The market fails me

I checked at five different stores. Turns out nobody makes non-repro-blue mechanical pencil leads in the narrow widths I like (0.5mm, but I’d take 03., 0.7, or 0.9). Pentel makes a dark blue, but it’s not the non-repro shade. I think I saw a set at 2mm, and I may settle for that, but it’s not much of an improvement over just using ordinary non-repro pencils; I’d still have to stop every so often for sharpening. The guy at NY Central said nobody makes ’em anymore, which pisses me off. How can there be no demand for something so useful? Maybe I’ll have luck hunting Japanese art supply websites.

I remembered to bring my digital camera into Manhattan, but forgot to snap shots of Union Square like I’d planned. (I want to get in some practice doing detailed, cross-hatched, from-reference drawings like Chris Baldwin does.) I did get the MetLife Tower (the one on 23rd Street, not the one that I still think of as the PanAm building) looking ghostly in the fog.

While at NY Central I picked up a couple more pens — a black Pitt S (the thinnest of their three non-brush markers) and and Alvin Penstix 0.3mm, also black. I’ve been growing dissatisfied with the 005 Pigma Micron; it seems thin and spidery to me now. I’m getting into markers that will make lines that are fat, sleek-headed pens such as sleep a’nights. The slightly thicker, jucier lines look better after scanning. And I think the Pitt ink is darker, blacker than the Pigma. I tested the Pitt out by stopping off at Starbucks for a coffee and sketching a guy; I like this fine.

Cool stuff

Ah, before I go to sleep, I forgot to note two cool things that happened today:

While putting on my watch, I found myself tightening the band to the fifth hole inward. I’d been using the fourth for the past few years, and originally used the third when I first got this band.

And on my way out of the apartment, I found a bag of fresh tomatoes hanging off our doorknob, presumably a gift from our landlord (who keeps a garden in the back yard). Mmmm. Not quite as flavorful as they could be, but there’s still a taste to garden-fresh tomatoes that you just don’t get from supermarkets.

(Oh, crap, RadioParadise has redesigned their website, so now I have to rewrite the screen-scraper I cobbled together to grab the current song for sticking in the Music field.)

Oh, and I learned a new Perl function today: sprintf. Here’s how to use sprintf format a numeric value as a dollar amount:

$dollar = sprintf "%.2f", $number

I learned this while writing a script to figure out when the per-cup cost (rounded to the nearest cent) of coffee refills at Ground hits 25¢. (Answer: With the 101st cup.)

I'm a subatomic particle or a navy crewman

Higgs Boson -- You are crazy and wacky and nobody
really understands you. Theoretically your
humor gives the universe mass and existence,
but the explanation as to how this all works is
still in the works.


What kind of subatomic particle are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

BFL, week 7, day 5: lower-body

Came real close to not exercising today. It was a string of excuses — got up late, was hungry so ate, I could skip today and do the lower-body workout tomorrow, etc. Finally I summoned up the willpower and went out and did it. The gym’s a bit emptier at 3 PM, I didn’t have to compete for any of the machines.

(  Lower-body workout numbers  )

Grids and chess

I spent a couple of hours at Ground working on a new piece of artwork. I’m still in prep mode on this, working from photo reference, gridding it and laying it out in non-repro-blue pencil. I’d gotten out of the habit of doing this kind of prep; It’s frustrating to not be able to jump right into inking. I may sketch out some quickies tonight just to satisfy my urge to scribble black lines.

A young regular at Ground, someone I’d chatted with the other day about the Iliad and the Odyssey, invited me to play chess with him. It’s been years since I played; if this was my fourth game in a decade I’d be surprised. I seem to have learned something in the intervening years; I could feel myself playing better than I used to. I was able to keep the traditional principles of chess in my head: control the center of the board, try to make every move do something for you, think several moves ahead, if you can force your opponent into reacting then he won’t have time to advance his own goals. I made one careless mistake, and lost a rook for it, but he made one too, and it cost him the game.