Guess who finally got a haircut, just in time for convocation??? (Pics of that forthcoming, sometime after Monday, meaning that a photo of me in an environment other than "in front of my laptop in my horrible messy room" will finally be posted on this blog.)



That's right, I look even more like a goofy teenage girl now (I'm almost 23, seriously)!! I need new glasses and my health plan will cover them in July -- suggestions? I'm rather partial to thick frames that distract from the late-night-research bags under my eyes.

You may also recognize, in the background, the shark balloon I found floating around in a Parisian street. I flattened him and brought him home with me in August; he will probably follow me to Montreal, just because.

It's like there's some other Janine Harper in the universe who is trying to do me a favour and fill out all my paperwork AND I DON'T APPRECIATE IT, BIZARRO-JAN.

I got a call the other day from someone who was very glad to hear that I'd accepted their luncheon invitation (???), and today, someone over at SSHRC is upset with me because I have allegedly submitted a form stating that I wanted to start receiving grant money in May. In neither case did I pick up the phone or a pen to contact anyone (in the latter, because UWO only just finished adjudicating my winter-term marks, so I couldn't submit transcripts to complete the admission process at McGill in order to activate my award aaagh).

Anyway, WEIRD. Maybe when I go in to get a new health card on Wednesday (they're finally making me ditch the red one and get a photo I.D.) I'll find out that some other Janine already took care of that too. Maybe when I go to the staff meeting today (four hours of people asking the most ridiculous questions and making unfeasible employee-appreciation proposals YAAAAY), they'll tell me I already attended yesterday's.

MALFI COMIX continue to be full of dick jokes (in my defense, the play is actually full of phallic humour as, eh, I dunno, Coriolanus) and also I'm stuck in a corner so I started drawing this:


But I probably won't finish it because (1) it is hella undynamic, and (2) if I actually finish the rest of the sketch and then try to ink it, it will become painfully evident that I can't draw horses. You might say I'm no horse(wo)man.

...That was terrible. Shut up, Janine.

I hope to be finished my part in the next week or two, assuming that I don't suddenly get a lot of hours at my other job (the boy is feeling fine now, so I don't have to keep taking his shifts). I have a bruise on my hip from carrying huge bags of books to and from the campus, but it's been pretty cool to do the work.

Anyway, to celebrate, I'm totally going to draw (i.e. very liberally adapt) one of the best scenes in the play.



(Posting a very tiny preview here makes it more likely that I'll finish it.)

P.S. You can pre-order Dragonslayer (the new album by Sunset Rubdown - a.k.a. "that band what has the dude in it who wails a lot and plays the keyboard in Wolf Parade") now and you totally should, because you get the album in MP3 format right away. When I first discovered the band, I disliked them pretty sincerely (having only experienced Spencer's completely-solo work, which is kind of an acquired taste, I suppose), and it took a couple of years for me to stumble upon them again and realize "hey wow this is pretty cool." Anyway, if you like uncomfortably personal songs about horses and failure you will probably like them.

Now that I think of it, most bands I've come to adore, I considered pretty crummy at some point or another. It's possible that my tastes are growing more diverse, but I think it's just as likely that I'm wrecking my hearing to the point where I can't discern between good music and bad.

ANNA ANNA ANNA OOOOHHHH~

It's been a busy couple of weeks.

-I have a real (temporary) job! A prof of mine is currently preparing a Norton Critical Edition of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (a super-rad play; read it now!), and it's my job to sort through hundreds of articles to find ones that are appropriate for inclusion in the book. The job entails 20+ hours/week, so there's a small chunk gone.

-My younger brother managed to give himself the most embarrassing skateboarding injury possible: he stepped on a board in such a manner that it flew up and tore into his nasal passage (thankfully, he didn't lose any teeth in the process). I have agreed to take all his shifts at the donut shop 'til his face has swelled down enough that he won't terrify customers.

-This isn't really time-consuming, but it's a little troubling: I got a CGS Master's scholarship(!!!), but in discussing the achievement with a bunch of academic types, we got onto the subject of selecting supervisors and getting embroiled in POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS, and specifically the Cultural Studies war. As an undergraduate, I never had to worry about choosing a faction or making sure not to associate closely with professors who would use me to fire at each other in said war, but it's suddenly become a big concern, even at a university like McGill, where things are relatively civilized. Anyway, I have been casually shooting off e-mails to friends-of-UWO-friends at McGill so as to ease that particular transition. You know, academia shouldn't be about this sort of thing, but it is, and since I'm looking to go all the way through the system...

-It's super-nice outside. :3

Here, have some unfinished doodles, crammed into one picture (behind the cut).

( Read more... )

Kind of want to do something involving BITCHIN' WHEELS guy, the rest ehhhhhhhhh.

Don't much like the background but you get to a point where you just want to AAAAGH DO SOMETHING ELSE AAAAAAAA.

...the less likely it is that I'll end up finishing a picture, but I thought I might as well throw this up here. If nothing else, it's some vague insight into my drawing process etc.



In other news, I am still getting very few hours at work. I hope that once the lifers start to take vacation time, things will pick up a little; I'm the sort of person who does progressively less and less the more time she has off, so that by next week, I will probably just sleep most of the day.

Don't ask how Captain Claude managed to antagonize a badger; I'm not quite sure myself.

It is hard to draw/shade someone upside-down, even when you cheat and flip the page. There's a number of problems with this figure, not the least being that she's rather off-balance (her right leg is going to topple her), but that's alright, because at least she's not as bendy as my people usually are, and the lines are a bit finer.

edit: I totally fixed the foot so reload the page if it looks weird.



Ehh, also, I don't come up with very good ideas on my own, so I'm taking suggestions for interesting things to draw. I strongly suspect that I'll end up drawing either Basara fanart (out of lack of English or French volumes of 7 Seeds to read boooo) or more pointless Duval and Oliver sketches.

vvvv This song is practically hypnotic; I adore it.

This time the prompt was something along the lines of "you don't draw a lot of animals; draw a [mountain?] goat," and I suppose it's true that, usually, if I draw an animal, it ends up being pretty anthropomorphic. Anyway, I drew the goat in the foreground, but quickly decided that he needed some friends and I guess also a keeper in inappropriate attire. I'm still trying to get the hang of using gradients in ways that don't make my drawings look like crap. Next time around I think I'm going to draw something using finer lines, maybe in black and white. Or else use more than one layer of shading if I end up using colours again; I haven't decided yet.



I have a total of 11 hours at work from now 'til next Sunday, and while I've said to them that they can feel free to call me if someone calls in sick, everyone seems so desperate for hours that I don't think it'll happen. So much for making a lot of rent money this summer... I feel completely useless. Maybe it's just because it's raining today.

YES.

I was out for coffee this morning and we got onto the subject of first-year classics courses. I'm not really sure how this conversation shifted to Medusa dating a hipster (especially since slotted sunglasses are butt-ugly and so make me think their wearers are vision-impaired, but they don't prevent people from making eye contact; I have this image in my mind of some idiot hipster closing them like blinds, though). I suspect it has to do with the ongoing joke that we frequently ended up talking about characters' date-worthiness in a certain 3000-level course.

Anyway, when I got home I realized that I had to draw it or I wouldn't be able to get done the other things I had to do.



So there you have it. I think I'm probably going to spend a few days just cathartically releasing all the pent-up drawings I've been storing before I get back to work.

...

Next thing to work on is backgrounds, I guess.

Normally I wouldn't cross-post all over the place (THAT IS A DIRTY LIE) but I felt like I should acknowledge the fact that this was originally a sketch-dump, sooo... Done for this: http://harveyjames.livejournal.com/126072.html


(the first one is seriously the first thing I have drawn on the tablet since that Panopticon comic)


I am so tired of reading over my notes that I am getting a headache. Went out for a run, drew a little, made some pasta salad. Feels like summer. Good times.

I keep forgetting to update this thing. Here are some things that are going on in my life:

1. I got into both the University of Toronto and McGill, and ended up choosing the latter (in part because they tacked a fairly substantial fellowship onto the offer, whereas Toronto basically said "You're on your own, chump!"). All the people to whom I've reported my decision have said I made the right choice; apparently Toronto doesn't take very good care of their English grad students these days.

2. Still waiting on my SSHRC grant (I mean, everyone who applied through a Canadian university is) but have been told by Professor ______ that I will owe him a beer if I don't get one, so I am still fairly optimistic about it.

3. I'm moving to Montreal in late August, finally launching out of my parents' home. I have secured myself a cozy little 1 1/2 apartment on the fifth floor of a reasonably quiet building in the heart of the student ghetto, and for a little less than I was hoping to pay. I will, of course, be heading to Montreal sometime this summer in order to sign documents and annoy the landlord to fix little things up, but the previous tenant is reliable, so I'm not terribly concerned. (I'm more concerned with making sure that I go in early July so that I can see Sunset Rubdown on the North American stretch of their tour, dohoho.)

4. I started back in on that "running" thing, in part to help combat some of the side effects of the meds I'm on for my acne. (That's been working well, too; I finally got to take a break from the antibiotics after almost eight months, whoooo. I have scars, but I hope they'll fade.) I'm going to have to switch to marathon cycling (ha!) in the summer, though, as it's too bloody hot in the Thames Valley in July to run even at night. At any rate, I'm at the level of fitness I had yeeeears ago in my track-and-field days (including the dress size), and it feels awesome. I've resolved not to let that slip again, no matter how heavy my workload gets.

5. It's back to the donut shop this summer. Not looking so forward to that, especially as I will be doing it with an honors BA. However! I don't have to take the bus, I'll get full-time hours, and it's rent money. It is not, unfortunately, vacation money -- I'm not even sure I can afford to go to Toronto this summer if I have to go to Montreal at least once (which I do). ._.

6. When I'm not at work, I'm going to be starting my thesis research! I just finished a seminar paper on a number of theatrical programmes for modern stagings of Hamlet, and it's gotten me really fired up about my usual paratext- and book history-related concerns. People look at me funny when I say I'm really fascinated by this sort of thing -- like "What is that? Is it even a real field of study that people care about?" Well, not really, unless you're me. I will perpetuate the cycle of pointless learning when I go on to teach eager young students about it.

7. I don't remember the last time I drew something but I can't say that I'm terribly upset about that, considering the fabulous things I've accomplished this year and the opportunities lying ahead of me. Maybe I'll start sketching again when exams are through.

I got my paper but am a little afraid to ruin it all with my rusty painting "skills." Will probably put it off 'til Wednesday.

Went to the Mac Outpost, laptop in tow with a series of System Profiler and coconutBattery snapshots saved for evidence that my battery dropped another 20% over the course of two days (seriously). The repair guy listened to my frantic babbling, took out my defective battery, and handed me a new one without even turning on the laptop to verify my wild claims (he also expressed his surprise that it wasn't a mess of dents and scratches at 10 months old, which kind of makes me wonder what the hell people do with their electronic items). Everything seems to be working well so far. I'm considering a RAM upgrade (which will hopefully make Photoshop behave itself), since I didn't have to pay for the new battery and it's super-cheap on Newegg. :3

( Here's a list of music I enjoyed in 2008, copy-pasted from a post elsewhere. )

With apologies to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey.

Edit: Here is a bit of background information...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a poem entitled "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" commemorating a day when he managed to injure his leg just as his friends William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Charles Lamb came to pay him a visit. Coleridge being unable to walk, he was left to his own devices while his friends explored the area; "Bower" is in part a description of the scenery which he has already told his friends to expect. The comic adaptation is playing on the imperative tone in the first half or so of the poem.

Thomas De Quincey is probably most famous for writing Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which details the events leading up to his addiction and explores the pleasures and pains of opium use. In an anecdote, De Quincey recalls giving a bit of opium to a "Malay" who happens by his cottage, and being subsequently haunted by the man in his drug-addled dreams. De Quincey met Wordsworth through Coleridge, but if the Wordsworths ever paid him a visit at his cottage, I haven't read about it.

I intended to make music reviews a sporadic element of this blog, but I was angry enough about this release that I had to grumble about it somewhere. I don't really like to think about it, but I suspect I've spent at least the last paycheck in its entirety on music, and it's made me very excited and verbose. I will be the first to admit that I "sample" a lot of music, but if I like a record at all, I will inevitably purchase it out of a peculiar mix of love and guilt.

The Dears - Missiles
I’m both defensive when it comes to Canadian music, and an unashamed Francophile, which tends to make me give bands from the Montreal scene a lot more credit than they might deserve. This may explain why I’ve stuck with The Dears for so long in spite of the fact that they never really do anything innovative or exciting; No Cities Left and Gang of Losers were just fun, hooky albums.

Anyway, Missiles is a rather disappointing offering, even when such low standards are applied to it. Over the course of its production, the band lost all but two members (lead singer Murray Lightburn and the band’s keyboardist, Natalia Yanchak, in case you might care) -- a turn of events that was bound to affect their sound. A lot of the album has an atmospheric, almost dream-pop - but, here’s the key, mostly boring and empty, and sometimes lyrically repetitive - feel to it. To put it more generously, this is a stripped-down album, compared to what we’ve heard from them before.

I grudgingly admit that Missiles has its appealing aspects. The band makes subtle use of woodwinds, and while I usually hate the sound of Lightburn's soft crooning, sometimes all this dreaminess works for him. Other times, though, the combination of sweeping strings, bells, and wistful vocals is corny as hell; see the beginning and end of "Lights Off" for a shift from the good to the bad. The wavering vocals of the album's title track are equally unimpressive. Rousing, belted-out songs like Gang of Losers's "Bandwagoneers" were a big part of The Dears' appeal, and that aspect is largely gone.

For every track like “Money Babies” that tries to break out of this subdued mode, there’s a tiresome “Berlin Heart” follow-up. “Crisis 1&2” is a gorgeous duet -- without a doubt my favourite track on the album. The spoken-word bits in “Lights Off” are embarrassingly bad, and the closing track, “Saviour” is a torturously long casino-church-sounding exercise in patience, complete with a children’s choir at the end. “Had no choice, / Had no choice, / Yes I am a sinner, / Ain’t no beginner...” No, Lightburn, you’re definitely no beginner; your band is old, burned-out, and irrelevant. Vying with Skeletal Lamping for the most disappointing release of 2008.

1/5 (Edit: I'm tempted to raise this score; I feel as though I'm being too harsh because I have an attachment to their previous releases. Still, it stays at 1 for now.)
Crisis 1&2

One-sentence review! Margot and the Nuclear So-and-So's - Animal/Not Animal: Ho-hum, it's 1.5 albums' worth of standard artsy low-key indie-rock, whose most exciting aspect is the battle the band had with Epic over its contents. Bonus sentence: Just listen to The Dust of Retreat.

There’s been a lot of music-related conversation at a forum I frequent, which has inspired me to do a bit of an update. I recently moved my music library over to my PC, which has a much better sound system. I missed having a subwoofer thumping against my leg. Anyway, I hope that some of the things I recommend in this post will find their way into your collection. Warning: Don't listen to the samples; they're all terrible indie-pop. Some of this garbage is even Canadian.

Four recent reviews, ( under the cut )

So it turns out that my MBP's case was just bent-out-of-shape enough to put pressure on its innards, which was causing the keyboard and track pad to wig out on me. I am at a loss as to how this happened (I use my tablet 90% of the time), unless someone else has been using it? This is not as unlikely as one might think, because it almost never leaves the house, whereas I'm out more often than ever this year. Or, I don't know, maybe someone set something on top of it when I had to stow it in the overhead compartment? (This last explanation seems kind of implausible.) I only bought a laptop because I needed to bring a computer with me to France; I don't find it very useful at school -- more distracting than anything.

Anyway, they replaced the enclosure, and I'm very happy that I'll be able to pick my baby up tomorrow. I have to say, though, my PC - which I've been using during my Mac's sad absence - is a rock. I have owned it for four years, and it has never gotten a virus, has never had any serious hardware issues (I once blew out a fan, and the monitor sometimes buzzes quietly, but turning it off and on fixes the issue), and has basically never given me sass over anything. It isn't exactly state-of-the-art anymore, but it's the most reliable piece of electronic equipment I've ever owned.

Erm, knock on wood.

I'm thinking about turning it into a jukebox machine, actually. I have a really nice set of speakers, but they're not compatible with my laptop (I usually use my headphones with it). I'm kind of resistant to the idea of having two computers on at once, though.