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Miragician

Contributor of dA mediocrity
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November update

6 min read
Well, two months have already passed and I never realized it.

Here's a summary of what has happened so far in my boring-as-heck life:


I've never been as open about my life as I am now with this blog/journal/social media junk, but that was mainly because I originally set up this account two years ago to try to solely post art without all the typical teen drama. I was naive at fourteen, and I had an overblown head thinking I was going to make good art back then. Well, now that I've studied fine art for a while and realized dA has the worst art community on the Internet (no joking, the crud that comes out of tumblr and Pixiv looks better than what's considered "great" on here), I've thrown these plans out of the window and into the nine circles. I may actually post some art if I have the time and courage, but that's not happening soon for reasons I will explain later. So teen whining text dump ahoy!



Senior year is turning out to be insanely busy, no joke. On one hand, a lot of pressure was taken off my shoulders. There's less homework, much more free time, and more time to socialize. My parents have stopped being so restrictive in regards to my education and that's been doing wonders for my mental health. On the other hand, all that free time is being taken up writing the GODDAMN college essays. Apparently, my parents were such geniuses to apply for ten colleges at once. Take that number and multiply it by three, and suddenly I'm spending every weekend and holiday writing. It doesn't really help matters that I have standards for writing and don't want to churn out the generic crud that other students submit as essays. And then to make things worse, my parents keep calling my essays crap and saying their writing is better, EVEN THOUGH THEY DON'T KNOW A SHRED OF ENGLISH. Seriously, starting an essay with "Being teacher's assistant" and obsessing over how apparently doing AP classes alongside being a teacher's assistant proves that I have a "hard-working ethic"? Pulitzer-prize material! Yeah, I'm not going to let them write any of my essays.

I think it was a really bad mistake to sign up for ten extracurricular clubs as well. This year had a lot more clubs I was interested in than last year, but then that caused a bunch of scheduling conflicts. Every club seems to be intent on meeting at the same time as each other and refusing to budge, so I've had to drop a few. Even then, my school schedule is completely filled up with the number I have left. And then those clubs ask me to do something to show you're committed on your own time, and I CAN'T BECAUSE COLLEGE ESSAYS.

Gradewise, everything is fine. Well, not everything. I've been maintaining the majority of my grades as A's, and I have PE this year (yeah!), so everything should be fine. Gov/Macro is a B, but that's nothing a few tests can't fix, right? And then there's AP Physics.

AP FUCKING PHYSICS. (teenage ranting go!) as well as pointing out that I'm being self-deprecating to try to excuse my behavior

"You studied the work-energy theorem, right? Scrutinized how Hooke's law works and how it factors into kinetic energy problems? Understand everything about potential and kinetic energy Studied your packet and questions and everything you've been handed this unit to gain an understanding of the physics concepts this unit? TOO BAD! Let's throw a bunch of questions you've never prepared for before with completely different formulations!"

The class is literal hell. I turn in all of my assignments complete and get full marks on them. I take notes every class. I took a complete course of physics and read through a physics textbook several times before taking this class. I should be prepared. So why am I getting Fs on the tests!? 

At this point, AP Physics more or less shoves the entire curriculum It doesn't matter whether you understand physics or not, what does matter is whether you know how to use Algorithm A to solve Problem B. It's absurdly stupid and void of educational value.

Naturally, all of this has been stressing me out a lot to the point where I'm oversleeping and fatigued. So yeah. no free time. Well, I did have the time to write this wall of text, but that wasn't much.



Creatively, I've been in a major slump (haha second time I've said that). I've still got a lot of stuff I want to do, but every second of time has been filled up by various affairs. Let's count the stuff I want to try out, stupid things included:

-Make good art the best if possible
--painting, mixed mediums, realistic art, realistic cartoon art, cartoon art with brush linework, coloring, inking, good anatomy (I've gotten the hang of the general picture, but I need more practice for more variations), different perspectives, negative space/vector art, whatever style catches my fancy
-Make a webcomic that people would want to follow+have some art persona or somefink that isn't embarrassing
-Write good stories/a good novel
-Develop a consistent sense of humor
-secretly do fan stuff under a different persona
-Make smooth animations (sakuga style? 2D/3D?)
-Make digital music
-Voice acting (not happening within the century)
-Be cultured (got a start, need to catch up with others)
-Do films with lots of special effects that have meaning (happening never)
-Make indie video games
-Write a comedy musical
-Do a play-by-post forum game
-In general be some innovative creator of entertainment

Ah, pipe dreams~

I've started to write down some stuff though, in a bunch of Google Docs. It's so obvious it hurts to realize it, but I should have started doing this earlier, to fix up my problems with memory. I've also started to keep a diary to keep track of my experiences.

I'm trying to keep track of Internet stuff through RSS feeds now, so I can save some more time by archiving everything and going through it later. I can't follow tumblr, 4chan (though there's always Foolz), and other social networks and fora, though. Sometimes I'm at odds with Internet tracking, because it bombards you with annoying ads (apparently, going to entertainment websites means your demographic consists of gigantic perverts with 9,999 different fetishes) but also records everything you do.  

At this point this journal is getting ridiculously long and I need to sleep, so I'm ending this here. I may add on something else when I feel there's something else I want to write (why can't writing college essays be like this). For now, if anybody has a way to manipulate time, please let me know, because I need more of it. 

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School just started up again

sooooo

I actually have to do work

and focus

and use internet less





aaaaaaaaaaaaw man

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Upd8

1 min read
So my older sister and her boyfriend are visiting for a week

Haha just kidding. They're pretty fun. I'll write more later.
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Can't wait to see this film. It's the movie I've already wanted to see as a kid.

May giant robots haunt Hollywood for the next decade. Unless Michael Bay and shaky cam are involved.

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Random Stuff

4 min read
For the first time, in a long time, I finally have loads of free time to myself.

Naturally, I'm wasting it all reading art tutorials, webcomics, novels, Spacebattles, and watching Youtube instead of actually creating stuff. Curse myself.

Hopefully this summer should bring me plenty of opportunities to try new things.

With that in mind, here's a bunch of random stuff I decided to write about.



Went to a TA meeting yesterday at UC Berkeley and filled out the paperwork for my stipend. Hyped at the money I'm going to get.

There was a lot of pizza and soda and I actually managed to remember the other TAs' names. Well, about 70% of them. It turns out I'm actually some sort of veteran (forgot this was my third year being a TA), so I got to explain the basics of the job to the newbies.

I think Reading for Creative Writing is some sort of beginner's writing class (I don't have much of a clue), so I hope I'll be able to help out the students and give them some tips to flesh out their writing.



Been watching Attack on Titan, and it is fantastic. It is basically an anime Walking Dead except instead of zombies, we get giants, and instead of survivors, we get steampunk Spidermen. I found this show particularly evocative of why I resort to watching Japanese cartoons when I feel like there's nothing to do, and I really wish more shows tried to be like it, instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator and shoving half-completed scripts and animation into viewers' faces.

Plus there are the hilarious works the fanbase is coming up with.




ConceptArt.org is down. I'm a bit sad, since that site was one of my favorite art resources. It actually encouraged me to strive for artistic excellence (not that I actually end up applying what I learn) instead of trying to make something that looks good to people and refusing to improve like what the majority of dA people do.

Hopefully the website should be back up soon. In the meantime, I'm going to go to Ctrl+Paint.



As for my own artistic progress, well, I'm still below mediocre. My doodles still look decent, and I'm incorporating a variety in character design, but they're mostly just profiles of people. I'm still trying to get a hang of drawing people in different positions. I also need to find a way to practice color theory and anatomy and seriously start pushing myself.

I can create lineart in Flash using only and mouse and the brush tool now, but the annoying thing is that I can only do it satisfactorily with a thick line width. My work ends up looking as horrendous as Tom Preston's artwork as a result. Perhaps I need to start using colored outlines, I just need to study up on how to do that properly. Once I can manage that, maybe I can move on to Paint Tool Sai.

Been experimenting with an old Intuos3 tablet I've been borrowing from the tech lab for the past few weeks. It's one of those tablets that feel more like a whiteboard than a piece of paper, but I've been getting used to using it. From what I've done with it, it makes sketching stuff from scratch infinitely easier; I can see why tablets save a lot of time. My sessions with the tablet have also got me acquainted a bit with Photoshop, and I can see why it's such a powerful art program. Unfortunately, I've only gotten to use it during lunch.

If I had enough time and resources, I would probably bang out "average-level" artwork perfectly fine, but as of the moment artwork takes too much time for me to do to justify it being done. I know that artwork requires a lot of perseverance, but when it takes you 8 hours to draw a lineart with only a mouse, it's hard not to be discouraged.



Ava's Demon kickstarter is up! Hooray!



 Co-creator of Oculus Rift killed by some prick today.

Sometimes the fact that we're so self-centered makes me so mad at the world. Unfortunately nothing can be done about that any time soon, so it's up to us to redeem ourselves.


 

And that is it for now.
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