miithariandros: Art by Kate Beaton (So Excited!!!11!)
Just to keep up with the tastings:

http://www.middlemountainmead.com/index.html

Last night we sampled Wild Harvest, which is definitely a desert wine. Very sweet, and not at all to my taste... but both Carmen and Ryan enjoyed it a lot. Got indifferent sipping from Clara, but she worked away at a brandy snifter for a while. Has a bit of an alcoholic fruit syrup flavour, which I might appreciate if I was eating something like vanilla ice cream at the time.

We only have two bottles left to try now, The Cyser (An apple mead, apparently Dry, so it will probably be the most Wine-Like of the bunch) and the 'Mead of Inspiration' (off dry) which contains organically grown and/or wild-crafted salal berries, elderberries, blackberries, oregon grapes, rosehips, arbutus berries, black and red currants, cherries and grapes, as well as herbs and botanicals too numerous to mention As well as a wicked quote by Odin on the bottle.

And then it's time for me to convince someone to go in on another order with me. 8D I wouldn't mind picking up a couple more of the cranberry (I still have another bottle of the Alpenglow sitting on top of my fridge... waiting to pounce...)

Mead!

Jul. 12th, 2009 01:28 pm
miithariandros: (Default)
For some of you, the fact that I've been on a constant search for a commercial meadery from which to purchase my boozahol is common knowledge. For the rest of you: I love mead. And I want it when I'm not at SCA events.

So recently I discovered a lovely little meadery on hornby island here in BC that not only is, er, a meadery, but takes paypal.

Needless to say, I slapped down the cash right there and bought myself a few (meaning eight) bottles.

We're going through them slowly, but I thought I'd give them a plug.

Alpenglow This one is a semi-sweet, and probably the favourite thus far. The first big difference between honey wine and grape wine is that while the alcohol in grape wine hits you behind the teeth (try it, it's true...) honey wine hits you in the back of the throat. This bottle was one of those 'only improves every sip you take' type things, where the more you drank, the more you could pick out the spices. Could easily be drank with dinner.

Olde Mead Again a semi-sweet, but slightly sweeter than the Alpenglow. I'd put it in the same class as the previous, but would probably buy the alpenglow over this one again (The taste was floral, as it has elderflowers, as apposed to the spice) However, I still enjoy it better than most wines.

Cranberry Mead an off dry... and that wonderful, cranberry bitter. This one was my favourite, while most of the others liked the Alpenglow. Very nice if you like cranberry. :3

And I have... three other kinds to try out, including a desert wine. This should be fun. :3
miithariandros: (iObject!)
OK. Just a bit of back story... Here at Unnamed Company we've been pushing for life drawing sessions for a while. "It will overall improve our art" we say, "and it's a good team-building exercise!" and of course "The rest of Unnamed Company gets to do this!"

so we pushed and pushed and pushed and eventually we were told "Gratz, you got it!" and so every other Wednesday we'd travel up to the university and get to draw naked people for four hours.

...

A little bit more back story: I've been doing life drawing since I was sixteen. I'm twenty-four now if that gives a bit of perspective to that. Formally (with classes) I've done about five years of this stuff, and I'm still not a master (Who is, really). But I was a little bit perturbed when I discovered this was a class. With an instructor. We'll call her T for now.

The first day started off bright and shiny. We received fancy new art supplies (Yay! a full Staedtler pencil set! Conte! Pastels! pour moi? :D) and then we got an outline.

An outline?

We didn't sign on for a class. We thought we were just getting an opportunity to study the model and work on things that we recognized the need to work on. But apparently we were being taught, and I think that T was under the impression that we were accountants or something, because it was a beginner's class.

I put up with the first class. We had a fantastic model that I wasted by drawing without looking and with my left hand for four hours, but I was pretty much done with that crap by second class. I get so few male models that I was going to take advantage of every one I get (wow. That sounded bad.) And, really, I was being complacent until she started Doing It Wrong.

"Today we're going to study perspective!"

Just as a quick note:


(n) : a view, vista or outlook; the appearance of depth in objects, especially as perceived using binocular vision


So I'm thinking 'yay! Contours and interesting poses where I can study foreshortening!'

"And you can use whatever sighting techniques you want to get the perspective correct!"

'Cool, I was pretty good at that back at CATO... they had me tutoring the guy next to me ...'

And then she told the model to just stand there with his hands at his sides and proceeded to get annoyed if we didn't use the head counting system. This, of course, meant that she would wander around the room and draw on top of your drawing the 'head counts' she was seeing.

For the non artists on the list: head counting is a way of determining proportion by measuring the size of the head with the end of your pencil and your finger, then counting how many units of that measurement are in the figure. It's a Greek method, and there's a lot more to it than that (like how it was used in idealizing the form) It also doesn't work if you're sitting below the model. (This technique was designed to be used if you were on the same plane as the figure)

So backtrack. We were told we were doing Perspective, which is the appearance of depth in objects, but were in fact doing Proportion, which is relation between elements and a whole... or, yanno, the size of his arms in relation to his torso etc. And we were told we could sight however we wanted, but were being bitch slapped for not doing the head counting system.

Right.

She was drawing over people's sketches (Like I said) and when she came up to mine, she decided we needed to count heads together. So I watched as she counted... And noticed something interesting. She was dropping the tip of her pencil on an angle, which meant that as she counted, every head was shrinking. This would be great if it was a top down view, but it was a slight bottom up (meaning that if anything, the size of the unit of measurement should have been growing as she went down, for proper perspective... but whatever.)

I called her on it, after she triumphantly announced 'Nine heads.' (PS: Back to the Greek Cannon system, eight and a half heads was called the 'heroic' figure, and was used almost exclusively for gods... This guy was tall, but no god... The human form is generally between six and seven and a half heads and I at least was counting seven and a half WITHOUT DROPPING THE END OF MY PENCIL THANK YOU.) and we had a bit of an argument which consisted of T saying 'no I'm not' and me going 'yes, you are!'

She came around a couple other times, but by that point my ear buds were lodged in my head and as my fellow Hen-Housians know, I can hear nothing of the outside world when they're in. So It looked like I was completely ignoring her (Which wouldn't be surprising considering our arguing earlier, but out of character for me to be honest.)

In two weeks we do this again. God grant me the patience...
miithariandros: Art by Kate Beaton (So Excited!!!11!)
Just as a general service announcement, we're posting regularly to the Santa Cruz blog over the next couple weeks. Expect photographed adventures, witty anecdotes, and exclamations such as: I am going on a BOAT! BOAAAAT!


http://triptosantacruz.livejournal.com


Yuss!
miithariandros: (Triumph!)
Oh hay gaize, here's the new Princess and the Frog trailer.


I think... I think I may have breathed a sigh of relief already. :D


miithariandros: Art by Kate Beaton (So Excited!!!11!)
Dear sir in the green shirt and your douche friends,

The only time it is appropriate to yell profanities and act like you are at a football game at a movie theater is never. Extra never when there are young kids in the audience.

Sincerely,

The Audience (yes, that INCLUDES us. Thank you.)

PS: Thank you for getting kicked out without disturbing the actual movie for me, and then getting me a complementary 2 for 1 pass because you're a bunch of jerkfaces. I loved this movie, and I believe I will be using this lovely pass very soon for a repeat viewing.


....


I could ramble on about the movie itself, but I'm still walking it off. :D Needless to say, it's a great blend of action and very funny bits, and is an origin story for the newbs but has a lot of Trek references for the veterans in the crowd. And a couple WTFUCKERY for the veterans as well (Uhura! WTH!? AHAHAHAHAH!!!!) The cast was amazing, I had a few hundred shipgasms, and I have to finish with saying that this is the first real EPIC I've seen in a long time. Yuss.

New Blog

May. 4th, 2009 02:40 pm
miithariandros: (Delicious Driving)
So I'm officially over at Dreamwidth now, http://miithariandros.dreamwidth.org for those of you interested. The few posts I make will be crossposted, so no need to worry much about it. :3 Just thought to send out the memo.

The car-mergency got solved pretty quick, so Santa Cruz is go as planned. This week is going to be the slowest ever. :/ Not looking forward to that. Am, however, looking forward to my raspberries and cream cheesecake icecream that's waiting for me in the fridge. Hoorah.


Adorable Anna sketches by Carmen over thar, just so you can see. And look! There's a Rune hiding in there! Naturally I would link, I have invested personal interest. :D
miithariandros: (Default)
Experimenting with the Dreamwidth crossposting feature... ooooooooh

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