Fridge Logic

Originally drawn for
I hate long weekends

There are some things that just leave you thinking. Take my Independence day post for example. Very nice, very poetic, but a couple of days after posting it, I started wondering if the clothes I had chosen had other implications.

These kinds of considerations have long been known in the movie industry, and in 1958, they were given the name "icebox logic" by Alfred Hitchcock. In his own words, it's a scene [that] hits you after you've gone home and start pulling cold chicken out of the icebox. Of course, few people today call it "the icebox", so modern terminology refers to it as "fridge logic".

Community Service

(Or “What’s been keeping me busy, part 1”)

Like many American (and, indeed Pan-American) colleges, mine requires me to do some community service in order to graduate. Apparently this is an alien concept to Europeans so I’ll try to explain it briefly: Basically, I’m required to do work for free “for the benefit of the community”, in hopes that this will motivate me to do stuff for the places where I’ll live “for the benefit of the community”.

Now, before you rain suggestions on me like firefighters or soup kitchens, part of the catch is that the community service can’t be just any old volunteer work; it has to be a “service” registered with the university. There’s a bulletin board with all the options, as well as a web page, and I spent two weeks reading through them all. Turns out, 80% of the options require you to own a car (which, just like 60% of the student population, I don’t).

The Graduation Countdown

I had it all figured out. I only had Statistics, my thesis, and community service (required by a local law – or was it an ordinance?) and then I could graduate. I would do statistics during the summer of 2010, community service during the summer of 2011, and my thesis throughout the 2011 calendar year. There was plenty of leeway if anything went wrong. The plan was flawless!

…or so I thought.

Now a Deviant

"Hey Diddle Diddle (because, let's face it, if a cat was given a fiddle, this is probably what he'd do with it)" was the first (and up to now, only) thing I drew specifically with the purpose of uploading it to DeviantArt.

So, yeah, I've created a DeviantArt account. When I started this blog, I was focused on telling two stories: the avatar story and the (as of yet unbegun) Jane's story. Every drawing I made, was a means unto that end. I was trying to work professionally; keeping to the clean, computer-made look. Whenever I did draw something on paper, it was as reference for when I "inked" it later on the computer, as happened with Jane.

But Christmas changed that.

What I gave my mother for Mother's Day

Text-only version

So, yeah, I sketched this in pencil, colored it on the computer, printed it, and gave it to my mother. It was wonderful to hear her laughter echoing through the house!

Well, I thought it was funny

No artist's notes for this one. It just came to me and I drew it.

The Japan relief effort

Text-only version

The Ophiuchus frenzy also got to me

I wrote the following on January 14. I didn't post it back then because I felt the need to apologize first.

I really hope I don't need
to explain why I put this
image here.

So, I was in the student lounge Friday morning, January 14, 10 a.m., when I overheard one guy tell another,
"Yo, you know what your sign is?"
"Duh, I do."
"Well, what is it?"
"Scorpio."
"Not anymore."
"Whaddaya men 'not any more'?"
"Your birthday's is November 30, right? The International Astronomy thingy is saying your sign's now Ophiuchus"
"What the hell is that?"


I immediately Googled "Zodiac" and saw the news story, already dead and buried by then, unfold before my eyes.

The last assignment

Text-only version

Character page

I've made a Character page detailing, well, the characters that appear on this blog. I tired to explain them in the best detail I could, but I realized that there's not really that much more to certain characters. What was really hard was compiling the list of all their appearances (which meant creating a new label for each of them and applying it to the appropriate posts). If I've left any posts unlabelled (or do so in the future) please let me know.

Crossroad

No, I don't know why I
thought this image would be
funny. And no, the blue
clothes don't mean
anything.

I find myself today at a crossroad. On one side stands writing a thesis, on the other stands doing an internship. The university's rulebook states that I must do one of the two to graduate. And as I try to decide I think I'm stuck in some sort of infinite loop.

My absence

Text-only version

My sudden post last Saturday after several weeks of silence may have left many of you wondering where I was. I hope this little comic strip can serve as an explanation

It's a miracle

Self portrait #2: face loosely based on photo.
The rest (hair, arms, etc) is the result
of me guessing how long the lines should be;
I have very little experience drawing
people in profile –or people holding things
up to their faces, for that matter.

So, I've passed all my courses. "What? That's the title 'miracle'? I thought you said you were a 'mostly-all-A' student; what's the big deal?" It seems pretty tame, I know, compared to the Resurrection of Lazarus or turning water into wine. All the same, I'm convinced God had a hand in this.

I try to keep the fact that I'm a very devoted Christian separate from my life online. I really do. Sometimes, it's hard; the words just escape me. People really don't like it when you randomly quote an appropriate passage from the bible or point something out as evidence of the existence of God. They pigeonhole you and put any possible resentment they have on any possible "bad" action the Church, as an institution, has done at any possible point in time during the past 2,000 years.

But still, given the situation I was in, I just had to write about it.

Life Sucks

I had something brilliant planned for Father's Day. A wonderful series of posts which were to take advantage of the fact that I comment on about half a dozen sites with an avatar, which I was going to change for the occasion. I hoped to have it up long enough for people to notice, ask themselves "what's up with this?" and click it, linking them to the blog. And the explanation would be here! Right after a short post which I hoped would tell enough about me to get them to keep reading my blog.

But my teachers didn't agree with my plans, and let's just say, I'm lucky to be alive... literally.