Synonyms

"I'm about to blow your mind," sneered Shouhei, "are you ready?"

Ralph's macaroni salad looks absolutely amazing at midnight. I wonder if you can still buy it, there's nobody behind the counter... Maybe they're on break?

"I'm ready Shouhei, splatter my brain all over this glass counter."

He gives a satisfied giggle and carefully repeats the line in his head so he doesn't mess it up.

"Okay, so, apparently Mountain Dew and Sierra Mist are produced by the same company."

"Okay..."

"Do you see the connection?

Mountain Dew
Sierra Mist

They're synonyms! They both mean the SAME THING...!"

Blew. My. Fucking. Mind.




I still think Mountain Dew tastes better.

Lego Car

Everyday since I came back for winter break I have been asking myself the same question over and over again.

WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING ?

Something about not being productive in any way during breaks makes me feel like absolute shit. I've been scurrying in and out of the kitchen constantly in search for food, not because I am hungry, but because I am bored. Ahahaha!

Not saying I literally haven't been doing anything-- I had an amazing Christmas, a hilarious Japanese school reunion, a fantastic basketball reunion, and I did hang out with people (a little bit lol). I've played my DS almost everyday (nothing serious like an RPG game, quick music games and puzzles and such) and I've finished Harry Potter Book 4! :) I've also been walking my friend's dog since she was in Arizona and am proud to say I am over my fear of ginormous dogs jumping on you. Sort of. Not really, actually. I will never get over dog drool and that smell you get on your hand after you pat them that makes you go look for a sink before you do anything else with it.

Why not upload posts on the blog if you're so bored, that's why you made it no? Yeah, I HAD NOTHING TO POST BECAUSE I HAVEN'T BEEN DOING ANYTHING. Yeah, I drew here and there, but no projects, do you know what I mean? Donna probably does, we tried to make a music video one time ahahhahahah

Getting to the point, yesterday Shouhei walked into my room and threw a small yellow car made out of Lego into my hands and told me to model it on 3D.

"Don't worry about all the bevels and shit on the Lego," he said, "just get the general gist of it modeled. I want to see it done by the time I get back from work."

I'm gonna be honest. I haven't touched Autodesk Maya or let alone any other 3D modeling program since the end of Senior year-- that's when senior year ended in me, mind you, not necessarily literally the last day of high school, and that would be around end of April, beginning of May.

It is fucking hard trying to work with a program you haven't used in over half a year. Also, I've been using Adobe Illustrator for classes in college so all the hotkeys for that program stuck-- "v" doesn't mean I have the select tool and "c" doesn't mean I'm cutting. On top of that, the Maya I used while I was in high school had customized hotkeys and all my preferences just the way I wanted it, so I had to set them all over again on my laptop after digging through my head and searching through the menu tabs for the tool's name. God, damn I forgot a lot...!

Anyway, thanks Shouhei for forcing me to working on 3D because that's exactly what I needed right now-- hopefully I'll start getting back into modeling stuff on it even when the year starts. Bored? Drop in something for me to model! :)
In the meantime, here's me trying to get my life back together! :D

Also, Happy Birthday & Happy Anniversary Mom! :) :) :) :)

+/- Lego Car

Photos of the original Lego car. It was really, really dusty.

And my modeled car on Autodesk Maya!

The door opens!

The trunk opens!

The steering wheel although it's really hard to see

Still working to get my render settings right


So, there it is! That's my ssssiiiiicccckkk laptop btw! :)

Happy holidays everyone, 2009 is almost over!

Desma 23 - Drawing

Fall 2009 Quarter DOWN! :)
Everybody has basically been hating on me because I didn't have any "finals," but I did have final projects for all my classes so don't hate so much. I should have kept track of every dirty face and punch I got every time somebody asked, "So, how many finals do you have left?"

Anyway, the first quarter of college is done! :) :)
College was everything I expected and more! So I guess that means it was not what I expected... Or it was more than I expected, which still means it was not what I expected...? It was good is what I want to say! It was really, really weird not having to take any math or science classes, as those were the only subjects that I cared for even the least in school. Everybody else on my floor are comp sci (Jenny) or some sort of science major, so they're all taking physics and calculus and whatnot, solving problems on the board in the lounge, and there I am, drawing. Feels weird, feels weird; in a weird way I guess I kind of miss it, but I have to let go someday, yes?

So, what have I been doing in Design|Media Arts (shortened, Desma) you ask? Well, let me show you! For the first 5 weeks or so, all we've been doing is drawing cubes, by hand and on Adobe Illustrator. We had to get this huge sketch pad and an even larger art board, a T-square, an 18" ruler, and all these other tools and carry them all to a classroom 30 minutes away, walking-- you should have seen us on the rainy days! :) As boring as it was, I can't say I didn't take any pleasure in it, using rulers and stuff. :) We only scratched the surface of the perspective theory (is that what it's called?), but it was suuuuuuuper interesting...!

I didn't have the patience to scan the hand-drawn ones, so here are just the ones I did on Illustrator. As a side note, Illustrator is SO WEIRD... I've only used Photoshop and Flash from Adobe before (well, Flash used to be Macromedia but let's ignore all that for now), but Illustrator was like a combination of Photoshop and Flash in a way; or at least it felt like that to me. Here they are!

+/- Desma 23

The first assignment on Illustrator was the one on top, the assignment was something along the lines of a 16"x16"x16" cube in perspective broken up into 64 cubes.

And then, we had to fill in the individual cubes with planes cutting through them. First, I thought we had to fill in all 64 planes, and wasted an enormous amount of time doing that :) Woo! I went to go print it out, when Amanda so kindly pointed out that I had used USC colors. Thanks Amanda, each color print costs about $3, but I'm glad we have our priorities straight.

Reprint, lol.

We went on to drawing the cube from different perspectives, both by hand and on the computer.

And then they taught us the theory. I'm not gonna attempt to explain what's going on, but it's really interesting go wiki it or something.

Our final assignment involving cubes was to make masks and texture them so that they look like cubes even without the outline. As you can see (and in this case as it is literally a cube at hand), I'm not very good at "thinking outside the box." I would very much like to think inside of it, thank you very much.

We then moved on to drawing this chair. This one's a scan, we had to scan them in and compare them with our photos to see exactly how off we were. By the way, my professor always walks around and critiques our drawings as we draw them. His comment? "It looks like a horse."

Traced the photo on illustrator and did the whole masking deal. "It's... Boring." I know thattttt I don't like "spontaneous" I don't like "comtemporary/modern art" leave me alone.


There's a really famous wood carving(?) of "The Last Supper" by Albrecht Dürer, and we had to "interpret" it and trace exactly one person. That was worded funny. We had to trace/interpret the entire drawing, and we also had to trace one of the people exactly as it looks on the original. The "exact trace" (the guy getting strangled by Jesus) took a good 5~6 hours. WTF
Original "The Last Supper" by Albrecht Dürer.

Our final project was the bicycle. I will shoot the next person I see riding a bike with training wheels, who will most like be a kid. :)

So, I guess that just about wraps up my drawings for Fall 2009. We had individual meetings with our professor and the TA, and I was the last one (last name "T") and he just kind of said, "You work hard. You get an 'A.'" Wow, yaaay! :D I guess the class did exactly what it was supposed to, and that was to teach us Illustrator.

Too Much Brunch

Brunch today.
My friend was in the omelet line and taking forever; meanwhile I got a shit ton of food.

Speaking of shit ton, I have exactly that much in homework right now...! :) Can't wait till Thanksgiving yaaaaaaaaay

+/- Salad Face

How to Make the Chewbacca Noise

R O F L M F A O

ESPECIALLY 1:12

Ahoy there back!

Donna, since I know you secretly have been dying to see what I eat, here's one of the things we can get for one meal swipe worth at Bruin Cafe! :) I get it almost every time, since I also happen to be a creature of habit, and it's called the southwestern chicken wrap. It has orange stuff and green stuff and black stuff in it, and the orange dressing that I spilled one time all over me too.


I don't think you care, but this is what my windowsill looks like. I think that's the first time I've ever written that word, windowsill.

Pumpkin Carving Craving Part2

Scott's life was shorter than we thought.
She died the day after we carved her :)
Some drunk guy kicked her lololololol and her remains were scattered along the hallway!

+/- Crime Scene

Pumpkin Carving Craving

Happy Halloween! :)
I passed out candy to two kids this year (our neighbor's kids on their way out), and played Mahjong with my family this Halloween!

Jumping all the way back to Sunday, I came home to my dorm room to find an unfamiliar orange object on the ground. It was a pumpkin. From Trader Joe's! :) I asked Jenny about it and as it turns out, we were going to be carving a jack-o-lantern on Friday! And it is the only thing that has pushed me to finishing my midterm essay.

I haven't carved a pumpkin since like, elementary school! :)



+/- Scott-o-lantern

Jenny carves a pumpkin every Halloween,so I left a lot of it up to her, but I like to think I brought a lot to the table too-- Kit Kats, for instance.

We didn't want our dorm room to stink up so we carved it in the lounge.
Materials: one trashcan, two trash bags, one pumpkin, one cup for the seeds to maybe roast later, one piece of white paper to sketch on, one pen to sketch, one pocket knife, one butter knife, four fun-sized Kit Kat bars, one bag of Trader Joe's Multiseed Soy Sauce rice crackers, and two spoons this girl on our floor stole from the dining hall. Later on we notice that we also need staples, superglue, a box of Nilla wafers, candles, and a lighter, but we don't know that yet :)


First thing's first, we punched a hole through the head of the pumpkin (actually we used the butter knife, but everybody kept asking, "Did you just, cut it open?" so we figured it'd be more interesting an answer). Everyone looked at me like I was crazy when I proposed throwing the seeds out, so we poured them into a free Roxy cup that Jenny got from this one thing at this one place. We cleaned it out with our spoons and then gave up and used our bare hands; it was sooooooo slimy and stringy. Pumpkins smell man, and they are the weirdest freaking fruit (they have seeds in them so they're fruits right?). They basically don't have any meat! You just eat the skin and the seeds, they're so shallow! Don't ever make friends with them!

Our sketch. I actually drew that with my left hand because my right one was full of pumpkin intestine. It's a snowman, by the way.

We drew our outline on the pumpkin, who we named Scott (and it's a girl, mind you), and Jenny carved in the first eye.

And then it was my turn to carve in Scott's right eye(our left). I fucked it up. It just looked awkward, and Jenny, with her infinite (18 to be exact) years of wisdom in pumpkin carving, bandaged it up by making it a swirl! That became the coolest part of our pumpkin, and I even get to say that I took part in turning a mistake into a success (only the mistake part, though)!

Scott before her mouth operation.

After the operation, and I don't hesitate to say it went surprisingly well! Look at the look on her face! She's happy as hell (granted we literally dug that smile in)! Why does she have such a small nose you ask? Because...

...we're sticking a fucking carrot in it! It's based off a snow(wo)man, after all.



Added a few more accessories, the cylindrical pieces are the carve-outs from its mouth, and the quail-looking thing on its forehead is from his right eye(again, our left). Idk why she has a thumbtack on her nose.

Finished! Now let's light the candle and turn off the lights! :)


Most. Productive. Day. Ever.

Scott will spend the rest of her significantly shortened life greeting the people that pass by D8. I like to think she has a pretty cool life compared to all the other pumpkins out there :)

Oh yeah, our neighbor carves pumpkins every year as well. Check out Ryan's jack-o-lantern! :0 Didn't want to show the picture at the beginning of the post or else Scott would end up looking like shit the entire way (now she just looks like it in the end).

Happy Halloween anyway everybody! :)

What... the FUCK?

Raise your hand if you knew "whatchamacallit" was a word. Firefox doesn't put a red line under it when I type it either, am I the only one more surprised about this word than I am about "Google" becoming a read word?

Proof

+/- Definition

n.
a name for a person or thing whose real name has been forgotten or is being avoided. : I lost my—you know—my whatchamacallit—my watch!

No Wheels on Bruinwalk

If any of you have ever gone to UCLA, there's this main walk that stretches east-west across the center of the campus called the "Bruinwalk."

They've always had the "no wheels on Bruinwalk" policy, but starting October 12 of this year they started actually putting a fine of $202 (what a random number!) for anyone caught on bikes, skateboards, scooters, wheelchairs on Bruinwalk. Wait, maybe wheelchairs were okay just kidding.
It doesn't affect me in the bit because I walk everywhere anyway, but everybody has bet pretty upset about this. These were drawn in the day the policy went into effect I think, and I thought it was pretty cool :)

+/- Chalk Walk

They drew in a bike (and all other wheels) lane with chalk!

This one was near the intramural field I think :)

Again, wheelchairs are probably an exception to the "no wheel" policy. Still funny.


Soo cooooool, the only problem was that it was so cool, people walking were on the bike lane following these traffic signs, defeating the entire purpose.


A shame it rained two days later.