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[Aug. 3rd, 2008|01:01 am] |
A quick note: I've set up another blog to deal with more career/education-relevant topics, rather than this one, which is updated every 10 months with a few random pictures. It's here, but be warned that it is dry and boring (also I haven't posted anything to it yet).
Freshman Year in Pictures
( Entirely too many images )
40 days left in this entirely too-long break.
What am I doing in the meantime?
- Playing Final Fantasy IV DS
- Paying for WoW but not actually playing it
- Practicing 3d modeling in attempt to stop sucking at it
- Learning the ropes of texturing
- Working as a shiftless vagrant and selling things on eBay to pay for school
Life is good, but I feel like I'm not putting my time to good use. Resolve rectify doupleplusquick |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 31st, 2008|01:43 am] |
I spent $360 on a GeForce 8800GT and a power supply so I could play Crysis. Now my computer has to lay on its side because a standard ATX PSU won't fit securely in a POS Dell case, so my DVD drive won't open. But on the plus side, I can run Crysis -- and it's also more of a long-term investment that will keep my computer able to play new PC games for a few more years. Never buy a Dell.
I haven't had much time to play Crysis, though. I'm also trying to play Eternal Darkness, but unfortunately it's not as good as I remember it from when I rented it six years ago. The story is kind of interesting especially in the way that it unfolds, but the boring gameplay and sanity gimmick just don't hold up very well. I also started playing Ultima Online on a pretty booming UO:R server, but I pretty much quit after getting 7xGM due to being completely unfamiliar with UO PvP and not caring enough to get acquainted with all the standoffish goons in the guild.
In addition to the GPU/PSU I also bought a second monitor ($220) and an electric keyboard ($100) with Christmas money a while back. The monitor is amazing and a huge productivity increase when I actually need it, but I'm not doing much to utilize it these days. Being able to practice piano is nice, but I haven't had much time at all to play it. Spending 700 dollars and not getting a whole lot of immediately appreciable value out of it has taught me a few things:
- MMOs are dangerously economical
- The Second Noble Truth is: 'There is the origin of suffering, which is attachment to desire.'
- I need to work a lot next summer, to recoup/earn tuition money and possibly build up an unpaid internship padding / going to GDC / relocating after graduation fund.
For lack of a better place to put this, this is the Mormon church where I met Mark the UPS driver at 10am every morning
My ideal simple situation would be going back to UPS but working as a 4am-8am package handler for ~$170 a week. In anticipation of physical labor, and also for other general reasons, I'd like to work out more (there's a student gym about 15 minutes from the dorm by foot). There are two problems with that proposition (I like lists):
- Not enough time
- Terrible pain in my duodenum thanks to SCAD's shitty Sodexho food
So if I don't have time to play games or enjoy my recent purchases, what am I doing?
My color theory professor, a middle-aged man with a greasy 70s combover mullet, thinks he's God's gift to painting. See, he's all about there being a fourth dimension of color in addition to hue, saturation, and lightness: transparency (what a groundbreaking revelation). Long story short, we pretty much have to do everything twice, once with opaque/inorganic paint, and again with semitransparent/organic paint.
Not pictured: the same fucking thing with a different kind of paint
Thanks to his batshit insanity, not only are weekdays filled with cutting out expensive colored paper and gluing it in a notebook, I also have to devote 10 hours of every weekend to doing a project.
In addition to that, I have Art History I, which is easy but boring, and Drawing for Storyboarding (at 8pm on Tues/Thurs), which is really chill and only work-intensive when the projects are due. The grading system works like this:
Project 1: 20%
Project 2: 20%
Project 3: 20%
Project 4: 20%
Final Project: 20%
More or less, you get out what you put in. It's not hard to make the grade, and whether you want to read and take notes depends on your interest in the subject beyond making a good grade. This was my first project (sans my piss-poor shading job):
The professor's a huge comic book nerd, and so is pretty much everyone else in the class. Half the class is lecture/drawing, and the other half is a rousing debate about whether a knife fashioned out of adamantium could kill Wolverine, and whether Anus Shades can invade the anuses of vampires, who have a present but non-working anus (like a network card without the appropriate driver).
All the talk in classes gets me thinking: most of the people here (outside my circle of friends) are the artsy type. They put hours of drawing into their classwork, and when they're done with that, they draw some more for fun. They talk about art in a highfalutin analysis that's about as sensible and consistent as feng shui. I, on the other hand, am a little resistant to the whole "art" thing.
(I should mention here that I still love SCAD and genuinely feel that it was the best possible choice.)
Don't get me wrong -- I like making things and seeing the fruits of my labor when they're finally finished. But I'm many other things before I'm an artist, and I really don't like drawing to boot. I couldn't care less about expressing myself creatively and showing the world what a brilliant, self-absorbed asshole I am. My main goal here is to get a degree, learn a thing or two, and in four years get a job in California that pays me $80,000 per year to use 3ds/photoshop/aftereffects or the like all day.
That's why I'm having a tough time deciding on a major. I've previously been set on Animation, but Visual Effects is starting to seem more appealing. It's like Animation but with less drawing and typically better pay. The downside is that my goal for Animation was to work in the Gaming industry, and that probably wouldn't be the case with VFX. As I understand art-related fields, they're less about the degree and more focused on individual skill and quality of work. I'd enjoy both, but I'm really not sure which I should go toward.
I downloaded the first season of Weeds and continued to the second and third seasons online. My roommates and I have followed the series up to within 3 episodes of the season 3 finale, but we just stopped watching it because season 3 is really boring as nothing really happens on the drug front and the writers just pulled a bunch of random shit that would never happen in real life (the military drone stands out especially) out of their asses. But it's reminded me of a great side effect of watching new TV series: discovering new music.
I'm trying to expand my music collection, and these are a few great artists I've heard through Weeds and other places:
Flogging Molly (Irish Punk)
Seryoga (Russian Rap)
Dan Reeder (Some kind of Indie -- Work Song is my favorite)
Beirut (Ukulele/Accordion Indie/Pop with an Eastern European influence) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 15th, 2008|07:03 pm] |
Everybody has those terrifying dreams that scare you half to death and give you an incredible sense of relief when you wake up and realize that nothing of what you just saw and experienced actually happened. This morning I woke up with a sense of confusion and relief like none other.
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I was back in Birmingham, the day I was set to leave for Savannah. I stopped at the Salvation Army thrift store on the way out to buy some music for the road. I walked up to the checkout line with about ten dollars worth of cassette tapes. As I got closer to the front of the line, I noticed that the blind, senile old lady at the desk was otherwise occupied and wasn't paying me any mind. Sensing an opportunity to save ten dollars, I clutched the pile of dirty audiocassettes to my breast and casually walked out the door.
I nonchalantly strolled toward my car, which was parked a few city blocks away. I was filled with satisfaction as I got closer and closer to the car without hearing any indication that someone was on to me. But as soon as I stepped up to my car, I looked up to see a policeman in front of me on the sidewalk, with his pistol drawn on me.
"Don't do it, boy," he said to me. "It's not worth it. Give up the tapes and I'll let you off easy." I pondered with horror what might happen to me if I was caught and brought in for stealing. I certainly wouldn't be allowed to shop at the thrift store anymore. They probably wouldn't let me keep the ten dollars worth of cassette tapes. I may be convicted of larceny, and then I'd have to check the little "Check here if you're a felon" box on job applications for the rest of my life.
In a split second I'd made a decision to take a gamble on avoiding such shame by pulling a gun from my pocket, taking no time to aim, and firing at the officer from two feet away. It didn't really feel like a decision -- it was more like I watched in horror as the bullet fired by my uncontrollable index finger ripped through the cop's neck a la Curtis Manning in Day 6 of 24. Overwhelmed with guilt and fear, I got into my car and drove straight to Savannah (a 6-hour drive), listening to music on cassette all the way there.
In Savannah, I started going to a class about the architecture of Cathedrals. The professor (who, oddly enough, happened to be Roseanne Barr) kept bringing up religion and morals and asking probing questions about things she ought not to have known about. I began to feel extremely guilty, and I obsessively checked the Birmingham newspapers online to see whether the crime was reported and whether the officer was alive or dead. Although it would have meant there was a living witness, out of guilt I desperately wanted to hear that he hadn't died, although I felt that I almost certainly had killed him. I found nothing but reports of violent crime and murder in Birmingham, but no mention of the cassette tape cop-killer.
As the whole scenario dragged on, things began to make progressively less sense, as dreams often do. My Mom was there, and she approached me asking to borrow my USB flash drive. She told me that she needed it to floss her teeth (wtf), and I finally gave it to her only after receiving evasive answers to questions like "why don't you just use floss." I found her using my flash drive to somehow view my browsing history of murder-related news articles in the Birmingham area, supposedly to confirm her suspicions.
My friends, too, seemed like they were on to me. They started making offhand remarks about cassette tapes and cops and murder, and they began wearing Kevlar vests and helmets in my presence. My phone started ringing constantly, and the police kept harassing me. It seemed like people were catching on, and that quite frankly, I was in deep shit. The sense of terror at having done something so stupid and being eternally screwed because of it was horrible. At about that point, as the walls were closing in, my alarm ("Shake, Rattle and Roll" by Bill Haley and the Comets) went off at full volume. I realized in a moment of relief that I'm strongly opposed to stealing, that I don't own a gun, and that I didn't shoot anyone.
Growing up going to Catholic school, I've had the stories of people who have seen Hell in a vision and repented shoved down my throat too many times to count. I can only safely say that I'm never going to buy a gun.
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Oddly enough, I woke up and looked at the news to hear about an incident that occured in Ensley, a high-crime, low-income suburb of Birmingham. A spectator at an illegal street race was hit by one of the cars as he was filming the race, and a rival gang member suggested that he should be taken to the hospital. Someone else then shot him for making the suggestion.
That's Birmingham, I guess. |
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| some random pictures and words |
[Dec. 7th, 2007|05:51 pm] |
I got a seasonal job as a UPS driver assistant for the next two weeks. I'm already set for the next semester's tuition, but this means I don't have to choose between that and Christmas shopping, plus I'll have some extra money and some experience in case I need a fallback job (janitors at UPS make 60 grand a year!).
On the way back from the training session today I bought a Milo's double cheeseburger with fries, sweet tea, and lemon pie, because goddamn I've missed Milo's burgers and sweet tea. I can't believe people eat at McDonald's in this state.
I found this hilarious Russian pop cassette at the thrift store (along with a 9-cent hymnal for fucking around on the piano, fuck yeah thrift store). The cover makes me laugh uncontrollably.
I'm back into WoW but not actually playing more than 30 minutes a day due to the account being tied up 23 hours a day and the fact that just leveling in Outland for the fourth time doesn't hold my interest too much. But without raids it's no big deal because there's no pressure to get anywhere. I'm also still enjoying a plethora of games on the (recently softmodded) PS2.
The Carnival by Wyclef Jean is now my favorite album. If you read this, get it; it's great. (sample)
Right after I quit playing WoW I started making a music video. After a couple straight days of working on it, I got frustrated by the extreme limitations of working with model viewer, so I canned the project. I may as well upload it somewhere for posterity, so: http://www.stage6.com/user/wasabimilkshake/video/1926066/ |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 19th, 2007|06:39 pm] |
 3840 hours played, sold for $350. Ignoring the fact that the game, its expansion, and monthly fees cost more than $350, that comes to 9 cents an hour. It sure was fun, though. Clearing late AQ40 held the most profound sense of guild accomplishment for me, given the PvP and competition with Letalis, the insane trash, and the difficulty of the bosses. Although MMOs are a tragic endeavor if you have anything better to do, WoW was a great waste of time for me while it lasted, and it was really hard logging on to gquit and delete my friends list and saying goodbye 4ever to Bus and tsu and the gang :(
So that account and a couple design things I've yet to collect on should give me enough to pay my share of the next semester, but I really need to have enough for at least 2 semesters, so I'm probably going to get a job at Chotchky's sometime this week or after Thanksgiving. After 10 weeks at SCAD, sitting on my ass and playing Final Fantasy 12 all day just isn't all that exciting.
Fun Fact: Gideon Emery, the voice of Balthier, had a one-time part in 24. He played Leon, the dude Jack finds making out in the basement of the Russian consulate in Day 6. |
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| an angsty spiel that you don't want to read |
[Nov. 9th, 2007|09:27 pm] |
Everyone at SCAD has to take fundamental courses in Drawing and Design. Drawing is pretty straightforward, but 2D Design's purpose is a little more questionable. You'd expect it to be learning to effectively utilize elements and principles of design to create compositions that are both pleasing to the eye and get their message across to the viewer in an efficient and intuitive manner.
Instead, we glue random shit to poster board.
Our two-and-a-half-hour classes usually consist of looking at slides of the professor's work (which isn't related to the course) while he toots his own horn, laying our work down and having him point out random (honest to God, completely based on nothing at all random-ass random) details for us to change, and pretending to work on said projects. Outside of class, he sticks by this homework = 2*classwork thing, meaning he expects us to spend 5 hours per class working on projects outside of class.
He assigned this project on Monday, giving us a sheet of 17 guidelines that must be followed while urging us not to be afraid to break the rules, and especially not to ask him any questions. He wanted us to show 5 hours of work for Wednesday (the next class), so I threw together a design in Illustrator, which took about 4 hours, and brought it in. He approved of it, and told everyone to be 100% finished by Monday (the next class), with room to change.
He started out telling us to have it 100% done. A minute later, he felt that was too little time, so he told us to bring in an 80%-complete project so we could get feedback and change it in class. Yet another minute later, he told us to finish it, but be able to change it in class.
Basically, he's incredibly indecisive, has no observable convictions, and constantly contradicts himself. I may not feel strongly enough about where we go to dinner to offer Zagat-quality suggestions to family or friends, but dealing with this man has made me resolve to be as decisive as possible in things that actually matter.
Back to the class -- I have my Illustrator design. I tweak it a bit and then get to work with phase 2: assembling the thing (because computers, and thereby computer printouts, are the devil). I spend about 10 hours printing, cutting, pasting, taping, spraypainting, buying overpriced faggyartshit from the bookstore, and otherwise devoting my weekend to a glorified third-grade arts and crafts project. On Monday I bring in my finished project and I've well exceeded his 5-hour time expectation. Then I'm summarily punished for having finished ahead of time. I get a B, the same grade I always get, and he pulls some things out of his ass to say about it.
"Not enough restful space." "Layer tracing paper over this." "Erase this section here." "This is larger than 18x24 the sheet said 18x24 why didnt you follow the sheet i gave you the sheet didn't i" and on and on.
Most of the time, I'm reluctant to let anything bother me. Most things I'll shrug off and honestly not care about no matter how much they purport to get to me. But everybody has at least a few things or people that just piss them off.
This professor, in addition to being horribly indecisive, doesn't give us any goals that aren't entirely pulled out of his ass. The only predictable thing he values is time commitment. That's what I can't stand. He pays absolutely no mind to quality and efficiency. Quality is entirely impossible to shoot for since his ideas of quality are completely arbitrary, and whether he likes your project is solely based on the alignment of Jupiter and what he had for breakfast. If you made your project using a method that takes less time and affords you more control (say, for example, one of these newfangled thinky-boxes and their Adobe software), that's a bad thing because you didn't do enough work.
Maybe refusal to accept efficiency pisses me off because it's counterevolutionary. Making things easier without sacrificing efficacy lessens required time commitments, which in turn allows for more output or alternate use of time, which contributes to the advancement of society. Forcing everyone to spend more time than required is just fucking dumb.
He ordered us to bring in seven possible changes, drawn on tracing paper overlays. Fuck that, I finished, it's done, give me a grade. No matter how much we change, it'll never be finished because he'll always be able to find more inconsequential details to have us change so that he doesn't have to bother making up another assignment. Long story short, I didn't do the overlays and skipped class the next morning. As has been the case many times before, they did absolutely nothing that class and he didn't bother looking at the overlays. The project's due on Monday, and I'm going to spend 15 minutes changing a couple of things around before I turn it in.
Truths:
-Sleep cures anger
-Efficiency is good
-Indecision + Authority = Confusion
-Art education has a very high bullshit content
-I just wanna know where the gold at
-I'll be glad when I'm done with this class forever. I-16 west ho Thursday the 15th 1:30pm |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 23rd, 2007|04:12 pm] |
Savannah
So a couple weeks ago I loaded all my worldly possessions (two computers and an office chair) into my macho '98 Escort and hit the road for Savannah, Georgia. The trip took about 7 hours (with one stop for gasoline and burritos). After Atlanta the road begins to look exactly the same for the next 250 miles, save one mobile home with no less than 4 Confederate flags on the lawn (not counting the Confederate flag T-shirts hanging on the clothesline). After a long and boring journey serenaded by Randy Newman, Spike Jones, and Ira Glass, I found myself in my swank 55-dollar room at the Days Inn Savannah Airport.
The next day I moved into my dorm with my roommates (both respectable chaps) and spent the weekend sitting in an auditorium while different college officials talked about resources and networking ad nauseum. After classes started I formed a rut pretty effortlessly. There's a lot of work outside of classes, but without WoW my time is manageable between schoolwork, socializing, playing non-massively multiplayer games, and sleep.
2D Design
The professor for this class is an eccentric madman from Louisiana. I have no idea what the class is about specifically, but so far he's had us draw lots of little pictures. It's impossible to get A's in this man's class without spending far more than the average amount of time and using a medium that no one's ever thought of before. Your drawings could be immaculate and beautiful, but unless they're painted on the heads of nails which have been driven into Vladimir Lenin's skull, the best grade he'll give you is a B.
Drawing 1
My Drawing 1 professor was born dirt-poor in Cairo, but he managed to get into the Art Institute. After graduating he got a job designing the secret anti-counterfeiting measures on Egyptian currency, which meant that he was barred from leaving the country. But apparently Egypt sucks because he wanted to leave anyway. After escaping Egypt he moved to Canada and became an art teacher. He's a 69 year-old Egyptian man who says "shit" a lot, and he's a fine professor. His class involves a ton of work, but I don't mind it so much because drawing is something I need to improve anyway. He also grades fairly based on effort and quality of work.
English Composition
This class is amazing. The professor is a young Persian fellow whose philosophy is that learning will follow naturally when we pursue entertainment. So every Monday and Wednesday at 7:45pm, I take a bus over to this class, and we watch a movie. That's it. We have to write a one-page essay about the film for homework, and there are 3 larger essays throughout the course, but the class is basically watching movies and talking about them. It's definitely a nice break from the constant work of my other two classes, and the movies we've seen are pretty good.
It's certainly a lot of work, but for my academic pursuits to be nothing but drawing and watching movies is really weird to me. It's not a bad thing, it's just really different. Though I can say that I'll be looking forward to when I stop dealing with pencils and ink and start using Photoshop and Maya.
Final Fantasy VIII
On a completely unrelated note, this game is amazing. I just beat it today and I can't believe the negative reputation it has among internet fanboys. In my opinion it's the finest Final Fantasy game ever made, in terms of story, gameplay, music, graphics, and everything else. It ranks right up there with Metal Gear Solid 1 and 3 on the list of games that moved me emotionally (a pretty small list), and I'm glad I finally experienced it. I'm probably going to beat either IX or IV next, then maybe XII. I still haven't beaten VII, but I've played it halfway through so many times, and seen so much relentless spin-off garbage that everything about the game has just become really annoying and grating to the point that I can't play it anymore. I also haven't beaten X, but the story and characters just seem incredibly boring and unlikable, and I hated having to constantly shift people in and out of combat so everybody got AP.
Yeah so anyway life is good and I'm drawing lots of pictures in hopes of someday becoming an animator with several yachts. Here is an interesting link ---> http://otr.net/ |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 31st, 2007|02:22 pm] |
I live in a weird neighborhood. It looks pretty normal at first glance -- it's one of those old white people communities where all the houses look the same and you're threatened with death if you don't grow the right kind of flowers in your yard. What's especially odd about it is the location. Right down the street is the awesome Iranian gas station, where there are at least 6 cars blaring rap/country/norteño music simultaneously 24 hours a day. Surrounding that gas station are no less than 3 apartment complexes, which house a pretty even mix of Mexican immigrants, low-income rednecks, and Black people.
Anyway, everyone in this neighborhood is paranoid. They all have home security systems, and probably half of them have caulked their windows shut because they believe an errant Negro might wander by and use his Negro powers to turn into mist, seep through the cracks in the windows, and steal their stereo. My mental image of everyone who lives here is basically that old lady from Bewitched who would spy on the neighbors all day because she had nothing better to do.
Nevertheless, I find myself peering through the blinds, with a camera no less, because random crazy people really enjoy shambling through the neighborhood and looking through peoples' garbage.
Maybe he's squatting in the house that burned down a few days ago.
I live in a weird neighborhood. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 20th, 2007|09:13 pm] |
Things I've been doing since quitting WoW:
cooking hearty three-dollar meals
rediscovering single-player games
inducing tendencies toward self-mutilation
expanding my music collection
making movies... with wow
I really miss raiding though, and I'm battling MMO demons right now. There's really no reason I can't make myself available for raids, and just not come whenever I have another engagement, but I don't know that wiping to Vashj, doing Hyjal, and the overwhelming time commitment are worth going back at all. But I bet BioShock will tide me over for a while. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 10th, 2007|03:28 am] |
 I've been playing World of Warcraft off and on since November 2004 (test 28 represent), and raiding solidly since I hit 60 on my first character in October 2005. It's a huge time investment -- the record for Sliver was clearing MC up to Ragnaros in 8 hours on a Friday night, but nowadays I spend 4-5 hours raiding every weeknight. I'm trying to gradually quit raiding (making an emo post and leaving without notice works out worse, I've found), and at this point I'm pretty conflicted.
Carlos Gardel delivers a fitting musical backdrop
Things I'd miss:- The people. Compared to a lot of other guilds, BG is surprisingly unfriendly and hostile, but they're still cool people and I'd miss raiding with them. Though I can't say I'd miss our stale sense of humor where every inane gag has an average lifespan of 6 months.
- Making movies. I love doing it, and the videos I make primarily convey the experience of raiding. I can't do that if I'm not raiding.
- The WarCraft storyline and the raid content, both the Illidan/Legion bosses we've yet to kill in TBC and the distant WotLK dungeons and encounters.
Things I've found beneficial in my two nights of sitting out:- I'm free to do other things. There's no span of time during which I can't leave my chair. I can play a game other than the same one I've been playing nonstop for 2 years, or do something productive.
- I'm free of the shitty aspects of the game that are somewhat rampant nowadays. Doing Hyjal makes me hate everyone and everything around me for the duration, and being free of the desire to punch someone in the face for an evening is refreshing.
- In the long term, I'd have more time for schoolwork and friends. I'm basically doing nothing for the next month, but when I finally start classes at SCAD I don't want WoW to dictate how I spend my time.
To boil it down for myself, the possibility of continuing to raid in the future is reasonable to me, but I really don't enjoy raiding right now and I get the feeling that it'd be beneficial to kick the habit anyway. And if withdrawing from the hardcore raiding forefront means I'll never raid again, it wouldn't bother me all that much.
I miss making things in Flash. I miss making things. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 13th, 2007|01:17 am] |
Spite does no good for anyone. If you feel that someone has wronged you, being a vindictive asshole toward them does nothing to resolve the issue and only widens the gaping canyon of animosity.
People like that really sap my desire to play WoW. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 28th, 2007|04:07 am] |
Graduation was today. It was with great pride that I accepted my empty leather-bound cover, and on Tuesday, unless the administration takes exception to the way in which I shook the bishop's hand, I'll be done with high school. I can only say that I'm glad to be finished.
Obligatory academic overview:
Freshman year I took all honors classes, made decent grades (4.14), then got the fuck away from Honors.
Sophomore year was easy except for Chemistry, which was extremely awkward and uneducational.
Junior year was easy except for Physics, which was extremely awkward and uneducational.
Senior year was easy as fuck because I didn't take a Science, much to Murray Meadow's chagrin.
So I have three or four months. I might get a job but actually finding one is the hard part, and it becomes less likely the more I put it off. I do have a couple of leads on some freelance work so maybe I'll just follow those and see how they pan out and what they lead to.
I really want to create something amazing in Flash. Really, there are 2 main career/major choices I've pondered -- graphic design and animation.
I thought about graphic design because I've had an interest in web design ever since I learned HTML 4 at the tender age of 10. However, I recently learned that I secretly hate web design with a passion as it's an incredibly restricted format and extremely finicky to design, code, and perfect across platforms. Furthermore, graphic design usually deals primarily with advertising, and I'm not too interested in that industry.
I learned Flash around the fifth grade, and I've loved using it ever since. I love being able to create a visual spectacle and a compelling story from scratch, without having to record and edit footage. I like 2D animation because it allows the author to draw a scene exactly as he wants it to be seen, and detail it in any style as much or as little as he wants. My only concern with going into animation is that the best job I'll be able to get is menial drawing/coloring work for shitty Cartoon Network shows that air on Adult Swim for 2 weeks and then go off the air due to poor ratings.
There's also broadcast design and motion graphics, which is more like the things I've done with video editing, but I feel like this urge to make something beautiful in Flash that I get whenever I have some spare time is a clear indication that I should go with animation. I really enjoyed making the behemoth WoW project I worked on last year, but I haven't been present for a lot of exciting guild moments and the "boss kills interspersed with random tomfoolery" format is probably pretty tired anyway. So I really don't know what to work on or if I'm able. Maybe this is the great dilemma of the artist -- wanting to make a masterpiece but having to spend time on other things and worry about being financially productive.
Honestly, though, I'm looking forward to going to SCAD 100%. I have no regrets and no reservations, and I wish I could say the same for certain other people. |
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| an excerpt from a research paper for english (rough draft) |
[Apr. 10th, 2007|01:07 am] |
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“Eleanor Rigby” uses poetic monotheism along with bicuspid plural feminism to achieve a coherency unrivaled by modern literature, which came as a shock to many in the industry. An essay such as this may seem to be making light of the assignment and having a disrespectful and apathetic attitude, but in actuality writing sentences that are clearly BS filler serves as a way to “rough out” a paper for a rushed preliminary copy. Later, when more research is done, the filler can be replaced with more appropriate poppycock that can pass as legitimate criticism, and more sources can be referenced to include a factual basis and multiple, valid opinions. The simple fact is that succinctness is the antithesis of the essay. What can be expressed in a few simple sentences is expected to be packaged within a structured format, rife with fanciful language and unnecessary metaphors, like a ripe onion being slowly peeled by the bejeweled scimitar of Bacchus’ handmaiden. Such a necessity for superfluous writing buries the simple point in a mountain of proverbial garbage, and also requires the writer to, after expressing his point and finding the composition far short of the required length, insert sentence upon sentence of garbage which has little to no worth in the discussion of the thesis. The process of essay-writing then becomes a search for the most relevant literary refuse to fill in the empty spots in a paper that has been stretched far too thin. Having explained my use of randomly inserted nonsense, I now return to the essay proper. While both “Eleanor Rigby” and “Sadie and Maud” evoke the basest feelings of loneliness and failure, Brooks’s poem is a better interpretation of success and failure. The contrast that she creates between Sadie and Maud illustrates the difference in a life well-enjoyed and a life wasted strikingly well. |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 2nd, 2007|08:26 pm] |
I've been accepted to the Savannah College of Art and Design and awarded a scholarship in the amount of $20,000 per year for a total of $80,000 because, luckily enough, I scored a 34 on my ACT. I'll be going there this Fall and tentatively studying Graphic Design, and if not that then probably Animation.
I really want to quit World of Warcraft, but I just don't have anything better to do. Problems I have with the game:
- Grinding/questing is really unentertaining and monotonous. When you consider the ratio of time enjoyed playing MMOs to time spent playing MMOs you realize how inefficient they are. 80% of my desire to quit stems from the felboar tuber quest in Shadowmoon.
- Running instances is the only enjoyable thing I can do to improve my character outside of raiding, but groups are hard to find (especially on a low-population server) and pugs are really, really hit-and-miss.
- Raiding is the part of the game that I thoroughly enjoy, but I completely fucked myself by rolling paladin when I wasn't able to commit the absurd amounts of time necessary to get back up to speed from level 1. Ironically, while I rolled paladin because I felt my raid spot as a mage was in jeopardy, I'm now the last of 5 raiding mages (seniority notwithstanding) because I was a month late to 70, and realistically having 5 mages in a 25-man group can't last.
- As sort of a sidenote, it's really nice to be able to get 8 or more hours of sleep every night. You wake up refreshed, go through the day doing what needs to be done without a problem, and have a lot of free time afterward to do whatever. That's not really possible for me as long as I play an MMO.
This is a pretty inopportune time, since I basically have 6 months of more-or-less effortless loafing until college and, like I said, nothing better to do. So, uh... fuck. |
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| my name is wasabimilkshake/kielbasa/forsythe |
[Nov. 19th, 2006|02:11 am] |
my life is like a battle played out across many fronts. well, not really a battle. maybe more of a game of putt-putt or semi-competitive beach volleyball. in any event, it's been quite a while since i've paid any mind to this journal, and a lot of things have changed (including my desire to maintain a livejournal).
these are the many (by many i mean four or so) aspects of my life, and how they stand today.
family
no reason to say any more than i ever have about this. everything's generally a-ok in my mind, same as usual.
friends/school
the day i bought world of warcraft i kicked all of my friends in the nuts and told them to fuck off because i didn't need them anymore. in some sense, anyway. most of my old friends are interested mainly in cross country and math homework these days, but we get along all the same. a typical weekday for me consists of waking up after 30 minutes of snoozing to the first ten seconds of germany to germany by ratatat, driving 15 minutes while listening to NPR and/or mexican AM radio, 8 hours of mostly pushover senior classes, then driving home and doing some other stuff and playing world of warcraft for 6 hours.
professional workspace
as far as my educational/professional/crime-fighting future, it's admittedly something that i haven't spent enough time on. right now i'm pretty much set on studying some discipline of graphic design, and my first inclination in terms of schools is SCAD, although i've really yet to look around at many others. but now is the time for preparing applications, i hear, so that's something i'll have to decide on fairly soon.
starmen.net
a while back i was brought on board to head up the old animation department at starmen.net. i actually had plans for it at the time and then a lot of other things started shooting guns / getting birdies / landing spikes in the sand and starmen.net took a backseat. the section's rather lifeless, and i do check in on it occasionally, so it's not the end of the world i suppose.
world of warcraft
i joined a raiding guild october 2005 as a fresh 60. everyone was dumb and so was i. we did molten core and progressed slowly. at ragnaros the guild broke up and reformed. we recleared MC and tried to progress in BWL with constant attrition of members. we killed razorgore once and then lost half the guild, and after a while of having people give up after 2 attempts on razorgore and spending 8-hour saturdays in MC, i pretty much stopped playing. around that time i, my siblings, my dad, his wife, her kids, and their dogs went to florida, which was pretty cool except that some welcomes got overstayed. so yeah i quit that guild on decent terms and the guild continued to fall apart.
farewell, portuguese rogue brothers of mal'ganis :(
then i joined blue garter as a regular raiding mage off the bat, thanks to a brave singaporean serviceman named benitto. later i copied my main and i still raid with the guild. nice to be with an actual functioning guild, though i'll admit that some of the problems other guilds have are impossible with BG simply because if you quit you have nowhere to go on the server but down. we're making progress in naxx while awaiting the release of burning crusade, and things are going pretty well. the majority of my free time is spent playing wow, so if i decide to continue updating this journal you'll undoubtedly hear about it. sorry.
this is me. i'm currently in negotiations with a wholesale textile manufacturer to order enough felt and velcro to construct a similar outfit for myself that i may wear for formal social occasions.
oh, and if you want to get a better understanding of what raiding in wow is like, both socially and gameplaywise, feel free to check out my 46-minute, 1gb movie detailing my guild's progression over the past seven months. it has something for everyone -- and lots of yelling on the internet.
http://www.theorderls.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12687 |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 6th, 2006|10:44 pm] |
note to self: play through final fantasy ix this summer. that game looks really amazing and i don't know why i've only ever gotten to like... lindblum. always get sidetracked by the quina frog-eating minigame i guess.
note to self #2: update this thing sometime. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 12th, 2006|03:08 am] |
 In WoW news, guild drama is just gay and inescapable, but I finally got my crappy mage FR trinket, got my 7th piece of Arcanist (robes), replaced my ST helm with Crimson Felt Hat (pimp), replaced my Mara dagger with Rod of the Ogre Magi, replaced my shitty green ring with Blood of the Martyr, and bought a decent AH cape to replace my crappier AH cape all in one night. All the while talking about old MMOs and listening to Rich Mullins sing the praise of Jesus over vent.
I just realized after reminiscing on vent for two hours that Ultima Online was the greatest game ever. You could do absolutely anything in that game and be perfectly content with it. It all depended on the people you played with, but the community was so great that even if you were the most anti-social asshat you would always have buddies to play with. It was the first of its kind, and for a few short years it was the perfect game, and an absolutely amazing gaming experience. Nothing will ever come close to UO.
But back to wow, Gurgthock opens Ahn'Qiraj tomorrow :D
If this entry made absolutely no sense to you, I apologize. I'll try harder next time. |
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| poop = funny |
[Jan. 23rd, 2006|04:42 am] |
It's 3 am. I have to be up at 6. A fateful decision lies in front of me.
Do I drink the NyQuil or the coffee?
Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spy the laxative.
...
Damn, that was a mistake.
(but at least i spent my 8 hours doing something slightly productive) |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 14th, 2006|12:57 am] |
why I haven't updated in 5 or 6 months:
ahaha okay, but seriously. it's a complicated mix of school (junior year = sadfaec), world of warcraft (sup 6/8 arcanist), and not fucking going to sleep. I also feel like a huge bum for copping out on the starmen.net thing that I kind of committed to doing, as well as all the other things I haven't been able to do. I'm kind of working on something for that, but I'll save that for later.
I appreciate you not pruning me from your friends lists, and I swear to God I'll post an actual entry sometime soon. I really do need to sum up Argentina, don't I?
but for now:
Name: kielbasa
Town: TB Port
Code: 2792-3569-0817
Frutas: just cherries :[
kbye, expect a follow-up entry in June ;D |
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| SAP LJ -- i need to practice, dammit |
[Jul. 26th, 2005|12:40 pm] |
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Pues, imprimí algunos materiales españoles que he olvidado, puse algunos juegos clásicos y emuldores en el PSP nuevo de mi hermano, cargué el DS, agarré "Harry Potter y el Príncipe que no Tiene el Totalidad de su Sangre," y hice la maleta para Argentina. El vuelo a Atlanta es una hora, entonces esperaremos dos horas y embarcaremos un vuelo a Buenos Aires que durará nueve horas. Con alguna suerte, no habrá diablo-niños cerca de mi asiento, y podré me dormir en el avión. Después, iremos al apartamento -- sin el $40 banda ancha conexión D: -- y entonces haremos alguna mierda, probablemente. Volveré en una semana :D |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 9th, 2005|07:27 pm] |
'nother hurricane coming in. it's likely that it'll own my power (and i'll have absolutely NOTHING to do, as my brother left my DS charger in texas, where he was visiting an internet buddy who most assuredly is not a serial rapist; and i don't have any books or at my dad's house. i'll just pray that mississippi takes the brunt of the wind and rain and crap. i mean come on, they deserve it more than us.
edit 26.07.2005 -- I said some very hurtful things to you, hurricane, and I'm sorry. You just scared me there, hurricane, and I didn't know what to make of it. I had a lot to drink that night, hurricane, and I didn't mean anything hateful. I don't think our relationship can ever be the same, hurricane, but I just wanted to apologize. |
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| This entry brought to you in captivating capitalvision. |
[Jul. 6th, 2005|03:02 pm] |
Argentina. The land of silver. ...or plates. I forget which one it is, but it's where I'll be in three weeks or so. Y'see, my sister double-majored in English and Spanish at some school in some place or whatever. Last year she studied in Mexico City, the good ol' de efe. I'm sure some crap happened there, but this is my journal, dammit. Anyway, she's been finishing some crap in Buenos Aires, and long story short, my dad decided that the city of benevolent drafts, as it's called, would be a convenient place to take a summer vacation. My brother and I had no qualms with this plan, so we went with it. I haven't been on a good vacation in quite a while, unless you count that one-day round car trip to North bloody Carolina, so I am a bit excited to go.
 Getting to the land of the tango and, uh, that big river they have, is a simple three-step process:
1. Wake up at 6pm, go to the Birmingham Airport.
2. Fly BHM > ATL, wait 2 hours in the Atlanta Airport.
3. Fly direct from Atlanta to Ezeiza. For 9 hours.
Now damn, a 5000-mile flight. Pretty far, eh? Well yeah. I spent the last of my hard-earned money on Meteos for DS, so I'll have something to do on the plane. Other than that, there are always books (and I remember now that I have to read some crappy book for next year, I just can't remember which crappy book it is). The trip would most likely suck without music, so I've been compiling collections to burn to CD, but my crappy 30-dollor MP3 CD player just broke, so wtf.
So then once we get to Argentina, where they speak-a the español, I'll probably find myself a bit confused by the native tongue, as I haven't spoken a lick of Spanish since the end of school. I really need to start studying some of this stuff again, or at least watch some Telemundo and let it all soak in. ...¡ELENA!
 But that's still several weeks away. What am I going to do until then? Why the same thing I've been doing all summer: World of Warcraft. I'm a 45 Undead Mage on Mal'Ganis now, and it's still a jolly good time. The downside, if you consider it one, is that I'm not doing much else that's very productive, such as Flash or a job, but that Flash movie wasn't going anywhere, and who needs money when you have [Whitemane's Chapeau]? Ahaha, yes, WoW has consumed my soul, but I'll pretty much have to quit playing all the time once school starts, so I've got 3 weeks of hardcore playtime left to enjoy. If I stick to my schedule, I should be about 54 (out of 60) before I leave.
So not much else going on. Our house is for sale once again, which I don't mind except for the random assholes wandering into the house to look around. And apparently nobody will buy your house if it has wallpaper (not a hot item in houses nowadays), so I've been helping my uncle and my brother take wallpaper off of sheetrock by blasting it with 200-degree steam and then carefully prying it off with a putty knife so it can be repainted. Thanks to the early-morning scheduling of this and, you guessed it, World of Warcraft, I didn't sleep last night, so now I'm half-alert and I keep trying to peel things off of other things. Guess I should go sleep for a while. I'll be clever and relevant some other time. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 3rd, 2005|11:48 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | not tired. WHY, DAMMIT? | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth | ] |
man, i really can't wait till summer. i've all of a sudden gotten into that end-of-the-year mentality, but i've still got more school and two of my classes suck (still). but here's the game plan for summer:
 - get crappy unskilled job at ~$6/hr. make a few hundred dollars.
- after one month, fake own death and quit job.
- use $40 for new speakers, and $100 or so for the summer gaming fund.
- execute said summer gaming initiative by sitting on my ass and playing Dark Cloud 2 (exact same as last summer, ha)
- maybe get back into WoW and level up some more.
- finish all planning and character illustration for flash movie, leaving only voices, music, sfx, backgrounds, and horribly painful lip-synching.
- vaya a argentina.
- ...
- profit.
a solid plan, but i've still got two weeks left, then exams. while i could space out for two weeks, i'd probably make crappy english and chemistry grades, so i think the best plan is to sleep a lot so i'll actually feel compelled to do crap rather than writhe in pain all day because i'm bored out of my mind and the dumbass who thinks he knows everything will not shut the hell up even though he can't string together a coherent sentence and is only spewing random words that he heard both in class and on the daily show, not to mention the fact that the study of literatue is, in my opinion, complete bullshit, and is therefore very difficult to grasp concretely and be tested on. but i'll manage. |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 24th, 2005|08:22 pm] |
 i sold disgaea (it sucked) for $40 and bought half-life 2, through steam, legitimately. now i don't have to bother with ineffective foreign-language cracks, i can use mods, and the AI won't randomly be disabled, forcing me to miss large chunks of story. oh yeah, and i won't burn in hell for being a filthy pirate. livin' the clean life, praise the lord!
let all of my thoughts between last entry and present be stricken from existence, because i don't feel like writing them down.
oh, but the new (leaked) episode of family guy is excellent. watch it. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 6th, 2005|04:27 pm] |
i've got nothing else i need to do today, but before i go off and do something more enjoyable, i've decided to actually update this before the crap that's happened becomes irrelevant. i haven't updated since december 20th, so this should span from the latter part of advent to the present. we're in for a long ride. particularly me, as i'm writing all this crap for some reason. topics are bold for easy skipping of uninteresting crap.
did a bunch of last-minute christmas shopping on the 23rd, had to buy crap for my dad -- ms pacman tv game, which somebody else bought him (whoops), heide, who's my stepmother if you haven't guessed -- picture frame >:], stepsisters one, two, and three -- purse, magnets, wine. also got FF1+2: Dawn of Souls for my brother, a big scented candle and a choir CD for my mom, and Lo Mejor del Chapulin Colorado and Lo Mejor del Chavo del 8 for my sister (heard about them from Giampi, but of course she'd seen them too, as she'd spent a year in Mexico).
on the 24th i got package from arizona, which turned out to be the prize from that tomato contest. inside was a B'z live concert DVD: "once upon a time in kanji - something something kanji kanji," a CD labeled "Battle Royal" [sic], and a beyblade DVD: "beyblade grevolution, volume 3." (webster's 1913 unabridged dictionary offered no hints on the definition of a "grevolution," so i can only assume that it's japanese for "hyper dragon super top battle go!").
 the B'z concert was pretty good. i'd downloaded a few B'z songs a while back (with some difficulty), and some of those old favorites were on there, like "ZERO" and "kanji kanji kanji da". i started watching Battle Royale on christmas eve, but 30 minutes into i realized that it wasn't very christmassy. but i finished watching it a couple days later, and whoa. the story goes like this: japan starts sucking as a country, unemployment skyrockets, and kids drop out of school. to rememdy this, the BR act is passed. it stipulates that every year, a single class will be selected, be transported to an island during a field trip, and forced to kill each other off with a variety of wacky and gruesome weapons. i don't quite understand how forcing the good students who actually go to school to participate in a bloody deathmatch is going to get truants to go back to school, but it makes for a good movie. it's got good fight scenes, followed by remorseful "i just planted a handaxe firmly into the skull of my classmate and chum (and also my best friend's neck exploded)" scenes. but if i was one of those kids, i sure as hell wouldn't be going on any field trips.
i was skeptical about the beyblade dvd at first, but after i started watching it, i was hooked. the characters and plots were so compelling, and the cinematography and animation in the action scenes was amazing. truly an enthralling experience. i've also started watching duel masters and yu-gi-oh, which are almost as good as beyblade. what works of art.
 anyway, after going to the christmas eve children's mass at my grandfather's church and eating some good chinese food (both family traditions), i went home, probably did some crap, and then went to sleep. the next day was christmas. christmas is about the giving (seriously), but i already listed the crap that i gave. my mom gave me taiko drum master and metal gear solid 3, my brother gave me metroid prime 2 (in november, actually, but that was fine by me), and my sister gave me a bar of chocolate and a prospective night on the town. then we went to my grandfather's house afterwards for a kickass christmas lunch, exchanging of gifts, and of course, visiting with the family. then on to my dad's house, for a second christmas meal (and one christmas meal = six regular meals) and traditional gift-giving. got a case of jones cream soda, a best buy gift card, and a nintendo ds with super mario 64 ds. hoho.
the DS is pretty awesome. my only real gripe is the lack of analog control (a d-pad just doesn't work for mario 64), and the traditionally tiny nintendo buttons. the touchscreen is a nice addition, but you can only use it in conjuction with either d-pad/L or ABXY/R, and some game overuse it in places where you could just use the d-pad and face buttons rather than move your hand across the screen to touch something.
 i started playing metal gear solid 3 shortly after christmas. it is, by far, the greatest game i've ever played. the gameplay is everything people have come to expect from MGS, only ten times better, and the story, in my opinion, is better than MGS1. big boss is just such a badass, but a complex and deep badass, and holy crap, i just can't put into words how much this game owns. the plot is the best i've ever seen in any game, movie, or book, and harry gregson-williams owns my soul. good lord. but i'm gonna try for the stealth and infinity face paint today.
so after christmas, i had about $100 cash, so i blew half of it a couple days later :o. went to gamestop and bought disgaea for forty bucks and descent II (PSX) for $2. disgaea's a good game in the vein of FFT, but it's a bit strange and overcomplicated. but it looks like another fun and long-lasting tactical rpg experience.
so, anyway, new year's was uneventful, then my sixteenth birthday was on the second of january. that was a sunday, so i had to wait till the week to take the road test for my license. i went to the dmv on tuesday morning, waited for four hours, then went out to took the test. long story short, i failed. drove on the wrong side of the road, eheheheh. so i gotta wait till next tuesday to take it again, and by then, i'll probably be good enough with a stick-shift to drive my car to school. as long as i don't fail again :X
remember, folks: support our troops. by putting a sticker on your car urging others to do the same. you don't need to donate money or write them letters or anything, the sticker is all it takes to keep our men overseas alive and well. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 20th, 2004|10:19 am] |
after a refreshing 5 hours of sleep last night, i got up at 7:30 for to revisit the foot doctor. the checkup was made a bit more eventful by some unannounced toe surgery (the other foot this time), but i've already described the surgery before, so no need to go into details. my last toe surgery, however, was marred by a lack of hawt surgery pix, so maybe i can take some this time. and put 'em on christmas cards.
i neglected to mention my frighteningly exciting exams earlier. first day was english and geometry, easy, then history and chemistry, sucky as hell. chemistry was all math (which i suck at), and it was horribly designed. the whole test was just those "pick all that apply" questions, so instead of four choices, you have a shitload. or fifteen to be exact. anyway, that didn't go too well, but spanish and theology were easy. so though i didn't study as much as i should, i think i did pretty well in everything except chemistry, which is probably the exact opposite. but then i had some bonus points, so maybe i'll be saved.
only five days til christmas. got about half of my shopping done, just need to get a few more things for my dad and the stepfamily. but i'll hold out on listing my frighteningly exciting list of crap i bought for people, cause i don't know who might be reading this (gyuh).
damn, i've been ramming my toe into the wall for the past 5 minutes, and i didn't even notice. stupid anesthesia.
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 7th, 2004|03:41 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Queen - The Miracle | ] |
i've been going through a bunch of stupid shit with this computer lately. it all started when i decided to download system shock 2, which is supposed to be one of the greatest games of all time, an FPS/RPG hybrid. the training mission had me hooked, but it crashes every time i try to leave an area because it was released in 1999 and doesn't work too well on WinXP. so that, coupled with the fact that my computer's been kinda slow lately, prompted me to reformat once again (last time was september). this time i decided to have a dual-boot configuration with both XP and Windows ME, so i could play system shock 2 and all that. so i reformat, install xp, and it works well enough. but ME keeps being a whiny little bitch, and it will only install itself on a FAT-formatted C partition. so i'm about to delete everything and try it once more, but with ME first.
only one more week of school left, then exams, then christmas. most classes are pretty okay, except chemistry, which is complete bullshit. all it is now is doing an enormous-ass packet of problems about converting meters to feet to kilojoules and then back to meters. i can't wait to finish this damned course, but unfortunately that's a long way off.
happy pearl harbor day :| |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 26th, 2004|01:22 pm] |
OMFG FRONTPAGE!
www.newgrounds.com
(most of the reviews on the last 4 or 5 pages are good, the ones later than those came after it was subjected to the test of the masses of newgrounds.com) |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 22nd, 2004|03:03 pm] |
when it rains here, it pours. and i do mean that in the literal sense. whenever there's heavy rain, it doesn't just come by and then leave. it always hovers over the city for hours, creeping ever so slowly eastward. and rain means two things to me: number one is the possibility of exploded internet, which is why i'm probably going to unplug my modem after i post this. number two is the inevitable invasion of ants, which occurs whenever it rains hard enough to flood the lawn. which is a lot. i wouldn't have a problem with these storms if they didn't always make the internet screw up.
but only one more day of school, and then i'll be... having toe surgery. dammit. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 20th, 2004|12:51 am] |
LOTS AND LOTS OF GAMES COMIN OUT NA
Let's see, currently there's San Andreas, Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime 2, and many, many more, with more on the way. i know, by the looks of it, i'm about to use the same damn livejournal entry formula, many game + no money = teh bad. but i think the point is all but conveyed. but this does warrant a rundown, which is still repetitive, but in not quite the same way because it's talking about different crap.
 i rented grand theft auto: san andreas a couple times. really good, there are a ton of improvements, a lot more vehicles, planes, etc. you can customize your appearance, too. what do you get when you work out and max out your muscle, take your shirt off, put on some jeans, buy a nice gold chain, get the "mohawk with beard" haircut, and enter L1-L2-R1-U-D-L-R twice? that's right, mr. T on a jetpack. the only thing that pisses me off is the multitude of the damned racing missions that are required to advance the story. what the hell? the entire gaming industry really should have learned from Mafia that you don't do that crap. but hey, at least one of the BS racing things had a cool cameo with the nameless dude from GTA3. his name's Claude, apparently. Claude Speed. you also get to meet the crazy ho who as far as i know is the girl that shoots him and leaves him in the beginning of GTA3. hooray for backstory.
 and i got half-life 2 today. except not from the store. or from steam. yeah. so after screwing around with the stupid french crack until it worked, i finally got to play one of the most anticipated games of all time. does it live up to the hype? partially. as far as visuals go, it's fucking gorgeous, and it runs smoothly with 4xFSAA in 800x600. the puzzles are pretty cool for the most part, and they use the physics engine well, so it's not just a "push this block onto this switch to open the door" deal. those are refreshing, but the game's just starting to get repetitive. i played for an hour or two, but it's just fighting the same enemies over and over. but i dunno, it's probably just because i'm tired as hell, and i'll probably wake up tomorrow and think "holy shit that was awesome," but point in case, i'm going to bed. haven't been getting much sleep lately, god love the weekends. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 10th, 2004|11:09 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | William Shatner feat. Ben Folds - That's Me Trying | ] |
damn, i'm damn tired. been playing world of warcraft since about 6. i'm a level 9 troll rogue/leatherworker on test 28. so that's pretty much all i've done today, aside from watching dirty work for the fifth time, and the new south park episode. afterwards i watched that animated reality show, drawn together, and as always, it was completely retarded. it tried to make fun of asian anime/pop culture, but south park did it so much better with chinpokomon and fun with weapons. south park does everything better. drawn together is just a bunch of bullshit thrown together for extreeeeeme radical shock value TO THE MAX, as in "look, our show has gay people, black people fighting with white people, and penises, and it's all on basic cable! holy shit how radical and groovy is that, uh, dude!" God playing with a blurry penis = not cool.
luckily i'm off school tomorrow because of all those brave men who died so we didn't have to work on the eleventh of november. and friday's the sophomore retreat, which is both good and bad. good because we don't have classes, bad because we have to go to some retreat center to go to church all day. still, praisin' the lawd is better than more boring-ass classes i guess. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 9th, 2004|09:47 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Richie Truxillo - No Hablo Espanol | ] |
i signed up and got my WoW account this morning. when i got home at 7:30 (had to stay at school till 5:40, then get haircut :\), i expected it to be long done, but it still had a few hours left. that's probably god's way of telling me to do my damned homework, but i still just played spider-man 2 for a couple hours instead. but i know enough about world war I already, the quiz shouldn't be a problem. so the WoW client oughta be finished downloading any minute, and then I gotta pick a server and race. well whatever, be prepared to hear more boring MMO crap in the days to come ;] |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 8th, 2004|11:14 pm] |
well the world of warcraft open beta, which i've been hotly and heavily anticipating for the past month or so, began today, or at least they started taking signups. what sucks is that they plan to close registration after their quota has been filled, and on a first-come, first-serve basis. the trouble is that their site is apparently getting the shit spammed out of it by people trying to join, and everything keeps timing out and going offline, and my connection is shot to hell by the blizzard bittorrent knockoff client downloader that doesn't let you limit the transfer speed goddammit. now i'd damn well better get a slot in the beta, or else i'll most likely roll around on the floor and cry like a little girl. normally i'd stay up all night until i got in, but i have school tomorrow, so i'm probably just gonna wake up at 3am to check it.
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 3rd, 2004|02:58 pm] |
well, bush wins, i remain indifferent. but you gotta respect john kerry for not getting all whiny and al gore on us, but instead conceding and not calling a recount. like nixon. if only nixon were still alive; he'd do a bang-up job.
but i'm from alabama, and alabama and the internet don't mix well when it comes to politics, so i don't really know what to think. the only issues i heard about in the debates and otherwise were the candidates' views on health care, vietnam, abortions, and dick cheney's lesbian daughter, so screw it.
and as for bin laden and his video threats, fuck him. he's getting all anti-bush, but apparently he forgets that he hates all the american infidels, not just the republican ones. seems like he's just trying to get attention by attempting to influence the elections and scare americans, but it's getting a little pathetic.
politcal entry, politcal picture. filibustercartoons.com. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 30th, 2004|12:08 am] |
i started playing the spanish version of final fantasy tactics that i downloaded. the game is good, as always, but i'm rather disappointed with the spanish translation. it's very shoddy, punctuation is often missing or improperly formatted, and hardly anything is translated. the script is mostly translated, but most other things aren't. they managed to translate "potion" to "pocion", but they seemed to give up on items after that. common names (dark knight, priest), skill names, some non-story/battle dialogue... all english. and they use abbreviations in the dialogue, like tam and ud. but maybe that's common and it just looks weird to me. overall, it feels like a fan translation that's about 20% finished, with an unedited script.
it's still an excellent game (though i've beaten it before, level 92, uh-huh), and i'm still learning some crap from it, but it wasn't worth the download because i've got too much other crap to play right now. namely tales of symhponia, which i recently got back into and am pretty much hooked on. that's one good game right there.
it's almost november, which is like the most crazy awesome month for games ever. i got no money now, but hopefully i'll get a few hundred from a website that i may be designing in the near future. why do games have to be so expensive? guess it's better than the $60-$70 games of the not-too-distant past though :
(i'm trying to stop talking about games and flash so much here, but since that's all i ever do, i probably won't be updating very often.) |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 24th, 2004|01:20 am] |
just sat around today playing front mission: gun hazard on the snes emu and watching south park. god i love weekends. i'm just wasting my time testing crap out in flash and listening to the best of oasis. pretty good, i was expecting all the songs to sound like wonderwall, but not really.
How can.. the Prime minister.. support a law.. that makes it illegal for people.. who.. What I'm trying to say is.. OASIS RULES!
i haven't done anything on the flash project because of character designs. whenever i get stuck and have to do character designs to keep going, i just instantly lose all motivation. backgrounds and inanimate objects are fine, but i hate drawing characters. it's not even that hard because i can just copy the body of one character, re-proportion it, and change the clothes to turn it into another character, but i just don't have the willpower cause i hate doing it for some reason. probably because i have to draw it freehand to get it right and then scan it, and my scanner sucks. but i should really stop talking about the damned flash movie here.
the three greatest things ever:
1. music
2. sleep
3. flash |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 18th, 2004|08:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  artistic | ] |
| [ | music |
| | earthbound - ending | ] |
well, i finally made some significant progress on my flash movie. (i'm tired of calling it "the flash movie," so until i decide on an official title, it shall be known as "atotl," which is a slight bastardization of the abbreviation of the working title of the original version. bleh.) before now i've mostly just drawn backgrounds and crap without really progressing, and that's for one reason - character designs. I really don't like drawing characters. especially from different angles, it's hard to make them all coherent. every character has to fit a certain style, and of course each drawing of a character has to fit together with the rest. it's annoying for me to do that cause i'm mildly sucky at drawing characters. but i finally drew what i needed to get a good chunk done out of the beginning, and it looks pretty decent. i've still got more to draw before i can go any further though.
that's what i have so far, plus sideview and back view for plo. plo looks pretty good i think, and reidman looks okay despite the fact that the drawing bears no resemblance to the real thing. but i drew tomato's head too misshapenly, and the big ol' nose makes it not fit in with the other ones. but i guess i'll deal with that when i get to it, right now i need to draw and animate some enemies from EB. it's annoying work sometimes, but it sure is rewarding. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 13th, 2004|05:30 pm] |
standardized tests SUCK. we took the PLAN today, it's a 3.5-hour ACT-ish test for sophomores. it has four sections: english, math, reading, and science. english was really easy, all you had to do was pick the answer that sounded the least engrishy. math was a lot harder, because is suck at math. i guessed on a good bit of them, but i don't think i did that badly, it just pisses me off cause it's math. reading was more boring than anything, and science was mostly reading charts and graphs mixed in with some weird crap about osmosis.
but man, it was really boring. and now i have to do some crappy projects for tomorrow :\. i finished the english thing, so now i just have to make a written explanation and add in some quotes (blech), and just do the history project... i hate these projects.
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 12th, 2004|09:21 pm] |
gwark, tomorrow's a test day, we have to take the PLAN test at school. that means that i have no classes tomorrow and i don't have to be there until 11:30am (¡:D!), but unfortunately i have two big, retarded projects to do, and i don't want to be doing homework tomorrow. one of the projects is a stupid concept map for history about a selected topic, mine being the pinkerton detective agency. the other is a collage for english about the american dream, which i'm drawing in flash and freehand (freehand's interface is foreign and retarded to me, so i'm only using it to supplement my flash skeelz). while looking for a picture of a hypodermic needle on google image search, i came across this. wtf?
Why does almost every movie have a Jewish person and a homosexual in it?
Answer: Jewish people control the money, Queers (as they call themselves) control the content, Christians are the idiots! (at least that’s the way Hollywood portrays Christians)
again, wtf? people on the internet are retarded, especially bible-thumping racist canadian housewives. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 8th, 2004|03:55 pm] |
well, i up and bought tribes vengeance yesterday. the demo was so sweet that i had to buy it. the single-player campaign is pretty well-designed and fun, and it's a lot more immersive with surround sound and a bigass subwoofer.
buy my crap.
snare drum set - $200
megaman dvd - $15
tron 2.0 - $10
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 3rd, 2004|12:52 am] |
  inspired by poe's post, i decided to make a depiction of myself as a sims 2 character. so i went in to the create family thingy, and made my character. but apparently you can't have a teenage character alone without an adult, so i created the creepy cowboy-hat-totin' Asspoo Forsythe as fictional legal guardian. we moved into an empty lot, and i built a modest house on the property. i guided myself inside to watch some tv, and asspoo tried to follow me. that creepy bastard was definitely up to something. but i held all the cards, as i could easily control his actions. i switched to asspoo, and quickly built a kickass tower next to the house and guided him inside, with false promises of food and basic amenities. after asspoo was safely inside, i ripped the door out of the wall and left him in there to die. meanwhile, i watched tv, ate cereal, and didn't go to school for a couple days. soon enough, asspoo, deprived of a toilet (though his urine puddles caused some festive weeds to spring up), a shower, any form of entertainment, any air at all, human contact, and food, to name a few things, got a visit from a delightful fellow who carried him away, to hell probably, for being a creepy-ass fat dude in a pirate costume and a cowboy hat who tried to follow me around everywhere.
so that's pretty much what i look like, except for the skintone, which didn't turn out right in that particular screenshot - my real skin is more of an EED2BD than an E7A776. people always say that i look like harry potter. i fail to see the resemblance myself, but it's apparently clear to everyone i ever meet. the first few weeks of my freshman year, i'd sometimes faintly hear whispers of "harry potter" as i walked down the hallway. damn, why couldn't he have a cooler name? but there you have it, an image of me that didn't require me to get up and fool with the digital camera - only spend 30 minutes playing the Sims 2.
so yeah, i beat the system. oh, maxis, you say i can't have a family with just one teenage dude? well i beat your damned system. maybe next i'll try it with a baby, to see if there are social workers in the sims 2 to take kids away from their dead parents. [see, this is one of the reasons why i keep this thing friends-only. this whole entry sounds pretty fucking demented if you don't know me on this particular level, i.e. if you're any kind of relative at least one generation older than me.] |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 30th, 2004|08:51 pm] |
 they came out with a tribes vengeance multiplayer demo the other day. and i gotta say, it is EXCELLENT. the jetpack, a tribes staple and the single greatest FPS feature, feels and looks awesome. skiing, the second most innovative and fun feature in an FPS, is perfect. you hold down the spacebar, and the blade things on your feet visibly glow, and then you can glide down hills and pick up insane speed. the grappler gun, number three, is another kickass new feature. you can shoot it at the ceiling in cavern levels, and swing around without jetting constantly, you can grapple onto buildings to pull yourself in, and you can grapple onto pods and ships to hitch a ride. how bout the airborne sniper corps, eh? speaking of vehicles, they're vastly improved from tribes 1 and 2. they took a cue from UT2k4, joint ops, and other MMOFPSes with vehicles, and now the vehicles spawn around the base instead of from an easily raped vehicle station. all the control issues from tribes 2 are gone, and vengeance plays like a charm. throw in what looks to be a quality single-player mode, and hell, i might just buy this one.
 i also saw while browsing gamespot that taiko drum master is coming to america. it looks like donkey konga, which i considered buying, except with drums and drumsticks instead of a cheap plastic miniature bongo set. after looking at the songlist and seeing it in action, i'm pretty much sold, but it really depends on how much money i have by the time it comes out. gotta save up for christmas (yes, my income is so limited that i have to be mindful of holiday shopping in september).
and then there's metal gear solid 3, which had a holy shit it's so awesome that i'm no longer concerned with such fruitless and unimportant things as bladder control and personal well-being trailer showing at TGS. it's really a must-have at this point, so hopefully i'll be able to get it when it comes out. other must-buy titles coming out in the near future include metroid prime 2 and not a whole lot else. time to sell some crap on ebay. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 21st, 2004|03:53 pm] |
excellent, i just finished downloading all 79 Final Fantasy soundtrack albums, a total of 6.33GB. over the next 88 hours of comp time, i'll be listening to all 1903 songs. man, this is some goodass music.
( the full (huge) album list ) |
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| epilogue |
[Sep. 18th, 2004|06:27 pm] |
hurricane ivan has passed. it was 2 days ago, in fact.
from now on, i will harbor a personal grudge against anyone named ivan.
i'm now sympathetic to florida and its hurricane bullshit, but i remain unconcerned with jeanne or any other storm not projected to kick my ass.
i know, once again, what it is like to lose power for 3 days.
it wasn't all that bad. i did adopt a new hobby. i call it "screaming like a lunatic."
having no electricity for 3 days taught me something. i fucking need tv, computer, music, and air conditioning to survive.
after spending 3 days in the darkness, the power finally came back on. it literally felt as if i was airlifted out of hell in an apache helicopter piloted by Jesus himself.
now, i can finally play the sims 2, which i worked so hard before the storm to download.
good lord i love electricity.
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| bracing for impact |
[Sep. 15th, 2004|04:01 pm] |
 well, it just started raining here, and Ivan should be up in our grill within a few hours. i expect that it'll hit us dead-on and we'll be without power for a day or two. what i'm hoping is that it'll suddenly blow west and own texas (they're due for a good hurricane, right?), or we just don't lose any power. so if i still have power tomorrow, i'll update again. if not, i'll have to read books or something while i go insane. i have the modem, router, and my computer in the 15-minute battery backup, so i may still be able to enjoy 15 minutes of extra internet time if the power does go out, i just won't have a monitor. but i'm really praying that this doesn't kill the cable internet for 2 weeks like it did the last time we had a puny little thunderstorm. fortunately, i don't have school tomorrow, friday, or monday, so if the power stays on, i'll have a 5-day weekend to enjoy. in any case, pray for wasabi and his internet, and i hopefully won't have to be without internet for days. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 14th, 2004|03:57 pm] |
 eheh, well it looks like ivan is projected to tear through alabama (has that ever happened here?) around thursday morning. we won't be getting owned by it like mobile and the other southern cities will, but from the looks of it, it'll still be pretty strong windwise when it gets up here. as long as it doesn't screw up my 6.33GB download of every Final Fantasy album ever, i'm cool with it. hopefully it won't knock out my power for six weeks, but i'm not too familiar with what noncoastal hurricanes can do, so i wouldn't know. unfortunately, i doubt that JC would cancel school, because even if godzilla was attacking the building while it was raining blood during an earthquake that was opening a rift to hell on the roads, they'd still make us go.
i now have a dvd burner capable of burning dual-layer 9.2gb discs (although the blank media won't be availible for months). that means i'm finally able to get rid of all the huge crap i've been keeping on here so far, and to easily backup my 20 gigs of music on only 5 DVD+Rs, as opposed to 28 CD-Rs. and it only cost about 60 bucks, which is a good deal for a dual-layer 4x burner. it can also burn CD-Rs at 32x, which is an improvement over my crappy old 12x burner. (now, what to do with the crappy old 12x burner?) it feels so nice to have 20 gigs of free hard drive space.
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wasabimilkshake's journal
