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January 29, 2004
Hey.. I have statistics!!
Kate, dammit, I'm about ready to think she's got minor omniscience or something, because she seems to know a little bit of everything, including the sort of things I'm supposed to know but am not even aware of. For instance.. my site's incredible statistics package.
Apparently there's 62 of you looking in at my site.
Hi! Thanks for coming.
What's really interesting is my search keyphrases and keywords.. as far as I can tell, these are phrases and words people have put into google and gotten my site out of it.
the top 10 keyphrases (from highest to lowest):
soul voltage regulator
living in the trenches
see you in hell my friend
gladius by james zhang artwork
quirks regulator
see you in hell my friend see you in hell my friend
cosplay gone wrong
regulator voltage isolation
voltage regulator history thesis
smell bleach
The keywords are neat, though. It's like a poem:
in regulator voltage
you my soul
see living trenches hell
... Though.. I am a little disconcerted that searching google for 'hell' brings up Eric Chapman. Hmm.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 06:31 PM | Comments (0)
Highly disencouraged complaint
I make it no secret why I chose to live off campus for my final year at Ringling. I didn't choose, I was driven out.
Oh, naughty Eric, huh? Did something bad, didn't I? No. Not really. I got my paperwork for student housing a half hour past noon on the day it was due. Why they absolutely have to have it in by noon on a Wednesday, I don't know. More on this later.
Housing arrangements were pretty screwed up that year for all. Everyone was told a month in advance that the system was not based upon a first-come-first-serve or incumbency basis. All rooms were put into lotteries based on what preferences you noted on your form, and everyone had an equal shot at getting everything. I will note that the lottery happened in front of a public audience. They just call out names until they run out of rooms.
They don't tell you how many rooms they're filling first. I'm guessing that this is because it would allow people to ask around and do the math, and find out that lo and behold, not all of the rooms were put into the lottery.
So when I turned in my forms, as did my hopeful roomie, half an hour late, we were told that it was okay. We'd go into the lottery.
The lottery came. And went. They called every name in the hat. Our names were not called. They were not called because they were never even put into the hat.
My room mate, Chris, was the one who was on the ball for all of this, not me. He went down and investigated right away (I was in class). They said that because we were late, we weren't put into the lottery. Despite assurances that we would be.
No, wait, I promise this gets good. Keep reading.
Friends of mine that applied well within the deadline did not get their names called either. I didn't find that out until the next day, and one came over to my place, furious, because she'd just been to war and back with the Office of Residence Life and found out that basically everything they told us about how the system worked was an outright lie. Rooms were given on a first-come-first-serve basis, and then modified by way of 'quality points'.
What are quality points, you ask? I still am not sure. Go through all the handbook information about housing policies, and all of the fliers they put up, and you wont find one mention of quality points. On report cards you'll find 'quality points', but not the right ones. We asked residence life about those and they pointed out that those weren't the quality points they were talking about.
In fact, try to find out about which quality points they're talking about, and how many you have, and you'll get nothing but confused people. What you wont get is an answer, or a sheet of paper that tells you how the system works or how many quality points you have.
The claim is that they're based on how long you've lived on campus. Hey, didn't they say incumbency wasn't a factor? My friends and I were all rising seniors who'd been on campus since freshman year. The way the tale goes, as I got this second hand, when this was mentioned the person they were dealing with stammered and got nervous, then tried backtracking. After calling up their records, the person informed one of my friends that because she changed majors and was going to be a junior again, she lost quality points. This is where they magically came up with the rule that states that seniors get more quality points than juniors, even if that Junior has been there for the same number of years as the senior.
This sounds alot like administrative Calvin-ball to me.
Well, that managed to discourage one friend of mine (who lives one street over from me now, incidentally). But the other, knowing full well that there was NOTHING they could get rid of her with, kept fighting like hell. She was a rising senior, had incredible grades, had been on campus every year, and turned in her housing paperwork an hour after she received it.. a month before the deadline.
They would not give her the room she was entitled to. After months being given a particularly vicious runaround, she finally gave up the fight (in a storm of Cuban obscenities I'm sure) and found a place off campus that, while very nice, is much more expensive than living on campus. The runaround she got, incidentally, is the same one I got, which is described a bit further down the page.
Now, flash back to when I turned in my application half an hour late. When I arrived, my paperwork was all filled out. All I had to do was wait behind a couple people (who'd been waiting since before the deadline ran out and because of it also got the tardiness treatment I did). So I handed them my papers and the housing deposit. As I'm signing the receipt, this other guy comes in, a stupid-happy look on his face, and asks if it's the day to turn in housing papers. Yes it is.
"Oh. Do you have any I can fill out? I lost mine."
The desk-person handed him a set. He asked what the deposit was so he could go get the money. I'm looking at the receipt in my hand and shaking my head. This guy was completely unprepared. He made me look sterling by comparison.
Out of his office stepped the esteemed Mateo De La Rosa: Coordinator of Residence Life and Housing. He's the one in charge of the whole deal. So he steps out, refers to the guy by his first name right in front of me, and says "did you hear? You got a Room. You're in the Bayou Village."
This was the day before the 'lottery' even took place. Keep in mind that the Bayou Village are the on-campus 4BR 2Bath apartments. This is what I'd been in for the last 2 years. They are the second nicest rooms on campus.
The guy looked at him confused, and said he hadn't even filled out any forms yet. Mateo made a couple of nervous 'shut-it' type sounds and repeated himself. "You're in the Bayou Village." The guy asked if he should still fill out the forms and if he still needed the deposit. Mateo told him yes. As for me? Well..
Begin Runaround: I was told that I didn't have a room. No wait, I did. No, wait, I didn't. Well, you do, but it won't be with your chosen room mates. Well, no, we don't have room on campus for you, but we have some run down, roach-infested shacks the school owns right off of campus with no air conditioning and an outrageous price tag we'd be willing to offer you and your chosen room mates. Wait, we have room on campus. No we don't.
Et cetera. For 4 months.
I tried to convince Chris to come off campus with me. We could get a nicer place for less than we'd been paying. It'd be great. But he didn't have a car, and his dad got in the way. Chris ended up staying on campus and being put with a bunch of other people they'd also jerked around, right down the hall from our old apartment. I was not about to let them keep screwing with me on this, so I went and moved in with a couple of alumni friends of mine, in an old-but-livable house that is, in fact, right off campus in the direction opposite of the shacks that Ringling offered. In fact, it's closer to where my classes are than those shacks were. Rent is considerably less.. half what Ringling was going to charge. I have two bedrooms to myself and I have air conditioning.
Let it also be noted that I received a final notice saying there would be no room on campus for me. Then, two weeks before school starts, I received a bill for tuition that included on-campus housing charges. Two days after that I got a letter from Residence Life saying I DID officially have a place on campus. Congratulations. I called them up and congratulated them on having my permission to shove it as far as they could up their collective asses. (End Runaround, thank you.)
So what's my complaint? Aside from the obvious grievances above? Mateo. I don't have to deal with him anymore, since I'm off campus, but I got an email from him recently. It reads thus:
ATTENTION RESIDENT STUDENTS
It has been brought to my attention that a number of apartments have been repainted by students. During our first meeting, I specified that it is highly disencouraged to paint the wall in rooms or apartments. Please be informed that any apartment that is not in the same condition that you found it upon check out, will incur some serious damage charges. Furthermore, due to the amount of repainting that has taken place, I am informing you that painting the walls in your apartments or room is not only disencouraged but it is also not allowed.
If anyone has any questions or concerns please stop by the Student Life office and I will be happy to discuss this matter further.
Mateo De La Rosa
Coordinator of Residence Life and Housing
Ringling School of Art and Design
What I want to know is what gives this shit-heel the right to treat the students this way? During the three years I did live on campus, it became routine to find some threatening edict over something minor plastered every 5 feet along the corridors with his name on it. At one point someone had apparently caused damage to one of the driers in the laundry room by way of leaving a tube of oil paint in it while it ran. This could easily have been a mistake: someone could have left it in his pocket and forgot. Mateo had fliers put up and sent out emails calling it a clear and vicious act of vandalism, and that if the person responsible didn't come forward immediately and be punished, that the entire student body would have to take the blame. I went and looked at this vandalism.. or tried to. Apparently the clear and vicious act of vandalism was a really subtle one, because I looked at ALL of the driers in the complex and couldn't figure out which one it was, aside from the 'out of order' sign on a couple of them. Who's going to come forward and get their ass kicked in this situation? Nobody. So they raised the already-high prices on all of the washing machines and driers and kept them that way ever since, blaming the oil paint incident for the raise. The prices made it so that doing my laundry every week cost me a minimum of ten bucks, much more if I wanted them dry, and I don't have many clothes. I took to wearing dirty ones, because I couldn't afford to wash them as much as was needed.
I've walked past Mateo's office many times in my 4 years here, and not once have I seen him actually working. IF he's decided to come in that day, he's just lounging around his office, hanging out with his chosen students.
The man's office door is a joke, in fact. From October to about Christmas Break, he had a paper doll snowman kind of thing there, one of the ones with the posable swivel-joints at the elbows, shoulders, etc. Except over the face was a photo of his own with a big over-the-top coy, pin-up kind of look on it. The snowman had a big reflective mylar snowflake glued to its penis. There was a speech balloon coming off of the photo saying "I'm so FROSTY!!!" I wanted to get a picture of this, but apparently it was taken down during December break.
So, someone tell me, where a fuckwit like this gets the right to say things like he did in that email to the students and then blatantly screw people in the room draw? I've seen the repairs chart, listing how much each kind of repair deducts from your security deposit. Repainting the rooms is on there, and it's about half of the security deposit, but from the tone of that email, it sounds like he's going to make special exception and increase the price just for them, because they've made him mad. And what right does he have to be mad? He used a vague, easily misinterpreted statement that sounded nice and official to him; now he's mad that someone interpreted it as 'we don't like it, but there's nothing saying you can't do it' and then they did it.
Oh my god. Someone painted a mural in their room. At an art school! THE HORRORS!!!
Posted by Eric Chapman at 04:44 PM | Comments (3)
Potraiture class
"Yucky pencil" Kate says to me about one of my other portraiture works. "Yucky pencil."
FINE!! ... so I did my next actual portrait (we've been doing lots of studies) in charcoal in the same sketchbook.
Results: Yucky charcoal. ;)
Posted by Eric Chapman at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)
January 27, 2004
Dizzarth Vader
Been really friggin busy. So much work. And not getting it done like I want.
In the meantime, enjoy Darth Vader.
... of course I found this right after reading this over at Making Light.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 11:06 PM | Comments (1)
January 19, 2004
Self Portrait - Work In Progess
Pencils... Begun Digipainting... More painting... Added rendered hair and shirt, with a couple hints at sky... and finally the sky. Done.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 10:56 PM | Comments (2)
January 16, 2004
Portraiture
Today's work in Portraiture class:
Irena. Click for a larger version (pop-up)
Posted by Eric Chapman at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2004
Woah
Japanese head banging music. I mean it. Look. Flash required. A decent computer probably also required.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 10:02 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2004
Sketches
Here's a couple of excerpts from the Mosaic Project sketchbook.
A better look at Maddox, my favorite test tube monster.
This guy is new. I'm still playing with names for him. 'Fritz' is what inspired the character. I had a couple alternatives knocking around in my head, but it's been a long night, and they've gotten away from me. It'll probably come back later when I'm less mentally taxed and more full of Chai. I do remember the nickname I was referring to him with when I was scanning the image: Uggie. It fits, doesn't it?
Posted by Eric Chapman at 07:27 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
January 10, 2004
Cat.
My genetically abnormal cat says hello.
(Among other quirks, personality and genetics-wise, she has no tail)
Posted by Eric Chapman at 02:20 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
My studio, my self
Here's a photo from September. I decided to play with some photo-enhancement in Photoshop. No filters used.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 12:57 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Quick random info
I just want you to know that, despite that you may think you're sitting relatively still at your computer, you are, in fact, moving at somewhere around 2,107,551 kilometers per hour. Or, if you prefer, about 1,309,571 miles per hour.
That's assuming I did the math right. And that the people measuring this aren't completely ass wrong, which is entirely possible.
Kinda makes our great achievment of breaking the sound barrier seem silly, doesn't it? We should be trying to outrun our own planet as it travels through space. Now that would be something.
Carry on. (whooosh!)
Posted by Eric Chapman at 02:30 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 04, 2004
Sunrise
For those of you who either missed it or saw it in a place where it sucked..
... the sun did come up today.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 07:24 AM | Comments (1)
January 03, 2004
Slightly new look
So I got bored with seeing the default of the default templates every time I loaded my own blog, blanding at me as hard as it could.
So I switched to a diffrent default template. I'm going to make my own setup soon, I swear.
Posted by Eric Chapman at 01:57 PM | Comments (0)
The idiot box has become the medicine chest
Loafing around my parents' house has become somewhat of a hobby of mine. I use it as sort of a medication for stress and tension. It provides fast-acting releif from the lingering effects of a stressfull, high-pressured and endlessly frustrating life. It's like a drug. I should call it acouchachillin. Say it.
Side effects include TV watching.
I'm apalled at the number of frivolous expensive drugs being produced and agressively pushed on the public for the treatment of personality quirks and natural inconveniences.
Are you nervous in social situations? Take drugs. Don't got enough hair on your head to suit your self-esteem problem? Take drugs. Take more for that self-esteem problem, too. Got body odor? Take drugs. Got heartburn after eating something that you know will give you heartburn? Take drugs. Can't fall asleep? Take drugs. Can't stay asleep? Take drugs. Have trouble waking up? Take drugs. Can't stay awake? Take drugs. No, really, aren't just a little bit drowsy? Take drugs. Don't like the color and texture of your freakin toenails? Take drugs, dammit!
I can't get through one hour of television without having at least 2 diffrent drugs pushed on me. A large percentage of these are prescription drugs. Advertising prescription drugs?? This can't be healthy! Maybe we need a drug for it.
Incidently, wonder why nothing's been cured in years? Because capitalists finally managed to worm their way into a controlling position in health care, which is somewhere I'm of the opinion they have no right to be. Health care should not be a for-profit thing. Ransoming people's well-being is among the worst kinds of barbaric cruelty you can find in human history, and every time it happens the results are not good.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you, we are at war: the War On Drugs.
If the War On Drugs were the War On Terrorism, there'd be big corporations training Al Qaeda operatives and hiring them out to people for things like lawncare and personality maintenence. There'd be exploding claymore mines in people's backyards as gophers trigger tripwires put over the entrances to their burrows.
They'd run commercials for it featuring soft pastel colors, kids running and playing slow motion in tall green grass, tossing unexploded shells back and forth to eachother, shifting to pictures of old people smiling warmly as jetliners crash into skyscrapers in the background.
And of course, just like the drugs, once they've accomplished the one purpose they were sent for, they just kind of wander off and do whatever they feel like doing wherever they feel like doing it. Do you like the sound of that? With terrorists I mean? Well it goes for drugs too. See, every time you take a drug and it does something, it has to leave your system somehow, aka, the water in your toilet turns yellow.
From there it goes to sewage treatment plants, which are designed to remove bacteria and 'sediment' from the water before returning it to the wild. What don't they filter out? Drugs, actually.
For instance: They're detecting significant levels of prozac in the rivers, folks. If it's in the rivers, its in your drinking water, and your seafood.
Yes, happy fish. Very happy fish.
It also means that, without prior permission or notification, people are being medicated with prescription and over-the-counter drugs that were never assigned to them and shouldn't be.
Lets not even get into the dangers of unchecked drug interaction.
But, hey, enough gloom and doom.
If you feel that you've had too much gloom and doom in my little rant, please feel free to take drugs. You're making very rich people even richer, and good for them, right? Money's all that matters after all, and certainly not the actual well-being of humanity. That's a low priority.
Eric
Posted by Eric Chapman at 08:47 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
I live.
I havn't posted much, but I live.
I am presently coming out of a funk.
Funk funk.
n.
1. One of my stints of anti-humanism, where I am generally of the opinion that people outside of my bedroom are a waste of time/space, and make little or no effort to speak to them.
It's still here, but it's passing. Think of it like a storm. Not the cliche raging thunderstorm, I'm just talking about a miserable, steady rain that lasts for days. If you're from the northeastern US you might know what I mean. Well, it finally stopped raining, but the sky is still a medium grey at noon and dark half an hour earlier than it should be. Drizzles expected, with a 30% chance of breif showers, continuing through the week.
What's brought me out of this? Well, time usually helps these things on their way eventually, but it is more often the case that someone sneaks through the newly created wall I've built for myself (during a momentary unlockage for something necessary) and says hi.
If this is someone I can't think of any reason to be generally annoyed or betrayed by, and I do put this to serious thought by the way, I am left without any good reason to escort them (rudely) to the other side of the wall, thus defenseless and forced to say hi back, and engage in a conversation that has me tense at the beginning but relaxed and enjoying the contact about 15 minutes later.
This time, the unexpected invader (and part-time bomb-defusal specialist?) was someone I only know online, which is surreal, because I kinda stopped having net friends right around the time that I came to college, and this one is new.
Yeah, Kate, I know you're reading this, and I'm talking about you. So everyone, lets hear it for Kate! Presently she's got mad tonsil disease or something, so any warm fuzzies you can send her way through the vast telepathic matrix would be appreciated.
So, I guess I'm willing to tolerate the existance of my own species again. Maybe. Do be carefull about it. Try not to poke the bear.
To sum up the last couple weeks, sans-funk:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was suprisingly good. Good like better than most games I've played. Bioware has proved that Star Wars is an incredible setting for storytelling and stories done in it can be fantastically satisfying, so long as George Lucas isn't writing and directing it by himself.
Seriously. Okay, so he came up with the story for those two movies, but inventing a story and actually being the one to write it out are two diffrent things. A bad story told well can be wonderfull, and a good story told badly is an atrocity. Not to mention that most of the SW games cranked out by Lucasarts in recent years have been average at best. Stunning visually, yes, but otherwise thoroughly average. Bioware matched their visuals and raised the bet with a compelling gameplay experience.
Lets see.. what else..
I like my tablet. Much easier to control. Harder to touch the keyboard though. Have to kind of wrap my arms around it and holt it with the pits of my elbows to type. Fortunately the thing has something like 18 programmable buttons on it so I've programmed all the hotkeys I use regularly into it and still have 3 or 4 buttons left idle. Reaching the keyboard only becomes an issue when someone IMs me and I feel like responding.
What else did I do during my funk? Uh. I loafed around the house alot. Let me make special mention of my appreciation for my parents' couch. It is very much flop-worthy and thoroughly enjoyable in that capacity.
School starts in a week from monday. My last semester. I'm scared.
Hold me.
-Eric
Posted by Eric Chapman at 07:20 AM | Comments (2)