About Me

Flynn the Cat's Fantasy Art
My Zazzle Gallery

A quick list of sites I'm actually fairly active on

• My Squidoo Account
• My Zazzle Store
• My Twitter
• My DeviantART Gallery 
• My RedBubble Gallery
• My Facebook Fanpage
• My Tumblr

What is this blog about?

Well - me. Stuff that interests me, stuff I do, stuff I want to share. This makes for a random science-geek-art-fantasy-internet-money making blog.

For my art, the Sketchblog label brings up my posts.

For Squidoo related stuff, see this page and another page for how I make money online 

I do post about cats a fair bit...

I also occasionally talk about events and places in Auckland, such as the zoo, or Auckland Armageddon Convention.

Otherwise, just check out the labels cloud on the left for book reviews, Zazzle, Terry Pratchett, humour, geekiness, and so on.

Other Blogs

I've started a practice photoblog about my pet cat at A Year of the Cat
And Good Graphic Novel Reviews is a weekly review of a recommended graphic novel book or series.

Who am I?
I'm an artist, a reader, a geek, a librarian, and a person who's trying to take over the internet (because it's more important than the real world). So far I'm failing (not that I'd admit success while anyone has a chance of stopping me), but making a small but steadily growing stream of money out of it. Even better, people actualy buy my art occasionally, and I get attention and occasionally a tiny bit of respect :D

My nights are divided between Squidoo - writing lenses about whatever my latest obsession is, painting randomly, browsing around the wilds and weirds of the internet and the latest game that's caught my attention (currently Morrowind - I have promised my flatmate never to try WoW, because they don't want to have to hide my body after I fail to eat for two weeks).

Art
Art-wise... I'm mostly self-taught, although I took art all through high school (for fun. I was one of those people who spent the rest of the day walking around with paint smeared on my nose and eyebrows, from casually touching my face after trying to retouch my paintings with my fingers), but I didn't learn much. Years later, I look back and 'get' what they were trying to teach us! But a year into university, I discovered ArtRage - a digital painting program that does everything but end up all over my face and fingers, fell into love and absolute obsession, and sacrificed my life, my first blog, even my books, to painting every night for the next couple of years. Three years later, I finally try and relearn traditional art again!

I was really active on DeviantART for the first few years, but it's started to overwhelm me. I keep promising to nip in and catch up, but tend to get swamped  by University, distracted by Squidoo, or hampered by wrist-pains before I get through the first thousand messages! I still visit, but tend to mostly lurk.

I do take commissions!

From ArtRage to Squidoo
 A couple of years ago, when I was getting sick of explaining ArtRage to every fifth person who came along on DeviantART, I found Squidoo. After looking around, I started cackling happily, and started writing an encyclopaedia of tutorials about ArtRage, to link to instead of writing out again and again. From there, I realised that I could write about... well, anything! And then I got paid. And then, of course, I was addicted.

Some boring biographical, and geographical history and so forth
Well, I live in New Zealand - emigrated from the UK with my family when I was ten. I'm coming up on my 24th birthday as I write this. It's too hot here for my tastes ^_^

  I've got a degree in Biology, specialising in Marine Science, from the University of Auckland, work part-time as a librarian, and am working my way through a postgraduate Marine degree, and a diploma in Library studies. I estimate leaving tertiary study in ...oh, 2031.
And along with that degree, I ended up with a whole bunch of side effects from studying Marine biology, such as having absolutely no patience for anyone who tries to tell me that evolution is a "theory" (rather than a Theory), that being anywhere on the Kinsey scale but dead-straight is 'unnatural', that climate change isn't happening, or is on Steve Irwin's side instead of the stingray's.


I've got two idiotically smart siblings, a very impressive mother, and a dad that likes to make elf ears out of gold foil and I encourage in geekiness. Secretly. When mother isn't around. And a cat, who was a kitten from the SPCA that I got for my eleventh birthday - so friendly that she used to knock herself over trying to headbutt me. Now she knocks me over. I don't want kids - cats are enough of a responsibility, and they are at least cute and cuddly 80% of the time. While a child only manages adorableness 30-50% of the time.

Also, I've got a weird skin allergy reaction called dermographism, which is the most irritating thing in the world when I'm off my antihistamines, and is awesome for creeping people out.

Favourite authors include Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, Gerald Durrell, GRRM, Tad Williams, Mercedes Lackey (her non-fluff books); Nicola Griffiths and Neil Gaiman.

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And I've figured it's time to start making guide posts/blog lists of my various groups of lenses. 

My Portal lenses
My Terry Pratchett/Discworld Lenses and Reviews
My Cosplay lenses
My Disney Femslash lenses
My 'normal' Disney lenses
My Artwork and Themed Art lenses
Joss Whedon - Firefly, Serenity, Buffy the Vampires Slayer and Angel - Lenses