I am a young woman with both technical and artistic aspirations. Here is the professional version if you don't care about my hobbies. If you need to contact me, please email sitarah at this domain.
I like to create the following:
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Contradictions
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Answers
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Photos
Photography is a lifelong passion. I started with film cameras from a young age, but the cost of film, development, and even disposables was prohibitive. My Polaroid digicam, bought in December 2000, was beautiful freedom. It ate batteries like Firefox eats RAM, but it was still so much cheaper. I never looked back. Since then, I've taken over 3,000 digital pictures worth keeping.
Today, I carry at least one camera everywhere. Sometimes I have two, further weighing down a purse that is already a Duracell graveyard. I try to go somewhere new every weekend so I can increase my Flickr count. Consequently, I've discovered a lot of my homestate, New Jersey, from behind a lens.
That said, while I love photography, I am not an expert that can turn a picture of a towel into a compositional study of color and texture. I realize that everyone takes pictures -- good ones -- of mountains, flowers, lakes, and cake, so I'm not doing anything difficult by taking a good scenic shot. However, difficult or not, I *like* mountains, flowers, lakes, and cake. Especially cake. Who has time for towels when there's a beautifully plated dessert nearby?
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Artwork
My best work involves photorealistic charcoal portraits, usually of women. I've been working in black and white for years, but did my first full-color picture in December 06. I also have a long background in digital art, having started drawing Sailor Moon pictures in MS paint at the wee age of 12. I've graduated to Paint Shop Pro and Adobe Illustrator since then. While I have made digital art from scratch, most of my work involves photo touch-up these days.
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Clothing
Most notably, I sewed, from scratch and by hand, a floor-length, white velvet gown to wear to the Return of the King premiere. Yes, I dressed up as an elf. It was awesome.
I've also made regular clothes, curtains, cloaks, and stuffed animals. I'd like to make a purse some day, but I've patched up leather bags for friends and had a very sore hand to show for it.
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Stories
I didn't like the children who lived nearby when I was young, so I spent a lot of time alone and writing. I had multiple page stories by age 8 and ambitiously started my first novel at 10. It was a parable on the danger of lies, told in a framework of mermaids and Atlantis. Deep, right? Word Perfect unfortunately scuttled the project by corrupting my full outline. Bastards.
Despite this inauspicious start, I continued writing, branching out to all kinds of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and documentation. I received a "graduate certificate" in business and technical writing to bridge my two bachelor degrees. Currently, I put this to - paid - use by writing proposals, competitive analyses, product reviews, and movie spoilers every so often.
If you see any English mistakes in these pages, it is purely ironic.
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Games
Alas, when I say games, I do not mean Grand Theft Auto or Wii Bowling. Having played both GTA and Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, I am abysmal at both. Frankly, I can barely drive an arcade car. I'm thinking my skills peaked when I got to level 3 of Sonic Spinball in 1995.
That said, I really enjoy text games. Yes, those quaint relics with neither graphics nor a controller -- MUDs. I love to read, and having new material to read every day as people did new things perfectly suited my insatiable appetite. I played one well-known MUD for 4 years, then became an administrator for the next 3 years. Eventually, I was in charge of world-building, scripting, and being one of less than 20 people responsible for entertaining more than 500 players. After I left that place, I resolved not to MUD again, but some day I like to think of starting my own.
I also like flash games like orisinal.com's, and this was my sole motivator for learning flash. That, and the tantalizing possibility of making music videos with dancing kittens. A flash video even inspired my first attempt at sewing a stuffed animal.
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Food
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Websites
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Scrapbooks