Sorry about that accidental hiatus, there!

Oh man you guys! I've been reading your blogs and commenting occasionally and suddenly BAM! It's been nearly two months and I haven't posted!

I'm wearing make-up nearly every day and I've been trying to photograph looks, but I still don't have a good system going with my lights so it's really hard. These days I tend to have to run off and do things straight after I paint my nails as well, so no nail pics either.

I've still been buying stuff and putting it aside to review - look!

That's just the indie/nail polish box, I have a few gifties from Suzanne I should review as well.

The reason for my absence is that aside from adjusting to having to do most of the cooking and cleaning in our little house, I've now got an evening job which means I don't get home til 7:30ish and by the time said cooking and cleaning is done, I am SO TIRED, not to mention my eye makeup is usually creased to hell and again, the lights are just blech.

The other reasons are good reasons. In fact they are BRILLIANT reasons: I have a job as the media liason for a small graphic novel publishing company in Perth. I have been interning there since Supanova of 2010 and they offered me this PAID position a few months ago. I've been privelaged enough to talk to many great bloggers and writiers in the industry, and the reponses I've had back about our books (which I'm a fan of) has been freaking awesome.

Breaking up the wall of text with a look!

Sugarpill Midori & Tako, and I don't remember what the blue was :(

The other job I've picked up is that of writer/reviewer for ComicBooked.com and that is where a lot of my energy has been going! I'm writing 1500+ words a week for them. It's an absolute dream. That's a link to my author page and yes, my real name, and my face! So you might see a few full-face posts on this blog now that my secret make-up-obsessed identity is all shot to pieces. If you enjoyed my non-makeup reviews, if you like games, comics or pop culture, I will totally beg you to bookmark the site. The staff are all really friendly and keen on both getting news out to their readers, doing reviews and analysing stuff and it's been a real pleasure getting to know them all.

Anyway, back to makeup! I'm going to do my best to post at least once a week here. Feel free to pester me on Twitter! I've missed you guys a lot and I don't want to stop make-up blogging, since I feel like it's helped me get to where I am now, both personally and professionally.

Supanova is next weekend so there will be some non-makeup posts, though nothing like Jerry's ridiculously awesome con photos! I am so jealous of all her hilarious celeb duckface pics.

I have, as pictured, a butt-ton of reviews to do. If you have something you'd like to see first:

• Aromaleigh v2 e/s
• Australis polishes
• Fyrinnae e/s (one new-ish one) and the Coffin Velvet lip lustre
• Eccentric Cosmetics - primer, one e/s and one lip product
• Two Morgana Cryptoria lipsticks
• One Scaredy Cat Cosmetics e/s
• Two Shiro e/s
• Misc nail polishes including Ozotic Pro, Rokk96 and Orly

Let me know, because I have no idea where to start! I will try to take photos if I wear make-up over the weekend, though.

Not make-up related: news!

I'm really, really exited because I've found a new job! It's a small business with great products, I'm not taking a paycut and the hours are just as good, if not better because I'm a casual again (instead of being part-time). What has me personally relieved is that there is no uniform and the dress code is smart-casual. So I'll be able to wear coloured polish and eye makeup again! I can feel myself relaxing already! I'm giving my two weeks notice at my current job tomorrow, and by the time uni starts I will have finished there and be finishing my initial probation at the new job. You can expect to see a LOT more NotDs and EotDs from me now, and maybe even some more jewelry making (since I have to get my study ready for the semester, I might be able to set myself up a craft station as well).

It's sad how customers can ruin a job for you. I think if the company itself hadn't been so ridiculously strict on some things I could have handled that particular stress a little more easily... vice versa, maybe if we didn't have such a high percentage of rude/demanding customers, it might have left me with more head-space to shrug off management issues I had problems with. But things being what they were, I decided that having the mental capacity to concentrate on graduating at the end of the year was more important than trying to stick it out at a job that was increasingly stressing me out.

My boyfriend has been wonderfully supportive through my decision-making process. I have to stay I'm glad it happened now rather than 6-7 months ago when I was still at home, as my parents were really skeptical about me leaving such a "good" job (and I am still very much concerned with their approval :/). They are an extremely generous company to both staff and customers, don't get me wrong, but... No amount of training sessions or discounts or free product is enough for me to pander to customers being rude and demanding! You don't get to walk all over me because you 'contribute' to my paycheck. That is NOT how it works for me and since that seemed to be how my workplace did it, I felt it was time to find an employer who was a better fit for my personality and my beliefs. That it happened so quickly, and with a company who sells product I am actually passionate about is a huge blessing. When I say quickly, I mean I dropped my resume there on a Tuesday morning, received a phone call from them Tuesday afternoon, had the interview on Friday and am starting Monday (tomorrow!) It was amazing and ridiculous and I'm really nervous but also happy. I am going to miss the amazing co-workers from my old job, but if I put aside all my money worries and my anxiety about learning new things, I know I will be much better off with this new job.

Just so this isn't a wall of text, here's the Australis flaky over a taupe franken!

MORE FUN NAIL TIMES TO COME.

P.S. Check out my rant/essay on customer service at my other blog, where there will be more book and comic book reviews soon. /plugplug

Foundation Day, Australia

I've been seeing a lot of posts and sales recently about Memorial Day, an upcoming (or past? not entirely sure) holiday in America. I see this a lot, with Labour Day and Thanksgiving and such. It got me thinking a little - maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I don't think I've ever seen similar attention by bloggers for Australian holidays. We do have them! In fact, there's one tomorrow - Foundation Day. It's actually an exclusively West Australian holiday: Australian holidays can get a bit confusing because each state was (and still is) quite seperate, and the same holidays will happen on different dates in each state. Foundation Day (info taken from here) "1 June, marks a significant date in the history of Western Australia for on this day in 1829 the State’s first European settlers, men, women and children, completed their long sea journey from Britain to the Swan River Colony.  They arrived on board the Parmelia under the command of Captain James Stirling and had their first view of mainland Western Australia."

Foundation Day actually changes date each year, it is celebrated on the first Monday in June. Thus, this year it takes place on June 6.

Public holidays aren't huge in Australia, not in my circle anyway. I don't ever remember having a big sit-down, here's-the-history in class or anything like that. This got me thinking. Australian history is quite chequered. There has been a huge upsurge of negative feeling towards Australia Day in the last twenty or so years. Australia Day in particular is one of the more 'contraversial' holidays - a bit like Thanksgiving in the U.S., I suppose. Though where you have white Americans and Indian Americans, we have white Australians and Indiginous Australians. Australia day pretty much celebrates the arrival and colonisation of the first white settlers, making Australia into the country that it is today. However, this country has a rather shoved-under-the-rug segment of its past (and sadly, the present also) which involves some truly shocking and inhumane treatment of Indiginous Australians. Slavery, no legal rights whatsoever, and the Stolen Generation, a horrible and racist act by the white Australian government which continues to have repercussions to this day. It was only two years ago that the government made a decisive move considering the utter wrongness of this act and the neglient modern response to it. Primer Minister Kevin Rudd made a public apology, which was recieved with mixed feelings. Sorry Day takes place on May 26, but is still hardly recognised by the public due to the controversy surrounding the whole thing.


Is this the bottom line? That we are too ashamed and confused about our past to be able to really celebrate our country? I don't know what the current state of relations are between American Indians and white Americans, so I can't make any comparisons there.

Another issue which is, I believe, a strongly contributing factor, would certainly have to be the extreme Americanisation of Australian media. I don't know how aware other nations are of this. My small forays into international media culture for my univeristy degree have shown the situation to be quite different from country to country. I'll summarise for you: on Australian TVs, 8/10 of programs are American. Movies? 9/10. Music? Probably closer to 7/10.

We know American culture inside out. We know the names of all your holidays. The average Australian probably knows more about American products than they do about any other country besides their own. Australian culure has become saturated with American terminology and products. It's quite confronting when you think about it. Australian media is making a slow comeback, with movies like commedian Peter Helliar's I Love You Too being released to good opinion, artists like John Butler Trio, and... well, I don't watch an awful lot of TV, so the only Aussie show I can direct you to that isn't an absolutely ridiculous soapie is The Chaser's War On Everything, which I don't think I've actually ever watched. A few of their more extreme stunts were on the news, which is how I know about them. (Please don't even mention the propaganda fest that was the Australia movie. I don't even know why they bothered showing it here, everyone thought it was lame as a one-legged sheep).

The majority of Australians (and probably nearly every television owner on the planet) know who Barack Obama is. How many Americans, U.K-ers, or Canadians, when reading this post, would not have known that Kevin Rudd was the current P.M of Australia? There's another point - Australians know that Canada is not a part of America. Most Americans I know, bless their little hearts, think that New Zealand is a part of Australia. Um, it's not. We may share ANZAC day, but we're neighbors, not roomies.

I'll admit, it does bug me a little when I'm on a forum or blog and the poster wishes everyone a "happy insert-American-holiday here" day. Or someone new posts "is there anyone from the U.K on this board?" I get that, even in English-speaking countries, there is a different culture. There will be things you can only discuss with someone living in the same environment. But it always makes me want to say "Hi, I'm from Australia and I have a brain! THE INTERNET IS INTERNATIONAL!" And sentances like "there has never been in the history of the world a better place for opportunity than here in the US" just make me gag. Sorry (yes, in case you were wondering, that was an actual verbatim quote taken from one of the forums I visit).

I don't mean any offense to Americans by this post. I was genuinely curious about the disparity I see in the view of American and Australian cultures, particularly online, where one might assume that the global nature of the medium would preclude such (arguably) blinkered views. Writing has always helped me think things through, and I thought this subject might interest people, especially since there seem to be so many common misconceptions about Australian culture. Like the New Zealand thing. No matter how many times I hear that, it still makes me laugh.

Until next I write,
Jade.

Invisible Children

News - both print news in newspapers and now online, and TV/radio news - is incredibly subjective. It's not entirely their fault; at any one time, there's so much happening in the world, to report it all would take up more time than TV stations have and more space than newspapers can spare. Unfortunately, because TV and radio news is free for the audience, the margin left for actual news once all the necessary advertising space (and the weather reports) have been squeezed in is not enough to cover even the important local, national and global events. Because TV stations are constantly fighting each other for viewership, they feel (and often are) compelled to put in bulletins which are (in my opinion, anyway) absolute fluff; "fluff", for me, meaning anything to do with the life of a celebrity or an animal that does something supposedly unusual. Important political, economic, social and legal matters - both local and international - should take priority over such trivial matters. I feel quite strongly about this issue with the focus of news media, in part because of Invisible Children.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say most of you haven't read or heard that name before. Allow me to explain: in Uganda right now there is an organisation called the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA. Headed by Joseph Kony, this group hides in the jungle, emerging sporadically. The people of Uganda fear and despise Kony and the LRA, whose numbers continue to grow: at night, every child in Uganda is at risk of being abducted by the LRA. These captured children are sometimes killed, but usually, in the case of the girls, are made to become an officer's 'wife'. The boys are physically and emotionally abused, threatened with violence, and eventually become one of Kony's mentally disturbed child soldiers.

This issue didn't make it to the news. Nobody wanted to talk about it. It may have remained a secret swept under the rug of the global community, if it had not been for three American boys, Bobby, Laren and Jason, who decided they were going to go on holiday in Uganda, and take a video camera with them. In conversations with locals, with children who left their homes every night to sleep in warehouses and underground car parks because it was safer than sleeping in their own homes, and in one hasty escape from a village the LRA was raiding, the boys uncovered this horrible situation. And they decided to do something about it.

The film Invisible Children was released in 2006. In 2009, the organisation started a global campaign to ask governments to do something to help the children of Uganda. On May 12th, 2010, after a petition garnering over 200,000 signatures and a camp-out of 11 days and 10 nights outside of American senator Tom Coburn's offices, a bill entitled The LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act was introduced in the congress of the United States of America.

It passed.

The issue is far from being resolved. There is still so much to be done, and other countries need to get involved. Please visit their website, and learn about this tragedy happening right under our noses. Even if all you do is pass the message on, it's better than doing nothing. By making someone else aware of this issue, you're doing something to help make these children visible.