Who?
I'm Sarah. One of the three people named Sarah who actually go by "Sarah" online. It's a very common name in real life, but hardly anybody uses it online, so I get to be "Sarah" here. Isn't that cool?
I sometimes go by "Aranel", which is the Quenya translation of the meaning of my name. I am not, no matter what my site name says, called "Eleni". Don't call me that.
I am 487 years old and I live in Antarctica. ;) (If you actually want to know more about me, I have a page for that.)
Contact
I am very, very bad at answering email. I forget to reply, and then I feel guilty, so I avoid it entirely. If you need a reliable way to contact me eventually, though, mail me at aranel_ah(at)yahoo(dot)com. If you need an answer and it's been a week or so, you might try again to remind me that yes, I am supposed to respond.
IMPORTANT: If I don't reply to you in about one week, and you needed a reply, email me again, leave me a message on my blog, do something. I'm saying this twice because I mean it.
Why?
I never, ever, imagined that I might have a dolls site (note: they are not "dollies" or "dollz"). Then I started poking around, having stumbled across a site with nice dolls, and I began to realize how individualized they have become. It's turning into a truly creative and expressive art form.
And it's easy. Well, easier than I thought, at least. This is a demonstration of what you can do with a little patience, a little time, and remarkably little in the way of expensive graphics editing programs. It's also my effort to give a little back to the community. Oh, and it's fun. And involves no soul-searching whatsoever.
Huh? (FAQ)
This is the part where I get to make up questions and pretend that they were actually asked by someone other than me. :)
Site - Dolls - Contests - Miscellaneous
Site
Q: What does the name of the site mean? What language is it in?
It's Elvish, specifically Quenya. (The "real thing", as Tolkien invented it. And no, I didn't get it from a "find your Elvish name" site.)
It means "Sarah's Stars", taking "Aranel" as the meaning-translation of "Sarah". It's a somewhat cheesy double play on words, made to seem elegant by Tolkien's lovely sounds. :)
Q: Why Elvish?
I'm a Tolkien geek. :) I think it was the beautiful sounds and lovely scripts that first got me really seriously hooked as a Tolkien fan.
Q: What's up with the site design?
I believe in accessibility. Anyone, and I mean anyone with a web browser should be able to see what I've got to offer, such as it is. Of course, since it is a doll site, I cannot hope to make it accessible to text-only browsers (what would be the point?), but that is the only restriction I find acceptable for my own personal sites.
Yes, that does mean that if your browser has trouble with parts of my site, I want to know, so I can fix it! It may not look the best in all browsers, but it should be accessible and not too ugly. ;)
Q: Why don't you ever change the layout?
I do, occasionally, but not every few months as is the fashion in some dolling communities. I do all of my HTML by hand and I have a pathological aversion to using frames, so it takes a really long time to changes things substantively.
However, my current layout uses CSS for much of the design, so it's easier to change things around a bit. I'm constantly trying to improve my use of CSS. The current version, I like to think, is the best yet.
Q: So how do you make the site?
Every last piece of HTML I write myself, by hand, using notepad, or, more often, 1st Page 2000, which is a very simple HTML editor that doesn't actually edit the HTML. It sort of colors some of it to help me to catch missing quotes and the like and there's a button I can push to insert an image without having to go and look up the height and width, but that's about all. That way I know exactly what is going in and what it is doing.
The same goes for the CSS. I do style and layout using style sheets. I do use tables to present the dolls.
There are only three pieces of javascript in use here. One comes from SiteMeter and is thus unavoidable (I use it for statistics and don't keep track of your data), one is to update the copyright date so I don't have to do it by hand every year, and the other is a random image script that I occasionally use to generate blinkies on the front page.
Q: Do you accept sister sites?
You don't really want to be my sister site. No, really. I'm really bad at being a sister site. I forget to make gifts and answer emails and stuff. When I do gifts, they tend to be spur-of-the-moment. I will forget your birthday, almost certainly.
I think of sister sites as ideally sort of like the arrangement Salli and I have. We visit each other's sites a lot. We occasionally make things for each other, but it's not expected. We just like the fact that our sites are associated with each other. A lot of people get caught up in an endless round of seasonal gifts and thank you gifts and sister site gifts and it becomes an obligation, not something you do for fun.
On the other hand, if you know me and you understand that the level of commitment you can expect from me is low (this is my hobby, it's supposed to be free of commitments, and I tend to disappear for long periods of time for no apparent reason), then I would be delighted to be asked.
Dolls
Q: How do you make your dolls?
I use the GIMP for most of my dolls now. I'm working on putting together tutorials to help other people to benefit from this excellent FREE program without as much work as I had to put into it. ;)
I still occasionally use MSPaint (especially for sprites and blinkies) and IrfanView (a freeware program) for saving GIFs. Practically everyone has MSPaint or an equivalent, and IrfanView and the GIMP are free, so there is absolutely nothing that I do which you couldn't do also, with practice.
Q: Can I do _fill-in-the-blank_ with one of your dolls?
Read over my terms and if you still aren't sure, contact me and we'll talk.
Q: Can I do _fill-in-the-blank_ with one of your bases?
Probably. I'm a fairly nice person. Again, read over my terms and if you still aren't sure, contact me and we'll talk.
Q: Do you do requests?
Mostly I have tons of ideas and don't need help coming up with them. You can get a free request by winning a contest, and I am happy to make requests for my friends (more or less as I feel like it). If there is something that you really want (particularly if it is something small, like a blinkie or something to do with tengwar), you can ask very nicely, but I can't promise anything.
Q: Why haven't you put up the gift/award that I sent you?
I love to receive gifts and awards. However, I am an extremely busy person, and also I'm bad at email (see above). I tend to get behind, and then I get guilty, which causes me to get more behind. I will probably get around to displaying it eventually, but I don't believe that displaying gifts is the most important thing to do with them. When I give a gift, the point is to give it, not to get a free link back to my site, and I figure you probably meant the same thing.
I have given up on displaying gifts that were given in general to forums where I'm a member. It gets out of hand. I really appreciate the thought and it's lovely of people to give gifts like that, but I simply can't keep up! I get all nervous and afraid I've forgotten someone, which rather spoils the spirit in which the gift was given, I think. I don't want to dishonor your gift by getting myself all worked up about it!
Contests
Q: Can I submit a late entry?
If I'm taking a while to get the voting open and you really want to enter, you can still send me your entry, and I will accept it unless I've already got the voting ready to start. (There will, however, be a slight penalty, since it's not fair to give some people more time than others.) I can't make any guarantees, so it's much better to get your entries to me on time (by 12:00 midnight, Eastern Standard Time, on the day of the deadline).
Q: Why do you sometimes accept dolls that are larger than the size restriction?
I'm giving away a secret here. I do accept entries that break the rules, but only if they break them very slightly. I allow 10% over the size requirements. If I say that you can have up to three dolls in your entry, I will accept four (but not five). I will, however, penalize you slightly in the scoring. This only applies to very slightly stretching the rules. The 300 pixel limit is flexible; the 330 limit is not. I'll let you know if you really break the rules, but if you just "stretch" them without asking me about it, I probably won't mention it to you, since I think it's only fair to expect entrants to know the rules and follow them.
I cannot accept entries without valid base credits (including a functioning URL). This is an ethical requirement, so I can't be flexible about it.
Miscellaneous
Q: Do you really live in Antarctica?
Only insofar as you take "Antarctica" to be synonymous with "South Carolina".
Q: Why do you use so many big words?
What, you mean like "pathological" and "substantively"? They're very expressive. Why use five little words when one big word says exactly what you mean?
Q: What is the value of Planck's constant, expressed in keV?
I have no idea.