I swear, every time we have a portrait crit or I get a segment grade back, a little part of me dies and I just want to never touch a camera again, at least in an academic sense.
I mean, if I suck so much, what’s the point of even trying? I’d rather be photographing and printing because I enjoy it (and oh god, I used to enjoy it so much).
I wonder if I should drop portrait. The class is killing my love of photography, and stomping every bit of enjoyment I get out of it into the ground, and then stampeding over it with a herd of deer, and then running it over with a steamroller. I technically have all the requirements for my photo minor already. It’s just that I always feel bad dropping a class, even if it’s a class I absolutely late (read: graphics last semester). I’d rather just stick with it until the end. The unfortunate thing is I don’t know if my QPA can afford the hit it’ll take from staying in the class (especially given Networks and Graph Theory this semester, neither of which is going well). Just have to work hard to make sure my other two classes are A’s.
Blaahhhhh.
To be fair, I don’t completely disagree with the grade I got on this assignment (I do think I could have done a better job)… what gets me is the lack of feedback and the fact that I tried really, really hard for this assignment (probably the most work I’ve done for any single photo assignment ever)… and that I was actually *happy* with my work (then again, I’m usually happy with my work, but it apparently sucks anyway).
I wish I knew how to fix my portraiture.
Someone tell me how to fix my portraiture.
Am I bad at framing? Am I a bad judge of lighting or angle? Do I just print horribly? Is my artistic sense just screwed up beyond repair? How the hell am I supposed to improve if I’m never told anything beyond, “Crop your prints better,” and, “These suck, do better.”?

Yeeeah, I think that ruined my mood for today. To think I was all happy this morning upon waking up too.

Today is clustaring, working on my webapps project (which I actually enjoy doing, and am apparently good at given that I’ve gotten 100% on every webapps assignment so far) and dinner with Alisa (yay all-you-can-eat pasta). Then, tonight, there is a campfire of yummyness.

No picture. I can’t stand to look at my camera or any photos right now. Hopefully I’ll be up for piccaring again by tonight (because campfire shots are always fun).

I did, however, download 6 CDs worth of new music from eMusic today. A bunch of great stuff, and a little not-so-good stuff, but meh… it was only $20, so I don’t feel bad about it. Yay for cheap, legal, DRM-free music that doesn’t support the greedy RIAA assholes. You should get some too, especially since March is the Boycott-RIAA month.

…
…
Wow, I feel really, really, really shitty now.
God dammit.

Break has been full of awesome so far.
I got our networks routing daemon (mostly) working the other day (with only one late day). The thing I spent 4 hours debugging manefested itself as 3 or 4 different bugs in different parts of code, depending on how I ran it and what the network topology looked like. I finally traced it back into the tree-generation algorithm, in which I found the error….
A loop inside a loop, where I had mistyped the “j” as an “i”.
Don’t you hate it when you do that?

In any case, yesterday was full of awesome gameness with Tim, Mars, Dan, and Ian after an amazing dinner with Christina and some exploring with Ben. Today was full of piccaring with Greg and matthewj, followed by games with Alisa, rlambert, damo, Alex, and Brian. Whee. I’m also managing to get a lot done for CMU Adventures.
Yay for breaks?

Piccars:

He’s got branches growing out of his head. I can’t decide whether I like it or if it detracts from the image. It’s less distracting in the full version because of the depth of field though. Meh.

Teh matthewj photographs well.

Whee photos!

Wheee… my housing situation is exploding. There’s a dependency chain in it, and the graph representing the various decisions that we’d each make is cyclic, and ahhhh. I’ll try to get it all worked out, but bleh.
I should put this out here now, I guess:
If my housing situation explodes over the summer, and I come back next Fall and don’t have a place to stay, is there anyone who would rent out part of their living environment for one semester? Only thing is that it has to be within walking distance of CMU (I’ll be taking OS), and I’ll be graduating in December.

Spent some time in the darkroom today making prints. Also played around with solarization (you might know the term from a photoshop filter… doing it in the darkroom is more fun though). Huzzah for solarized print of matthewj?

Mike and I worked a bit on our networks project. We’re implementing the network layer of the network stack, and building a router and a daemon that configures it. Whee. It sounds awesome, but it’s confusing as hell. So this is what building a real app is like. Hmm…

Still bummed about the Google interview yesterday. I wish I hadn’t been so stupid on some most of the questions. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it now.

So much more work to do this weekend, and an exam to study for for Monday. Ahhhh!