With this year being the 20th anniversary of Final Fantasy VII, I used one of my projects in printmaking last spring to pay homage to Mr. Lash Blast by Covergirl Jenova. The assignment was drypoint etching. We had to work the plate gradually, pulling prints as we went. I didn't really make good use of …
It was like 2AM and I had been checking short Japanese compositions on Blackboard, explaining in words that もってくる and もっていく are not interchangeable, and that I think it's weird that many people seemingly use "take" and "bring" interchangeably in English. What a jumble of words, I thought, and deciding that pictures would make things …
The Beginning This little furball came to live with my family near the end of the year 2000. I don't remember now if he first started coming to our apartment in November, or if that's when he stayed there for good. Either way, at first, we thought he was really old because he was dirty …
It's time to slowly reveal the products of this spring's adventures in printmaking. Woo! I'd shown my warm-up linocut letterforms before, but I hadn't finished the J at that point. When I did, I hand-printed these letters again to practice registration (aligning the paper to the plate properly) because I figured that would be a …
A week ago I accidentally published my draft of The Air Moon Chapter 5 Part 2 in a fit of sleepiness. I immediately changed its status back to "draft" thinking that I could "unpublish" it, so to speak, but it only half worked; the post did become unavailable to the general public, but when I …
Sorry if anyone following the blog got the draft version of this in their email; I was sleepy and accidentally hit "Publish" instead of "Save Draft." ^o^; That version hadn't been edited for clarity, and was missing the last two pages of this chapter. I wanted to hurry up and finish but things kept popping …
The first four months of 2017 were all over the place. I was pretty tired being both graduate student and part-time faculty. It still seems a bit funny to me that this is what I've ended up doing. Teaching Japanese while studying Art Education. I was trying to get away from gray areas and here …
I spent my winter break preparing to teach Japanese 1020 at my university. As an Education major it amuses me that I can't teach at most grade schools yet, as that requires state certification, but I'm being allowed to teach Japanese at the college level. Well, it is Elementary Japanese, but still. Of course, having …
Japanese text of the lyrics available at Rock Lyric. There is one minor difference between what's sung and what's written there, namely that where the lyrics say 「心の中」(kokoro no uchi) what's actually sung is 「心の中心」(kokoro no chuushin). The meaning doesn't change much; kokoro no uchi would be figuratively "one's mind" whereas kokoro no chuushin would be …
In late November, with only two of four sculpture projects completed, I struggled to make a semi-autobiographical portrait bust in clay. I've gotten better at thinking in three dimensions, and despite being quite familiar with my own face, this was quite the toughie until I rolled out a slab of clay and literally draped it …
Warped Frost 