Well, it's over. Tomorrow I'll be starting high school.
I did sieze the day and create a shweet cover for my binder, though. Check it out...
I put that together in Adobe Flash. On the back were two images and the school year.
Ahh, flash. Is there anything you can't do?
In case you're wondering, I read many trilogies and series'. Bartimaeus Trilogy, Inheritance Trilogy, Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, (every) Harry Potter, Series of Unfortunate Events (1-12), Peter and the Starcatchers (1/2)... and now I've finished 'His Dark Materials', 1-3.
It's a good fantasy trilogy, but it really forces down the readers' throat that God and religion are evil and should be fought to the death.
Yeeeaaah, not a good message. Even if you aren't religious, it's obvious how you're supposed to think about religion by the books' end.
Scary block of text, eh? Well, it's my description of each book, starting with the first.
First book!
The first and second books are mild, with the girl 'Lyra' being given an Alethiometer through which she can learn anything she wants by simply turning the handles and reading the symbols. It features her-- oh, I should mention, SPOILERS!-- fighting a rogue branch of 'the church', the "oblation board", or better known to the children as the evil 'Gobblers', who kidnap children and take they're "daemon"s; every persons' lifelong companion, or as it's found out later, they're soul, which can change form at will and must stay close to their person, and tear them apart from the children. They did this because of the trilogy-long obsession with 'Dust', a strange, counscious matter that is compelled to adults. The church is obsessed with it, and the oblation board experiments to discover more about it. As it turns out, Dust was 'Original Sin', when Adam and Eve took a bit of the forbidden fruit. SOOOOOOO, Lyra's father, Lord Asreil, created an enormous entrance to another, parallel world at the end of the first book, and Lyra and her daemon, Pantaliamon, enter it. There the book ends, the the second begins!
Second book!
In the second book, Lyra explores a world where there are adult-attacking specters, who can't be killed and will suck the life force (later discovered to be the souls) of the adults, rendering them totally oblivious to everything, empty shells without souls. There she meets Will, a boy from OUR world who has all his life been on the run from the authorities, trying to lie low. His mother is... special. She can't do much on her own, and he takes care of her. He didn't know much about his father, aside from that he was an explorer who went missing, and never came back. He discovered a rip in space, a window of sorts, leading into the world with the specters. The town itself is deserted, and he stays in a little hotel, as does Lyra, and they discover eachother and stick together from then on. There are children there, and they're afraid of the Specters, but they can't see them and aren't affected. Him and Lyra EVENTUALLY discover a knife, a SUBTLE knife, which can tear the fabric of a world into another, allowing transportation between any instantly, in the position where it was torn. Blah blah the kids discover they have it and fight them for it, because it holds off the specters, blah blah they're saved, blah blah he lost two fingers fighting to get it, blah. blah. Anyway, I do know your time is valuable... The witches who save them (because they know Lyra and protect her) go into the forest and are overcome by specters, lead by Lyra's corrupt mother Marissa Coulter, who was the head of the Oblation Board, so Lyra didn't trust her. Sooo, Will discovers his father finally (skipping many a chapter of how he came to be there), who heals his fingers and turns on a light to see his son and realize it, just in time to be killed... by a witch... Then, Will comes back the the camp and finds every witch soul-less, and Lyra gone. There the book ends, and the third and final book begins!
Third book!
Lyra was being held captive by her mother in a quiet cave by a village, and Will comes to save her with some help from rogue Angels and tiny spies from Lord Asriel, who is leading the resistance against God- "The Authority". He accidentally breaks the knife because of losing his concentration, and he finds the armored bear-king Iorek- a long-time friend of Lyra's- who fixes it. Lyra and Will then decide to go into the land of the dead (remember, there's no Heaven and no Hell in the book, just emptiness and a 'prison camp'), where she could find her friend Roger, who she brought to his death unknowingly, and Will's father, whom he had never known. Lots of pain and suffering, accepting of death... she has to leave her daemon/soul behind, which was gut-wrenching for her, but she was hopeful that she could get him back. They come into this huge dim area where everyone dead is at, who are dull and bored after centuries of reruns of 'Frasier', and who are all depressed and Emo, and can only talk in a faint whisper. They find the people they wanted to see, and set off to make a rip into another world where they can release them into. They find out they'll dissolve if they go out into the air, but they elect to anyway. Lyra and Will, with the help of some ghost friends who kept themselves together, help Asriel fight against The Authority's (the term used to soften 'God's) armies, where they release "The Authority" from a little glass container, and he dissipates into nothing, and are reunited with their daemons, and since Will came from ooour world, he never met his, and they went into another world.
This is where the story gets pretty interesting. Well, by interesting I mean controversial.
Controversial parts!
They already killed God, now they have to have sex, right? Well... possibly. This whole time, over two books, they're obviously right for and attracted to eachother (they're 13 btw), and over two books it really builds up, until suddenly in that other world they conpulsively have a first kiss, and then it comes back to them laying asleep holding eachother. YOU DECIDE. It sounds very out of character for them to do more than hug, so I assumed it was just that. Although I admit it suspicious.
They come out of the woods hugging and kissing, saying they love eachother, all of that. And then, they discover their friends from Lyra's world are coming to take them home, and it's brought to their attention that anyone staying in another world for long gets sick and dies horribly fast, so they can't stay permanently in her world or his, and that using the knife to go from one world to another drains the world of Dust (discovered to be conscious thinking, intelligence, conscious life), and that every time they rip a hole a Spectre comes into being. Really ridiculous, if you ask me. Two books building up, and then the day after they actually admit their feelings, they can't ever be together again. EVER. They're messing with my emotions!!!11!!
It ends abruptly after that, with Lyra returning to her world and Will returning to his, each "loving eachother more than anyone has loved anything before." Haha, dramatic. Still... it spends more than half the series focusing on this will they won't they drama between the two, just to have them kiss, do it?, and never see eachother again.
Like I said, good fantasy series, just... dramatic, and very, very, un-subtle near the end.
And Congrats on actually reading four huge blocks of text. Better than the 1500 pages I read, but still, on the internet it's about equivelent for attention spans. 8)
Playing a whole lot of Garry's Mod lately, and on a friends' server, where griefers roam rampant. Same server as 'Why Griefers S U C K' took place. I've begun to record it happening, griefing in progress, and compiled it into a video;
I finally have video evidence of Gnome... now if only the admins would watch it :P
My parents have decided that I've had enough video games for one life.
Heh. Hehehehehe.
And my Mom suggested I buy clothes, or school supplies with my money instead. When I laughed at her, she said, "Well duuh!"
Hehehehehe. Parents are funny.
I've got $20 and I want some Tom Clancy. I'm pretty set on getting Rainbow Six Vegas ($20), to name one reason becuase it is the most like a modern Rainbox Six 3 (which was very fun on PS2), but I want to hear what you think :)
G.R.A.W. (Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter) looks really good to me, but I think I would rather have Vegas. It looks and plays much more modern, from what I've seen.
One other thing I'm thinking about is Splinter Cell. It got very favorable reviews and if I got it I'd have just enough money for GRAW as well...
So tell me what you think...
or
Anyway, I only have a few days of summer [read: freedom] left, so I'm not looking for anything TOO long, but it would be nice to get two new games... Well, I'm still thinking Vegas. I'm not a big stealth guy, but then I've never had more than a demo of a stealth game, and GRAW isn't as Rainbow Six 3-ish as I would like...
Hmmm... so... I was playing Garry's Mod today. Good server, kill/build, where builders can't be killed by deathmatchers/DMers/Killers. Some people want to fight, others just want to create something.
I'd been on this server for a while with some people I know, and then the admin I know left. A big, big, big, hated DMer/griefer 'Gnome' came on, and... I don't know one person who likes him. Everyone I've talked to about him, including the admin that left and all the players there, wanted him to be banned and to never come back. Ever seen War of the Servers? (Also, watch the beginning of the video to see what Garry's Mod is all about) Yeah, he's like that, except he'll cuss you out too.
So the admin who's a friend of mine left, and after Gnome came and killed a bunch of people trying to have fun, all the people I knew on the server were gone too. So there I was, minding my own business... I started building a base, which was easy because 90% of it was already built, and the only thing that needed to be put in place was a door or something to keep people out. I put one there and started doing the usual, putting 'hoverballs' on it so it could float up/down to open/close the entrance from outsiders. I put the two that needed to be there on the inside, and then went outside to place the other two and-- boom.
There's a little car made with wire to follow (more like flying, erratically because of the explosions) me around wherever I go and that had 'no collide' put on it so it could go through my door into my base. That wouldn't matter if there wasn't a stick of dynamite on it, exploding constantly. Luckily, I still had 9999 (or, more like 8500, which was what was left of it) health from when my admin friend was on. He gave it to me because I was building and you'll get in trouble for killing people who are only building. Here I am, running around the inside of my base trying to escape the @#$%&^ thing, trying to capture it to stop it from chasing after me, and eventually I get tired of being blown up and run outside of my base, deleting it as I went, to find Gnome outside, in a car so he can't be hurt. I made a car seat to sit in, (don't ask me why, but that's just how Gmod is) so he couldn't hurt me any more. He gave up and I went on the offensive. He deleted his car when his target wasn't affected by it anymore, so I got out of the chair and spawned my secret weapon. I built it on site earlier to have a fort war with other people, and so now I spawned that and sat back down.
My secret weapon is a totally invisible, remote controlled car that I put a stick of dynamite on, at the end of it.
Oh, and another thing, I've NEVER seen Gnome build.
I used my boat to invisibly and safely blow him up a couple of times to get some vengence, and then an admin came on, one I didn't know. Gnome told him to ban me because I was KILLING HIM FOR NO REASON while he TRIED TO BUILD. There are more than two problems with that... Well, I told him ROFL and LMAO and said I was trying to build while he sent in an exploding car. Just the nerve of him to say I was killing him while he tried to build was an ROFL ARE YOU ACTUALLY LISTENING TO THIS? moment. Apparantly the admin was someone who hasn't... encountered Gnome before. He wouldn't ban me because he had no proof, but he let Gnome tell him his sad sad story of how terrible I am, trying to kill him... for no reason.
I think I shed a tear, right then.
Yesterday I heard that the Internet Explorer 8 Beta was out, but I didn't remember to download it then, and I got it now.
It definitely adds some nice features, one such addition being a very Firefox-like bar under the URL bar with favorites, recent URLs, etc. popping up as you type. Again, if you used Firefox, it's very much the same thing. I'm glad that's in IE now.
IE 8 is also supposed to load pages faster, be more secure, and more reliable, and I only watched the beginning of the 'faster' video, so I'm sure there are a lot of new features I'm overlooking.
Oh, and the next looks like it's rendered in ClearType on youtube now. Well, it is. It wasn't before on YouTube, and by pressing the (NEW!) compatibility button, you can see the webpage like it was rendered in IE7 or before.
Overall, it's a pretty nice upgrade. I do wish it looked more like IE7, though, because now the toolbar/tabs are looks totally 256-color blue. I'll provide a screenshot...
So it's not very easy to see on GameSpot's tiny blog sizes, but click here for the full picture. I couldn't find any pictures of the latest release, so I uploaded my own :P
And for a zoomed in picture:
Who here uses IE? Who's a Firefox user?
This morning I went over my original animation and improved it (very much).
Now it's the entire [climactict part of the] scene from a top-down view with better animation. In particular, instead of Leonidus moving and rotating to kick, I actually have him move his leg up. I know, right? Big changes here. :P
I've created a playlist of them as well as for any future animations I do in Flash.
Check out the new video here:
'This is Sparta' Scene in Flash with Stick Figures
Be sure to leave a comment telling me how bad my drawing is! ;)
This evening I played around with Adobe Flash CS3 (Pro) for the first time, and learned how to add frames, animate, all that. And after ONE (1) evening of messing around in Flash, I created a shweet animation and then a flash video containing it, saved it as an .avi so I could upload it to YouTube.
I've got to say, after one night of Flash, I'm an addict. It's really really engaging. Sure, right now all I can do is make basic drawings and animate them, but in the future I'm sure I'll figure out the action script to have [PLAY] buttons, etc.
So be sure to check it out and tell me what you think! :P
I've always wanted Photoshop CS3, and today I finally got it!
This guy will guide you through it, if you're interested.
I also got:
Illustrator CS3 (sketching, drawing)
Fireworks CS3 (icons, websites)
Vegas 8 Pro (Advanced video editing)
So now I have quite the project ahead of me-- figuring all of these out o.O
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