Wandering with the Wind...

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Hey there. I haven't posted for a week - hell, that was a long time. Well apparently things happen and there can be many interesting things over a mere set of 7 days; first thing, this Fri was Good Friday. It so dang saved me lol. School was getting over my head.

TGIF indeed.

Well yup on Fri my parents and I went over to Taka Art Friend - you know, that huge art shop that looks like art and smells like art and feels like art and leaves you wandering round and round not knowing what to buy - and bought Charcoal for today's art lesson, together with the Charcoal fixative that, when you add them together, cost a bomb.

Ok it wasn't just the charcoal and all that. Basically what I bought was this thick black classic lead holder that was about 11 bucks, two 5,6 mm 2B graphite leads, and Daler Rowney charcoal and colourless fixative. I was so darn excited! There were soooooo many professional stuff that you can't buy out of a regular popular book shop. I bet artists would be over the moon if you could - I guess that's what makes these stuff...well, professional.

So lesson learnt: Professional = rare and hard to get + costs a bomb + looks pretty.

Ultimate lol. Society's getting cheap nowadays, in some aspects at least.

Anyway, did you guys realize these days my posts have been getting more and more bland? It's just words and words and emo ranting. Yea, sry to say, school makes me emo all day long. I'm an 80-sth% introvert to start with. So now I'm gonna start posting...PICTURES!

They're done by me, of course, and some of them do suck. But at least having a few random graphics may do the job. Just a lil note, I sketched these things using the Bamboo art tablet that my dad exchanged (with my mom's windows XP package which proved no use in the end), on the com, so it's pixels and you shouldn't expect to get the nice papery feel. It looks a bit like pen sketching though. The tablet's good enough for a com drawing tool.

Better than the mouse, that I can't even draw a decent curve with. Maybe we should use graphmatica to draw curves next time you know? They give you perfect, accurate, precise curves.

Nah, just joking. I would never mix those sort of rigid deliberate things with art. Terrible combination you know, unless you're trying to achieve this firm abstract style of expression that is, basically, your own choice.

Okay, so here goes.
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1) 毎日のコーヒー

Description: I drew this out of utter randomness when I was thinking of relaxation, and simplicity, and...you know, some peace from all the bustle in our daily lives. Everybody wants that peace. The title here means Everyday's Coffee, or Daily Coffee or something, cuz I can't really think of anything else really. The whole idea of drinking coffee beside the fireplace feels a little cliche and over-used, as in it's just the sort of typical American two-store-house-white-picket-fence sort of life that doesn't appeal to my senses at all. But at least the simplicity of that sort of life is something we're sure we don't have right now.

Maybe things could really be better you know, when people realizes what good it does when we don't try to make everything as complicated as we can.

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2) Alone

Description: I have to admit I'm a Naruto fanatic, if there is such a word (sry my vocab sense got a bit jumbled up lately). This pic's a combi of my emoing and Naruto obsession, which, not too surprisingly, made quite a perfect combination; there are indeed many sad and emo scenes in Naruto for all I know. Let's not talk about the philosophical ones - though I love them all the same.

It just feels so...calmingly, peacefully, soothingly sad when the characters are alone in some vast, lonely wilderness. Like Gaara in the desert facing the setting sun, or Naruto sitting on the windblown cliff at night thinking about Yuukimaru. It's nice, you know, when you're alone and you get all the personal time quietly to yourself; I do that a lot in my inner world anyway, in my world it's just me, me alone, and this whole huge empty and lonely nature all around with wind everywhere you go. It doesn't happen in the real world though, both thankfully and sadly. Lols I dunno which to choose. Sometimes having companions can save your heart from all the burdens too, but it depends on what type of companions you get. The naruto type is practically out of this world, and what we get here, in reality, is honestly a shade lighter than desired.

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Haiz, I'm a loner.
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And I'm proud of it.

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3) 仲間

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4) Sunset Wanderer

Description: Right, this one is emo. I dunno, the strokes and shading were too hard and dark cuz I couldn't really regulate and distribute the toning very well on the tablet, they were all pixels, remember? Well yea. But the whole idea is there. The girl in some moor looking at the setting sun with leaves all around in the wind - just some sort of thing I do in my world.

Yup, and in this pic I tried a new perspective. From bottom to up, it's pretty common in all the mangas and some other pics, but for me it's my first time trying it and achieving something actually close to the effect. It's pretty challenging; you've got to get all the proportions relatively correct and incorporate the whole down-to-up travelling view meanwhile.

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One good thing about this perspective is that it opens up to the sky and leads the viewers' attention to what's above in your setting. Effective in showing loneliness, thought and some other things I guess.

5) Anatomy Proportions

Description: Just having fun with anatomy. These guidelines are pretty interesting to draw postures with; right now I'm no longer using the main part of Davinci's anatomy guidelines, which is the circles-for-joints thing, cuz it's all too time-consuming and messy if you do that for every single joint you can find. But the main structures are still there. Panyu said she recognized my msn avatar as self-drawn just because of the guidelines - whew, sharp artist, but being observant is something very important for artists after all, if you want to create better works. She's good at these things. I still have a long way to go before I can even catch up with her proportion sense.

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Oh, and she doesn't learn anatomy btw. I'm planning on searching up and knowing more about the muscular and skeletal systems, so that I know how to draw the structure of the body next time - well, just a basic view through everything. I'm not going into as much detail as the organs and all that; maybe someday I would, if I have the heart and time to, but for now...just the things that form the structure will do.

6) Sunset Wanderer (Colour)

Description: It's my first time trying the Corel Painter Essentials 4 software that came with the tablet, and apparently I suck at making things look nice on my first try, but here it is. I liked the colour of the sun and sky though. Especially the sun. I didn't want a sunset that was too warm in this picture - the sky needed a little bit of gray, and the sun had to be some sort of cold yellow for the lonely ambience. I spent a lot of time finding the correct shade and colour for the sun, and the dress was a torture to paint. Perhaps I could start adding the reflections at the outlines later on, after I've gotten myself a bit more familiar with the software, but for now that's all I could do with that time I got on Friday. It was a refreshing experience.

I need to work on the cloak, if you even know it's a cloak (which I doubt you can).

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Okay yup that's all for the art sharing. Time to go on with a brief account of the happenings today...I'm tired and emo now, so I'll just skip through all of them...

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Art lesson at 11am, we drew the structure and basic shadings for 4 bottles and 3 apples (hell lot of things to be drawn in only 3 lessons), with charcoal, that was so darn hard to manipulate for first-timers, but it was relatively fun for the try.

Actually the whole thing's pretty interesting; charcoal prevents you from going into detail, cuz it's almost impossible for you to stroke out everything fine and nice with those thick chunks of sooty things, so you have to look at the big picture all the time. Endro lent me her kneaded eraser since I forgot to bring mine.

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Okay so then after that we were released 1 hour late, which was 15 minutes early for our usual dismissal date, cuz the teacher "kicked" us out of his house cuz we wanted to continue on with our charcoal drawing. Nobody seemed to want to stop so in the end he had to like...take away our boards and force us to stop. Lols.

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Charcoal = Dead Drop Charmer?

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Question Mark.

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Yup so when we were going to the LRT station Endro made Mao eat this weird...uh, red bean green tea bread that she bought from Bread Talk. Yea poor Mao. Apparently it tasted horrible, or so he says. I didn't eat it btw.

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*Laughs at Mao*

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Okay so the three of us ate lunch together at CCK, and then Mao left for his math class, and Endro and I went to the cck library to look for some books to read. I wanted to borrow this sketching and architecture book, but then I had fines to pay in my card, and my Ez-link was out of money, so yea. In the end I just browsed through and left. Endro borrowed everything about the universe and dark matter and sirius. Yup, I could have, but apparently that wasn't the main point of my book-search today.

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Basically that's it, dad and I had a moot over whether I should take grade 8 piano or not, and he got really burned up after that. I dunno, sometimes I just don't want to do certain things. I'm sick of being made to do what I don't want to do - it's okay for the academic things, cuz everyone goes through them anyway, and it's important for survival later on in life. But doing some other things unnecessarily, it really puts me off.

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We can't be everyone you see who're good in certain ways. There're too many ppl in the world with too many talents and wondrous abilities. You can't have all that. For example, Obama's a world leader, can you be one?

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I'm a loner to speak the truth. I do not like being in conspicuous positions which a person gets installed in if he was to be a leader; I like having my own time and own space, and it's best if I'm not given too much attention but still be recognized gradually overtime. The best is adequate attention. It gives you all you need, sufficient, nothing more, and nothing less.

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Sometimes, if not always in the tangled diversity of viewpoints, merely being who you are is enough to make you unique. That's why people are different. If everyone was all-rounded and good at everything, academy, arts, sports, anything you can name, then what's the meaning in everything?

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The world would be bland if there was no diversity. We would see the same creatures walk the earth cuz we have exactly the same looks and same intelligence and a same world in our heart. We would hear the same sounds and see the same things and feel the same energies without having different interpretations of their expressions. How would it be, when the whole world is the same everywhere you go? There would be no self. No identity. Cuz everyone is you, and you are everyone.

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In some way we can call it unity, in a robotic, mechanized world. But that unity holds no meaning as a unity such as teamwork. It has no depth, no meaning, no binding process which holds all the different natures together. It's pure, transparent and clear, but it is bereft of variety and colour.

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I had a dream yesterday. I dreamt of the end of the world, when the volcanoes erupted in this farmland thing, and a meteorite crashed somewhere round the other side of the globe, another was about to crash into the sun, and all the people were freaking out. It was chaos. Then some girl with long black hair came walking up to us holding a black box, and she brought us into the 5th dimension somehow. Everything outside the portal we were in was light. Bright, 5th dimensional light.

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Haiz...I think I'm being a little too emo nowadays. Even through all these years I'm still trying to run from reality. It's most likely what makes up my emoness, not that I don't like being emo, since it gives me the time and space to think, but sometimes...I wish I could be somehow a little more...normal in the heart. I'm not saying I'm different, cuz I'm not - it's just that sometimes I would really wonder why I'm never really seriously attracted to all those happy light-hearted things that this world is filled with at times. I don't like happy songs, I don't like songs like "love story" and all that which many in 207 are obsessed with, and I don't like socializing events.
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The Eng and Lit teachers (names undisclosed for privacy purposes) both said that Az, Cher and I were dark. Maybe in some way we are, though Az claims she's not, I'm emo, but Cher's ultimately just a ball of fun, it's kinda funny that people would just label others for what they judge on first sight. They don't know us much yet. Things are not as simple as you think they are.

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I'll make it clear; 207's an awesome class, I really love it, it's the best class ever in my entire schooling life from p1 to now. I doubt I would ever get to another class as good as this.

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The only reason why the three of us don't appear to be socializing is because we like to hang around together, that's all. I understand that cliques are very unwelcome and teachers do try their best to make everyone come together, but sometimes there can be personal preferences to be respected. Teachers don't know all of their colleagues that well too. There's got to be certain people you want to hang out more with, and others that you don't.

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Seriously, we're just not the popular type, nothing else. We don't hold grudges against anything, anyone in 207, we're just hanging around being who we are and sharing experiences with people we choose to open up to.

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Well yea, now that the declaration's over, I would just say...I just like the feeling of being alone, thinking, trapped in metaphysics, being gone and away in my own world. I'm used to it. Sadness is a nice feeling; it reminds me of nature, when it's raining in a forest and you're beside the pond or river. It's a deep emotion, one which makes you know who you are and what you're composed of.

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Everyone's sadness is different. We have different reasons to be sad, different degrees of it, and different...feelings towards the emotion. It makes people understand each other.

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Haiz okay I guess I should sign off now. Too much ranting. It makes me even more emo now. I should go, cya, night!

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PS: I got shortlisted to attend the interview session next Wed for the Sapporo immersion prog thingy. They chose 6 from RGS. I wonder whether I'll get in.

And sorry for this terrible line-paragraphing, cuz the blogger suddenly couldn't space everything out properly and things appeared in chunks, so I had to take the pain to divide them with these retarded lines.

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~~~*Played with the winds at 9.44pm*~~~

Aurinya blogged at 7:53 PM

Roaming the Winds

Thursday, April 2, 2009

2nd April 2009 (Thursday)

Oh my that was another huge gap between my posts, wasn't it?

Well yea I have been kept busy this whole week. The guitar juniors had to go and help out at our seniors' SYF rehearsal on Monday, so I ended up reaching home at 8.30pm, that's 15 min later than my latest record. And Tuesday I had guitar, wed was that whole moelc ceremony thing to meet the jap buddies, and today...well, today was interesting. XD

Apparently I met my buddy yesterday during the ceremony and started hosting her from 7 o'clock today morn. We met at the bus stop pretty early; Akiho and Nana came like way before 7, at around 6.38am if I'm not wrong, and Wan Li and I over-estimated the time we needed on 190 so we reached early too. Jia Le was late btw. We waited for her for almost half an hour, or twenty minutes, to be more exact. Haiz.

My bud's name's Sawada Nana. She's a pretty interesting girl - Az feels that she acts cute, well she does, but to me it's perfectly fine since a bright buddy is much better than one of those very shy and "dao" ones in some not-so-fortunate classes. A bright girl for a bright class like 207. I find it really fitting; Minyi-tachi got themselves very very entertained by helping me entertain Nana, and seriously, I have to confess...

It's my first time trying some kids' hand games other than Concentration.

Funny, eh? Nana taught us a new game that I suppose she plays a lot in Japan. Minyi knows about it though - so maybe it's pretty widespread after all. I'm just an airhead when it comes to these things (or as Minyi called Amelia, vacuum-head).

And most importantly, Nana can speak almost perfect english. It's even got this British accent (I guess it's a side-effect from attending International School for some years)! She has absolutely no problem with the heavy Japanese-accented pronounciations that's supposed to trouble her tongue! Wow, ain't it?

Overall comments?

Nice.

First of all a buddy of an ideal personality gave the whole thing a better start, and then there's Minyi's help and 207's hyperactiveness, and also Ms Wong's lil sparks of humour in her geog class. Too bad some other teachers didn't manage to impress as much. Nana remarked that Chem was boring. I so totally agree with her.

So totally agree. Poor Nana!

And us...!

Okies I think that's about all I have to say for the Jap Immersion thing for now, since it hasn't even ended. I may elaborate further tomorrow after the prog's done. XD

Kay. So I think before I go to sleep...I'll just state a few things I've been pondering over the past few days. They've been staying in my head and sometimes the answer just seems so close, but yet they just slip away damn fast too. I don't know how to put it, really.

Well here they are. Firstly, Julia from guitar told me about this group of scientists who managed to teleport a very small object about 10 metres from its original position, with the use of mechanics - so keep away from parapsychology for now. And then there's chem lesson for the past few days, I didn't understand a lot of it, but at least some parts (the visual parts with all the atom and molecule models), are quite comprehensible, if there is such a word.

Apparently, there's such a thing called electrostatic force or something which holds the electrons in their shells; and also there's this process called metallic bonding whereby the attraction between positive ions and negative electrons (sea of electrons) holds the whole molecule - and material - together. So if we find a way to negate this energy interaction, to cancel out its effects, or, putting it simply, cutting out the connections, we can break the material of which that molecule is comprised. Literally, breaking it.

So probably those group of scientists managed to use this method to sort of dismantle the molecules and atoms, and then send them through the space to a location 10 metres away, and reassemble them again. The dismantling and reassembling part doesn't seem to hold much of a problem to current human technological advancement; but the main prob's how they sent the atoms through the space. They said used machines, but how?

Is it by reflection, or energy waves, or electromagnetic fields like how the telekinetic psychics do it etc?

For telekinesis, it is a psychic skill (actually not really psychic, everyone can do that at times) which makes use of the electromagnetic fields of the psychic, and visual areas of the brain, to send electromagnetic waves towards the target to either repel or attract it. So in truth it isn't so "magical" in a sense as people mistake it to be. The whole thing's not as simple as staring at the target and making it move in designated directions that your mind sets. It's about manipulating what's between us - the energy, the forcefields, to move the target without making any physical response. Just like underground work, hidden, unseen, but potent all the same.

One simple example is the force push; when u put ur hands in-front of something very light, like tissue paper, and then pump a lot of energy into ur hands without touching the tissue, you will notice it moves a little bit in a jerky action. That's because of the force your exerts doesn't just end at your fingertips. It crosses the space between you and your target.

And everybody does that btw, force push is one of the most widespread telekinetic traces in the world. Everyone does it though we may not have noticed.

So in truth what makes the psychics so special, is only that they have found a way to amplify the efficiency and effects of the methods and applied them on adequate targets; and on more extreme cases, they have managed to open up to a little more of their minds than what we're using now. That's all.

Simple as that. Nothing horrifying.

And this teleportation thing brings me to another question I've been pondering. Again, psychics. This time it is about "Mind over Matter", the famous bending spoon activity. Apparently in some newspaper a couple of years ago was shown the reports of some young Chinese psychics, who bent a spoon, and she commented that it was easy once you concentrate deep enough. The main problem here is, what do they concentrate on? Surely they don't just try to melt the metal with their "concentrated" stare.

What I think is that through intense visualizing, which they may have taken in under "concentration", and certain ways of channeling of their psi and ki (such as Reiki exercises), they manage to affect the internal mechanisms of the spoon. So far all the spoons that have been (or known to be) bent were metal; so it links me back to metallic bonding. Why are metals easier to work with?

One possible theory for the bending spoons thing is that instead of totally negating the electrostatic attraction in the atoms, which results in breaking the object, they weaken the connections so as to manipulate the object easier than what it would've taken originally. Another is that maybe they subdued certain atoms with certain properties in the molecules, and brought out in contrast the one with the property they needed to achieve the desired outcomes. Metals can be ductile, remember? So maybe in the process of bending the spoon, they actually made the molecules of the object having "flexibility" as their main property, and diminished all the other unwanted properties.

Come to think of it, being psychic really may not mean being stronger than normal. Perhaps it is just being faster than others in finding a way to weaken your targets in comparison, that you appear stronger instead.

Okay I think I've babbled enough. Anyway these are just my thoughts - they are not backed up with any evidence, no reports, no info, no nothin', so just ignore all these if you're the sort of deep-rooted person not interested in air talk. Just my theories, my ideas. My Math tuition teacher encourages us to do this - recording our thoughts just in case someday...you know, something goes wrong, and really wrong...

Nah, I'm not planning that far yet.

Actually I believe it's pretty near.

Okay I have a feeling you don't know what I'm talking about. Gud night then, I gtg, tomorrow there's 3 hours of art! Whoopeee! At least Nana won't have to sit through boring classes that drone on and on. Cya.

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~~~*Played with the winds at 10.34pm*~~~

Aurinya blogged at 9:44 PM

Roaming the Winds