I went through my favs today and de-faved a bunch of stuff that I thought was pretty but a) don't really think is pretty anymore or b) the artist has moved on and gotten better. And then I looked at some of MY old art... and the stuff I wrote with the deviations. omg. OMG. i was such a pretentious brat! DX How embarassing.

Sometimes I wish I'd gone to college for Art instead of Computer Science. xD I love my college. I like programming just fine (and actually, I venture to say I might be better at it than at drawing), but I never actually realized that art was my passion.

Now I look at my stuff and I look at other people, who dramatically improved in art school... and I just have this wish to know how good I might have been if I'd gone. Y'know? It's sad that all I have the time for now are hour-long sketches.

BUT THEN AGAIN. If I'd gone to art school I'd have missed all my geek jokes and my stupid XKCD shirts. Geesh! What a choice!

Tomorrow (today) I'll be helping out in the department showing baby freshmen around. I love showing baby freshmen around. They're so lost... and adorable! <3

Even though I haven't grown an inch in the past two years, they all somehow seem so small. <3 <3 <3

My parents left for home yesterday. I miss them already, but I miss my boyfriend (fiance?) more. Stupid Australia! Why do you have to be so far away? D:

OH WHICH REMINDS ME

I got engaged last month! :3 OMG.

I'm still reading them.

Other than that... not much. Lots of homework that requires me to write code on VIM. I hate writing code on VIM. The VIM copy paste system is one of the worst ones I've seen, ever. But I'll write it and LIKE it... because I gotta xD

I think the reason this journal never gets updated is because I don't really have all that much to say.

I'm out of clothes hangars for right now. xD So a wishlist!


Force FX lightsaber (blue, preferably used)
Brown Jedi robes ((in cm) 138 nape-feet, 42.5 shoulder width, 171 knuckle-to-knuckle across back, 89.5/97.5 bust/hips.)
Small harp
The Skillful Huntsman: Visual Development of a Grimm Tale at Art Center College of Design (book)
How to draw Star Wars, Bonnie Burton (book)
The Art of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (book)
Tryst, by Elswyth Thane (book)
Art of Matt Stawicki (book)
The Land of Far-Beyond, Hollow Tree House by Enid Blyton (book)
The Last Unicorn (book) (Peter S. Beagle)
Dragons of Spring Dawning (poster), Matt Stawicki
Revelation (poster), Matt Stawicki
Jason Chan, Painter sketch (a download) ([link])


There. :3

By the way, Thanksgiving was great. I went sleighriding. And read a stackful of badly written romance novels. Like chocolate, just worse.

So I couldn't play the Force Unleashed on PC, and the 360 is being hogged by my two housemates.

And I was pretty peeved. I mean... this game is out for the little itty bitty handheld PSP. If my PC couldn't handle it, I'd suck it up or get a new laptop, but it's not even going to come out for it. So I spent time Googling reasons why, and I was pretty surprised that a lot of people were blaming piracy for the downward slide of PC games. (Not Force Unleashed, they gave a different reason for that.)

I don't know about y'all, but ever since I came to America, I haven't bought a single non-original game. I was a complete pirate back in my old Malaysian days, and somehow just being in America made me go straight, and I sort of figured out why.

If you're going to count how many people have pirated your game and compare them to your game sales, it only seems fair to take into account who can even BUY your game to begin with, right?

For instance, I'm sure we all agree that there's a limit to the amount of money we'd spend on a game. I'm from Malaysia, and there are very nearly no game stores that sell a good selection of original games. They all sell pirated ware - sometimes right next to the original stuff, and when you see the price difference, it would make a game developer go pirate.

What about online? Let's say I want to buy Halo 2 for PC, a game that's been out ages and ages and ages, and I can't find it in a local store. So I hop on to eBay Malaysia, and the cheapest Halo 2 I can find is, umm... RM 70.00 including shipping.

Well, that's kinda nasty. I tried the international version too, but with shipping and all, it all rounded to about the same thing. We earn the same as an American, just in our currency. That's not to take into account that most games only come out in Malaysia about a month or six after they come out in the USA, and I don't exactly think that my country's alone in this whole small-currency-large-shipping-costs thing.

So now you're asking your potential customers to wait six months so that they can dish out 70 bucks apiece for a game... as opposed to 4 bucks for a pirated game now? It's just not a reasonable expectation. I don't know how hot the Master Chief is under that suit, but I could eat for a week on what it takes to find out.

And are we still trying to count on these people NOT to pirate your software, or not to buy the pirated versions? I'm sorry! Maybe I'm a little cynical, but I buy the original versions if I think them reasonable, and 70 bucks isn't! Now that I'm earning US currency, it's not half as bad, but at home, that's just nasty!

I'm a college student in America studying Computer Science, and I know barely anyone who doesn't get their games the legal way, or who consistently pirates games. Are we even sure we're clamping down on the right market here? Are we even sure we SHOULD be clamping down, instead of simply selling your stuff to people at rates they can afford?

If we really wanted to stop piracy, maybe we should stop putting people into situations where it's become a pirate or don't play at all!

I'm not sure how to fix this. But I think trying to fix it is a long sight better than just saying "oh, so much piracy in world! I not release my game for PC!" because then all you're doing is making a bunch of people mad.

So I'm taking a very basic drawing class, and I'm just about realizing that I'm actually, actually, really BAD at art! I'm horrible at it! My shadowing is bad, I have urges to outline things, I still don't know how to make a big place into a solid shade of gray, I miss colour, and I don't have a clue how to highlight anything.

I'm just LOST!

There goes about four years of ego building, lol. xDDD

Also, I'm sick.


EDIT: xDxD Awww, thanks y'all. But I think I didn't phrase it properly - what I meant was that I'm really lacking in the real basic-basics of art, because I've always just jumped straight into things and ignored stuff. I mean; I know if light comes from here, a shadow is cast here, but I don't know that the light reflects back off the floor. And I know to put a saturated shade into skin colour to make it more authentic... but I only know it because I figured it out after several years of drawing sallow-skinned people. It's like being able to do Calculus (which I can), and finding out you're not really very good at adding and subtracting (which I'm NOT xD).

So... I'm pretty glad I'm in the class. The teacher is sweet, and I'm not very thin-skinned with crit.

If I always did it my way, I'd never ever learn how not to do it my way.