Sta.sh
I'm leaving Ireland soon, and I'll be sad to go. But on the plus side, I've worked out the dog situation with my parents, and my mom will be keeping them when I am at college, so that's very good news.
I've alluded to needing surgery on here before, and I'm happy to say that that's happening at the end of January, in just over a month. I'll be $3000 in debt for it, which I am not at all pleased about, but it's a necessity and I will work to pay that loan back. I've pretty much given up agressively offering cheap commissions here, because a) nobody really seems to want them much and b) they don't bring me that much money. I'm always open for commissions, but for the moment I'm going to stop advertising about it. It's a good thing I never expected or planned to make art my livelihood, lol. I have too low an opinion of my art (and other peoples' desire to buy it) for that.
And now for a bit of a rant about HARPG (because honestly I don't expect any of you to give a shit about my life, because that's not what your here for, so I doubt many will read this far anyway). I'm both amused and annoyed by the constant 'drama'-enabling that goes on in HARPG circles.
Read that again. NOT the drama. The drama-ENABLING.
Yes'm, that means you, my darling reader. We're pretty much all guilty of this. Tension and strife is always going to exist, but it doesn't have to be a big public spectacle the way it is now. The reason it gets so big is because we participate. We buy into the one-sided idea the the person we like is liek OMG totally right!!! and has been wronged, whereas the other person is wrong, butthurt, whiny, arrogant and quite possibly catastrophically stupid. That idea is, in most cases, bullshit. Yet we tend to throw our support behind one competitor, and then each side moans about how the other is immature and obsessed with dArama. Truth is? Usually, both sides are, and that's what annoys me.
"Drama" has basically just come to be a word that means "other peoples' feelings that I don't like, and thus want to simplify & discredit." In order to justify shitting all over those opinions that you disagree with, we've come to a place where simply saying "Oh, she's a drama queen" or "she gets butthurt over every tiny thing" or tenuous claims like "He secretly stirs up drama that makes him look wronged" are enough to completely vindicate us in our own minds and the minds of our friends and paint the supposed drama queen as a childish 'attention whore' with no sense of perspective.
But you know what? There are some people who do take those traits to a pathological degree, but in general my view of the PEOPLE of HARPG is...well, that they're just people. Individual humans, each with their own thoughts, opinions, desires (except a few who might be robots or aliens - you never know!). Obviously confirmation bias and selection bias play a role here, but the people I interact with on here are mostly quite friendly, nice, (more-or-less...) intelligent people...but the instant the words "drama", "butthurt", etc are mentioned, many of us throw prudence and sense to the four corners, paint our faces, hop up on the fence and scream our one-sided, hypocritical support for one person over the other.
I'm sick of it.
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UPDATE 02/11/12:
Thank you to those of you who stopped by with kind words. It did really help to have a supportive group here.
I've been negotiating with my parents since they said they were going to get rid of my dogs, and they've agreed not to do anything for the moment, until we've talked more about it. Of course, because the two of them can't agree on anything and seem hellbent of blaming each other for absolutely everything, I can't see this ending well anyway, but at least there's a chance I can keep them.
TW: rape.
Some other bad stuff has come to light in the past few days, including the fact that one of my friends, someone I trusted, sexually assaulted a girl this semester, so...ugh. That makes three relatives and two (now former) friends that I know have raped someone, and three friends who I know have been raped. It just makes me think, how many others that I don't know about? How can they even think for a second that what they did was excusable (or anything other than despicable)? So I had to counsel a different friend through that.
Anyway, it's been the worst Halloween of my life, and I can't scrape together any motivation to draw anything. I'm sorry to people who took out commissions from me, but for the moment I'm not going to be working on them, so they'll be later than expected.
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30/10/12
GODDAMMIT. SOMETIMES I WANT TO MURDER MY PARENTS.
THEY'RE GETTING RID OF MY DOGS.
They separated recently and neither of them is particularly good with dogs, and neither of them wants them while I'm away at college. My little brother is crap with them and doesn't give a shit about walking them, playing with them, training them, etc., so he's no goddamn help at all.
I just...my dogs are the only good things about staying with either of my parents for summer/breaks nowadays, and if they get rid of them, I'll just...I'll miss them so terribly. I don't want to think about it. I don't want it to happen. First they got rid of my stuff and my room, and whatever, sure, that was just material possessions, that's fine, but now they're getting rid of my dog and my puppy and I just
4/11/12: Judged - now with titles!
Prizes
Ribbons posted: 
TEAM OF CHAMPIONS
1st: 
I stay up pretty late — until around 4 AM — so if your entries are in before I go to bed on the tenth, it will count!
Show: 
Dan Belkin earned a Ph.D. in biology at the University of Florida in 1961. He was an evolutionary biologist specializing in physiological and ethological ecology, supported by a National Institutes of Health Career Research Fellowship at the University of Florida Medical School. He also taught respiration and nutrition in the physiology department. 
Below are all the horses that are currently up for stud or brood at Khamsin Stables
The race is closed for judging (1/2/11).
3rd place will recieve a head portait of horse with their ribbon.
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