My style: cramped.

This past week has been kind of crappy! I started it off by coming down with a bad cold, which is still with me, and halfway through the week, my computer also came down with something. I haven't been in the most present and alert state of mind, so I was sort of more wrapped up in blowing my nose and stuff when I tried to wipe the malware off my hard drive. My repair attempt pretty much destroyed my OS in five seconds! Like, all of a sudden, Windows wouldn't load at all and all my stuff was inaccessible, and when I went to reinstall, of course I had to reformat and so lost everything on my hard drive.

This is, I think, the digital equivalent of having your house burn down.

Luckily, I've got a hoarder mentality and I've backed up my necessities regularly for almost a decade! I've got my FTP program from 1995, writing from when I was in high school, and a copy of Bejeweled I'll never be without! Alas, I hadn't backed up a few random but very important things, namely my work files and some Winamp skins that I've made over the past several years. I've just never thought of saving those just in case, and my work files change constantly, so backups are outdated so easily that I only do them every now and then, like if a major change has been implemented to the site (I do small websites for local organizations for a living). The work I've lost... well, it's traumatic to my sense of stress, but I can knuckle down and redo it without too much pain. But the Winamp skins! I'm very sad about those!


Making Winamp skins has been a hobby of mine for many years. I think it's an outdated hobby by now, and also a hobby that has a lot of strong roots in fandom and other such culty things, the dorky people who love to surround themselves with something of a particular nature. Why would I ever want my Winamp to look fug when it could be PINK AND KAWAII? I would not! I collected skins like a fiend, and it enhanced my music experience much in the way a wallpaper on your phone and your own particular ringtone can make your phone feel like your phone and not Apple's. I really like having the ability to change Winamp to suit my interests or moods and match it with my desktop wallpaper.

Back in the days of dial-up, when I only had MS Paint and gumption born of having hours of time to fill while I waited for a single webpage to load, I used to open up Winamp skin files, investigate all the parts and tweak them, and over time, taught myself how to make them from the ground up. It's not a difficult process once you've got it down... it's just a tedious one with a learning curve, and I was always proud of myself for sticking with it. It can take a very long time to make a single skin, hence the burn of losing them. They take so long to make, require a lot of finnicky tweaking, and are usually labors of love for the person who is sitting there for days staring at a single picture and editing slowly. Many times skins would take me days to fully complete, and I had a lot of skins that were sitting around in a state of half-completion, waiting for me to be in the mood for them. Along with skins that were incomplete, I lost a small handful of finished skins I had never backed up in any way, including the only one I've used on Winamp since I made it two years ago. Gone! All gone!


Goodbye, lost skins! I'll always remember you via screenshot.

While I was mourning my lost skins and my naked Winamp, I decided that I'd like to have a Winamp skin with a Blythe doll on it, so... boom! This took me about twelve hours over two days.


Of course it is Ice Rune :) She will always tug my heart strings in just the right way. And of course it is pink. I am a little in love with pink.

I think a real interest in customization runs through many of my interests. It was the customization aspect that got me into Blythe dolls, kept me playing Sims 2 for years (I just loved to create custom clothing and decorate houses! The creativity/technical prowess of the Sims custom content community online is not to be underestimated), got me Winamp skinning, and got me doing websites.

Well, now that this post is overly-long and I've complained my fill and been boring to those who prefer iTunes, I will end it on a high note with a picture of a beautiful tulip-patterned romper I ordered last week for Aury:


I can't wait till it gets here! I love tulip-print stuff!