Pencils matter.

A bit. My drawing teacher said he traveled all of America searching for the perfect pencil and never found it because pencils aren’t that important. But considering people who draw as a hobby without any sort of basic direction generally draw with HB pencils, there is such thing as a better pencil. (HB Pencils are what we call #2 pencils in school, the same type of graphite is in most mechanical pencils.)

First problem is that HB and other “#H” pencils are gray, not black. This makes most drawings look drab, and filling in negative space never looks consistent. You also end up tearing paper if you try to really fill it in. H stands for hardness, B for blackness. However the scale both includes tone and hardness, so the blackest pencils are also the softest, and the hardest pencils are also the lightest. This is because softer/blacker pencils have a higher percentage of clay in the graphite mixture.

You will see that B-pencils are geared towards artists, and H-Pencils are geared towards engineers – because engineers prefer precision and control, and artists would sacrifice that for depth of color and a higher variety of line darkness and thickness. Softer pencils have more “bounce”. Pushing down harder makes a significant difference in the end result. Hard pencils are generally pretty consistent.

Ditch the fancy stuff.

I only have a few brands and I do have some of the renowned Koh-i-Noor pencils and they are lovely but I’m just as in love with the 6B pencil I got from Micheal’s for $1.60. Ultimately – just make sure you find a hardness that feels right and gives you range.

This is important for artists and writers. After all, many authors used pencils instead of pens.

• Nabokov famously wrote every book in pencil, several times over.
• Steinbeck used about 60 pencils a day. East of Eden is estimated to have required more than 300 pencils to write.
• Vincent Van Gogh insisted on the blackest of pencils and preferred pencils made by Faber.

Recent Pencil Crushes:

Woodless graphite pencils, Zebra “Fat Lead” 2b Mechanical pencil, Any type of graphite that fits in my 2mm mechanical pencils + Graphcube

Moral of the blogpost? A good pencil is like a dog, always loyal and a constant presence. The biggest problem with pencils is that they lay unused. It’s hard not to draw when you have something that belongs in your hand.

Coming Soon: the perfect sketchbook

Wii Fit has been pretty useless for me as far as losing weight (you can tell where I used it a lot because there are a lot more weigh-ins .. I used it daily for a while.) Within those concentrated dots you don’t see that much improvement, except for October, where I distinctly remember losing my appetite, directly related to my cessation of a SSRI medication, and not related to Wii Fit activities. Overall, you do see improvement, because I started eating less in general (probably 1500-2000 cals a day), less at night, avoiding sugar (I seem to have lost my constant craving for it, probably SSRI related), & drinking almost only diet soda. Actually this is the least I’ve weighed since I was 16, probably.

The endurance exercises like running and biking on Wii Fit are waste of time and it doesn’t help you lose weight, or gain muscle. Actually I find that most of Wii Fit is a waste of time, unless you enjoy doing it. (ie, yoga)

Edit: Actually I did increase my muscle mass in my thighs with lunges. However I wasn’t happy because my intention was to lose weight in my thighs. My thighs actually got thicker, not in a bad way, but enough that I got a stretch mark. This upset me and that was the first time I quit doing it. Alot of the exercises are marked incorrectly like this and I wasted alot of time doing things that were not bringing me closer to my goals. (Overall weight loss, definition in arms and stomach area.)

I’m not really a family drama movie type person, but I really enjoyed this one. It flowed really well and just kept getting better. The ending was so and so, a bit unfinished, but I think it suited the story. I’d give this an 9/10.

I love Amy Adams (mostly for Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day and Junebug) so it’s hard for me to hate a movie with her, but wow. The plot for this movie was basically, woman in a relationship travels to ireland to propose to her husband, she meets a dude on the way to help her get to her boyfriend, cheats on her boyfriend, falls in love with random dude, boyfriend proposes to her instead, she says yes, then changes her mind and comes back to Ireland and gets married to random dude who proposes to her like several hours after she comes back to see him. Random. Not romantic at all. Sads.

let the right one in

I liked it. I’ll put it somewhere in my top 20 or something. It reminded me of Naked Lunch and La Dolce Vita. Naked Lunch is my favorite movie and La Dolce Vita is … cute but not really amazing. So it’s somewhere in between. Made me realize that if there was a genre called “medical surrealism” .. It would be my fave.

There’s no right or wrong. We live according to our needs. Yours is a hellish desire to live and to create life. / What’s yours? / To be dead. Stone dead.

“All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do so.”

I remember one time, senior year in high school, when one of my teacher asked me if I had been reading any books lately, I said, yes, I just finished Lolita, and I’m starting a new Nabokov book. I awkwardly added that Vladimir Nabokov was the best writer ever, giggled, and walked away.

This was my second time at Peking Dragon, and I have to say I was pretty impressed. First time I went, I didn’t remember much of what I ate so I didn’t have a very solid opinion. This time, we ordered more. For starters, their brown rice is amazing. Really huge yummy kernels, sticky, easy to eat and didnt taste fatty at all. Then we shared a Peking Lemon Salad. This was really good but a bit overpriced at $9.50 for the small container it came in. Although, the setting is pretty nice and this is an average price for a salad at a restaurant in these parts.

One of my favorite elements of Peking is that they encourage plate sharing. They actually have certain meals that are meant for multiple people. This is, according to them, in Chinese tradition.

Then we had the Peking classic lo mein dish – pretty good, not very meaty but it had a bit of shrimp, chicken and beef. This dish was pretty fatty. They serve some of the best Green tea here. I’ll go so far as to say it is the best green tea in Dana Point.

The tea and the rice were very cheap (a few dollars each) and they are the best part of this restaurant. Although it doesn’t hurt to have a salad or an entree when you are here. I still haven’t tried their soup menu – from the looks of their soup, it might be another of their strengths.

My fortune cookie said I am a food and drink connoisseur, so I thought it would only be appropriate if I wrote a review ;)

Can’t really recommend this movie. It’s not really animation, it’s rotoscoped live action. The plot and the writing was occasionally interesting but overall pretty dull. It was probably too stream of consciousness and too … hipstery. It was definitely original and unique but the pros don’t outweigh the cons. At times it was barely watchable. The 2nd half is better than the 1st half.

I was expecting a good movie because of the fantastic reviews and I did get a really good movie, well worth the price. But I wasn’t expecting for people to go out and say this is the greatest movie ever made. But then again wasn’t Avatar the best movie ever made a while back? I shouldn’t take it so seriously … :)
I felt this movie is far from a great movie. It’s a good movie. At it’s core, it’s a twist movie. A weak narrative that serves only to get you high off surprises, mindless action that lacked the beauty and elegance of the editing, which was probably the most interesting part of the movie. A couple days later, I realized the editing had a bit of a Rashōmon flavor, which, judging from Nolan’s other movies, is his favorite flavor of editing. (Fun fact, before the movie, there was a coke commercial that had music similar to the Rashōmon music.)

The writing? Blah. It wasn’t terrible, but I’m a huge believer in “Show, don’t tell” especially when it comes to movies of the mystical/arcane variety. I felt that too much was told to you. Lines like “We create the world of a dream. We bring a subject into that dream and they fill it with their secrets.” and of course the eloquent – “Dreams within dreams is too unstable.” Too bad this wasn’t a movie about cats.

Last but not least, I really disliked the heist elements.

That’s it.

PS. Memento was better.