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Thursday, July 14th, 2011
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10:50 am - Bad hunches about myself
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Did this happen to you before? Sometimes, I just don't want to do something. At first, it seems illogical, sometimes there's something I really need to do, often it's something required by work, studies or family. Something I'm expected
to do, and to do it well. If anyone ever asked me why I don't want to do that, I couldn't say anything better than " I just don't feel like it. "; often, such an answer would be inacceptable, as the stuff needs to get done, I'm the only
one who can and has the responsibility to do it.
Then the moment comes, and I have to do that. And, invariably, it goes wrong, and it's all my fault.
Maybe I can predict this sort of things. Maybe I can tell when something bad will happen, that some effort will be best not done than done. But I can't foretell what, or how, or what I will do wrong.
That sucks. What am I supposed to do when I get those hunches? Straight refuse to do that? On what grounds? How do I justify my decision not to carry out on those requirements? What if an " I'm afraid I'll screw this one up " just won't
do? What if I can't just declare myself incompetent?
current mood:  indescribable
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Monday, June 20th, 2011
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2:39 pm - Oh, the coincidence...
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After I finish with this - rather longer than I thought - storyline about the kids from Sueños del Sur going to Japan to visit their family, I'll update their cast pages, with redrawn pictures and further information.
Nobody cares about bits like height and weight anyways, but I just found out quite a coincidence. In March 1995, Rosa Martínez was 13 years old, weighted 41 kg, and was 152 cm tall.
I just found out that the main character of certain not-quite-well-known anime was also 13 years old, 41 kg, and 152 cm. Karin Kokubu, from "Ai To Yuuki No Pig Girl Tonde Buurin".
And she also wears a ribbon on her hair. Nice to know, nice to know.
current mood:  silly
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 15th, 2011
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3:27 pm - Google Image Search from image.
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Played with it a bit.
Tried it with one of my comics, and it yielded me some cartoon pictures, including one of the K-On! girls in a bad mood.
Tried it with another one (this image), and it returned photographs in the snow during Blue Hour.
Tried it with a nyoron yonkoma comic, and it recognized it as one, giving me only nyoron pictures as results.
Tried it with a drawing of a cute girl lying over grass, it returned mostly pictures of girls in a grass background, with various degrees of cuteness.
Tried it with a black and white drawing of a face, it returned black and white drawings of faces.
Tried it with a photograph, it didn't recognize the setting but returned pictures with a similar color configuration.
Tried it with a mostly green image, it returned pictures of people in sports fields.
Tried it with a screenshot from Hare Hare Yukai (The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya) and recognized it perfectly.
Tried it with a poster from Alphonse Mucha, and also recognized it.
Tried it with various screenshot from Atari 8-bit, and returned screenshots and presentations that had similar colors, none of them Atari 8-bit screenshots.
Tried it with a wallpaper I found on some site, and it found it, also returning many pictures from the same road in the picture.
current mood:  amused
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
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3:09 pm - My thoughts about K-On!
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| Thursday, May 12th, 2011
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9:57 pm - Art Nouveau
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I saw it first while I was in high school and I couldn't explain myself the dated aesthetics of the old libraries and museums in Santiago, of books and postcards dating from around 1890 to 1910.
It was just now that I knew how that style was named. When I saw it on the Web, it immediately reminded me of the old Elfwood gallery and online community. It filled my mind with elves, turn of the century imagery, and old european posters.
But I didn't realize that it had a lot in common with old Japanese woodcut art. Ukiyo-e, they call it. Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec admired the aesthetics of Japanese art, and became inspired by it. Soon, other followed suit. It's called Art Nouveau because of an art gallery that featured modern art since 1895. It's also called Jugendstill because of a german magazine. And it was also called Style Mucha in honor of the great master of this kind of art, the Czech artist Alphonse Mucha.
In Chile, Alejandro Fauré was the master of this style, and much of his artwork shaped the turn of the century. The style was also popular in Brasil, Uruguay and Argentine.
Soon after it became popular in Europe, Art Nouveau also became popular in Japan, where it was featured in many postcards, thus closing the circle.
TVTropes says that Art Nouveau is dead. Well, maybe mainstream dead, but the style is still alive on the Web. Just search for "Art Nouveau" in DeviantArt.
I want to make an Art Nouveau-inspired poster. I have a drawing tablet, so all I need is to find some time to do it. Alas, I have to finish homework (hence why I skilled this week's Sueños del Sur). Gotta go.
current mood:  artistic
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4:23 am - 25 Essential Expressions Challenge
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That's a meme on DeviantArt. Draw your character(s) having those 25 facial expressions.
Guess what's the one expression I have no clue on how to make. Win a prize.
current mood:  confused
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| Saturday, May 7th, 2011
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11:59 pm - Fanfics
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I fail at them.
Yet somehow I found myself writing at least three of them.
One talks about another light music club at Sakuragaoka University (in the K-On! universe). It's been some years since the events in K-On! canon, the name of Azusa Nakano is a legend, and the new girls learn about the old band and try to emulate their success.
Another one (also about K-On!) features the Hokago Tea Time band being brought into The Real world by a genie who granted a wish from an otaku that was hopelessly in love with Azusa Nakano. The otaku got arrested and Azu-nyan travelled to her town only to find that it wasn't quite as she knew it, that her high-school was now an elementary school's old building turned into a museum and public library, and that K-On! was a massively successful manga and anime talking about their lives. Then the other girls find Azusa at the music room, which was a shrine for all things K-On!. The next day, they play as a band at the school in front of thousands of K-On! fans, etc.
The third one is about some other series. Let's sum it up by the last line of it, spoken by one of the two guest stars...:
- " Look at me! I just had to serve as an interpreter and teach: advanced Japanese, basic social skills, verbal language, earthly carbon-based life, and human moral values and abstract concepts, to what are essentially artificial interpreters sent by two completely different, immensely powerful, extraterrestrial megaminds, that haven't had any clue on how to communicate to each other in millenia! One of them is immensely curious about how physical matter could have developed intelligence. The other one had trouble understanding what was being alive, dead or an inanimate object. And my intelligence is not even above the average human! Can you imagine the headache that it all caused me? Give me a break, please! I'm going home to sleep and not wake up in weeks! "
Yes. That bad. I'm not publishing that crap, I assure you.
The worst part? I live under the illusion that Sueños del Sur is not quite that bad...
current mood:  blank
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, April 20th, 2011
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10:52 am - I came to a rather bad realization today.
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All the time I've been publishing Sueños del Sur in webcomics form, there was a small and subtle but very important artwork detail that I got horribly wrong.
Most characters don't quite look their age.
This shows particularly badly with the girls; they look invariably older than they're supposed to be. Their body proportions are more mature. Mid-to-late teens, at the very least, instead of mid-to-EARLY teens.
Why did I commit that error? Well, Sueños del Sur spans many years, and as most characters are in their teens by then, they are supposed to go through puberty and grow up, some becoming adults by the end of the story. If I look at my old notebooks, I can see such change happening. Yet I got used to draw them all as they looked like in 1997-1998, and that's not the same physical appearance they have in 1994-1995.
Of course, your mileage may vary. Girls are maturing earlier than before. The average 12 years old chilean girl in 2007-2011 looks different than the average 12 years old chilean girl in 1990-1996. On the other hand, certain characters are supposed to look older (or younger) than their age, which further complicates things.
I should have had that in mind when I decided to put this work into a webcomic...
current mood:  embarrassed
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| Friday, April 8th, 2011
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1:09 am - Links to other webcomics
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But before that, an announcement: I'm back to university, after a year-long hiatus. Informatics Engineering, second year. Sans a lot of math classes that I already took elsewhere.
Now that I'm back to university, I found myself with time that I can't spend in my personal projects because I have to pay attention to class while at a computer lab and the labs don't have the required tools (namely, GIMP and Linux).
So, for some reason I found myself with some time that I can spend in catching up on webcomics and finding new ones.
From those I used to read before 2005, only the following webcomics remain in my bookmarks:
- College Roomies from Hell!!!, of course
- Megatokyo
- Count your Sheep
- Wapsi Square
- Minus
Also, FAUB, but it stopped updating in July 2009, in the middle of what seems to be an important part of the story...
Since then, I found other webcomics, some good, some bad, some unspeakable. I'm not linking to certain one I found that, while often funny, it also contains certain material I find objectionable.
I found the following ones to be worth linking:
- The Princess Planet, a puntastic webcomic about princesses and strange fantasy creatures.
- Chanpuru Saga, it's only 100 strips long and the art quality is substandard, but I found it funny.
I also took some time to read Wayward Sons, that comic Keenspot constantly keeps pimping on ComicGenesis's ads. It's a quick read despite the big words and creatures. Laconically, the gods from ancient mythology are aliens, grecorroman versus egyptian/mesopotamian. The artwork is great, but the story is not the kind I like to read, so I'm not linking to it.
I still have a long way before catching up with all these.
current mood:  curious
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, February 10th, 2011
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11:26 pm - I have a drawing tablet!
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A 8x6 MousePen Genius, to be exact. Not a pro tablet, but I don't care.
I must confess that I didn't buy it for Sueños del Sur. I have other plans in mind. Still, I'll try to draw at least one complete Sueños del Sur comic at the tablet. I say "try", because as a cheap tablet, getting used to draw on it takes a while.
As an example, I'll leave you a drawing I did of - who else - Rosa Martinez:
Advantages of using a drawing tablet:- Accuracy. The lines go where I want and are drawn however I want.
- It is easier to correct mistakes.
- It saves me having to scan and clean.
- I hope that, when I learn to draw well on the tablet, my comics will be delivered sooner.
- In theory, I can draw with any pen I want.
- I can perfectly straight lines and use all the GIMP tools.
Disadvantages and problems using the tablet:- The 8x6 MousePen Genius brings a wireless mouse that's completely useless. It's better to keep the mouse you already own.
- The tablet isn't forgiving. Errors are much more evident. I have a tendency to draw curves in one direction and not the opposite one, and it costs me more to draw the same curve at the opposite side.
- The style I had developed during all these yearsa was 100% based on quickly drawing by hand and subsequent cleaning. With the tablet, I can not afford to do that.
- As it's a cheap one, it has no built-in screen. I have to draw looking at the computer screen, which is not natural.
- GIMP gets a bit dizzy with the tablet. Pressing a button on the toolbar activates another, clicking on a color palette gets the color copied, and so on. I read in other websites that the version of GIMP for Windows has many more gaffes.
- Any drawing tool, physical or digital, will not make you a good artist.
- Time flies while I'm at the computer.
- I have to be on the computer to draw.
- The configuration of this tablet in Linux is still complicated. I had to follow the steps in a HOWTO for Ubuntu and do a bit of black magic with the xorg settings to make it work in Debian Squeeze.
On a different note, Google Translate has a lot of trouble with negative verbs. Since my Japanese isn't quite good, I must rely on machine translation to do certain dialogue for Sueños del Sur. However, I found many errors in machine translation, so I have to double check them against a dictionary. Also, if I want to write on a nonstandard japanese dialect, I have to write it myself. But I bet there are a lot of errors in the japanese text I write for Sueños del Sur.
But I say this because, well, I originally wrote this post in Spanish. I machine-translated it to English and found the same problems with negatives. For example, it said that "I bought the tablet for Sueños del Sur". I didn't.
Also, if disaster doesn't come my way, tomorrow is the last day at work before vacations. I earned a bonus, so this time I have money to go for another trip. I don't know if I can afford to go to Valdivia as I originally planned, but I want to go back to Concepción, this time for more than two days.
current mood: artistic
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Sunday, October 10th, 2010
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3:45 pm
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Rare Akuma is like Street Fighter's Gouki on pots.
current mood: puny
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(comment on this)
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7:11 am - Random stuff.
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COSE SEGRETE:
At some random time of the day, a public phone starts ringing. A random man walks to the phone booth and listens to whoever is calling the phone but doesn't say anything. He just listens to the message and then promptly hangs up and walks away like nothing happened.
FORGOTTEN:
Is there any collective noun in english that describes valuable belongings (not trash) that you left somewhere in your house and then forgot you had them until you found them during a major cleaning or while looking for something else?
current mood: curious
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(comment on this)
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| Friday, May 21st, 2010
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11:41 pm - I just saw the most lame, incompetent ad ever.
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It shows a mockup of a Windows Explorer window, in English, being scanned for viruses, then showing a Windows Security Alert window.
Well, thanks for scanning my system for viruses, except:
1. I'm browsing with Google Chrome, not Internet Explorer.
2. My desktop is in Spanish, and has a completely different look and feel.
3. This is a Linux box.
Nice try, idiots.
current mood: amused
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
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1:22 am - So... uh...
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| Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
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2:05 pm
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| Monday, March 1st, 2010
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2:32 pm - Devastation
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It was worse than I thought. Every minute more news are known, and the outlook gets more and more grim.
To make it short, the whole coast, at least from Pichilemu to Tirúa, suffered massive devastation from tsunamis.
Constitución, the place I chose as inspiration for the fictional setting of Sueños del Sur, suffered massive damage. There alone at least 300 people died, which is very likely the highest death toll on a single city because of the earthquake. The first floor of many three-story buildings collapsed to the ground. Water reached the second floor of many houses, ate some completely, uprooted and moved many others around many meters. A supermarket was sacked and put on fire by vandals. Constitución's hospital is operative but damaged and may be closed.
Iloca was probably the most devastated town in the coast. "Was" because it's practically gone. People escaped to the hills and saw how the sea destroyed everything on its path, leaving them all homeless.
Talca, east from Constitución and the region's capital, suffered heavy damage, mostly on old adobe and brickwork houses, many of historical significance. Its hospital is collapsed and patients have been evacuated.
Talcahuano is a major port at Bío-Bío river. It got hit by a large tsunami, which destroyed a lot of houses, and washed large fishing ships up to three kilometers ashore. Nearby Concepción has all three bridges over the Bío-Bío river unusable.
Dichato is 80% destroyed after being hit by many large waves.
Even Santiago, far from the epicenter didn't get it easy. When I posted that last post I didn't know about "Villa Olímpica", the blocks of buildings built in 1962 near the National Stadium in Ñuñoa. They got hit hard, many will likely be demolished. There's another interesting spot, "Ciudad Empresarial" (Enterprises City) in Huechuraba, home of many corporative buildings. At least three are collapsed and unusable.
Major problems at affected places are distribution of basic goods, including water, electricity and oil; communications (broken bridges and roads; also phone and internet connectivity); health (campaign hospitals).
And security, since there are many dickheads eager to sack houses and markets. Grrr.
Current death toll: 723. And nearly 2 million people have been affected by the earthquake and tsunamis.
current mood:  sad
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Sunday, February 28th, 2010
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2:20 pm - Massive Earthquake
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First of all, my family is all OK. No damage at all where I live, I've only seen bad stuff happen on the news as of now.
For some unknown reason I'm worried about how things go in Constitución. Not only it got hit hard by the earthquake (mainly at the old northern corner of the city), but it also got hit by a large wave, that ate some tents at the beach and destroyed many seaside buildings.
Concepción also worries me, because I've been there too, and I missed visiting the port of Talcahuano, which now seems quite devastated.
The news have been rather fidgety on this subject, since the area hit by the earthquake is vast and communications with the center-south and the coast have been difficult.
The death toll figures are still around three digits, which is sad but speaks about our level of earthquake awareness. A similar earthquake in another country would have been much more disastrous, claiming in the order of hundreds of thousands of lives.
The ugly news have been that, contrary to what it could be expected, most collapsed buildings weren't the heavy, ancient adobe or brickwork that's widespread among old, small towns in the central and southern Chile. Instead, these were large, private, sumptuous, expensive blocks of flats, many less than 5 years old, some still being sold. Shameful and suspicious.
By comparison, my house was built by a local charity organization, by government-subsidized basic housing standards, at least 20 years ago. I got a government benefit in order to buy it. All we had were some objects that fell from a shelf. No damage at all. Each of these apartments are nearly as expensive as my block, and these buildings fell like a house of cards.
So yeah, this is my report from La Granja, Santiago, Chile. Now to get more news about the disaster elsewhere...
current mood: scared
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(9 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, February 5th, 2010
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5:17 pm - List of programming skills learned during this year so far:
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- XSLT
- C#
- ASP.NET
- Moving an Umbraco 4.x install to another host.
For that, I've received a cease-and-desist letter from the Government Assembly of the People's Republic of Platapapan, threatening to revoke my honorary citizenship if I keep "flirting with the Dark Side of the Force".
Luckily, today is my last day before a three-week vacation, and the project is over. So, hopefully, in March I'll go back to my full-in-Linux activity.
P.S. Internet access during these three weeks will be iffy... read: if a public library is so kind...
current mood:  relieved
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(1 comment | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
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11:05 am - And today's FAIL award goes to:
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http://www.nibble.be/
They post a lot of quite useful code on their blog, mostly Umbraco and .NET stuff. But they (or the WordPress plugin they use to format C# code) seem to have no freaking idea about correct quotation.
For instance, look at this:
The character to the left of the “1” is U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK. Used as a left one.
The character to the right of the “0” is U+2033 DOUBLE PRIME. Not even a quotation mark!
The correct code should read like this:
With plain U+0022 QUOTATION MARK. Like, ASCII, instead of mis-implemented “cute” quotation marks.
FAIL
current mood:  aggravated
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, January 25th, 2010
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1:42 pm - One-letter variables, and their common usages.
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a.- accumulator, any purpose variable
b.- second accumulator
c.- third accumulator
d.- fourth accumulator (rare). Also, an opaque data container.
often a through d are used together in one to four-dimensional sets.
e.- often the e constant.
f.- often a file reference.
g.- often a graphics context.
h.- often a handle for an external something (for example, a Windows control)
i.- first-level counter
j.- second-level counter
k.- third-level counter. Also, a key from a key-value pair.
l.- fourth-level counter (rare)
i through l are usually used together in nested loops, often while iterating through a matrix
m.- a number - usually used together with n (this goes n, m)
n.- a number. Also, a name.
o.- an object or option list.
p.- a parameter - quite often a search expression
q.- second parameter. Also a SQL query or result handler.
r.- third parameter (rare). Also, a regular expression or database row.
s.- fourth parameter (rare). Also, a string or object.
t.- A time counter. Also, a coordinate axis. Also, a object standing for a template to be filled in.
u.- coordinate axis. Also, an unit.
v.- coordinate axis. Or just a variable.
w.- coordinate axis.
x.- first coordinate axis, often within a graphics context.
y.- second coordinate axis.
z.- third coordinate axis.
current mood: curious
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awake
