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.

Easy chicken coop accessories

There are some fancy schmancy chicken food & water dispensers out there, and they cost a lot of money. There are several different designs out there, but the main ideas behind the good dispensers are all the same:
1. They only put out a little bit of food or water at a time, so the goods stay cleaner, and there is less waste.
2. They hold a lot of food & water so you don’t have to change or refill often. They keep feed clean and dry and protected from unwanted critters and creatures.
3. They are easy to refill when you need to.
4. They are hard to tip over, minimizing waste.

Gravity Feeder

We made a gravity feeder for Maxine’s chicken tractor, and have it hanging underneath the roost so it won’t get super poo-ed. Food is stored in a piece of gutter from Home Depot (less than $3) and a plastic container that held mushrooms from the grocery store.

We poked one hole towards the lower end of each gutter face, and two holes in each face (except the bottom) of the mushroom container. Then we strung a string through as shown above to attach the containers together. Then we filled it with feed.

The chickens eat from the bottom, and the weight of the feed pushes more into the bottom for the chicken to eat.

I think this one passes the first three criteria above. If your chickens peck viciously, the bottom tray does tilt a little. Perhaps in version 2.0, we would tie knots to keep the string from sliding around and rearranging the hanging angle.

Waterer

This is very low-tech but pretty effective. All it is is a ribbed tin can tied to the hardware cloth. Refilling is easy (just pour water through the hardware cloth and down into the can). Since it is mounted to the angled part of the hardware cloth, birds can’t sit right on top and poo down into it. It doesn’t hold tons of water, but I think it’s better to be changing water often anyway. And you can install several according to how frequently you want to refill it. So, this system passes criteria #1, 3, and 4.

Roost

These big branches are nice for the birds to hang out on in the run area. But how to attach? Credit goes to my sister for this very simple mounting technique. Drive two screws into the end grain. Lift the stick into the A-frame section and it will grab onto some of the hardware cloth.

fix it with shading

drawings by MJ Kwan