(Source: thatquote)
To-do list
Thanks to @sipritflier for this one:
Dove hired a forensic artist to draw how women see themselves versus how others see them - the results are moving.
Holy hell, this was unexpectedly tear-jerking.
(Source: choosechoice)
Just Some Girl: On Beauty and Crooked Noses.
I just was perusing some of the LBD pictures from the Streamys for old time’s sake when I happened to see a comment on one of the pictures, of me by myself, about my “crooked nose” that was pretty negative.
I’m not making this post so everyone will go tell that person to shut up or whatever. We…
All cats love boxes.
All cats.
this is one of the greatest things I have ever seen.
What The Lizzie Bennet Diaries Has Meant To Me.
I’m having a really hard time knowing how to start this.
I remember doing my audition for Lydia thinking it was way over the top and that I probably wasn’t going to get it. I remember reading the sides and thinking, “We’re dressing up as other characters? What?? This is weird.” I remember not knowing what vlogging was. I remember not knowing how this project was going to go over because it seemed kinda weird and I didn’t really know if I was any good in it and even though we had shot the first round of episodes I didn’t know anybody involved that well; I knew somewhere down the line my character was going to be involved in a sex tape and that seemed scary and I just didn’t really go into it expecting much.
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and my experience with it, has become a thousand times more than I ever could have dreamed or imagined.
<3
.@mkwiles from #TheLBD or an attempt anyways
I spoke to you in cautious tones
You answered me with no pretense
And still I feel I said too much
My silence is my self defense
Some of you have noticed I’ve been posting songs and tagging them #For Lizzie. I typically refrain from talking about Lizzie’s inner world; my posting of these songs is the most that I have broken from that position until now. I have also not discussed my acting process, which I’m going to do a little bit here, so if that’s not something that interests you, stop reading now. (You can still listen to the song. I know I never say no to Billy Joel.)
Our last shooting day (eps 93-100) was an interesting challenge because Lizzie is having a very internal struggle that she is trying (though sometimes failing) not to share with her viewers. She knows who one likely viewer is, and she’s terrified of her feelings for him, convinced that he doesn’t return them and she should get over him. She doesn’t do a great job of that. Lizzie is sometimes blind, willfully so, in this case I think, because the truth scares her too much. There is too much at risk.
As I prepped for the shoot day, I put on a mix of emotion-evoking songs I started making years ago (and add to periodically), skipping through and listening to the songs that hit me in a meaningful way for Lizzie. I have been posting some of these songs; others include songs about losing people, being hurt, and saying goodbye. I had to pack a whole month of Lizzie losing sleep, crying, feeling frustrated, being in denial, feeling confused, angry, hopeful, scared, trying to distract herself, etc, into that last shoot, all while she tries to deny her feelings to everyone, most importantly herself.
I was struggling with the moment in ep 98 when Darcy tells her that he took down the website for her. In the book, she is silent, and he proceeds to tell her his feelings haven’t changed. In our version, afraid he’ll think her feelings come from a sense of debt, she searches for words and comes up with, “My gratitude is there and always will be.” I knew in the moment she wanted to say more but wasn’t sure how, but it still didn’t feel quite right to me. Then, as I skipped through this old mix of mine, I came to “And So It Goes,” by Billy Joel.
But if my silence made you leave
Then that would be my worst mistake
Suddenly, this moment fell into place. To me, this is one of the greatest love songs of all time, because it acknowledges the terrible truth that falling in love with someone, in addition to being wonderful, is saying, “Here, I trust you with this fragile part of me, and I accept that by giving you this part of myself, I am also giving you the power to devastate me.”
In that moment, Lizzie can’t. She’s too scared. The glimmer of hope makes it even more terrifying, and then he says they’re not friends, and she thinks she was right. And then she says she wants to be friends, and almost says more, but still, she doesn’t have the words. Our talkative Lizzie, and she can’t say it. The risk is too great.
So I would choose to be with you
That’s if the choice were mine to make
Then Darcy - dear, brave Darcy - says what she cannot, and she doesn’t have to say anything. Lizzie, who talks through every problem, says nothing, but acts, and says more than any words could with a kiss.
But you can make decisions too
And you can have this heart to break
HappyFoodie
So we’re a week on from Whole30 and I do not feel as good as I did! But still pretty good. We binged on pizza and it was awful. Put off pizza for life, or at least a couple of months. Seriously. Had a friend visiting so wasn’t quite as good as I’d hoped to be either. Restarting a little healthy eating again from today. Going to try being gluten-free for a week if possible.
(Who am I kidding? If I try, I can do it - I did Whole30!)
So yeah, having dairy back in the diet but cutting out the gluten again. I had a cereal for breakfast yesterday and felt rough. Going to make banana bread for breakfast again tonight. Also going to try making one with a twist, maple syrup instead of honey and some chopped pecans. Will share the recipe if it works though the original banana bread is from: http://paleomg.com/banana-bread-french-toast/ and was scrummy.
I’ve decided that despite the fact I’m not on Whole30 anymore, I probably still want to blog about food, because I love food! Plus I like sharing fun cooking adventures. Anyways, so now all food posts will be a) prefixed in the title by ‘HappyFoodie’ b) tagged HappyFoodie and thus c) will be visible using the ‘page’ function of Twitter which is called ‘HappyFoodie’ and collects all the food posts together in case anyone wants to read just those :D
In light of my gluten-free plans I am going to try making gluten free bread at the weekend. I don’t even eat bread that much but it will be a fun experiment and maybe we can have Paleo pizza ;)
Made potato mash for the first time in six weeks yesterday - so good. I missed mashed potatoes but now they’re (sort of) allowed again. They’re not very Paleo but every so often will be a good treat. I also made soup yesterday in a moment of cooking badassery, tasted pretty good so no cooking tonight!
Went to the gym twice last week and going twice this week as well plus Kempo on Friday - gonna be so damn fit. If anyone’s interested, I use Fitocracy which is a great little app for making you feel great about your exercise, tracking your progress and connecting with your friends. Add me as ‘Amethystwillow’ if you’re on it.
That’s all for this major update I think.
Willow xx
Embed your Tumblr into your website
Another tech post for you here.
So I’ve been setting up my main website and also a subdomain to put some of my art on. I realised that I’ve dabbled with a few art forms including (for the purposes of putting it all in the same place) writing. Not in a big way, I’ve posted 5 short stories on this blog and that’s pretty much it. But it was interesting enough that I thought I would try to include those blog posts on my website under the ‘Writing’ heading.
It was not quite as easy as I’d hoped. I did a lot of Googling, checking StackOverflow etc. I didn’t really want to get dirty with the Tumblr API etc. partly because you need an ‘application’ to register in order to get an OAuth key and yeah, I don’t have one of those!
So I turned to PHP because I knew I’d used that previously. I found one bit of code that would allow me to embed the most recent post on a website:
<!— The Latest Text Post —>
<?php
echo “”;
$request_url = “http://wamoyo.com/api/read?type=regular”; //get xml file
$xml = simplexml_load_file($request_url); //load it
$title = $xml->posts->post->{‘regular-title’}; //load post title into $title
$post = $xml->posts->post->{‘regular-body’}; //load post body into $post
$link = $xml->posts->post[‘url’]; //load url of blog post into $link
$small_post = substr($post,0,350); //shorten post body to 350 characters
echo // spit that baby out with some stylish html
‘<div class=”panel” style=”width:220px;margin:0 auto;text-align:left;”>
<h1 class=”med georgia bold italic black”>’.$title.’</h1>’
. ‘<br />’
. ‘<span>’.$small_post.’</span>’ . ‘…’
. ‘<br /></br><div style=”text-align:right;”><a class=”bold italic blu georgia” href=”’.$link.’”>Read More…</a></div>
</div>
’;
?>
So that’s cool. But what if you don’t want only the last post? What if you want all your posts? Well that’s when I thought I’d check whether or not I still had my code from my old website where I did this. And I did!
<?php
$xml = simplexml_load_file(“http://canadatokathmandu.tumblr.com/api/read”);
$posts = $xml->xpath(“/tumblr/posts/post”);
foreach($posts as $post) {?>
<?echo $post->{‘regular-title’};?>
<?echo $post->{‘regular-body’};?>
<a href=”<?echo $post[‘url-with-slug’];?>”><?echo date(“jS D M, H:i”,strtotime($post[‘date’]));?></a><br />
<?}
?>
Much simpler isn’t it? Besides, the former bit of code had a lot of styling inline which is just plain wrong. But what if I wanted all of the posts with only one tag? All my stories for example. So I kind of mushed together these two bits of code:
<?php
echo “”;
$request_url = “http://canadatokathmandu.tumblr.com/api/read?tagged=stories”; //get xml file
$xml = simplexml_load_file($request_url); //load it
$posts = $xml->xpath(“/tumblr/posts/post”);
foreach ($posts as $post) {
$title = $post->{‘regular-title’}; //load post title into $title
$body = $post->{‘regular-body’}; //load post body into $post
$link = $post[‘url-with-slug’]; //load url of blog post into $link
$small_post = substr($body,0,300); //shorten post body to 300 characters
echo // spit that baby out with some stylish html
‘<div id=”post” class=”panel”>
<h1>’.$title.’</h1>’
. ‘<span>’.$small_post.’</span>’ . ‘…’
. ‘<br /></br><a href=”’.$link.’”>Read More…</a>
</div>
‘;
}
?>
So as you can see I’ve taken the styling it out, did that first. Then I added in the ‘foreach’ loop from the second snippet. I had to modify the variable definitions because otherwise it would post the most recent blog post for each blog post return there was (5 in this instance).
I then had the slightly confusing problem where the blog posts were right but the links all went to the most recent post. And then when I changed the code to the above, as it should be. It would return no link at all. After a couple of very confusing minutes I realised I had two variables with the same name. So $post=$post->[‘regular-body’] became $body=$post->[‘regular-body’]. And now it works :D
Check it out here: http://art.salixsys.org/writing.php
Willow xx
