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