K-Squared Ramblings

Under Construction Indefinitely

We went to Wayzgoose at UCI on Saturday, which meant getting our annual taste of what’s changed about the college campus. I’d caught the new Student Center last fall, but Katie hadn’t been back since last year, before it was finished.

Some of the meeting rooms buried in the hill still remain from the previous building. In a food court next to the bookstore, I found a window looking down on this familiar-looking atrium.

Through the glass paneling is a stairway that leads up to the ring road entrance. Clone Copy and Clone Notes used to be on the lower floor to the right (off-camera). In the mid-1990s, the area below the overhang to the left was a pool hall whose name escapes me. I think they converted it to a study area when they remodeled the upper floor to create Zot Zone (which has since been demolished and relocated). The area where I was standing used to be an outdoor walkway connecting the main courtyard to the bookstore.

What was really odd was the west food court, where my brain kept trying to overlay the old layout even though I’m sure they ripped out and replaced that section of the building entirely.

The sad thing, though, was that they’re tearing up the large grass area in the middle of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and putting in another building. Everything in the quad bordered by the Claire Trevor Theater (formerly the Village Theater), the Studio Theater, the scene shop, Studio Four, and the drama offices is a big fenced-off area of dirt.

Aside from the usual uses for a lawn, it was a great place for people to rehearse. It’s not clear how much of the fenced-off area will actually be turned into a building, but they may have finally finished paving the entire school.

I found it a rather ironic discovery to make at this time, considering that Wayzgoose/Celebrate UCI is also combined with Earth Day.

UCI Student Center: Then and Now

I drove out to UCI on my lunch hour, and got my first view of the newly-completed Student Center. There are actually some parts of the building left over from the previous one, but the whole exterior is new. Then I remembered a photo I’d taken of the old Student Center, back when I was attending the school, from the top of what was then the Humanites Office Building, now Murray Krieger Hall. Since I had extra time on parking, I decided to see if I could match the shot.

Here it is 10 years ago:

UCI Student Center: Late afternoon, 1996–1997

And here it is today:

UCI Student Center: Early afternoon, October 4, 2007

Read the rest of this entry »

Strange Sights of San Diego

Our first night in San Diego, we picked up our badges for Comic-Con, then went out to see Avenue Q. We took the trolley back, and as we walked up the hill from the Little Italy trolley stop, we saw a pair of giant cartoon eyes looking out over the city from a balcony near the top of a nearby building. I thought they might be satellite dishes with convenient lighting, but then I remembered the number of odd publicity stunts connected to the Simpsons movie. No idea whether it’s related or not.

The shuttle route from our hotel to the con passed by this mural, which plays with the nature of the constructed reality. The wall is a newspaper page. The face is a sculpture, a painting. The hands holding the chisel and paintbrush, of course, are just as artificial as the face being created.

We noticed an interesting coincidence at Horton Plaza. Just a few doors down from the Post Office was an Aeropostale clothing store:

This bench was in front of a hotel, probably the Hilton San Diego Gaslamp. I suppose that makes the pun on dog training more appropriate, since it’s a block away from Petco Park stadium.

I’ve always figured standing out on a street in a mascot costume must be miserable, especially in summer. But how much worse to be dressed as a giant soft drink? I suppose this would go with last year’s walking sandwich.

Now, you have to wonder about AMN Healthcare. It’s clearly a set of initials…but how often do people complain about health, insurance, and the healthcare industry? It’s just one letter off from “Damn Healthcare.”

Back to the shuttle route, next to (or possibly connected to) the Martini Ranch spotted in a previous installment of this series, was this nightclub that made no pretensions about what people are going there for. Also note that it’s a “niteclub” — is that a nightclub with fewer calories?

Then there’s this place, which employed the ultimate euphemism:

That’s got to be the most convolutedly delicate way of saying “sex shop” that I’ve ever seen.

Comic-Con Photos are up for 2007!

Whew! I’ve been sorting and labeling all evening, and I finally posted this year’s San Diego Comic-Con photos!

• Comic-Con International 2007 Photos

I’m still adjusting the descriptions and titles and such, so the text will change a bit over the next day or two, but all the photos are up! 293 pictures of costumes, convention sights, San Diego and more!

Pirates vs. Sylar

I’m still attending Comic-Con in civvies, but Katie wore two costumes this year: another update of her pirate outfit on Friday, and a Sylar victim with a telekinetic slice across her forehead. Saturday, of course, for the big Heroes panel.

She did the makeup from scratch, using latex and fake blood, and got a lot of attention. In fact, while waiting in line two hours to get into the panel, series director Allan Arkush walked past, stopped… and took her picture!

Sadly, even after waiting two hours she wasn’t able to get into the room, which was about half as big as it needed to be for the audience. Lots of people left at that point, but she was among the group that stayed hoping to get into the Battlestar Galactica panel afterward (which she did). While bored in line, she and the fan next to her posed as Sylar and victim. Edit: we have a copy of the photo, and permission to post it!

So you can see the result of the traumatic experience of the day:

She got her revenge, though. After we went to see the Buffy the Vampire Slayer 10th anniversary screening of “Once More With Feeling” (described in my Saturday guest post at Comics Should be Good), we went out to the Ghirardelli shop in the Gaslamp District. She got a dark chocolate raspberry sundae, and the raspberry sauce was dripping around the edge of the glass, just so…

Flash Sightings at Comic-Con

I saw quite a few Flash T-shirts in San Diego this year (more than I’m used to seeing at Comic-Con, actually), but only two people dressed as the Flash. Interestingly, both were women.

While all four of the major Flashes have been men, DC has published a number of female speedsters, including several alternate-reality Flashes and two who have worn the Flash symbol in-continuity: Lady Flash and Jesse Quick.

I also found it interesting that both costume designs incorporated sunglasses, reminiscent of one of Jesse’s later costumes and of the Kingdom Come version of Iris West II.

Update August 3: Wallyoeste and West both pointed out CBR’s 3rd Photo Parade, which includes two pictures of a couple in Flash costumes. Part 4 has a picture of a DC group with a fifth. This brings it up to at least 5 Flashes at the convention: 3 women and 2 men.

Spring Haze

On Sunday, March 11, a brush fire struck in the Anaheim Hills area. It was controlled relatively quickly, and by the next morning, the smoke had settled into a blanket of haze over Orange County.

For contrast, here’s a shot from a few weeks earlier (February 23), when it was unusually clear. This was taken from a park in the Quail Hill area of Irvine, looking across the Saddleback Valley from the south toward the same range of hills seen on the left of the picture above.

Click to enlarge

Two Sunsets

Just after sunset on Wednesday, February 7.

Just before sunset on Monday, February 12.

Blurry

I set up a slide-show screen saver on one of my computers at work. To start, I dropped in some of my wallpapers, including several from the Astronomy Picture of the Day, then snagged some photos from my website to add a little variety.

Of course, 800×600 (or smaller) images don’t look so great blown up to 1400×1050, so last weekend I grabbed some higher-res copies from home.

What surprised me was how blurry the older photos were. Most of the digital photos I have older than 2003 are scanned in from 3½×5 or 4×6 prints. And half of those were done with a point and shoot camera. Even the photos that I scanned at a higher resolution tended to be much blurrier than the 5-megapixel images I’ve been taking since we went digital.

It also pointed up a problem with the point-and-shoot camera and lighting. Compare the following photos from my American Southwest page:

The one on the left (of the moon above a rock ridge) was taken with an old SLR camera that my grandfather gave me when I was maybe 12 or so. It was entirely manual except for a built-in light meter. I loved the control and the photo quality I could get out of it, but it was big and bulky, and eventually I stopped carrying it.

The second photo (with the one tall building sticking up out of nowhere) was taken with the point-and-shoot camera I picked up during high school and used right up through that first Hawaii trip. Notice the difference in the sky? The sky does vary in color—you only need to walk outside on a clear day to see that—but something about that camera just collected less light from the corners of the image. The Laughlin picture is a good example because you can see the circle continue across the lower half of the frame as well.

The ones from the 2003 Hawaii trip are actually not too bad, even though they were done on the cheap camera, because they were scanned straight from the negatives by Kodak. I suspect they have a slightly better scanner than I do!

Evening Skies

Here are a couple of photos, one just before sunset, the other just after, over the past month.

First up is a twilight view of South Coast Plaza. On Friday the 13th, we went to the nearest Borders to pick up The End of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events and Neil Gaiman’s new short story collection, Fragile Things. We ended up crossing the bridge over to the main section of the mall, turned around, and saw an amazing twilight display with clouds silhouetted against the blue.

We stopped to take pictures. We weren’t the only ones.

Perhaps an hour later, the rainstorm arrived.

Next up is from this past Monday, October 23. I was driving up the 405 after work and noticed that there were some feathery clouds in the right area, so I started looking for sundogs. Normally I don’t find anything. It’s Southern California, after all, so the right conditions are relatively rare. (Though occasionally I see something spectacular like the full halo I caught in February.)

To my surprise, I saw a faint bright spot in the clouds, level with and to the right of the sun. It got brighter over the course of my drive, with hints of red, orange and yellow creeping in on the sunward side: a classic sundog. Once I got onto city streets, I had a chance to stop and take a picture.

Comic-Con Photos are Up!

I’ve just posted our photos from Comic-Con. Cosplayers, San Diego sightseeing, comic creators, random convention stuff, etc.

Edit: The 2007 Photos are up now, too.

Smoke and Fog

Monday morning dawned foggy. By the time we left for work, most of the fog had burned off, but we looked out the car window and saw a huge, billowing gray cloud hugging close to the ground. If this had been the usual fire season, or if there had been no fog to start with (or if there had been time for coffee to take effect), I think we would’ve both immediately recognized it as smoke from a brush fire. The Sierra fire in the Cleveland National Forest had started just a few hours earlier.

There was still fog around, though. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunrise, Sunset

The first photo is from Wednesday morning around 8:00. Katie took it on our drive to work. There’s actually another shot that shows more of the sky, but this one is more striking. The second shows tonight’s sunset as seen from the Metro Pointe parking lot. Yes, it’s a freeway in the foreground, but the sunset itself was incredible. Both thumbnails are linked to larger copies of the photos.

Finally, here are some vaguely lenticularish clouds I saw looking north at sunset on Friday. This one’s full-size already:

Comic-Con Photos

Photos from San Diego and Comic-Con are up!

• Sightseeing, panels, and exhibits
• Hall Costumes / Cosplayers

Edit: The 2007 Photos are up now, too.

Comic Con! (2003)

I’ve been to the San Diego Comic Con every year since 1990 (before they changed the name to Comic Con International), but this is the first year I’ve gone in costume.

Last weekend, Katie and I searched a bunch of vintage clothing and regular clothing stores looking for pieces she would need for a Sluggy Freelance Gwynn costume from “The Bug, the Witch and the Robot”. I already everything for a Riff costume except long hair, so we looked for hair extensions as well. We plan on putting up a “how-to” at some point, but I’ll just post the finished product here.

A ton of photos follow: Read the rest of this entry »