go spend my new year's day like I did when it was 1999-2000: taking a hot shower and washing my hair to Prince's "1999" on the radio. Peace out, and may your resolutions be something that can actually be obtainable this year. ^__^

Happy Belated Turkey Day!

I hope there were less dumb-dumbs burning down their houses trying to fry turkeys inside this year. I hope you all had a good day yesterday, because I did. The family and I were going to go to the movies, but my sister mentioned going to buy bootlegs of the currently released films, so they nixed going to the theatre. Nothing can comfort me about not going to see Happy Feet. -_-;;

Much later on, me and the boyfriend played Gamecube games. I whooped him in Double Dash and he whooped me in Soul Caliber (despite the weird button setup). Then he played through the first 2 episodes of Viewtiful Joe; after these couple of years, VJ is still really cool. I'm in love with the art/graphic style. It is a good system, that Gamecube. Playing Soul Caliber made me think about the future of fighting games on the Wii. I hope there are at least a few really good ones that debut, with an arcade pad to be included with packaging.That should solve uncomfortable button setups.

I'm working on my assigned part of my Comic Book Artists Guild's first comic issue, "Key/Gate". I believe that's the official name. I don't have the photo reference for the house that's to be used for the comic yet, but I'll alert the members via our Yahoo Group asap so I can have the main character not floating on the floor playing a floating video game. O.o;;; I also need photo reference of the Fantasy Shop of St. Charles. In case you're not a St. Louisan, the FS is a specialty comic book store. We also aspire to have the shop sell some issues of our comic and set up our own online book store for selling our comics. I really hope we can continue this project without any major interruptions. It would be my first major contribution as a 3-year member of the CBAG. ^.^b

This Wednesday is my Friday

Yup, it is. I still have to work though. -_-

This monday was Nov 20th, the Day of Rememberance, a day where we as human beings take some time out of the day, a mere moment even, to remember those who who have died being themveselves or trying to correct the lives they were unfortunately born in. The full name of the memorial day is Transgendered Day of Rememberance, but it includes everyone from the gay, lesbain, and bi communities too. Hate crimes against someone of a different race gets national media attention with immediate sympathy toward the victim's family(-ies), but a hate crime against someone who is different by means of sexual orientation or gender identity barely gets printed unless there's enough of a fight put up by the families of the victims. And if the attacks do get printed, it's a bigotted story that sympathizes with the attacker and totally disprects the victim by labelling them a freak in between the lines. It's happened in major publications before, and no one but the victims (who in reality are few but enough) ever dared to challenge the media for creating and perpetuating such a horrible misunderstanding of the transgendered.

Racism still exists, sure, but why are there no/hardly any laws protecting the transgendered folk? People who are different because they, simply put, were born as the wrong gender and trying to fix their lives so that they can be honest and happy with themselves. If a man discovers that his gender is female, he corrects the genetic mistake by transitioning into the right sex. He begins to live his life as the girl he should've been at birth (or female to male sex transistion), maybe in stealth (meaning no one knows his past life except a small circle of loved ones) or totally out and honest with everyone. Rita Hester, the victim whose death inspired others to create the "Remembering Our Dead" web project, is one such case. She was loved and befriended by straight, gay, les, bi, and trans people alike. She was a lively woman who dared to be herself and open with everyone, living without fear of others' bigotry. She was murdered for being extraordinary, and all the the press did was call her by "he" pronouns and her original male name, and they stirred up rumors about her living a some double life.

Most transgendered don't tell everyone at first, or at all. And it's totally understandable why; almost every time one's outted by choice or accident, they're attacked. Many can't even live in relative comfort because their chance of death by murder is higher than any minority group out there. It is sometimes by strangers who're homophobic and sometimes by the ones closest to them who can't cope with the transistion. No matter the reason, it's truly evil to kill someone because of the hate and ignorance brought on by such a society of hypocrites. This could happen to my gay cousin. This could happen to you if you're "different" or someone you love who happens to be different. Every fag, dyke, and sissy dick girl is loved by someone.

Please take the time to look at this site: http://www.rememberingourdead.org/index.html

Read some or all of the entries on that site. Every year there are names added. For every name, there's a family out there whose lives have been torn apart by the tragedy of an often ignored hate crime. The only way to stop the killing of innocent people is to remember the ones who have lost their lives daring to be on the outside who they were on the inside.