PoptartsNinja

I like the Statesman Says poster.

This is still on the first page, even. >_>

As a Warhammer 40k player, I greatly enjoy seeing other people's miniatures.

There are a couple of tricks to photographing miniatures you may find helpful. First and formost, check to see if your camera (I'm assuming it's digital) has a 'macro' button (it will look like a little picture of a flower).

Second, setting up a couple of desk lamps and disabling your camera's flash go a long way towards getting a clear shot of a miniature. A white cloth background helps a good deal as well.

Third? From what I can see, your painting techniques are very clean. I don't see any blotchy spots, but I can't really tell more without clearer pictures. Still, from what I could see your marines look like they're in great hands.

Also, don't sweat compliments or negative responses... some people don't realize the amount of effort it takes to create an artwork because they stopped trying sometime between Kindergarten and the 3rd grade. Art's all about practice, and so long as you make the effort you're doing a thousand times better than those people who gave it up in gradeschool. Stick with it, I for one rather enjoy looking at your work.

Sara watches the bar intently for a few minutes, waiting for a reply from Marcus. When none is forthcoming, her expression sours and she begins repeating her earlier message at half of her previous typing speed.

Sounds rough, Sara spells out in reply. Her responses come more and more quickly, as if she’s studying the limits of Marcus’ ability to read through them. I also begin to understand why I read you wrong at first. You have two separate identities in your head, don’t you? I guess that’s where that undercurrent of confusion keeps coming from. I’m glad you weren’t successful in murdering your own family; but I also understand what kind of impact a cult can have on an impressionable mind.

So, odd question, she continues a few moments after completing her last message, as if to give Marcus time to catch up. Could you graft yourself to a clone, and become separate from your brother? I imagine that it could be theoretically be possible: if you were bonded by grafting your arm to your brother, couldn’t your arm also be grafted to a clone? I know Crey’s been making some headway into cloning biotechnology, and with their presence in the Rogue Isles and your apparent power, I doubt it would be difficult for you to “gain access” to cloning technology and enough scientists to make an attempt possible…

And then you go and disappoint me again, she chides, her fingers moving with lightning speed over the assembled letters. Finding a Dark World character that vaguely looks like a smiley face, she predicates her sentence with it in an attempt to take out any hint of actual malice. Anyway, to answer your question: I built them. Miniaturizing the parts was quite a challenge, but I am reasonably satisfied with the results. I just have to keep adjusting them whenever inspiration strikes me… I have to keep them up to date because my signature scrambler also scrambles my vitals, so the Mediport system doesn’t detect me at all. If I don’t upgrade wherever possible, I’m liable to wind up bleeding to death in some warehouse or office building… and I think even you’d agree that would not be a positive and uplifting experience.

So what about you, she inquires. You don’t strike me as the scholarly type, so how does an individual like you wind up with such a strong grasp of mystic forces?

Oh good, you figured out what I was doing. I was going to try messages in a bottle next, Sara replies just as a large crowd of dancers obstructs her view of Marcus completely. I’ll have to reappraise my opinion of you again. You’ve consistently surprised me, and that’s rare. When I first saw you, I had you pegged for the quiet, unassuming, romantic type.

a pity… hm, looks like the capital ‘a’ vanished. You wouldn’t, by chance, be trying to make me look foolish by reducing my ability to respond to the level of a fourteen year old on Paragon online Instant Messenger, would you?

For a moment, it looks like Sara’s about to mime a response; but then a flash of inspiration seems to strike her and she turns back to the bar. Her fingers play over Marcus’ symbols, spelling out a message despite the limited selection of characters. She must be wondering if he’s capable or observant enough to pick up on what she’s doing, because once she finishes her message she starts typing it again, and then a third time as if giving him a chance to figure it out.

do I really need to ?call? you an idiot? i figured you uuould haye cnouun that about yourselph by nouu? Also could i get some more letters?

Sara lays a hand on words Marcus had formed on the bar. For a few moments, there was nothing but dead silence from her, but then something started to come through. Unfortunately for Marcus, her thoughts are unintelligible, it’s much akin to listening to a very, very distorted radio transmission. Either her defenses are vastly more complex then he’d expected, or her thought patterns are in some way different from those of a normal person. After a few minutes of mental garbage, Sara pulls her hand away from his runes, a frustrated expression crossing her face.

Still, with his apparent desire to stay relatively low-key, Sara had to find another way to answer his second question, obvious though the answer was. Raising one of her brass mechanical gauntlets, she raises her other, gauntlet-covered hands and points to the first. Then she slaps herself in the forehead with the back of her hand, points at Marcus, points at her breasts with both hands, and mimes a look of abject stupefaction.

Her message is pretty clear, despite having used mime to convey it. [My origin’s technological, duh. I guess you were too busy drooling at my breasts to notice.]

Sara’s reply was… descriptive, to say the least; and this in spite of the fact that she didn’t respond to Marcus with any kind of mental contact. Her one-finger salute, coupled with a smile that was almost half sneer was response enough, even from across the ‘D.

Certain that she still held Marcus’ attention, the pointer finger of her right glove started to crackle with bright electrical energy. Moving with surprising quickness, she begins to spell out a response, one letter at a time.

[Are you always so grammatically imprecise, or are you just thinking with your endocrine system?] she replies, turning the form of his own question against him. [Mind shielded,] she adds in response to his second statement. [More fun that way.]

The pinch on the butt took Sara completely by surprise. In a flash, Sara was covered in a personal force field, the force and suddenness of its appearance sending the barstool she’d been sitting on a fraction of a second earlier smashing into the waiter’s knee. The waiter yelped, at fell backwards, spilling the new drink he’d been offered all over his uniform.

Sara’s bubble faded an instant later, as she brought her defensive instincts under control. She turned slowly, and affixed the waiter with a stare that could’ve frozen nitrogen. Still, she offered the fallen waiter her hand, helping him to his feet.

“I trust that was another ‘message’,” she asked rhetorically. The waiter nodded solemnly.

“Make sure he pays you. Then tell him I might have changed my opinion of him if he’d have come and done that himself… after that, I suggest you take a smoke break, because if I hear of you do anything like what you just pulled to any woman in Pocket D again, I’ll put you in a Detention Field and deliver you to DJ Zero personally. Got it?”

“Yes, ma’am,” The waiter replied, scrambling away. She knew he’d deliver her message, and trusted his fear of DJ Zero would see him off the dance-floor almost immediately after.

“He told me to tell you ‘it’s for luck and that every beautiful woman deserves a drink’,” the waiter was saying. Sara’s eyes narrow in undisguised anger, her fingers tightening on her own glass. With a sharp ‘crack’, her mechanical gloves grind it to sand, sending her drink spilling all over the floor.

Without a word, she snatches the drink Marcus had paid for from the waiter’s hand. “Thank you,” she says, regaining her composure. “I assume he paid you well to make the walk all the way from the redside bar.”

Her mouth twists upward into a smile that would’ve done Ghost Widow proud. She slips the waiter a twenty before he can leave, leaning in to whisper into the man’s ear: “Once he pays you, I want you to deliver a message from me: Slap him in the face, and tell him not to bother talking to me again unless he’s got the brass to stick around for more than six seconds.”

With that, she dismissed the waiter with a wave, and appropriated one of the stools at the bar. She sat carefully, her body language perfectly composed. Before, her posture had been neutral. Now? Every slight nuance of her pose seemed to exude vibes suggesting that entering her personal space would not only be frowned upon, but could result in a very public emasculation.

The circle of empty space around her widened almost another full foot.

"Hm... damned if you do," Sara mumbles to herself, finishing up an internal monologue. Idly, she leans up against the bar, cradling her drink in a neutral posture, neither inviting nor uninviting, ignoring the appraising glances that nearby dancers and drinkers would occasionally direct her way.

Still, the space around her stayed clear as folks moving to buy drinks simply clustered up elsewhere, rarely coming within two feet of her. She was a fantasy, unapproachable, but the kind of woman that most would brag about having been shot-down by to their friends on the way home.

It was becoming harder to tell if the coldness to her eyes was due to feelings of superiority, or a defense against loneliness.

“Sara Deckard,” the woman in red replies, her golden gloves crackling briefly with electrical energy. “So tell me, Marcus,” she begins, her mouth twisting upward into the faintest hint of a smile, “Is it just a side-effect of the physical attraction, or are your motives always so… transparent?”

Sara holds out a hand expectantly, and without a word a passing Pocket D waiter (a real one this time), presses a glass into her hand. She tips the glass slightly, as if saluting Jonas, then takes a sip. “It would appear, Mister Dark, that you have just become marginally more fortunate. Now, the question is, how far do you think your new-found luck will get you?”

"There," the 'perfect' woman in the red costume says with satisfaction as the almost-conflict wraps itself up. "I knew this could be resolved without violence." She eyes the floor beneath Kheldragon, having either ignored the other woman's earlier statements or simply not heard them amid the commotion. "Well, mostly without violence," she ammended, flashing Khel a bemused wink.

Her gaze shifts back to Jonas, and she eyes him with a cold stare.

"Is all this really necessary?" a melodic voice asks, cutting through the commotion with an ease that suggested years of practice. The sea of dancers parted, allowing a young woman to pass.

Her skin is flawless, her features drawing admiring gazes from the dancers she passed. Her hair falls about shoulder length, black, and left to fall free with just enough in front of her face to add a bit of asymmetry to her beauty. Her eyes are a stunning shade of green, setting off the dark red of the one-piece costume she wore. Her arms and legs were bare, but any hope for a brush of skin-contact was dashed by the thick golden gloves and boots protecting her hands and feet.

If a single word could be used to describe her, that word would be "perfect". Perhaps even a little too perfect.

She fixes the would-be fighters with an icy stare, as if irritated by the prospect of having her night ruined by a squabble. "Surely there's a better way to handle this? One that won't get you fired," she directs at the waiter, "and one that won't get you tossed out of the Pocket D?" she directs at the others, her cold gaze sweeping each in turn. "You all look like bright people to me... I'm sure you can come up with something fair."

Makes you wonder how useful those bubble escape-pods would be against an opponent with enough intelligence to, y'know... shoot at them.

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!

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F is for friends who do stuff together!

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U is for you and me!

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N is for anywhere and anytime at all...

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Down here in the deep blue sea... >_<

Here you go:

Tech Sleek in the Character Creator

Tech Sleek front

Tech Sleek front close-up

Tech Sleek back

Tech Sleek back close-up

Finished mine. Here's Megatron vs. Matter Eater Lad.

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and on top of everything, I got my site back!!!

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You wouldn't believe how many I.T. Ninjas we had to save the President from in order to swing that. Luckily, the whole art forum is filled with "bad enough dudes" to make that street hunt didn't take too long.

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doesn't matter anymore

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Um, your site's up again.

Maybe it was just down because of network maintanance? Maybe they were hacked / had a power surge / had the servers taken off line for an upgrade and didn't tell anyone? I haven't know any ISP that'll outright delete content without at least sending you a "You have violated our TOS and your website is being taken down!" E-Mail.

*Uses Howling Twilight on Gamma Girl*

Virtue is the unofficial roleplaying server.

Television

Donut

So, should we vote on the PCU mascot or something?

If so, I propose either the PCU Fighting Phalanx or the PCU Patriots, as either would be pretty fitting.