Aijuswhanakno

Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate!!  Here is my monthly Beauty Blog’s Backstage post.  This month, I actually got to interview LiAnn herself (the queen of SparkleCrack Central, a very informative site on almost all cosmetics.  This was actually a really pleasant interview!!  I’ve only talked sporadically with LiAnn in the past, and I didn’t realize she was such a cool person!!

1.)  What got you into makeup in the first place?

When I was a teen, I was doing a sleepover at a friend’s house and we put on a little bit of makeup – very little, very subtle, “not getting busted by the parents” type of stuff. I wore it home, Mom praised me for not putting on way too much like some teenagers do, and there my interest kind of withered. I dabbled with foundation and lip gloss periodically through high school, because That’s What High School Girls Do is mess around with makeup; but I didn’t like the way cream foundation felt on my skin. When I tried BE 25 years later, on a whim, I was thrilled to find that my face didn’t feel like it was submerged in axle grease…but it still looked good. So I did a little bit of research online, hit Ebay (a lot), and dove headfirst into reading a few beauty blogs and the QVC makeup forum. I’m still learning things, and I probably always will be learning new things. But…what’s life, without new stuff to learn?

2.)  What is the weirdest thing you have ever experienced in the cosmetic realm?

I haven’t actually experienced much. I don’t routinely go for makeovers, I don’t like going to spas (I know, I’m weird), and I haven’t been using makeup for long so I never tried a bunch of really out-there or adventuresome things when I was a teenager and utterly nonsensical things seem perfectly logical. Like owning neon-camo spandex leggings. Aherm.

I think the weirdest (in a “simple dog” kind of way) thing I’ve ever done was putting together a Halloween costume for a high-school costume dance. We’d raided Goodwill, -=the=- place for lower-middle-class high-school kids to get all sorts of stuff for making costumes; and I was going to be an elf. Gauzy green chiffon dress-thingamajig that was probably somewhat nifty in the 60s, green powder all over…that would totally work, right? I gave it my best shot. I used up my mom’s entire pan of light green eyeshadow, trying to turn my skin light green. I didn’t use any primer, I was applying it with a cotton ball (Mom didn’t use much makeup herself, and the sponge applicator was WAY too small for what I was trying to do)… It didn’t exactly come out like I pictured it in my head! (Thank the ghods greater and lesser that no pictures exist from that incident. Consumer-grade digital cameras were still 20 years off.)

3.)  Outside of cosmetics, what also holds your interests

I love to read (mostly anthropological or sociological science fiction), I love to color, and I love just about anything that involves spotting patterns. Take me to Vegas and set me at the blackjack tables. As long as it’s all done in your head, it’s not illegal. Thus sayeth the Nevada Gaming Commission. :D

A lot of the music I listen to is either instrumental, vocals in non-English languages, or electronica…because music is how I get my brain to get out of my way and let me get my work done. For me, listening to music is like giving a small child a pair of socks so that he’ll be endlessly quietly amused, thus allowing you to balance your checkbook or get the taxes done or possibly remember why you froze your car keys into a block of ice. Actually…it’s patterns. Give my brain something sufficiently complex that it has to work just a little, but sufficiently simple that it can just hang back and groove once it’s identified the patterns, and it merrily gets out from underfoot and lets me get my think on.

4.)  I see that you know how to write html.  By hand.  We all wanna know……how geeky are you? :-p

I am sooooooooo very nerdy/geeky…

I watched Star Trek not in its original broadcast run, but in its first syndication runs in the mid-70s. (And even when I was 5, I knew those foam-rubber rocks were so way totally hella fake. And mom still thought it would give me nightmares.)

When I was nine, my parents gave me a chemistry set. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as mixing household chemicals together, though.

I made up a language, starting when I was about seven. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing, but…yep.

My first computer was an Apple IIe, that my dad bought for our family in 1982. I learned to program in Basic and I played the original Zork text adventure game.

I listened to the Doctor Demento show in the early 80s. My friends and I sang along (with more enthusiasm than skill) to They’re Coming To Take Me Away, and Dead Puppies, and Existential Blues, and Because I’m A Blond, and Star Trekkin’. I knew about Weird Al when he had just released Another One Rides the Bus and My Bologna, but before he got extensively noticed by the mainstream. (So I guess that makes me a hipster-nerd? Ugh..!)

I’ve built game-worlds, come up with complete geographies and cultures and languages and soforth; and even sold some “lazy GM packs” to local gamers when I was in college. (Worldbuilding is my favorite aspect of gaming. I think that’s another reason that MMORPGs don’t appeal to me: the worldbuilding part is already done, and I can’t play there.)

I’ve had a VAX account. I’ve changed the tape reels on an old IBM mainframe. I’ve even had to maintain a punchcard machine. (That one professor had it programmed *just so*, and flat-out refused to stop using the machine…and since it graded all his quizzes, and he had tenure, we had to learn how to keep that thing wheezing along. Fun times.)

My college household held a party when we got a 14,400 baud modem. Because at that time, that thing was screechingly fast. And we were the first ones to have one. (And yep, this impressed everyone in our neighborhood. We were all collectively so geeky, we were like a sinkhole of social skills.)

Along with those same people, I learned HTML when the spec came out. We did it for fun. Since I’d been using WordPerfect with Reveal Codes turned on for years, I was already pretty familiar with the general conventions.

I actually know what HTML stands for. And I know that despite the “L”, it’s not properly a language.

This year I am 42. And if you don’t know the significance of that number…pay no attention to the white mice. They’re just monitoring the experiment. (And my first internet account – outside my college account – was on a geekhaus computer…called Deep Thought.)

I made up a joke:

sub Yellow {

// we all live

}

END

I showed it to a friend, and he made me promise to never, ever, EVER do that to him again. (If you’ve done any proper programming, you might be able to figure that out. If not…go find a programmer. C, Java, JavaScript, Basic, any actual programming language will do.)

That’s how geeky I am.

I know that there are lots of people out there whose geek-fu is greater than mine – even people older than I, who did not grow up in the middle of, go to college in, and enter the workforce in, Silicon Valley. But compared to most folks, I’m fairly tech-geeky.

5.)  Summer is coming soon.  What would be your absolute dream vacation, and why?

I have absolutely no idea.

Travelling to places doesn’t hold a whole lot of appeal for me, unless there’s a specific person I want to meet there or a specific thing I’d like to do. I had fun when I took a trip to Panama, but don’t necessarily want to go there again. I enjoyed my visits to Halifax (I attended two UnCons [Lexx fan conventions]) but unless I was meeting up with friends, I wouldn’t necessarily care to go to Halifax again. I do most of my travelling in my head – dreaming up worlds, reading about this or that event or place. Where I am physically doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. (Just don’t make me live in Alaska in winter. Or Minnesota, for that matter. I’m a total climate wuss.)

6.)  Out of your 900+ eyeshadows, not to mention all of the other types of makeup you own, what have you learned?

Know your own habits, and buy accordingly. And buy for your own reasons. If you are the type to go through lipsticks like there’s no tomorrow, and you use them every single day, then sure – build a stockpile of lipsticks costing $20 and upward, and don’t feel bad if you just have to get a couple of Tom Ford lipsticks at $50 a pop (as long as you don’t put yourself into debt to do so.) If you’re like me, though, and use lipsticks only occasionally, stick to the $5 to $8 stuff, with rare occasional forays toward $15. (I feel free to stockpile mineral makeup because as long as I keep my brushes clean and as long as I don’t get liquid in my loose powders, they won’t go bad. Lipstick – even the stuff that’s chock full of preservatives – has a definite shelf life.)

7.)  What is something that all of us blogger ladies and gents would be surprised to learn about you?

Online, I’m a Chatty Cathy, always ready with the one-liner or the small-novella response to a simple question. In person, though…I’m a complete introvert. This summer I’m going to Dragon*Con in Atlanta, and spending the week with Sirvinya and Numindan (and Numindan’s hubby Drew, if he doesn’t get deployed.) Either we’ll all get along like a house on fire, or we’ll spend the week quietly and awkwardly. (Actually, all of us are fairly introverted, and we’re all science fiction geeks. So we should actually be good…once we’re sufficiently caffeinated.)

Thanks LiAnn, for letting me interview you!  <3

Tags: b3, beauty blog's backstage, blog share

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