www.davynextdoor.com

So here are a couple relatively minor things I haven’t mentioned recently,

I went to the photography club meeting here to check them out. They were all really cool and nice, but I had to pay 30 dollars a semester for the club whose main purpose was pretty clearly just to use their darkroom which is pretty useless for me. They don’t go out and take pictures together, practice different lighting techniques, or teach photoshop tips or anything of that nature. All they would provide me with is a big board where I can showcase my pictures at the Sophia Festival. That’s okayyy

I also went to a PhD associate professor’s office the other day to be a participant in her research project. She is doing research trying to figure out how students learn a second language from nothing when immersed in a culture for a year, such as I’m trying to do. She’s going to pay all the subjects 50 dollars a semester, so yeah, I had no problems signing up.

When I there she had me fill out a couple papers about myself and my background. I figured she would just give me a Japanese test and then give me one at the end of the year to see how much I’ve improved. She ended up putting me through a lot of really intense intelligence/memory tests. The first one was reading different complicated english sentences out loud and then recounting to her the last word from each sentence. It sounded easy, and was at first, but once it got up to 5 sentences when you would read it out loud it would really through off your memory of the previous words you were trying to remember. After that she passed me a paper with a couple columns of numbers and had me circle the same ones on each line. It was really easy and I was like, “uhh, is that it?” Then she flipped it over and the entire back of the sheet was filled with these columns of numbers and she said “3 minutes, go!” I was really surprised and fairly nervous but it ended up being a lot of fun. She gave me a couple similar ones testing pattern recognition, sentence structure, and object association. I’m coming back in a couple weeks for more.

Here are some pictures from a walk to the grocery store I took with Chris and Mika the other day.

This disgusting sofa cushion had been sitting out by the side of the road for a couple of weeks… so naturally I took Chris’ picture on it.

Unrelated:

A super emo shot of Chris and a subway shot

Also I’ve been spending some time trying to figure out photoshop. I’ve been using Google’s Picasa to edit pictures but it can only get you so far. This is my first before-after that I’ve actually editted fairly significantly in Photoshop. It’s not the best picture, but if anybody has any suggestions for how to better edit it I’d appreciate it.