Prepare for Fanfic Download....

And for the third post of the day, we have fanfic.

Iron Chef: Social Services intervene at Casa Lane is the newest Iron Chef on PPMB, by Ms. Kinnikufan. The title says all. Give anyone any ideas?

Pinhead once again brings more "Small Jokes" to PPMB. Join in and share the goodness.

PPMB

• The Curse of El Smoocho, by Roentgen (Part 2): "General, I've got two lone ewes without a bell in Sector 16." "Affirmative, dude! Put them in the sheep pen. A rancher will be there in five minutes."
  
• Finn Morgendorffer 6: Beautiful, by HolyGrail2007 (Part 2): “What do you... uhhh... what do you think of...” Stacy stuttered so much Finn was starting to lose his patience. He took a deep breath and counted as Stacy tried to get out what she was trying to say.
• Sinspiration, by Vlora (Part 21): The youngest of the Lane family finally arrived home, her eyes oddly red and her hands clutching to her backpack. She didn’t bother to say hello to her brother and just went straight to her room. Once there, she slumped onto her bed and stared at the ceiling.
• Unnamed story (Iron Chef and/or Discussion: Gender Bender), by Pinkminx (Part 1): Let me introduce myself. My name is Dean Morgendorffer, I'm a seventeen-year-old high-school student and proud Lawndalian. Okay, I lied: I'm not proud to live in Lawndale, but it sure as hell beat the alternative.
  

One Last Blast from the Past

It's funny to think about it now, but when I began this blog two years ago, I was afraid I would run out of images very quickly. How naïve.

At left, a special image The-N once sent out to those who completed a quiz to show how much like Daria they were, and managed to score right at the top. One of the neater little things The-N had on its site, along with large-size images of Daria and Jane, and huge unique wallpapers.

Garden gnomes! Who doesn't love garden gnomes? I think the image at upper right was from Wildgoose's old site, Hell Is Other People. Was this scene at the Gupty's house? Don't remember where it showed up.

Oh, just a side note: check out the newly expanded Backgrounders webpage for The Head, the clueless nerd who seems to show up everywhere, sometimes twice at the same time. You know Ms. Li's gotta be running a Professor Xavier-type school here with all the mutant time traveling, shape changing, self-duplicating, teleporting kids around this school. My sincere and heartfelt thanks to UU and Pinhead for the images and labor that are slowly transforming the Backgrounders site into a thing of absolute wonder.

Too bad you can't click the image at right and really get Mystik Spiral to show up at your house. This was from an old MTV Daria page. I seem to have a lot of tiny Tank images from all sorts of places.

Where did the Fashion Club like to shop? Just look to the right and find out (another old MTV image for wallpapering).

At left, an excellent screen capture from Is It College Yet? showing Daria and Jane as bff's in the 1920s. They're wearing flapper outfits. Good jump-off image for a time-travel tale. This was from CyberDaria, touched up a bit. Funny, when you read the first couple of paragraphs about flappers on Wikipedia, it does remind you of Jane and Daria. Mostly Jane for me, but your mileage may vary.

At right is an alter ego that might not look familiar to you unless you've played the computer game, Daria's Inferno. In the end credits for the game, as information on the game's publisher (Simon & Schuster) is being given, this picture appears. (It is quite large. Click on it.) It is Mr. O'Neill, of course, dressed as the Simon & Schuster logo. He looks more like an older version of the S&S logo from 1961, but even more like the original source of the logo itself. The S&S logo was based upon a French artist's work from 1850: Jean-François Millet's The Sower, which surprises us nowadays as it was once considered a revolutionary work. During Daria's time, Simon & Schuster was the publishing wing of Viacom, which also owned MTV. And there you have it: an alter ego with a longer-than-expected history and meaning.

Left: A rare screen capture of Jane Lane putting on lipstick. I forgot which episode this was in and on which extinct website I found it. Oh, well. The image came from fan artist extraordinaire Pinhead, and my thanks to him for it. Love the shot. It's actually rather big. I touched it up a little.

Last, we have what I think is an image from the Mystik Spiral rock video, "Freakin' Friends," though I am not sure. Kind of evocative, the lighter and psychedelic background and everything.

Enough for tonight, moar tomorrow at some point.

LATE NOTE: I've just discovered that some of the images I posted today and credited to CyberDaria actually came from a different goldmine, the recovered files and images from the old Triste Monde Tragique website (also French). I have so many new images I'm losing track of their origins. My apologies for the mix-up.

LATE LATE NOTE: Remember the Lawndale High teachers' lounge?

Wallpapers, Get Your Free MTV Wallpapers!

I spent way too long playing with Archive.org's WayBack Machine last night, and lo! here are a bunch of computer wallpapers and webpage backgrounds. I skipped some of the little tiled ones but will add them later. If you want to see what an image will look like as wallpaper, click on the link and right-click the mouse, then select "Set as desktop background." Finally, click on "Tile."

Remember that any computerized image can be set as wallpaper, but a subdued/pastel tone is best if you plan to put writing over it as the background to a web page you're creating. Dark backgrounds should have light, bright lettering, and pale backgrounds dark lettering. A very light screen (background shade) actually improves legibility, which is why I use very light gray tones on some of my fanfic.

The Not Quite Complete List of
All MTV Computer Wallpapers for
Animated Shows and Other Stuff
(1997-2001)

AEON FLUX
Aeon Flux, 1
Aeon Flux, 2

BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD
Beavis and Butt-head, 1
Beavis and Butt-head, 2
Beavis and Butt-head (on couch)
Beavis and Butt-head (Christmas wreath)
Beavis and Butt-head (doctors)
Beavis and Butt-head (Huh-huh, small)
Beavis and Butt-head (Beavis with frog in mouth, small)
Mr. Van Driessen

CELEBRITY DEATHMATCH
Deathmatch
Deathmatch Ring

DOWNTOWN
Downtown (blue)

SPYGROOVE
Spygroove




DARIA

BRITTANY
Brittany (name)
Brittany
Bubbles (Brittany)
Pom-poms (Brittany)
Space Brittany

QUINN
Quinn (name)
Space Quinn Page
Quinn
Fashion Club Page
Cute (Quinn)

DARIA
Daria (name)
Daria Main Page (2000)
Space Daria Character Page
Daria Character Page
Daria Data (computer theme)
Daria Character Page (2001)
Daria Screensaver Background (2001)
Daria (face oblique)
Daria (face front, purple)
Daria (face front, blue)
The World According to Daria (space theme)

HELEN AND JAKE
Helen & Jake (names)
Helen Character Page (2000)
Jake Character Page (2000)
Jake

KEVIN
Kevin (name)
Gridiron (Kevin)

JANE
Jane (name)
Jane Character Page
Lane-Bay, 1 (space theme)
Lane-Bay, 2 (space theme)

TRENT AND MYSTIK SPIRAL
Trent (name)
Trent (space theme)
Mystik Spiral
Trent and Spiral

JOMA (Jodie and Mack)
Jodie & Mack (names)

UPCHUCK
Upchuck (name)
Upchuck Character Page (red curtains)

OTHER DARIA
Virtual Lawndale (space theme)
Lawndale Lions
Ask the Cast (space theme)
Downloadables (space theme)
Exclusive Clips (space theme)
Daria Store (space theme)

An artsy-type project for the can-do fan

This artsy-type project came about because I found a huge Daria wallpaper online, through the Wayback Machine. A small version of the 1200 x 1200 image is above. The link to the BIG version is here. Your mission is to modify the above image into something unique and new for the enjoyment of the fandom.

Ready, set, go.

When in Rome, Party Like the Romans Do

Today is the first day of Saturnalia, the ancient Roman midwinter festival of wackiness, when the low became high and high became low for a week (until December 23rd). That's why Daria gets an emperor's golden wreath today. It is also a day marked in a Daria story having to do with her diary. Do you know that not a single Daria story makes use of Saturnalia? What have we become to have missed this?

This is also Wright Brothers Day, commemorating the 105th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first heavier-than-air powered flight at Kitty Hawk, during which no one served salted peanuts. Thanks to them, Daria and her father got a rare chance to bond on a passenger jet in the episode "Of Human Bonding," but they blew it. Of course.

Wouter offers some Sandi wallpaper for your computer on PPMB. Thank'ee kindly!

Wallpaper Uber Alles

One of the nice little gifts inside my Sick, Sad Life Planner CD was a selection of four wallpapers for various Daria characters. For your entertainment, they are presented below. Click on the name and keep.

Daria...Jane

Fashion Club...Trent

Hope you like 'em.

So, anyone like the audio files attached to the website? Do they work fine for you? I use RealPlayer for mine, keeps the screen from changing or things from popping up.

Bad News Again: I tried to get on Lawndale Online and got:

Cannot Connect to Database The Database could not be found at this time. The server may be down..

Wallpaper Tiles: When You Want Something a Little Weird

While exploring the forgotten reaches of the Internet through the WayBack Machine at www.archive.org, I discovered some background tiles used in MTV's old Daria site from the late 1990s. These were found on character description pages. Each background image was stacked across the screen with the character's name written in calligraphy almost like the Daria logo. A sample one for Our Heroine is at left.

If by any chance you have an interest in using tiles like these for your own website and webpage creation, by all means, use these. I've loaded them into the image section of my home site as GIFs. All you have to do is click on the name(s) you want most, and the tile will appear so you can save it to your computer. Quick 'n easy. Though the names on the tiles are off-center, this effect disappears when the images are tiled as backgrounds. You can play with the images any way you like, even changing their sizes and colors to suit your needs. And they're official, from MTV! Well, MTV from a long time ago, but still cool.

Brittany
Daria
Helen & Jake
Jane
Jodie & Mack
Kevin
Quinn
Trent
Upchuck

Have fun with it!

Flip-Flopping on the Issues

Glance at the image at right for a second. Notice anything unusual about it?

If you said Daria's hair looks odd, you win an Internet cookie. The image is one of many on the Internet and in other media that has been "flopped," as we used to call it in the magazine business. It's been flipped over, left to right, so Daria's front bangs swing down to her left, not to her right. Andrea looks odd for the same reason.

If you pick up your copy of The Daria Diaries and look at the back cover, you'll notice (eventually) that the bottom image of Brittany, Jodie, Jane, and Daria has been flopped, too. In The Daria Database, the family portrait of the Griffins, standing on their home's staircase, has also been flopped. You can tell because the same area in its correct orientation appears in the episode "Gifted," when Quinn is over at Sandi's house.

Similar pictures have surfaced on various websites. There is an otherwise nice wallpaper for Daria on Absolute Daria Files that has been flopped so several people look a little strange.

Flopping isn't bad in itself. In fact, it's a neat way to generate more eye-catching images that look slightly familiar but still unique. I've used flopped images in this blog when the difference between the proper orientation and the flopped one was nonexistent. This image of Sandi, for example, was flopped, and I flopped an alter ego of Jake on March 1st for comic effect.

Irfanview allows you to flop images very nicely, better I think than Paint, and if you happen to like toying with images then you can give flopping a try. You can't do it with anyone whose hair style is asymmetrical, like Daria or Jane, unless the hair style has been changed (e.g., pulled back in a ponytail).

Just a random note to start off a Saturday. It's not like I'm going to watch basketball all day or anything. Seriously.