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Spring semester has started! Yaaaaay! Yaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Okay, done being enthusiastic.

Actually, I'm somewhat more enthusiastic about this semester than last, in hopes that the classes might be a bit more interesting (Not that last semester wasn't good - I had Nobel Prize winner Thomas Cech as my professor and that was fantastic). Besides the requisite chemistry and biology courses, I'm taking Calculus 3, which I'm relatively excited for, and "Advanced First-Year Writing", which I'm not as excited for. I feel like IB pounded writing into us, and find it irritating that college doesn't count the IB experience for writing courses. So, here I am. Being forced to take a writing course. There is one thing that may redeem the course, though, and that is that the professor allows us to do our "reading responses" in whatever genre we want. For the first, we're responding to a piece about the various ways that the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were portrayed. I decided to respond using a propaganda poster:

(Click for DeviantArtness!)

The "Reject Propaganda - Accept Truth" slogan is derived from my observation that almost every portrayal of the incident seemed to be saying, essentially, "The other sources are unreliable and just Communist/Capitalist/whateverist propaganda. Go with our perspective, instead!". This sort of message seems to be fairly commonplace, really. The 'Department of Truth' was something I came up with, but in retrospect, it was probably subconsciously derived from 1984's Ministry of Truth. In any case, if the professor is alright with this sort of thing as a reading response, then writing class might not be as bad as I'd feared.

In vaguely-writing-related-news, I did a quasi-calligraphic sketch over break for the fictional Top Hat Appreciation Society:

(Click for Artistic Deviance!)

I'm rather proud of the flourishes and whatnot, though much of it came from Google Image-ing and a silly amount of improvisation. It's definitely not the sort of typography/handwriting which I'm used to. The flourishing and decoration is quite amusing to do, though.