Arus808's Mixed Plate

10. Enviro-Bear 2000: Operation: Hibernation (Justin Smith) [Windows freeware, paid iPhone version available]

Created for the TIGSource Cockpit Competition - and, rightly, the winner - Enviro-Bear 2000: Operation: Hibernation is what you might call 'downright genius.' Taking control of a bear just as winter is approaching, the task is to gobble down enough fish and berries and then find a place to hibernate before the snow starts to fall. All this takes place in a car. Obviously. This is where the hilarity begins, as - and prepare for the bleeding obvious - our bear isn't the world's best driver. In fact, he's only able to grab one part of the car's controls at a time. Cue trying to accelerate with your paw, then frantically grabbing the wheel and dodging around that pine-cone tree, or that angry looking badger, or even the other bears who are, of course, driving their cars around looking for food too.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4224/gamasutras_best_of_2009.php?print=1

Who is playing video game? Bear is playing video game! HOW CAN THIS BE??

I've been convinced to buy Raiden Fighters Aces just by looking at the screenshots...

Nintendo, Microsoft: I'm still waiting for Scribblenauts on XBLA. Make it happen and you'll both make bank. Refuse to coop with each other and you'll both make zip. It's easy money, folks...

## The web Flash sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand
## tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now those bottom-line
## clueless pinheads who've never even heard of "TCP handshake" want to run
## *commerce* over the damn thing. Ye godz.

- Fyodor, http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/netcat/netcat-4/netcat/scripts/web


Today, I spent 3/4ths of a day hitting my head on the code to merely draw a red rectangle between two layers in a MovieClip.

Ultimately, I had to resort to creating a whole new symbol in CS4. And that, of course, had to be a another whole damn MovieClip itself. Because we couldn't allow people to just use Sprites (or, god forbid, simple Bitmaps) for static graphical objects, now could we Adobe?

Then I had to battle with the problem of calculating where said MovieClip would go on-screen, and how to calculate the correct measurements for the rectangle in Flash's insanely broken and wrong-headed "Y increases downward" coordinate system. Wanna see the code?

column.drawColumn(0, -(bottomY - se.target.y), redWidth, (bottomY - se.target.y), redColor);

If that makes any sense to you, you're a much smarter person than I am. I particularly love how the starting Y coordinate has to be negative. So very intuitive!

And all this bullshit because when I do MovieClip.graphics.drawWhatever(), it unfailingly draws my whatever below all layers (and thus, underneath all other graphical elements) in the MC.

There's no way Adobe uses their own code. If they ate their own dog food, this kind of unbelievable crap would have been shit-canned seven versions ago.


(And don't even get me started on Adobe's burying of Red5. A horrible, nasty, evil, open-sores hack (but I repeat myself) that required a whole fucking Apache Tomcat installation just so you could record a three second sound clip from the user's mic. But it was a threat to Adobe's $5k (massive rip-off) Flash Media Swerver, so they got it dragged offline. Can't have people recording audio in a flash app! No siree! Not unless they fork over a hundred times what that kinda thing is worth - to us!)


God I hate you Adobe. Hate you so very, very much. From hell's heart, I stab at thee...

http://xkcd.com/681_large/


Edit: Some moar science pr0n: Visualizing Density!

I've finally gotten around to finishing the audio on my gemcasting tutorial and posting it here:



This is part one. You can find parts two and three here at my Youtube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/theproplady


It IS my first video tutorial where I actually talk (and after listening to my sloppy-tongued, robot-reading-cuecards speech, you'll know why I haven't done it before.) Let me know if you have any questions about anything. (I may have to revise the audio if people are confused with certain parts of it. There are times when I swear I sound no better than this guy. And that's just not good.)

Here's hoping that the 5-day blizzard finally ENDS outside so I can do some spray-painting. (Sigh...)

I'm sitting at home, in front of my XBox 360.

"Why?", you might ask.

Because every last 3D showing in a 30 mile radius is sold out.

On the one hand, I'm glad to see Cameron's swift kick in the ass to a hide-bound, anti-innovative movie industry being rewarded.

On the other hand, I'm pretty pissed off that said industry is so short-sighted as to only allocate one theater and three showings of said movie on a weekend day. When anyone with an IQ larger than their shoe size would have predicted the theaters would be busiest.

But then, since I can't go to the movie I guess aforementioned industry isn't getting my money, are they?

Perhaps the best medium IS winning, after all...

...And it wasn't me. Grr.

Again, Linkara posted the tutorial we worked on together so if you have any spare time this holiday weekend, have a look at it.

I'm hoping I can go back home tomorrow since I have a lot to do, although I don't know if the weather is going to cooperate. It snowed all day yesterday and now it's raining, and then it's supposed to get cold and snow again. I took the precaution of brushing all of the slush off of my car so it doesn't turn into a giant block of ice, but I don't know how well the whole travel thing is going to go tomorrow.

I did put some of my holiday time to good use. I've posted about 200 pictures here on my DeviantArt Page. I also answered all of my comments there as well. I've got my Facebook Page up and running and I might do some other site-maitenance-y things.

I've finally got around to posting my Amazon Wish List. I've kept it to practical things I need, because I really don't need any more "taking-up-space" crap. But I could use some Apoxie Sculpt, because that stuff is as useful as it is spendy. (Thanks to everyone who's helped me through the years already! It is appreciated.)

Hope you're all having a good holiday!

Linkara finally posted the tutorial I helped him with:

http://atopfourthwall.blogspot.com/2009/12/green-ranger-dragon-dagger-prop.html

I was really hoping I could post my new resin casting tutorial in time for Christmas, but I had to leave town a day early to avoid the bad weather. (As much as I'd like to demonstrate my Minnesota Chops by driving in a blinding blizzard in the dark, I'm afraid I like this whole "being alive" thing and would like to continue it for a little longer.)

I posted some new items (and retook some pictures) for my Etsy Store. I've also posted two new doll clothing patterns on my doll blog.</a> Merry Christmas!

This has nothing to do with Christmas, but it could help you relieve a little holiday stress. Enjoy!

Tags: etsy

2005

And yet Apple inexplicably continued with plans for the iPhone.

Rumors that iTunes will land on phones turn out to be true, when Steve Jobs demos Motorola’s ROKR onstage at an Apple event. When Jobs shows how you can pause music and take a call, he pushes the wrong button and the feature fails to work. News reports later say that consumers are returning the phone at six times the usual rate.

http://technologizer.com/2009/12/20/dumb-moments/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akm3nYN8aG8

Gets a little annoying and self-congratulatory at the end. But the meat of it, that the USA wages war for no reason other than convenience, and that a whole lotta people here basically don't give a damn about killing brown-skinned people, is very accurate.

Also, it's so cute that young, naive people think they can change the system. I just want to pat them on the head and say, "Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww! You're so CUTE! Can I buy you an ice cream cone?"

RinnyFlamboyant
Gabe is so fat he has to noclip around valve HQ

tempusrname
Gabe Newell is so fat, he moonlights as a reference mass in Einstein's special relativity experiments.

PureToxin
Gabe Newell is so fat, when they scanned him to a wireframe to put him in the game in a cameo, the computer had an out of memory error.

It was running a 64 bit OS.

Sparkleton
That was worth a month.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ahid3/every_time_you_make_a_gabe_newell_is_fat_joke/

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/all/1

There's a certain project I know of that shares many of the same characteristics as DNF. I believe I will begin calling this project "<project name> Forever".

Unfortunately it's going to snow in the next couple of days so that might put a damper on my outdoor spraying.

I did a lot of vacuum-forming this week.


It does shave time off of a project, but it also consumes a lot of styrene so I'll have to get some more pretty soon.

I've been trying to add some more costume stuff to my Deviant Art page:

http://amethystarmor.deviantart.com/

I've also got a Facebook page that I'll have to add content to. (I feel about 5 years behind the times here. I spend so much of my time nose-deep in projects that I only notice fads and memes several months after they've ended. I'm like the Universal Uncool Aunt of the Internet.)

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to pull my jeans up to my nipples and frown disapprovingly at the Young People of Today...

"Disneyland does indeed have feral cats. It keeps the mouse population down (hah!)."

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/agl28/iama_former_disneyland_employee_who_worked_most/

Current Music: Modest Mouse - pick any of: "Make Everyone Happy" "I Came As a Rat" "Gravity Rides Everything" "The Good Times Are Killing Me"

I'm afraid my video on resin gemcasting will have to be delayed for a short time while I figure out Sony Vegas Pro. I've discovered, sadly, that Microsoft Movie Maker is only slightly more useful to the art of digital editing than removing my computer harddrive and repeatedly hitting it with a rock would be, so I've finally become sufficiently irked to try and learn a whole new program. On the bright side, I think I've finally figured out where to position my microphone for maximum voice quality. Not that it helps me to sound any less like a robot reading a list of stock quotes, but at least I no longer sound like a robot reading quotes while standing at the bottom of an empty grain elevator shaft.

I have to do some vacuumforming in the near future and I wanted to take some footage of myself doing it. I don't know if I'll be able to position my webcam close enough to the stove to capture anything useful. The best you'll see is me in dumpy clothing, puttering around a crate with a plywood board on top of it with a vacuum hose attached. (It's also hard to take still pictures of the process since vacuumforming is a two-hand job at all times. Boy that sounded dirty, didn't it?) I'll try to figure something out, if I can.

I've made a new discovery. Cool Jewel ice cube molds are great for resin casting:





I was worried that, since it as made of what looked like foodsafe silicone, it might not work, creating gems that were sticky or dull. I've only used clearcast epoxy resin with it so far and don't know how well it would work with polyester resin. (Which I'm NOT testing since Polyester resin smells like a bear's bare ass on a bad day.) So if you want to make faceted gemstones, this ice cube mold is definitely the way to go (although you should NOT use it for ice cubes once you've poured resin into it. )

I think I've discovered the problems I was having with my microphone--I was sitting too close to it. I'm still splicing together the video for my Cast-ravaganza tutorial so I hope to get that edited and finished in the near future. Stay tuned....

Based on the water-skipping Fiero, I have to say that Jessi is the best new mythbuster since Grant. Maybe they can keep her around for a while longer - until Kari's new kid Stella is walking, perhaps?

http://www.tistix.com/cart/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=1&zenid=jfd4ppg4le3blqar7if2m6vni4

I've seen some backpacker's Ti chopsticks before but they were partial sticks, with wooden ends. So totally misses the point. This guy got it right!

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1321-Demons-Souls


Also, Angry Joe on Why the Spike VGAs suck.

I think I've only watched the VGAs twice. One time wasn't so bad, the second time I turned it off halfway through. The big thing that annoyed me is that they stretch it out way too long. They just don't have enough material to justify the running time.

Also let's face it, the Spike VGAs are very carefully and deliberately targeted at the "Bro" demographic - the frat-boys who pretty much only play Halo. Utter the word Ikaruga around these guys, and they'll say their girlfriend thinks rugby is icky too; mention Eternal Darkness an they'll say they studied that painting in their art appreciation class. ;]

It doesn't work very well so I have to record my dialog with my webcam and then split off the audio. I've made and posted a sound test on Youtube in which I gibber some nonsense two times in a row. The first recording is unaltered. The second one has been run through Audacity's Noise Removal Filter.



The Unaltered audio has background nose and scratchy "s"'s. The Altered audio has no noise but is very tinny-sounding. Does anyone have any advice on how I can improve the audio quality? (I throw myself on your tender mercies, internet!)

Thanks to everyone who's tried to help me thus far....

Oh Oscar the Grouch. You channel my soul....



Okay, I probably don't hate Christmas as much as he does, but I might be inclined to like it more if I didn't take such a financial hit this time of year. (You know, what with people losing their jobs just before it happens and having to cancel costume orders, and with people having to use all of their disposable income for Christmas presents and with my having to stand in long lines at the post office to get anything mailed out.) I mean, I want to be all sparkly-eyed and full of wonder, but... I'm a bit stressed right now. I hope I don't come through as a grouch in my writing; I don't want to bring everyone else down. Sheesh. *jams hands into pockets*)