The Agrinautica

   More doodles from the D7D nights. I was afraid for a long time to even attempt to tackle drawing women because it seemed too easy to accidentally make them terribly ugly but I finally dove in. Top left is Mick's Girlfriend's character, a mace wielding cleric. I feel like it doesn't look terribly unlike her herself. I know a mace is traditionally less marshmellow-shaped but drawing everything the bog standard normal way is dull so I'm going with marshmellow-of-war. The girl holding the lute is Greg's character, a gnomish bard that was formerly an orc. No human model but it was kind of an update of this earlier attempt at her when she was more clearly an orc (but I had gotten the fang/tusks going the wrong direction due to lack of an orc model). Was told I made her "too attractive and her boobs aren't big enough." Lol. I think the top right was my subsequence attempt to draw a decidedly unattractive female face but I didn't like it.



   This was player Gemma's elven druid, I also tried to use her herself as the initial model but it really came out looking nothing like her except for the fact she has a septum ring and this character has a barely visible one. I'm also going to go ahead and blame my problems a bit on the paper -- I had picked up a "watercolor" sketch pad thinking it would work fine but I tihnk the paper is too textured and it kind of messes up the finer details (lips and eyes) on such a small drawing. No she's not smoking a cigarette its just her favorite thing to shoot fireballs at stuff.


   And then I saw someone post about a "life drawing session" right here in my little town of Birregurra on Tuesday. Sounded good! I signed up! I didn't quite realize there would be a nude model, which made me feel a bit bashful at first, but it turned out alright. I thought it would be like a class but it was really just the Birregurra Art Group organized a drawing session with a model and that was that ($25 a person to cover costs). The following are a selection of the resultant pictures I drew:

( LJ Cut for artistic not-very-scandalous nudity )

   The above is the current logo of my non profit, Bee Aid International, it was very kindly designed by my parents' neighbor, a professional graphic designer, who was very very responsive to my many requests and tweaks about it. I was pretty happy with the result but over time I've begun to feel a bit like I don't think that's the optimum bee in it.

   As you probably don't recall from my last post about drawing, I had identified a tiny bee in an earlier drawing I'd done as "the perfect [stylized] bee." Today being a miserable cold rainy day with buffeting blustery gusts of wind it was definitely a day to hole up inside and work on sometihng on the computer machine. So I thought I'd see what it looked like if I inserted that bee into the three hexagons:



   As you can see I used the extent of my off-brand-photoshop skills to rotate the wings. The original plan was that the bee's wings completed the sides of the hexagons, but I don't think I like it as well as simply the original:



   Definitely fills the space better even if it abandoned the follow-the-hexagons plan. Also I chuckle to myself guiltily that one of the things I was insistent on to the original designer was that it accurately have two sets of wings as bees do (the major distinguishing feature between bees and flies-that-try-to-look-like bees!), and here I've abandoned that. I'm still not sure about it. I think it might look better if the hand-drawn quality of the lines was completely replaced by nice smooth computer generated lines, but because both the wings and body are not elipses but kind of pear shaped lopsided elipses, it is beyond my meager graphic design skills.


   Anyway, all of this was kind of a side note to the main activity of the day. I need to establish bee sites ("apiaries" in pedantic) in areas further afield from where I currently am. The plan is to put looking-for-a-bee-site flyers on general store bulletin boards in areas with lots of the flora I'm looking for (I'm doing serious studying this winter of the flowering patterns of western Victoria), as well as possibly knocking on doors of houses on property that looks ideal, with a jar of honey ("pre-giving" they called this in my Theories of Persuasion class) and a nice note I'll have printed on cardstock in case they aren't home (primordial version). So here's the flyer I designed today:



   Background picture is of one of my current bee yards (I loathe and despise using stock images, and even seeing them on other people's websites.), I wanted to give them an instant visual of what it would look like in practice.


   In entirely unrelated news for about ten minutes yesterday it looked like I might have a chance to spend my winter/summer sailing on an adorable brig between England and Ireland -- I had applied for a paid position they had advertised and they actually contacted me sounding very interested, asked if I could be available on May 8th which is only 4 days hence and, flabbergastingly, when I checked flights they were actually available on this three days notice for around $1300 which is what it would be at best of times anyway Ii think ... but then my dreams of being out of here chair spinning to be getting paid to do something awesome for second-summer were dashed when they asked if I had a work visa for UK and Dr Google informed me that it does not look like I can just conjur up a UK visa all lickity-split. So stuck here in the increasingly miserable cold blustering wind and rain ): ):

   Once upon a time last october I was standing in the sand in the middle of the Red Sea. I looked up and saw the wobbly distorted silhouettes of boats some 100 feet above me. A moray eel glided between some rocks nearby. The dive instructor made a signal and I pressed a button on my scuba suit. The inflatable vest filled with air until I released the button, and with my increased volume-weight ratio I floated gently off the sea floor until I reached a new equilibrium a few feet higher, and swam off toward the instructor.


   It was around this time that a thought struck me. Zeppelins float effortlessly through the air due to buoyancy, but require power to move about. Sailing vessels move about effortlessly due to the sails harnessing the wind power, but obviously are not buoyant enough to float about in the air. What if one could combine these two things?


Fig. 1 - A hastily drawn and coloured zeppelin

   What if you took a zeppelin, as pictured above, and put sails on it, as pictured below:



   As I floated buoyantly there in the crystal clear Red Sea reefs I began to expand on this idea. Why not conserve space and make the sails themselves on such a vessel also the bags of lighter-than-air gas?



   No need to make the sails square, a lense-like slice of a circle would probably be more efficient. They would be concave on the back to provide the wind something to push against and convex on the forward side to increase volume.
   Obviously the vessel in this picture has a much higher hull-airbag ratio than the zeppelin, one might have to tinker with even bigger sails and/or perhaps also putting bags of lighter-than-air gas within the hull (providing of course that the hull remain heavier than the sails so it doesn't reverse-capsize.


   But then it further occurred to me that the reason sailing works is because, while the wind is pushing against the sails in whatever direction it happens to be blowing, the vessel can only move in one direction due to its keel (well two, but you aim not to be going backwards). So these vessels clearly need keels. See Fig 3 below:



   And, as I probably completely spaced out from whatever the diving instructor was trying to pantomime to me, I contemplated further: I know that square rigged sails (ie those that are perpendicular to the vessel) are better for harnessing the power of the wind if it is relatively coming from behind, but you can't sail at a very good angle INTO the wind -- fore-aft sails, ie sails that are parallel to the length of the vessel, ie Those Triangular Ones, are much better at maneuvering at angles to the wind. Up in the wild blue yonder there will no doubt be no shortage of wind, so it would be more valuable to go with the greater maneuverability option. This, it turned out, opened up a whole new pandora's box of problems.

   In Fig 4 you see a fore aft vessel with giant keel. This looks like it could be a simple ocean-going vessel but keep in mind these sails still must contain lighter-than-air gas. In this case they are shaped in three dimensions like giant ravioli or pillows, again with a concave and convex side. I'd imagine one could arrange it so that the pressure of the wind will push whichever side you are using for that into the concave side.

   In Fig 5 you see my realization that we no longer need a mast to hold these sails up, since they are holding themselves up above the ship (or rather, holding the entire ship up ... though now with less than three masts by age of sail terminology it would no longer be a ship but a boat). Also I realize that now we can fix our airbag-hull ratio a bit since the sails can be wildly bigger than the hull.



   But of course to sail with these sails you'd traditionally loosen the ropes leading to the aft end of each sail, allowing the wind to blow it into an angle where the wind is more fully hitting it. At the arrangement we have in Fig 5 loosening these lines would... just make the sail raise up higher above the vessel (or, again, actually it would just lower the vessel's hull). So that brings us to Figs 6 & 7, where we have placed sort of horizontal masts off abeam on both sides in order to run lines from them to the ends of the sails so the sails can be swung about without simply raising up and down.
   While we're at it, just for fun, we decided to utilize the Kutta–Joukowski theorem in shaping these protrusions, what fun!
   Also, why put the keel on the bottom where it will utterly flummox your attempts at landing when you may as well continue the inversion and run it upwards between the sails. This could also house some lighter-than-air gas-bags within itself.

   And so, there you have it, my hare brained theory as to how one could make a totally steam-punk flying dirigible schooner. An idea wildly conceived 100 feet below the surface of the Red Sea, perhaps only attributable to suffering from abnormal levels of oxygen at the time!

Shot by Reagan
   So I wake up yesterday at like 8pm to hear someone saying "someone got shot by Reagan!" and I'm like "thats odd... and here I thought he was dead."

   Sometime shortly after five Kristy and I were walking back to her place after our final when police cars when we saw a policecar or two drive by with sirens on, and a firetruck being escorted by a (police?) car. Obviously something was up on campus.

   Kristy gets home to hear from her roommate Jadine that she had walked past a body under a white sheet by the Regan freshman dorms.

   Reportedly there a (homeless?) man aged 18-20 loitering around between the dorms and some coops, acting really weird and scaring people that walked by. Someone called police. Police arrived shortly, and when they approached the individual, the individual produced a handgun and proceeded to shoot at the officers. Officers returned fire, at least ten shots were exchanged, and the man died of multiple gunshot wounds on the scene. No officers were hit.

   This is the first shooting death on UC Davis campus. This is the first officer-related death on campus. Kristy and I passed close enough to the scene to see the emergency vehicles from between the buildings, probably not more than ten minutes after it happened. Here is a picture of the scene. The daviswiki entry on "Violent Crime" has links to more news articles on this incident..


Those Elections Hearings
   During last Sunday's Campus Judicial Board hearing for the Elections Committee, I decided someone ought to draw the courtroom sketch one often sees in the news of trials. As no one else was about to do it it fell upon my own unfortunate artistic abilities to make this rendering.

;nbsp;  So thats the first hearing. Obviously I am completely lacking in skills of an artist. Actually I could draw about this good in third grade, which was pretty good back then, but I haven't improved since. On the right we have the Elections Committee, on the left are the Orwellians, and right behind them a fellow who insisted he be identified as "Barnabus Truman." In the middle one has the hearing tribunal, who were not intended to look like monkeys.

   This is roughly what the room looked like after the Orwellian opening statement in the second hearing.


UCLA Revisited
;nbsp;  Pictures are finally up from the St Lucia/Julfest Swedish party thing I was at down at UCLA.
( pictures )

   So I had to create a new photobucket account because photobucket has totally sold out. Not only did the lower the quotas allocated to free accounts, but they raised the paid account price from $5 (forever, or until they sell out apparently) to $9 (for three months). Consequently, my account is now at 282.1% of my quota.


Previously on EMOSNAIL
   Year Ago Sunday: The great Berlin wall of livejournal, invite codes, came down! To think that was only a year ago.
   Year Ago Yesterday: Saddam Captured - and uncodified moral rights are "nonsense on stilts." Also roommate bonding, winter break at last, and ... the theft of $6,000 of materiels?


In Other News: In response to an obscure previous post, an anonymous commenter has delivered to me the crushing advise that I "get a life!!!!!!!!!" Adding the epithet "Non Supreme Court Chief Justice". Several things are distinct about this incident: the detracter appears to be barely literate, with negligible command of the fine art of insult, and they appear to have fixated upon my position as Chief Justice. As such I'm inclined to believe they are associated with the Elections Committee. What's more baffling is why 169.237.101.156 decided to leave the comment to that specific post, as it was posted last February and doesn't look likely to be unusually insulting to anyone in particular. Needless to say, I was brought nearly to tears by the proposition that I ought to "get a life."