merry christmas

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from ajax publications!

the future

Halcyon Blue.

the gates of sleep

There are two gates of sleep. One is of horn, easy passage for the shades of truth; the other, of gleaming white ivory, permits false dreams to ascend to the upper air.

- Virgil (Aeneid VI.893-896)

qotd

He wanted to beat their pulpy little brains out, those gross Cruikshank children; yes, that phrase fit them, those fox-fiend, melancholy Cruikshank children, with all the guile and poison and slyness in their cold faces. In the name of all that was decent, what manner of child was this new generation! A bunch of cutters and hangers and bangers, a drove of bleeding, moronic thumbscrewers, with the sewage of neglect running in their veins?

~ The Playground, by Ray Bradbury

cohen's masterpiece

Man, I so wish they had sheet for this. I never knew that Bioshock had such a good soundtrack. I mean, the rest of the score is nice, but this takes the cake. Enjoy!

jesus in the thirty-first century

See here.

warsaw concerto

I found a few nice YouTube videos of the piece I'm currently learning on the piano: the Warsaw Concerto, by Richard Addinsel.


Here is the arranged version for solo piano I am learning:




And this is an edited/shortened version with the full orchestra:

signature festival, final day

Alas, the Festival draws (see what I did there?) to a close. Our three days of nibs, ink, and intelligible handwriting have been an experience to remember. For now, let us end this time of joy... with pie!



The pie is a symbol of the home, the embodiment of comfort! It represents the love and care of one person made real, and gifted to another



Pies are delicate. Their finicky crusts take precision and care to create. There is no set recipe for a real pie-crust: while there may be guidelines, every crust must be individually tweaked to achieve that unique, flaky texture.



Pies are varied to beyond imagining: If you can think, it has be baked into a pie. From apples to blackbirds to coconut creams, there is a after-dinner (I prefer them as a mid-day snack) pie for everyone.



The pie is not limited to just sweets, though. Personally, I have sampled meat pies, potato pies, and squash pies (among others). There truly is a pie for all occasions.




P.S. (The cake is a lie!)

signature festival, day two

Day two of the Signature Festival was a success! We had a team of speed-painters facing off on a couple Nintendo DS systems running the homebrew app Colors!, as well as the winner of the actual signature category: Mahmud Khan son of Abdulhamid.

cleaning house

Gee golly, this place is dusty! Guess that's what I get from not, y'know, writing anything. Hey, look! I can draw little pictures on the surfaces. You can check out los dibujos over here. Yup, I gave in and made myself a deviant. I was sick of abusing flickr and polluting it with the dredges of my B3 Algebra II class.



In celebration of this glorious event (hooray!), I have decided to appoint myself the Minister of Rhetoric of the lands beneath the Tower! With my new power, I proclaim today (Tuesday, November twenty-seven, two thousand and seven Anno Domini) to Thursday (November twenty-nine, year two thousand and seven Anno Domini) the Signature Festival: almost 72 hours of calligraphy, important documents, and flourished handwriting.



So, enjoy the Signature Festival, and keep a sharp eye out for some of the other changes I'm going to make as Minister!

cryptic sea on imagination

     "… I can't stress how important using real reference photos in art/design is. I know a lot of artists who refuse to do this and only use their "imagination" to dream up environments and other graphic elements, but really isn't your imagination just referencing things you've already seen? It's hard enough not to easily fall into video game cliche visuals in level design. Having real world references that you can pick and choose from is something that I think will give your game more life and actually inspire you more then referencing other games/making it all up yourself."

     - cryptic sea.

4:11 - 11.4.07

'I’m writing down my dreams and I am going to tackle them. I am going to write down my faults and fix them. I am going to let down my walls and let people in.'

facades

Huh.

I feel like I'm just putting on faces more and more. I'm really not the person I was a year, two years ago. Almost opposite, in fact.

Lately, I've been feeling like I'm losing my inspiration. Instead of this being a place for me to write whatever I want for the whole world, like scribbling notes on the bulletin board at the post office, I've been trying to be 'interesting' and have 'features' or whatever.

I need to figure out who I am again.

packet garden

From the website:

Packet Garden captures information about how you use the internet and uses this stored information to grow a private world you can later explore.

To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an 'HTTP plant' is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a 'Peer to Peer plant' is grown, and so on.

None of this information is made public or shared in any way, instead it's used to grow a personal landscape, a kind of 'walk-in graph' uniquely shaped by the way you use the internet. With each day of network activity a new world can be generated, each of which are stored as tiny files for you to browse, compare and visit as time goes by. You can think of packet gardens as pages from a network diary.

lambdamoo

Programmer status? Check.

Just type 'help programmer-policy' for more information.

4:11 - 10.13.07

'En skog, märklig och djup.'

4:11 - 10.12.07

I'm washing my face.

4:11 - 10.11.07

'Most commonly, this "voxel" terrain is actually stored and processed as a heightmap, the result of run-length encoding on a voxel grid.'

another toy recall

i knew crysis had good graphics...

... But I didn't realize they were this good. Holy crap - it's almost scary.

a collection of wonderful things - ii

I think I'm going to make this into regular 'feature', if I remember to collect the orts of my browsing every week. Anyway, enjoy this week's feast of esoteric delights, denizens of the internet!


Crowd Farms

Geostationary banana over Texas

i hope this is a joke

Why Mommy is a Democrat

One word: propaganda.

Now, I'm not a republican OR democrat. In fact, the whole "2 parties" thing really bugs me. But that's not the point: The point is that this 'book' is bizarre and funny and sad and just makes me go "Wow." all at the same time.

big sale

Fred starts his first day as a salesman at Super-Mega-Mart, the store that sells everything. The sales manager shows him around, how to write up sales orders, where the break room is, etc. He tells Fred to remember that customer service is king at Super-Mega-Mart so whatever the customer needs Fred needs to find it and sell it to him. He promises to stop back by and check on Fred periodically but due to one urgent matter or another he doesn't come back until the end of the day to ask Fred how many sales he made.

FRED: Only one.

MANAGER: Only one?! That's terrible! You'll never last at Super-Mega-Mart at this rate. How much was the sale for?

FRED: $48,619.54

MANAGER: Holy Smoke! How did you sell that much merchandise to one customer?

FRED: Well, first he needed some bait so I took him to the sporting goods department and got him some worms. He needed a fishing pole to put the bait on so I got him one as well as some line, hooks and sinkers. Then he needed a boat to fish out of so I took him to the boat sales department and got him a bass boat, outboard motor and trailer. Then he realised his Ford Focus would not pull the trailer so I took him to the car sales department and sold him a new truck with a towing package. Then off he went.

MANAGER: That is incredible! You sold all that to a guy who came in for a $1.75 pack of bait?

FRED: He didn't come here for bait, he came here for tampons.

MANAGER: How could you sell all that to a guy who came in for a pack of tampons?

FRED: When he asked where the tampons were I said "Dude, your weekend's shot, you may as well go fishing".

coffee-eww

(*Thought process of the guy who invented coffee: "I have an idea. Let's pick these red cherry things, then dry them in the sun for a week or two, then throw away the fruit and keep the seed, then bake the seed for ten minutes, then grind up the burnt seed, then pour hot water through it, and then drink the brown liquid.")

via Wohba

sixtyTen

Reversial has finished his new wordpress theme! Go, all my fellow avid (and not-so-avid) bloggers! Go download it right... now!

4:11 - on hold

Uhh... Yeah. I lost my watch that I was using as an alarm, so I'm unable to continue until I get a new one. I'll let all you inhabitants of the blagosphere know the minute (the minute!) I get another alarm-thing.

a collection of wonderful things - i

In celebration of my impending birthday, I present to all you imaginary readers this week's collection of wonderful things. Enjoy.



ef·flu·ence /ˈɛfluəns/ [ef-loo-uhns]
-noun
1. the action or process of flowing out; efflux.
2. something that flows out; emanation.


abecedarian
(ey'-bee-see-dair'-ee-un) adj. 1a: of or relating to the alphabet. b: alphabetically arranged. 2: rudimentary.


pule
(pyool) v.i. to whine or whimper.


gribble
(grib'-ul) n. a small marine isopod crustacean (Limnoria lignorum or L. terebrans) that destroys submerged timber.

Pi

Cadaeic Cadenza. An amazing piece of literary work.

cephalapod

Swaying softly, its
Tentacles wait gently for
A tender morsel.

another year

My birthday's coming up soon. September 24! Time to start bugging people...

analog days

Yup, I switched to film. My little digicam is almost completely dead, so now I'm using a nice SLR: a Nikon N60. Take a look at the first roll of film at flickr.

'cause some people don't have maps

once again

…I am among the unwashed masses. School started yesterday!

Things of note:

- School lunch is now just under a kajillion times better than last year's lunch.
- Everything else is about the same.

machinarium

Besides the fact that this is my most-anticipated game since about 10 minutes ago, the first bit of concept art on the website is now residing in that special place of glory and adulation known as my desktop (reserved only for photos and artwork of the highest caliber).

via TIGSource

knytt stories is out!

Nifflas has released Knytt Stories. That's all I really need to say. Oh, and it has a full level editor, so people can create and share their own level packs. Besides, I helped with the development.

For those that just need to know more about the game before downloading it (yes, hard to believe) it's a free, much more challenging successor to his exploration-based Knytt. Here's the blurb from his website:

In Knytt Stories, each level is its own little adventure. One level is included with the game, where you have to stop a machine that draws the life out of the planet. An official expansion pack is also featured at the website with four original levels.

Knytt Stories is a 2D platform game that runs on Windows 2000, XP, and later. Current version: 1.0

Note that compatibility with Wine has not yet been confirmed, as far as I know. Keep tabs on this thread from his support forum though.

the adventure of a lifetime

I'm sure my brother doesn't think that right now.

Last Wednesday, my older brother (Nathan) moved to Madison, Wisconsin. He's living there for a year before going to college, so as to get residency and save a butt-load of money. I've no idea how I would survive something like that. I'd be too terrified to even get a job!

this is why i like legos

dynamic/intelligent resizing

Once again, Wohba delivers. Go here to see the future of image manipulation: context-specific scaling. What this means is you can resize and stretch and squash and otherwise humiliate an image or photo, all the while keeping everything that you want intact. You can even seamlessly erase animals, people, even buildings and make it look like they were never there. Heh, you'd better prepare yourself for a deluge of industry news 'leaks': "ZOMG TEH IFONE V2 NOT GONNA HAV TEH EMAIL!!!1!!"

haitus

Hello again readers (reader?). The wait is over: I'm back in action, or at least back from vacation. Just so you know, school starts September 6th. That either means that I'll have very little time for writing, or that I'll have lots of interestingly mundane things to blog about.

If I remember, I'll put up some of the few pictures that I took up in the Adirondacks. Maybe I'll even get around to finally scanning some of my drawings and other cetera!

4:11 - 8.17.07

'His voice leapt up around the spiraled sunlight.'

4:11 - 8.16.07

"HTML is easy to learn, but it's quite time-consuming to code."

4:11 - 8.15.07

'… animals have a full system of cautionary signals …'

4:11 - 8.14.07

I'm twiddling with an SLR lens. It's a Nikkor 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6D AF.

4:11 - 8.13.07

I'm playing Gunstar Heroes on the Sega Genesis.

4:11 - 8.12.07

"They're like big, long, contrail things."

4:11 - 8.11.07

(Maybe I should name it.)

4:11 - 8.10.07

'Seven five and a half.'

4:11 - 8.9.07

'Do they plan to buy Stonehenge in bulk and sell them
like Stacktors?'

4:11 - 8.8.07

I was taking a nap, and slept through the alarm.

the fog horn

"The mysteries of the sea," said McDunn thoughtfully. "You know, the ocean's the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colors, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock's tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone.

- from The Fog Horn, by Ray Bradbury

4:11 - 8.7.07

"Yeah, get rid of the green herbs. But you can only eat the fish once."

4:11 - 8.6.07

I'm eating a bowl of curry and rice.

4:11 - 8.5.07

I'm trying to ride a road bike.

milk meets coffee

I didn't take these, but they're still cool.

counting down the minutes that you've wasted

Temporal Consistency

4:11 - 8.4.07

I'm watering some dead-looking peonies.

And I think that all my posts are off by one day. Though I'm not sure, it just may be that the clock's messed up.

four-eleven

These four-eleven posts are taking over my blog. Maybe I should start (gasp) a new blog? At least that way I can keep 'em all together.

4:11 - 8.4.07

'"Stop it!" I almost shout it.'

4:11 - 8.3.07

I am carefully placing a couple of windows in a picture I am drawing.

4:11 - 8.2.07

"Knife 'em!"
"I can't. He's not close enough."

4:11 - 8.1.07

"Do you ride the same horse all the time, or different ones?"

convergence

And now I realize that my painstakingly-coordinated new colour scheme is remarkably similar to the "Minima Ocher" pre-set template.

Darn.

metamorphosis

This blog now has 75% less teenage angst and 0g Trans fat!

4:11 - 7.31.07

I'm munching on a late-afternoon snack of madeleines and milk.

jello metroid

I thought I needed some more pictures on here, so behold!

i can hardly hear the echo of my own voice

There are be billions of people, all whispering to the people next to them, or shouting st the tops of thier lungs. Blogging isn't something that you do for other people: it's a way of expressing yourself. For instance, take photography: taking and selecting and viewing photos is an intensely personal matter. Why would you even think of putting them up onto something like Flickr? Why would you allow the whole world to see through your eyes, look at a snapshot of your feelings, view a matte print of your soul? For me, it's because there are so many people that my voice is lost, and only the people close to me can hear my voice. There's very little chance that some wayward wanderer of the internet will stumble across this blog and become a regular reader. And just like that, my voice is no longer lost in the din: only the people that need or want to hear me actually do.

But again, I am not blogging for anyone other than myself: like drawing, photography, biking, speaking, living... writing is just another way of articulating myself and understanding my own personal self.

Another reason for this futile endeavor, this meager collection of thoughts, these late-night ravings of a mad, mad, mind is that they are another way of exploring the world around me, another way of noticing the little details that make up our life. Just like photography strips away everything but what the photographer sees and highlights a single thought or emotion, just like drawing adds a stylized and personal interpretation of some idea or scene, so does writing. It just so happens that I (and many others) put this visual information into black-and-white squiggles.

If you look closely, a drawing is nothing but black-and-white squiggles. A photograph is nothing but little black-and-white dots. Just like I am nothing but a single voice in the crowd.

But that doesn't mean that if you step back, you won't be able to appreciate the single penstroke my voice adds to the masterpiece that is being created around us.

4:11 - 7.30.07

I'm reading a webcomic. It's not very funny.

4:11 - 7.29.07

single quotes are text, double quotes are speech, parentheses are thoughts

'In short, Blu-ray is not necessary for gaming in HD, if by necessary you mean anything approaching the dictionary's definition of the word.'

4:11 - 7.28.07

One minute of my life - 4:11 pm.

I'm kneeling in front of my TV, fiddling with the sound settings as I try to get the right balance between treble and bass. My knees hurt, so I stand up.

this is what death tastes like

I have just tasted the nastiest soda EVER. Chinotto. Moxie? Hah! That is like corn flakes compared to chinotto! God... I can still taste it.

enigma

Finally, some real written work on here. I've got a couple other reviews of games, restaurants, and movies in the works, so just you wait. You'll get some more soon enough.

----- Enigma -----

Past

Ahh... remember the golden days of gaming? When classic gameplay elements were devised and refined to their purest form, unhindered by flashy visuals and over-the-top special effects. During this time (around 1992, to be exact) a small german known as Dongleware released an innovative little shareware game called Oxyd on the Atari ST. Reminiscent of Marble Madness, you controlled a little black marble that rolls around, facing some of the most devious puzzles in any game of the time. Oxyd was quite successful, and spawned at least five sequels on the Amiga, Mac, PC and Atari. Alas, this success was not to last. In 2002, Dongleware stopped making games and pulled support for its flagship product. Then, in 2003, the world saw the first release of Enigma: A free, open-source, updated, unofficial version of Oxyd.

Present

At first glance, Enigma seems to be some sort of memory or dexterity game, but a few levels in and you can see just how wrong you really were. Enigma is a puzzle game. A really, really big puzzle game. As in over-one-thousand-levels-and-growing big. The sheer size, difficulty, and amount of some of the levels (or "landscapes" as they are called) can be intimidating. All of the landscapes were designed by users or developers of the game, and with that community still in active development, there are more landscapes being thought up and created every day.

...

I'm sick of writing this, so just go download it.

sonority

Here are a few sound-related bits of interestingness to tickle your ears today. Make sure you have some headphones!

Blind Pong: A simple twist spices up this tired game nicely: play Pong, but without any visuals. Let your ears guide you! The ball beeps regularly, and its noise gets louder as it travels (vertically) towards your side of the playing field, and the noise moves from left to right as the ball travels horizontally across. Very challenging, especially if you tried playing it with only one speaker.

Holophonic Sound: "Okay, people have two ears - makes it easy to figure out if a sound is to the left or to the right. But amazingly we can also determine if a sound is above, below, behind, or in front of us. How does that work? Top Men have figured out that it has to do with the folds and shape of the ear itelf, subtle delays and distortions of the sound that our brain subconsciously interprets to accurately pinpoint a sound location in 3D space."

Samples (Headphones required! You won't get the effect without 'em.):
Box of Matches (best sample)
Sweet Whispered Nothings
(this one's from Wohba!. They've got some more samples on their site.)

Youth Repellent: This GOD-AWFUL noise supposedly can only be heard by people under the age of 30. It is used by grown-ups in the UK to keep kids from hanging around certain places, or by certain (crazy, I might add) youths as a ringtone only they can hear. There was a BBC news article about it, and I'll post it when I find it.

The Lyrebird: Amazing. Just watch. That's all I can say.

Aural Mapping: This American Life (which is a great program, I might add), created this episode that explores different ways to map the world around you: visually, aurally, olfactorily, somatically, and gustatorily.

The reactable: Their site puts it most concisely: "The reactable is a collaborative electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible multi-touch interface."
You twist, pull, push, tap, and rotate little blocks on top of a backlight table, which in turn creates a work of art for both the eyes and the ears (if you like electronic music, that is).


Enjoy!

observation

If you just look hard enough, you can find some really valuable stuff that people just leave lying around. For instance, I found a spanish doubloon lying right in the middle of the road! I don't understand what kind of person would carry something worth that much money. Just leave it in a bank or something. Anyway, so I picked it up and brought it home.

Then my little brother says that it's just a squashed bottle cap. I was crushed! All my dreams of fame and fortune were blasted out of the water.
And in that instant that he told me that it was nothing more than trash, I saw (I saw!) the old coin lose its golden luster, shed its ancient metallic weight, and turn into a plain old bottle cap that had been thrown out of a car and left to die in the middle of the hunting path of those giant, rumbling, artificial creatures known as cars.

I wish I hadn't found out.

i got to play with an iphone

And I gotta say, it's really cool. The whole multi-touch interface works like a charm: so simple and intuitive and natural, that it feels like you're not controlling it, but that it just so happens to be doing exactly what you want at any particular moment. It's perfectly weighted, and feels sturdy. The only thing I don't get about it is why Apple did not have an option to use the on-screen keyboard in a horizontal position. Right now you have to be holding it vertically, which makes it feel top-heavy and a bit unstable. Other than that, it's a dream.

I want one.
Now!

space invaders ++

This is how crazy people with too much time on their hands play video games. Enjoy.

product manual of the future: the death ray

"Congratulations on your purchase of a genuine ZapCo D-99 Death Ray. Please read these instructions thoroughly and carefully before handling, operating, or servicing your death ray. Careless or incorrect use of a death ray could result in serious injury."

Just in case you lost the manual to your own death ray.

cash rules everything around me dolla dolla bill

There's plenty of money out there. They print more of it every day. But that ticket? There are only five of them in the world, and that's all there's ever going to be. Only a dummy would give this up for something as common as money. Are you a dummy?
~ Grandpa George, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

soup forks

Patience is like eating soup with a fork: you may not get satisfied quickly, but you can savour the meal better.

no-no

Yes, I have been re-posting crap from the internet.
Yes, I have had very little original work on here.
Yes, I am working on putting something real on here.

endurance test

My eyes... oh my god... MY EYES!

this is where they come from

... Giant, pink, knitted bunny rabbits flopped on an italian mountainside.



I want one.
Full article here.

i want some

Giant, pink bunny slippers. What else can I say?

(via Tinselman)

why don't they make...

...meat-flavored gum? More beef for your viewing pleasure at Flickr.

A new milestone: I've already exceeded my bandwith limit! So no more photo-beef until next month, but you can look forward to some written reviews of various things in the near future.

powered by wind

"The walls between art and engineering exists only in our minds."
~ Theo Jansen

(via Wohba)

this ain't no t.v. dinner

It's a steak. More beef for you at Flickr.

immortal defense

[edit +] It's gone now.


[yet another edit] And now some clarification on how the download actually works:

"The way they work is this:
They give you a zip file with a setup executable and an activation executable. Both execution (i.e. installation) and activation (i.e registration) must happen within 24 hours. You can download the zip file several times and activate on several machines, so long as all this happens within 24 hours.
Oh, and if you don't activate your copy within the 24 hour period, Jack Bauer WILL find you, and he WILL get that activation code from you..."
~From bigbossSNK on the studiores.com forums

[more edit] And now I find out that it was made in Game Maker. Unbelievable. Just incredible.

[edit] So I found a better video on YouTube. I need this game. NOW. The graphics are slick, the soundtrack: fantastic. I'd buy it for that alone! Why, oh why, does it have to be Windows only. Can't these indie developers make universal code?! Ah well. At least I have my copy, whether I can play it or not.



Immortal Defense is available for the next 8-and-a-half hours (at time of most recent edit) at Game Giveaway of the Day. It's a complete, full-featured, this-is-what-you'd-get-if-you-bought-it download. I've heard it's pretty good, so go get it.

Oh, and this is what the developer says:
“Although it’s the full version of the game, there are some restrictions: they tell me (I haven’t actually confirmed this) that it can only be installed once.

Also, anyone who gets it free from that site will not have access to future patches of the game (which will include new levels, a medals system, level modding, new music, a graphics upgrade, and so on).”

Video nabbed from TIGsource and YouTube:

redesign

If you haven't already noticed, I'm in the process of redesigning this blog. I'm not quite sure what the colour scheme should be, but I have some ideas. Any input greatly appreciated!

here's some more beef

More photos on Flickr.

chimerical sounds

I heart the theremin. I had thought about getting one about a year back, but I didn't have the money at the time. I mentioned it to a friend, and he managed to lay his hands on a kit and so I did have a brief experience playing one. It's really, really, fun.

The theremin is a musical instrument that you play by waving your hands near two antennas. One controls pitch, the other controls volume. It's awesome.

Just the other day, I saw this YouTube video of this guy playing the theremin. It made me remember it all again, and now I want one even more than ever.

empty

empty
Originally uploaded by JrSquee

Just seeing how this will look.

pickup

I thought this was funny:

"I wish I was your problem set, because then I'd be really hard, and you'd be doing me on the desk."

cherry pits

You've eaten all the sweet, outer flesh and now there's nothing left but a rock.

...

How similar that is to life.

here's the beef

Finally got an account on Flickr. Got a few photos I took today up on it too, so go take a look.

there's the beef

After I had written where's the beef?, I found that Reversial had a similar thought posted on his blog, and I wanted to share it:

-----

i feel imprisoned
imprisoned in a little 700×250px box, trying to put my thoughts into text.
often, something I think, see, or feel is simply too profound to fit into a space this small.
the language itself is a restraint; i could not express this in words, even if i desired to.
if i did manage to convey the rough meaning of what i am trying to say, it would feel inadequate and hollow.
pixels on a screen don’t show emotion. they don’t have feelings and passions. they just are.

-----

If you don't already, you should check out Reversial's site. He's a pretty lucid and often profound writer, as well as a great photographer. I take a lot of inspiration from him.

where's the beef?

I should get some of my art and photography and cetera on here. Maybe I should get an account on Flickr? Until then, you get to read my mad ravings:


About six or seven months ago, I got this burning, almost-obsessive need to draw.
So I did.
I wanted to draw my dreams.
So I did.
I wanted to be like those concept artists, and draw like they did.
So I tried.
I still feel like I can't draw well enough to be able to convey my thoughts, my ideas, completely and with all the little nuances that make it important to me.
So I try.
I said I wanted to draw my dreams. Not the kind of dreams you get in your sleep. Mine are different. I tried to describe one here, but it turned out to be a casserole of words, thoughts, bits of poetry all swirling around to make something not-quite-as-substantial as I wanted it to be.
I still tried.
I said my dreams were different. They are. I never remember my dreams when I sleep (though I wish I could), but I don't have these when I sleep. I create them: whole worlds, in my head. endless possibilities for variation. but they're stuck
stuck here, in my head
sometimes i just need to get them out
define them put them into substance make them real

So I do.

mr. president

Yeah, that's me.


Next: The world!

once upon a time

I had a dream.

I was up to my chest in a golden field of gently waving grass, and all the way to the horizon there were these enourmous, sharp, craggy boulders. I didn't know where I was, but it felt perfectly normal to be standing there in the middle of nowhere. I got up, and started to walk around. I climbed on some of the boulders and got a couple little cuts on my hands, but they didn't hurt much.

I started to think that this place had no end when I saw the ruins of a great tower right nearby. It hadn't been there before, but I felt like it decided when to show up and when to leave by itself. The tower was a rusty gray colour, made of these stones of an inconceivable size. They were maybe 20 feet tall and 8 feet wide, each intricately carved with patterns of flying beasts and geometric designs. After I had somewhat goten over the shock of seeing such huge cuts of carved stone, I noticed the little staircase winding up the side. I climbed up and up and up and up and I felt like it would never end.

But it did. And the view was... underwhelming. It was just the same thing I had seen before: the wheat-golden grass, the pointy rocks, all stretching out to the limits of my vision. It was beautiful, but in a stark and minimal way. When I lay down to rest, I saw the sky: a dark, dark blue, filled with stars like someone had dropped a bag of sand and it burst, scattering white-hot grains to the edge of the world. I had never seen a sky as clear as that. And it was a strange and wondrous twilight-blue sky, with not a single familiar star, consellation, or moon. My eyes started to get heavy as I star-bathed in the silver light, and I fell asleep.

The last thing I remember was the moon, tiny and shy, staring to creep abouve the horizon as if it was afraid to see this unknown intruder.



Then I woke up.

1964-1965

Big. Colorful. Futuristic! It was the 1964 New York World's fair, and National Gographic did a 25 page photo spread of it. It represented the joy and hopefullness of the '60s, and was a smashing success! Too bad that the world can't handle things like that today. There'd be guys with guns guarding every door, the US government would be a nervous wreck, and everyone would be afraid of disasters. Alas! I think that it's what the world needs right now: recognition of the accomplishments and friendships of the nations of the world.

You can see the rest of the article here, at Modern Mechanix.

i'm in ur bed, snugglin ur plushies

hergé comes to the silver screen

Here comes Tintin, photorealistic and set for a big-screen trilogy. Directed by two heavy-hitters: Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. Sweet. I wonder why they didn't stick with the time-tested ligne claire visual style. This could be GREAT, or REALLY BAD. Or, more unlikely, mediocre.
I grew up with Tintin, and used to own a couple comics/works of art of Hergé's (aka George Remi). I actually saw a biography of Hergé a while back, on his (or Tintin's, I can't remember) 100th anniversary. Good stuff. I was inspired by Tintin, and drew a couple comics of a similar style way back when.

Look here.

gaming like it's 1979

So I played, or rather I am playing my first ever Interactive Fiction game. Calling them 'text adventures' is so 1980s. But anyway, I downloaded a parser and the game Floatpoint, authored by Emily Short. I gotta say, it's pretty good. I wasn't expecting a text-only game to be as compelling as this. It started off pretty slow, but now that I'm getting the hang of things it's pretty immersive. Floatpoint is about human genetic modification, xenophobic politicians, and brittle diplomacy between an almost-human race and a post-plauge Earth. Plus, who can't love a game with files that end in *.zblorb? Get Floatpoint here.

To play Floatpoint (and any other IF games) you're gonna need a player. Get 'em here:
OS X: I recommend Spatterlight. Solid, but still in beta.
Linux and Windows: I've heard Gargoyle is pretty good.

Baf's Guide to the IF Archive is a great place to get other IF games, if you so disire.

wadf

Within a Deep forest is one of the best games that I have ever played. It's atmospheric, beautiful, and crazy hard. You play a bouncy little blue ball out to save the world from the evil Dr. Cliché's plan to turn the world to ice. It's very exploration-based, but also a masterfully made platformer. Like any good platformer, the controls are simple and tight: move left and right with the arrow keys, bounce higher with 's', and reduce your bounce with 'a'. The simple pixle-based graphics are masterfully made and animated, very fluid and colorful. All it's cuteness and atmosphere just enhance its maddening puzzles. The music is also ambient and evocative, perfectly complementing the visuals and gameplay to create a almost perfect game.

Get it here.

echoes

The latest game from the talented muchachos at binaryzoo, Echoes seems pretty nice. I'm only going to be able to play it at school, but whatever. It still looks fun. Quote from their website:
"it's a bit like Asteroids' hyperactive, drug crazed brother displayed in blur-o-vision© and viewed through psychedelic sunglasses in a cheap nightclub."

Get it here. (And check out the rest of their games, they aren't too bad!)

fifteen-up

The name "the fifteen-up" is inspired by the Up Series, a set of documentaries of the same people taken every seven years. I think they're working on 56-up now. A couple months ago, my uncle started a sort of personal Up Series, including me and a few other people in his interviews. I originally intended this blog as a companion to that personal vid-doc, but I think I'll let it just take its own direction.

[Edit] Here's the wikipedia link:

welcome

This is my place. I'll be irregulary posting things I find, thoughts I need to get out, ect. I might even post something coherent! Check back later.