Rockin' the braids...

We had a gig tonight to dance at a medieval dinner theatre production, as 'a gift' brought back by one of the crusaders from the Holy Land. It was pretty awesome; we were a big hit, the show was really fun, and Sofia and I got to try out a hairstyle I'd been wanting to do for ages; I had an embroidered Uzbek hat and recently my dad brought me one from Kazakhstan, so we decided to do our hair up in Central Asian style. We'll definitely do it again as we loved the look.

We even had a tent with gauzy curtains, behind which we lurked mysteriously until it was our time to make an appearance. It looked much nicer without the flash, but so does everything. :P

Shades of White!

We debuted our first full choreography (as a primarily ATS troupe we mostly do improvisation, so creating a choreo from scratch was tough!) and spiffy new costumes and were a hit if I do say so myself.

I'm sure I'll see all sorts of mistakes when I see the video, but I'm a perfectionist. We had a lot of very positive feedback and it was super fun, bad weather notwithstanding.

As the more experienced costumer I provided advice and assistance to S and V since we were on a tight timeline. This was my pet project (both the music and the costumes) and I think we were all very happy with how it turned out.

"Hey guys, how do you feel about dancing to Japanese hip-hop?"

Important Ebay information - massive changes screw over sellers

starherd.livejournal.com/306304.html

It's a little long, so here's the short version:

- they are reducing the listing fee by 5 cents and making Gallery free. On the surface this looks great, and this is how they are marketing the change - as a "fee reduction". However, if you read the fine print you'll find that they are raising Final Value Fees (The fee the seller pays when the item sells at auction) by as much as 33% to 66% for some sellers.

- if you have below a 95% satisfaction rating on Ebay, Ebay will not display your auctions in the search engine. This seems reasonable until you consider people who don't sell in high quantities. For example, if you sell 20 items one month and 1 of them has a neutral or negative left for it by a buyer (deserved or not), you can no longer list auctions on Ebay and have them be seen in the search engine, which makes it impossible to improve your feedback rating since none of your items will ever sell.

- they are removing the ability for sellers to leave feedback for buyers. This despite the fact that many sellers have been burned by buyers who try to extort the sellers by threatening to leave bad feedback if they don't ship something for free. This, coupled with the 95% feedback rule, means that one or two unscrupulous buyers can completely ruin a small business' reputation on Ebay and make it impossible for them to continue selling.

- if you have less than 100 total feedbacks or you have less than 95% positive feedback, and you sell an item, Pay Pal will not give you your money for 21 days. They are indeed expecting sellers to ship goods without pay, releasing the money only when the buyer gives positive feedback or 21 days has elapsed. How much you wanna bet that many buyers will then claim the item was not as described and have the charges reversed?

- they instituted a 15% discount as a "Seller Reward", but out of Ebay's top 500 Powersellers only SEVEN qualify for the 15% discount according to the criteria given.

Ebay claims that they're only targeting 'problem sellers', but really the ones who will suffer are the small businesses and individuals. Essentially they are making Ebay suited only for large businesses who move tens of thousands of dollars a month, and making it impossible for small businesses, hobbyists and casual sellers to function on the site.

Many sellers and buyers are holding a strike on February 18th through February 25 - that includes no buying, no listing, no selling, no auctions on those days. Please honour this boycott in order to get the message out that these policies are NOT acceptable.

Article on CNN Money; they're investigating the issue: fsbfeatures.blogs.fsb.cnn.com/200...ion/

Bunnies! And cupcakes!

Amy Sedaris did a short film for Microsoft as part of their Office 2007 online ad campaign, and it's full of bunnies. Amy's own rabbit, Dusty, even makes a cameo appearance (the black & white "mini"-rex in the chef hat, eating sprinkles).

It's pretty corny (and Microsoft sucks) but the plethora of bunnies amuses me so very greatly.

www.youtube.com/watch

(those are my two little monsters in the pic above)

Oh NO!

My favourite restaurant is closed indefinitely? www.chowhound.com/topics/449300

Where will I get good Moroccan food now? This sucks a LOT!

*cries*