Monthly Archives: August 2004

Education and Career, Lucacentric

Get my learn on

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My third and last year of school at the Institute of Design begins tomorrow morning. I am both sad and happy about this. Sad because my life of unemployed leisure will be disrupted, and happy because it’s my final year and because really I genuinely enjoy learning new things. I am not apt to retain much with my memory in the current sieve-like state that it’s in, but at least I kind of feel smart when I learn and understand things, however temporary the feeling lasts.

Here’s my class schedule. The semester is divided up into two seven-week sessions.

A–session schedule
  8am-noon 2pm-6pm 6:30pm-9:30pm
M Research and Demo Comm Des Workshop  
T      
W     Structured Planning
R Research and Demo   Business Frameworks
F      
B–session schedule
  8am-noon 2pm-6pm 6:30pm-9:30pm
M Research and Demo Comm Des Workshop  
T     New Product Definition
W      
R Research and Demo   Comm Planning
F      

It doesn’t really look like a heavy load, but I’m sure I’ll be tearing out my short stubbly hair by the end of week 3. The major question is what my demo project will end up being, as that is presumably what will be taking up most of my time. I will probably know more by the end of class tomorrow.

I intend to treat the rest of my classes like roller coaster rides; that is, relax and try to have fun. And try not to projectile vomit afterwards, but go ahead if it makes you feel better. That kind of thing.

The Creative Process

Can’t stop the rock

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I’ve just written the most offensive script I have ever written, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I have written this script with the intention of drawing it (it’s about four pages long) and submitting it to an anthology whose works are thematically linked by their questionable tastefulness. I have decided to challenge myself to meet these stringent admissions standards in order to accomplish the goals of

  1. getting my first comics work published, and more importantly
  2. drawing a complete story, which I have never done.

Naturally, it is an intimidating process. But after months of writer’s block I’ve banged out a story. It’s topical, it’s got some satirical zing, and various groups are likely to find it insulting. It may be too complicated for a novice like myself to draw, but I’m not too worried about that. The thing that I keep thinking about, which is keeping me awake, is what would happen if the thing got published. What if I got loads of hate mail from offended groups? Would any parodied celebrities come after me with lawyers? Would the subject matter turn off mainstream companies who might otherwise consider me as a writer? Would having such an object in my past affect relations with some future employer? For god’s sake, what would happen if I ran for President?

I’m jumping the gun here, thinking about this. For one, I still need to submit my script and have it be accepted. I need to successfully draw the thing by deadline, which would be a fancy trick considering school starts up in a day or two. And if my work is found publishable, I am free to use a pseudonym. And even if I don’t, hey, maybe people aren’t as easily offended as I think they are. It’s possible I’m vastly overestimating my capacity for tastelessness.

Nevertheless, all this keeps running through my head. Does this happen every time or just during the first one?

Metariffic

All-new, all-similar

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At this writing I have gone live with The Lucubus Version 6.0. This revision entails a drastic change in layout philosophy (goodbye, nested tables; hello divs and CSS) as well as a change in engine (Blogger is out; WordPress is in). The site is still in a tweaking stage; the three-column layout breaks when one clicks on the comment link, to name one of many glitches in need of repair.

In addition, the transition from HTML 4.0 to XHTML has left my archives strewn with code that does not validate properly. I am gradually going to go back through my archives fixing code and categorizing posts (only about six hundred or so) . I will also gradually implement some neat PHP tricks that I’ve picked up along the way.

Why did I bother redesigning the site after two years of relative dormancy? One reason is optimism: if I’m not sick of looking at the site, maybe I’ll feel more inclined to post. The other major reason is I wanted to experiment with CSS as a layout strategy and not just a fancy way to mark up text. After all, that’s the way our founding fathers in the W3C envisioned the interweb.

Comments are open. Feedback is welcome. Not that I have any regular visitors at this point, but all you people doing a web search for “hentai” and coming here in droves only to find it is merely ALT text for an image which doesn’t even show tentacles, let alone tentacles raping anybody – well, maybe you’ll be interested in the new look.