sOph:uncut:blog

My very first sketchbook, which I started in 2004, was just titled “SketchBook I” and it took me about 3 years to fill it, despite the fact, that it only had 80 pages. I didn’t draw as much then as I do nowadays, but during the last pages of that sketchbook I realised, how much fun it is and that I want to be really good at it and would like to make a living out of it at some point, so I started to draw much more often …

Around that time I thought about how sketchbooks are kind of best friends to oneself, or maybe the term children is more suiting in this case, you care for them most of the time (somedays you don’t), they are like companions and follow you everywhere when you let them.
But what would children be without names? So I decided to give them names (Gilmore Girls is probably to blame for that), names that have a meaning for me, not just random human names, but more like phrases that relate to me, my state of mind or to media, that impresses me in a touching way. These names also give my sketchbooks a personal, an alive touch, at least for me that is.
Beginning with the second one they will also have individual covers, which correspond to the particular names.

Additionally I decided to also categorize my new sketchbooks:
• Sketchbooks that I only draw into when I’m not at home, so everything I draw in parks, during trainrides, during classes, at friends, at bars and so on, ends up inside these. I do some clean ups and flesh outs on pages in these sketchbooks at home on occasion, but the main ideas and roughs are done outwards.
These sketchbooks belong to the category “SketchBook Urbane” or SBU in short.

• Then there’s a sketchbook on my desk that only contains fleshed/rendered out drawings, though its still pretty empty and I should draw inside it more often, but thats not the point right now.
This sketchbook belongs to the category “SketchBook Royale” or SBR in short.

• Furthermore I plan on getting sketchbooks extra for the purpose of being a reference collection. So always when I learn something and practise it for a while until I think I got it, I would draw it inside this sketchbooks and write some descriptions and notes in addition. So these sketchbooks would act as kind of a rule book whenever I’m not sure about stuff I knew before.
I’m still not sure about the category name though, for now “SketchBook Educate” and “SketchBook Brainfood” are on my mind, but maybe something better will pop up …

• I’m also thinking about starting another sketchbook category, something like the “SketchBook Urbane”, but for the use at home, where I could doodle some ideas and experiments without having to flesh them out in the end. Right now I use loose sheets of printerpaper for this …
I’m also not sure about what to call this category, “SketchBook Zone” is on my mind, but it doesn’t fit that well …

^{(sorry, this poem is just in german)}

Ja, alles wird anderst, wenn ich dies hier dir sag,
Der Wunsch wird erfüllt, den in mir solang ich schon trag.

Denn ich möchte dich finden und nicht mehr vermissen,
Um endlich zu leben, nicht nur träumen zu müssen.

Und hier stehe ich nun, gleich daneben stehst du,
Und ich möcht es dir sagen, doch ich komm nicht dazu.

Weil meine Hände schon zittern, wenn dich ich nur seh,
In mir kein klarer Gedanke, den ich jetzt noch versteh.

Und mein Mund bleibt trocken, die Zunge wiegt schwehr,
Nicht ein einziges Wort und meine Stimme bleibt leer.

Ich kenne nicht deinen Namen, kenne nur dein Gesicht,
Nur meine Sehnsucht, doch mehr auch nicht.

Doch nur ein Lächeln von dir erhellt meine Welt,
Ein Traum, der auf Ewig, für einen Augenblick hällt.

Und diesmal wirds anderst, doch der Wunsch wird nicht wahr,
Denn das Ende bleibt meist, wie es am Anfang schon war.

Doch solang es dich gibt, bleibt in mir dieses Licht,
Das Hoffnung heisst und mein Herz stets mir bricht.

… … … … … … … … … …

Das Gedicht ist am Dienstag vor einer Woche entstanden, da hat es auch noch Sinn ergeben. Nun gut, es macht immer noch Sinn, jedoch habe ich letztes Wochenende ein (anderes) Mädchen kennengelernt und bin erstmal gespannt, wie es sich da weiterentwickeln wird. Daher spiegelt dieses Gedicht nur 4 Tage nach seiner Entstehung nicht mehr meinen Gemütszustand wieder …
… und wird dadurch beinahe nichtig und bedeutungslos für mich, irgendwie schade eigentlich — aber irgendwie auch nicht.

Maybe I’ve lost the meaning of a birthday somehow, it became different in the last couple of years, rather an ordinary day. I still remember how it was before, you’ve been able to look foreward to these days, you waited for these days to happen, it meant something important. But now this feeling is gone. I don’t know why, but it just feels like every other day, except for the phone calls and messages you get from your family, your friends and a bunch of people that somehow happened to be on your ICQ list.
So here it is, this big day, my 26th birthday, but it just doesn’t feel different or special at all. Maybe it’s feeling that way, because I stopped to expect something from life, stopped to expect something to happen on its own a while ago. When I was little and cute (I doubt the second one) I mostly thought that everythink would work out and I just had to become older … but now, I’m 26 and nothing worked out the way I expected and wished things to be.

And now it’s getting even worse, back then I had a goal, a plan I could work towards (I didn’t do much for it, but that’s another story, a short one and is told with this last few words), but now everything feels so unreal and I don’t know what I want my life to be. I don’t know if I want to do, what I’m doing, don’t know if computer science is the right thing or something art related ever would be.
I’m doing (or most of the time not doing) all the stuff I’m doing now, because of my long standing wish to work at a games company on some videogames. But I haven’t played much good games in a long time now and I just don’t know anymore, if I want to become a part of all this, so every little piece of future I used to cling to, is vanishing into thin air right underneath my fingertips.
I don’t know where to go from this point, I remember all that directions that were exciting some years ago, but now no one is exciting enough. I want to have a goal, a plan, a path through life, something that points me the way. I think this is the reason why this day feels kind of empty, I want to say “I lived” at the and of my beeing and not just “I was” … and with every passing year I am more and more afraid that it won’t happen.

Finaly, no more homework, no more classes, no more learning for tests and no more figuring out how certain algorithms work and how to implement them best. At least for the next two months. But before I get the chance to enjoy all the free time, another one and a half weeks have to pass, because I’m working until then, yeah for real money. Its dull and monotonous work and my back hurts almost every evening (though it’s become better than at the first week), but theres money.

So what do I want to start with all the free time, as far the work is over … there are some things in my mind, draw some more, traditionaly as well as digitaly and hopefully continue with my anatomy studies, maybe sew something again (I badly need a bag), eventually code some tools I have in mind and I thought about reactivating my World of Worcraft account, but I’m not sure about this yet. Also the Games Convention 2006 is coming soon and I will visit this event again and hope for it to be better than last year.

Thats it for now, and I hope for a productive semester break … and more frequent posts …

I stumbled across this interesting article (german) on spon, while reading the blog of Alex Draude a fellow artist of the daf-community. It’s about procrastination and how it affects your entire life. Until I read it I thought that it is totaly normal to procrastinate actions to a later date, I always wondered how someone could start doing something shortly aufter they got the task to do so, that seemed kind of weird to me.
So this article truely gave me a reality check. I noticed the fact, that I am not just procrastinating the unpleasant and annoying actions, but also actions I actually like and that are important to me, like drawing, coding, sewing or some other activity I like to do. So instead of doing this stuff, I am throwing my time away by checking some forums for new posts every 5 minutes or by doing other trivial stuff, though they wont run away some hours later. It almost makes me think of being addicted …

There are also two major procrastination types listed: the arousal procrastinator assures, that for him it is only possible to do something and be creative, when he feels the pressure and the avoidance procrastinator who is afraid of not being able to do the task in perfect quality, so he starts late to be able to affirm, that the time was to short to do so.
I would tell, that I’m mainly an arousal procrastinator, but I couldn’t deny, that there is also a fraction of an avoidance procrastinator inside of me.
This is nothing to be proud of, I guess, so I want to fight it. And I started right after I was finished reading the article. I opened the task for the bioinformatics homework and started coding it, though I couldn’t find some easy to understand informations on the net … but it actually was fun to think on and code an algorithm for local sequencealignment, I plan to post some algorithms in the near future.

Hope this fighting will continue … here some informations on procrastination on wikipedia, if you are interested in …

Last weekend the digitaldecoy convention 2006 took place, sixty members of the digitaldecoy forum (meanwhile digitalartforum) took part at this event. I was one of them. It was an incredible event … to meet just some artists is a rare pleasure for me, therefore, meeteing sixty of them and all of them unbelievable nice was just marvelous.
There was that much artistic energy floating around the space, that much inspiration, that much shoulders, you could take a look beyond, that I couldn’t help but draw a good portion of the time. Haven’t drawn that much for more than half a year, have to scan and post all the pages soon.

Beside all the drawing, we also could try some WACOM products, e.g. an A3 tablet, but combined with a 17” screen was way too big for me (it would take a long time for me to manage that big size). Also got the chance to try a Cintiq 21UX this piece of hardware is just gorgeous … maybe sometime I’ll have the money to afford it.
Another really incredible tool, I could give a try, was the Omni Device. It was just amazing to feel the surface of the model, while working on (or actually drilling some holes into) it. Another toy on my wish list.

But one of the heights of the weekend was definitely drawing on a picture in collaboration with souly. It was a great experience to draw along with her, inspiring one another and watch the empty pages become a dreamy scene. It was fun. It was definitely one of this thingies from my 60 until 60 list (that I have soon to set up again).

It was a gorgeous event, I gained much of motivation and inspiration, met many nice people, I knew from earlier conventions or just from reading their posts. It was fun, but way too short and I just cannot await and am looking forward to see everyone of them again … maybe at the ArtJam at the end of the year, but definitely at the first “daf convention”.
So this was the last digitaldecoy convention, this time for sure.

By the way, Shu, sorry for ripping your post title …
Here you can find the shirt design, and because on the shirt the ‘C’ inside the speech bubble is missing, it’s giving a cool name for the title.

Nearly two and a half months have passed, since I announced, that the new design was 60% done. But as always I just didn’t recon, that the last 10% of doing something will take more than 90% of the time.
All the fresh designed elements had to be merged to one whole piece, some plugins had to be written to give me the functionality and features I needed (or just wanted to have). Some thoughts on organizing content had to be done, so I could use given features in a way, they weren’t meant (e.g. the multiple page system to implement bilingual posting (though multiple page posts don’t work correctly in feeds (a WordPress bug I guess))).
Also learning for tests, doing some homework and of course laziness, made this time span not really shorter.

Finally its done, so what changed? First of all, the eye catching part, the design has changed, from a dark to a bright one … I just wanted some more brightness in my blog. I as well made the width fixed, mainly because its easier to read shorter lines, then long ones. Also my logo has changed from a angled appearance to a round and more symetrical one and I like the new one very much.
Also the URL changed to http://blog.cyphic.net, but the old one will still be redirected for at least a half year.
The biggest change is and will be the bilingual apearance of posts, therefore I misuse the multipage funktionality of WordPress. You can find the option to change to the othe language at the top, as well as at the bottom of a post, if more than one language is availible.
And for a better organization I added a tag system, you will find the tags of a post at the bottom of these, followed by a link to the whole tag cosmos that you also can find in the navigation on the right, when you are in the main view.

So enjoy the new sOph:uncut:blog …

In den letzten Monaten ist mir im größerem Maße aufgefallen, dass diese lebenden Gestalten, deren Blogs ich mehr oder weniger regelmäßig lese, ihre Software von was auch immer auf WordPress umstellten, oder andere lebende Gestalten, die ich kenne, ein WordPress Blog starteten.
Vor einem Jahr, als ich dieses Blog hier ins Leben gerufen habe, habe ich mir einige Blogsysteme angesehen, darunter auch WordPress, jedoch fand ich es damals sehr einengend, limitiert und konnte mich nicht wirklich im Backend (also da wo man neue Beiträge schreibt und die Einstellungen ändert) zurechtfinden, daher habe ich mich auch schliesslich für b2evolution entschieden.

Dieser WordPress Ansturm gab mir natürlich etwas zu denken, vor allem dadurch, dass ich viele Aspekte an b2evolution einfach satt habe. Also hab ich mir die neuste Version runtergeladen, schnell einen Apache+PHP+MySQL Server auf meinem Heimrechner aufgesetzt und WordPress gestartet.
Die Installation verlief einfacher als erhofft und es läuft. Das Backend war zwar immer noch etwas befremdlich, aber nach wenigen Minuten hab ich mich damit angefreundet und bin überrascht, wie logisch und einfach es aufgebaut ist … besser geht es zwar immer, aber das ist was für die Eigenentwicklung.
Weitere fünf Minuten und es fallen die negativen Aspekte auf, kein Kalender, keine Statistik … das Aus für WordPress? – Nein, denn es gibt Plugins. Schnell sind Kalender und Statistiken gefunden … und 100 weitere Plugins, an die man selbst nicht gedacht hat, die aber sehr interessant und nützlich klingen. Wird jedoch einiges an Zeit kosten, bis ich die alle durchprobiert habe.

Und es gibt eine Plugin-API, die es einem erlaubt sehr einfach Plugins zu erstellen, ohne dabei im Hauptcode herumzupfuschen, was zum einem das Updaten der Blogsoftware, als auch der Plugins sehr simpel gestaltet. Leider vermisse ich in der API einige Funktionen zum installieren und deinstallieren von Plugins. So müssen bei einigen Plugins bei jedem Aufruf Tests durchgeführt werden, die vermeidbar wären.

Ja, WordPress gefällt mir richtig gut und ich werde mit dem Redesign darauf umsteigen. Wer jetzt denkt, das würde doch eh nie geschehen, so muss ich widersprechen, das neue Design ist zu etwa 60% fertig, das größte Problem, bzw. Aufgabe wird es eher sein WordPress so einzurichten, wie es mir vorschwebt, sowie eine Gallerie aufzusetzen und zu integrieren.