memories

More travels through packrat-ism. In about 1994 I worked with a very diverse staff of Respiratory Therapists. One of the women was a Russian, and I prevailed upon her to write my name, “Joseph” in Cyrillic. It looks pretty cool.

And now that I’ve scanned it, I’ve one less piece of paper! Yay for trimming and slimming.

Albeit one page at a time.

Well, that last one was a terrible resemblance, as pointed out by Tom Bickle.

This one is rather better, I think. This actually looks like my professor. I even have some proof of that.

I used to draw a lot in his class, psychology is a great subject for drawings. Drawings to illustrate my notes, or just to doodle. After all, I think my major at the time was Fine Art, well, that was my declared major, inasmuch as a Community College student can have a major.

I enjoyed that class. I liked to make arguments in that class. The Prof argued that we overused the word “love” so much as to negate its meaning. We “love” the symphony, we “love” our car, etc. I argued that love still had meaning as a word, because from context we can tell what people mean by what they say when they say they love something.

Well, I love being able to share my meandering and rambling thoughts on this blog.

Can you tell that that’s different from when I say that I love Leah?

Oh, I’m getting pretty deep now.

It’s striking to me that a class I took for a few months 17 years ago has left such vivid memories.

And here I am disgorging them in a medium that did not exist when I had the memories originally.

Little more than a scribble. The mustache is an afterthought. Not a great likeness.

I can tell the year because of the mustache, and the lab coat.

Maybe it’s not obvious to you it’s a lab coat, but it’s sure obvious to me.

This was for the graphic design class in 1988 that I did so poorly, as I recounted here. The idea was to have some rich textures to show off. This one was done with india ink, washes, and black and white colored pencils. I still quite like this texture.

Something like this makes me think of Creative Commons licenses and how I am not really using them. Every time I look at them I am not quite sure how to license my work. I really don’t want to give all my stuff the same license, and doing it on a case by case basis seems too hard to me.

I guess metadata is hard.

On a downbeat note, it seems that flickr will transition all their users to yahoo membership accounts in 2006. I hate that idea. I lost my “artlung” account on yahoo.com several years ago and I can’t log in because I gave them a fake DOB way back in 1997 or so. If I can’t have “artlung” as a username and you don’t provide me with a mechanism to retrieve it or even talk to a human being about what it might make to do that, then your service is stupid.

More on the conversion here: Top 5. Do I have to log in via Yahoo!?

Please note that we will be migrating all independent Flickr accounts to Yahoo!’s network in 2006. At that time, if you have not done so already, you will be asked to create a Yahoo! ID (or link your account to your Yahoo! ID if you already have one) in order to continue using your account. We’ll provide further details about the merge as the date approaches.

In the post “One Less Password” on flickr blog, Stewart Butterfield indicated nothing of the sort.

I appreciate the service flickr provides, and I don’t want to migrate away from it, but I will if they make me do this. I’m preparing for this eventuality.

Part of my fandom of Japanese culture was learning, which is to say trying to learn the hiragana and katakana alphabets. So while these vehicles are interesting and well rendered, what I find more interesting is my own careful choice of names.

Jek is the overarching name of the zaibatsu I invented for these pieces. Think of it like Mitsubishi or Sony. Then, the actual vehicles are named Platypus and Amenbo. Amenbo is Japanese for “pond-skater,” apparently from some language reference on page 191. While Platypus is from the english word, and has been broken up into it’s syllables: pa-ra-te-pu-se. These phonemes, or maybe they’re syllables, then get looked up to their katakana equivalents.

Today I’m back to work, and things are pretty good.

There’s lots to say but no time to say it.

Hope you’re all having a great day.

I don’t remember this guy’s name. I would have drawn this on a slow night at California Hospital. He was a midwestern guy, and a supervisor. I think he was primarily a neonatal therapist, though he ended up as a night shift boss.

It’s kind of strange how I got the job there. I interviewed with the head of the department and never heard back. I reached out a few times in the next two weeks to try and contact someone and never got a satisfactory answer.

About 4 weeks later I got a call for a second interview with the night shift supervisor. It was for a noc position, so it was scheduled for about 10:00pm or so. So I took the opportunity to prepare by going to Twoheys for (breakfast? dinner?) [i found a picture of their sign on flickr]. I was still in Orange County so it was a stretch.

Getting the gig at Cal was the thing that allowed me to move out of the OC and into L.A., specifically to Koreatown.

That was a good deal. A big step in my transition to Angeleno. Yeah, that’s what many of L.A.’s denizens call themselves.

It’s funny, I consider myself a San Diegan and an Angeleno. Can I have dual citizenship?

Or are they mutually exclusive?

It’s been a long day. Days off coming up here with family in town. I worked my butt off today on a project for work. Badass HTML and CSS done right and done hard. But I’ve got no energy for anything else. I worked a ten hour day today and let non-regular employment stuff go by the wayside. Tomorrow I catch up.

This was drawn as part of my brainstorming a Christmas card in the run up to the first Gulf War. It’s supposed to have a melancholy feel. I think given that the tank is sort of unrecognizable, it has a science fictional quality.

Interesting to me that 14 years later and we’re dealing with Iraq and desert warfare again.

I was pretty naive and hopeful that we would not have war happen for Gulf War I, and Gulf War II for that matter. I do wish we had managed and would manage the occupation of Iraq better. We seem to have made a lot of mistakes along the way and taken our eye off the ball in terms of the actual, active threats provided by nimble terrorist groups. Of course I’m not even mentioning the threat of other nuclear governments.

Feh. Politics. Go read TMV if you want politics, I don’t have the energy to write about it here.

In 1987, the year I graduated High School, I did this poster for Halloween. I’m still proud of this one. It’s a big mishmash of characters, it made an impression on those who came by, it was fun to do.

Related: pumpkin designs.

Nine designs for pumpkins. I believe I did these in anticipation of Halloween, 1987. On paper, and with Micron Pigma type pens. I like ‘em.

My favorite thing about these is that I can tell I showed them to my grandma, who declared that Pumpkin Idea 5 looked like he “doesn’t have good sense.”

I always enjoyed Halloween particularly making decorations such as banners and posters. I also like giving out candy. My usual thing is to demand that kids say “Trick or Treat”—that’s the ritual. My pet peeve is that kids come to the door while one batch of kids is getting served and just want candy. Sorry, the transaction is this: you have to be in costume (or do your best to be in costume); you have to say “Trick or Treat;” the candygiver has to dole out some candy and say something about your costume (or hassle you about your advanced age and sucky costume); and you have to say “Thank You” (well, you don’t have to, but it’s good Halloween manners.

This is my favorite of the inky colored pieces I have. I’ve said before I don’t have that many pieces in color. Ones in black and white and red are among the strongest pieces though. I like the clarity of this one, decisive line work. This one is not with spray paint though, it’s with a red ink I had at the time.

There was an art store, I can’t remember the name, on Cass street in Pacific Beach and I would ride my bike there and browse their stuff. One day on clearance I found this set of inks, semi-clear, and on sale that I really liked. I think I spent $12 on them, which was a lot for me at the time. Darned if remembering them doesn’t make me want to get another set!

I think the material it was most like is this Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bombay India Inks. It’s not the brand it was, but it looks similar. The one I had also had a dropper in the cap. At the time I would carry the inks around wherever I went. Not that I used them, but I have a packrat mentality.

It’s a pity I don’t have more pieces done with those inks. Perhaps when I get a chance I’ll get a set and do some work. I have much more fun with a brush than with a pen. And not just a “pen brush,” but a real brush and india ink can be great.

Oh, and I’m not even mentioning the charcoal I used here. I bought that for a drawing class I took at Mesa which I totally failed to get it together for. But I did have some fun with the various charcoals there.

Note to myself: One thing, this has been retouched a bit more than the other “spraypaint” items because there was something on the back of this image that showed through. I’ve done some Photoshopping out of that ghost of an image.