Power Hour(s): Spring Finals Shenanigans Part 2... or not?

Spring Finals Shenanigans Part 2

I worked on my microanalysis for over ten hours straight in the library yesterday and I did not get up to a single shenanigan.

Unless you count a little Facebooking, a little texting, a little staring at the weather radar and trying to decipher if there actually was going to be a tornado again. (There wasn't.)

Like, seriously, I didn't really do anything goofy or shenanigan-like. For ten hours. And I was even there with my friends.

Ten hours.

I'm not sure whether to be proud or disappointed.

I mean, if I was there for ten hours, then obviously I really needed to get some work done, so I really didn't have time to goof off and whatnot...

You know, it's nice that I could actually sit down and work without throwing a mental temper tantrum for once. I don't know if it was the right time, the right place, the right pressure, or what, but for once, I didn't have that "I DON'T WANNA!!!" voice screaming in my head.

So... no big shenanigans from my part, but I heard there were plenty of shenanigans happening downstairs on the first floor. Since the library has not one but two basements and it was going to be open all night for finals week anyway, people were allowed to go there for shelter from the tornado we were afraid would happen. They were allowed to bring their pets. So everybody trying to study on the first floor apparently had to deal with loud children and barking dogs, and they were not happy about it.

Luckily, no tornado happened last night, so everybody was able to go along their merry way.

Two New Pages - Inked!

Hey, y'all! Guess what- I'm alive! And to make up for my prolonged radio silence, I've got two new pages of my graphic novel project to show you.

The resolution looks really crummy, for some sad reason. Just pretend it's really pretty.

A lot of things went wrong with the inking on these two pages. Shaky hands, globby ink, pens that wouldn't work on downstrokes, tracing the wrong lines, smudged ink, failed attempts to draw people in profile, attempts to be artistic that just looked dumb...

Like I said, just pretend it's really pretty! It looked really, really awesome before I inked it, I promise. All things considered, the art doesn't look too bad.

The new character who appears in the bottom-right panel is the Scarlet Pimpernel, a character from Baroness Orczy's novel of the same name. I based his design off of Douglas Sills' portrayal of the character in the 1997 musical based on the book.

I just noticed that the backgrounds got much less detailed on the second page. Whoops!

My partner was having to crop the panels in order to make them fit on the page in InDesign, so I started using roughly the same margins she does. Margins are important. 

Yeah, in the middle of the uppermost page, I drew a rectangle and wrote "just put a black rectangle here." Because... come on. Much more easily done on a computer.

Hope you enjoyed! I made the awful realization today that this week is Dead Week and finals start next week. Actually, my finals start on Thursday because my French final is split over two days. I am still sort of freaking out about this realization. I'll try to keep posting (I mean, I'll definitely be working on this graphic novel project, so I ought to have something to show you every day), but if this post is followed by more radio silence, you'll know why.

Also, NaNoWriMo is over. I gave up on finishing my novel within the month, because November is just too busy a month for your average college student, but I do plan to finish it when I can. I really can't wait to get back to it. For now, I'll just celebrate breaking my record for number of words written! I'll get it next year!

And if not, I'll definitely get it the year after that, because then I'll be out of college and hopefully working at a grownup job and hopefully it won't have homework.

Oh, look! It appears I'm rambling again, as I often do on this blog. I had intended to end the post with the paragraph that started "Hope you enjoyed!" but then I just kept remembering things I wanted to tell you all. It's been a while since my last post, and I have things to share!

For example, I'm twenty-one now! Yaaaayyyy!

The reason I'm sitting here in the library writing this right now is that the fire alarm went off in my dorm about quarter past midnight and I decided that, if I was going to not be allowed to go to bed, I would try to get some work done. And I did. A little. I was going to get more work done, but then I decided I should write a blog post instead. It is this kind of reasoning that gets me behind on every single project I ever do.

Okay. Wrapping it up now. For real. Thanks for reading! Signing off.

Journey to the Center of the Library

I'm at the library again because this is my third home (my first being my dorm room and my second being the marching band field), and tonight I thought I'd be responsible and try to do some research earlier than I absolutely had to for a deadline. So I logged onto a library computer, plugged "World War I" into the catalog search engine, and scrolled through the results until I came to an interesting-looking diary of a solider in World War I.

See, normally I just do my research on the Internet, but my professor's encouraging us to use books, and I'm already at the library, so why not? Books are easier to cite than websites are, anyway.

I snapped a pic of the book's location using my iPhone and then strolled over to the chart by the elevator that tells which floor contains which section of books. My book was located on LL.

"LL?" I thought to myself. "Lower Level? The basement?"

In my two years and two months at this university, I'd never descended into the basement of the library. I knew it was where people went to hide during tornadoes. I'd heard rumors that it was where the Satanist books were kept. I'd never seen it for myself, though. In fact, I wasn't even entirely sure how to get there.

After poking around a few doors and stairwells, I finally found a staircase leading down from the first floor. There were no signs, and the stairs looked quite... well...

A picture's worth a thousand words, isn't it?



...gross. That's not at all what I'm accustomed to seeing at our library. Most areas of our library are clean and quite attractive, often with comfy or cool-looking furniture.

But in the spirit of adventure (and finding my book), I descended. And I was quite alarmed by what I found when I opened the door at the bottom.

The basement is... dismal, to say the least. Dark, dingy, even a bit creepy, and with lots of personal work spaces. I guess the basement is where you go if you really don't want to be disturbed. There were two people down there when I entered. One of them looked up at me as if he were shocked to see another human being.

One thing that interested me very much about the basement was this:

We have these emergency phones scattered across campus, always marked with a blue light so one can find it at night. However, they're typically located on the streets and in parking garages... not in the library. I also kept seeing signs stating that this area was under surveillance and that any inappropriate behavior would be reported to the campus police. Now, I didn't actually see any cameras, but the signs and emergency phone made me wonder exactly what has gone on down in the basement in years past. Couples on a study break? Satanic rituals?

The other floors of the library are similar to the basement in that they have aisle after aisle of books, but the floors are actually tiled, there aren't so many clunky ducts (there could have been a spy hanging out in those things for all I knew), there are actually ceilings and bright lights, and the shelves aren't so dull and depressing.

I walked down one aisle that was so dark I couldn't read the titles of the books. I had to whip out my phone and use the new flashlight feature in the control center. Good thing I updated to iOS 7, eh?

Once I turned a corner and found this:

Peek-a-boo.

I didn't actually see any Satanist literature while I was down there. I did, however, see books from just about every religion known to man. Also all the British history books. And the Russian history books. Philosophy, psychology...

Of course, there are some books that will probably never, ever be read-- not because they look boring, but because of this:

Did that really seem like the best place to put a bookshelf?

I never actually found the book I was looking for. I went to the shelf on which it should have been waiting for me, but it was strangely absent. I didn't find any helpful books down there, unfortunately. Feeling that I had wasted enough time, I ascended back to the civilized world, feeling a little unsettled but definitely more enlightened for having finally seen the library's basement.

During my ascent, I ran into this:

I very much approve of decoration on the walls, and I can't wait to see how the art students responsible for the designs finish their project.

I wasn't, however, quite prepared for this:

The air smelled like whatever it is that makes painter's tape sticky. I'm not sure if it's better or worse than the smell of lonely basement books.

Investigation in the Library

I was in the library tonight because I had some reading to do and I can never seem to concentrate in my own bedroom. It was dull, dull stuff tonight- an article on literary theory, and a very badly-written one at that.

(Seriously. Typo-ridden and far too wordy with certain parts feeling so out of place that I was starting to wonder if the writer was desperate to reach a minimum page count. This passes for scholarly writing? I was offended by it. And it was, like, 35 Microsoft Word pages long. It took me more than two hours to read. Argh.)

The first floor in our library is classified as the "noisy" floor. There's a coffee shop that provides the sound of coffee grinders and blenders as background noise, while the students are permitted to talk and use cell phones. So I'm used to having a constant drone of noise while I study.

However, there's always the oddball noise. Like someone dropping their stuff, a funny ringtone, shouts of jubilation or despair-- stuff that distracts you for a moment before you move on with your life.

Tonight I was quite distracted by an oddball noise that wouldn't stop. Somebody was clicking their mouse almost constantly for the two hours I was there. Rapid-fire clicking. Clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick.

Someone was playing a game, I assumed. But as the hours ticked by and the clicking didn't seem to cease, I grew more and more curious as to what type of game required such constant clicking. And at one point my article got so boring that I decided to get up and investigate.

I strolled nonchalantly out of my aisle of computers, pretending I was on my way to the printer or trash can while I was really zeroing in on the source of the clicking noise. It was coming from another aisle of computers a few aisles away from my own. I strolled over that way, walking past the aisles and looking out of the corner of my eye until I found the offender.

He looked up as I passed, but I kept on walking like I had better things to do than care about him and his infernal clicking. But the moment he returned to his game, I glanced back to see what was on his computer screen.

The guy was playing Starcraft.

I think I've played StarCraft fewer than ten times in my life, but I'm fairly sure you can play it without clicking constantly. I mean, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but the guy seemed a little overenthusiastic. I wondered why his little Terran forces didn't just throw their hands up and quit under the pressure of his constant nagging. I also wondered how the guy's pointer finger hadn't fallen off yet.

So, mystery solved, I sat down at my computer once more and returned to my boring-as-insert-your-favorite-expletive-here article. The clicking continued on into the night, but instead of being distracted by it, I merely rolled my eyes as each new salvo of clicks began. Good luck, little Terran dudes.