Month: December 2003

Oh my, if people didn’t remind me about it, I wouldn’t have realized that today is the last day of 2003. Granted that I had not gone through new year’s eve since I started to write LJs, I had a minor dilemma that I need to resolve. It is a tradition that before the end of every year I would write a review of the entire year into my physical journal, the kind that you use pencil and paper and remains permenant and is immune to server crashes… you know what I mean.

I had the thought of doing it this year on my LJ. On one hand, there are quite a few memorable moments that’s worth sharing, and on the other hand I found a large chunk of what I want to write should remain discreet for its harmful contents. So, as a remedy, I’ll write part of this year end review here and its entirety into the physical version. Hmm. Here goes.

I think that the most unique thing about this year is that while no new significant friendship was formed this year, I’m happy that those that started lasted, unlike the ones that I had back in OCC or further back through bad times that shall remain obscure to my memory for life.

It is rather strange, also, that I had the privilege to take a whole year of Japanese out of sheer interest. It consolidated my fansub watching as a weekly habit, and boarden my horizon a bit so that I wouldn’t be ashamed to step foot in Japan in the future. Oh well, by the time I had the money to go back, I’d probably be so rusted in Japanese that I’d revert to trying to speaking english by spelling everything in katakana – and look like an idiot to the spirit of a true gaijin.

I’m not sure if it’s a worthy topic, but I’m financially in heavy debt, and this year I’ve spent considerable time just worrying about what I should do after I get out of college. There’s always what I WANT to do, what I CAN do, and the option to compete for a fast food job with 16 year old high school kids. I’m not sure if it’s a good term to describe it, but I feel *sticky* for being in a situation like this – not entirely trapped, but nonetheless bound by some measure so that I cannot do everything I wanted to do as before.

On the game and art department, Ronin become my first “commercial” success – at least I’m reassured that I have not lost it when it comes to game design, and so a game career is not completely out of my hand… however, I’m totally slumping on the art department. Despite my increasing collection of art books, I’m not seeing improvement, and it’s taking longer and longer to churn out just average art. Not to mention that I haven’t done one CG save for the CAE T-shirt… I’ve been away from life drawing for too long and the effect shows. I really should stick to my plan and go back to OCC after I graduate to take more life drawing classes. The new art department should be built by now and I’ve heard it looks really nice.

As for disappointments – AX sucked this year. Everyone either staffed or were simply not there. Besides the typical book hunting, there wasn’t much that was worth my ticket. The cosplaying scene seems somewhat lacking (or there’s just too many Naruto fans), the Arcade too expensive, and this year’s Masquerade really, really sucked – I’m not asking for anything professional, but God there has to be a better MC than the one they had for that night.

Hmm, I actually did not make a wish list last year. Actually, I do have one, but as the year progresses it reached a rather depressing and disppointing ending, so it’s not even worth mentioning. As for the coming year, my biggest wish/goal would be to secure a solid career that pays my debt, and hopefully be able to start regularly working on a webcomic. I think I’ll drop the silly “get a date” wish this year. I have known that I have no capacity for relationships for years and still I had the childish hope that someday, something would turn out. It has been the source of sorrow and grief for many years in the past, and now that I have more important things to think about, hopefully I can push the whole idea off my head for awhile.

I was trying to draw something cute for Christmas, but I ended up drawing a gun toting gambit (from X-Men). Hoepfully I’ll be able to come up with something kawaii when I wake up.

Maybe.

Go to google.com and try searching for the following phrases and hit “I’m feeling lucky”:

“miserable failure”
“weapons of mass destruction”
“french military victories”

And I’m getting close to it. Nothing good is coming out of my pencil for the better half of the last few days, and you get the urge to pick up a knife and stab stuff – fleshy stuff especially welcomed, to get some feeling back on my hands. According to schedule, I need to finish one drawing a day on average, and even then I’d be a couple of drawing late to make the Jan. 9 deadline, and the artist’s block is not helping.

After about 2 years of not formatting my computer, its stability is finally breaking down. So after picking off my brother’s old TV card and CD burner, I thought I’d get some blank CDs and there it was, a whole rack of video cards, none of them on sale.

Bought one on a whim anyway.

I felt guilty about it all the way back. I didn’t price compare, I didn’t look online for a better deal, I didn’t even check the reviews of the card before I bought it. It violates every single rule of a smart consumer, and I pay the price for it: the card definitely isn’t worth its dollar. Going to return it tomorrow and probably get a better one, now that my wallet is open.

Good news is, Christmas presents flowed in. This year, my entire extended family seems to adapt my very nuclear family’s tradition. All presents come in the form of cold cash, which is just what I needed.

I think it’s a fine tradition that should be preached across the globe. Forget about gift wraps, a stack of useless sweaters and keepsakes, the cards that gets thrown away and the greetings that goes in one ear and out the other. Everyone needs a little love. Money is the best gesture of love.

Oh, lots of swearing ahead. You’ve been warned. Whoops, you already saw the title? Too late.

Gotta make this quick because I was going to take three days to make these Chinese New Year designs and it’s going to take a week, if not more. I’m stuck at home working for the most part, driving myself insane. This isn’t any better than the finals week.

But anyway, to the point. I need to find a couple of Chinese font to complete my design. So I pulled out Google and look for “Chinese Font Download”.

I found a site that lists the search result for “Chinese Font Download”.

Oh, it gets better. One of the more plusible links brings you to a site that lists the top 15 sites for font downloads.

Fortunately, the search-to-search links stop there, but imagine going through bullshit like this every other link when you are just trying to find a site with Chinese fonts, any site, I don’t care if they sell the fonts for 50 bucks a piece. If I want to find a site that sells Chinese fonts, give me a site that sells Chinese fonts, not a site that searches for other sites that searches for some other sites where your search topic eventually gets lost in a web of poorly linked searches.

This is one of the fine examples of the massive, useless portion of the internet that’s just there to cause frustration today.

That, and the pop up ads, and the spam.

Thank god for Mozilla Firebird.

LOTR – With the badger scene restored

試験はおわないさ。。。

看到趙靈兒的icon, 真令人想買仙劍奇俠傳2…

Of course, I might have screw up my spelling/grammar on the two phrases above. I’m willing to take the flame on the ground that I haven’t used these two languages in awhile and I need an excuse for not beating myself up after screwing up two of my finals so triumphantly.

One final starts at 8:00 am in the morning, and it’s a class where I rarely attended lecture and a good chunk of the grade depends on the finals. So I thought, waking up at 5 and studying should be reasonable, except… there’s this one thing about the alarm clock from that gets me every time, is that only one tiny dot indicates whether the alarm is on, and the knob for setting the alarm is the sliding type that is really hard to see and every morning you’ll have to switch it off to turn off the alarm, so chances are I usually forget to set the alarm before I got to sleep.

So, I woke up at 7:45 this morning. And don’t forget folks, it’s peak morning traffic hour on the 405 at this time. Luckily, I practiced taking the 73 and am quite certain of the way to campus from there, which saved me some travel time, but I’m still there at 8:30 without a trace of knowledge from that class, because I didn’t study for it. I failed miserably doing anything that involves new knowledge since the midterm and also didn’t do too well on the old ones either because of the time pressure.

Later on in the day, my final project for another class is being evaluated, and I have the genius to decide to add a feature 30 minutes before the evaluation, which basically screws the entire system over and shows everything that can go WRONG with my project. As it only lasts 15 minutes, I have no time to redeem myself and I’m certain the professor got off on a very bad note showing how I wasn’t able to do anything with my program.

Now, let me be honest for a moment – I’ve never been stressed during finals before. At most, I’d take about 2 hours per class studying the materials and I’d usually come out on top on all of the exams. This is the first time where I screwed up and I know it, and that just makes me feel… irritated, soaked with that feeling where I want to go back in time and change things. Of course, I firmly believed that whatever happened happened and couldn’t have happened any other way, but still… all I need are passing grades. I’m not even sure I’ll be getting that. And for a student trying to graduate, that’s some very bad news.

So, last night we had a very, very small scale Karaoke party at Brian’s place. There was beer involved (although I didn’t think anyone actually got drunk) and I ended up making up a lot of parody lyrics (all of which inappropriate for children under the age of 17), because I really am starting to get tired of the same song list. Hopefully I didn’t offend anyone. Apology in advance? I swear, it has to be the beer that I didn’t drink that made me do it.

But that’s minor compared to HAPPY BIRTHDAY SIDDDDDDD =D

Just in case you don’t remember what this reckus is about, here’s a link that might help:
secksual compatibility quiz aftermath

EDIT: I realized how wrong the grammar in that short phrase is. Whatever…
EDITx2: Sorry that I can’t do a more full fledged picture like the one I did for Cindy. Finals… ;____;