Abieka

Sorry dear husband, but I need to spend some money

Okay, I’ve got two draft posts in the works, but I’m so excited about this that I have to jump my own queue for this. The concept cartoons have been out for two weeks, but now the first promo pics are out! Teeny weeny little 70×125 pixel photos!

No pic of Lily Wild yet.
But wait, there’s more! Limited Ed Prima Dolly Peony! Gorgeous pink.

I’ll update this post with specifics a little later.
x Happy Camper.

The art of pfaffing about. + real Art

There is so much on my plate at the moment my head is spinning. To think I do it all to myself by choice, and without a paycheck. Serves me right. So I sat down tonight to pay some bills and at least correct the stuffup in my sidebar and change the background colour. Instead I’ve been on a magical procrastinational tour of art and culture. It has enriched my life, but not shortened my to-do list. I did discover the work of french artist Koralie, and my life is definitely enriched.

Here is Koralie’s website. If it’s a bit slow to load, here’s a picture search. I asked my Better Half if I could buy one of her paintings. He says okay, as long as I sell some of my Blythe to fund it. He could have just been straightforward and said “no”.

On the doll front: This week a My Melody Pullip and Fantastic Alice mini-Pullip joined the horde. I’m sorry to say that Fantastic Alice wasn’t as rugged as the Petit Blythes I’ve thrown to the kids to distract them. She lost her legs before I even got a picture of her out of the box. Into the Fixit-Bin with Fantastic Alice. I bought Melody without her stock so I could have a real play. She came naked, but she did bring her darned sausage curls with her - and they look ridiculous without the hat.

What to do, what to do? Find out what happens when you brush out sausage curls:

I was determined to straighten it, but that ‘fro is kinda growing on me.

We Perth Blythies are getting together tomorrow for a customising workshop. I have been waiting for this for weeks…but this house is full of gastro and I might be quite unwelcome. We shall see in the morning. Sigh.

Fertility goddesses and doll collecting

The other day Christopher Wilde was cool enough to leave a comment inviting me to read his new article Blythe Doll Redux. Shameless self-promotion on his part, but, hey, I must be important enough to promote to, so it is sweet by me! I pretty much disagreed with his article (and his earlier article) - so maybe I’m not the best person to give the short version - go read the whole thing at his site. Otherwise, here is my short version:

Blythe imagery is starting to appear in the mainstream, and it’s appeal may be due to a reinterpretation of the “Fertility Goddess” archetype. Historically the Fertility Goddess is an ultimate representation of femininity with her exaggerated sexual features proving her…well…her fertility and her example as the pinnacle of womanly success. Times have changed though and fertility is not the ultimate aspiration for women anymore.

These days, female success could be defined as having intelligence, mystique and grace. This new set of feminine values allows a modern interpretation of the Fertility Goddess. With their more subdued sexuality, Blythe dolls perfectly represent the modern take. And that has allowed Blythe to enter the collective consciousness as a visual idea. We see more big-eyed/big-head imagery spontaneously appear in our culture now.

However, Blythe as a product is not capitalising on it’s potential. To reach it’s tween market properly it needs to make a television show or movie to “cross the tipping point” and bring it fully to the mainstream. If it did this it would tap into that wider consciousness and be a gigantic success. Even without this, expect it to surge in popularity in the next 6 months.

Chris, if I got it totally wrong, you are very welcome to come back and give me an earful.

For some reason I had a burning need to respond to this on thursday night. I’ve become a Blythe Activist! Oooh. It isn’t worth writing the whole mini-manifesto here, seeing as I posted it as a comment in Chris’s blog. See my ramble here. I must have been in a dilly of a mood on thursday night. I need to get a hobby. Oh…ha…right…

But I didn’t start this post just to prove my obsessive tendencies. It’s partly because Chris wrote again to defend his idea about the reinvention of the fertility goddess, and I still don’t agree with him. I could have just left another comment at his blog. But I do need to write for my own blog, and I want to learn how to do trackbacks or backlinks or whatever the darn things are called. And apparently I don’t know how to make a concise point either - so it’s more polite to write here than flood his blog.

I’ll have to finish my non-concise point later on…the little humans set a kitchen timer so I would have to get off the computer and pay them some attention today. Cuties.

Oopsie - wordpress plugin vagaries

Two posts in one day! This is just a quickie. I really hope you don’t see a problem by the time you see this post. It had been a burning issue for me to figure out how to get rid of the “blogroll” of wordpress links and replace it with my fave links. I thought I’d nailed it…but something has gone wrong and somehow I’ve got repeat link entries:

I’ll fix it tomorrow. Or the next day. I hope.

If the displayed pic doesn’t show clearly what’s wrong with my side-column, I’ll fix that tomorrow too. I hope.

Georgette is loose/I think I’m turning Japanese

I really think so..da da da da da da…except I can’t read or speak Japanese, ha.

You are reading the blog of someone who is now registered with Yahoo! Japan. No mean feat for someone without the lingo, let me tell you.

But first! I’ve had my PDC for weeks now, still in her box. I bought her on the secondary market, and was nervous about letting her loose when I realised she really was nrfb. Well I got brave yesterday, and here’s Georgette:

Here’s an example of the pressure involved with taking photos of Blythe at my house:

Considering that she is such a special limited release doll (one of 500), I was surprised at how ordinary her hair is straight out of the box - extremely uneven length, no particular styling, lank… The pics above are after cutting of the stray hair that were 1-2″ longer than everything else and with a little bit of styling applied. None of this matters, of course, because it’s nothing unfixable. It’s just info for reference purposes. Georgette is beautiful and I’m lucky to add her to my family. Say hi!

Back to Yahoo! Japan. I was going to document in this post how I managed to get a user ID, but it took me so much time swinging backwards and forwards between Yahoo! Japan, Google and Babelfish, that I’ve got brain-burn. I might write it up later on. For those of you who wonder “why bother?”: it’s a major step towards being able to buy things from Japan without having to pay extortionate buying service fees. And the market there is quite different, so it’s worth figuring things like this out.

One last picture of Georgette:

Hello world!

Indeedy, helloooo!

Here is my blog! Here is where I’ll keep track of my crafting, my hobbies and my insane love for Blythe dolls. If you don’t know about the Blythe, here’s a little info. And, yes, she is Blythe:doll/supermodel. Say it with emphasis, lol.

I resolved that this year I would master the art of keeping a website, and I think I’ll log any progress here too. A month ago I bought this web domain, and it has taken me a whole month to figure out how to get anything to happen. Today I took my first step away from the rank “Total Noob” by doing the following webmastery things:

First I downloaded Wordpress from wordpress.org

Then I uploaded Wordpress to my site using Gftp

Then I spent 3 hours wondering why the heck I can’t see or access anything on any of my web pages.

Then I read a manual and learnt that web pages have set permissions, which have to be…well…set to give permission to access the pages.

And here we are. Hooray for instructions. It looks pretty bland right now, but it is supposed to be a super-duper customisable program. Let’s see how long it takes me to figure things out from here.

I want to post regularly - but I need to do blog-worthy things first! So, instead, here’s some gratuitous pictures to wrap up my first post:

Gratuitous Pic #1: Parker on her first outing

Gratuitous Pic #2: A little button storage “book” I made for the Craftster Button Swap II last year - just to prove I do occasionally make things.

Gratuitous Pic #3: Cute offspring. Just because she’s cute.

Cheerio, Ariel.