So much to do...

God, I feel overwhelmed. Not as completely depressed about life, the universe, and everything as I was yesterday, but I still am still weighed down how much I have to do. An essay, a one act play, two larps, more articles... God, that's a lot. It wouldn't be so bad if I could actually buckle down and focus, but my general melodrama of the moment is making that tough. This weekend (my first truly unbooked one since early OCTOBER) will have to be devoted to getting work done. Maybe I should work in hour increments on a given project, then switch to keep my brain engaged.

Of course, I haven't finished holiday shopping yet. I hate doing it, since I never know what to get and a large portion of my intended recipients don't like stuff anyway, so I have massively put it off. Maybe I'll just do a mass online buying jag tonight and call it there. :-P Better than what I did last year, which was venture out into the mall mobs that close to Christmas. I could barely get a parking space.

More Festival bids are coming in, thanks in part to the lovely ultimatepsi, wired_lizard, and captainecchi, to whom I very grateful. We are much closer to my goal of a full schedule with between sixty and seventy player slots per time period. At this point we don't need everyone who I talked to about bidding soon to submit something, but we do still need some. I am debating whether or not it might be a good idea to encourage people to start signing up for the con, just to get an idea of how many player slots we're likely to need. Signups for Festival at large are open, so feel free to put your name in there now if you'd like, but I know I won't wait any longer than a week before the schedule is supposed to be published (first week of January) to start getting after people to let me know they're coming. That way I can be sure the schedule is the right size to accomodate them without any games having to drop.
 

Photo editing

So as you may remember, I wanted a headshot board outside the theater for To Think of Nothing. Bernie took the headshots on my stupid point-and-shoot camera, and though they came out by and large okay, I wanted them to look really slick. Black and white was an obvious option, but then I started messing around on Adobe Photoshop Elements to see if I couldn't make them a little crisper. I took forever trying to teach myself the rudiments of the program-- as I said, it's a good thing Liz Baessler is so cute, because I spent hours staring at her headshot. I mostly messed with the contrast, the shadows, and the brightness, but I also figured out how to smooth out small imperfections like flyaway hairs, under-eye circles, and acne. I actually think I got pretty decent, if decidedly uneducated and unprofessional, at editing photos such that they looked pretty good in one way or another. 

Yesterday, in the depth of my doldrums, I decided to amuse myself by playing around with some other photos. Since I was depressed, I indulged myself by using pictures of my favorite subject-- myself. I made myself a new profile pic out of the shot of me in my Halloween costume posted in thefarowl's Facebook album. I then took it a step further and upped the blue content to make the color of my costume seem richer and to cool down the brightness of my skin and the wall behind me. I actually think I like that version, which I posted on DeviantART, better than the one I used in my profile.

I also decided to challenge myself by taking a picture of myself that I hated and making it into something that I liked. nennivian had an album of shots she took at a girls night dinner we had, and I was shocked at my acne-blotched skin tone and unbelievable helmet hair. So I put it in grayscale, cut the frame in tight, erased my acne, and played with the contrast levels until I got something that looked kind of soft and artistic. Here is the end result:
 

It reminds me of those pictures people use on the last pages of retrospectives about the life of some famous dead person. Heh, when I die horribly and young, as I'm certain I will, and somebody does a book about me, here's a nice shot for the end.