Below are the most recent 4 friends' journal entries.

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009
summercomfort	3:26p	China comics website Those of you who follow sushusketches have seen the new china comics updates. Yeah, it's been a while. 4 months, in fact. ^^;;;;   1 month spent dawdling and deciding that I'm leaving LJ and using wordpress + comicpress. (Major reason: obnoxious ads for non-LJ users. Major regret: friendly comment threading and notification). 2 months spent busy with school and also many false starts -- I wanted to draw something about the street life in China, but had difficulty not repeating myself. Then I wanted to draw something about residential communities, but couldn't think of enough to say without explaining old people. And so it wasn't until I was stuck on a plane to Chicago for Thanksgiving that I said, "Hey! let's put the street and the residential community together!" and got the approach and tone figured out. Then I spent 1 month being busy with school again. :/ I spent some of last night and this morning fiddling with the new website for it, which can be found here: http://www.sushux.net/chinacomic/ . It doesn't look amazing, basically just a quick color swap of the original comicpress default theme so that it matches with the rest of my site. I did spend some time trying to make it functional -- I typed up transcripts, so you can search for random words like "gaudy" or "street" or whatever. I categorized each comic into topics of "lifestyle", "objects", "places", and "attitudes", and also tagged commonly appearing things like food. I had a hard time with the navigation, and even now it's not satisfactory. The primary system that wordpress supports is date-based -- calendars and monthly archives. Comicpress adds chapter and storyline support. Since my comic doesn't really have a single narrative, the forward/back and chapter archival setup doesn't really work for me.*   What I wanted as a way to easily navigate to any comic by name, and a way to browse the comics visually.   So on the side bar, there's a "recent comics", but that maxes out at 15, so in a few more comics it will no longer be a complete list. If you click on archive, you can sort of browse through all of the comics. And at the bottom of the comic post, there's a "related comics" -- comics that have the same tag. So hopefully the navigation works out. The next step is designing non-obnoxious navigation buttons so that I can put a set at the top of the comic. Anyway, I'll still cross-post to sushusketches . I'm wondering if you guys have any preference for commenting on LJ versus commenting on the comic. It's not much effort for me to manually mirror any LJ comments onto the website, and then you can get LJ threaded comments and notifications and stuff just like normal... But you should still link to the website itself. yea/nay? Moving forward, I'm quite happy about finally finishing the streets/residential communities comic. I've been struggling with the streets comic for a long time. (In fact, the Buying Stuff comic was a failed attempt). I think I'm about done with the basics of China (maybe one more about restaurants and one more about bathrooms??), and so a new topic may be "stories" -- the anecdotes that some of you have given me. Yay! -------------------- *This is a problem that I see in perry bible fellowship, kate beaton's comics, penny arcade, etc, and no one really resolves it satisfactorily. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 20th, 2009
summercomfort	3:58p	Martial Arts Novels Jono and I are talking of making a role-playing game based on martial arts stories! I'm quite excited! 武侠 Martial arts stories are the fantasy stories of my youth. So instead of Tolkien, I read Jinyong (and some Gulong and Liang Yusheng). Just as fantasy novels evolved from a European tradition of fairy tales and mythology, martial arts novels evolved from a Chinese tradition of swordsmen and outlaw tales. (We can blame 史记, 三侠五义, etc). Unfortunately, I didn't watch many films, partly due to the cost and scarcity, and partly because the ones that I did come in contact with seemed very silly and shallow compared to what I was reading and imagining. To try to generalize wuxia is like trying to generalize fantasy -- is there a way to generalize a genre that includes Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and the Golden Compass? (Not to mention the movie adaptations and spinoffs that develop their own tropes). Can we speak of magic? of medieval settings? Of knighthood and chivalry? Of kingdoms and intrigue? What of the Magical Object or the Rule of Three? What are the equivalents for Wuxia? ( Woo! Xia! ) But yes, this all started because I bought a couple volumes of Heaven Sword, Dragon Sabre comics on Thursday and then Jinghua was asking about western fantasy on Saturday. :D (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 19th, 2009
summercomfort	1:13a	miscellaneous thoughts before bedtime Went to hot pot and board game night at Ed's tonight. They're cool and I want to know them better! We played Small World, which was lots of fun. I really enjoyed the colorful people that you can play while you conquered, and it was straightforward in just the right places (2 steps in a single turn, only one basic way of calculating victory points, 8 rounds, only 5 races to choose from at any given point, and very visual representation of any complications), but also complex in the right places (complex interactions with other players as you figure out which lands to conquer and what they might do on their turn, 20 skills x 14 races = many possible combinations, and the combinations all both fun to imagine but also have in-game relevance -- flying dwarves can conquer any land and get +1 on mine lands, etc). We also played the new Super Mario Bros Wii as a group. It was pretty fun. I think it's a game where me, an utter novice at the entire video game playing enterprise, needs to take some time to practice and explore on my own. But Jono got pretty excited. Especially when he got to wear the penguin suit. What was also interesting was later at home I was talking about how the advanced players were asking me and Jinghua, the n00bs to do things like jump on them, but I couldn't figure out how to time the length and distance of the jump. Jono then commented, "sounds like you haven't mastered the jump skill-atom". I then had to point out that jumping is not a skill-atom. It's a whole skill-organism: just knowing which button to press is just the beginning. Then you have to figure out distance, direction, timing, eye-brain-hand evaluation and coordination (to say nothing of all the other options like stomping and shooting things and the various purposes of jumping). It's good to be a novice at something, though. It helps remind me how something as straightforward to me as "consider the context of this document" might be many many skills to my students. I've also been going to some of Jono's accordion lessons. They seem so different from the piano lessons of my youth! He would show up to his lessons and show the teacher what he's worked on during the week, and they'd work on it a bit more, with the teacher correcting anything that needs correcting or teaching strategies where necessary. The pace of the lesson is very organic. It seemed that my piano lessons as a kid were very prescriptive -- I play the pieces that were assigned as homework from last time. Teacher corrects what is necessary. New pieces are assigned. Looking back on it, I realize that no time was spent asking whether I was interested in this piece, or telling me what new skill the piece was supposed to practice, or discussing the music theory or music history or music appreciation aspects. It's just: do this. I'm not saying that there is no benefit from doing things from rote. But on the other hand, thinking needs to happen. Engagement with material needs to happen. I feel like as a teacher, even now, I don't have the right balance between rote and thinking. (Which is related but on a slightly different axis as skill vs. knowledge) Lastly, there were a bunch of Asians at this party, and it sort of made me realize how much I miss having someone to geek over Chinese stuff with me. Ironic given where we live. I mean, there is quite a substantial Chinese and Chinese-American population here. But always this feeling of being disjointed or somewhat distanced -- my particular encounter with Chinese culture is ... weird. Plus I've always been "the principal's kid" with all of the Chinese peers I interact with. So... I'm not sure I know how to properly interact with Chinese-Americans my age outside of that context. :/ (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 18th, 2009
summercomfort	11:09a	This is what I do when proctoring exams.. Read the Onion, which is running a "Our top stories in the last 4.5 billion years" shindig: http://www.theonion.com/content/ourannualyear09 Highlights: Woman Domesticated-- Once burdened with physically demanding chores, exhausting farm work, and other unpleasant duties, man's quality of life dramatically improved after his successful domestication of the common woman. Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World Industrial Revolution Provides Millions Of Out-Of-Work Children With Jobs Some Of Man's Most Important Inventions * Inclined Plane: A simple machine consisting of a flat surface whose topmost point is higher than its bottommost point, this is yet another example of mankind's propensity for "inventing" things they just found lying around. * Printing Press: The mass production of printed matter was an instant hit with readers everywhere, who at the time numbered nearly 1,000 and were spread out over some 57.4 million square miles. Great Monuments to Human Achievement: * City of Pompeii: In a stunning and still unmatched work of conceptual art, the citizens of Pompeii arranged themselves in poses representing the emotional es of anguish, fear, and desperation, and then waited patiently for lava from the nearby Mount Vesuvius to seal them in time forever. * The Colosseum: Though best known for brutal gladiatorial blood sport, this amphitheater was also host to a fantastic farmer's market on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday mornings. (1 Comment |Comment on this)