Good conversation and good food

[vilakins]

I've had an excellent day. First quarryquest rang me, all the way from the other side of the world! I'm so stoked. I feel very isolated down here, and it was wonderful to talk to someone. We chatted for about an hour about Blake's 7, the filming locations, Michael Keating, Gareth Thomas, cons, London, how we try to get inside our characters, how memory works...

Then I went out for lunch, to a really cool place called Palazzo Roma. It's 30kms out of the city, in a small agricultural industrial area. The restaurant's in a warehouse attached to a company called Phoenix Italia who make replicas of Roman and Greek statues and columns etc for the garden. It's a symbiotic relationship: one attracts customers who go to the other. The restaurant has all this wonderful Roman stuff set up inside--vine-covered columns, stone benches and tables, statues of artfully-posed people, dressed or not--and serve top Italian cuisine. It's such an odd place to find such high quality food. I had artichoke hearts and caramelised onions, parmagiano reggiano gnocchi, and for dessert, raspberries and [mmmm] crème brulée, my favourite. Yum!

On the way home we went into a bookshop and found the complete Farside collection--every cartoon Gary Larsen ever produced (about 4000) in two massive tomes. They're in chronological order and I'm rationing myself to 6 months a reading.

Comments

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I couldn't do the black glow effect on the text layer you described. PSE2 only does a white glow and I couldn't change the colour. They only do black shadows underneath too. So I did another layer at 50% and drew in a black glow around and over the text with a fuzzy brush then brought the text forward. Crude, but it worked.

BTW that Vila is from a set of B7 S4 collectors' card I got incredibly cheap in a mixed lot from an ex-B7 fan here. I scanned them all a while back, so if you want the others (I see you have some--the Vila at least) I can send them to you. They're all posed with their guns except for Servie who's drying her fingernails.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

I've got good scans of all of them (Marian sold hers on Ebay and scanned them before), except Servalan. So if you can get me a good, high-quality scan of the Servie (scanned at at least 100 dpi and saved with minimum jpg compression), I'd be delighted.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Um, the one I've got is 413 x 600, 200 pixels/inch. If that's OK, I'll e-mail it. I noticed my Vila card has a darker blue background than yours, as have they all incl the Servie. Perhaps my cards were a later printing.