if all you feel is pain and suffering, get someone to suffer with you

every year, the physics department would have a "visit day" during which all the gradschool applicants who have been accepted into the school get invited to visit the department for 2-3 days. hotel and accommodations are fully paid, so in a way this is how the department lured naive undergraduates to join them in spending the next 6-7 years of their lives in pain and suffering. that, and constant ego-crushing from faculty members.

i myself went to one of these 2 years ago. i was entirely impressed by how organized the event was, and decided that maybe gradschool was not such a bad idea anyway. now here i am 2 years later, realizing what a naive idiot i was back then. but that's not the point i'd like to talk about in this entry.

the physics department always uses the 4th floor lobby to socialize, and 4th floor conference room to hold seminar for events like visit day. for the past 2 years, the walls of the lobby had been covered up by posters that grad students make for presentation... until today. on my way home today, i went to the 4th floor to drop off some stuff, and there it was, a shiny new whiteboard out on the lobby wall. why anyone would stick a whiteboard on a lobby is beyond me, but seeing a shiny new whiteboard being used to write stupid shit like PHYSICS RULE or E = MC^2 just irked me, especially since the people who wrote stupid shit like that are physics graduate students. they can at least use it to derive maxwell equations or something more significant.

so i picked up a red marker,



and what else is more fitting than two of my most favorite physicists, facing off in a loincloth?

i can't wait to see the looks on the professors and the prospective grads tomorrow morning when they went up to the 4th floor to get some bagels and muffins.

i've been looking at the last 2 pages over and over and decided that page 11 just doesn't flow well to page 12. so i decided to move page 12 to 13, and insert a new page as page 12. ___sasuka@LJ asked for some sort of tutorial on how i do my pages... but i don't really know how i can possibly make a tutorial, especially with the way i draw things, so instead of a tutorial, i'll just post how the page actually looks like before i channeled it up on photoshop.

this is the actual raw scan from the sketchbook:



this is after the mode is switched to red channel:



i sketch the page first with a red pen, and then i "ink" with a blue pen. when i sketch, i just try different positions until i get one that i think is right. that is the main reason why the page looks really messy with red lines everywhere. this doesn't always work because sometimes i'd draw 5-6 different positions and none of them would work and before i know it the entire panel is already filled with red lines and i can't see which one i should work with anymore. panel 3, for example, was redrawn SEVEN TIMES before i finally went with that pose. i tried top view, bottom view, bird's eye view, zoomed-out, and other angled shots and none of them worked at all.

this is the page when it was halfway done.



enjoy. i'll try to work on this more over the weekend.

happy early valentine's day

don't forget to wear protection if you're getting laid. or if you don't have any, my roommate a few years ago claimed that foodwrap works just as well as an emergency contraception device. let me know whether or not he was lying, as i've never actually tried it myself.

Love, Wish, and Heaven

occasionally i'd come across random songs that people send me or ones that i'd get off a community such as moomusic. i don't have a particular genre i like to listen to, so i usually just download any song available to me and keep them if i like it. it's only on some rare occasions that i would like the songs that i found in a batch, and it's even a rarer occasion to come across OTHER SINGER that i end up liking during the process of looking up more songs.

you see, i don't listen to the radio, and i don't watch the TV, so i don't know who's currently out there singing or rapping or hiphopping. the last time i used a radio to look for new songs was when i found out about jason mraz's "the remedy," and this was way back 5 or 6 years ago. so the only way for me to get new songs is for people to randomly send me the song they currently like, and if there's one that i like, i'll look into other songs from that same band. that was exactly what i was doing last night.

gingerpan finally updated moomusic with some songs, and so i downloaded all of them. one i like in particular is Shiny Toy Guns' "Don't Cry Out," and so i decided to use AllTunes to look for more of their songs. I came across four other ones in the same album that i thoroughly enjoy, which is quite rare. one of the best among the four is "We Are Pilots." i'm not into electronica or whatever genre STG is, but these two songs are particularly enjoyable.

while i was on AllTunes waiting for the four songs to download, i came across some euro music chart with amy winehouse on it. what interested me was not her, but a name underneath her. very simple, pretty name: Mina. i opened up her catalog and found 3 albums, so i opened up the most recent one and picked a random song. i was immediately hooked. the first song i picked to listen to was It Can Only Get Better, because that's what i always tell people who are feeling down, including myself. i've always loved melodious songs, and this one in particular works really well with her voice. i usually label a voice as either pretty or cute, but mina's voice was both cute and pretty. either that or maybe i'm just having problems classifying her. sometimes pretty voices get exhausting and cute voices get whiny and annoying, but mina's voice is sort of a perfect balance between the two. my curiousity peaked after this song, and so i put aside the physics homework i was doing and checked out her Learn To Fly album. i started with with the first song of the album: "Read My Mind", and i never got back to physics.



i love it when i found a good singer who's not mainstream. i tried looking her up on wiki but could not find a single thing about her. so i used the oldest trick in the book and googled her name with her album title and came across popaddicted's blog where you can download the entire album. it turns out that she's a german singer, but her english is impeccable. here's one more song to get you started, and then you can head straight to popaddicted and download the entire album.

Mina - How the Angels Fly

i think i'm in love.

it's true because i said so, QED.

the last problem on my homework set for this week goes:

A closed volume is bounded by conducting surfaces that are the n sides of a regular polyhedron (n = 4, 6, 8, 12, 20). The n surfaces are at different potentials Vi, i = 1, 2, ..., n. Prove in the simplest way you can that the potential at the center of the polyhedron is the average of the potential on the n sides of the boundary surface.

the following is my answer to the problem:



i really really hope the professor does not whack my face with a baseball bat for pulling such a retarded proof. i mean, if i were the one teaching the course and one of my students turned in such a cheap solution like this, i'd want to at least bitchslap that punk.

but whatever. i'm done. time to sleep.

ANIME EXPO 2008 ARTIST ALLEY UPDATE

registration was supposed to start 5.30am this morning. i woke up at 5.25, went to pee and made a cup of tea.

at 5.30am, there was nothing. i checked the forums. as expected, it's flooded with people freaking out about AA registration screwing up like last year. i waited with my cup of tea.

at around 6am, people decided to call EXPERIENT, the registration company, to complain about the mess. not long afterwards, people started posting about how tech support people said that something was wrong with the website and that they have sent an email to the programmer. a response (and hopefully resolve) should be obtained within an hour.

i have trust issues with people, especially tech support people. mainly because i'm quite certain that they're just told to tell an angry customer the same procedure on how to fix things, and if things are still not fixed, to tell them to "wait for a bit while we reach the person who's behind this thing." i guess it's just the nature of human beings to blame things on someone else who's not present at the moment, or who's currently unaware of the situation, like homer cleverly put it in the simpsons: "quick! blame it on the guy who doesn't speak english!"

so i decided to stick around. around 6.20, i thought i should make myself some sandwich, so i went to the kitchen. while preparing the sandwich, my bladder acted up again, so i went to the bathroom. on the way back to the kitchen, i decided to refresh the AA registration page...

and there it was. a box to enter the number of tables you want for the artist alley. i entered 4 and proceeded to pay.




and here's what it looks like THREE BLOODY MINUTES LATER.



dear shiroro, makoto, brigitte, kama, joanna, and eggy: YOU ALL OWE ME YOUR FUCKING SOUL. BOO YAH, BABY.

soul, and $210. the latter is more important, by the way.