It's finally happened! A reverse image search is active, letting you submit an image and find websites that contain that image or variants thereof. Still only in beta and has a relatively small database, but very cool.

I dreamt that I was in high school on the last day of classes (interesting that I just had my first day of classes in grad school), in a painting class (this also relates - my mom just found a bunch of paintings I did in high school and put them in my room, one of which was a self-portrait). I had yet to do a project (for some reason I hadn't even started it), and so I had to do the whole thing, or as much as possible, in that one class period. The teacher first announced that she needed to get a piece of painting canvas (everyone was standing near the painting canvasses talking), and I picked one up and went back to my seat. I sat with some people who were my friends in the dream, I think, though I don't think they were real people. They were finishing up some work.

I started filling out the sheet on what I was doing for the project - it was a portrait and I had to fill out some basic information - and then I had to find someone to pose for the portrait. I didn't think anyone would want to sit still and stare straight ahead on the last day when everyone was talking and finishing stuff up, so I think I went to the teacher - she announced that I was doing the project in a single class period and needed someone's help (which I thought was odd, because it was obvious I was doing the project just now from my picking up the canvas). To my surprise, like 3/4 of the class stood up and made as if to come help me, apparently happy to get out of doing their work. Either I or the teacher chose one, some kind-looking Latino guy.

The guy sat down across from me and started doing his own work; I told him I needed him to pose and he said, "Aww! You needed me to pose?" (apparently all the people who had stood up just thought they were needed for moral support or something). So he sat still and looked straight ahead. I finished up the preliminary info on the form, and found that I had to do a sketch on a part of the form first, before doing the actual painting. I looked up and found that the guy had disappeared. I was right next to a window and looked around, trying to find him, but I think it was snowing or something and it was hard to see him. I thought to myself, "he's pretty fast for a guy in a wheelchair" (I don't think he was originally in a wheelchair, but he was now), then thought that that was a stupid thought to have. Then he came back, looking dirty and kind of overexerted, but cheerful, and posed.

My initial intention was to just do as realistic a painting as possible - this was what I generally did in painting and drawing classes in high school, feeling that I couldn't do a really good stylized work unless I got good at painting or drawing what I actually saw. I puzzled over how I wanted to frame the portrait (i.e., where the edges were going to be) and started sketching with my pencil, only to find that it was absurdly small and that in fact the space for making this sketch was really big, almost as big as the canvas itself. I erased the tiny sketch and started a more reasonably-sized one (this is actually something that happened a lot in high school), and found myself drawing the guy as a kind of ogre rather than a person. I decided that I in fact wanted to draw him as a melancholy-looking green-skinned ogre in this guy's clothes with jutting, sharp teeth called Sergeant Jargon, who wasn't really a sergeant but was some guy working in an office who was disillusioned with his work and having some kind of existential crisis. As I drew him, I thought more and more about his backstory until I became Sergeant Jargon in the dream (though I think while this was happening, I was aware that it wasn't real, and thought that I was more kind of acting, making a movie, even though there was no movie equipment and I was really just living this guy's life; think The Truman Show).

As Sergeant Jargon, I standing by an elevator door. I had poisoned some kind of food for an office party and was anxious to see if it got through undetected and started killing people; I was deeply unhappy in my job and just wanted to kill my coworkers. I pushed the button to go up, and the digital floor display showed quickly-changing random two-digit numbers, as in that elevator in ShinRa Headquarters in Final Fantasy VII. I thought to myself that this was either a weird bug or a nice security feature; I for some reason had the impression that such displays were standard in secure office buildings.

I took the elevator up and came out in the floor where my office was. I overheard an annoyed-sounding secretary saying something on the phone about poisoned cookies, but I hoped that they had nevertheless made it through. I stopped by some other office along the way, an area full of low cubicles with a bunch of people milling around, and saw none other than David Klotz working there. I had some short exchange with him that I don't remember. I walked on to my office, which really looked something like a video store, with the counter-area being used to dispense food for the party. My coworkers were milling around.

I went to the counter and the person behind it showed me the finished painting that I had been working on, laughing. I got angry and defensive and asked what was so funny. The person said, "Doesn't it look just like you?" I said, "So what if it does? What's funny about that?" Then I looked at the food being offered, weird crumbly cookies that were all the same size but colored and shaped differently, and didn't see mine, which were "have a nice day" smiley faces. I stomped over to another counter and started yelling at the person behind it in a state of outrage: "Where are my cookies? There were supposed to be poisoned smiley face cookies here! I was going to kill all of you! Where did you put them? I want my cookies!"

I went between two of the video racks and saw some guy who for some reason wanted to pick a fight with me. He started to charge up for some powerful super-kick, like in a video game, as I stood a good eight feet away or so. Then he let loose, kicking straight up but overdoing it and somersaulting, comically landing on his face. Then he just lay there, defeated. Then the movie-quality of the dream reasserted itself, as Andy Samberg (of Jizz In My Pants fame), sporting a bit of a jewfro, made some quip about the guy who tried to kick me; he was playing one of the people at the party. Then the room went dark and credits rolled for Sergeant Jargon on one of the walls from some unseen projector.

Interestingly, Sergeant Jargon is apparently the name of some unknown rapper; search for 'jargon' in the following page: http://alphaflomegaman.xanga.com/676960620/how-can-i-not-write/
A fitting name, I suppose.

Finally done with this pain-in-the-ass 19-page manuscript for my capstone project, and hence with UMass as a whole. Starting all over again with Northeastern's math masters program next semester, gonna be signing up for classes around this Monday.

MSPaint Adventures is an awesome webcomic and everyone should read it. The older adventures are good, but this new one has an incredible amount of side-content and overall quality.

( Click )

Funny speech by John Hodgman on C-Span about Obama.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW7OPByRGDY

http://minecraft.net

A cool independent mining/building sandbox game, entirely browser-embedded. Very simple but a lot of fun. When I was in elementary and middle school I used to fool around a lot with Build, the level creator for Duke Nukem 3D, and while this has a rather different style, it's still cool to make things and then walk around in them. It lets you save worlds and continue working on them later, and link them to other people (there's a little forum where people have been linking their worlds). I've already put like four hours into this thing in the past couple of days.

Here's a bunch of screenshots and game links to people's levels: http://www.zolyx.co.uk/minecraft/v0013/

A charming Super Mario Bros.-like freeware platformer with a creepy twist. Check it out: http://zarat.us/tra/offline-games/eversion.html

I went to a shooting range today! It was pretty neat. I mainly fired from a .22 caliber revolver, which was much lighter and had way less recoil than I thought it would. I also fired one shot off of my friends' .40, which wasn't much heavier but had way, way more recoil. It cost $32 to shoot 100 bullets, which I split with Matt.

http://learning2share.blogspot.com/2009/04/search-term-jugheads-hat.html

A really cool article about the origin of Jughead's (from Archie comics) hat.