Owned by the Sidewalk

Posted on 14th November 2010 in Something Daily

Upon waking up this morning and seeing how beautiful a day it was, I decided to go for a skate and get totally lost…which ended up being successful in one sense, and very unsuccessful in another sense. The part about getting totally lost went well, as I ended up under the Brooklyn Bridge by Delancey in some huge parking lot, and for the first time in a while, couldn’t find my way back without a map. This may be excusable, due to the fact that I had eaten pavement a few minutes earlier. I totally skinned my elbow when my board slipped out from under me…I’m just glad I didn’t land on glass or anything.

I spent a while today discovering how to use Gimp to remove the graph paper lines from some of the pencil drawings I did a few weeks ago. It turns out that it can be accomplished by duplicating the image’s blue channel on a white layer, then selecting the lighter grays that make up the graph lines. After a bit of playing around with Gimp, I came up with this guy:

The enhanced version of my Sonic

It’s a start, huh? I’ve been wanting to learn the process of enhancing drawings on the computer for a while, and here’s my beginning. I’m going to add some shading to it a bit later on.

I started watching BSG again tonight with some friends. It’s crazy to watch again from the beginning and see all the stuff that I missed the first time, or foreshadowing that you can only catch the second time around. Some favorite quotes: “Frakkin rats!”, “You sound like a lawyer.” Quinn, if you’re reading this, you know what I’m talking about.

ubuntuforums.org is where I get a lot of answers when Ubuntu seems too daunting to be true. Maybe you’ll like it too.

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White Whale – Holy Grail

Posted on 30th October 2010 in Something Daily

I’m listening to Leviathan by Mastodon right now and it is so. Sick. Awesome. I found out about them recently from Leo and they’re great for an old fan of Slayer’s Reign in Blood, albeit a bit less thrashy. I think the very idea of writing a metal album about hunting Moby Dick is a concept that oozes awesomeness. I mean, it’s a huge WHITE WHALE, and when you listen to this album you’re getting hit by huge waves and hanging on to the mast for dear life while this monster with crazy eyes and about fifty harpoons sticking out of its face smashes its tail against the ship and you can feel it shaking and hear it cracking and everybody’s yelling and firing cannons at it but you can’t stop it no matter what you do. That’s what listening to Mastodon is like for me. It makes me really wired though, and it’s hard to hear right after listening to it all the way through.

The wiredness is only increased by the fact that I just got off of a several hour long Dragonball Z binge – so I’ve been watching super saiyan Goku blowing crap up with his mind and listening to Mastodon and apart from that staring at a computer for most of the day. So I may be a bit crazy. I drew a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog today, I think I’m getting better. I was going to do Charmander, but I don’t know if I’m up to it tonight. Maybe later.

Sonic the Hedgehog, drawn 10/30/10

When I get out of school, I’m going to try to get into audio engineering. But if that doesn’t end up working out, I’m going to open a pancake house with a friend of mine. We’re going to call it “Mancakes”, and we’ll only hire big beefy hairy guys to dress up like lumberjacks and serve you flapjacks – the minimum will be a five-stack.

Last night I saw an undergraduate performance at Tisch Dance that a friend of mine choreographed and danced in, and I helped her with the audio for her piece. It was a really good show, just as good if not better than all of the other Tisch shows that I’ve been to, in my opinion. They’re mostly modern pieces, usually with some type of message behind them, and usually choreographed by students, who are incredibly talented in my opinion. There was one piece that was really manly where these three guys with their shirts off were running around and jumping and slapping themselves and grunting. It was really unexpected and awesome. I think the dancing was top notch, and I loved a lot of the freshmen that I hadn’t seen in performances before. I mean, I don’t really know anything about dance, but I loved watching this show.

I decided yesterday that my room would be a lot cooler to live in if we made it more like an island, and then filled it with muppet treasure.

A friend of mine sent me this link to a really cool music video. I don’t know the band or anything, but I really enjoy the song, and of course the video is crazy cool. And I’m from Philly, so there’s that.

Oh, and Edward James Olmos is now following my tweets. That is all.

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