The Final Hurrah. OR IS IT.

Hell week.

Crunch week.

Finals week.

Call it what you will. At this point you could call it fucking Great Uncle Ichabod's Superhappy Funride and I wouldn't really care. Because Great Uncle Ichabod's Superhappy Funride just spent two weeks soundly kicking my sorry ass for some unnamed and as of yet unrevealed crime.

But I remain strong.
In the midst of the near anal violation offered by having a semester's worth of procrastination come down on my head like a 6-ton wench launching itself off the Empire State Building, I have worked, steadfastly, on the little project that we like to call Astro McFly.

Game designs, art-wise now consist of the game screen, recolored designs for the ship, background tiles, asteroid obstacles, five or six different stars from the grand ol' 70s including Charleton Heston, Clint Eastwood and Jean Seberg, and components for eight or nine different drinks, and enough flashy flavor text and kitchy looking stars to take over a small country. Anyone feel like a Harvey Wallbanger? I'll just have a screwdriver without the orange juice if you don't mind.

The collective gathered again a few hours ago, it was a party. And by party I mean 'coding fiasco'. Once again the ability of ActionScript to baffle rears its ugly, ugly head. Problems with the arrays and the appearances of some certain drinks in the menu bars kept the program from being complete and did a real bang-up job of frustrating the hell out of Jared and Sean.

Hopefully we'll get a chance to keep working on this. All of us really want to see this come out to be a good game, especially after we merged the graphics and what we had of the code last night. Let me tell you it looked fucking AMAZING.

If we do we've got three or four days left.
In those three or four days I also must complete my Java final, and a five minute soundscape that I have not yet begun.

Yay for Great Uncle Ichabod's Superhappy Funride.

Astro McFly...Now In Technicolor

More on this soon. I mean it this time.

Sausage Link (Get it?!? Cause its a link....and...)

More more and more in a few days coming.

Parody Me This

I never thought I'd be able to hammer this out in one and a half weeks.

But here it is, in all its Flash animated glory...
I present to you....Project Two. Or is it Three? Jesus, I don't fucking know anymore. Its a parody project, and at 3 AM in the morning that's more than enough of a damned identifier for me:

FuckingFinally

This was one hell of a ride to create.
The moment I got the idea for the project I opened Notepad and immediately began jotting down ideas.
Everyone (well not everyone...a lot of people) has seen those commercials done by the US Army. They feature closeups of soldiers standing tall and proud, silhouetted against the sunset, or standing stoically over their work from their field of expertise, like a mortar, and saying simple phrases meant to stir the heart like "If there is terror overseas...I shall confront it" or "I am a protector of our country".
This continues while a heart swelling, patriotic tour de force plays in the background until it ends, finally, on one soldier saying "I am an army of one" and everyone watching goes "Wow" and their hearts are supposed to swell with pride as they are inspired to get their fatsacks off the couch to enlist for a few years of getting your ass kicked.

I'd also recently watched the flash animation "I am Resident Evil" by Legendary Frog. If you haven't seen it, just google "I Am Resident Evil" and it should be the first one that pops up. It takes the same style as the commercial, except applies it to the popular scare-your-pants-off zombie survival game Resident Evil.

So I thought why not apply it to executives of big corporations?
...
It made sense at the time.

ANYWAYS...first came the obvious ones: Starbucks, WalMart, Enron, Shell, Microsoft.
Then I hit up some of my friends and asked them for some names of corporations that had a reputation for being asses in general. This dug up some more names: Reebok, McDonalds, the RIAA, ConAgra, Disney, Firestone.
Once I had all my names, I could start animating...all I needed was voicework.

Thank sweet fuck almighty god that the internet exists.

If it weren't for the internet, there is no way I would have been able to have received all of my voicework in the time I did.

But there it is.

"I Am Corporate Greed", presented by yours truly.

I'm going to bed.

What Do You Want From My Life???

Still haven't figured out how to make this dungheap work.

Please god someone help me.

Link...He Come To Town...Come To Save...Th- Nevermind
(The link above doesn't have any of the music files attached to it, since I finally got that already figured out, for fuck's sake. All code involving the sounds attached has been commented out.)

Show Me The Money! And By Money I Mean Sketches!

We may.
Just may.
Have progressed out of the initial planning stages of things.

I am a link. Hear me roar.
There is the initial gamescreen design for the game that we have (temporarily) christened "Astroy McFly"

Here's the concept: you play as Astro McFly, someone who is very Astro, and Fly.

You pilot your spaceship, unofficially named by me as the McFly Express, through the dangerous byways and flyways of space, avoiding asteroid debris, dodging the fuzz, who are trying to shoot you down, and collecting parts to mixed drinks, which just happen to be floating in space, to please your cargo of celebrity partygoers.

Awwww yeah.

I too am a link. Hear me roar.
In other news this is the first time I've ever been able to tell someone "I just drew a spaceship with an afro" and mean it.
(For those of you who are easily lost, the link goes to sketches for some potential designs for the McFly Express)

I am a link. Here me mumble incomprehensibly about roaring.
That is the game schematic....a sort of map of how the game is going to go from one screen to the next, starting from the loading screen all the way up til the Win/Lose screen at the end of the game.
Its not pretty. If it had a name, it would be "Grigor" and would have the unusual hobby of wrestling bears into submission using the weight of its ugliness alone.

Russian bear wrestling by ugly aside, that is what we have so far....there seems to be a general consensus that its a good design for the game. Though our lead programmer seems to be missing.

I'll get back to this at a later date.

An Addendum

For those of you who care (and you shouldn't, considering you're still reading this despite the title of this little thing), it has occurred to me that there is a chance that I may be absolutely fucking wrong in everything I said in the post below this one.

If that turns out to so you all have permission to beat me with a sack of oranges.

O Heart! Or Parody!

Thank heaven for parody or we'd all take the world a bit too seriously.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-04-15&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-04-18&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-04-20&res=l
^
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I am of the firm belief that Jerry and Mike have once again proven themselves online comics masters by pulling this out of their collective asses.
Its a pure mark of perfectly orchestrated internet genious that Penny Arcade has managed to not only make fun of the absurdity of webcomic breakups, but to make us actually believe that they are experiencing one themselves.

...webcomic breakups?

For those of you who out there who actually have social lives outside of the computer and the world of webcomics, there have been a few notable breakups of fantastic webcomics created by multiple author/writer/illustrator teams, most notable of these the breaking off of Largo from the writing team of the much-celebrated comic Megatokyo.
Many viewers have, since then, had nothing but beautiful, glowing flames and complaints to heap on the new one-man Megatokyo comic.

I remember first reading the Penny Arcade news post for that first comic that I linked up there at the end of last week.
I thought it was for real. Gabe and Tycho, the two-man cornerstone of the webcomic world, were breaking up. It couldn't be happening. It couldn't possibly.
It would be an event that would affect the world of webcomics forever....as while Tycho's writing defines the humor of Penny Arcade, its Gabe's art that is the visual identity of the comic, which is almost as important given that its a comic...not one of those ebooks that you get off of obscure literature websites.

I remember my heart skipping a beat when I first lay eyes on the comic the next day and found Gabe's art gone....and not in the way it skips when you see a burning fox of a woman walking down the road. No, this was more the OH GOD ITS HAPPENING ITS FUCKING HAPPENING WHAT THE F- kind of skip. It was the end of an era. The end of an -age-....a golden age of comics. Tycho couldn't draw to save a bag of dog droppings. I was watching history unfolding before me, a new era in webcomics was beginning, and I had a feeling that it involved a lot of good old fashioned downhill rolling.

Thank heaven for parody or we'd all take the world a bit too seriously.

Long live Penny Arcade.

OFFICIAL (very offical) PROJECT PROPOSAL

Game Genre: Suspense/Horror Exploration and Puzzle Solving

Working in a group that consists of both artists and programmers, I am of the belief that any project we undertake should balance both of these aspects of creating a game in Flash. Not too art-heavy, yet not too code-heavy, either.
A suspense style or survival/horror type game would be perfect in this situation. The artists of the group (and myself) get to flex their imaginative muscles on drawing environments, critters, backgrounds, objects, and creating the visual and audio ambience of the entire game, while puzzles and environmental and even possibly time-based events will keep the programmers busy figuring out how to incorporate code into a graphical environment while still making the puzzles and mini-games easy enough to play, yet interesting enough to drive the story along.
The specific theme…..whether it be vampires, zombies, lycanthropes, abstract spectral beings, cosmic horrors, or ghosts….is unimportant. Its equally easy to be frightened by a shambling ghoul as it is to be frightened by hands bursting from the walls. What is important is that the game must play towards the viewer’s fear of the unknown, the unseen, while still driving the viewer to explore and discover further. The setting can be any number of places…a park, a manor, an underground lab.
I’m hesitant on deciding on story-wise and environmental specifics without the rest of the group’s input…if everyone can agree on a theme or setting that they like, it makes the project that much easier to work on.
As it is, I, personally, have always wanted to work on a project where I could stretch the more twisted parts of my imagination and show them to a wider audience.
That, and its fun to try to scare the flying pants off of people.

DON'T DIE ON ME NOW

I've told people that a computer's operating system is much akin to whatever it is that connects the human brain to the rest of the human body. Without it, the computer is retarded. Nothing but a brain, which, as wondrous and complex as it is, is about as useful as a spongy lump of fat and cholesterol can be in any other situation when it has nothing else attached to it.

I'm sending this post out now from the Syracuse University computer labs located near Kimmel Dormitories, because my computer has turned into a paralyzed vegetable capable of only four words.

"Operating System Not Found"

Tomorrow morning I'm going to try to wrangle myself a new hard drive from the student store and get Windows installed on it, and hopefully, the data on my hard drive will still be salvagable.

Glee.

!@#$

It's come to my attention fairly recently that I swear a lot in my blog. Namely the word 'fuck.' Well, not a lot, but more than is to be expected....the profanity is there, in other words. Especially when you note that this blog is supposed to be for a class, though I post other non-class related stuff in there as well.

But why, Patrick? Why the dirty mouth? Surely there are other ways of expressing yourself that doesn't involve the words fuck, shit, and damn.

Well I don't know about 'damn' and 'shit.' But I would like to say this.

"Fuck" has got to be one of the most versatile words in the English language.

I can make it mean anything. Nouns. Adjectives. Verbs. Adverbs. Conjunctions.
It can be used to punctuate a sentence, to add an extra emphasis to a sentence or to take away from a sentence.
George Carlin even proved that fuck could be just as effective put inside another word too, i.e. in-fucking-credible, or unbe-fucking-lievable.

It can be used to get an idea across very quickly, and very effectively.
"Fuck off" has half the length, and about three times the punch of "Leave me alone."

In other words, I like the word fuck.
Its a valued, versatile, and hardworking member of my vocabulary.

If any of you have a problem with it....
....too fucking bad.

Damn My Eyes. Or Fingers, Rather

So.

When my instructor told me oh so many weeks ago to -save- constantly, and to -save- many versions of your Flash work in seperate files.
He wasn't kidding.
...obviously.

Of course, I, being the collosal dum-dum that I am, didn't listen until I've already lost a metric fuckton of work in my last Flash Actionscripting exercise.

The original idea was to create a lens flare effect, similar to the one I posted down below a few posts ago, except to elaborate on it and make it look not-quite-so-crappy.
Attach a sound, change the shapes, bind the lens flare to the mouse. While not quite as easy as pie, there's still a progression there.
However, as I have taken care to mention before, I am a colossal dum-dum.
Somewhere along the line I managed to totally lose any semblance of sound or mouse-tracing in the entire project. The code for the sound is -there-.
This:
mySound = new Sound();
mySound.attachSound("WAAAH1");
mySound.setVolume(100);
mySound.start(0,9999);
...which is the code for creating a new sound object, is sitting -right there- in the middle of my code.
All things considered, the moment I hit Ctrl+Enter, I should hear the sound of a grown man crying from some unspoken atrocity being committed on him.
But instead, I am greeted with the stony silence of the ages. And some circles that drift across the screen when I click the mouse.
I have managed to do the simpler things like bind object alphas and the actual drifting to the click of the mouse:
http://web.syr.edu/~pctsao/LensFlarePyramid.swf

But any semblance of the tribal wonders of a lens flare shining behind a the silhoutte of a colossal, nameless pyramid have thus far been lost in the seas of my stupidity.

Damn my eyes. Or rather, my fingers. Damn my fingers.

Down With The Sickness

Isn't being sick a wonderful thing?

...

Unless we're talking psychologically sick, if you said 'yes' I reserve the right to give you a left hook across the jaw.
Being sick blows. It blows harder than a northern wind coming down from Greenland if they installed a huge-ass fan that spanned the width of the country, powered by a half dozen nuclear power plants the size of Kentucky.

And that's pretty hard.

One of the many many reasons it sucked like a whore out of Amsterdam is it kept me from focusing on....-anything-....for a full two or three weeks. I can't really say for sure whether it was two or three, cause I was too damn delirious to pay any attention.

At any rate, I saw the movie Sin City over the weekend.
...
Go see it.
Now. RIGHT now. Go here -> www.moviefone.com. Find the theater nearest you. Buy tickets. Wait for the time to come. Then SEE THE MOVIE. If there was a way for me to reach through this screen to collar you and shake you back and forth while saying this I would.
I kid you not. Sin City is, bar none, the most amazing movie I have ever seen. I will tell you no more about it, because that's how I went in seeing it, and to be honest it utterly blew me away.
If this doesn't get big I will be shocked.
Of course, if this gets big, there will come the inevitable fanboys, the endless quoting of lines from the movies, the mobs of fans, and of course, the inevitable endless parodies.

First will come Saturday Night Live, and MAD TV. Then the Simpsons, or South Park. If Family Guy still ran, it would be Family Guy, too. And don't even mention the endless amounts of internet prop it would get.

Is this a bad thing?

It can be a bad thing. Things like satire drive such nice things harder into the mass marketing spotlight, which tends to have a habit of spoiling the nicer, fewer-and-farther-between works of art that come out once in a blue moon. On the other hand, it makes for some truly genious work in multimedia all on its own as well. Just look at Newgrounds (www.newgrounds.com), the premiere online location for independant flash artists and cartoonists...it has an entire section devoted to parodies, tributes, and imitations done in Flash.

I may as well jump on the bandwagon. Sketches and ideas to come soon.

That last sentence took about fifteen minutes to write. Its impossible to write anything when you hack up a lung everytime you write a word.

I hate being sick.

Flare That Lens, Baby

Oh my my my its that time of the month again. No, not for my man-period, that's just a myth. Or is it? No, its time for me to put out some of my coded works once again.

This one was a mite easier than all of the others, if for the sole reason that I didn't have to code it completely from scratch as I tried to do with all the others. A lot of it was based off of a tweening demo that was posted on the class website a week or so back.
It still needs some work, coloring-wise and overall movement wise, and polish wise, and it needs some sort of sound or music or -something- to give it that extra umph...ok so it needs a bit of work, but its difficult to work when your brain is pounding on the insides of your skulls whining about pink and yellow monkeys threatening to sell it life insurance. I'll add that in a few days. The polish, that is, not the monkeys. But for now....

http://web.syr.edu/~pctsao/LensFlareEffect.swf

That Old Black Magic. I mean Storyboard.

More on this later when my brain isn't so addled its ready to fall out of my ears:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/machiavelli33/Photoshop/Storyboard.jpg

Mad

When the world drives you mad, one of the finest things you can do is to let it.

Mad

When the world drives you mad, one of the finest things you can do is to let it.

Snow Day

I've been in Syracuse University for about two years now. One and half if you really want to do the counting.

It's come to my attention that in all those two years, I have never taken the time to stop and simply take in a snow-fallen landscape.
So tonight, just about two hours ago, I did.
I stopped in front of my dorm on the way back from dinner and instead of ambling inside, muttering a hello while flashing my card to the RSA, and tottering upstairs to this computer...I just stood outside, and didn't go in.

Anyone who knows me well enough know that I love big cities. Los Angeles, New York City, the bigger, the taller, the more sketchy, the better.
The Walnut Hall area, as far as I can acquaint it, is as close to the big city feel as you can get.
Sure, Marshall Street and downtown has bigger buildings.
But its like when you're watching Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and the animation is so superb, so fine tuned, so detailed, that you can't but help notice the minute differences between the animation and what's real, and in the end, it'll all be better if you just scaled it back.

That's what its like in Syracuse. Downtown, Marshall Street, you see the big buildings and you get the feeling that you're in a big city, until you start noticing the little things that tell you that....well...you're not in a big city. Its too quiet, for one. And too clean.

But right outside my dorm door...it may not seem like a big city at first glance, but stick around during the evening, and there are little things....small things that remind me of the city.
One of these things is a single, lone street lamp right across the small street in front of the door.
When its on at night it flickers, on and off, continually. And I like it.

I've always known it was there.
But until tonight, I hadn't really taken the time to take it in. To notice it. To ...appreciate it.
And everything was covered in white.
Every day up to today since the beginning of December I've known that the white stuff was coming down from the stratosphere to puff up the Earth in a blanket of pure cold.
Never really took the time to stop and look at it though.

Its funny how so many of the beautiful things around you spend ages ignoring while they're frolicking right in front of your eyes waiting for you to pay attention.
All you have to do is not want to go home.

A First Attempt At Some Real ActionScripting

There's snow by my window.

Absolutely exemplary the Syracuse weather spirits, the snow persists on even as we go into late February, the sky blessing and cursing us at the same time with light dustings of powdery stuff every so often to remind us that yes, we're in Syracuse, and yes, its fucking cold.

But in spite of a late winter that hadn't even kicked off by mid January, the snow is still retreating noticably fast, dashing aside any premonitions I had had about a late winter slodging on into May and perhaps even June.
We'll get flakes once every so often now, the pitiable little crystals plummeting from the sky in a valiant attempt to bring Syracuse back to its former hellishly wintry splendor, while the trees, the grass and the various foliage shed their skeletal winter coats and attempt to shine green again.

Its in the midst of all this, that I, like one single blade of grass trying to push through a foot of leftover snow, attempt my first mind-numbing foray into Flash Actionscripting.

Its in the midst of all this that I am reminded of why I dropped out of the Computer Science program senior year after having slogged through it my entire high school career.
Its not like its hard...no not at all. Its cake, compared to OpenGL or Java or any of those mass bigtime languages. Cake with icing and three cherries in fact.
Its just -picky-.

The interface for Flash, I found, is -extremely-, extremely click-sensitive. Not saying that it takes more or less pressure per click than any other program, but in saying that the interface is a lot less forgiving in terms of selecting objects and working with them and such.

First thing I did was give the pen tool another chance.
After trying half a dozen things that I could think of off the top of my head, consulting a few books, and trying some more things scraped up from the bottom of my braincase, I was still unable to move two control points across the screen.
I rewarded all of my hard work by deleting them.

Next I attempted to replicate one of the white line borders from the project below by drawing it manually...procedurally, as it were.
This process alone took me two hours. One single fucking white line took me two painstaking hours, most of which consisted of a random mixture of frustrated searchings, looking up tutorials, and occasional cries of "AGH WHAT THE FUCK" that ended up really confusing my roommate.

Finally, finally, I was able to create a single white line.
This white line was unable to move. And as hard as I willed it and wished it to move across the screen on its own, or maybe by the power of my mind, it remained resolutely in place.

So I deleted that too, and just used the line tool.

From there converting to a movie clip symbol was easily done enough. The coding was puttering on nicely until I tried to test the movie and it showed me the one line sitting on the left side of the screen.
It still wasn't moving.
Nevermind the fact that my code is supposedly telling it to run across the screen and do little flips and act like it was happy despite the fact that I could use up my hands and feeting counting and still have times left over where my roommate was confused with my shouting.
It still wasn't moving.

SO then, I took a breather, took a step, took a step -back-, and looked at the code and the timeline, and the symbols...everything.

Then I made two clicks and four keystrokes.
And suddenly it was working-

SWF:
http://web.syr.edu/~pctsao/VectorAnimation.swf
FLA:
http://web.syr.edu/~pctsao/VectorAnimation.fla

I had spent more than an hour and a half of frustrating shouting, typing, recoding, and saying inspiring words to my monitor trying to get this thing to work....and it was all done in two clicks and four keystrokes.

That's awesome.
And by awesome I mean its the most torturous thing I've been through in a while on the computer, and really brings to mind why I was never a -huge- fan of the compsci.

There's snow by my window.
Maybe I should go outside.

And the whole city was burning.

THE ORIGINAL

THE FLASHED


More on this later.

"Psychology"

Don't get me wrong.

Sciences of the mind, such as psychology, psychotherapy and neurology are, in my mind, some of the most mind-boggling sciences out there. It is within the realm of the mind-sciences that the mysterious Pandora's Box of the mind is thrown open to reveal what lies within, for better or for worse.
It is there that the human brain, to this day a mystery to man, is opened up like a mere pocketwatch so that we may see what it is that makes people tick.

Its a powerful tool, and a respectable field, and I'd call anyone who says otherwise a fool right into their face. Unless they were Mr. T. Cause nobody calls Mr. T a fool.

Anyways, its with this in mind that I say that I find my psychology course thus far to be utterly and completely useless.
Keep in mind, I've never studied psychology before. Maybe what I'm about to describe is the epitome of psychology...in which case I'm going to have seriously re-evaluate my views on psychology as a whole. I kind of don't want to.

I'd expect, in my psychology course, to be actually studying something useful. To be taking notes on how the mind works, the how and the why of what drives a human being to do what they do.

Instead, all I've been privy to is a handful of redfaced students giving garbled presentations at the front of the class of scientists that have contributed something to the field of psychology, and a few lectures that fulfill the endlessly helpful purpose of naming things that I already knew about. That most people with any sort of education or intelligence should know about, and ideally, have thought about.

At any rate, I need the extra credits this semester to make up for the credit fiasco that was second semester last year, so because I must fulfill my educational obligation to the University so that I can get myself a scrap of paper that declares that I know my shit, I will be staying on.

Here's to hoping it gets better.

I Said Gimme The Damned Vector!

Here's something I scanned in, a creation of my own.



Here's the original:


Her name is "Ghoul."

What exactly is Ghoul?
...
Experiment Code: 43a1BB

Day 1-
Specimen has been retrieved and satisfactorily subdued within Lab Cage 3.
Retrieval from "Earth" plane.
Species- Homo Sapiens
Gender- "Female"
Age in Earth years- 23
Name- Unknown, inconsequential
Notes- Young, lithe, notably attractive by human standards. Body surprisingly resilient to the subduction process, required between 20 ccs of drugs and 40 ccs of corrosives to sufficiently bring to a quieter state.
What a wonderfullllll catch.

Day 3-
Specimen awoke before the lab table could be sufficiently prepped and attempted to force open the cage door. Exhibited signs of sorrow. Liquid leaking from eyes, shrieking. The usual reaction to capture and subduction. I'm very pleased. The trauma should carry through well into the final stages. Took more corrosives and nerve-gas to ensure that the subject did not harm herself in the process of awakening. More sleeping solution had to be applied.
Very strong individual. Will be very difficult to break. Results should be SPECTacular.

Day 4-
Lab table prepped with necessary equipment. Specimen was still asleep when applied to the table. Actual experimentation begin tomorrow.

Preliminary schedule:
Pain resistance testing
Reflex testing
Nerve-to-brain reactionary
Limb-strength testing
Mental acuity and sampling, Neural health

Day 6- Specimen did not react well to pain resistance testing. Bleeds easily, though this is to be expected. Skin samples removed to be inspected for tensile strength. Bad day bad day.

Day 7- Skin cells analyzed, looks like the specimen lacked a constant intake of protein and fiber. That's fine. Nothing some corrosives and surface proteins won't fix.

A strong mixture of proteins, fats, and yeast should create a suitable replacement skin for the specimen.
Extra strong clamps were needed as well as the mist-spray apparatus. Applied corrosives to outer surface of specimen's epidermis in even layer to remove weak skin and applied surface proteins when epidermis was sufficiently worn away. Specimen's face area moved too much, and specimen refused to close eyes. I did not want to risk blinding the specimen, so I was forced to use 40 ccs of anaesthetics to bring the specimen under control. Protein and yeast mixture applied properly and set within an hour.
Process was completed, will move on to further experimentations tomorrow.

Day 8- Pain resistance testing and reflex testing successful. All nerves responded exceptionally well to extreme stimuli and skin was sufficiently resilient to applied conditions.
Specimen continues to exhibit signs of sorrow, fear, and desperation and screams continually. Tear ducts have recently gone dry. Minor setback. Not a big deal. At all.

Day 9- Moved on to Nerve-to-brain reactionary. In retrospect this was a -bad- move. Trauma after opening the cranium has resulted in complications. Specimen has stopped crying, is probably experiencing extreme migraines and sensations similar to a concussion, but does not react and simply stares fixedly at a spot on the ceiling. Unexpected...and interesting. Replaced removed bone with steel skullcap. Used rivets as the nerves reacted as expected and I don't think I will be opening up the skull again.

Day 10- I remembered before I began today that steel conducts electricity especially well. Was able to use this to my advantage and stimulate the specimen's brain back into a higher level of activity after yesterday's complications. Magnificent side effects, has begun to show signs of joy instead of sorrow.
Possible reversal in neural reaction due to the accident? The answer is inconsequential.

Day 12- Limb-strength-testing finally completed. Bone and muscle structure had to be completely redone, removed and replaced to match even the frailest of the Horde's soldiers. Was able to retain the original protein-yeast based skin, however.
Used lab materials:
-fifty pounds carbon-aluminum alloy
-five pounds "marrow"
-Forty-three gallons amino acid mixtures, mixtures 53D, 12A, 5A, 3A, 44B, and 66A.
Facial features kept intact. She has the cutest look on her face when she is feeling pain.

Day 13- Subject was beginning to show signs of enjoying being bound to the lab table. This was very much a problem.
Applied 30,000 volts to head to erase previous mental patterns, memories, experiences. Voltage was within the standard margin of error, and base memories (walking, talking, fucking) should not have been lost.
First application failed. Hair got in the way and prevented proper application of the device and much of the voltage was lost. Some skin was burned in the process.
MAKE NOTE OF THIS.
Specimen experienced large amounts of pain during first application of electricity.
Second application worked like a charm. Remainders of hair were removed from the skin and this made the application of the electricity work perfectly. Specimen did not feel pain. The body reacted violently and nearly broke one of the ankle restraints, but this is to be expected.
Neural health was tested to be an acceptable level after application of electricity. Specimen did not react adversely to static and moving images presented, either, which is a good sign.
Skin has taken on a white pallor. Nice and aesthetic.
Specimen began drooling by end of day...a problem.

Day 14- INSPIRATION.
Applied a ball gag and steel muzzle to the mouth and extremely tight torso coverings. This kept the specimen from drooling and prevented the specimen from becoming lethargic after being released from the lab table.
Victim was unable to speak or breath, however. Tracheotomy was needed and performed with no problem.
Sufficient communication ability was provided through a speaker grill installed in the forehead. More bone removed, fortunately specimen did not react to the extensive trauma to the cranium caused by drilling into the forehead.
Specimen is now ready for field tests. Its beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.

Day 16- Day two of field testing. Specimen reacts beautifully and has superb threat detection. Loves to hide and use surprise. Specimen also takes pleasure in killing live field test subjects, and experiences signs of arousal during as well.
Thisssss issssss deliciousssss.

Day 19- Day five of field testing. Specimen has not failed a field test to this date. Has killed one of my laboratory assistants...a pleasant, pleasant display in cunning. Has begun showing signs of bouts of body-wide pain that detract from concentration, side effects of the skin and muscle replacements possibly. I will give her a few packs of painkiller syringes to keep it from becoming too bad. Much potential.

Give Me The Vector, Victor

Hhh'ok. So.

Macromedia Flash is one of those interesting programs in that it doesn't have one real specific purpose. Well, that's not true. You could say that its purpose is 'graphic design.' But that's kind of like saying a computer's purpose is 'computation,' or a knife's purpose is 'sharp, pointy object.' Its true, its that there's just so much more.

Most of the time, we see Flash used to make movies and games. AddictingGames.com, Newgrounds.com, these are all really good examples of these.

But I've recently discovered that Flash can be used to make some slick images:

THE ORIGINAL

THE FLASHED

^Anyone else reminded of "Waking Life"?

I present to you the glorious CHUCKIE ANVIL, a band formed by two friends of mine, Akio aka AK (the guy on the left) and Nick (the guy on the right). Photograph taken by Akio's ma, who's an awesome photo-er person.

The first thing I learned when I was making these images is that the pen tool in Flash is unbefuckinggodlievably unwieldly to use. It might be because I've been spoiled by using the pen tool in Photoshop so damned much, but hell, in comparison to Photoshop, the pen tool in Flash is just so...unintuitive. For example in Photoshop, Ctrl gets you the arrow outline which allows you to move the point around and adjust both bezier handles at the same time, Alt gets you the pointer which adjusts individual bezier handles, and right click gives you the option of tracing or filling the path, or deleting the point or the whole path.
No such luck in Flash. I'm sure its something I just have to learn, but for now, godSAKES its bothersome.

Other than that, it took me a short while but I managed to figure out a relatively fast way to work with the color pools that Flash uses. Thus far, I've only been working in one layer...the only thing that's not in the one layer that everything else is stuck in is the circular gleam coming off of AK's guitar.

But hey, I've got a lot to learn. I've only used Flash all of two times before this.

It's going to take me more than three uses to get a handle on a versatile little bastard like this.

Close to Home: Unproductivity Though Too-Many-Fucking-Projects

It's January.

Currently on my project to-do list, in no particular order:
-"Hellhounds On My Trail" hand drawn noir style comic
-"The Rusted Angels With Broken Wings"Trailer
-"Gheisterstadt" music video
-Photoshop portraits of Xforumites
-Continual short stories
-Expand my portfolio website

On the backburner:
-"Royal and Manchester" short animated film
-F-zero style racing animated short
-My webcomic "The Gravy Train"

It happens like this:
I do some work on some of the projects on the aforementioned list, occasionally pushing the projects past the 'preproduction' stage into the 'production' stage.
I take a break. Maybe its to sleep. Maybe its to grab a bite to eat. Maybe its to go to the Bookstore to get something.
During said break, a new idea comes up. Said idea begins to grow. Or fester, depending on how you look at it.
By the time I get back to my room, I'm all excited about this new idea, and put another project onto the list and start working on that one instead.

....

Godsakes someone help me, I'm never going to finish anything.

The firrrrst posssst

This is the first post of my blog.
I suppose I should put something meaningful in here, since its the first and all.

But I'm not.

...

PPPPBBBBTTTT