drawing

004

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Here’s yesterday’s drawing. I realized how much I take my “studio” for granted. It’s never gotten much steady use before, but I missed it last night. I started this at the the office after work and finished it in my parents’ dining room. Each pleasant places in different ways, but it was definitely more difficult to challenge myself with the drawing since It felt like I was doing it between other things, instead of in it’s own time.
(P.S. Snapped the picture and posted this from my new iPhone!)

drawing

Daily Challenge 003

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I finally went to The Drawing Club tonight. The theme was Hard Boiled. I want to start going regularly, and there’s another figure drawing session Mondays and Wednesdays I may start going to again. Between the two, I think I’m pretty much set for live models.


P.S. I’ll scan these in later. Right now my scanner’s out of ink T_T

drawing

Daily Challenge 002

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Daily Challenge 002

Second day doing the daily challenge drawings. Yesterday was just getting the ball rolling. Today I feel like I learned something. Next time I’ll look at it scaled down or from a distance. The value here gets muddied, and you can’t even tell it’s a dog, let alone a manic dog.

journal

From my ear to Beethoven’s brain

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Here is little thought trail I hiked to warm up my brain for a day of coding.

From my ear to Beethoven’s brain, with some assumptions and generalizations:

  1. I hear music!
  2. I perceive time in my brain
  3. impulses from my ear are perceived as sound over time
  4. speaker drivers pressurize and depressurize air near my ear
  5. electrical impulses are sent from my iPod to the speakers
  6. the iPod decodes a compressed binary file into degrees of pressure over time
  7. computer copies encoded file to ipod
  8. computer encodes compressed file from uncompressed CD data
  9. CD is pressed with record audio data
  10. record is digitized at a resolution that will fit on a CD
  11. record is edited and filtered to remove noise and balance volume
  12. electrical impulses are recorded over time
  13. microphone translates air pressure over time to electrical impulses
  14. instruments alter the pressure of the air over time
  15. orchestra plays instruments!
  16. orchestra reads and interprets notes on the page
  17. orchestra practices playing music…many, many times
  18. music notes are duplicated on paper
  19. Beethoven writes notes on paper
  20. Beethoven codifies this music into notes
  21. Beethoven imagines music!

Every one of those actions has infinite tangents within it. How does electricity travel along a wire? What ink did Beethoven use? How did the quality of light reflecting off the page affect Beethoven’s thought of the music. And the same for the orchestra, and for everyone else.

I suppose a thought is never finished, but left alone for the moment. Now, back into time and work.

journal

recent times, and times to come

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I haven’t spent any time in my personal cyber space lately. Pretty much since I’ve been employed full-time again. I haven’t minded especially.

However, I’ve just finished cleaning out piles of code placed on my server by some jerk (polite enough, in some cases, to put is infernal garbage in wide margins, labeled with his alias).

Cleaning out all that junk has put me face to face with some aborted or stalled projects, such as this one. And as with any spring cleaning, on or off season, the result is a little fatigue and a bunch of hope.

So here’s a list for the near future of chrislovejoy.com:

  1. add support for videos on the main site
  2. improve my little CMS so that I begin posting things regularly. Currently it can only set the title, description, date, and tags. Content and links need to be done manually on the server. What a drag!
  3. post work! I have some projects that can go up right away, but I’ve been holding back for some of these other things to be more usable.

Here we go! As a little bonus, and to set the mood, here’s a recent sketch inspired by a song from the Ghiblies “series”:

journal

Longest day

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Yesterday—the word stretches to hold three days’ time—I awoke in my padded cube, which evoked scenes from Deathnote or some Japanese drama with secretive internet use. Having won my struggle to type in English, I wandered through the corridors of cubes until I found a bank of free hot drinks. ありがとう神様！I generally don’t drink coffee, but I was glad to fill a cup with espresso and cocoa…and drink it.

After gathering ourselves and paying our bill, David, Yuki, and I patronized a café and a konbini. We made our way to Yuki’s home by train and taxi. In Tokyo and Yokohama, the air was full of voices and engines, and at Yuki’s place, outside Yokohama, I heard only rain and semi. Yuki’s entryway is prepared for heroic measures, with a pickaxe, crowbar, rain boots, and gas can. After showering and packing our overnight bags—in preparation for Yakushima, yay!—, we were off to lunch with Rob and Junko.

While we were on the train—in the Green Car, a luxury car, as a treat—David realized that if I were to join them for lunch, it would be difficult for me to get to the Ghibli Museum before 4:00, when admission ends. After a brief conference, David and Yuki decided that we could split at Shinjuku, me on my way to Mitaka, and they to Tokyo. I was glad to be off on my own adventure, and appropriately concerned by the prospect of finding David in Shinjuku station, the busiest junction in the world.

…

We have to leave soon to catch our flight to Kagoshima. I packed my little bag for the trip yesterday, but I’d forgotten to bring my hiking shoes. I’ll be making a memory of hiking all day to an ancient tree in my chucks. I’ll write about the Ghibli Museum and Mitaka, and share my photos, later.