Come to the light

Hey! Two updates in the same week? Amazing. Anyway... today I took a couple pictures with some really great volunteers, this is my favorite, and I actualy don't have much to say about this other than it was a lot of fun.

wow

Been a long time since last post. Lets start with something stupid. So i'm on the bus behind somebody who doesn't seem to know which lane they want to be in at a red light, and this idiot driver opens her door, steps half out of her car, and yells to the bus driver that he's blocking her rear-view mirror.

I'm dead serious.

It's things like this that make me lose faith in people. Others include but are not limited to how you can't have the word "edge" on a video game cover without getting sued, Micheal Atkinson staying purposefully ignorant of any video game (look him up, he's worse than Jack Thompson), commercials over youtube, and not on the side like any nice person, nooooo, on the video you're watching.

It's people like that woman on the road that make me realise that humans can always get dumber than you think they can.

devry and e portfolios

so, i seem to have missed a few things, and here they are:

first, devry, for those of you who weren't here for some reason or other, I enjoyed the presentation, even though it took time away from my dvd/game covers that I really need to finish. Other than that, I enjoyed the presentation, but although while it was helpful, i'm not quite sure that it will be something i'll be continuosly intrested in. It almost seems to me that when you make/use extra things, it just overcomplicate a process that could be done with fewer tools. It might take longer, but it would be that much easier fo others to understand.

next, on E-portfolios. Five tips that make a good E-portfolio are:
1 Make sure it is easy to navigate. This is probably the most important one. You could have great ideas and great works but if people can't find your work, you're S.O.L. I know I've been on some websites with remarkably bad navigation, and just desided to quit before i could find anything.
2 Make sure it's easy for potential clients to contact you. Self explanatory, but important. if nobody can contact you, no jobs, and once you run out of spare housepets, YOU STARVE.
3 A portfolio sit should be easy to update. This is more for your sake than the clients, but if a portfolio isn't easy to update, typically you will update less, and then more than likely forget to put new stuff up at all.
4 A portfolio sit should only showcase your best work. NEVER show bad stuff and say this is your worst. Anybody who hires you will want to believe that you are some sort of machine who can put out good work after good work. Anything bad will make them think that you will create something like that again.
5 Provide a downloadable resume. This one does not seem to be important, untill you realize that the majority of the human population are lazy or procrastinating or forgetful sloths that will not do an ounce of work untill they have to because the are doing other things (also why I forgot to put this update up, but in my defense I was busy working on other things). Anyway, people are lazy, and a lot of them won't even bother reading your resume untill it is downloadable. When you finally do though, they won't download it, they'll only read/skim it online, but they like to think they have the option.

games that nobody bought

now for a list of good games that nobody bought:

SMT Devil Survivor, Eternal Darkness, Black Sigil, valkyrie profile (all), and for the bigshot, breakdown, an awsome game from Namco that I would argue is easily the best FPS ever made.

whoops

a lot to get through this time. I seem to have missed a lot and am going to update more regularly.

anyway....

a guy whose name I forgot and will post if someone tells me came from the center of arts and technology, the presentation was interesting, and I learned worldwide media industry is said to have made 12 trillion dollars by 2012. In this comapany you get paid a lot of money to do almost anything, ad everything, skydiving, baby pictures sports. no lack of jobs in network security, interior design, requires sitting in front of a computer for over 60 hours, which for me is great. I also learned that there are awards for websites, and by 2011 the game market would have made 49.9 billion dollars

anyway...

Last wedsnday I learned that there are many different art styles for tv showing, some of which look almost comic book stylish. Also proving that you can make anything in HD. The main one I'm talking about is Injustice, an interesting show about todays justice in courts. the most interesting thing about it is that the images give a sense of depth, one image stays at the front focus, while a second image rotates around the first, sometimes fast, sometimes slowly,and it gives an interesting feel.

anyway...

so I came across a book, that has some of the worst grammer and worst word uses you could ever find. I never even knew any author thought using "especialy" was a good idea, and it has the problem of not telling you anything. We came across a "lorg" what a lorg is or what it looks like isn't explained until six pages later. Then one guy fires an arrow from a bow, and another fires a bolt. Alright, a crossbow and bow right? No. The guy with the bolt explains that his weapon, whatever it is, calculated the targe and fired for him. Wait, computers? Then why do they still have armor and swords? I'll leave it to you to guess what book this is.

phoenix

Just recently we went to phoenix advertising. It was an interesting place, what surprised me the most was they make (among other things) logos for various places, almost all of which I have seen at one time or another. Most of the logos they make are in the photos above, if you can read them have fun and try to see how many you recognize.

odd/good games Black Sigil

just a little while ago, I bought a new game, went home to play it, and was blown away by the fact that it doesn't suck! This hit me completly by surprise, as games sucking seems to have become the standard, and anyone who makes a game that doesn't suck has to undergo a lobotomy to be brought down to the norm, see the makers of eternal darkness and too human. So when is it that people lost the idea that games had to be good? Was it when mario received his 37th game? was it when the wii switched over to casual gamers? was it when sony announced they would be harder to develop games for, causing good games too slow to a crawl? Personally I blame franchises. why do people get attached to icons like mario and sonic? If you don't want to play as mario, sonic or any casual game, then you have no choice to go over to the ps3 where almost every single game is some variation of 1st/3rd person shooter, or the 360, which seems to put out games by the truckload, and picking a good one becomes almost hit and miss. Of course black sigil was hit and miss too, but I bought it because it was original enough and not trying to leech off of anything before hand. why can't more games be like this? When did we suddenly run out ideas that we had to keep using things over and over again? let's just ax a franchise after ten or so games, that way we wouldn't have to be faced with crap like f.f. 11/12, any new mario/sonic games, and with all their expansion packs, the metal gear universe would be on the verge of death as well, and then we can make new series and keep ideas fresh.

------ VS -------

Eventually everyone asks a question, it is something that bugs everybody, and that is, can pirates coexist with ninjas? luckily this post is really easy as somebody has already answered this question, just copy past the address and read the text.

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/essays/coexist.htm

don't even think about calling me out on who this guy really is. Any comments on such will be deleted.

Poster

Here's the poster we did. I' like to thank all my classmates for providing background entertainment. me and my partner both worked equally in cutting and designing. I did slightly less gluing, but slightly more cutting, which makes us even I guess.

They were smoking something

Recently i finished on of the better stories I was reading, and decided to rant on it for a little bit. This story is your standard humans with special abilities vs. ancient vampires. the one different thing that this series wants you to believe is that the main characters (human and half human) can survive anything and still manage to kill a vampire who makes Sephiroth look pathetic, and Kefka look sane. (nerdy reference)

ex. In this story the half human gets her arms and legs sliced open, gets sliced apart by claws, gets thrown through 3 stories of floors, before getting thrown through five more stories, then gets caught in a magic vortex, where she get sliced at by dopplegangers, after all this she's somehow still alive, and because the vampire is that awesome, he crushes her, and the castle she is inside with, wait for it, the moon. Yeah, the moon, not a bolder, or a wall coming down, the reach up to the sky, apparently using magic, and cause the moon to come crashing down on the heroes, the hero it hits getting completely crushed.

After this she still gets up and beats the vampire in a one on one match, and whereas she can get up from anything, she kills the vampire by shooting him through the stomach with a holy bullet. not the heart or the head, the stomach. how come she can regenerate anything but this vampire can't? Only ever hits him once and that time proves to be fatal?

I shouldn't even have to explain why that pissed me off. The only reason i can think of to make her still survive and win, is because the villain always losses, and this story is no exception. It's still a fun read if you don't think the villain is the greatest evar (i do), and it's funny to watch people make up excuses for why the hero/heroin wins after getting crushed by the moon, something not even link can survive.

What were they smoking?

WOw, that last post was WAAaay too seriouS and FuLl of Spellcheck. Let's reflect on a much less serious, but much more aggravating topic. Endings. Endings to anything, books, movies and games. lets talk about endings that suck.

Now, I'm not opposed to endings where the main character dies, or endings that are tragedies, or even endings where everyone forgets what happened, I'm open to almost any ending there is, the only endings I'm opposed to are endings that completely destroy the entire point of playing the game, watching the movie, or reading the book.

Ex. In a movie, everyone forgets what happened. you might as well have not watched it in the first place, because for the average amount of 2 hours, movies usually have a hard time making you really feel the experience, when you finally are inside, you then find out nothing mattered, because nobody remembers what happened, and things go to the way the were before the movie started, the only way this is countered is if it was a psychological thriller designed to make you think, but some movies now seem to think this is a good idea.

Books are a lot harder to mess up, but still possible, Ex. the entire book is based around one, or two characters, and then in the end they kill one or both characters. This just makes me want to strangle someone or burn the book. When you try your best to get the person to sympathise with a character, only to kill them off, shows nothing.

Not to say that this can't be done well, it can, certain series that i've read have shown that, but the majority of the series that do this ending are not dark or gritty, and having the character die is a massive shift from where they previously were, to tragic, a change that will alienate any previous reader.

and finally the last one to look at: games. Now it is almost impossible to get a games ending wrong, but some people were determined to find a way, and before now i believed it to be impossible for a game to be destroyed by it's ending, until I played a certain game by a certain company, and found it ended with everyone forgetting what happened, with the exception of the main character, who gets killed in the final battle, and everyone lives their lives as they would have if the game didn't happen.

I shouldn't have to explain why I wanted to burn the game, especially when the game took over two days of game time (48+ hours) to beat. This is the type of game where you DON'T want your name on the credits.

There many other ways to screw up a good thing, but this post is long enough already. I might post them in a shorter list if I find more people who don't know how to end something.

E portfolios

found some e-portfolios, they're what i'm going to be doing sometime later, here's some good ones:

http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=25054367282478&id=51020225091856

good things about this one are: it tells what links lead where, what they do, and the links are neatly organised.

https://mysite.wsu.edu/personal/mkushin/e-portfolio/default.aspx

good things about this one are: it tells what they do, and everything is organised in a professional manner.

http://www.alexandrakp.com/

good things about this one are: everything is neatly on one page with a navbar on the side to allow for easy use.

http://my-ecoach.com/project.php?id=9675

good things about this one are: once again everything is nicely organised, with a nice little "search" buttonso you can easily check to see if they have the skills you want.

http://www.myeportfolio.org/Introduction.htm

good things about this one are: everything is bad. Oddly enough, this is a good thing. by looking at this as an example, we can see exactly how NOT to do it: colour choices are awful, the navigation is unorganised, and there is nothing intresting to keep you motivated, not to mention the inconsistancy between the colours and fonts for no reason..

nothing here yet

nothing going on yet, i'll update this sometime later, when i find something else to talk about.

creative commons

just heard about creative commons, first time I heard of it. I am surprised that it took people that long to find this method of doing things. For those who don't know what it is, basically it says you can add this, this, and this, but you can't change these; whereas copyright says change nothing.

new online journal

nothing to write here, just got started here, i'll come up with intresting stuff later