That I thought of last night that I wanted to get in Rift? I tried it out on Faeblight, and then thought.. “now I have to get her to level 15, and then play Shuffle The Characters” to get her across to Laethys… What to do? what to do?? In the end, I bought a few more Credits, and did a Race Chance in the Barbershop on the character who used to be known as Mossrose – I turned her from a High Elf into a Mathosian… Then I bought a Name Change scroll, crossed my fingers that I’d be able to get the name I wanted, and renamed her…. Roseinbloom! More expensive, but much quicker, cleaner, and far less stress 🙂 So, that’s what the name was… “Roseinbloom” – I thought of it last night while I was desperately looking around my desk for something “inspiring” to use as the nightly blog title. My eyes fell on the roses that Julian had given me on Sunday for our Anniversary, and it went like this: “roses”… “rose buds”… “rose blooms”… “roses blooming”… “rose in bloom” “hmmmm… Roseinbloom – wouldn’t that be a pretty name for a character! I wonder if I could get it… I must try!” And that, folks, is pretty much how all of my characters come into existence! I stumble across a name I really like, and the next thing you know, I just have to create a character with that name! Of course, I feel that I can’t possibly ditch the name, so the character has to remain… to be shunted around from shard to shard as I have to make room for new names… I mean characters…

So that’s what I did this morning – I also took Belezza up another couple of levels, then quit out of Rift and worked on my project for a while. It’s so sad that things have become so “nasty” on the internet that whenever I want to download Photoshop filters, or brushes, or styles, or whatever, I have to get himself to vet the download site first and make sure it’s clean – there are so many really nasty viruses out there, even on really “nice” sites, so it’s far better to be safe than sorry… Anyway, I downloaded a number of brushes, and much to my annoyance, the person who had made one of the brush sets I really wanted to use, had put bevelling on them! This might look fairly smart when used with a solid colour, but adding effects or styles just made them look lumpy and misshapen. Grrr… However, after a bit of trial and error, I found a work around for it. If you’re into graphics, this is how you do it. Make your brush picture on a new layer in a solid, dark colour (black is good!). Click the magic wand in the centre of the image, and you’ll get the familiar “marching ants” around the image, but just slightly outside the edge of the brush image. So go to your Select menu and go to “Modify”. Choose “contract” – and this is where the slightly fiddly bit comes in. You pretty much have to guess how many pixels you have to shrink your “marching ants”! Now, I’m a person who can tell you, within one pixel, where the centre of something is, or where the edge of a pattern is, or whatever (says she boastfully – but I can! Just ask Julian!), and even so, it took me two tries. I “guestimated” 4 pixels, but that wasn’t quite “tight” enough, so I adjusted it to 3 pixels, and it was a perfect fit to the brush image. OK, so now you have your bevelled brush image nicely selected. Still with the area selected, open up a new layer, and use your Paintbucket tool to fill the selection on the new layer with… well… black. Now you have your brush image as a flat, black area that you can style, colour, use a glass, chrome, or bevel filter on, without any of the “lumps” or “bumps” you got when you were trying to do it on the original pre-bevelled brush.

End of tonight’s lecture on graphics! 🙂

Ahhh… so you all heard that unearthly shrieking and wailing sound this morning… well, it wasn’t the wind… It was me. Weigh-in this morning was absolutely, totally devastating! I couldn’t believe it. I’m still not sure if I believe it even now… but I weighed myself three times, and each weigh-in was the same. I’d gone from a svelte-feeling 112.7kg… back up to an ugly, fat-feeling 113.0kg – the same as I weighed the day before yesterday. It was horrible! And this time I can’t even blame my medication, because I’m not taking it at the moment, and haven’t, for over a week! I don’t want to talk about it.

Tune in tomorrow night for more of the goings on at Casa Nostra (our house, as opposed to Cosa Nostra, [literally] “our business”) Hopefully today’s weigh-in was an “aberration”! See you then….