Christmas Sandwich

I have just discovered that the Christmas Sandwich (which I proposed here) does, in fact, exist! It was created for Mr. Bean (who else?) for the episode that aired on December 29, 1992. If you want to see the circumstances that led to the institution of the Christmas Sandwich, click the image on the right; it will lead you to a YouTube video.

Larger format

I've just edited the template a little because my last post has a couple panoramic images (images much wider than they are tall) that just don't look right in the tiny space provided by default.

Christmas Story: Part 3 (take 2)

Let's try this again. It literally took me all day to draw the last panel (because, well, I'm with my family and you know what day it's today) but it's all good because I got it done before midnight

...right?

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Christmas Story part 3

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Modularity

Unless you're also a computer science major, you're probably still puzzled at what I meant when I said

Forget modularity
Forget reusability
Forget modifiability

To keep it simple, these are the three things any well-written computer program's code must be:

• Modular means that it is separated into the different parts of the program, each doing only what they're supposed to do.
• Reusable means the code is general enough to be used later in a different program
• Modifiable means that the code is structured and commented in such a way that it's clear what each individual part does, thus allowing a hypothetical future coder to change it.

In the context of computer-drawn art, modularity means that the character can, for example, be separated into his individual body parts (I can, for example, select just the head and rotate it alone) and from the background. Reusability means that his expressions aren't too specific to the situation that I can't put the same image in a different setting without it being an appropriate response. Modifiability means that if an expressin appropriate to the situation needed doesn't exist, I can take an existing one and change, say, the mouth.

Of course, none of this is possible when the art is a scanned pencil drawing, unless you're penciling on acetate cells.

Christmas Story: Part 2

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Christmas story: Part 1

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Of Cookiez and Internetz

Predicting what's going to happen next is a natural part of reading literature. It's a sort of self-test that you understand what's going on, and have taken up the author's hints. It's also generally way too fun to speculate the wildest outcome possible, and see it unfold.

On the internet, this can take on the form of betting.

Now I know how webcomic artists feel

As someone who reads webcomics, sometimes depending on them to relieve stress, when a webcomic didn't update when it was "supposed to" (say, Monday at Midnight) I always took the point of view of the reader: indignant because the promised witty neural stimulation was not up.

But today I find myself on the other side. I was trying to have the next part of my Christmas story up by midnight, but yesterday afternoon I stupidly thought I could check "just one" TV Tropes page.

That was the time I needed to make today's episode. And what have I got to show for it? Just one lousy panel!

Okay, the panel isn't, in itself, lousy, but the fact that I only have one, is. Maybe I should've entitled this post "The episode isn't ready, but we're getting there," but it's a little to late for that.

I guess this is the part where I apologize for not having it ready and ask you for patience, but I tried to stay awake to finish it, it's 2 AM, and I'm really not in the mood for that sort of thing right now. Sorry, but there won't be a "sorry".

What happened to Part 2?

I originally said I'd post the Halloween story in three parts. However, due to time constrains, I jumped from part 1 directly to part 3. What happened to part 2? To put it simply, I designed it to only garner suspense, and I thought that, after keeping you waiting for a month and a half, suspense was unnecessary.

Below is the script of what would have become part 2, had I been able to do it on time

Christmas story: part 0

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(Each of the following images can be seen thrice the size shown here by clicking on them)

The last assignment

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Screw the colors, I have hurry

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(The title is a reference to YuGiOh, The Abriged Series: "Screw the rules, I have money" ...not that I've watched it...)

Forget shading,
Forget lighting,
Forget coloring,
Forget inking.

Forget reusability,
Forget modularity,
Forget modifiability.

I promised you people I'd finish the Halloween story so that we could get to the Christmas story, so let's get this show on the road, even if it's only in pencil. There are only 9 more days until Christmas and I–
"9 more shopping days until Christmas"

Apreciation never comes too late

It really is things like these that make it all worthwhile:

How did you do that?

If you read through the old comments on the sites I comment on, you'll notice some of my avatars have changed. Now I don't mean the typical "blanket" change (where all the avatars have adapted to something different) I mean that only some have changed. Every odd "normal expression" avatar has now been replaced by the image on the left, and only in the places where it's apropriate. The obvious quesiton is how I did it.

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.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Maybe I am not celebrating Thanksgiving this year, but that doesn't stop me from making something special for you to commemorate the occasion.

This is the first time I have a drawing ready on a date before it's actually supposed to go up. I guess we can call that a milestone!

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.

Expunge your vocabulary

(Sorry, no art today. Just introspeciton.)

When I was younger, I was constantly trying to learn bigger and bigger words. I figured the more words I knew, the better, and it was often the case that I'd learn a word, and realize something I had said incorrectly at some point in the past, had been incorrect simply because what I was trying to say was something I didn't know the word for yet. I used these aforementioned "big words" copiously, to the extent of being indiscriminate (kind of like I'm doing in this sentence). I figured if I had learned them, being just a kid, the reader had to have learned them too, especially if they were older, right?

I didn't realize that I wasn't right until I changed schools.

Okay, what's with the new avatars?

If you've come here from the sites I comment on, you may have noticed the one or two new avatars I'm using. The short explanation is that I've noticed the need to be more expressive when commenting, and that I need a break after doing all those projects before working on the ones due next week.

I didn't make it

Firstly, I want to appologize to the people who expected I would have my avatar's Halloween story done by today. Or by Thursday, when I promised it for. The thing is, something happened. Something bad, yet it turned out monumentally well. And by getting involved in it, two days passed without my noticing, and my duedates caught up with me. (No, it's not love; I'll tell you what it was later.)

I will finish the halloween story, mainly because it feeds into what I'm planning to do for Christmas, but first I've got three projects to hand in this week: one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday, and one on Thursday. And Monday, it seems, I'll need to dedicate to closing off that thing I got involved in.

So maybe the real question is, why am I investing time into telling you all?

Someone to introduce you to

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Mouse avatar Halloween story: Part 1 of 3

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Do I really need Thanksgiving anymore?

Thanksgiving is like the perfect holiday: it creates a weekend that’s not too short, not too long; it always lands when people have cash on hand, it’s there right when you need it – when the fourth quarter of the year is getting hectic–, and you get to eat all you want. What more could you ask from a holiday? Well, there’s the fact that you can’t always enjoy it, like when you have a test on the following Monday.

© Rick Griffin 2009.

For the past few years I have been “celebrating” Thanksgiving on a date that’s intentionally off. The fact is, I don’t consider a day off to be a day off anymore if I have to use it to study for a test or get work done: it becomes a regular weekday where that day’s class happens to have been cancelled. The last two years I’ve been celebrating Thanksgiving a couple of weeks early: right when I finish my first round of tests, and before the second round can begin. Last year I went so far as to actually stuff a chicken, serve it to my family, and read out a lengthy grace. (The previous years I simply slept in late and watched TV for a couple of days, rather than worry about the tests that were about to come as I usually do.)

But last week changes things.

¡Felicidades, Chile!

For the past 70 days, 33 men, not all of them miners, have been trapped, 700 meters underground, in a collapsed mine in Chile. They managed to get organized, and survive, and are currently being rescued in what the Chilean president is rightfully calling a feat of engineering. Many happy returns, Chile (literally), from my humble little burrow digger, to yours.

Happy Columbus day

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On this day, 518 years ago, an Italian entrepreneur captained a crew of Spaniards on a voyage never performed before. Although he became rich for discovering "new lands", he would die, 14 years later, convinced that he had merely found new islands to dot (what is now known as) Indonesia.

Like all vessels at the time, his ships were filled with all kinds of vermin. I can't help but wonder, if Columbus thought he had reached the East Indies, where did these mice think they had arrived?

Something to tell you

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John Lennon Google Doodle

Okay, so I was wrong when I said I wouldn't be able to post in a week, but today's Google Doodle is definitely worth breaking the silence. Click below to watch it

Well... I thought it was funny...

I probably won't be able to post again until next week or the week after, so in the meantime, I thought you guys could have a laugh with this drawing I was referred to through the Internet:

"Sitting on Danger"

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Autum begins beautifully

"For the first time in almost 20 years, northern autumn is beginning on the night of a full moon. The coincidence sets the stage for a 'Super Harvest Moon' and a must-see sky show to mark the change of seasons."

—Dr. Tony Philips, NASA

Today is the equinox (get the rake ready) but it is also the night of a truly beautiful full moon. If you can, try to get outside and see it, for not only is this a rare occurance, it also is a great night to spy Jupiter in the sky.

Those naughty not-ty prefixes

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Don't you hate it when there's a word that seems to start with a negation prefix, but doesn't? It leads to all sorts of confusions! Take the following, for example:

by David Morgan Mar.

Scheduling muddle

I apparently made a mistake with the posting dates for the posts that would be automatically published. What follows is what I actually wanted to publish on September 11:

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

The "when" of "now"

Now then, there is one thing that bugs me now about the word "now". "Now" is a word that's supposed to mean "the present." It is what is occuring, what is just about to happen, or what has occurred immediately previously. It basically means "the time remaining to / elapsed since this event can be rounded to zero."

But there's the other usage of the word "now".You saw how I used it in the first sentence of this post, didn't you? There was no time implied there. Now was just there as a filler; an emphasizer; a muletilla, if you will. People have been using "now" to mean anything but "now" for years. (I want to say "centuries", but I don't know which word preceeded it in this usage.)

And before you say "what is our language coming to?" or "bah, it's English, get used to it;" let me tell you that it gets worse in Spanish. Way worse...

Making my avatar: The hard part

"If I had a foot,
I'd be tapping it
impatiently"

I guess I might as well finish this... the "how I made my avatar" sequence, I mean. I feel kind of bad for leaving everybody hanging last time –a month and a half ago. The thing is, not only was I overloaded with coursework, I also thought I had passed the interesting part: what's coming isn't exactly "hard" because there's a lot of things to do, nor because there are a lot of decisions, but because the outcome isn't nearly as interesting as doing the actual face; what I still haven't told you about is actually kind of boring. It's the body and the arms.

Sigh, mothers...

One thing I can say for sure already is that when this week is over I won't have watched that much involuntary TV, but still won't have gotten much actually done. Why? Well, the title says it all.

Summer vacation: 29.4% over

So, it's over. I miraculously passed all my courses, and am officially on summer vacation now. It's a wierd feeling; I've been taking summer courses ever since I started college. I'm finally free to do whatever I want.

Looking at the days gone by, I can't help but wonder, what have I accomplished? What have I been doing since the start of my "vacation"? I know I haven't been blogging, and that I've watched way more TV than I ever have (mostly because the computer is too close to the TV for me to be able to ignore it when anyone else turns it on) but have I just been lazing about?

Happily, the answer is no.

Again on the library

Ha! I bet you didn't expect me to blog about the library this far into the summer did you? Well, the truth is, what I'm going to tell you actually happened before I created the blog. When I did create it, there were a couple of things I just had to say first. By the time those were out, I had all but forgotten about this little event.

I started working in the library because it just peeves me to see books that are left lying; books that fall behind the shelf and nobody picks them up; and books that are so obviously out of their section, it's hard to believe it was done by accident. In short, "Hey there, library folks, I'm perfectly happy to reshelve books. Pay me to be happy, will ya?"

Except that, as I have explained, reshelving books is the last priority for the library. I really don't mind having to tend to the course reserve, dish out study cubicles, or look after the computer terminals. What really gets on my nerves is things that don't seem like library work at all.

Dan Browned

Gazing upon a cross,
petting a mouse.
I really can't think
of anything to say
about this drawing

I know this is not what I usually post about, but last Sunday I finally watched The Da Vinci Code. Yes, I had read the reviews beforehand; so yes, I knew it was basically a big load of bullshit. But you know what? Halfway through the movie you can’t help but believe it. The moment doesn’t last (a good thing, considering I was watching it on a Sunday and hadn't gone to church yet) but it’s there. Maybe it’s part of the suspension of disbelief process; maybe it’s that the movie is so complex and compelling, you have to believe it to understand it to the end. But you know what? The movie warns you.

There are three points in the movie, where the characters tell you that this whole thing is a fake. Three fleeting passes that are what allowed Dan Brown to, after the fact, go through all his interviews saying, “Of course it’s all true! Ninety-nine percent of it is true! Completely and entirely true! … I can’t believe you fell for it.”

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.

if(summer_vacation == false){...

The term is over. I should be on summer vacation. But noooo. I'm stuck here doing a project due (of all the impossibles) Sunday! (Yes I know half of you are going "Bah, I've had to hand in projects on Sundays before; I've had to hand in projects on Christmas day! What's the big deal then?"
and the other half is going "What? Sunday? How can that even be possible? Is he going to be in his office on Sunday? I don't think so! There must be some law against it!" Look, I have no clue.)

What a game!

I watched the World Cup Final yesterday, not that my avatar would know. ("What do you mean 'not that my avatar would know'? Is that all the explanation we're going to get?" Yes. Go see the birthday sequence if you want to know where this came from. And before you point it out, yes, I know there's no #99 in Football/Soccer.)

I really, really, really wanted to write about it in the "heat" of the match, but someone said "Ha, ha! Nobody in Spain is going to go to work tomorrow after this!"
"ZOMG! Tomorrow is a Monday?!?"

It was such a great game, the ball going everywhere without a chance to blink, I totally forgot about everything else. And I mean everything else. I forgot not only what day it was, but that it was the final, that I hadn't been rooting for these teams, I even forgot the half-eaten Frito in my hand!

Spain definitely deserved to win. But then again, so did Netherlands.

Fifa.com

Fourth of July special

Take a moment to listen to The Star Spangled Banner. Seriously, do it. It is possibly the most American thing there is (after the Pledge of Allegiance... and Apple Pie... and Baseball... you get the idea)
The song was written during the War of 1812, and didn’t become the National Anthem until 1931.

For the Fourth of July (possibly the most American holiday… after Thanksgiving... ok, I’ll stop) I wanted to do something with the song in my avatar, for all those sites I comment on. So I decided to dress him as a US soldier during the War of 1812.

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.

Getting organized

If you've been here before, you'll probably notice that today I've added a couple pages at the top (About the Author and Topics). These are just to tell the readers what the blog is about, again hoping to make it more inviting to new readers. My idea wasn't to sumarize what this blog has been or will be, but to allow easier navigation for the people who visit this blog (and, trust me, in the future navigation could get really complicated since you can't really nest one label inside another, and I plan to do something of the sort for some Big Things yet to come.)

Special occasions on (the) line

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It’s important to have traditions. Very important. (I’ll explain later why I say this so categorically, just bear with me for now.) This year I started a tradition, and it was also a pretty strong force in convincing me to create this blog. No, it’s not in my first post, so don’t look for it. This tradition was to change my avatar at certain special times of year to tell a small story.

Obligatory World Cup post

As you very likely are aware, the South Africa World Cup started today, completely changing everyone's attitude and priorities. TVs were placed all over the campus, in every student lounge, making it more of a "lounging about" room and less of a "actually getting work done" room.

Poor naïve little me, having not gone to student lounges during the last World Cup, actually thought I could isolate myself from the games, and work on my projects. As the way the sentence is constructed may lead you to think, I was wrong.

I tried, I really did, to work on my projects, but there was no way to escape the "Ooooh!"s and "Goaaaaaal!"s  and especially the "Shit, man!"s. After all, I am human, and the temptation to find out how the match was going was way to great. In the end, I ended up watching both games in their entirety, and regretted it.

"Sure," you probably say; "now he regrets not working on the huge projects he's got due next week. He regretted it because he's gonna be stressed out all weekend! But when he was watching the opening match –savor that for a moment: the... opening... match!– he surely wasn't regretting it! He's just being a hypocrite!" Well, no. I regretted it because I found the matches shitty.

Fifa.com

Linking to the future

Many of the posts I've made so far were planned for from the beginning of this blog; I simply didn't want them to appear yet, for fear that in some future week I may have nothing to post (last week was one such week, but since I had something pre-written, that's what went up, although it wasn't planned from the beginning). To make this more apparent and easier to navigate, I've gone through several of my old posts and added links to the posts that came after, expanding on them (my first post, for instance, says "more about this later"; which now links to the post that came after giving the "more about this").

I'll try to keep doing this with posts yet to come (linking them from an old post, I mean) to try to make the overall blog easier to read, more inviting to new readers, and to incite you to re-read though the old posts every once in a while

Mouse avatar: Ears, nose, and mouth

Last week I told you I was cheating when I showed you the ears, mouth, and nose before it was time. This week I’m going to show you why it wasn’t that much so.

When I started with the ears, I thought I could fake it by drawing a circle á là Mickey Mouse. This didn’t work out so well.

I therefore turned to tracing again. Because the image was so dark, there were two places that could be the top edge of the ear. I went with the one closest to the center under the justification that rounder is cuter. However, there was still something that bothered me about the result.

Fortibus Es

Last Saturday, May 22, I went to the library to meet with my partner so we could work on a project. As I've explained before, my college is quite removed from the city. It therefore has a whole fleet of buses used to take students between the city and campus. (Of course, you can always bring your car, but some 60% of the people who come to this college don't own one... long story.)

We had no problem getting to the library, it was getting back that was the problem. The library opens on Saturdays until midday; there's usually a bus at 12:30 for the people who need to come to it. But there we were at the bus stop, and 12:30 came and went. The logical question arose: where is our bus?

At that point, I told my partner the following:

Luc síbili si ergo, faustus üin don mon dei; pas fortibus es in aro.

This was obviously a reference to http://foribuses.com/. My partner didn't get it, even when I wrote it, so I had to explain: Luc síbili (Look, see Billy) si ergo (see her go) faustus üin (fast as wind) don mon dei (on Monday) pas fortibus es (past fourty busses) in aro (in a row).
My point? There may be no busses now, but on Monday there will be more than fourty!

When he got it, he said something along the lines of "that was so funny I forgot to laugh."

The bus finally arrived at 1:00; having been asked to wait for some course for non-students.

Crisis nominally over

Our granters (or whatever you call the people who give grants) have analyzed the situation, and audited every last penny my college has spent to make sure it was being spent correctly (it was). The granters, as a whole,  can grant more money, but due to the lengthy processes it must undergo, none of it would be available before October.

The funny thing is, apparently they had already provided the money for the rest of the year, but the board refused to spend it because it had been given on the condition that it wasn't to be spent until September; spending it before then would constitute embezzlement. It would also just postpone the crisis until later on in the year.

How the library works

The reason the library was so keen to have me stay is because they are working with four TA's this term in total (the library needs about 20 to function correctly) of which one must guard the computer terminal at all times and one must guard the course reserve.

I put this in my first post as part of the list of things that motivated me to create this blog. It is admittedly confusing to someone who doesn't know our library, so I thought I'd explain this in more detail with today's post.

The library has your typical Reference section, open-shelf section, and some computers with internet access (called the Computer Terminal Room for historical reasons). Like most college libraries, it also has a Course Reserve (which keeps copies of several books under closed-shelf space because the management considers these books shouldn't leave the library) a Hall of Thesis (where graduate and undergraduate theses are stored), and several Study Cubicles which can be lent to students in groups of four. (The list goes on, but I just need enough to get the explanation down.)

The library has a firmly established hierarchy with a director at the top, heads at each section, and employees under them. Also assigned to to the library, but out of the hierarchy due to being assigned by subcontractors, is security and maintenance personnel. (The subcontractor deals with the whole campus, but the few that are in the library are stationed permanently there.) At the very, very bottom are the TA's, short for Teaching Assistants. (Yes, we know there isn't exactly classes to be taught in a library, but the name is more of a payroll-enforced thing we have to deal with.) When I started working in the library in 2006, TA's were basically payed 47 US cents per hour (we're that low on the ladder).

The Windows to the Soul

Eyes are easy to draw. Take two teardrops and put one on top of the other. Pick a color for the circle where they intersect, and put a smaller black circle in the middle.

Position these correctly in the center of an egg-shape and voilà! Instant realistic human.

This is possible because human eyes are nearly symmetrical within themselves. You can use the same shape for both eyes and few people will notice. Not so with other animals.

This was a problem for me in making my avatar: the eyes I was using weren’t human. Animal eyes are more akin to two teardrops pointing away from eachother, than two copies of two intersected teardrops. So, I went back to my model and tried to trace his eyes.