Kiery King | Bridging the Gap - Artist, Author, Filmmaker

Team Treehouse

January 27, 2012 Web Design No comments

I found this really great video tutorial on Web Design and Development by Team Treehouse. I’ve been watching them and all of the things I forgot about web design I’m now remembering. The beautiful thing about their videos though, is that 1) they start off with the current versions of html and css (HTML 5 and CSS 3) and 2) they INDENT!

Nothing is more annoying than un-indented and hard to read code. Maybe it’s because my husband writes lovely code and he’s the one who taught me, but when I view the source of pages and it’s all over the place and there aren’t any indents or easy ways to find what belongs where it’s really irritating. Admittedly, I don’t do this as much as I used to, but still.

Anyway, I watched the intro and the text series so far, and HTML 4/5 is much more simple than what I was writing a few years ago (xhtml). The videos are *really* basic too. Sometimes annoyingly so, because I already have a grasp on the language, but if someone is just starting out, they would be absolutely perfect (and hey, I love them) because they’re so easy to follow. Interestingly, they give a bit of background on the history of it too, which I found fascinating.

I downloaded MAMP and Alex did the thingy to connect it to my sites folder so I can practice locally, which is handy, but unfortunately, because it’s local, I can’t actually share linkage to my clever bits so a screenshot will have to suffice (it’s only HTML, nothing fancy at all).

Purple Space

January 26, 2012 Design, Life No comments

I painted my white space purple. The painting looks “textured”, with multiple hues of reds and purple with shots of cerulean and in the corner, in white, I wrote “love” and called it good. I might add some more plum elements just to pull in the curtains more overtly, but at the moment, even with less plum, it ties things in rather nicely.

I haven’t done anything to the bedroom since, but I did give my bookshelf and The Flux some attention. I took down my animal/fairy display from the bookshelf so I could put more books on it.

So, then I moved my awesome animal and fairy display into The Flux. I put the three cardboard boxes that I was keeping (after I got rid of a ton of others earlier) to use and covered them with some leftover cloak material and made myself a little corner.

I also moved the desk off the green screen so we can use it again, and moved my sewing machine to floor so we can actually use the desk (currently, prop-making). Eventually, we’ll need to get another desk…

I don’t like diets

January 25, 2012 Health and Fitness No comments

I find them restricting and complicated. I need something simple, just like, what do I need to eat to be healthy and how much? A drag and drop system would be lovely, and maybe I’ll make one someday. I went to the library the other day and brought home 4 books, remarkably, after flipping through most of them before coming home, the most helpful (so far) has been Food Rules.

It’s kind of…perfect, and freeing. I was almost lamenting the other day about how if I’m really serious about this (and I am), it seems so complicated that it’s probably going to turn my life on it’s head and I’m going to need to become a food/nutrition guru just to be healthy. Unfortunately, as nice as that is…it’s not really my personality and the idea of putting all of my energy into some kind of plan just seemed…daunting and a bit suffocating.

Especially with the books I brought home. Admittedly, I brought them all home for different reasons. Food Rules seemed like it’d be a great guide (and it is!), the Mayo Clinic book has colorful charts, and The Perfect Body Diet I ironically didn’t get for it’s diet, but because it lists and describes some interesting exercises that I think I can do in my second floor apartment. Ideally, I’ll get a $10 yoga mat, because I don’t like slipping on my hard floors. The um, encyclopedia I got because it’s an encyclopedia and seemed handy, though it’s remarkably hard to hold open.

Maybe I’ll garner up the nerve to watch Food Inc. on netflix. Food Rules was great in that it explained everything clearly and took off a lot of the pressure I was feeling to focus on individual elements in food, rather than how healthy and processed it is as a whole. So while they’re important I feel less need to think “okay, I’ve eaten 8 grams of protein and now I need to eat 12 grams of vitamin __” because honestly, that was just stressing me out.

As much as I want to lose weight, I want to be healthy more. I’m not sick, but I’m definitely not exactly healthy either. I think that if I can eat well (which sadly means cooking, but I’ll be 21 in February so maybe if I drink a glass of wine while torturing myself by cooking, it’ll be more tolerable…and also healthy. Though I guess it’s better to have with food…but I’ll experiment) then my weight (and possibly hormones) will start to balance out as well.

This weeks’ diet of frozen dinners and ramen noodles has definitely angered my system enough for me to be open to change (I don’t think there was any chicken in my nuggets :S). The biggest and most helpful thing I’ve gleaned from Food Rules is basically that the biggest thing is how processed everything is. If you can stay away from as much processed stuff as possible and eat small/proper amounts (and lots of plants) of food in moderation, then you’re good. Which for me means I’m not restricted with what I make or what I eat, as long as it’s in moderation (which I kinda have down, because I get sick if I don’t ) and as un-processed as possible.

While I don’t feel the need (or have a big enough wallet) to go to whole foods every week (as ideal as that would be) I’m okay (now) with spending more, for better quality food and shorter shelf life. Food Rules in combination with this article kinda helped with that. I tend to be a bit uptight when it comes to buying food…since I don’t particularly enjoy it anyway.

So that’s a step.

Footage

January 24, 2012 Film No comments

Saturday we did some wrap up of basic pre-production stuff, and then went outside and started filming. We didn’t stay out too long, because we were freezing, but we managed to finish a scene in 30-40 takes, and get some fun behind-the-scenes footage of costumes/hair and make up, and I managed to grab a couple screenshots of the footage of the cast in character.

Basically, we just walked in the cold.

And somehow managed to look really good and remarkably un-frostbitten in the process.

The script is a work in progress – we only have a few scenes done, but since we can only film on the weekends, we can write and finish whatever props that we need to work on during the week. Thankfully, the costumes are done (we were worried about mine until we raided the closet and found something perfect) so really all that’s left are actual props that won’t come in until later.