Spring Break was here and gone…and I feel like I need a vacation from my vacation. I spent most of last week at a regional dance convention. We’d get up for 8:00am classes, barely have time to eat, dance until 4:30, get ready for an evening of concerts, eat, attend the concert, then go out for drinks. Guess how dancers unwind: with more dancing. We partied for a couple of hours each night, crashing late and waking early to do it all over again. We performed our piece pretty near the best we ever have, and the adjudicators were rather incompetent, so we don’t at all feel bad for not being showcased in the final gala concert or going to nationals.

And I hadn’t had a whole lot of sleep before this thing. The night before we left I was bleaching my hair. Lately I’ve been going through hair styles and colors more often than I’m around cameras, unfortunately. It came out a rather neon orange (because of being dyed black before), so I tried to fix it with a ginger shade of dye. It’s a little more normal now, but I’ll be bleaching it again in a week anyway to a full platinum.

Thus, I’ve decided to play Saffron (aka YoSaffBridge) from “Firefly” at the east coast LARP. It’s a character very much unlike me; but, not only do I think I really have a chance to do her justice, I expect to learn a lot about myself by playing such a starkly different character. I don’t ever want to be one of those RPers who only play one type of character–worse if that one character is himself. The only problem with the LARP is that it’s expensive. I may be getting some of the costs subsidized by the friend whose idea it was to drag me along to this, which will help to ease my aprehension about going at all.

I saw “V for Vandetta” yesterday…goddamn. I adored Hugo Weaving enough already, but this recent film shows just what an amazing actor he is. We never see his face, and yet it almost seems as though that creepy mask has varied facial expressions. Natalie Portman, too, gave a stunning performance. Star Wars scripts aside, she’s a good actress.

What really struck me about “Vandetta,” though, is how good a movie it is. And for a comic book movie, it’s fucking spectacular. I thought the “Hell Boy” movie was about as good as it got, and then we got “X-men,” “Spiderman,” “Sin City,” “Constantine,” “Batman Begins,” and now “V for Vandetta.” Granted, I’m not a huge comic book nerd, and of the few I own, most are manga. But I have an great appreciation for the graphic novel style, and it’s just so gratifying to see it blossom in film format, still intact. I love the care directors take, when filming a concept that began as a graphic novel, to make sure that key frames are turned into storyboards. In “Sin City,” especially, it looked exactly how one would imagine Miller’s art come to life. You could see the original frames in the direction, even if you weren’t familiar with the book’s pages. Brilliant. Fucking brilliant.

Oh gee, I disappeared again. School is kicking my ass. I haven’t even written in my mundane blog lately…

I’m in a lot of dance concerts on top of eighteen credits, so I haven’t had time to do anything at all for Gnymphs. On top of that, I’ve been doing a lot of sitting and eating. >_> Not cool.

So, yeah, appologies all around.

I’ll be going to a LARP next September and the characters are all literary or otherwise fictional characters. I can’t seem to decide on who I’d like to play. Current ideas:

River (Firefly)
Saffron (Firefly)
Alice (American McGee’s Alice)
Death (Neil Gaiman)

I’m totally up for suggestions if anyone has any.

Well, off to class.

Yay, my set’s up. I’m liking it less the more I see it, though. The lighting was crappy and I’m much skinnier now.

I think I’m addicted to NPR. I especially love “All Things Considered” and “This American Life.” I just really love hearing absurd stories about what it’s like to be human, I guess. Similarly, I’ve been hooked on the “tell SA a secret.” thread even though it’s been locked for a few days now. I don’t have archives, so I just left it open on my desktop and I’m working through it. I submitted three secrets of my own, and the first made it onto page 60, but I haven’t checked beyond that because I’m only on page 24 so far and I’m determined to read them all. I’m such an e/n whore. :v:

I’m an optimist at heart, despite all the doom and gloom surrounding us (and coming out of my own mouth). At the same time, I have a self-destructive streak, so I kind of get off on the idea that my dreams will always be tragically dashed. There’s something romantic about that I can’t get over. I don’t like to come off as emo and I avoid anyone who has their wrist stapled to their forehead, but at the same time I hate how bubbly I can seem at times. I’m sick of being “cute.” Why can’t be “crazy-sexy”? I get those adjectives seperately often enough…

Woah, that was a tangent. I usually don’t have much content for this blog because I have another one that gets priority. Anyway, I’ll try to get a set done over Christmas break in January.

Oh man, I’ve been so busy lately. School is taking up all of my time, especially with all these dance classes. However, I did find time to participate in the Tub o’ Dice shoot Ada pulled together. We all had a lot of fun taking pictures, eating junk food, and chatting. It was originally Ada’s idea, and she pull all the strings with Chessex, but I have a treat from the shoot for all the SA goons.

Before that, I managed to do a pirate-themed series. It was fun, although due to lighting, is not necessarily above amateur quality. It was more that I wanted to get a series done before I cut my hair. I like it much better how it is now (a black bob), but it was nice to do at least one series with the hair style I’ve had for most of my life.

I think it all started in Ada’s living room during Thursday night D&D. We were chatting and lamenting that there was no porn geared towards geeks, even though the subculture has become a rather large demographic in the entertainment industry. The punks and goths have Suicide Girls–what about us? Sure, the geek porn shtick has been attempted before, but not by geeks themselves. Why not do something about it?

Naturally, there were qualms about breaking into the adult entertainment industry. However, executed properly, the Internet can be a relatively safe and anonymous place, for both the producers and consumers. We’ve all seen those camwhore sites with their low-res smut and Amazon.com wish lists–but we aspired to something a little more artistic, something more in the budget of a wargames nerd.

So, taking a page from the Suicide Girls and Ernie Cline (his spoken-word piece “Nerd Porn Auteur”), we’re following our own vision of geek-based erotica and our own format. It might be a little slow to get started, but we’re not going to give up after all we’ve invested in Gnymphs LLC.

It has been a rush. Deciding to launch at Gen Con has been the largest constraint on what we have to offer so far. It’s Wednesday already, and I’ve just finished the layout mock-ups. Let’s hope y’all have something to look at by Thursday–although, if you’re reading this, there obviously is.

What’s in this for me? It isn’t the money, that’s for sure. We’re looking to pay our Visa bill and bandwidth costs–anything above that would be incredible. I’m more in it for the self-expression, sharing what I love with the vast subculture I only see face-to-face once a year.

In the future, there’ll be a lot of changes to Gnymphs.net in order to get up to full speed: layout changes, more content, plugging in ccBill so we can actually sell you the pictures behind the thumbnails. And a simple equation: Molly + Natsilani = Strip Chess.