http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:blackunicorn&section=today deviantART RSS for by:blackunicorn en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:00:53 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/8368897/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/8368897/ Tue, 04 Apr 2006 22:31:54 PDT [link]

It's my sketchblog, and it gets updated far more often than my dA page.

]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/4765443/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/4765443/ Wed, 09 Mar 2005 00:38:58 PST ]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/2818411/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/2818411/ Tue, 06 Jul 2004 15:28:18 PDT
]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/2593754/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/2593754/ Sun, 06 Jun 2004 01:06:57 PDT
I mean, it's got its place for sure. But I can do better than that. For the month of June...well from June 6 to July 6 I will challenge myself to do a few, but no less than three works that are well composed, using a more restrained and subtle color pallate than I have been used to. In Painter or using real media. I am more comfortable with my color choices in vector stuff, so I'll hold off on that for a bit.

Meanwhile, the search for good source material continues. ]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/2131717/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/2131717/ Thu, 01 Apr 2004 16:52:21 PST
I mentioned Max Ernst and his desire to be Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, and the pragmatist in me screams that that is artsy-fartsy nonsense, that illustrators market one or maaaaybe two styles and that's it so do that or you'll starve, damnit!

Anyway I think I should always try to expand, because that's just healthy. Excersize is good for the brain, and all that. But right now I'm really starting to enjoy this one sepia-looking, watercolory, pastelley, simple style. So I'm a-going to see if I can make that more sopisticated. I have some cute cows and things to upload later (with the way I update my devART journal, later is probably going to mean three months ago when someone who is not me reads this,)

It forces me to do clean up my prepwork, which is always a good thing. The better the initial sketch, the better the final project, because they're practically the same thing. ]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/1245086/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/1245086/ Mon, 06 Oct 2003 23:13:33 PDT ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/1163430/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/1163430/ Mon, 15 Sep 2003 00:00:49 PDT
I will be able to conduct a whole day's work without pretending to wake up and eat breakfast every three hours (a gimmick to "reset" my brain so that I can approach a project from a different angle.) ]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/1062378/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/1062378/ Tue, 12 Aug 2003 20:54:07 PDT ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/353128/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/353128/ Wed, 20 Nov 2002 00:22:38 PST I should do my homework
I should get more sleep
I should eat better
I should get out more
I should call home more often

I go back to LA in two days. I can't wait. I've been away so long I can't stand it anymore. I need some time to relax, and that seems silly because I slack off so much here. But it's not the same. There's monotony and lonliness here. Home, now more than ever, is a place of warmth and holidays and people being genuinely happy to see me.

I miss my parents and my sister. And my cat. And my room. All the crap on the walls from ages past...we don't have anythign up on the walls here. My tiger lily painting that Dad made for me is hanging in our room, which helps, but I miss the chaos on my walls.

It'll be a good 10 days. I hope I don't burn out running around trying to see people. I'll overload and get no rest. ]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/302568/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/302568/ Sun, 13 Oct 2002 02:06:35 PDT
My first thought was to format this like an anonymous "you" letter; I was going to vent and feel better, I guess so I could go watch Ghostbusters with my friends in a few minutes....fuck, I just broke one of my thimbles.

I found Steve's livejournal a few days ago by clicking the link on his AIM profile that I had theretofore assumed was a link to his comic. I was pleasantly surprised, so I went to his user info page to add his name to my friends list. While I'm there I notice colesama on his friends list, which was great, because I haven't had the best email exchanges in the world with her, but I was still curious about her, if she's happy, how she's doing, what she's up to. So I read back from the beginning to catch up, and I read something that hurt my feelings a little, which led to me thinking about all the dumb things that she and I did to each other after I found her "other" online diary (the contents of which is a whole other, and very very long, story).

So I spent that night being upset and thinking. I posted here, but I later made it private, because it wasn't well worded, and if I thought I was going to eventually resolve anything, I didn't want to start it with some livejournal post that barely reflects how I feel.

So this is the long one (assuming my feinds let me stay here in my angst. They've threatened to drag me out to the livingroom and force me to have a good time. )

okay, so this will be the long one...later

---

So it's later. I'm not sure what I really planned to write, other than reiterating over and over how hurt I feel, and how wrong everything seems to have ended up.

This is what I know: I did a lot of things in my first two years of college (and probably before that) that hurt nicole. I did not do them to hurt nicole, but they had to happen for my own growth. Was that okay? I don't know. Out of it I personally gained Carl as a very close friend, and Gil as the love of my life, a new school where I could spend time doing work instead of trying to get classes, and essentially everything that makes me who I am now. I'm kind of getting ahead of myself, and making this into another "coalescence" tirade, which I've done a couple of times, and don't really need to do again.

I had a space on diaryland when I did most of the things that hurt her. I went back and read those, and an AIM conversation she and I had sometime in the first quarter of sopomore year. I literally hated myself for hurting her, and I exhausted myself being torn about the whole thing. I said "...everything that I feel has made me free and ultimately happier with my cowardly self, is causing pain to someone I never ever want harm to come to." So much later, those of us that felt that way have gotten a very large "fuck you, let me have my bad moods," and I get it now. She would've gotten along great with Gil if she hadn't hated him so much. Anyway, i think it's a minor point that I didn't understand that she felt like feelings like mine were doing nothing other than trying to squelch her.

I didn't know her at all, ever. It was all, and always, guesses with her as to what was wrong, or what she was feeling, or whatever. Even now, with this group of people she's writing for, she's really vague. I never felt like an insider with her, which led to this wierd feeling of being challenged to be let in. It worked itself out literally later, when I hacked into her journal thing. That was probably the closest I ever got to a straight answer from her, and in a way I wish I'd never told her I'd read those things. Then I'd always, at least sort of, know what was going on. But that would've been diabolical- I already felt terrible for doing it in the first place.

So basically I feel like my relationship with her had been this enormous impasse for a year or more. For all I knew until February of sopomore year she was in terrible pain, or resented me or him greatly, whenever anything even remotely had to do with Gil or my relationship to him. And that whole time I felt like I owed it to her to be as inobtrusive as possible about it. I did everything I could not to talk about him around her (which was fucking impossible because we lived in the same suite. So especially every time he had a radio show, or we had a fight, or I went to visit, she knew about it.) And then, out of nowhere, (at least to me) she and Lori are in love, and...what? (see, this is the part of the story where I get really insensit... ]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/299173/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/299173/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:45:48 PDT
It's about Nicole, and the whole disaster that has been the last couple of years of our friendship, or lack thereof.

Also, this is going to be stream-of-consciousness, so it may not be linear.

----

Cole liked me. I knew that, but I ignored it. That was stupid of me. If I liked my friend, I wouldn't want them to ignore it. But I did, and at some point it became the kind of love that only happens out of inexperience, where there's lots of worry and lots of secrets and all that stuff.

So she had this webpage that was pretty much an onlne diary, before online diaries were as popular as they are now. It was basically just a gUrlpages page that she'd write in all the time. Some were public, and some were not. I knew there were non-public things, and for reasons I don't even understand anymore I decided to try to find out what tehy were. I think it was because I wanted to find out what the source of her suffering was.

Well, most the private stuff was about me and her feelings for me. I, at the time was screwing around with this friend of ours who lived in my dorm, which was a source of pain, and also why she eventually hated him. It was really surreal for me reading everything (why, oh why did I have to be so goddamned nosy) So of course I had to tell her that I knew, that I had seen it all, and I did, poorly. I don't remember what I said- I tend not to remember what I say when I'm nervous. I blurt. I imagine it was probably very stupid as was the rest of everybody's behavior about the whole thing.

I had a space at diaryland back at the beginning of all this, and so I have a sort of incomplete record of what I was thinking. It doesn't help much. I already know I was trying to figure out what would be best for all parties. That's not important, because things only started to go awry after I had starting thinking about only me.

So, at this point I no longer know what she was thinking after I uncovered her private journal pages..so we flash foraward to Jalama, when I met Gil, and Cole got upset that I was flirting (we had all been drinking, so she was more direct and I was more inclined to put my hand on the knee of a boy I had just met). The Jalama trip, I later heard, was supposed to be where Lori and Cole kind of kindled their feelings for each other.

I wish she'd told me. Not that it really matters, because she still hated Gil, and would still brood. So a lot of sophomore year I spent feeling apologetic to her, like I owed her something for not having romantic feelings for her, and falling in love with somebody else under her nose. She said mean things. I don't remember what, and frankly it doesn't matter anymore

...perhaps more later. I have a headache ]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/297653/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/297653/ Tue, 08 Oct 2002 17:59:56 PDT
Rhys is a docent for the Arcata Marsh project, and part of his training is to shadow a veteran docent on a tour, so Gil and I joined him yesterday. It was a gorgeous day and there were lots of birds to see and all that. We rented binoculars from teh visitor's center, and picked the (invasive) blackberries as we went along and just generally had a good time. After a while we went ahead because our tour group walked e x t r e m e l y s l o w l y, at which point we got really silly and became Invasive Plant Vigilanties, and started breaking all the fennel growths, mostly to get the licorice smell on our hands.

Saturday was also Pastels on the Plaza, so we went and checked that out. Pastels look so good on concrete, I suppose because it's so dark, anyway even the ones that weren't "technically" very good looked great, but most of them were just freaking amazing. Someone did a Zebra with black stripes on the head and rainbow colored stripes on the neck, and since I'm suddenly so enamored with the Quagga again I really liked that one. I hope they're still intact today, I'd like to go take some pictures. Gil and I decided that next year we'd do a spot together- this year we found out about it too late.

Probably the least interesting thing to anyone else that happened was that after the Pasteling and the Nature Walking, we went to Eureka on a a quest to buy "nice clothes." Gil got 8 pairs of underwear (mostly plaid, but I insisted he get at least one pair with dogs on them...they were cute!), but didn't find any pants, Rhys found a sweater that, in my opinion, he paid way too much for, and I went to Ross and spent about 70 bucks on two pairs of pants and three sweaters. These are strictly "non-wrecker" clothes, as in I won't wear them to school unless I'm dead sure I'm not going to make a mess. I need to have some nice clothes, because until this weekend everything I owned was falling apart. All that stuff is still falling apart, of course, but now I have some stuff that's not *stupid smile*

Vewry eventful day for us, especially considering we ususally spend saturdays sleeping and playing Animal Crossing.
]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/292059/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/292059/ Thu, 03 Oct 2002 20:20:42 PDT
I realize this doesn't mean anything to anyone else, but I read Zoobooks fanatically as a kid, and for one reason or another the "wild horses" issue (they're actually asses, but who'se splitting hairs?) stuck with me all these years. It had a short peice on the exinct Quagga, which is this sort of a half-zebra, half-donkey, in that the black and white stripes dissolve into a brown coat on the lower half of it's body. It was hunted to extincition sometime in the late 19th century, but since it's genetically a subspecies of plains zebras that still exist, a bunch of scientists have been working towards selectively breeding zebras with similar markings to bring the quagga back from oblivion. The project has been going on since 1987, the year I turned six, and also the year I first started getting Zoobooks.

...I realize that it doesn't acutally mean anything. I promise I'm not actually that far-gone. But wierd connections like that feel very profound to me.

If I could just convince myself that it wasn't a sign of my going totally bonkers I would live in the most fantastic world, where things like that proved magic is real. *shakes head* maybe I should be grateful there'll be no new Harry Potter to read for a while after all.
]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/284016/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/284016/ Thu, 26 Sep 2002 22:01:35 PDT
When I was a kid I always liked the stories about the kid who was a magical person among non-magical people, or the ones about the boarding schools of witchcraft (there's this movie the Disney channel used to play repeatedly every Halloween called The Worst Witch that I looked forward to all year), so Harry Potter is making me revisit that...wish, I guess it is, in a way I haven't been able to do since I hit puberty. Like, literally, my imaginary horses vanished sometime in the middle of junior high, and so did the fantasies that I was living that life.

So it's really strange when I start pretending to myself that HSU is a (somewhat less prestigious than Hogwart's) wizarding school in Northern California instead of a State University. It's fun, it's just wierd. I do it seamlessly, like I never stopped doing it in the first place. I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up one morning to find Lucky and Lightning grazing in my backyard.

(heh, I wonder if I should tell Garrett about this. He's read Harry Potter, I think, and he and I shared whole separate universes in elementary school...argh, of course he's not online right now )

I knew it was going to be delightful. Danielle kept saying it was "delightful." But this I never expected. I like it. It's so automatic that I don't even feel sillly doing it. And it doesn't hurt that a few of the buildings here are ancient, so I've got this environment that's conducive to pretending...and, well, that's the end of that.

]]> ~blackunicorn http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/268844/ http://blackunicorn.deviantart.com/journal/268844/ Fri, 13 Sep 2002 01:20:16 PDT
We'll see how this goes. ]]> ~blackunicorn