Finished Lone Wolf and Cub

11 #

I finished Lone Wolf and Cub yesterday–all 28 volumes. I’m speechless. Everything about it is amazing.

Pant Guy Steve

6 #

Oh yeah, Steve. Just when you thought this little drawing was lost forever in the memoryhole, it exists! I present Pant Guy Steve which is a blatant copy off of Shirt Guy Dom:
Pant Guy Steve 001
(Click for the larger, readable version (47KB))

The unedited, raw version in GIF format (44KB)

More elaboration on this later!

Tags:

AP European History Drawing

7 #

AP European History Blood and Iron Drawing
Click for larger version

Wait! Before you call some organization for the detriment of child violence or something to its equivalent, I would like to explain myself.

There was a “political cartoon” mini-competition in AP European History last week for extra credit points. I was part of an awesome group including Euge, Steve, Liebniz, and C. Grace. Since we all had somewhat horrible Euro grades (well, it just might be me), we decided that the best way to win would be to draw super-awesome cartoons–and so we did, in our opinion.

Euge drew two hilarious cartoons (he should scan them) in his usual stickfigureish style. Chris drew a Mario and Luigi adaptation of Giuseppe Mazzini’s meeting with Victor Emmanuel symbolizing the unification of Italy. Liebniz drew the death star and Brandon the Hut. I drew for the Germany category depicting Otto von Bismarck’s “Blood and Iron” phrase.

Well, maybe, I was a bit too clear about that. We (the group) took the straightforward approach for the cartoon and went for humor instead. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out very well. Here’s how the results went:
Mrs. W: “Group 1 (our group) gets 5 extra credit points!”
Us: “Yeah!” *All looking happy since we think we won first or something*
Mrs. W: “Group x1 wins 7 extra credit points!”
Mrs. W: “Group x2 wins 8 extra credit points!”
Mrs. W: “Group x3 wins 9 extra credit points!”
Mrs. W: “Group x4 wins 12 extra credit points!” (or something like that replacing xn with the group number)
Us: “Oh crap. We must have done really bad.”

Oh, yeah, right. About my “cartoon”. Well, if art is supposed to capture a certain emotion or feeling, then I think my attempt at the manga-like cartoon seemed to work. Because of the intensity of Bismarck’s goals, I thought his mindset was really emphasized in his “Blood and Iron ” phrase. When the rest of the group suggested that I draw blood and iron literally, I drew blood and iron, literally. Just imagine how much it would hurt to get smashed in the face with a huge high-density iron. Yeah, that’s exactly how Bismarck worked (I’m supposing, of course).

So, I tryed to put more dynamics in there, but I’m still horrible at drawing people that I botched a lot of the angles up. I was trying to simulate fast motion with the lines, but that’s not quite how manga artists do it. When I was reading Initial D, I realized that perpendicular lines are used to blur the edges. I think in other action manga, no arm is drawn at all, just lines marking a boundary. It’s quite interesting to draw actually. It helps me look at the world with some perspective… (bad pun intended)

New Style

4 #

So what do you think about this new look? Compare this with the standard Kubrick theme. I modified the existing Kubrick theme to look like my paper style from the LaTeX project and this is the result. It has its ups and downs, but is this more suitable than Kubrick (which I like very much)?

Latest project: A (better) LaTeX to HTML converter

0 #

So I procrastinated today and worked on this spontaneous idea I had. You see, sometimes I want to convert my documents (in LaTeX, I barely use Word anymore) into HTML format. I’ve searched very long on the internet a few months ago, but the best I could come up with was TeX4ht, and I just found pyLaTeX which is good, but not what I want.

So I began working on my own version of a LaTeX to HTML converter. I spent today setting up how pages would look, and I have a few demos to show you.

I essentially took Adobe Acrobat 6 output (at 118% magnification at 1024×768 screen resolution) and tried to design an HTML layout around the “page” format. I purposely constrained LaTeX output to the Times font instead of Computer Modern so I could better compare my version with the real LaTeX generated version.

If you are acute, compare the TeX4ht xhtml code with my xhtml code. Notice how the TeX4ht version seems a lot more bloated? My goal is to convert from LaTeX to HTML while maintaining logical and clean HTML.

Now, since I barely have time to be doing things like this, would anyone like to help me? We will be doing PHP work and writing some CSS to account for all of the different LaTeX environments and formatters. Let me know what you think.

Gah! Microsoft and standards do not equate

2 #

Arg! I was doing some CSS/XHTML work for yet another project I just started today (yeah, ha, I really don’t have any free time to be doing stuff like this) and was baffled about why Firefox and IE displayed my designs differently. Then I found this page that pretty much explained that when Microsoft created IE5 and 6, they decided to define their own standards like: “Well, we think that the width: attribute actually applies to the stuff inside the container tag including the padding and margins despite the standards clearly saying that the width is only for the inside content and does not include the padding and the margins!” There are a host of other problems too so most pages have to manually implement some sort of IE hack so that those poor Microsoft browsers don’t break.

I’d like to say that Firefox is hip on the standards.

Radio Shack Sells Manga

3 #

Okay, this is not an April Fools joke. I swear. I maintain that everything I say below is true. Eugene was witness to this.

So I was at Granite Run Mall on Monday for the science fair and after wandering around for a long time scrutinizing projects with Euge (we applied our scientific knowledge to some of the projects and saw some serious flaws in some of the results and conclusions), we decided to trudge into Radio Shack to see if we can come up with a way to build a weapon from the electric and magnetic concepts we had learned from AP Physics. Admittingly, we couldn’t come up with anything good besides looking for the biggest bad-ass capacitor we could find, charging it up, and discharging it on people. There were also ideas of making epileptic blinking LEDs or ear piercing peizo sound generators.

Then, I turned around and something caught my eye: Initial D Manga!

Okay, let’s stop here and consider this statement:

  1. Radioshack is selling manga.

Next, pinch yourself, because you are awake. This is not a dream. Read that sentence again and do not panic! Yes, Radioshack is selling manga. No, you are not going insane.

Well, I thought I was going insane when I first saw the three pack bundle of Initial D sitting innocently on the bottom shelf. “That’s insane!” I practically yelled. In fact, I might have. I don’t remember.

Now, consider this next statement:

  1. Radioshack is selling three volumes of Initial D (1-3) for $5 (all three).

Now, you might be saying: “So what? Am I supposed to do a backflip or something?” My response would be: “Yes, yes, a backflip would suffice.”

Considering that each volume of Initial D costs $10, the three pack bundle would logically be $30. However, Radioshack is selling it for $5 despite this ominous stick on the back saying $20 (for all three). I even asked the lady if it was an error, but she shook her head and sold it to me for five bucks. Wow. That’s great :). Considering my lack of monetary funds, that deal was too good to past by!

Now, I swear that they had a pricing error. There should be three packs left. Get them while you can.

Tags:

Results from the Science Fair

4 #

Well, the good news is that I placed first in 12th grade computer science at the local Science Fair also won best of category (computer science).

Now, the balanced news is that I believe I was the only competitor in my grade-category level and that the computer science category was only comprised of two other projects.

I will now move on to the Delaware Valley Science Fair. Hopefully, Spring Break will give me more time to refine my code and research as well as learn more about the derivation of the backpropagation formulas.

One week, one research project

11 #

Here’s the situation: I have one week to complete a research project for the upcoming science fair.

Here’s how I’m doing:
So far this week I’ve been sacrificing homework and cows to conduct research in neural networks and genetic algorithms. I am two days away from the project deadline (Sunday after 7:30PM), and I think I’m somewhat on schedule. I spent most the the week reading literature on neural networks and learning how they work. I was stuck on designing a good experiment since I did not want to do the cliché handwriting recognition application. Just a few hours ago, I thought up a good way to compare multi-layer backpropagation NNs with genetically evolved NNs so I’m going to go all the way with this idea.

Hopefully, I can program this in two days! Can mikeXstudios make it? Or will the evil villian Pro. Crasti Nation lead to mX’s demise?! Find out on the next episode of: mikeXstudios gives a meaningless update on his exploits!

*Isn’t the suspense killing you? Well, they say that curiosity kills the cat! (Please disregard these meaningless statements, my brain is thinking faster than I can process information at this point). What if I write a script that manages files and call it: Xfiles (continuing the naming format of my programs)? Arctank.

Hey, you know what I just realized, I’m writing in stream of conciousness! w00t!

Um, oh yeah, heart of darkness, er, neural networks.

Looking for Xcomic?

0 #

The early versions of Xcomic accidently had my url instead of the script’s url in the bottom link. If you are looking for Xcomic (the script), please go here. Thanks! Sorry for any confusion!

Tags: