Sep '06 - Dec '06
My studio partner and I have spent the last week and a half making intricate screens for our model. We've been using baswood and an olfa knife and tweezers, and have pretty much managed to develop carpal tunnel. They're awesome though:
Anyway, we were on our last batch the other night, and suddenly my good friend remembers he has one of those choppers where you can set up a template and then chop piece after piece with almost no effort involved. He ran over to us with it all happy that he could help us. When we saw our salvation and thought about how close to the end of the torture we already were, we both burst into tears. We cried for a good ten minutes while everyone gaped at us. It was hilarious in retrospect, though. The chopper proved amazing. And we managed to finish our model, though we didn't manage to sleep. Oh well.
One thing I truly believed before I came to college was that it was impossible to fall asleep while actively doing something. This saddens me, because there are countless classes where I've completely given up taking notes because the word never forms on the page before I lose consciousness.
On a third, even more unrelated note, one of my favorite professors stopped me in the hall last week and told me he found my blog on this site. I'm making a deliberate choice to embarrass him here, and would like him to know that I overheard one of his students refer to him as "awesome" tonight.
15 Comments
nicely made screens - and beautiful. i'm sure i missed it but what are they part of?
like your comment about the sleep vs activity. you'll probably develop a whole new theory of sleep over the next couple of years: is sleep real or virtual? is it really necessary, or is it just something we've been taught to do, so that those in control can reset the game? what happens to 'sleep' when we stay awake? is it somewhere else? does it cease to exist?
I personally like to think that an all nighter is simply an IOU taken out on the body -- and the body will collect on that IOU some time down the road ...
^yes!
THE CHOPPER is the greatest tool ever made...
eventually you'll end up with a divot where the blade comes down and will need to either by another one or retrofit it with with a really thin piece of metal at the chopping point...
to this day mine still has a petrified ant that made the mistake of walking across my chopper while i had zap-a-gap in hand... he will forever be encased in a zip kickered zap-a-gap sarcophagus...
great craft on the screen models by the way... there's nothing better than a finely crafted physical model...
Is that your studio partner? She looks like she could use some sleep!
i developed tendenitis while doing my thesis project back in the mid 90's. i still get flare ups now and then...
Yeah that's my partner Nicole (she's also my roommate) and when I took these photos we both needed sleep badly (otherwise the photos would have been better - usually I try harder). Thanks for the comment about the craft - it was mostly Nicole's doing. I'm better at drawing than building.
The chopper we were using already has a divot but it seemed to work just peachy, but I might look into what you said about the piece of metal, Phil, thanks.
that's kind of cute. :) have you fallen asleep standing up yet?
Also, those screens look beautiful! One of the biggest things I truly regret about my undergrad projects were that I had never heard of using tweezers, zap-a-gap, a chopper, or glue-in-a-syringe to help build models. We weren't given any of those pointers from anyone and in a vacuum I guess somehow I never found out about them. I don't remember anyone else using such things, either, but they probably did and I was just too sleep-deprived to take note. Ahh well.
a chopper? i thought all you kids today used laser cutters for everything.
i was actually dozed off once while using a urinal. it was the last one, in the corner and i was leaning against the side wall while pissing...next thing i know, someone's tapping me on the shoulder saying, "hey buddy, you need to get more sleep at home."
i went home to take a shower one morning before a jury after an all-nighter... i first fell asleep on the toilet and then again while standing in the shower...
I was helping a thesis student last semester who went home to take a shower the day before his review, and ended up falling asleep in the shower for over two hours. I don't think I"ll ever get over that story.
And no, I have yet to use our laser cutter. My professors tend to appreciate my hand drawings, and so nothing ever gets put in CAD to laser cut...
another great tool for cutting thicker pieces of modeling wood, that the chopper can't cut, are those miniature circular saws...they look like table saws but the blade is about 2 inch or so in diameter...
i had a classmate who showed up at 7 in the morning left at 11 and repeated this everyday...the guy was disciplined as hell and produced some nice work...only seen him stay up til the morning twice...i couldn't do that though...i wait til the last minute to build my models resulting in all-nighters...
i've dozed off in structures class...but that's nothing out of the ordinary...
what's a chopper?
Turn over your Chopper and tell me what the sticker says. Mine says "Inspected by Norm."
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