I Cropped, I Scaled, I Pasted

Resisting the temptation to use the logo again, since I just used it in the last entry, but I feel kinda proud of myself for making it because it's actually the first picture I ever cobbled together with an editor. Usually I just crop and scale, but this time I did some cutting and pasting and adding text. Sure, there are people with way more Photoshop-fu out there, but I don't even -have- Photoshop and I've never been much of an artist, so yay me!

Before I get into the ground rules of this exercise, I want to give a shout out to the ones who inspired it. Obviously (for those of you who might have read his stuff) major inspirational credit goes to Mike Smith ( http://mike-smith.livejournal.com ) and his humorous critiques of the Harry Potter series which have been giving me lots of laughs and perspective since 2005 (warning: not safe for die-hard Harry Potter fans). He also posted a brief critique of the Twilight Saga as a whole back in August 2008 during the frenzy of the impending release of Breaking Dawn based on their plot summaries on Wikipedia at the time. The review was funny and awesome, because of or in spite of the fact that the plot summaries were crap, and it is my hope I can do for the Twilight Saga what he did for Harry Potter. Or at least entertain and gain new readers.

Another major inspiration is one of my closest and dearest friends, Amanda Dalton ( http://amandadalton.com/index.htm ), who is quite possibly the nicest and most encouraging person I know, and certainly one of the most creative. I figured I had a potential winner on my hands when I mentioned this project to her and she got a maniacal gleam in her eyes and said "Do it!". So I am. It's always encouraging to know that what you do will make at least one person smile and laugh.

Credit also goes out to all the friends and acquaintances whom I've discussed the possibility of this project with, in particular Steve ( http://pandoras-closet.livejournal.com ) and Heatherface ( http://www.heatherface.com ). More inspiration also came from the rapid-fire stylings of Zero Punctuation's Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw ( http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation ), and also from many random women at OkCupid who consider the Twilight Saga to be among their favorite books. If it was under my radar before, it certainly isn't now. Not a bad thing, mind you, because visibility is part of how new fans are born.

All right, without more proving why I'm the Master of tl;dr Disaster ...

( The Story So Far ... )