KODA

Yesterday I was treated to this lovely deviantART subscription nag screen, which would not retreat from the site until I clicked the little “no thanks” button at the bottom. How very lame. My feeling is, if I wanted to continue using their service I would care enough to notice and renew it. As it stands, their bargain price of 8 cents a day is about twice what I pay for hosting here at NFS. I’ve been on the fence for a while about leaving the website all together, and this is pretty much the end. If I were Fella, I’d be crying at how dissapointing his site has become.

Tonight was the first real test of my Story Game with more than 3 players. I invited some friends to come play over the evening, and see how the game worked out in real usage.

Let’s just say there was mixed success. The PHP and AJAX performed beautifully… but as the number of people increased, the story became more and more disjointed. But would you really expect otherwise? Things went great in the vocabulary department, as the diversity of players broadened the range of words used, though this came at the cost of very grammatically and semantically distorted sentences. It seemed after we hit the 3 player mark (topped at 6 during the test!), the problems really began.

Today I worked on an animated “throbber” icon for Qball and the GMPC project. You’ll see it turning up in the SVN Just a fun little Inkscape/Blender project. Sure, there are hundreds out there, but how could I resist the chance to try doing it myself? After recalling reading Jimmac’s write-up of his creation of a throbber in Blender, I set out to create my own in Blender. The method I ended up using actually was much heavier on Inkscape than Blender, which instead became more of a raw animating and compositing tool in the end.

Ta-da:
Just rotation:
With In/Out animation:

The solution I came up quite simply used a single plane with two textures: an Inkscaped shape mask and a Blender conical gradient. Blender is pretty versatile when it comes to mapping, so I simply made the gradient align with the object space, and the shape with the viewing window area. That way, I could just let the camera roll and the coloring rolled with it.

It takes so much effort simply to face oneself.

Yesterday, I discovered that the graffiti I found about a month ago has been painted over. Frankly I’m not surprised, but it’s hard to understand how people can take such unique art and slap a dull brown paint over it. It wasn’t even out in the open — you had to look to find it. How much culture and honest self-expression is lost to this “cleaning?”
That image was one of the most personal and raw statements I’ve seen for quite some time, and it is really too bad it had to be painted over. How fascinating that it’s expression should be further emphasized by it’s very destruction.

Today marks the day upon which my beloved childhood pet Mazel passed away. Tonight is the night a year ago that I stayed with her as she died. Tonight is a night of ghosts, of memories, of reaching back to a time that feels so close and yet so far away. I remember sitting with her, that sleepless night, resting on the floor to try to be nearer to her. I remember stroking her body outsite my room, trying to calm her breathing. It’s ironic but fitting that because of company tonight I shall be sleeping in the living room, the room in which she died.

Tonight I’m just feeling melancholic and reflective. I couldn’t stay sad long after I realized I wasn’t mourning for her as much as I was for me. Often when I think of her I feel a boost of love, of motivation. Reconciling her death pushed me to reach out, to imagine higher goals in my life, to try to reach out and connect with people. While I didn’t have the heart to photograph her on her decline, after her death, I felt drawn to photography: to be able to document and capture a bit of the things that I loved. This medium and it’s meaning has grown in different directions on me over the past year, but the process of dealing with her loss was what inspired me to get started.

	Firefox	75.6 %
	Safari	9.7 %
	MS Internet Explorer	5.8 %

Sorry to those 5.8% (!) who are using IE, things will be looking pretty ugly here from here on out since your browser does not know how to display standards-compliant web pages properly…

For the other 94.2% of you out there, I think your taste in web browsers is damn cool.

http://browsershots.org/website/1152960/

Today, this day… after years of ISDN, I finally have DSL. Oh man. What a difference a little bandwidth makes.

Later: This is incredible… hahaha, I’m apt-get dist-upgrading and listening to internet radio at the same time.

Just taking a break from schoolwork to test out the Wordpress “Updated Today” Plugin…

Just to let you know, it’s likely to get quiet here for a little while. I’m forecasting a significant drop in the awesomeness coefficient for the next one and a half weeks or so while I wrap up the end of this academic quarter. I’ve got books to read, papers to write!

I am so glad that summer is approaching.