October 11, 2002

Some random thoughts of the day/week/month/whatever:

(1) Super Mario Sunshine rules X3 I've been starting to hear the "Shine sound" everywhere in real life, though. Scary.
(2) School sucks. Especially when exams are just a month away, and you realize you've not learned much in the last couple of months.
(3) Yay, my Ragnarok Online fanart got picked for the Fan Art Collection Book thingie~! I'm so happy ^o^
(4) Oil painting is really, really messy and troublesome. No wonder Painter is so popular.
(5) I want to see Red Dragon.

11:27 AM

October 15, 2002

Okay... my programming project is due on Monday, Oct 21, and I have yet to do anything substantial. I'll probably be losing a lot of sleep and peace this week... pray for me *_*;

11:26 AM

Finally went out and watched Lilo & Stitch. Awesome movie, albeit a bit too short for my liking. I want to see Treasure Planet now :P

09:57 PM

October 16, 2002

Blergh... spent almost the whole afternoon in the computer lab at school, doing the stupid C programming project. I found that it wasn't that difficult to do once I got past the first stage, but boy was it tedious to type all those code O.o;; I was using vim (text editor for Unix/Linux OS), and I had to copy+paste a lot of things. But since I didn't know how (and couldn't be bothered anyway), I retyped the lines I needed :P Oh well... at least it's 95% done now~ Just need to do a bit of touch-ups tomorrow... and I'll hopefully be finished. They gave us five whole weeks to do it, and I just had to wait until the last moment to start working on it @_@;;;

10:09 PM

October 18, 2002

Is artistic block an infectious disease? I seem to be having a severe case of it ATM, but the weird thing is that it seems like a lot of other artists that I know seem to be going through it too. Hmm.

In any case, I can't seem to come up with any decent drawings lately, no matter how many pages of sketchbook I fill with doodles of the same subject. I'm not too upset about it though...been through it before, I know it's gonna pass in time. What concerns me more is the fact that somehow I'm feeling very, very lethargic right now... can't seem to be doing anything worthwhile ;_; All I wanna do is just sit/sleep and think about nothing -_-;;; Erh... no energy... to type...

04:14 PM

October 19, 2002

I don't know if you've noticed this (most likely not), but I've started putting my new "signature" of some sorts in my most recent drawings. It's no more than a bunch of simple but stylized initials of my name, but after all this time trying to find the right thing to sign my art with, this one looks like it's gonna stay ^^

08:13 PM

October 20, 2002

Woo, had a couple of Soul Calibur games today with some friends I used to play against back home. It was really fun, since I've not had a good match for the longest time. Bad thing was, the 1P joystick was busted -_-;;; So we kinda didn't get to evenly play. But it was fun. Hit. Parry. Guard. Thrust. Slash! Throw! MWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Fun, I tell you.

10:56 PM

October 23, 2002

So yesterday, me being my usual bored and lazy self, I bailed from my 2-hour computer lab class and went to the university library. This library is like no other, in that it doesn't contain academic books; instead, it holds hundreds of popular fictions (yes, you can find most of the Vampire Chronicles there -- it's heaven I tell you!), DVDs, videos (of movies, cartoons, etc. -- there are a couple of anime), and shelves of comic books (including, surprisingly, manga). The library has a very cozy listening room (you can even request music from a particular CD you like~) with beanbags you can comfortably sleep on, and that was where I was headed. I had 1+ hour to waste, so I looked for a good read, which ended up being a comic reference book titled Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It's made in comic book format, so it was fun to read, but what kept me sticking to reading it was the amount of in-depth information it provided about comics. Through the book, I discovered that comics were much, much more than panels of sequential art put together to tell a story. There is a lot more to them than that, and the depth of it is just amazing. I can't write them all down here, I'd be writing a book if I did. One of the thing the author writes about is why comic book characters look cartoony, and why they are usually drawn against a very realistic backdrop (this is especially true to manga). The simplicity and unrealism of the character is supposed to be a way of making it easier for the readers to place themselves in the place of the character. If you read comic books with photographic people as characters, you'd probably subconsciously find it way too "foreign" for you to enjoy. There's this thing about "self-image" and "image about others" that he outlines; for example, when you interact with somebody else, when the person smiles you'd be seeing how exactly she smiles, how she looks when she smiles, etc. However, the person herself would only have a vague image of how she looks when she smiles. It's sorta like this: she knows the ends of her lips tip upward, and her eyes squueze a little, but she doesn't know how exactly she looks. Just a vague image... simple representations of facial features like eyes, lips, etc. in her mind, instead of her face as a whole. Same thing goes if, for example, you're holding a glass in your hand. You know without looking that your thumb is positioned so and so and your pinky is holding the so and so part of the glass. You don't need to literally look at your hand to know what it's doing in order to hold the glass. But the representation of the hand holding the glass in your mind can't be a realistic one; it's just (hopefully) five simple fingers holding a simple glass, and this simplicity is what makes up a cartoony style. I so did not explain that clear, did I? @_@;; The fact that he explains everything in a comicbook format alone makes it very, very difficult for me to describe it in words. My poor English skills don't help, either *_*; Anyway, the point is, with that much science and research going into comics, you just KNOW that the book is a must-read. Try finding it next time you go to your local Borders or Barnes & Noble, if you have the slightest interest in comics (which, I suppose, you do have; otherwise why would you even be at this site at all?), you'll most likely be hooked in no time. What I just tried to put down was perhaps just 5% of the whole book, no seriously. It's got a LOT more, and it's a lot more interesting to read than my babble, I assure you. Behold the science behind comics~ XD;

09:54 PM

October 24, 2002

Wow, the site has nearly reached 75,000 hits~~ I wonder if I should put up "be the 75,000th visitor and request something" thingie at the front page. Or maybe I should wait till the 77,777th one? Or do both? Or perhaps just draw something that says "Thank you for 75,000 hits"?

Seriously though, thank you m(______)m for visiting my page here. I won't be so dedicated to art if it weren't for you people who keep visiting ^o^

11:53 AM

October 27, 2002

I bought hitokuchi choco manju from the Asian grocery today~ It's some sort of sweet cake, and it's VERY nice :9~~~

09:09 PM

October 29, 2002

I don't know why people dislike bread crusts. I think they're just fine; when toasted, they give this extra crispiness that I love. And, like any other parts of the loaf, it tastes just like bread.

10:15 PM

October 31, 2002

I'd forgotten how pleasant it was to converse with somebody who speaks American English. Before I came here to Australia, I was so used to hearing people talk in American English; heck, I even used it to talk to my mom at my otherwise Indonesian-speaking home at times. However, coming here I find that Australian and American accents differ greatly, and goodness, was I having problems communicating. I couldn't catch clearly what my lecturers were saying; I couldn't even grasp what the salesperson was saying to me about the clothes I wanted to buy. They couldn't understand my babble, either. I improved over time, fortunately, and now I don't have that much difficulty catching what people say, and I seem to be able to make them understand what I'm saying, too. I still do have a bit of problem at times, but it's not as bad as it was at first. As a result of this, however, I've become a bit wary when I have to talk on the phone with anybody speaking (Australian) English; I'm always subconsciously haunted by the fear that either I wouldn't be able to understand him/her, or he/she wouldn't understand me. Or both.

However, just now there was a phone call from an American dude, and despite my initial anxiety of having to talk over the phone in English (read above), I found that I could grasp what he was saying without the slightest hint of difficulty. He might have just as well spoken in my mother tongue; it was so... natural. I wouldn't know whether he understood me or not; my English accent has ranged from American to Singaporean to Australian to something inbetween since I came here, I'm not sure it's even comprehensible anymore. But eh, I made my point :P

A note: I'm not saying that Australian English is bad or that American English is better or anything like that; it's just that American English is what I'm used to, and I find the change kinda difficult to adapt to. I hope I'll improve though; I'll still be here for at least 2 more years, I can't keep on getting anxious everytime the phone rings ^^;;;

01:53 AM

I'm feeling very, very jumpy today. My mind keeps going round and round, and I can't seem to stop moving. Now that I think of it, I was a bit hyper too yesterday... I wonder if it's because I've been trying to empty the 600ml bottle of Vanilla Coke I bought yesterday? I don't usually drink Coke (or any other soft drink for that matter), but I thought the caffeine shouldn't affect me too much since I drink a lot of coffee and never get this jumpy. Argh. Remind me never to touch Coke again... it's got a scary dose of caffeine that beats even coffee.

While I'm at it, I must say that Vanilla Coke actually tastes quite good ^^ I'd buy more, but I can't be this jumpy everyday, it's causing my brain to stop working *_*;

11:41 AM