TrickoftheDark AKA Didodikali AKA Dido

Beholder! Yay!

didodikali@yahoo.com — Sun, 17 May 2009 05:37:26 GMT

The reveals are up for the 2009 HP Beholder Fest, a celebration of the 'less' appealing characters of HP (although they are not at all less appealing in the hands of this crew). Go read, there's some fabulous stuff up there! In particular this year, there were some very fine Viktor Krum fics and some very fine Millicent Bulstrode fics. I so love this fest!

I wrote/illustrated Fruiting Bodies for LittleBlackBow. My fic is cracky and illustrated with sculpture. Why sculpture?

My 2008 submission to the fest last year was not near anonymous enough; many people hinted to me last year that my drawing style is rather obvious and gave me away instantly. I wanted to do a better job of being anonymous this year, and so thinking hard- I decided to use sculpture to illustrate this year's story. I decided this shortly after the reveals last year and I have spent the last year carefully not posting about sculpture so as not to associate myself with it. I even temporarily hid some of the more recent 2008 sculpture posts.

However I've been doing a lot of sculpture this past year and have even been going to a ceramics class with my husband. I'll have to start taking some pictures of what I've done and posting it. Some of it was ruined by the school's nasty cheap glazes, but some came out okay. But anyway, those who wondered, those little sculptures were done with plain old white ceramic clay. I intentionally sculpted them very tiny and then took big photos of them, and their tinyness and the squashy crudeness of the ordinary ceramic clay forced them away from my usual people-sculpting style- which in sculpy looks rather too similar to my drawings. Since I knew for months I was going to make clay illos, I had a lot of time to think about a reason for doing such a thing, and so my plot (such as it is) ended up built on the why of the clay illos. I don't know how successful I was at hiding my identity (PurpleFluffyCat seemed to suspect), but I hope this time I was less completely obvious.

However, next year I'm clearly going to have to break out of illustrated fic entirely and go with either straight unillustrated fic or some kind of non-obvious art, and I have so far absolutely no cunning ideas. Um. Yeah, dunno. We'll see.

PS. If you've been missing DidoPorn (which I don't post on LJ ever since they went all bantastic on erotic artists), there's some showing up here every month.

Inspiration. =)

didodikali@yahoo.com — Thu, 07 May 2009 01:53:30 GMT

I had to draw something for DD and I was inspired by the cute little Goyle/Millicent story made by a Mystery Author for me at HP-Beholder over here. (Thanks, Mystery Author!)

Mystery Author wrote me a fairly clean story, so I hope she does not mind that I drew an NC-17 drawing inspired by it for my DD assignment. And I only had time to paint the pertinent parts. Oh, well. The drawing is over here. And I seem to be late with it, too. Shoot.

points

didodikali@yahoo.com — Sat, 03 May 2008 12:47:27 GMT

http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2008/05/its-not-whether-you-win-or-lose.html

My Present, let me show you it.

didodikali@yahoo.com — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:11:51 GMT

A fabulous anonymous person wrote this fic for me over at HP-beholder:
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/hp_beholder/9836.html

Isn't it wonderful! The flying penises and everything! This fic is so For Me! They really went all out!
Wow, I can not wait to find out who wrote this. If it's someone I don't know, I'll have to go read their entire works.
If it's someone I do know... wow, I just can't guess yet. How long till they tell us, I wonder. =D

...This is the first time I've participated in an anonymous fic exchange thingie quite like this. I'm afraid I haven't tailored my offering to my assigned recipient anything like this spectacularly. And this fic I got is so awesome! OMG! I hope the person who randomly got assigned to receive my thingie will be gentle with my newbie offering. Oh, well, I tried.

But, man, the fic I got is the best thing ever. I love my present, anonymous author! Thank you! <3!

Hi, IJ.

didodikali@yahoo.com — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:36:38 GMT

While IJ was out, I was ill: http://trickofthedark.livejournal.com/162837.html

...Still not great. Going away now. Back later.

A round up of everything I've been doing for a month.

didodikali@yahoo.com — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 01:20:06 GMT

I scanned some paintings and put them on cafepress stuff. As well as these, there are chickens, guinea hens, nautilus, and shameran.

www.cafepress.com/natashad

~

Meesto's Little Sister went to the US for a month to see the new nephew (Big Sister's new kid) and now Little Sister is back here with us. I enjoyed having Meesto all to myself for a month, but I guess I can share him some more again.

One of the things Meesto and I frequently do is read things aloud to each other. I tend to read to him while he's cooking, he reads to me while I'm doing an assortment of things. We often read news articles, blogs, assorted nonfiction economic/geopolitical analysis to each other, but sometimes we read entire fiction novels to each other. A while back Meesto read me some Walter John Williams's science fiction novels. Over the last few months I read him the first two Temeraire books, which he liked very much, but I didn't want to read the next two aloud because I find some of the plot directions in 3 and 4 very annoying. He'll have to read those himself. :p

But I read him Bujold's Shards of Honor some time ago, and while it didn't really excite him (he could never remember all the vorcharacters) I wanted to keep going to see if he'd like the later books better. So this last month I read him Barrayar, which he liked quite a bit. So now I've started The Warrior's Apprentice and now that we are several chapters in, he really likes it. As in Really Really likes it. Yay!

~

I painted the toilet room green with ferns. (In NZ parlance the bathroom is a separate room, and indeed our bathroom is blue and our toilet is now green.) Is there anything finer than a squat amongst the ferns? No, I didn't think so.

Plus tui painting.

~

Happy Easter! Happy autumn! For Easter we harvested our pumpkins. They came out very well. We've bought an assortment of seeds for next spring, some of which can maybe/sorta work for winter crops (radishes, mesclun salad), so we'll try that now. I've been weeding the garden. I need to do more of that.

~

We've had scaffolding around our house for the last two months. The putty was falling out of our second-floor front windows and the weather was coming in. So we had people put up the scaffolding and Meesto reputtied and repainted the windows and we repainted the house--all this on one end of the house. Now the scaffolding has been moved so we can do the other end of the house.

However, when we first had the scaffolding put up, our cat jumped out a second floor window so she could explore it. Unfortunately the windows open slanty in such a way that it's possible for her to jump out onto the scaffolding, but NOT possible for her to jump back into the house- and a missed attempt would have meant a fall from a second floor window to a concrete path- not a healthy prospect for an ancient arthritic cat. When Meesto saw her out there, he freaked. I told him to shut all the windows so the cat didn't attempt anything and I'd climb up and rescue her -without getting scratched even, because I had a cunning plan. Which I did.

And she never went out on the scaffolding again.

Whee! Baby!

didodikali@yahoo.com — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 23:11:17 GMT

I have a nephew! Everyone's fine. ...That's all we know so far. I guess they'd be weighing him now?
---

ETA: 6lb, 10oz. Baby ate, mother asleep already. Still no name. LOL!

Nautilus painting.

didodikali@yahoo.com — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 05:48:23 GMT

Shiny nautilus painting.
I think I'm cephalopodded out. =)

Now some rabbits...

didodikali@yahoo.com — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:42:28 GMT

My terrifying suckery squid painting in the bathroom.

Notice also the beer-filled tub.

Go here to see what else I've been up to this month.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/20959605@N06/tags/feb2008/

Snupin Challenge

didodikali@yahoo.com — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:50:53 GMT

My entry for the trading Places Challenge at Lupin_Snape.

Dragon baby toys.

didodikali@yahoo.com — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 12:24:31 GMT

I'm going to be an aunt. And I'm reading Temeraire. So I made dragon baby toys.

Dragon toys Jeanie and Pascal. Pascal gets his wings sewn on tomorrow.

See more pics of the toys over here.

SilverClay sculptures

didodikali@yahoo.com — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 12:19:25 GMT

Flock of Phalluses

See more silverclay beads over here. Winged phalluses are an old roman fertility symbol. Very lucky. ;)

Hi.

didodikali@yahoo.com — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:02:01 GMT

I have a large backlog of stuff that I've done but not had the heart to post on LiveJ. I'm going to post it here now and see if that makes me happier than standing around with my hands in my pockets, looking mournfully at what's become of LiveJ.

*picks up camera*

Oh, I feel better already. =)

Most Trusted Meme

didodikali@yahoo.com — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 04:48:06 GMT

Look at all these cool people! Some of them I was even already very familiar with. Why on earth didn't I have them already friended? Hi, cool people! *friends*