comics

Happy 77th, Golden Gate Bridge

In retrospect, I’m really glad that I chose to direct all my creepy photo-collecting, drawing, stalking, and obsessing at an inanimate object, and not a classmate. Well, the latter still happened… but let’s not digress.

To anyone who tried to tell me otherwise, admiration of an inanimate object is not completely futile. This bridge gave me goals and taught me to draw! (And maybe lost me some friends? Eh, totally worth it.)

So, let’s ~~make fun of~~ examine some of my Golden Gate Bridge fanart of over 10 years ago!

Happy Birthday, dear bridge! The Golden Gate Bridge turns 77 in a few days. If you’re out there in San Francisco, pay it a visit for me.

More words that lacked English counterparts in my childhood

My sister thought of a couple more and drew some nice pictures to go with them! She says:

chinese handwriting credit goes to mom, who saw my awful attempts and redid all of them.

Thanks for contributing, Mimi & Mom!

I’ve also thought of one more!

I know the bloggy trend nowadays is to give a trigger warning for corporeal punishment, even if it’s just by feather duster and/or knuckle, but I’m with Russell Peters on this topic.

Ahh, the ol’ knuckle to the head. The hands of my father could contort into a talon of justice! I have tried but it doesn’t look as menacing. I think it’s a perspective issue. Once I think it’s all in position, I turn my hand in to check, but then it just look like I’m tightly gripping a subway pole. Not very menacing.

If you don’t get this is all about, I’m trying to figure out which Chinese word it actually is. Below is my very credible analysis.

Yeah, I have no idea. I start to wonder if my parents made it up… any other Cantonese kids gotten the joy joy? Any idea what word it is? Leave me a comment!

Meanwhile, I’ve just looked up “talon of justice” to see if I made it up, but apparently World of Warcraft beat me to it. It’s a stun spell! Weirdly appropriate, I must say. Not so for the English word of the same pronunciation…

Bass bar + architectural rendering tutorial

Back to school! Thankfully, I found my bass bar more or less the way I left it nearly a month ago. It’s all done and glued in now. Definitely not perfect, but a decent first attempt, I think.

This little animation explains the ridiculous challenge of the bass bar. You aren’t fitting it to just plop down and sit perfectly (though some people do?), you have to put it under a little tension. This means gradually over-cutting or lifting the ends of the bass bar, but still making sure the entire bar will make contact if you are pressing it into the plate. But you have to make sure that the way the bar contacts doesn’t twist your plate either! Just a few things to worry about. There’s probably only like a million other things too.

I glued up the bar yesterday and snapped some photos.

Those clamps. That bar. Those little cleats. The straight grain accentuating the topography of the spruce. All this inevitably leads me into….

Architecture RE:lapse

Did you know that I was once a great master of Photoshopping horribly underdeveloped models into magical architectural wonderlands? I exaggerate only as much as an architectural rendering does. People ask me how I do it. The methodology is very very simple, but making a good rendering requires some pretty well-developed eye judgment. Kind of like violins… That said, let’s take the above photo and make a rather ridiculous rendering lacking in good judgment.

1. Get you a nice sky

2. Add some green stuff

3. Busy things up with scalies and texture

4. Fluff it up with some filters and highlights

Other notes: I am a heavy user of Multiply, masks, brush and pattern presets, and Flickr. I am a very light user of layers. Keep that file light.

And remember, if anything’s looking off or ugly, or if something’s underdeveloped, or if you’re too lazy to solve some particular detail, you can always just FIX IT WITH SHADING!

Household items whose English names were unknown to me for a while

step stools are called bing bongs in my family

My elementary school encouraged my parents to speak English at home, so that we wouldn’t be totally lost when we went to school. (That was bad advice – we could have grown up bilingual! But I’ll save that rant for another day.) So my parents spoke a little less Chinese and a bit more English to us, and eventually we were responding exclusively in English. But a few English words eluded me for a long time, and even today, their Chinese names come to mind before their English counterparts.

a feather duster is a tool for asian parents to beat children

If you don’t know about this, ask your ABC friends. I was surprised to learn that it wasn’t just our family. Yay, we can all bond over the absurd feeling of running with your hands over your butt! I never processed that those three characters are basically “chicken fur sweep” because it just meant “time to get an ass whoopin'”. I don’t know when I even learned that the thing was actually for dusting stuff off. Ours was so dusty living atop Mommy’s Fridge that it probably wouldn’t have actually cleaned anything.

gu hon gwaat / miser scrape is such a better name than rubber spatula

This one followed me into adult life. In fact, I’m still not satisfied that it’s just referred to as a generic ol’ spatula. That’s so boring and unspecific!! It’s a scraping-device-for-frugal-misers.

Operation help-Max-get-chickens, part 2

The $100 tractor for three chickens

Today we discuss the making of the chicken tractor, without the drama.

Bill of Materials

The following chart is what it would cost, not what we paid. We spent a bit more (sorry, Max), because we bought extra of a few things (mainly OSB, due to errors and then design changes). Though we also made use of scrap or leftovers from previous projects.

material	unit cost	quantity	subtotal
Pressure-treated 2×4, 12′	$5.57	3	$16.71
2×3, 8′	$1.92	5	$9.60
OSB 7/16″, 4′ x 8′	$8.45	1	$8.45
Corrugated Metal Roof Panel, 26″ x 8′	$19.49	1	$19.49
1″ Teks Roofing Screws with neoprene washers (box of 120)	$9.88	1	$9.88
2.5″ Exterior Wood Screw (1 lb box)	$6.71	1	$6.71
1″ Exterior Wood Screw (1 lb box)	$6.71	1	$6.71
1/2″ Hardware Cloth, 3′	~$2.00 / lf	~11 ft	~$22.00
3″ Strap Hinges (pack of 2)	$3.27	1	$3.27
TOTAL			$102.82

(Nerd note: I’ve always wanted to use an html table in an appropriate context!!! ie not for formatting my angelfire/geocities pages 10 years ago!)

Other stuff we used that may or may not cost ya:

Drill, circular saw, mitre saw
Staple gun for mounting hardware cloth
Metal-cutting blade for circular saw
Egg drawer!
Nice big branches for roost sticks
It’s a good idea to prime or paint the wood with something, especially the OSB, and especially especially where ever the OSB was cut.

Some Assembly Required

Chicken tractor construction, animated in gifs.

1. Partial A Frame

1 chicken tractor a frame construction
Floor size: 3′ x 6′
Height: ~3′
For 3 chickens, this is a bit on the small side.
The run area is 3′ x 4′.

2. Chicken House Frame-up

2 chicken tractor house frame-up
That OSB wall and its little mini-studs were assembled before sliding into place on the A frame.

3. Perimeter Cladding

3 chicken tractor perimeter close-off
Tediously cut your hardware cloth with wire cutters. Careful! It’ll draw bloood. Staple directly onto the frame.
Roost access door is strap hinged.

4. Corrugated Metal Roof

4 chicken tractor corrugated metal roof installation
This was our first experience with sawing through metal and using those Teks screws with built-in squishy stuff to prevent leaking through the roof.

5. Egg Drawer

chicken tractor egg drawer
We ripped this drawer from my sister’s old kitchen counters. The box itself is about 11″ x 18″.

6. Insert Chickens

chicken tractor just add chicken
The coop is a bit tight, but miraculously, even the puffball Buff Orpington can fit down the 8″ ramp, and through the tiny door (which is maybe an 10″ high triangle.)

More Photos

chicken tractor construction

In case you forgot, it rained, so we took the job inside.

chicken tractor construction i can't fit through the door

Peek-a-boo. See? The tiny door prevents human-sized predators from crawling in and attacking them in their chicken house at night.

chicken tractor outdoor roosts

Ameraucana and Buff Orpington hanging out, and a shy Rhode Island Red hiding inside.

chicken tractor overview

Ta-da! All nice and… half-primed.

I’m still on session break from violin-making school, so violin-related posts will resume next week. Can’t wait to see my möbius strip bass bar!

In the meantime, next post will STILL be about chickens — troubleshooting and accessories.

fix it with shading

drawings by MJ Kwan