Chronicles of Smerity

Chapter One of University

2008-03-08T18:07:00.003+11:00

I've just experienced the first week of university.
And it is good.
Really good.
Mind boggingly good.

Obviously I haven't seen it all, haven't experienced it all, but everything I've done so far has struck the right chord. It truly is just liberating to finally be there, walking about campus and running into friends completely accidentally - all of whom are quite happy to see you =]

As a really simple run down of some of what I've experienced this past week -

Missed the first Linguistics lecture to attend the Linguistics Society picnic (accident I swear!) and thought I missed the first tutorial (they announced it wouldn't be on in the lecture -_-)

Nearly lost my phone and wallet

Nearly lost my bag (with laptop and study notes) - I was learning however, I still retained my phone and wallet

Stayed back late to play DotA and succinctly missed all sane buses (left SIT at 8:10pm, got home 11 something)

Accidentally cheated on a Back of the Envelope calculation (James forgot to say calculators weren't allowed, and I was sufficiently gold fish like to forget he'd specified that in the past ^_^)

Attended the pain that is the 8am Math Lecture

The Math I Fear
There is one slight issue. Math. I'm pushing myself by taking Advanced Math - it's my last chance to try and grab hold of high level math before it leaves for orbit. Advanced Math generally assumes that you've studied Mathematics Extension Two in high school, so it doesn't fluff about with such things.
Luckily the lecturer is covering it all - and so far it looks like I can keep up.
But we'll see with time whether I finally succumb to the torrent of math being thrown at me.

I can't procrastinate much longer - maths calls in a hauntingly sombre tone...
Smerity

NCSS Over and Out

2008-01-14T12:11:00.000+11:00

NCSS
This year NCSS ran from Saturday 5th January to Sunday 13th January - and I was lucky enough to be invited back as a returner. Amongst the highlights were Crypto Challenge, the Programming Challenge (where I worked with a lady employed at Google), Google site visits and Atlassian site visits, amongst a million other things.

The most shocking thing is just how rapidly the days flew past. This year we were given an extra two days, yet of all things it felt shorter than that of last year's NCSS.

Other things needing notes...

The Final Countdown
The NLP Song ("He saw the girl on the hill with the telescope... Telescope, telescope, telescope! Time flies like an arrow, I may-aid her duck") - notice the emphasis on MADE? It's a MINIM people!
Random seeds from Microsoft
Excessive NDAs from Google
Game after game of Bartok and Zah Butsah

Towards the end we finally got our version of Youth Off The Streets up and going - a bit of a struggle due to a few issues which were sorted out only the night before the presentation. Sadly I didn't get a chance to implement my collocation based search suggestion due mainly to the fact I was in damage control mode for the website fighting just to get basic functionality up. Nonetheless, the result that came out looked quite impressive - here's a screenshot with my chat client in action.

Nonetheless, just as last year it was a stunning week - many close friends old and new. Thanks to all those who made it happen ^_^

---

I was going to write more, but I realised it's nearly a month after I left NCSS - and that's time enough =]
Smerity

Enchanted in the Least

2008-01-04T21:55:00.000+11:00

I usually voice my hatred of Disney pretty clearly, but when they get it right I'll at least acknowledge it.
There are only a few rare films that allow you to become utterly engrossed - you forget all your troubles and just feel yourself fading into the narrative web - and Enchanted was one of them.

All I can really say is that it was a pleasure to watch, and sadly a film that's making me think about the way I perceive the world - it can be your stage show if you'll let it =]

Special mention to Amy Adams who was just stunning - I knew her from Catch Me If You Can, but her style has changed immensely - a testament to her ability =]

Tomorrow is the beginning of NCSS '08 =] I'm certainly looking forward to it, butI have this worrying feeling that I haven't prepared for it, which is strange considering I really can't. Such happens however - at least I'll be with a bunch of friends - nothing horrifically bad could go wrong - I hope ^_^

HSC, Scholarship, UAI and USyd

2007-12-22T03:18:00.000+11:00

Sadly I need to be rapid. I would love to recount this tale in full, but it's 03:33 and I need to be up in a stupidly small amount of time for the drive up to Adelaide - hurray.

HSC - 19th of December
At 5:30am Adelaide time (6:00am Sydney time) I received this shockingly simple SMS.

Course - Mark (out of 100 or 50) - Band
EngAdv 85 5
EngX1 41 E3
EngX2 46 E4
Maths 83 5
MathsX1 33 E2
Music1 85 5
LatnC 86 5
VET IT 89 5

None of the marks were horrible, but none of the marks were great - except for one - my English Extension Two mark - quite glad with that =]

Later that day I received a phone call from UTS - the University of Technology Sydney - saying I'd made been offered a place in their Bachelor of Information Technology and they were offering me the $13k a scholarship. It was damn tempting, so very tempting, but I honestly had my heart set on University of Sydney. The second I said no though my doubts flared up - I'd just basically ripped up a $39k cheque - and there was no assurance yet that I'd get into the course I'd want at USyd.

Smerity began to enter panic mode...

That night Smerity went clubbing with his cousins Laura and Kate - it was a pleasant form of distraction and beneficial apart from the alcohol keeping him up until 5am.

UAI - 20th of December
Woken up by a phone call from my friend Stui, I checked my UAI in a somewhat zombie-like state. Oh - 90.15? I didn't know exactly how to react at first - it was in the 90's - that's good. Only issue is I remembered the course I wanted - Bachelor of Information Technology at USyd - had a 96.60 UAI.

Smerity upgraded from panic mode to high definition surround sound terror...

Did I make a huge mistake? I couldn't quite decide. Either way, I wasn't straight into the course I wanted - I'd need to rely on the Experienced Programmers Portfolio to boost my mark. Only issue was 6 points seemed to be stretching it.

Luckily here some friends reminded me of a very fair point - Ben Taylor especially. USyd has a flexible first year, meaning that "students who do well at university [have] the opportunity to reapply to higher cut-off programs which they may not have been successful in gaining entry to on first application" - so I could get into BCST and transfer up. Smerity was reassured from this, but he still wouldn't mind getting straight into BIT.

USyd - 22nd of December
Usually it takes USyd a fair while to sort out and evaluate the Experienced Programmers Portfolio submissions, and even then applicants can be required to go through an interview process to be considered. I received a strange email tonight however, marked simply "Application for Engineering at Sydney University". At first I thought it was just another push for students - they'd sent out an email with the subject "You've got your results...what's next?" only a day or so before - but I began reading the email and something was different. In the second paragraph however my interests were peaked -

The extra information supplied has helped us determine that your UAI will be sufficient to meet the flexible entry cut-off requirements for your 1st Preference of Bachelor of Information Technology (expected cut-off of 95).

I reread the sentence about three or four times in a slight shock. Then I reacted in a somewhat childish and giddy way - but I reserve my right of excitement for times like this =]

So, simply put, this shall be my new home =]
Smerity

Schoolies

2007-12-09T23:14:00.000+11:00

I returned yesterday from possibly one of the best weeks of my life. A group of my friends decided to avoid the main and raucous schoolies area of the Gold Coast and simply rent a house right on the edge of the ocean near Nambucca called The Glen.

The view from my bedroom window

Nearly every day we went out on the boat, and nearly every day someone suffered some sort of injury. I suffered a badly grazed knee after a seagull flew at me whilst on an extremely treacherous rock, James was struck by a car, Hayley suffered a concussion, and later I was bruised raw by a loose life jacket.

Miss Hayley and me

Beyond all that however was my drinking story. Deciding to get drunk I ingested the majority of my bottle of absinthe - a fiery burn which I've learned to love! That wasn't the issue however - the issue began when I was offered the rest of the butterscotch to finish off. Having a gulp or two I decided I could easily finish this - it tasted like a thick gluggy water, and for the alcohol I could easily put up with that. The next morning I woke up sick as a dog however - it turned out the butterscotch wasn't butterscotch - they replaced it with Home Brand Olive Oil. I downed half a bottle of olive oil and didn't even notice O_o
Luckily however I still maintain my record of never having been sick due to alcohol - even when the alcohol is tainted with olive oil =] I never plan on having to throw up to offset my inefficiencies of drinking - and I hope that plan remains in effect.

The Culprit of Smerity's Drinking Story

Overall it was a splendid week. Among other things was the fact that I got up first time in water skiing - so far I've yet to fail a take off =]

The Crew

-in jokes- Oh Fifi! Oh Fuck! Star! -/in jokes-
Smerity

Wargh... 5am...

2007-11-18T05:33:00.000+11:00

It happens to be 5:33am - and I'm in the middle of a LAN still very much in operation. Sleep should have overcome me hours ago, but it seems that peer pressure from a bunch of USyd students does wonders =]

DotA, CS:S, Pudge Wars - so many strange and horrific things. Oh, and I forgot a powercord, but was saved by Aaron - happiness ^_^ And Cat's house is in the worst place ever for getting heavy things to and from ^_^ And it's hard to find - mainly as the directions from WhereIs are wrong O_o

This is all following a meeting with a bunch of school friends - and I'm meeting with them again in around 15 hours ... I have a fear I may fall asleep whilst there with them. Normally that isn't a bad thing, but I gave them permission to draw on me ... in permanent marker ... =[

Anyway, I fear I need to go - they seem to be playing some action arcade game now which likely desires my attention...

They're taking the Hobbbits to Isengard!
Smerity

Over - quite quite over =]

2007-11-16T01:00:00.000+11:00

Life
The HSC has been over for some time now. It went a lot more rapidly than I expected, and for the most part a lot less stressful than I expected. It is over now - and no, I don't like it when people ask "ZOMG! How do you think I went?"
The less times I am forced to remember that period the better ^_^

Dashing past the HSC, I really haven't done a great deal so far - incredibly sad :(

Yes, we were quite the awesome =]

Me, Marcus, Stui, Luke

Oh, and the Formal happened - nothing great. Lets just say nothing happened, and then nothing continued not to happen =] I couldn't even get drunk! The drinks were ridiculously expensive and involved about a tablespoon of alcoholic liquid - so I decided against wasting my money ... argh ... so much for social lubricant !

I am however going out with Luke and the majority of 'the gang' tomorrow as we need to test and get familiar with the boat before we take it out on schoolies. (Just don't remind me I should be getting sleep instead of writing a blog post, considering I need to be at his house in only a matter of hours ^_^)

-Edit-

I guess this counts as Life considering how long I've been playing it - Call of Duty 4 came out and me and StephenC have been dicing it up on the pub servers. I've decided Ventrilo is such an awesome thing - the world needs much more Ventrilo - the closest thing to LANning =]

Programming
I haven't really gotten into coding as much as I should have by this point - I have started going through K&R for C, but it's somewhat slow and laborious. Such happens I guess.

I did slap together a Mandelbrot Generator - fun fun =] Was originally going to do it with PyGPU as the Mandelbrot set like raytracing is an embarrassingly parallel algorithm but sadly there is next to no written documentation for PyGPU and it has a somewhat unclean interface, so I had to fall off that idea.

ZOMG! PRETTY! See a larger non-animated wallpaper version here

On a further sad note, the Programming Weekend Challenge has died out it seems ... That was a great push for me to produce something - I really need to rediscover that drive elsewhere, and preferably independent of third parties.

...first up against the wall when the revolution comes?

Finally, an interesting thing - Google's new Android SDK. I am quite tempted - I have a desire to learn Java (I know, sickening isn't it?) and learning for a purpose rather than for the prosperity's sake can certainly help the process. I'm nearly giddy about it honestly - reminds me lightly of the times when I coded on the PSP - except that this time it isn't a kludged together toolchain I'm using but instead a properly written framework =]

Nonetheless, I should get some sleep...

Here are some things I still need to do -

- start or give up on the podcast idea
- do some more programming
- do some NLP (plus below)
- do some AI (plus above)
- fix up my F chord and start properly working on barre chords (on guitar they're EVIL!)
- take over the world ... don't worry, I like you - I'll let you live ^_^

SELECT * FROM World WHERE IQ < 0
Smerity returned

The Imminent HSC

2007-10-17T00:01:00.000+10:00

Well, as the HSC creeps up on me I thought it important to leave some sort of vestige for future reference. There is currently one day and nine-ish hours until my first exam, and I honestly don't feel horrified. I probably should be, but it would almost be an effort to panic at this point - and as panic wouldn't benefit me anyway it seems like way too much work ^_^

What will happen will happen and what won't never would - no use in stressing over that.

There is one thing that's going quite well however - my study pattern.
Unfortunately for any subject I don't innately like it's hard for me to study - for subjects I innately like (such as computing of course) study is almost equivalent to enjoyment - so I need to find some way to force myself to study.

Which brings me to the method that works. Be prepared to laugh =]
Study Block -> Episode of TV Show -> Repeat Ad Nauseum

Using that method for a straight afternoon (about eight hours or so) I got a 100% mark in an Extension Math exam, so it's proven to work in the past. The main advantage with using an episode of a TV show is that, unlike internet or music or whatever else, the break is limited and well defined - when the episode ends it's time to get back to work. When you're just surfing the web, jamming music or playing a computer game the temptation to hang around "just five minutes longer" is much too strong.

Yes, I watch Angel - a vampire with a soul helps me to study

Back then the television series was Stargate Atlantis - unfortunately however I've run out of that series, so I've moved on. I'd comment more on the series, but it's past when I should be in bed (HSC remember =]) but I will simply say that Joss Whedon, whom I've loved since Firefly/Serenity (and unknowingly Buffy) does not disappoint. It seems that Fox enjoy killing his television shows before their time however, but that's a matter for another day.

And a special thanks to Stephen (no, not me, my friend... I do have multiple personalities but I wouldn't insult those other personalities by giving them the same name as myself!) for lending me Season One, Two and Three of Angel on DVD ^_^

Film Noir much? =]

Other than that it's probably best I go. Time flies on, the exam comes nearer, but so too does the end of all of this - now only 15 or so days away =]

Wishing for a temporal fold,
Smerity

HSC Post #1 - Consumerism in Brave New World and Blade Runner

2007-10-02T23:03:00.002+10:00

As I'm heading into HSC waters I decided I may try something a tad different. It's unfortunate that I procrastinate so much, but if in any small way I can combine procrastination with study then it will not be a loss. One of the main things I need to do at this point is to explore ideas and concepts in Brave New World and Blade Runner (specifically the Director's Cut), so I shall try through my normal blog style discussions.

Feels slightly Alice in Wonderland... Through the looking glass?

Consumerism in Brave New World and Blade Runner
Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, lived through a time of turbulent changes, where society was rapidly being transformed by the advancing state of technology. In his novel he focused on how these advances affected the individual, as opposed to society itself, but it doesn't diminish the advances he foresaw themselves. First amongst them, and something nearly incomprehensible by today's standards, is the loss of craftsmanship.

One must consider that up until only a few decades before Huxley published his novel that when an object was made, it was made one at a time, individual, with great care. This is part of the reason why antiques are so valuable. Antique objects are considered intrinsically individual, not by artificial restrictions (such as Limited Edition promotional objects) but due to the fact that a single craftsman had to dedicate a great deal of time and care into it's creation.

For Huxley it must have been terrifying to see the world move towards Ford's assembly line - where the creators were no longer craftsman but instead automatons, putting no genuine care into their work. Huxley may have feared whether this copy culture would continue all the way up to the arts, removing the creativity and originality from them which in his opinion made them so valuable.

Huxley continued this trend on to human beings, the idea that those individualistic human traits are sacrificed for simplicity and efficiency. This is very much where Brave New World and Blade Runner collide, they both feature worlds in which technology has led to dehumanisation, where due to the forces of commerce and science working hand in hand it is no longer economically feasible to have an individual identity - society is willing to suffer a carbon copy culture for efficiency's sake.

The Carbon Copy Culture

To some degree however we're wandering from the topic of craftsmanship when we talk about individuals as human beings. Whilst yes it is true that the concept of the creation of life (and mass production of it) is being used in both the texts (either through the Bokanovsky Process or by the creation of Replicants in Blade Runner) the fear of individuality is spawned by a different foe - that of power and authority.

In both texts there is essentially a tyrant (Mustapha Mond in Brave New World or Tyrell in Blade Runner) who aim to perpetuate their authority and power by the removal of individuality. In Brave New World this is achieved through Pavlovian Conditioning and peer pressure (in that any slightly taboo topic, such as an appreciation of nature, is either drilled out of them behaviorally or failing that, drilled out of them by the community) and soma, a powerful hallucinogenic drug that is considered (the cure to) "morality in a bottle", whilst in Blade Runner the control is instigated through the life spans of the Replicants. These methods aim to prevent individuals from pushing forth change, quelling any possible uprisings or revolutions well before they could endanger the tyrannical dictators. Of course, that didn't quite work for Tyrell now did it? =]

Soma
Copyright © Miss Emily

I may end it there... It's late and I'm starting to ramble, and I'm not entirely sure any of that moved toward con...

And on top of that Marcus just messaged me with "hey stephen, what do u think about christianity? like are u one or do u believe in god?" - I need my brain cells elsewhere =]

Wishing morality came in pill form,
Smerity

Graduation

2007-09-29T00:59:00.000+10:00

Apologies for the bad quality, as most of my photos are - the only camera I had was my camera phone, and in anything but daylight it is shocking. These are only photos from the Valedictory Dinner, and it's unlikely that I'll get photos from the Graduation Assembly itself as none of my family brought cameras.

Your host for the night - Smerity

Some of the gentlemen of the evening - Marcus, Luke and James

Two extremely lovely ladies, Ashleigh and Mirelle

Continuing the trend of lovely ladies, Jacqui and Julia

The live entertainment - courtesy of Luke, Ben, Chris and Mike

You know what they do for movie spoilers online - how you have to highlight the text to be able to read it? Well - guess what - I've a surprise for you! Introducing Smerity Spoilers - the innermost trials and tribulations of Smerity's mind. All I shall say is if you read this, it's your fault.

Warning - Genuine and Depressed Smerity

I've graduated.
...and I've been lying for some time about it. The truth is, for whoever's there to read it, no, I was not excited. I played it on for other's sakes - why be the downer if you can smile and keep them feeling cheery - but it was then I started to wonder why I wasn't excited - what could be wrong with me? Unfortunately when my mind works on such a negative level it can do wondrous things - and in this case was no exception. It refined and filtered every single possible bad feeling I had into an unbreakable glob. Yay...

Through these pensive and melancholy thoughts I've come to a few conclusions - none of which I'm likely to fix but they remain conclusions nonetheless.

I need to break down my facade. I pretend to be content for the benefit of others, hiding my true feelings so readily that I'm not sure Smerity has had any true feelings in a long while. I shouldn't need to do that to protect other people - I should be selfish enough to show my genuine feelings to other people regardless of how it makes them feel. I fear it won't happen though - Facade Smerity has been in play too long, and I'm not sure I'd be able to separate the illusion from myself anyhow. Who am I if not the complacent fool?

Stop seeking recognition from others. I was sitting at a table today. No glances fell upon me. It was like I was a specter, invisible. That feeling never disturbed me before, I've known for some time I'm an outsider - gaijin (in the universal sense) if you will - but this time the feeling did disturb me. What had changed? I was deluded enough to think I was now tangible, something more than that specter.
Solution - if you don't have expectations of anyone then you can't be disappointed. If you don't expect them to come and try to cheer you up when you seem down then you don't become further disillusioned when it doesn't happen. If you don't expect someone to be looking for you you don't feel alone when they don't round the corner calling your name. You are the only thing you can control - not others, not the outside world, none of that - so if you're going to do a preemptive strike, you have only one place to attack - yourself.

I wish I didn't care. Honestly, I think that's what it boils down to. It's selfish, it's evil, but it's what I feel. I wish I didn't have these freaking morals slapping me in the face every time I want to do something selfish. I want to do something selfish every once in a while, something with total disregard to anyone but myself. I see others doing it all the time and it's not fair - how can I not have that freedom?

I'm not in a good spot in life unfortunately. A lot of the constants in my life are being reevaluated - friends slipping further and further away or simply turning on me (which is something I've never had before) and this horrific feeling that all those steps I thought I was taking forward may in fact be back.
Oh, and HSC is now looking to be more and more of a disaster - it's the same feeling when you're surfing at the beach, and you feel a wave starting to suck you in, and you know that this wave is a dunker - that it's going to throw you under and you're unlikely to come back up.

On a completely random note tonight was the first night I played guitar by moonlight - sitting down in the middle of the horse paddock and jamming to the stars and the heavens. Jimbo (one of my horses) even got interested and came up to inspect me! I discovered later he had ulterior motives however - he tried eating my guitar ... Such are horses however - no respect for the high arts =]

All for now,
Smerity

Balloonage

2007-09-26T22:16:00.000+10:00

Whilst my school has a fairly strict line when it comes to muck-up days, my school also has some insane people. Let me explain I guess...

Although I wasn't for it earlier, Jacqui used her womanly wiles to convince me - and I'm glad she did. For the fairly cheap price of $120 -cough kick cough splutter cough die- (split between three at least) we had in our possession two helium canisters and a few hundred balloons. It was the least destructive way of terrorising the school =]

Accomplices in crime - Miss Hayley and Miss Jacqui

The result of about an hours work (it's actually damn difficult!)

Unfortunately you miss seeing any photos of us delivering the balloons room to room, but trust me when I say it was fun =]

First students to emerge at lunch

When they're happily prancing away you know your job is done =]

The only regret of the day is I got home and realised that I hadn't taken a photo of myself with the balloons, but as far as regrets go that's a joyfully insignificant one =]

Operation Balloonage - success

Also on that note, it was my last day of school ever yesterday - technically we shouldn't have come in today. Knowing that it was my last day I did my last gift run, handing out a handful of things to teachers et cetera. One of particular note was a gift I gave to my favourite math teacher - a great man. His stories alone kept me sane in maths, and he was best known amongst his students for standing out the front whilst the students do work practicing his golf swing, staring into an imaginary green to watch that ball fly further and further away =]

This isn't the final product, just the last photo I have of it

I must say though, it felt good getting down and dirty with art again - it doesn't happen commonly enough.

Finally, on the end of school note, I really need to update my Blogger About section from "Student waging his way through the stress and anxiety that is high school." now...

Bon voyage,
Smerity

Pubbed and Clubbed

2007-09-23T23:57:00.000+10:00

Little time however, so I must keep this short. This entire weekend has been a write-off, with myself either in transit to and from the city or in a state of inebriation - no studying was really possible in either state =]

Drunken Adventures
Thanks to Xachro I've had a pleasurable first pubbing and clubbing experience. Xachro has a moral stance against getting drunk himself, but he was kind enough to look after me when drunk. It's seriously not a bad idea - the sober lead the inebriated - and I made a suggestion that he should charge for it, that it could be the equivalent of a drunk taxi service but alas he did not think the same =]

This is an extract of a recount from a conversation with my cousin Kate -
-ramblings-

So before we went out we went to Josh's apartment which overlooks Darling Harbour from six+(?) stories up, where they were doing funky mixes, there came the generic suggestion of "Man, it'd be awesome to fly a paper aeroplane from here"
Thirty minutes later we had half of a packet of A4 paper on the street infront of the apartment - Cat won, and only about three of the dozen plus planes actually flew at all =]
To note, we were not yet drunk at this point... =]
So we began our journey from Josh's house in a happy flurry, prancing along the street from sheer euphoria of being alive, not intoxicated, and we came to our first bar - the name of which escapes me now. Using my ID for the first time ever I gained entry, and it was there we had our first drinks whilst playing pool.
Xachro, being the devious little man he is, kept trying to get me girly drinks - luckily Gareth and the others saved me from such a pink and frilly fate =]
After that we moved onto Equilibrium, a fairly high end bar, where Xachro and Josh's friend Rocko works - and it was there the heavy drinking began. Upon entering Rocko gave us each a free drink coupon, then proceeded to give us a shot of a strange blue-green liquid. Upon closer inspection, it was absinthe, and one even closer inspection, it burns.
I began making a face similar to that you'd make if someone started cleaning your teeth with a jackhammer and asked, in between tears, for water... He gave me a transparent liquid, but alas - it was not water. I'm not sure what it was, but it had further alcohol in it. From that point we went downstairs and played some pool.
Trying still to recover from the earlier liquids I asked the barman for a coke - before I could respond he gave me a coke, but with two shots of vodka... Oh noes... Then Rocko reappeared and he passed me a Smirnoff Ice... -tears- So now double loaded and with a strange light headed sense of floating I called it a night and decided that was enough of the drinking.
The remainder of the night we spent in a club called the Chinese Laundry - it was good, but not $25 good, the entry fee was somewhat extortionate.

-/ramblings-

Smerity has had absinthe and it's effects were not underrated. In many ways it is similar to the Pan Galactic Gargleblaster

I should also note that light levels of drunkedness and paper aeroplanes mix - they mix very well =]

The morning after I went and saw Ava's friend's band play, the kthxbyes - and luckily they live up to their name =]

Guitar
I bought a few books on the way home including a guitar book which lead me to actually understand how to pluck properly, so without further ado -

Smerity's First Guitar Piece
Four layers of sound - the riff, the bass, the melody and chordal accompaniment

School - or future lack of it
This week also represents the last week of school I shall ever have - somewhat depressing! On that note however I had to present up a baby photo so they can embarrass you with it during graduation, so to continue that embarrassment further -

Zomg! I'm eating my hat!

And with that I must go recover,
Sleepy Smerity

The Bubbles of a Llama Lamp

2007-09-21T11:55:00.000+10:00

To those in the know Smerity needs bubbles to remain sane for reasons far too lengthy to describe here.

Is it not beautiful?

I shall not harp on about all the amazing qualities of the humble bubble, but instead let Wikipedia do it for me.

Did you know the colour is determined by the thickness of the bubble at that point? No? I weep for you - you've not lived!

The only issue is that recently my bubble solution has been running out, and I'm not entirely sure as to the formula for bubbles. In desperation I was going to ask Ava to send me some of her spare bubble bottles by mail, but that seemed excessive, and for the time being I had a small number of bubbles left from my solution. Luckily, after much hunting, I found them - packs of four. Their purpose is supposedly to make bubbles at weddings - why at weddings I don't know, but I really don't care =]

On top of that, I have acquired an amazing apparatus similar in many ways to the humble bubble, a lava lamp! It has always been on my list of things to get, especially after I knocked plasma balls off of it after one electrocuted me ...

It glows radioactive green to ward off pirates! Arr!

Now not only do I have a lava lamp (a stunning persistent demonstration of fluid dynamics + chaos) but...
I HAVE MORE BUBBLES =]

Smerity is appeased... =]

Notes.py

2007-09-16T01:43:00.000+10:00

For those of you on my inner inner circle, and for those on the out, I've finished an upgrade to my notes tracker. These notes are little comments I write, see or hear and feel an intense desire to retain. Although I doubt it'll be really useful for anyone but myself, regardless of the fact that it contains everything from philosophy to the phrase "Naked Lesbian Mud Wrestling", I'll pass the link on to the Internet at large anyway.

Available in three flavours -
Random Note - Last 100 Notes - All Notes (Warning: Large File)

Can you hear Pavlov's bell striking in the distance?

2007-09-16T00:10:00.000+10:00

We don't like to admit it, of course we don't. We've got a fair reason not to.

The feeling that we're controlled by anyone but ourselves isn't comforting.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to shake that feeling for some time now. Are my thoughts my own? I used to think so but I can't be sure anymore. After an unfortunate experience involving Krispy Kremes (a long strange story likely more suited to the epic style of Roman poetry than a blog post) I've watched my habits with some alarm.

The consumerist society we live in plays us like fiddles, you may have just never noticed before.

As if from afar I can see my bad habits controlling me. Ask yourself this - when you go to a cinema, do you buy junk food? Yes? Then ask yourself this - did you actually have a desire for that junk food? The actual food itself? Or is it just a habit - a motion you go through every time you go to see that big screen?

Can you hear Pavlov's bell striking in the distance?

Consumerist society has already won. The world is no longer tailored to your actual needs, nor your actual desires, but instead to those that the corporations and the entities favour, to the ones that can help them reach the highest level of profit. The economic policies that society places upon you, from birth, is that of consumption, where we literally reach a point where we equate one's own happiness with material possessions. Such things shouldn't happen - consumerism shouldn't be able to rob us.

The fact that they rob us through a conditioned response rather than forcefully taking from our wallets makes no difference.

Such is the hidden state of society where having been unknowingly subjugated from birth we have never been able to see the elephant in the room. To us the elephant has been there as long as the room itself, and who are you to question where the elephant begins and the wall ends?

Conspicuous consumption
In The Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen wrote of something he called conspicuous consumption, a term he used to describe the excessive spending on goods and services that are of no greater purpose than attaining or maintaining social status. One of his examples were the use of silver utensils at meals, even though utensils made of cheaper material worked just as well or, in some cases, better. This has continued in much the same way over a hundred years later, where cars which serve no greater purpose than getting from A to B have become examples of social status and wealth, costing tens of thousands of dollars more than an equivalent counterpart that performs the exact same job. Conspicuous consumption has been crafted by the expectations and assumptions of society rather than the needs or desires of the individuals the society is comprised of.

Consumerist society has an incentive to cheat us.

Consumerist society doesn't want to pass on to you the cost benefits of the latest upgrade in technology - if they can keep you paying the same price as before, they will. You can see this in the telecommunications industry, where the cost to the user of sending an SMS is hundreds of times the actual cost, and the price is retained at that artificial level to boost their profit margins. These same trends will continue, with the benefit stolen from consumers, until there is a massive refactoring of society as a whole.

That's it for my rant tonight, though I do need to make a bit of an addendum about the Internet and Consumerism =]

Humbly refusing the placebos of society,
Smerity

A Sword Short

2007-09-09T23:45:00.000+10:00

Social Interaction

Here's a worrying thought that I've been mulling over for some time. It seems like I can only get to know people intimately over instant messenger, not the real world. Statistically at least it looks like that, as if you go through my list of close friends you'll suddenly notice that most of them I rarely (if ever see) see face to face. This lack of human contact may be part of the reason I'm kind of going mad ... ^_^

There's just some part of me that believes that the compulsive desire to loop through IM->Myspace->Email is an action representative of an unhealthy mindset.

Do 'normal people' feel that compulsive need for social interaction on any level, or is it a compulsion created by the social networking technologies available to us today?

I shall need to continue this train of thought later ...

Ever felt lost in the woods?

Muck-Up Photos

After some very late notice from school I've rallied together what resources I have for the Year 12 muck-up photos tomorrow. This mainly consists of a Light Horse uniform for the mere fact that both my parents do reenactment of the Australian Light Horse, so this stuff is literally just lying around the house.

Reference Photo - Australian light horsemen riding waler horses

If I could flesh it out further I'd ride in on Razz, my old horse, carrying the old bugle my father used to own and with rifle in handle and sword lying on my belt. Only issues with those are, in sequential order, Razz, the one horse I trusted with my whole heart, passed on some time ago, my father sold the old bugle, and finally I highly doubt it's legal to ride into a school in possession of either a sword or a 303 rifle - but one can dream no? =]

Your despondent anachronism,
Smerity

Here Endeth HSC Music

2007-09-07T21:24:00.000+10:00

HSC Music

HSC Music - the practicals at least - are done. Over. Finished. Forever. Please excuse me whilst I temporarily hyperventilate in relief.

-paid advertisement break-

On how I did I can't be sure of course, but there was nothing horrifically incorrect in the performances or the viva. Just glad to have it over and done with however. The markers were nice enough of course, but just the freak outs that occur, the stress, everything that goes with having to do those sorts of performances, can really get to you. At least if you're not that good of a musician, and in light of true musicians I am glad to admit I'm mediocre. I play music for my own benefit, not for anyone else, and thus I'm glad even with the absence of perfection.

LAN

After the practical examination I sped off home and collected my computers for a LAN party. A short time after attacking my car with a pressurised disinfectant canister I arrived at Marcus' place and with a handful of others gamed the night away. Favourites were WC3 (DotA, MaD Ballz, SOS TD and a game involving melee meat hooks, though the name evades me), Enemy Territory and a handful of others. That lasted until the horrific hours of the morning (I always find it horrific when I look out the window extremely late and find the world outside is awkwardly lit in a pale glow) when I bunkered down to sleep. Note to self - Semaj stole my pillows, please avenge me and my sore neck!

So, the situation now is that I need a recovery from the recovery I was using to recover from HSC Music Practicals. At least it's a peaceful recovery however, one I can happily put up with.

Day After

-babble-
Jump to a day after I began this post (I take an eternity to write these things) and what little recovery I've been doing is yet again in jeopardy. I've entered into that dangerous emotional state where things start becoming a bit numb unfortunately - and usually I'd cure in one of two ways. One, entertainment and/or distraction. I was working towards that, about to go see Ratatouille, but unfortunately the parentals want to come which isn't usually an issue except that one of the parentals has disappeared so we can't go to the early showing and the other parental doesn't wish to go to the late showing. And I can't go by myself as then that'd be slack to the parentals... So we're going tomorrow... Saturday is the one slice of pure heaven in my week - nothing to worry about the day after (being a Sunday) and nothing to rile you up before (like earlier work on a Friday) - it's merely the calm between both storms. So, a movie on Sunday isn't as good as I'll be stressing out over Monday.

If I went past this predicament, with my mind thrown into a state of chaos, then I'd usually go lie down under the stars, watch the wonders of the sky. Surprise - can't do that. Only place I can go lie down is near the horses, and I need to keep my distance from them since the Equine Influenza issue. You see my dilemma?
-babble-

...and here must I remain...
Smerity

I'm under quarantine

2007-09-05T19:25:00.000+10:00

Equine Influenza - it may have been sensationalised by the media but it also happens to be an actual issue. An actual issue that happens to be, unfortunately, inextricably tied to me now. Yes, our three horses have EI and we're officially under quarantine. That means no party Smerity - sux2bu.

Progcomp

On a somewhat unrelated note, Smerity was pwned in Progcomp. How badly I shall not say, merely that it's enough to make me feel somewhat inadequate. Such happens however, and life goes on unabated. I just decided that 'hiding' it probably wasn't going to do anything, positive or negative. My theory is that if next to no-one reads this blog but myself, and I lie or obscure the truth within it, I'm effectively lying to myself. All things considered that's generically a horrendous thing.

Birthday

Oh, I'm 18! -distant cheering- Yes, yes, Smerity has come of age. From this point I can drink, vote and marry - whether that list is in order of importance I shall let you decide for yourself. It was somewhat underwhelming however, but underwhelming is not necessarily a bad thing. I did get a few trinkets however, cute little things that are of infinite sentimental value (I'm looking at you Mirelle - your handmade burning fluro birthday card shall forever haunt me!)

HSC Music

Finally, tomorrow is performance day for my HSC Music. I'm playing two pieces, Moonlight in Vermont and Sonata I (piano duet - W.A. Mozart), and finally doing a viva voce on How Nobuo Uematsu manipulates his performing media to support gaming media.

After that final stress test - the final assessment before the HSC - I shall have a three day weekend, all thanks to APEC. It appears that DotA and TD shall take up a fair deal of it, and then, if luck should favour me, I may actually get down to some work and study.

One can always hope no?
Smerity

PS. Chaser's back! For great justice!

Calm after the Storm

2007-08-23T16:12:00.000+10:00

One of the first major HSC hurdles is over - I've submitted all my major works for it. Now is the time I sit back and wait... And wait... And wait and wait and wait... =]

Music composition (Mp3) - effectively a tribute to Nobuo Uematsu's One Winged Angel

The Ideal Enigma (PDF), my comedic metafictional absurdist short story for English Extension Two

With those two things over I have a feeling I'll be a tad more sane for the rest of the time.

And then, on a somewhat unrelated note, I had a short stint as Wolverine =]

The claws were much better in motion unfortunately - in time I shall Photoshop them to full glory but until then =]
(tidbit - first time I've ever worn leather lol)

And then, on a further unrelated note, I was newspaperised ...

We are all caught up in this narrative web for the mere fact that we cannot exist outside of it.

Smerity

Extend my telomeres damnit!

2007-08-14T22:54:00.000+10:00

First, all my exams apart from music are finished - and I got pwned in Maths Extension :(

On to the title - in my typical MSN discussions Xachro and I broke onto an interesting topic - Obfuscating Python - and we were doing pretty well. It eventually lead to a small discussion on DNA - specifically on that thing with the really really cool name that had to do with gibberish at the end of DNA so as to act as a disposable buffer for the lossy replication of DNA (to say the least)...

After a bit of Googling I came up with it! Telomere ftw! So of course I revised myself on it, as any good nerd would, and came across -

However, it has been hypothesized that there is a trade-off between cancerous tumor suppression and tissue repair capacity, and that by lengthening telomeres we might slow aging and in exchange increase vulnerability to cancer (Weinstein and Ciszek, 2002).

So, it's ridiculously simple what must be done now!

1) Cure cancer
2) PROFIT
3) Extend telomere - end aging
4) PROFIT

As you see, my plan does not fail where others have tread. Unlike other worthy adversaries, such as the Underpants Gnomes, whose fatal flaw was not properly defining their steps.

That is all for now.
CEO Smerity

Divine intervention is... unlikely...

2007-08-12T00:10:00.000+10:00

I've given up on shooting stars at the moment. I saw another one tonight and just couldn't fathom wishing on it, so I'm passing my wish off to someone else who wants it. As far as I know wishes passed on to third parties should still be valid, no?

Trial exams last week and this week. I'm finally getting into the heavy duty end of my high school life - quite worrying. Whatever way it ends up it shall be over soon at least, and I plan to do a lot of things once the HSC is finished. Of course, the operative word there is 'plan' - plans seem to fall through easily though. I'll outline them here so I shall at least have failure forced upon me should I miss them.

Post HSC
----
Programming
Just as before with the NCSSF Weekend Challenge, I'm going to continue to explore the tangents of computer science. I'm going to become fully fluent in C/C++ and experiment in some other languages. Remind me to experiment in fluid dynamics - specifically water and smoke, image based modelling - even a simple version of this would be a realization beyond my wildest dreams. Maybe for the latter I can even do it as a Python script for Blender - that'd sure be interesting - allowing a fly through of the generated geometry.
----
Write-Ups
Creating tutorials on my previous NCSSF Weekend Challenge projects so that I can help others in learning about topics. I want them to be fully inclusive, where if you're doing the tutorial on writing a raytracer and don't know what vectors are a small section will pop out and give you a fundamental grounding in vectors, until at least the level of understanding required by the article. This removes all barriers to entry and lets people regardless of level learn.
----
Media/Multimedia
I want to see if a podcast or a videocast is possible. Producing content instead of just consuming it. It'd also be nice to find the niche of podcast which I would love to listen to but have never found and instead of leaving it empty fill it for others.
----
Music
I want to be able to actually use that acoustic guitar I bought forever back!
----
Art
Start to sketch again, even if it's just doodling. Maybe even do CG if I'm adventurous.

So there's my short rant. I was going to go onto something a tad more depressing, but having read a bunch of university papers I feel strangely contented almost - so no complaining today.

Link dump -
Soft Scissors : An Interactive Tool for Realtime High Quality Matting
Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene
Parthenon Renderer (GPU accelerated global illumination renderer)

The Case of the Missing Semicolon

2007-07-12T21:33:00.000+10:00

If this was a crime fiction murder mystery, we'd begin in a mysterious fog shrouded alley with a distant silhouette of a man in a fedora hunched over a lit cigarette - but surprise, this isn't a murder mystery =] The Missing Semicolon I speak of is one on the end of a line - on the end of a line of Javascript.

This might make a bit more sense if I actually explain it. After I finished my NLP Question Answering system for Dr Curran, he basically said it was good, but wasn't good enough - some more work was needed. To do the stuff he wanted, I'd basically have to use Javascript. Luckily I'm a quick learner, and I filled in the gaps of my knowledge and got underway. Only major gripes - Javascript debuggers don't tell you anything! I sat there looking the code over and over, nearly going mad, trying to find some sort of error - and - oh look at that, a single missing semicolon... So yes, other than the lacking thorough debugging support for the language, and a slight annoyance at the way it handles the scope of variables (that may just be being silly though ^_^)
It only works with Firefox (only needed to work with Firefox) and there's a chance it may work with Opera/Safari but next to no chance with IE.
NLP QA Quick Answer System
I could learn to live with Javascript if browser interoperability was less of an pain =]

Other than that I haven't done a lot the last few days... Huzzah for the lazy =]
Smerity

Ray? Sphere? Intersection?

2007-07-09T21:21:00.000+10:00

It was at about this point that a strange Pommy walked up to me holding a cup of tea, and with his high strung accent he said to me - "Why hullo there dear chap, I must say, can I have your ray-sphere intersection when you're done with it?"
Strange delusions... many... =]

Anyway, over this weekend I have accomplished one of those little dreams I've had since I started 3D all those years ago. A raytracer that is one hundred percent mine all the way from the ground up!

I started off writing a 3D vector library which makes handling a lot of tasks (creating and normalizing the original viewing vectors etc) and make them simpler. A short while after that, I implemented the ray-sphere intersection code and ended up with -

"Oh... Hmm..." says Smerity.
Oh hmm indeed - much to my annoyance it appears one of my spheres decided to go elliptical on me...
I thought it was an error in my ray-sphere intersection code so I redid the entire ray-sphere intersection code to use vectors... Much prettier - but didn't change anything...
Eventually I discovered I was an idiot and that, just like real life, I had the 'camera' too close to the spheres so that you end up with a depth of field effect - when you go that close it ends up with a smudge basically...
USER ERROR BY THE GUY WHO MADE THE PROGRAM :(
Silly Smerity =]

Anyway, after I got my bearings with the depth component I ended up with a thing of beauty... Nearly =]

That concluded late Saturday night. Sunday I went to work on diffuse shading, which came out quicker than I thought. By the end of the day I ended up with -

My attempt at adaptive antialiasing failed... Horrifically... Teaches me to try and come up with my own theory flying in the face of convention - this is just me cheating with low supersampling ^_^

My 'ghostray', the results of the failed adaptive AA =]

Today however I ended up going into the University of Sydney. Yes, the coding sprint that I thought was off was in fact back on =] A disturbingly short email alerted me to its re-occurrence but luckily Cat filled in the gaps... Got there today, extra early as I was expecting trouble on the Bridge (the Tunnel went toll free) and freaked out for most of the morning as no-one was there =] After a while a guy or two appeared and the day got underway. A bunch less people that I expected, but that was as they were either overseas or they were panicking about a commercial project due in some time last week =]
I ended up working on a web interface to help users classify questions. I won't say too much about it as I'm not exactly sure how open/closed it is, but here's the result of day one of two -

Obviously the question has the answer in it, but that's only as we haven't done our own questions yet and are running on previously tagged corpus questions.

Anyway, until next time, NLP FTW!
Smerity

The world could be one very lonely place indeed

2007-07-02T01:40:00.000+10:00

That was my general thought patterns of tonight. Long story - ready for a stroll?

It was around midnight, and I'd just finished seeing Knocked Up with a few friends, so I was heading to Robyn's place to drop her off and my car hit a really really strange object on the road - gave it quite a good thumping - so I decided that after I dropped her off I'd go back and fix up whatever the issue was there. So I got back to that spot of road, now about 12:30 and looked at what it was...

Quite strange ... There are doorknobs... dozens of doorknobs all over the road... So I went to work, collecting them, with some cars driving past who I no doubt think must have decided I was a drunk loon, and finally ended up with a quite reasonable stash.

I moved the stash off the road to a grassy side area and called it a night. Just for more of an indepth focus, those doorknobs were huge!

Anyway, as I was driving home, I became more and more depressed, for reasons I won't go into. Having arrived home, I decided that it was time to go for a walk - which is basically what I do when I have melancholy thoughts. So wandering out and about in the moonlight at 1:30, thoroughly defeated and cursing the world, I was saved by a shooting star. Shooting stars are wonderful things - truly truly truly. I mean, they might not fix the problems, but they give you that tiny glimmer of hope that the world is much larger than you reckon it to be - that there's a chance, that infinitesimally small chance that things may happen for a reason.

So that's where I'm at =] With this clear state of mind I may confront a few issues, and then round it off by what I did for WC #5.

First issue, I'm starting to become a bit of a running joke with my group of friends from school, and my best friend seems to be drifting off. Really not a good thing to start happening as I'm about to enter my last term of school with these guys. Such happens I guess. I'm sure they mean it in jest - or at least I hope they do - but it's really starting to get to me. I don't know what I can do to fix it - I don't know if there is anything that can...

Second issue, girls. But they're always an issue, so best left unsaid.

Third issue, academic. School is pulling away from me - I need to do some major catch up. This is the last holiday I really have to finish everything - three weeks from now is when the world starts to implode. Extension Two needs to be completed, math needs to be revised, Latin needs to be (majorly) relearnt and music needs to be finished. And it's worrying...

Fourth issue, avoid the deus ex machina mode. It's a lovely feeling to imagine that someone will come down and pluck you out of your meager life as it stands and place you high above the reach of mortal man - but sorry, it's unlikely to happen. Malcom Reynolds says it best - "That's a long wait for a train that don't come."
I fell into that trap again. A Doctor invited me to an academic venture in the holidays, and I thought it was a great opening, and it would have been I guess, but it didn't come to a point of fruition. You just have to realise that if you're going to get anywhere from the point you are at now, you have to work for it yourself. You can't bank on anyone else helping you - the world's not so kind.

That's my major whine at least. Hopefully I'll look back on that and laugh =]

On a much happier note, this weekend Weekend Challenge #5 launched - Game On ^_^ I didn't actually end up finishing a game, but I did a fair amount.

Above is an image from a homebrew game I made a while for the PSP - based on a game called Airstrike. I decided I wanted to try something like it, but more complex, involving projectile motions and gravity etc. The major thing I wanted to go for was a 'gravity bomb' ^_^ Only problem is that it all involved vectors, and no-one ever taught me vectors - I unfortunately couldn't take physics at school due to a subject clash :( Anyway, I taught myself vectors, didn't end up being as difficult as I'd imagined, and ended up with -

Projectiles ^_^ I simulated gravity. The picture above is just with the computer firing projectiles off in random directions and at random velocities. I later on refined it and made it user definable by calculating the vector from the mouse cursor's location. Moving on from that, I then decided I wanted to do gravity full stop and reacquainted myself with Kepler's laws of planetary motion, and also with gravity generally itself.

So I finally ended up with gravity =] Oh gravity, how sweet you are. The point of gravity is also user definable via right clicking ^_^ Makes for some fun in flinging objects around. And finally, if you leave the objects trailing around long enough they begin to eerily resemble the Spirographs of my youth ;)

How this will actually end up a game of any kind I'm still not entirely sure ^_^

So yes... That's how I've been - how about you?
Smerity

Bogosort FTW!

2007-06-22T19:52:00.000+10:00

Chris introduced me to a lovely concept - bogosort!
Imagine you wanted to sort a deck of cards - you could either sort it like a sane person or you could throw the cards into the air, pick them up, and if they're not sorted, repeat the process. Surprise - it's not all that efficient =]

In other news, as part of The Hills Grammar team I competed in Progcomp, and we got into the finals - woot ^_^
I didn't do Q1 and Q2 was a joint effort. Lost points in Q5 were due to having O(n^2) or similar instead of a more efficient algorithm and I think I may have done some funky formatting on Question Two.

We'll see how it goes, top prize is $3000 and UNSW scholarships - nice no?
Smerity

Maths =]

2007-06-12T10:03:00.000+10:00

Ok - scratch the last post that I'm failing Extension Math, because as of 8:45am my last assessment I got 100% =]

I'm happy now - all I have to do is get a reasonable mark in Two Unit and I'm set. McClure seems sufficiently shocked ;)

Second edit - it's a few days later and I have my two unit back. 87.5% - it's not the same explosive level as three unit but it's certainly respectable in the least.

Here's to math!
Smerity

Near a year and near no heart

2007-06-10T20:51:00.000+10:00

Nearly a year has past, once again, a disturbingly long period. I never seem to make the time for blog posts unless I'm procrastinating - and when I'm procrastinating I damn well know it, and hence don't really get that far =]

In short -

Stopped going to Jazz Ensemble, Orchestra and Senior Concert Band - something regrettable but ultimately needed
Went to NCSS
Year 12
More fixation delusions
Universities nearing - appears I'm most likely USyding
Python scripting is second nature now
Made Perfect have broken up - I guess their website's not worth that much now no?
Went to the Debutante again
Researched into Natural Language Processing, Neural Networks, Self Organizing Maps etc
Failing Extension Math ... Bu yeah ... -dies-

To show you some of the stuff I've done ...

Hayley pulled me to seeing Pirates of the Carribean with their crazy group =]

I really should have known - never trust pirates :S

Went to NCSS, won Top Programmer's Award, then I joined the NCSS Forums (NCSSF)

(I decided to make fun of James Curran, who runs NCSS =])

Started the Weekend Challenge on NCSSF. First weekend was text handling, so I made a Mark V Shaney generator, which produced interesting results to say the least. Second was Plugins, so I made a plugin for Blender that created a Lorentz Attractor.

Third was Artificial Intelligence, so I made a Kohonen self organizing map that when given totally random input would sort it into sensible groups. For example, when entered with totally random colours it moves to -

I also then expanded the application to sort images depending on their overall colour components - some example sorts,

That's where it's at for the Weekend Challenge so far. I motion detection using my webcam under Linux. These were my first few attempts at finding a way to isolate motion.

Putting this into something useful, I eventually ended up with an applet that detected movement - the example below was a result of me just twiddling my fingers.

I shall continue this hit and run down memory lane later =]
Smerity

Of Norse Gods and Metafiction

2006-11-12T19:39:00.000+11:00

So here's where it currently stands - I haven't posted here for about three months - I know, I know, naughty Smerity eh?

To note, since I'm now posting on another blog, I'll cross post links to and from it when I make a new entry -

Of Norse Gods and Metafiction

Lets see... Outlined since the 7th of August...

Mirelle was right, deluded Smerity was wrong - previous fixation fell through the cracks
P Plates ! Mind you, I haven't really used them to their full ability yet, but it has loosened up my schedule considerably... Now all I need to be able to do is get drunk legally and I'm really in a position to cause havoc ^_^
Participated in NCSS Challenge where I learnt Python (and promptly fell in love with it)
Made a website for MadePerfect for their gig on the 28th of October (Exposure)
Went to Animania
Met a girl from band camp whom I've taken an interest in (though I'm starting to think deluded Smerity has made a return)
Started English Extension Two meetings ... oh the humanity ! They're actually a lot of fun, but Gates makes you do quite a bit of work O_o
Discovered Jericho
Fallen back in love with Cowboy Bebop - such a great series =)
Become first trombone in jazz/senior concert/orchestra, and taken on the challenges from that O_o
Got Brisco instead of Peters for Latin - he's different, more relaxed, and better in many ways

That's all I can really remember at the moment =)

No hidden signals

2006-08-07T23:18:00.000+10:00

- Currently- watching Scrubs
Also, good link for a random word generator

Speaking with a friend on the state of friends, girls and the world, we've both come to an agreement.
The mind should be open. Not only open though, but near broadcasted! My friend wants thought bubbles popping out of people's heads, I want a bit of a heads-up display (you can see I'm the technological nerd here lol)
So, on this thought bubble or HUD, is placed our current train of thought, or even just an emoticon. When you walk up to someone, and they first catch sight of you, could you imagine the feeling you'd have if you saw a smiley face suddenly appear floating above their heads. Not only would they wearing a smile (which could be fake), but you could see they were genuinely happy to see you - no lie, no fake, all truth.
At least in our minds that would be amazing. Yes, both of us see that there is the chance for unfortunate consequences, like the discovery that someone you thought truly was your friend isn't, but put simply, wouldn't it be better to find out now then at a point when it truly matters?

Ah... And I don't know =)
There's either the chance it's going well, or the chance that it's not going at all.

That's how I've felt for a while recently. The one thing worse than knowing that you've lost your chance is not knowing whether or not there stands a chance at all...

You can't teach courage. You can force it, but we won't always be around to give that nudge...

2006-07-12T01:22:00.000+10:00

So says a possible character. Great man you say? Maybe... Can courage be taught? It's an interesting question, one that opens an avenue for exploration.
But that isn't why I'm here. No, I've come to this place in search of an idea. I've a stunning need to write something for the Creative Writers Group (CWG) and without an idea, a story gets nowhere. And worse than that, a notebook full of ideas, but a story has yet to really emerge from any of them. The ideas are bad? Maybe. The writer is bad? (A more likely) Maybe.

And this is where I skip the above as I wrote it days ago and left a window with it open in Firefox =)

Nonetheless, its been an interesting time. I thought of the above whilst sitting around Towers after my date.

To put the date in perspective though, we have to start well before it's beginning. I was dropped off to Towers at 8:20 in the morning, before almost any of the shops had really even opened. The date wasn't actually to start until 11:30, so I had some time to kill. I began wandering Towers, just listening to the calm. It's amazing how many things you don't notice until you stop and look at them. There are musings there that the mind never sees, the whole place is like a Museum.
So, I stared at the sights until 9:30, when Just Cuts opened and got a hair cut (where I also found my name was 'Jessica' according to the print out). From here, I bought a pad and pacer, totally ~$2.50, and wrote for a while. Eventually I grew bored of that, and bought a book, Foundation by Isaac Asimov. Great book, kept me well enjoyed.
Some time before 11, I decided I would go up there and wait around for her to turn up. I got there however, and she was already there ! O_O
"OH MY GOD! I'M LATE FOR THE DATE" < - Panicking Smerity Luckily though, as like most things, I overcompensated. She was early =) We grabbed a bite to eat, and then wandered about Towers for a while, turning off our frontal lobes and running child mode for a while ^_^ Then we finally went to see Superman Returns. It took me an hour to raise the arm chair in between us, and then nothing really happened. I don't think it was me chickening out, she just didn't seem very interested in even resting her head on my shoulder, so...
Hope it's not me =)
Then we wandered about Towers again, for what is chronologically a long time, but felt like a blink of an eye to me. Then she all of the sudden had to leave, her mum was already there.
After that I spent ~3-4 hours in Towers, until ~6 or 7pm when I saw Pirates of the Carribean : Dead Man's Chest.

So there you go, a quite surmised summary of what happened =)
She said she enjoyed it, I know I did, so here's hoping for the best from the future!

To hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.

Being this happy can't be legal! ^_^

2006-07-04T00:20:00.000+10:00

So, today as I was going through my emails, I came across one from the Oxygen Factory with the title of Risk. It begun,

Take risks; if you win, you will be happy;
if you lose, you will be more wise.

Well, thank god I'm not wise! lol
Basically, it worked. I took a jump, a leap in the dark. The main line of thought was the exact same as above. If I win, I surely would be happy, and if not, well, it's not the end of the world, not in any way.

What did I win you ask? A trip to the movies on a Friday night with a lovely girl

Just like Hawk though, after the first hurdle is done, I can freak out at the ones coming. There are questions burning their way into my mind.
We're going to a movie yes. But, me being a chicken, I didn't really define whether I was going as romantic interest or just as friends. While I'm happy with b if that's all I can get, I hope to god it's a. How do I find that out though? If she's expecting a and all I give her is b, she'll be confused, and if it's the other way around, she'll be freaked.
And then, in either case, panic! It's me! I'm going to lock up, freak out. Conversations will seem strange, and unnatural, like pot plant under bad fluroescent lights! Why in the world can't I find my damn book! I just hope it works out. Doesn't need to be Shakespeare, but what comes out of my mouth has to make sense, and it has to flow, instead of stop-start like I'm trying to do a math equation.

Anyway, got to go, considering 1:30am.
Just some things which I oughta point out in short.

Debutante, Sneak being busted, Peryta (from Peryton, for Miss Abby), Superman Returns, Cars, PotC Two, German exchange students returned home

"It reminds me that there truly are good people in the world, and that I'm not one of them"

2006-05-12T00:14:00.000+10:00

Obviously haven't posted in quite some time. Not much time to go into full, so will use very short words to tell of some of the newest things, no specific order...

Firefly, ADSL, Joss Whedon, HSC IT (in Yr 11), Debutante, Job (ISP), English (Gates), Writing (Creative - Gates), Corpse Bride, HHG2G, James Blunt, Time Machine, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Cory Doctorow), Stressed, Smallville, Gundam Seed, The Lab, Alive, Well

They're just a few things obviously.

Since I have very little time, as it's midnight thirty, I'll just do a few creatives things. Will also note how cool it was to look over some of my old posts, was I ever that strangely interesting? lol

Dangit, my old random word generator site is down, and I can't really find anything to replace it for the moment.

The men had once come here to help them all. They came as heroes, hoping to save a generation from their own failings. All they succeeded in doing was the opposite.

truant - In real life, people like to be blind to the truth. The truth is hard and solid, a fact, and as such, can't be changed, for better or worse. Ever wonder why your parents rarely told you the truth when you were young, especially when a white lie would suffice?
A lie is not restricted by the tightly bound morality of the truth. If the information is painful, it can be changed, podded and proked just enough to be kind instead of a killer.
Truants have never been blessed with this ignorance. Other than the most elaborately staged mistruths can a truant not tell the truth is being misrepresented. At all other times, a lie, whether large or small, rarely gets past one.
For this reason, they've been exiled from much of society. Why would you want a truant? They can read your thoughts almost like their own, trespassing into a place you own, a place where you cannot erect fences, your very mind.

wiltand - A small portable device lodged into the ground to detect probabilities for a set of preset events. Instead of having to hire a surveyor, or a battle strategist, or anyone else, this small device, placed upon the ground and left for mere seconds, can tell you the decisive result on any forceast.

okerin - Handheld injection syringe used within the classroom. It injects the (expensive and rare) Retaneld-D into the blood system, which acts almost instantaneously, and overclocks the brain for a small timeframe. During this period of time, one can reach a state where the rest of reality is apparently slowed, whilst the brain calculates at a speed at which the body cannot keep up.
Originally this was used by students in exams to boost their results, and very successfully. This practice was considered immoral, as not all students could afford or obtain the drug. Now however, before all major exams, students are injected with a standard government issued Retaneld-D, meaning that no students get an unfair advantage.
Some studies suggest that the use of Retaneld-D can result in excessive neuron loss and neuron structure deformation, but these studies have been preliminary, and often disagreed with heavily by peer-reviewed sources.
Whilst it is true that Retaneld-A through C also had prevasive stability issues, it is believed that Retaneld-D is a much improved and safer structure, as it has been completely rebuilt.

Hope you / me / my rare and nonchalant audience enjoys =)

No triangle I've ever met is perfectly equilateral

2005-05-29T14:03:00.000+10:00

Oh sure, it all works well in theory. A perfectly equilateral has sides of the exact same length and all internal angles are 80 degrees. But have you ever tried the damn thing in real life? One angle argues with another, and they try to get as far away from each other as possible. Now look what the hell you're left with! An ISOSCELES triangle! What the smeggin' darn bleemin' is so good about an isosceles triangle? Well... I'm sure there's something, it's just I was asleep through that maths lesson...

But that whole rant was attempting to express my whole disgust with the way most things are in life. Most of the time, one thing is perfect, or near to it, and the rest are absolutely stuffed. You try and fix the things which are absolutely stuffed, only to turn around and see the perfect now making it's way sorrowfully to the midline. Or something like that.

In summary, you fix one side of the triangle up, the others sides go out of wonk, just like when you try to balance a pencil on your nose and have a conversation at the same time.

Once again I'm off on a rant, but it's better to be on a rant than to be in a coffin, or worse, be the wood of a coffin. What a depressing thing it would be for a tree. It spends its whole life growing up, dreaming of being an elaborate carving on a marble staircase or a meticulously detailed table, when all of the sudden its chopped down and turned into a smeggin' coffin! No-one ever looks at a coffin, and they're always crying if they do, and then, when that part's all over, the damn things buried, never to retrieved again...

Ok, it looks like every time I notice I'm in a real rant and attempt to stop, I just keep going... Most things are like that though, for the same reason why there has to be an orange light before a red one at intersections, some daft idiot takes a while to get through his head he has to stop.

Well, I guess I was trying to be a little creative, but this is turning more rant out than rave. I'm not sure if that's a problem, and I sure as hell don't want to find out!

Some days, some days...

2005-05-07T01:10:00.000+10:00

Some days you find yourself wandering if all the good in the world is already in use, and whether you're clinging to the scraps. Or at least that's how I feel.
It may not be reflective, creative, or even true, but it's pretty much how I feel. There are some days when I've had about all I can put up with, and I think this is one of them...

My eyes burn as I type this, my neck wears for sleep, and my mind is all but lost in a blind hope of rest. I really don't know what I want, I just know that I don't want to fall asleep feeling so unfulfilled, left without any story...
I still chase after illusions, illusions of a possible grandeur, a spot in the world, but that's fading fast. As soon as I ponder upon it, another side of my brain already comes up with a counter argument. It's horrible sometimes... My mind works against itself, every decision I make. While yes, it's good most of the time, makes me appear responsible, forward-looking, it's just so strenuous. I don't want to have to think like that. I just want to go out, live the moment, not the future. That's the major problem, if you live the future, that's the thing, the future never gets here...

Bang! Anyway...

Perspective
Making multiple attempts at perspective recently, just another piece of the so called puzzle I need for art. It's horrible though, I don't know whether I am actually progressing! It's not like music, where you learn dominant 7th chords and you can immediately start using them, it's much more subtle that that... You study and work on X, but until Y and Z are done, you aren't going to see any change... Zip... Zero... Nada...

But hey, I'll still keep going. Cuz that's me, clinging on to a non-existent future... At least I do it with a smile! =)

Music
So much work, so little time. I have to work on a huge repertoire list for an upcoming gig... I have serious doubts on how ready it will be, but meh, I just have to try...

Imagination
Its been a little lost lately... No surprisingly imaginative ideas sprawling to life, just slow dreary babble. Whatever it is however, it won't be fixed by the same thinking that got me the problem in the first place (thanks Einstein!)
I plan on doing a lot more sketching and writing... That's what I usually do though... Maybe I should look at some photography pages, like the one a while back with a guy snapping all these abandoned houses and trains.

Farethewell, I hope better luck than this night's...

The sunshine falls on in

2005-04-19T23:14:00.000+10:00

Well, the girl I like is now on talking terms with me, and I'll take any improvements I can get! So, for the remainder of the night, I feel pretty good!
Now, Wikibooks is horridly hard. It's one of those things where you don't know how hard it is until you do it. Still though, I knocked over an intro, so what the hey.

However, I looked into some writing tips/techniques/ideas. Some great sources are:
Holly Lisle
About.Com

Some of the ideas suggested were incredibly insightful, some of them are just what I've been doing all along! So, without further adieu, the insanity begins.

Rain assaulted the sky, lightening awoke the thunder in the clouds. One man stood, alone, in the rain, seeming to pay no attention to it. He was drenched, frozen to the bone, but it really didn't bother him. He didn't feel it anymore. Feel anything anymore.

Yeah, well, I kind of lost the train of that one, but hey, how cool is the intro!

I can of fell off the wagon again tonight, I spent the next 30 or so minutes reading the story tips =)

Oh well, good luck...

Wikipedia, a home of all

2005-04-19T14:51:00.000+10:00

Wikipedia is an absolutely fantastic source of everything. An open encyclopedia, able to be edited by the common man or the fabled rocket scientist. If you don't know of it, check it out! It really is an experience, and from that day on it will be the first thing you turn to, even before Google.
From well-known things like chords to more oblique things like a little known game I play called Utopia it seems Wikipedia has it all.

A sub section of the whole Wiki culture is also Wikibooks, books that can be created by anyone. This isn't quite as filled as Wikipedia, most probably as articles are much easier to write and add to than full blown literary creations.

That brings me to my next thought, should I make a Wikibook? I go there, see a title, and open it with a smile, only to find it's empty. Empty you say? Well, yes, no-one has written it yet...
What gives you the permission to write a Wikibook? Well, that's the point, equal rights, equal world, the Wiki doesn't discriminate whether you are a PhD scientist or a young kid, as long as what you write is legible and sensical.

Thus, I am to write/contribute to a Wikibook!
Thus, I am going to contribute to The Written Word, of which I at least have elementary experience, and something is better than nothing, correct?

I am off to contribute, so fair the well, and I may drop by again soon.

Sleep is a highly addictive behavior, break it!

2005-04-16T15:28:00.000+10:00

Think about it though, sleep could pretty much be described as an addictive behavior, of which we are, whenever we're awake, in withdrawal from. Since a child is born and first convinced to sleep, it has begun to take over. Then, as they grow older, they become even more addicted to it. If they don't get their fix, they become agitated, angry, annoyed, and even if we get a full dose, we can only last so many hours before we must succumb to it's grasp again!
Therefore, I surmise that sleep is a drug, and that the habit must be broken... =)

Characterisation
Preston asked me today how to do characterisation. It was really hard to give even an elementary explanation of it. It's one of those things which you always consider so simple when paying no attention to it, but the second you need it, find it ghoulishly difficult.
I got it down to a few base things, none of which may be true, but I try!

Every character is not simply a name written on a page. For a name to actually become a character, a lot has to be taken into mind. There is no such thing as a simple character, for every character there ever was is as complex as ourselves, or at least should be. When a character makes a decision, it has nothing to do with what is wrong or right or what fits in with the story, but has everything to do with what the character would choose, why they would do it. That's why Final Fantasy or Lost is so successful, each character's persona is so fleshed out, made so real, that every decision they make is completely justified.
Also, whenever you describe a character in writing, there is always a chance to work in something about their persona. What they're wearing, what they do, they way they do it, is all a diffuse reflection of who they are. They can be obvious things, like telling how quickly they come to anger by showing that he assaults the barkeeper for not letting him have a drink, to subtle things, like the character being shy and therefore always hiding behind a layer of hair. You have to reveal the character in this way unless you want the reader to have to go through a dozen pages of introduction on who the character is and what they do.

Anyway, that's my rambling on characters and their personae (don't you love Latin declensions!)

Characterisation
One of the largest things which I forgot to mention, is that over the last year I have slowly been taking up piano, and, especially, have taken up jazz piano. Mind you, I'm not genius yet, but I can feel myself growing bit by bit more confident as I go, and at least now I know all the styles and have a good feeling of jazz music under my belt =)
For example, I just finished playing Fly me to the Moon, which is one helluva jazz standard. Mind you, I didn't play it smooth, I'm still learning it, I'm just trying to find a piece to play for performance coming up in a few weeks.

Inspired by Myself

2005-04-16T01:11:00.000+10:00

I know how dorky that sounds, but at least let me explain. I ran past a few of the posts in my blog from a year ago, and was amazed by some of the "Creative" writing. Simply put, it's insane! An unhindered flow of anything and everything to be thought of! It's just so utterly loose! I have trouble remembering a lot of it, as if it was written by someone else! I just have to try and get back into that groove.

Here we go again

He stood in a great hall, brilliant cold sunlight, the shade of the blue sky, spilling in. Under his leather boots was an expanse of polished marble floor, with the guild's emblem created within it. The emblem was simple, merely a black and white representation, but it got across the point. It was so polished that it was like looking into a tinted mirror. He stood in the middle of a great meeting, pleading with them to see his point. It was all coming apart, no-one saw his truth. He was going to have to fight for it. Some people laughed, others payed no attention, but they all knew it was the truth. In the end, he was forced out of the building. He descended down the steps of the great hall, now in disrepair. It resembled somewhat of a postmodern cathedral, or a renewed Parthenon, and was the only new building among a field of half destroyed ones. As he hit the street, he hid himself behind a cloak. This cloak was to be his home for years to come. Only hours later, this man had arranged it. The group. The one to repair the past, to redirect the future. The streets could not be left like this, the buildings could not be left to crumble. He had arranged a great taskforce, of the four most talented agents in the whole of the world. Each complementing the others strengths, all trained professionals, the others stood no chance, knew not what was going to hit them. It began with the destruction of a few warehouses. No one thought it a big deal, for the waterfront warehouses had only contained simple records. What they didn't know, however, was that those waterfront warehouses were actually a closely guarded secret. They kept his plans. The ones they had stolen from him. The only things keeping him in power. And now that they were ash, they had no more true power, only a dwindling empire to fall back upon. He would return this city to its prior pride, even if it killed him, and he meant every word of it. The taskforce was a work of genius. They were never anything more than something in the corner of your eye, leaving no trace, no trail. All the Guards heard were rantings of ghosts, people who disappeared into shadows, who fell into the street at mere sight. To some, they were thought of as heroes, avengers, but to the rest, they were the monsters under the bed, a fear greater than all others, a force of change.

Hell, I like it =) A post-parvum-apocalyptic world controlled by a monarchy of technocrats who stole their idea off of a man with pride still left within him.
Would make a good story, eh? =P

Good night, let your dreams be true and plentiful! =P

Infinite Monkey Theorem! And I'm back...

2005-04-14T17:55:00.000+10:00

The infinite monkey theorem, while technically impossible, is still amazingly cool. The general premise goes:
"Given enough time, a chimpanzee typing at random will eventually type out a copy of one of Shakespeare's plays."
Go to Wikipedia's article for more info

And yes, after a year long hiatus, I am back, having wandered in from the darkness, with the bitter cold biting at my heels.

Phone Dialers
This very morning I was awoken by a devil itself. The viril buzz evoked the most primitive sense into me... Get up, and RUN! No, it was not the alarm clock, but, the phone.
Yes, the phone. You can't tell if the person is important or unimportant until you pick up, and unfortunately, due to it's very nature, you have to race to it to get to it in time.

This, is a horrible shock to someone still half asleep (semi-somnus), as the primitive instinct in your mind says "It's going to stop if you don't do something!"
So, I jumped up and ran for it! Ran with all my might! And what did I get when I picked it up? Someone asking if I was interested in some sort of holiday! BAH! The evility of the world today!

Holiday Hell
Yes, what I say is true! I seem to hate the holidays at the moment... Maybe it's just my frame of mind, but for the whole of the holidays so far, I've only been depressed or partially elated. I haven't really gone anywhere, and that may be the problem...

No, nowhere, apart from the movies and half a handfull of other places. It is deadly boring. It reminds me of when I was much younger, or, well, even now, when every weekend is like this. I have to entertain myself. How do you think I became so good at computers? It was the only thing I could turn to... No-one takes me out, no-one can take me out... Hanging out to me is what the teenagers in the movies do, I rarely ever do it, and I mean, ever...

That's a serious problem of my life at the moment, and hey, it needs a solution, but I haven't come up with one yet.

When, over a year ago, I said:
"I also need to find a project to become dedicated too soon, or I'll go mad..."
I didn't know how true I was.
I still haven't found anything, and it's gnawing away at me.

Now, for something completely different!
Considering this one post has taken more than three days to write (considering multiple times my post has been lost, I've been too busy or simply forgot) I'm going to simply wrap this up with my old insanity... I haven't practiced in a while, so I may be a little rusty, but hey! Stick with it =)
I want to get back to the "My subconscious went into overdrive!" days, and I certainly look forward to it!

(random words site)

forbs - The name of underground resistance groups, always working on weapons. They work on weapons as they don't have numbers, the only way to win with wit. Smoke is always billowing out of the deep underground caves, and many measures have to be taken to ensure they remain secret. That becomes the job of the smoke-watchers.
rehazes - On the horizon, the eyes of a talented seamen can see a slight disturbance of the horizon, as if one is tugging at the edges of the air itself. That haze, that small disturbance, may end up saving one's life, for it is actually the emissions of a cannon, one which, as all great weapons are, is only seen, not heard.
hievoksed - They have no option in life, they always have to run. No-one understands their talents, they only know their own fear. To see into another persons emotions is almost like trespassing, but they can't help it.
crontomodused - When one distorts the natural progression of a civilisation, because they focus on one area way too much. Essentially, it is when a civilisation advances incredibly in one area, but nowhere else, creating an immensely imbalanced society. This inevitably leads to a downfall. The closest in today's world would probably be computing, exceeding the speed of innovation and creation of almost any other industry in leaps and bounds.
enherest - The people who enherest promote the idea of revolt against an inane monarchy, one which controls all for one man's (or woman's) benefit. If caught, they are commonly charged with enheresty, which is considerably worse than mere treason.
collacon - These devices are the equivalent of a Miner's Bird. The material, through the world itself, can predict the possibility of destruction. It acts much like a piece of metal and a magnet, except this piece of metal tries to run like hell. Commonly used in military vehicles, this has saved many peoples lives. A more infamous use is that of a personal pendant, worn around the neck. The only reason it is infamous is that it is considered cowardly, and to be a coward, one must lose much honour. None the less, many talented fighters have been seen with these smalls pendants embracing their necks.
trimage - Many assassins, before they go off to battle, gather the three closest mages they know to them, to perform a sacred act. This act is the blessing of the assassin's tools, blessing them not just with luck, but with justice. It is believed an assassin must have the permission of three other highly respected individuals, at least that of mages, before they may perform such a task. It is commonly believed that if even one of the the three is in partial doubt, that the attempt will end up disasterous.
ductivations - A technique used by many new-age detectives, where one tries to know as few facts as possbile about a crime, and attempt to fill in the gaps from there. This means, that if they are going down the right track, the other facts known about the crime will fit into the detective's story, therefore, meaning that the detective is correct. Some people believe these men are more like psychics than true detectives.
ressive - Ressive tactics are most commonly used in war. Ressive tactics are actions done merely to infuriate the enemy, not to any real advantage. These are often very difficult actions, requiring immense skill and effort. A good example is a midnight drop of a dozen marines into a heavily armed fortress, with their only aim to spray paint propoganda and slang on the walls of the fortress.
hurterlation (from hurterlated) - The process by which pain is transmitted up to the brain in a partial cyborg. This is quite different to that by which a normal human feels pain, as nanoprobes assist in this task. First, the body is injured, and a message is sent along nerves to eventually end up at the brain. However, along the way, nanoprobes pick up on these senses and send them by wireless to nanoprobes in the brain. In this instant, the person is struck by pain as they notice their body has been injured. Meanwhile, the other message is still being carried along the nervous system, and finally reaches the brain. Bang! The person has just received the same message of injury again, to twice the discomfort.
A similar thing happens in fighting, called hurterlation insight, where a cyborg is given the information necessary in the fight mere milleseconds before they normally would, and because of this, end up fighting almost a few milleseconds earlier. Consider it their spidey-sense.

Wow! That was fun =) Now I remember why I loved it so much, and I haven't even gotten back into stories yet! Oh the world we live in! ^_^

Tears are a release, not a terror =)

2004-07-16T23:45:00.000+10:00

That's a excerpt from a conversation I had to a very depressed friend.
Sure, not all tears are a release, crying from pain is certainly not, but when it comes to emotional situations, a tear is the starting point.

Anyway =P

An Upgrade!
Seems like Blogger has had a GUI update, don't know whether or not I like it yet, but at the moment it's fine. Like the option to edit HTML manually though, very good idea (not that I'm going to use it lol)

Dream on =P
Yep, that's right, they're still going. Latest one was extremely weird, had something to do with France, some very stylistic architecture, old Gothic Cathedral style? It also happened to involve my school, friends from school, a clown, and having a talk to a clown about losing people "I know it's hard, I lost a friend once myself" "But my cow left me!" (the cow was like a spray painted coloured cow... enough said eh?)
Funny dream, very strange lol

Another one involved me having Spiderman powers (but I later found out that the Spidey powers only occurred in my dream's dreams, though I think I did attempt to bring my dream's dream to my dream's reality... Yeah... lol) and strange giant steam engine tanks, and I had to destroy them. So, armed with a rocket launcher, I took a few out, until I tested the alternate attack (right click =P) and that charged up a little bar and took over an enemy vehicle... Yes, it was about as weird as it sounds lol

Homework... EH?
School starts again on Tuesday next week *eek*
I have an assignment to do, in four parts, and I'm going to absolutely hate all of it... Some of it may have been bareable if given in seperate chunks, but who wants to do a new cover for a book, a short story, a character study and a book review all for the same thing?!?!? It's not sane!

Of VSG
Well, I just started with the list, started to get bombarded by their mail list =P
Oh well, heavenly creatures really, I'm sure it's going to get uber-fun very soon...

Of horror stories and power cuts
Well, I was reading a thread at CGTalk entitled "Strangest experiences that happened to you", absolutely freaked me out. These people don't lie (or at least the majority of them) and most of them I would trust with my life (well, almost), and it was really scary stuff. Anyway, page 14 out of 19 and the POWER WENT OUT! It never goes out here! What are the chances! Anyway, I was scared as hell all that night and didn't fall asleep till hours later when the power was back on... lol

Goodnight, it's almost midnight (11:59 as of writing) and I must up and away... Farewell one and all (even though, as I have pointed out many times before, no-one reads this but me lol)

Dream on =)

2004-07-08T22:55:00.000+10:00

Well well well =)
I've had a dream every day (or more specifically night =P) since the nightmares, and I'm happy to say they aren't nightmares (or at least don't scare the hell out of me!). I can remember them, if I really try, so that's an extremely good thing. Dreams are actually a lot of fun, a purely original show playing out in the deep abyss that is your brain.

Anyway! =P

The Girl =)
I've got to make sure I don't chicken out on this =) I've got to make sure I don't screw it up monumentally. I just want a fair chance at asking her out, without any trip-ups, or half broken sentences. If I make a good stand, and she says no, I'll be happy, because I made my stand. Then, it'll be even more confusing if she says yes =P We're kind of in different social groups, both kind of inbetweeners, and that means that at school we probably wouldn't have a great amount of contact.
Oh well, at this stage, it's a dream, but a dream which I hope has at least some foundations outside of the Wonderland playing itself inside my head.

My teeth are imprisoned in bars of metal! =P
The braces are going alright, I guess =) I got them in two days ago now, and they're about as bad as the spacers I had in before, but with the major difference it hurts to chew on anything at the moment =) Yes, anything, biscuits, sausages, and especially calamari! It takes a lot of getting used to though, especially when I tried to whistle for my dog, and then all of the sudden noticed it wasn't working too well. After a few stops and starts I found out it worked, but haphazardly lol
Only time will tell, I so hope I get used to them! =P

Last Exile
I still haven't gotten that last episode of Last Exile! Episode 26, the final one, that's it. Still haven't got it...
*sigh*
lol. It's actually not that bad, if I leave my connection on for approximately 26 hours and start downloading, it'll be done, but the problem is that it isn't a resuming one, so an hour here or there won't work.
It's an amazing series though, so I'll get the end of it eventually.

Star Trek
Star Trek Season 7 Marathon finished today, and I hadn't even noticed that Star Trek: The Next Generation had finished in 1994, silly silly me =) I quite like the series generally, I mean, nothing really challenges you mentally since Macguyver, it's good to see something which expands the general ideas of consciousness and of possible relaties, time, anti-time, etcetera =)
It was good while it lasted! =)

Homework
It really doesn't seem fair, but my last week is going to be partially ruined by homework. Fabulous me has left an assignment off until the last minute, a writing one, so I'm going to have to test how fast I can write this week, should go well, on a computer I can type faster than I can write. Anyway, that's my main bother =)

Forrest Gump
An excellent movie, makes you feel every major emotion during it's length... I don't have too much to say about it, apart from that =)

Creativity
It's that time again, to release the mental anguish =) Perfect time too, my music just clipped over onto Linkin Park, In the End, my favourite song, EVER!

Like a whirlwind inside of my head =)

An alleyway with ladders running up and down to the ceiling around it, and electronics, and wires, hanging out of every wall and sparking - A man is standing in the middle of it all, turning around, in a relaxed stance, to look at you. Two men, fighting on rooftops, which are tiled, running up and down with an agility never seen before - one falls off of the edge, but rebounds quickly using some kind of cord and the gutter of the building - they continue fighting and leaping from rooftop to rooftop. A man walking down a street, in the dark cold of midnight, and down a run down alley he encounters two guys, and rises slowly from his slunky walking pose to fight them off quickly. A electric train is running it's route between different flying cities, all connected by a small runway between them - All of the sudden the train is attacked with a kind of high-tech ballista, which fires a connective rope from far below straight into the vessel, letting others take over the train - the floating buildings it travels between look like pyraminds, but with quite a few extensions mainly below it. A vessel, meant for anti-grav transport, with a rudder at the back to direct airflow, it's coloured green and marked with golden runic symbols, on the bottom it has an engine which fits snuggly into the whole design - the whole thing looks like a fish with it's head and tail cut off, ie, tapering towards the end. Like in X-Men, with the girl who can go thru walls, someone fades into a building's wall and starts pushing out the bricks which hold it together - the guards come over to inspect what the hell's happening, and all of a sudden, out of the darkness just caused by the brick's hole, and hand comes thru - WOOOMPH - and knocks the guard stone cold =P ...

Oh well, not quite as good tonight, but I've been talking to my cousin Kate quite heavily =)

Here's to another day over, and yet another long night just begun!

My subconscious went into overdrive!

2004-07-07T22:45:00.000+10:00

Apart from a bad dream or two I had (involving death of family/dog and the end of the world, end of the world in a way which no-one could stop, they were just waiting for death), my subconscious is actually beginning to act really well. The only negative effect apart from nightmares is that I can't recall certain words like I used to, don't know why.

But other than that, I just noticed my sb (subconscious from now on) has been working in overdrive everwhere. I'm able to imagine completely original and independent things, like the African-American young boy, on a train, looking at his watch, and even though they may not be amazingly sparking ideas they are completely original and not derived. I think I hit the first step in breaking into my brain. I also noticed that my sb is working on MY problems now, not just running off in random directions (which was why I was probably so good at word recollection). For example, I found out that my sb was thinking about my crush all through my English exam, and when it came time for creative writing I just out of the blue decided to write one on a romantic comedy.

I really don't mind it too much, it's amazing to sit there with your eyes half open and let your mind wander to the strangest places you've ever been. You just start slowly swinging your head, and you feel only semi-there, and start melting away in your head. You can imagine whole worlds on your own doorstep.

General
Anyway =) I have once again gone no-where today, and the VSG school hsan't gotten back to me yet, and I'm getting braces tomorrow... Hmm...

Style and Simplification
Beauty comes through simplification and style... Simplification to represent only what needs representation, for example, like most comics, they only represent what needs it, and what's the use of highly detailing the left side of a car when you're never going to see it. Can you get the same effect with a sphere as a highly subsurfed and carefully tended model?
Style, everyone needs style, as style is what will help you define a work. Some people's styles come through colour schemes, others through the use (or overuse) of certain techniques in post pro, or others just by doing something no-one else could. Some people try to develop for a world, so that people think of it and like it like a telivision series, waiting for the next 'episode'! A lot of things generally =) I must persevere to try and discover my style...
WooT WooT!

The Moon, Lunus pretiosum
I think that translate into 'the precious moon', but I'm not sure. Pretiosus/a is precious/dear, I know that, but there are some disrepcancies on lunus/luna. Either way, I don't have my Latin books here =)
Just a general note, the moonlight has been excedingly bright recently. So bright infact that my alarm woke me up a few nights ago, and I thought it was broken, because there were shadows on my wall from all the light. It was actually the moonlight. This light was just so piercingly strong that I could see everything around my house, a good 5-10 kilometre view, perfectly, apart from a few areas bathed in fog.

Maybe it's a sign decreed by the ancient Hindus showing that the moon is at a perfect reflective angle to the sun, signalling that the moon shall fall out of it's orbit and crash into the earth... =)

Well, we can all still hope right? =P

Klaus Badelt =)

2004-07-06T12:05:00.001+10:00

Sounds like a bad science fiction name, but in all reality he is a fantastic musician. On par with Howard Shore, creator of the Lord of the Rings Soundtrack, and that's saying something.
Klaus Badelt is the creator of the music for Pirates of the Carribean! The music has an amazing sense of mood and power, and I really love them. It also fits in perfectly among my Howard Shore, Last Exile (Dolce Triade\Shuntaro Okino\Hitomi Kurioshi), and the rest =P

My site
My site required a LOT of work it seemed, mainly along the lines of W3C Validation (that's the set of rules and compliance for HTML on webpages). Now that is all done, all I need to do is add little thumbnails to the galleries =)
It also has a new domain, now it is located at www.smerity.tk until I can get www.smerity.com =)

Spiderman 2
Quite an excellent movie personally, all the effects looked excellent, Doc Oc's tentacles were composited in the scenes perfectly. It also had a nice balance of action/comedy/drama (even if in some scenes drama is over or underdone). I personally think it was much better than the first, and I love coming out of a movie and feeling I could run up a wall =P

3D
Considering going to AFTRS (The Australian Film Television and Radio School) for my post HSC studies, as it is available in Sydney, has a strong creative/traditional art foundings and education on that subject and will speed track me through learning Maya. It has also been influenced by the recent success of Sejong Park, a student who went there, and now has an animation about his experiences in war-torn Korea at Siggraph.

Invader Zim
Trying intently to download Invader Zim, a cartoon about a misfit alien trying to "TAKE OVER THE WORLD!"
While it may sound typical and common story plot, the way they play it out is amazingly unique, and is one of my favourite shows. Everything has an overexaggerated personality, and that's half of the reason I love it so much =P
(BTW, may I note here BitTorrent sucks! It's supposedly supposed to increase download speeds, well, I have a modem, and so far I've downloaded 47.2 Mb and UPLOADED 244.3 Mb! Where's the justice in that! I have almost another 1000 hours before the download is finished... Oh well...)

Art/Creativity
I think I'm getting better. There are sometimes, when listening to music, or lying in bed before I fall asleep, that my brain just wonders and sees a million different things, a corridor here, a winding staircase there, anything and everything, organic or inorganic, and all things inbetween. Architecture unfolds with every beat of the music, a dragon unfurls from it's shell. It's quite amazing, drugs except with no injection, at least not one I'm aware of =)

Of note, I created three new 3D works recently =P

The Techy Trashcan =) More info available at my site in the gallery pages, but the general info is the original image was created for a speed modelling contest, and from there it evolved into a scene. I still have a long way to go on the scene, and I just noticed how lowly detailed the trashcan is (I've seen it with 'new eyes')
May have an update in the future

The Blue Mushroom! =P
This I really really like. It started off merely modelling a quick mushroom (nice and simple things lol) and then I started to work on the texture and material heavily, and then I added a quick branch, and then some leaves.
I'd love to make a scene involving this in the future. Enchanted forest, with some sort of twist, maybe pollution killing them off, a "you don't know what you're missing" kind of thing =)

Anyway, I'm just going to let my imagination run wild until I'm forced to go to bed, just relax and listen to the waves and babble on typing. I saw this really weird scene with some sort of mannequin smoking, sitting lazily on a chair with it's feet on a desk. A scene with a car speeding along, the speedometer going wild, when all of the sudden something happens, and you go to a view under the car, and see ice start to travel along a pipe under there, freezing up the rest of the engine. Just a note, a really weird thing on Nickelodeon at the moment, they feature a pufferfish singing an old 1970s (or 60s, lower) into an old microphone while he's underwater in his fish bowl ("I'm waiting for the moon, a little sunlight, and just you..."). Nova 96.9 commercial ("Sounds Different") features an old guy peeling an orange, which screams every time he peels it. Imagination back, an old man, with an old pair of half moon spectacles, a top hat, and a gold chain to hold the spectacles. He is facing forward (forward forward, the same way as the photographer) but turning his head to look back, and has a mistrusting look in his eyes. I'm starting to lose it, so I'm just generally typing, typing helps to bring it back, and just looking forward with my eyes closed, somethings come quickly, others not at all. A control room featuring gears, and old mono style levels (pull the long level back to control something). Some sort of reddish crocidile, with bags under it's eyes. A robot, facing forward, with something like antlers, and his hands on the ground forward infront of him. Some kind of superhero, holding onto a cloud with one hand and grabbing someone else with the other, while he gets dragged around by the cloud. An Egyptian wall, with block collums to the left of a doorway, with stairs up to a giant door, and an Egyptian style dog at the top of the entrance, sticking out and protecting it. The top of a building, and the gargoyles on the side are replaced with ravenous dogs, their mane's hair stuck back in vicious spikes, and their mouths open to let the rain water drain out through them. It's all about trying to remain on this stream of images, adding tiny variables to keep cycling through the imagination in your head. The main variation I'm using is light levels (with my eyes closed), I turn on my picture screensaver, and it flicks to a difference size and contrasting image, changing light levels. I'm cycling music through my head too, and if I see a flicker of an idea, a balloon, a ballast, I try to focus on it and keep adding detail, or just staying with that in my head and seeing what I come up with. Just be free..... A generator in the middle of the air, with a spiral of small stars and particle streams all flying down towards it, powering it somehow. A building with two giant barrels on the top of it (cooling stacks, missile launchpads, who knows?). A giant robotic foot, nothing else connected, and all of the sudden part of it detaches and slowly goes down to the ground (like the back of a horse float) to reveal an army. A giant pole with chains coming off of it, getting struck by lightning, and down the bottom it is connected to an old book, standing on it's own stand, connect by a pole shaped like an upside down L. A snake charmer, with one of those goofy giant hats on his head, and a moustache, curled at the ends. A ship throwing anchor, with the anchor streaming past in the water, and the cannon on the boat in full roar with an aura of red surrounding it, blurred by all the motion. A guy with dreadlocks (brown) and a metal face, with screws holding it in place here and there, with an expression of a rockstar on his face. A young boy, African-American (ie, black, but I hate having to say it cuz I sound racist, and I'm not) with a green baseball cap on his head, looking at a wristwatch.

Anyway, the time is now 11:19 PM, I kind of just left this window open throughout the day so I wouldn't forget to post, but all that creative stuff I came up with in the last, probably half hour. Got stuck in some trance, still half in it now =)
Goodnight! =)

A knight in shining armour? Stuff that, do you know how much polishing that takes!

2004-06-30T21:41:00.000+10:00

I'm straddling the gap between feeling okay and complete depression... Don't push me...

I am trying to stay happyish, hopeful, ish, and everything though. It's just hard!

BTW, I created the site I was talking about. Three days work... Woot... Woot...
.: My site:.
The whole site in total is only like 50Kb, should be almost instant, even for us poor modem users

It really sucks, I couldn't go to Spiderman-2 today. It just came out... I'm on holidays... I haven't gone anywhere yet... I've literally stayed at home the whole time... I tried arranging it with my parents... And... For all that hard work... Nothing... At all... Except that really annoying feeling like you've just swallowed liquid lead, and the whole inside of your stomach and heart are trying to meet the floor...

You shouldn't feel like this on holidays... It's just not right, nor logical. Should be happy, brimming with happiness... Yeah, right, theories suck... Dang nabbit. My dad wants me to go into his work, fix some computers there, and link one from home to the office, yet he doesn't know I haven't been out once since holidays... Once... I feel like a prisoner in my own home!

I guess what I'm saying is I don't want it to be this way.
I just don't know how to change it.

If that makes any sense...

Eh
On a positive note, a friend of mine in CG invited me to work on one of his projects, a project to recreate the cinematics of a game called "Crusader - No Regret". He talked me into it, and hyped me up about it =P Prospects for it are very good. There is still a huge fan base, and I implanted the idea that he could make an opensource recreation of the game, like Freedroids at Sourceforge, except this would be even better as a result of the huge fan base still obsessed with the game. This is also another sad story about what Microsoft can kill, the company who produced the game, Digital Anvil, a spin off of Origin, was bought out by MS, and nothing has been heard since. Ouchie, poor Natronio.

2D
I'm falling in love with two dimensions all over again. It all started with a DSG where I did a quick sketch of a Goblin King and digital painted over the sketch, and the flames were eventually fanned by an ex-Blender artist called Landis Fields, who has just updated his site to include Flash animation tests.
I want to try some stuff soon, really really want to try.

TV
A TV show I really enjoyed has it's series finale today. It was called Grounded for Life, and featured all of the kind of fun you want from a TV show. A crazy and cool uncle who hasn't married and seemingly never will, a father who doesn't want to stop you drinking beer but join in and chug a cold one himself, a mother who is just lovable, and a daughter who is a predictable teen. You of course, also have the grandfather, who's living with them instead of the home... Anyway, it ended, with a mixed flash back to the day the two parents got married, lots of fun. I'll miss it though.

She who must be obeyed...
That's how my dad refers to my mum. She set the beeper to 45 minutes. Like it matters. If I don't get up early tomorrow morning, it doesn't care, I'm not going anywhere anyway. Apart from possibly my dads work. But we all know how much I want to go there... Well, it's not that I don't necessarily want to, it's just like I'm going straight from school to work, instead of school, fun, work, fun fun fun... Just typing the word makes me sick. It's like eating a sausage infront of a starving man. Worse than that, it's like cooking them and then eating them infront of him.
Eh, stuff she who must be obeyed, I'm staying up. *goes to reset timer*

Steve C
'The energy stored in coal, crude oil and natural gas all comes from the sun. Im supposed to "Explain this statement."'
Well, I helped him out, and, for the record, 'I can't express how much you have saved my ass', it was an assignment due tomorrow for him =P (he's at a public school, we get holidays a week earlier and longer than they do)
Always happy to help an oppressed school student!

Planning for post-HSC
Hmm... I have a few [insert word meaning imposing and clashing] plans for the future.
For example, I want to do the three following -

1. I want to go straight into an internship at Rising Sun Pictures, and get a job there
2. I want to go and get educated in 2D and 3D graphics, at preferably a place like VFS or somewhere which offers Pixar certified training, or even better, is taught by Pixar employees.
3. I want to go and learn the theory and coding behind such a thing, at universities like Berkeley and Harvard.

Hmm... Let's consider all three... Fat chance...
I literally feel really sick at the moment... It's just not working out, and it's not like in those cruddy movies where everything is falling apart for the nerd (who under the surface is actually a 'cool guy'), and then some guy, or girl, or chic, or girlfriend walks up to him and says 'It's alright, life's a million paths, you couldn't predict the ones you were going to take, blah blah BLAH...' Well, ya know?

I just wish it wouldn't always feel like a fight to try and firmly plant my feet anywhere outside of school...

Endeth
And on that note, tune in tomorrow to discover how Smerity valiantly escapes the clutches of depression,

He can't be that bad... He's got Tic Tacs =P

2004-06-26T20:38:00.000+10:00

What is with the above name, I'll never know =P

ANYWAY! Less depressed than last night, actually, I can say without a lie leaving my mouth (nor my fingers =P ) that I'm actually happy, and hopeful! Added bonus eh?

While I'm typing this, my internet connection has been on for 1 day, 4 hours, and 8 seconds =P I forgot to turn it off last night when I fell asleep waiting for Cowboy Bebop to go on TV (in Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, who would've known =P ), and so far 'Saturday Afternoon Fever' (a funny little animation from a guy at VFS), two trailers for 'Sky Captain and the Day After Tomorrow' (looks very promising, love the retro 30's style, and the guys at RSP.com.au are doing the graphics =P ), downloaded a few TV themes, updated (and added) a few people to my Examples folder, and am in the process of refreshing my 3Dnspiration issues (online magazine for 3D peeps).

So, yeah... It's all good

Art
Today, I've spent a lot of time redoing some of my old projects, like cleaning up some aliasing on my weekend challenge for Atlantis (the link below will have updated, and it's nothing major, my little nit picks)
But, more recently, I have rejuvenated... PEDRO!
Pedro's, I guess an oldish man, which I made in 3D. One of my first wades into the organic realm on my lonesome, and all my concept too. Here for your enjoyment is the good old man himself, PEDRO! =P

I have a sketch of him, which I used in initial construction, but in an artistic sense it's pretty hideous, so it's not linked here =P

I also need to find a project to become dedicated too soon, or I'll go mad...
Getting a project makes you focus your creative energy, and it'll make you work until you can get it right, because it means something to you...
Like Sormann's ThemePark World! It is one of the funniest concepts I've seen, something to keep an eye on =P

Inspiration
This one isn't really a long winded, heavily articulated one, merely a few brim ideas...
I got this idea while getting my sketchbook out of my bag, while mum was asleep infront of the TV on the couch, and my dog was asleep too... My dog woke up, so I quietly put him back to bed.
When I finished grabbing my sketchbook, I noticed I didn't have my small lamp, and didn't want to turn on the large light, so I snuck back across the lounge room into the corridor and finally into my bedroom to claim the lamp... After having a quick duel with my Lord of the Rings Return of the King poster, I snuck down quietly in the dark and begin the tedious task of finding which cord was the lamp's. When I finally found it, I yanked it out, only to find it was the wrong one, nabbit... Then, I finally found the one, and softly pulled, as if worried a giant spark'll leap out and engulf me. That was when I got the idea. What about an extremely successful thief, of extreme expertise, who is in the middle of a project. He's sorting out which is what, and finally thinks hes got it, when the most unlikely situation arises and he is caught (even though it's not his fault). He ends up working for the people who caught him, probably the government, and ends up meeting a 'baddie', who, in his words 'You can't steal the planet!' "Exactly, that's why I don't want anyone else to have it...", ie, this baddie is the kind who blows up anything he can't have, ie, the world =P
I can imagine it now, episode one is introducing the main thief, working his way into a top secret facility, hiding among the shadows while people run past (have him slink into the shadows, and have 2D cutouts with a projected shadow onto the ground/wall run past), and finally getting caught unexpectedly, with the last shot being the alarms starting to go off and the look of complete disbelief (I mean, really, he's an experienced thief, but part of that experience is having never gotten caught! He doesn't know how to react! lol)
Episode 2, introduction to the 'Justice Gang' I guess it's the policeish guy who basically plots him against all evil, fire against fire sort of thing, and probably the good old nerd like Nigel (sp?) off of Alias! WooT WooT! (can have an extra sequence about having the Nigelesque character saying it was his technology that caught the thief, and then after the extremely disconcerning look from the thief, have him splutter something like 'Yes, well, of course, a lot of luck was involved afterall...')

And there are the first two episodes, created in probably less than 30 minutes, in a nutshell =P

Also, for my first animation project I think I'm planning to do a sort of complexified sphere, with arms extruded out and probably two eyes just to add that 'human' factor to it... Something so simple it's gotta work... =P lol
I hope to have this animation done by the end of holidays, which will give me three weeks to work on it (and since, as I said in my previous post, I have no plans, it should be pretty easy =P)

Anyway, that shall be the night for me, at least, the night recorded in this journal. I plan to do some odds and ends, and then eventually go to sleep *sigh* and, for the sake of my computer and my ISP, disconnect the bloody internet connection! lol

Geez, I never thought holidays could end up this bad...

2004-06-25T18:18:00.000+10:00

And they just started...

I'm literally on the verge of tears... I know I should try and keep all my posts positive, but that just isn't going to work here...

I've just started holidays and lets look upon what the world has put forth. My parents are growling at each other, as per usual, I don't have _any_ plans for the holidays apart from braces (oh, great...), two of my best friends I can't really communicate with (both without computers, one's grounded, the other, well), and generally I feel like complete... yeah...

In these times, one of the main problems is that we dwell on all the bad things, it's almost like we're trying to give ourselves a reason to feel so bad. Personally, I still do it, but if I want to feel bad, chances are I'm not inflicting damage on anyone but myself, and so I have the ultimate control in decisions of mood. I usually only break down at home, I don't think I've ever broken down at school, at least since Year 3...

I'd love to ask the girl out, but I just keep putting artificial limits on myself. And, I mean, there's a difference between sitting here and saying 'She'd probably say yes' and standing next to her, the mind reverting to another answer...

Okay, I don't like how I feel at the moment, so, this I must ENDETH!

Creativity, a good pick-me-up
After picking up some of my old txt documents, blowing the digital dust off them, and having a revising read, I feel inspired, ish =)

Actually, I'm not so inspired

To disappear
I'm going to disappear for a bit, go read some Elysiun stuff... Sorry for such a short post (even though, as I said a million times before, no-one's reading)

Too much of a good thing... Results in cavities =P

2004-06-23T19:11:00.000+10:00

I started off the stupid line above depressed, but all the sudden I became happy =P At least it's good practice, see things from the other way they were meant to be viewed. Get kicked in the groin, at least you can join the Boys Choir, etc etc =)

Anyway, something which I'm trying to persevere and cultivate in my head is that it's the quantity of ideas, not the quality, that is important. It is better to have lots of strange ideas, all different in their own right, than one or two extremely defined and carved idea, as you can always continue concentrating and improving a thought, but you can't get the same inspiration you had at that very moment back, and that may just be the difference between a smoking crater in the ground or your science experiment (made that up on the spot, a little OT, but just deal =P)

I do also note I have been negligent in my blogging performance, therefore I apologise to the ghosts or umbrae reading my blog, since no humans seem to be =P

School
Got a Distinction in Computing, whoop diddy. The main thing I remember about getting it was putting my mind in a blender to try and find a way of getting out of the middle of an isle without annoying anyone else. Luckily, I was adjacent to a walking corridor (well, not really a corridor, just a gap in all the chairs to walk through), so I pulled my seat out into the corridor and walked along it, therefore not annoying anyone else and having to leap over others feet =P
Even one of the girls noticed my 'heroic' attempts and criticised someone else in our row for not doing the brave and daring maneuver.

Had parent teacher, overall, very happy with it. Main criticism was 'Stephen can't rely on his natural ability anymore...' Darn, they're forcing me to study now =P lol
Was very pleased with my English teacher though, she told me that the story I wrote in the exam (had like 40 minutes), the nightmare one I talked about earlier, really revealed a 'light and fluffy' side to me (she didn't say light and fluffy, just thought it was the perfect description lol)
Everyone was expecting a futuristic, techno, over the top, serious, etcetera, story from me, and instead they got a romantic comedy, and NO, I didn't plan to write a romantic comedy, it just... Happened...
Pretty good while starting from the word 'Nightmare', huh? =P

Shrek 2
Saw Shrek 2 on the weekend, was crammed into a tiny spot at the back of the room as we were late lol
I had a very kind girl next to me (I also had to help give her back her handbag, it was accidently kicked to the left as my mum walked through the isle) and her annoying (what I thought) boyfriend, who kept complaining about the smallest things, like a child crying a bit, and babbling about the Box Office returns of the movie.

About the movie though,
I liked the story overall, but they may have to create a new story soon as they're beginning to massacre it.
Graphics, as per usual, were excellent, especially with the implementation of global illumination in all rendering and that of fast subsurface scattering, made some of the characters at least the quality of Final Fantasy imho. Of the main two things I remember is a mushroom splashed in a potion, which, from one corner of it, becomes cocooned in an aura, and then puffs into smoke and becomes a rose. I also loved how Shrek was played out as a human.

AND ABOUT MOVIES IN GENERAL
A few of the biggest movie names, I'm using Scary Movie and Shrek & Sh-2 as examples, are making huge amounts off of a mock plot. While Shrek may have a bit of a deeper plot, a lot of it is made enjoyable by the mocking of other stories, such as the Lord of the Rings and other legends or myths in Shrek 2, or the use of scary movies and completely mock playing them such as in Scary Movie. These have all made giant gains at the box office, and are not to be underestimated.

Creativity
Thinking about creativity also, I think I prefer making full worlds as the larger the world, the more things I need to make to exist within it, and therefore the more ideas I am able to generate. Small disconnected ideas are fine, but this makes the idea seem to have a depth around it, as if it does come from somewhere, by the ways it links to other things.
Stuart has really fallen in love with my story about a flying world (project name is Aerial Spires, and a beginning story of it is below)
The whole world is beginning to be based upon Hallows Peak, and it has become partially destroyed during a war. Stuart and I may be planning to make a story based around it, but how far it will get (whether it gets anywhere at all lol) is questionable =P

'The only power I believe in comes out of the barrel of a gun' A quote from the movie 'The Phantom' (on in background)
Well, that's an interesting statement.
A society based around settling all of their affairs through singular gunfights, almost in a Western style, but I've never been a fan of Westerns =P
Singular gunfights being one on one warfare, with great dishonour coming from having outside help. Preferably these gunfights aren't a one shoot kill kind of thing, but a way that the world becomes partially seperated into certain clans, and one clan's actions may have a reverberated effect on all else.
Well, that's weird enough at least =P
Then of course, you have either the singular hero, or an ungoverned group, a group not associated with any others, a group with no bounds.
Or you could have a singular hero, and a servant of him, who will take his place once he falls...
Imagine it now, the hero is draped and hidden, but with a strange gun clutched in his right hand, elongated to look almost like a blade, and engraved with a symbol of a tiger, with claws upfront, ready to strike. The gunfight starts, everyone moving in a dash, dust is beginning to build up in the air untill almost all you can see is the wake left behind the movement of the bullet. Suddenly, *chink, chink*, he's out of bullets, so he almost slides to a corner of a building. There, his servant is waiting for him, with bullets dangling from clips on his shoulders, and a vest full of armaments on him. There, he does a last check of the golden bullets, tipped with a translucent blue, and with the speed of lightning, drops them into a clip and passes it to the hero, where he succinctly replaces his ammo and returns to the fight.

If you could only see the dust and bullets echoing inside my head... =P

STUART
One of my best friends, and a great buddy when it comes to creativity, has been GROUNDED... ahhhhhhhhhhh.....
Why you ask? Because he forgot to hand an assignment in on one day. His mom is an authoritarian, very very rigid, and because of this he has been grounded, at the very least, for the whole of holidays.
DARN!

Well, music's going well =P

2004-06-19T17:54:00.000+10:00

Screw everything else, music's going great...

[babble mode]
On Wednesday afternoon I missed out on last period to go and get fitted for my Jazz suit. Oh yeah, love missing out on school! It ended up being black pants, shirt, with a silver tie and vest. (silver was highly reflective, I'm sure I was aiming to blind a few people when the spotlights hit me)

On Thursday morning, I woke up, got prepared awfully slow and then was driven to our Musical Showcase venue. I arrived at the venue (late) and had to whip my instrument out extremely quickly as everyone was about to start.
Fantastic rehearsal for jazz, my only two issues was I had to play up, and play, in Justin's words, "LOUDER!"
One of the guitarists got a wibble-wa peddle (very weird =P ) and ended up using it for his solo improv.
Around 9:30 we packed up, left for school at 10 after when the bus arrived. When I got back to school, I didn't go to class, I went to something called Musica Viva (not sure on spelling), and listened to that. Great jazz artists, the one who played trumpet/trombone was a hippy with eyebrows that looked a bit like Guy Sebastian's hair, another was an old man who always played the cello with eyes closed, the percussionist was generally cool, very quiet though, and the final guy had a trim haircut and wore glasses, he played sax.
Anyway, got out of there, had recess, got back to my first and only class of the day, and that was... Music! =P
Unfortunately, we got a replacement teacher and just sat around doing sheets, but then just before 12:30 we left for the next bus. Luke and I caught this one, and we listened to his Christian rock on the way down... Good to know Christians know how to write songs! =P
When we arrived there Intermediate Band was on first, so I went and watched Luke play. He was extremely bored, as the majority of his notes were single handed and crotchets. We're actually thinking of making me play it, as I need to learn piano, and, well, reality's the best way to learn =)
Next was flute ensemble *insert sleeping sound here* They weren't actually that bad, but my ex-girlfriend is one of them, so of course I've got to pretend to be bored lol
And then, we were on... WOOT! Senior Concert Band, conducted by the awesome Hutch (don't worry, it's a nick name for our teacher =P ). The band performed fabulously, apart from the small situation involving the oboe-ist and the Pizza guy (his sister was supposed to pay for the Pizza, but, well =P )
Anyway, I was supposed to go back to school then, but the bus was filled with Junior school kids (shove them in the baggage compartments!), so we had to wait until the bus came back... That was a very long time, excessive to the extreme. I ended missing out on all of last period.
After that, I went to the bus stop to *sigh* 'hang out' *sigh*, and everyone's bus turned up in the first 5 minutes (Thursday remember, shopping spree night lol) and after saying bye to Elyse (Elyce, Elise, spelling *sigh*) and to Josh, and giving her a chip packet, I went in the library. God knows what I did in there, something to do with raytracing and trying to find out how to calculate translucency utilising a similar technique to ambient occlusion I think... Anyway, finally got picked up.
When we got there I went to Orchestra rehearsal. Boring. Orchestra isn't the greatest unfortuntely, we played Mission Impossible again for like the 2nd year in a row, and a song called Finlandia from the Babe movie. Wow, some way to start a show.

Start of the performance we played the two Orchestra songs, it was alright, nothing fantastic though. Then I had to wait until past second intermission, when we play Senior Concert Band and Jazz... So, I went up looking for Luke (he said we'd wait around together), couldn't find him, so I hung out with Anistasia, a friendly girl in Year 10 I think, plays the clarinet. Then, she found her friends, I saw Sophie and Jenny and I hung out with them for a while.

After 15 minutes, it was interval, I got prepared for Senior Concert. It was an absolute BLAST! Only problem was 9/10ths of the crowd went home because they were in Junior School... Oh, hurray... They should lock the doors lol
The song we played was Pablo, fast, sharp, and absolutely a lot of fun to play, the kind of song that gives you an adrenaline rush.
Went back, I changed (with lots of difficulty) to the suit I'd gotten on Wednesday, and was teased by probably every single student, and even by Hutch, our conductor/teacher/generally cool guy, he did the whole mother thing where he got my tie and straightened it and fixed it up *sigh* lol
Justin ended up wearing "shades", and so did the drummer (he also wore suede, cool huh?)

THEN! Jazz! Started off with "This Ain't Love", a 1930s style swing song, usually used for dancing back then. We began playing into our stands, quiet, muffled, then blew EVERYONE away! =) Fantabulous, absolutely excellent, always fun.
Then we played "Blue Bossa", which is once again another great piece, and I can almost play all of it lol This song was Justin's solo chance, lots of fun.
After this, we were supposed to leave and go home, but the guys had planned to break into "Chameleon" after, unfortunately the crappy music to fill the gaps started, and we had to wait for them to switch it off. Once that happened, we waited around for about 10-15 bars playing it, then packed up and went home.
And I was told on the next day Hutch made kissy faces to Luke and Lauren (my friend, who's going out with Lauren *der* as they were sitting next to each other). Luke at the moment is attempting to avoid Hutch, with little success! =P lol

Friday -
*phew*
No-one really congratulated me, but that's alright, no-one usually does lol
I ended up cutting my inner lip or causing some kind of unfathomable pain in my mouth
Generally went back to school *sigh*

But the main pick up that night, was, I went to the Lord of the Rings Symphony at the Opera House!
We got there early, I 'dined' on two hot dogs and some plain rice, and strolled around admiring how big the Opera House was. Even though I'm an Australian, the last (and only other than now) time I went there, I was four and all I really remember of it was sitting outside, very bored and cold, waiting for intermission so we could get back in...

Anyway, it began in an excellent manner, with Howard Shore being a... quite interesting? conductor... He actually conducted on off-beats I think, or something strange like that. I have four pages of notes beginning at the end of intermission. It was an excellent performance, get the soundtrack! =P
Also, I discovered that there is a crushed car at the Opera House, crushed by a rock with a smilie face... Quite peculiar...

Anyway, it's 11:04 on Sunday now (I kind of got to finish this last night) and I'm going to sum up
Oh yeah, yesterday I got an electronic compass for my Robot *woot*

Bai Bai

Crush Fever =P

2004-06-16T18:49:00.000+10:00

Your heart suddenly has an urge to become a drum, your pupils think it'll be funny if they dilate, and your world becomes a little confused about which way's up...
Well, that's how it generally feels when she walks by =)
Words cannot describe such a feeling, but words have never been much good anyway =)

Stuff keeping details to a minimum... I don't think anyone has read this journal yet, so stuff it, it's a journal for myself! =P
I know a crush usually occurs due to a physical attraction (which is certainly the case lol) but she does have some depth to her. She takes Latin, which is difficult, and is very kind, although a little shy =)
I know, this is all really small stuff and probably doesn't mean anything to anyone but me... But... Well... In a way, I'm my main audience, so if you really want, skip to the next section, cuz I'm going on =P
She had her books in my way this morning, and she said in the sweetest way "Oh, sorry"... Yes, very very small, but... Yeah =P I guess what I really like about her is she isn't outspoken, she's not zany, she's not loud, she's just, in the best possible description, seems a little shy =)
I doubt she likes me unfortunately, and if I really want to a go, and ask her out, I may have to take a very very large leap. But before any of that, I just need to make some sort of small connection... I remember reading in an entry to CGTalk's 'Lost and Found' sketch competition, a little picture. Supposedly someone lost their gym card in the university dormitory hall, so he went to return it to the room number. He knocked on the door, and out popped the a fabulously beautiful girl... Well, that would be the perfect, absolutely heavenly, sort of way to connect to her for the first time. Of course, that's implying that anything like that happens out of Hollywood movie sets or children's stories, and even then the guy who met the girl didn't go out with her, but was merely 'haunted by her beauty' or something to that effect. Well, chances are it's never going to happen, but I'll find a way... I mean, it couldn't be worse than a million to one chance, or at least perfectly equal to it =P

Never play leap-frog with a unicorn, Murphy's Law states.
This beautiful unicorn may make me break that golden rule...

----

Firefox 0.9 came out today =P
I've already downloaded it and am going to install it after I finish this post. If you're getting sick of Microsoft, or Internet Explorer crashes on you/attacks you with spyware, go to Mozilla.org and try either Mozilla or Firefox out (Firefox looks a lot better and is much more slimline)

----

I'm failing in my attempt to use every moment to its fullest. But I'll try to keep the practical part of the theory in full effect, no matter which way the coin falls... I just need something to get me moving again!

----

Creativity
I just noticed something, all my ideas are based on quality. They should be based on quantity, because you can always develop an idea later down the track, but you may only have the stimuli at that moment to create an imaginary masterpiece.
To help me develop a new way of innovation, I have enlisted the help of a random word website. Very random, not punctually random =P I'll take the first ten and try and write down what comes to head first, creative or non-creative.

(site for random words)

Damn! Site's out at the moment due to DNS problems affecting the net (Slashdot story (here)

New temporary word generator here - Word Generator

This isn't quite as good as the other, as the other generates random words, this just generates made up words... But what the hey =P

* handian - An ancient culture who live ontop of the vast forests of floating sea-weed. The sea-weed growth is so thick that it creates a hard surface for them to survive on.
* rendeleckilopetels - (rend-el-ec-il-o-pet-els) A telepathic condition that the gods give some humans for their own amusement. Rendeleckilopetels allows you to see that you will injure yourself, but not how, therefore making you know you are going to hurt yourself with no preventitive measures! For example, you may know you are going to feel an intense 'pain' in your crotch, but you don't know exactly what'll cause it, so they avoid angry women, baseball balls, and any projectiles, until, when still trying to avoid everyone, he doesn't pay attention to the ground, and a man hole remains open. He falls, and... Well... You know =P
* pennelisits - I won't say what FIRST came to my head... This is strictly a PG13 site ;)
A covert group of pencils who write propoganda, with topics similar to 'We're all wood you know' 'You'll never sharpen me alive' and an all time favourite 'Freedom to the LED!'
* ting -
* menter - It is the capacity that an object has to indirectly change the future of the world. If it has a high menter rating, for example, a nuclear bomb, it can instill a huge change, while a blade of grass may have a low level of menter.
* counkers -
* impingler - A person who makes a living by stealing barbed wire from prisons. These people are therefore indirectly responsible for a large percentage of successful prison escapes.
* ackiddentiont - A young
* dwely -
* belly -

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MUSIC SHOWCASE TOMORROW!
Music Showcase, when all the schools bands come together and perform. I have very high expectations for Senior Band, and ESPECIALLY Jazz Band =P Don't have quite too high expectations with Orchestra, but that's just because Mr Hutchins's such a great conductor, and musician in his own right =)

Center stage is set, the lights are focusing on you, and it's time to discover just what I'm made of!

The best thing though, of course, is I miss out on lots of school because I'll be going to the Hills Centre during the day to do final rehearsals and sound checks! WOOT! I also took last period off today to get a black suit/tuxedo type thing, to wear when we play in Jazz band. I was only told this morning, and kind of had to... Rush? =P
Hopefully I'll fit in, but I am wearing silver, and spotlights on silver might blind a few people *sigh* Oh well =P
And I have been getting a lot better with my music. I can play almost all of my jazz band pieces without fudging a single note (fudging in bands is a lot more common than you think).
Heck, Justin hasn't even insulted me for the last few days =) (Justin is first trombone, in charge of being bossy and talented =P )

----

Another night finished... Good night, and I wish you a happy future =)

Still trying

2004-06-15T18:59:00.000+10:00

My idea on trying to use every moment to it's fullest is on a kind of confusing verge. I don't know if it's working too well, could just be me. Either way, I'm still persevering with it, even though it isn't going too well =)

/me crosses fingers in hope of a new speed modelling topic at CGTalk

*sigh* Not a new subject... AGAIN! I can't take this. I need something to push me. The Weekend Challenge really did a good job, even if the result didn't turn out too well. It pushes you just to MAKE SOMETHING... Must stop sitting around and complaiming.

Just giving a link to myself - SUPER COOL FERRET MADE IN XSI!
Mr Ferret ;)

Anyway, SPEED MONSTERS! =P Quick 3D models I made, took about 20 minutes each

*heeheehee*

Watching Alias, and guess what... We just discovered, the Passenger... It's her... *horror music* SISTER! *background scream* Yeah, well... I knew about it before, because E! News doesn't respect the fact Australians are like two months behind all the TV shows... *sigh* lol... Also, Von found out that the Australian actress (oh yeah, go Aussies! Melissa George RULES! *innocent whistle*) was a double agent! WooT! They killed Sloan! WooT! Jack revived Sloan! Wait a sec... Eh? =P

Stui has been helping me out since this morning when I told him about the "Aerial Spire" thing (just remember, that the name is only a working name, not final), and its been quite fun =P We could become a double team of writers! WooT!

I've got a terrible terrible cough, which isn't getting anything out of my throat, but more specifically it feels like razors being run down the insides of my throat... Ouch... I stayed up until literally 4 AM yesterday (or more specifically, this morning) and went through three episodes of BBC Lord of the Rings Audio Series.

It's 10:30, and Alias just finished.
Anyway, time to go, for the night draws close, and the world is beginning to withdraw.
Farewell

Every moment should be used...

2004-06-14T20:19:00.001+10:00

Every moment should be used. No excuse. Procrastinating is not an option. This is a purely raw theory I'm spitting out, so it may seem crude, but I trust you, it is not. Everything must be a stepping stone to something else. Waste not on things which have no destination. You must push yourself, for if you do not push yourself, nothing will ever come out of you. You cannot rely on the world around you to do the pushing for you, because it will not happen. People who succeed in this life do so as they push themselves, or if they don't push themselves, they do something lots because they love the thing they do.
The main problem with my blog at the moment is that the ideas are so refined, I write, read, rewrite, everything I think. This should be a null issue now. Pure essence is what makes a character. In real life you don't have time to think a comment, rethink it, do it again, so why should you as you are writing?
From now on I will cease to use the Preview button (as technologically cool it is) on all things, other than to check that link or image tags work.

I cannot slow down, or not keep pushing myself. Pushing myself will force me to do things I have not done before, which is good. One thing which I did stop writing for then, is for a moth. A moth landed on my computer screen, I think they're attracted by the static electricity on it, or merely the bright light, but I'm not sure. It had the most magnificent texture on it, and was brown, the colour of sandpaper, and was translucent in a fuzzy kind of way. As he was inside, and they don't survive very long, I softly got him in my hands, made a protective sphere, and released him outside through the dog door.

Always have time in your life for creatures that need help, even if it's a spider, snake, or anything.
I'll also mention my tadpoles at the moment. I saved them in December I think. Their eggs were put in a dam after heavy rain. Problem is, the dam is a quick drain dam, and all the water in there is gone after a few weeks. I found out they were up there, and knew they were going to die without my help. I went and got a bucket and began sorting the water. Spiders, some weird kinds of leeches, and weird insects which looked like leaves annoyed me, but I kept going. Today, I have saved countless lives of tiny tadpoles, and as small as that may seem, it is significant to me, and I'm sure that in the far future it will make some difference. Just remember, if you save one thing, you are therefore saving all it's descendants, so in the act of saving one tadpole, you may have just saved hundreds, if not thousands of frogs. And if the act of even saving ONE life is not significant, I ask you then, what is?

Every moment
Every moment you should be giving your hundred percent all. Everything you have is sitting there waiting to be used, and even if every limb you have is broken, you should still be thinking all the time. Trying to sort the world into logic, trying to observe everything you see.
Pick up a leaf and see everything there is to see. Notice the bumps? The veins? The translucency (that's light getting through the object, like transparency (like glass) but you can't nessacarily see straight through, if you know what I mean), the colours. Everything!
Everything in this world is infinitely complex. Your body changes every atom it is made of in 8 years. The simplest thing still has a myriad of rules about it. Nothing is too small to be observed.
Everything observed is easy from someone else's point of view. You never know how complex a job is until you do it yourself.

Everything has an essence
A picture is just an array of colours, and hues if it contains no essence. Essence is what separates a picture from an illustration. An illustrator is from the Latin verb "lustrare", which literally means to illuminate.
This site has influenced me in such a strange way. Look at it, respect the artwork, respect the brother who has passed to the other side.
An illustrator, literally illuminates a person, gives them an amazing idea, redefines a thought, something of great meaning. To be an illustrator can relate to any part of your life, not just art.

Relaxing to some degree
Okay, I have to smile at least once as I write this =) Remember, that without other people, your development as a person, as an artist, cannot grow. I'd like to end this weird section and go into creativity by saying, enjoy everything you do, or try to find some way to do it. Even the worst task can be a competition of how fast you can get it done! Also, ask yourself, "ARE YOU SERIOUS!" Of which, I shall always reply, "YES!"

Creativity
Ok, straight from talking about being spontaneous and quick thinking to doing it.

Veins. Hands. Blood rushing back and forth. Life. Essence. Birth of the world.
Everyone must come from somewhere, everyone must have a story before themselves. Everything has an origin, of which it is almost always complex and confusing. Respect it for it.

Must try to find an aim. Instead of shooting bullets wildly into the night, try to find a target and aim not to shoot blanks.

Wait, before even that I have to find out what exactly I want out of creativity. New ideas? Strong characters? Realistic plot? WHAT? Dictionary.com, Creativity - Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative: creative writing.
This essentially means creating anything. Including a short story, which I may as well do now.

Aerial Spire
The world as we know it, is no more. Recreate the world, remold it. The human race has not had a massacre, and had to rebuild itself, merely that the world has never had to go along that certain path.
High above the ground, hidden within the deepest breaches of the clouds, are great aerial fortresses. Helium is the life force, keeping their world afloat, while hydrogen, created by splitting the water of the clouds, is their movement. Some people live in a settlements of thousands of people, the metropolis's of the skies. They are similar to countries. They all have their own way of subsistence. Their own economies, and their own rulers. Then, there are two kinds of free-rangers. First, is the traders, who usually move in small groups of vessels, from metropolis to metropolis, and survive through trading. Then there is the rogues. People who live by pillaging others. They commonly target the small traders, but some have vessels large enough to take on, and often beat the metropolises.

Well, that's good babble. Not really going anywhere though. I wonder how you develop such an idea... Only probably by practice. Exams are good for that, they force you to work in a small timeframe and give a reasonable result out of it. The computer may actually be working against you, as it gives you a world of options on what to do, yet when you're in an exam, with a pen, some paper, and only 45 minutes remaining on the clock, you cannot spare to waste anything.

The airship began it's slow crawl across the sky, leaving a tiny vapor trail in it's wake. In the cockpit of the vessel, sat an old man, with a cane across his lap. On the top of the old man's cane, engraved into the wood, was a sculpture of an eagle, with two gems for it's eyes. He was staring out into the calm blue sky, wandering what it would be like. Whether it was still the way it had used to be.
The silence was broken, by the energetic sound of someone running up the spiral stairs from the lower hold behind him.
"Grandpa, where's our next stop?"
He turned slowly in his chair, and looked through his spectacles to his grandson. The boy was growing to be more like his father every day.
"You have heard of the haven of Hallows Peak before, haven't you?"
"Hallows Peak? Are you serious? Wasn't that where the Kailen Wars took place?"
"Yes it was. Just remember that a war doesn't just involve guns and explosions, but people too."
"What're we going there for then? They have the best of everything don't they?"
"They used to have the best of everything, remember the hydrogen cells we've been making? I have an old friend there who makes them. He'd be very interested in our new design."
"Tell me about Hallows Peak grandpa, you've been there before haven't you?"
"Not just been there, I used to live there. That was where I met your grandmother."
"Was dad born there?"
"No, your father was born on this very vessel. We left Hallows Peak almost fifty years ago now."
"But why'd you leave Hallows Peak! It's part of legends! It's, it's, it's..."
"It's the tallest mountain on all of Earth, and the only habitable bit of land left on this world..."
"Why'd you leave then?"
"The war came."
"Yeah, and?"
"The war took your mother, your father, and my wife. You were the only one left..."
They both stared out the windshield, into the clouds, where, if one had the eyes of a hawk, one would have seen a glittering peak, covered in a permafrost that has been there since the dawn of time. Neither of them were really paying too much attention to the sky though, mainly to how to avoid the next step of logical conversation.
Breaking the silence had a feeling similar to that of dropping a glass vase.
"How long until we get there?" the young boy muttered silently under his breath.
"About half an hour. How about you go and get the cell ready?"
"No problem,"
The boy ran down the spiral stairs, and the sound began to fade away.

The haven of Hallows Peak is believed to be the last bit of habitable land for humans. It is the center of the civilised world, and is real estate which only the richest can afford. Being the only bit of land left in the world, it has commonly come under attack, the worst of which being the Kailen Wars. Half the peak was ripped off of it's foundings, and plunged to doom, by a cruiser's suicidal attack.

(first sentence, wake is used in boats, slipstream in aeroplanes, but I'll use wake still, as the airship is slow, more like a boat than a plane)
{second, [Middle English halwen, from Old English hlgian. See kailo- in Indo-European Roots.], Hallows Peak, to Kailen Wars)
(third, possibly add in a necropolis to the mix, a floating city that had been wiped out by a threat [dragons burning all the city?] but it mysteriously floats. It is said to be cursed, and no-one has gone there since, or at least none have returned to tell of the story)

I'd love to continue the story, but it's time for me to "go to bed"... In other words, that means pretend to be asleep, but more essentially go to my room and do my homework. I really love this world so far. I really really do =)

This post has been amazingly successful, and it actually takes me a while to scroll down through all the babble!
Farewell, and may we meet again at the haven of Hallows Peak.

And the nights keep getting longer

2004-06-14T19:01:00.000+10:00

A tug-a-war has begun over my life. On one side, depression, the other side, happiness... And may I just say, they are evenly matched at the moment =)
I'm disappointed with my Weekend Challenge entry, but nonetheless, here it is

I'll post @ndy's (@ndy is a great 3D artist) entry when he finishes it, but I shall warn you now, @ndy rules =P
His site is at Artificial3D.com if anyone wants to have a look. Purely inspirational artist, and he reminds me of LohnC (Australiain Blenderer who I know well)

I haven't been too happy with the results of that... Not sure if it's the bad post processing, or whether its just me, but yeah... This is the main reason I want to keep working on my computer graphics, my sketching, my everything. I want to be able to look at myself some day in the future, and say, "You are a good artist"... When you say something like that to yourself, you know whether or not you are bending the truth...

In other news, great thread by an artist called buzzz3d (although he's a 2D artist lol), of which he is trying to force himself to draw everyday. Good idea... Good idea...
Thread here

Also, I'm being driven around the bend... The Brady Bunch have been on TV1, mucking up all regular programming, for the last THREE DAYS! That's SEVENTY-TWO HOURS AT LEAST of Brady Bunch

Here endeth the previous babble...
Well, as the LONG weekend draws to an end, and we thank the Queen for having a birthday (whether or not we care about the Queen, go public holidays!), we must look back and reflect... Reflect upon the world, and it's being... And remember that, no matter how long a rest period we may receive, remember that, I HAVE HOMEWORK! ARRRGGGGG!

*sigh*

I really don't quite manage time the way "I should"... I use it quite well I think, but I usually leave unimportant things to the last minute (for example, _homework_) I always do it, no matter what. And if the homework is going to take time to finish (like a writing assignment), I WILL start that earlier. Assignments, I occasionally start before the night before it's due, but that's a rarity ;)

This kind of concludes my report for today. I'm not pleased with it... So, I'm going to go check what homework I have and then, either finish now or finish it midnight plus tonight, and then learn how to rig a 3D object (or, in my hope, an object that'll soon become a character)

Also, I'm running out of ways to say farewell, goodbye, or good night... So...

Out of the shadows I shall return, to reclaim my lost home... Farewell...

Charged with negligence =)

2004-06-13T21:51:00.000+10:00

I have been very negligent with Blogger, but at the same time very busy =)
Ok, after checking my last post, I haven't been that negligent, only 3 days lol
Long weekend this weekend, and I've decided to participate in Elysiun's Weekend Challenge (given the topic "Atlantis", I'll show you the results soon enough)

Enanami
Enanami is still going strong, the map is getting small bits and pieces thrown onto it. Some are of purely original merit, others influenced by TV shows (I was watching "The Seven Great Wonders (of the) Industrial World", featuring the lighthouse constructor Robert Stevenson), and others are taken from my previous ideas (remember, I never steal other peoples ideas, very heavily against my morals)
Really, from a few random squares, scribbling at the points they meet up, you can create a situation to let your mind wander. The best thing though is that it even lets your logical mind, not just creative, to wonder, as it is considering what could happen at a given location (near a volcano, etcetera)

Robert Stevenson
"You cannot build a lighthouse on a rock that is submerged for the better part of the day and receives gails at every other time!" said the Chief Executive of the Northern Lighthouses.

Oh boy was he wrong. Robert Stevenson became the builder of a lighthouse (Bell Rock, completed on the 1st of February 1811, which stood 11 miles out to sea) which saved dozens, if not hundreds, of lives. He had originally wanted to do it as ships crashed upon it regularly, but it was not until an English Navy vessel ran upon it, and thus lost all of its 300 crewman, that the Northern Lighthouses Association supported him financially to do so.
He not only calculated the angle (although there is disagreement if it was nessacarily him or John Rennie who decided it, and of whom designed the lighthouse) but also developed an amazingly bright array of lights, utilising parabolic dishes and by using many different techniques integrated (like putting a tube over the candle, therefore making it burn brighter by using the convection currents it makes)

Either way, both Robert Stevenson, John Rennie and the crew who built the mighty monument, deserve a mention. As do many other people on this greater Earth...

About Bell Rock, and who built it... This is made by (and using the same picture as) the people who made the TV documentary I saw (BBC)
About Robert Stevenson (BBC)
A more fulfilled biography on Robert Stevenson

Personalities
A Slashdot article recently came up with something quite interesting. It relates to me in some ways, some ways may I note, but I never flunk subjects (getting the equivalent to Ds or Es, which would be 60 or 70% correct? Sorry, Australian schools usually only give percentages), I always do reasonably well (around 90% most of the time)
Slashdot Article
It also ended up giving a link to an interesting site detailed types of personalities,
The site, with example personality

And, as usual, if you look down, you'll see the hundreds of Slashdot comments, a place where the occasional drop of wisdom can be found (and starcraving lunacy at all other times =P)

this "stick-to-it-ness"...

TENACITY! It's called tenacity! I swear, the next grade-school teacher who I hear use the word "stick-to-it-ive-ness" is getting a swift and painful English lesson.

Seriously! It's a syllable shorter! Let's do a comparison! (In list form, because Slashdot's support for preformatted text is bad.)

1. Is it a real word?
* Tenacity: Yes, and a good one as well!
* Sticktoitiveness: No, and it never will be.
2. How many syllables does it have?
* Tenacity: Four. Rolls right off the tongue.
* Sticktoitiveness: Five. It's an ungainly hippo-in-a-tutu of a word.
3. Does it make you sound like a Special Ed teacher when you use it?
* Tenacity: Not in the least.
* Sticktoitiveness: Yes, if not straight-up retarded.

Stamp out sticktoitiveness wherever you see it. It's the red-headed stepchild of the English language...

lol

Of other points noted in there, intelligence is useless without dedication, "We all say that intelligence is the highest achievement, but that's not entirely true. Intelligence is distinct from knowledge, which is distinct from dedication. All three are necessary for success.", there's a lot of "unusually smart people" out there, "You are a unique and beautiful snowflake. Snowflake number #3857493 to be exact." lol, "Life is basically a vacation from death some author once said.", "Reiterating what many others have said, stop whining and prove your worth." <- Very important, "Intelligence is a prison. You no longer lead a fulfilling life, but one full of questions" <- yeap, I know that feeling, LONG! "People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities." LONG!, "The fellow who edited your comment mentioned that you were probably an INTP. This is true; so am I. This means that you are devoted to finding logical solutions to problems, and are dreamy and absent-minded if you're not involved in something that interests you.", "Be prepared for your spirit to be crushed", "you can't call yourself something unless you can back it up", "You will have to focus and refine your talents to get anywhere. The ability to work really hard for a short time when you happen to feel like it won't help you any. Otherwise you will feel cheated when those without your "raw ability" whiz by you in life.", "My only advice would be to stop telling people you're "uniquely bright." It doesn't go over well. That kind of thinking is something you just keep to yourself...instead, demonstrate your intelligence through action. If you're interested in programming, I'd suggest picking a pet project and getting your hack on.", "Your talents will take you wherever they take you, but friendship will fill the gaps"

*phew*

As you can see, those are the SELECT comments from a Slashdot article. They have about 12-24 of those every day, and I try to read them all... Takes a long while...
Some of the suggestions in there ARE novel, and will affect me for some time to come.

Robocup
I haven't mentioned this before, but I am involved in something called Robocup. It's essentially programming a small robot to play soccer =P I've participated for sometime now. I won't say too much more, other than this, since I need to remind myself something... GET A COMPASS! =P
It is quite fun though. Realtime programming. Programming in a way that has to interact with all the inconsistencies of the real world. And I have a great team with me =)
And this year may be the best year of them all!

Coding
Made some quite large steps with my coding. I have essentially all the theory for raytracing downpat, now just writing an implementation. The main problem I have at the moment is getting the right result returned lol. Working on it. The arrays seem to be a little wacky (or more specifically, I seem to be a little wacky with the arrays) lol
I plan on writing a tutorial on Sourceforge (http://www.sourceforge.net), to exhibit the code and explain it in terms that I would have loved (I've been battling through explanations that quite literally take a degree in mathematics to solve). But that's all bee part of the fun I guess =)

Ideally I'd love to have various levels of raytracer construction (bare bones, diffuse shading, specular shading, reflection, refraction, etcetera etcetera) and also have a forum for everyone to talk to each other in (newbies with older people, all kinds of graphic theories merging together), and a version of the raytracer that will keep on growing, of which I will add ANYONE'S code if it does not break the raytracer and any previous functions, and also marks a small landmark. This will allow newbies to go in and see all the kinds of things people have developed.

I am also very peeved that a book called "Graphics Gems" has not been evenly partially published online. It has a whole chapter on Writing Raytracers, of which I've never seen, and probably never will, which every institution or programmer refers me to. Very agitating =)

Anyway, I just updated my WIP (work in progress) for the Weekend Challenge entry. I'll have finished (probably) by tomorrow...

Goodnight, and here's to hope... =)

On the next day...

2004-06-10T22:20:00.000+10:00

On the next day, will I ever remember the world as it is? As it was?
Every small detail, the houses I see, faces I should remember, the valiant pen fights with Stui, how I felt when I saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for the first time. It's a tradgedy you never remember the small things. That's what I hope this diary will help out with, a vague recollection of events, enough to recreate a small world.
They say that your life flashes before your eyes just as you are about to die. I personally think that's a little unfair, you've lived x amount of years, and for all those years, millions of hours, billions of seconds, you get a mere flash of your life? Or is it a Hollywood style moment when the world around you slows, and a million life times could fill that very second... And, if it is true you see your life flash before your eyes, is it a chain reaction of neurons sending off bursts of messages?

*phew* Babble babble babble...

School
Got a Distinction for computing... Oh, yay... 96th percentile of state... Oh, yay... Proves nothing worth knowing...

I should be getting skipped forward for computing studies anyway. Doing some online training courses, which should turn out useful.

And yep, still staring at my crush... Staring staring staring =P
(and a theory has been proposed to me that I will never be "on the inside", but I rebutted the theory stating that I have never had an aim of being on the inside, and anyone worth discussion on the inside is therefore abducted out of it =P)

I also started on a map today, of a purely fictional world called Enanami. Quite amazing what a few random squiggles and ideas can turn into, a world full of rogue continents, Aganthean trading oceans, a single mine spanning over continents and the everpresent threat of the trade ships being raided by pirates =P

And now...
Now I'm up, with my mum sitting in the next room waiting for me to do my homework. Hmmm... I've finished memorising Latin (takes like 2 minutes), but, well, the rest'll take a while =P
It's annoying, she's staying up of 'her own free will', and later dad will blame me for keeping her up.
And she just said I have ten minutes. Ten minutes. I guess she doesn't know I stay up till midnight every night then. Neither does my dad. Just a hint for any adults reading out there, putting a limit on a teenager is like wrapping a noose around your own head, not smart nor suggested. I do go to bed at midnight every night, I know what my body and mind can take, yet they don't trust my own judgement.

No time for creativity tonight, but I think the map did the same task pretty well. Oh, and last night, while up at night drawing, I came up with the idea of a small figure (tribesman, and small meaning two inches) who religously sticks a fork into a 240V socket =P They believe that they are electrocuted by the mighty deities for a job well done on earth, and that the smoke rising from the steaming ashes/corpse is the soul finding it's final resting place =) Well, it's good to dream...

Anyway, fare the well for tonight, I have to work my way around parents/homework/music... It'll be fine though, it always works out in the end.

The Path Taken

2004-06-07T19:16:00.000+10:00

The moon lit the snowflakes like tiny chandeliers as they made their descent down to the ground. The wanderer walked the long path into the night, as the frost began to take hold. It was too late for him to turn back now, he had already strayed too far from home. He must hope the path he has taken will lead to a better end, and not one forever cold.

Stephen Merity, 7:27

That's generally how I feel at the moment. I just hope I haven't taken too many wrong choices so far, and that the hopes I lean on do not fall =) I'm pretty sure all hopes will hold, and if not, there will always be other things to grab before I fall!

I think I'm generally feeling like this because of two things. CG, computer graphics, output of the imagination, and something not going too well at the moment ;) And I have a crush on a girl... Girl girl girl... Geez lol... (notice the alliteration, repeated use of the letter g... right... too much English work at school =P) I'm not actually going to say who it is online, no knowing what kind of prying eyes see this (not general people, just possibly friends from school) but seeming that I don't think I've gotten any views I should be perfectly fine ;) Anyway, I barely know the girl, so yes, I'm attracted to her from the shallowness of my heart *sigh* But I'm hoping she has a smart spark, as she takes a quite difficult language at school, and mainly I guess it's just hope though...
I haven't asked her out yet for a myriad of reasons -
Obviously shyness, grand characteristic =) - I'm not sure it'll work out, we're kind of different social groups - I'm not even sure if I want a relationship - Freaked she will say no (but of course, typical fear =) The last two girls I dated were quite a different matter. The first one I asked cuz my friend spilled on who I liked, and thought it would be better to straight out ask her than tip-toe around the whole issue, and the second asked me out, lots of work on my part =P) My self esteem on this subject is not the highest ;) *babble babble babble*

Yeah... *phew* Girls *eek* =P (not eek in a "shes got girl-germs!" way, but in a "oh! I wanna ask her out but chances are a million to one, and then it isn't "Lived happily ever after" but more probably "Lasted two weeks before beginning a shout match at each other, then broke up in an explosive display that would make New Years Fireworks look like a set of sparklers"... darn" kind of way... Long explanation huh? =P)

Creativity
Well, today I'm going to start off with a word, go through a random picture archive on my computer, mix my thoughts with that and see how far that gets me =) Ready? =P

vade mecum - A useful thing that one regularly carries about.

This reminds me so much of my sketchbook, it goes everywhere with me and is always on the verge of falling apart! =)

Okay. A guy in a gaol, carrying around a giant weight supposed to stop him getting away. Ice Troll was one of the images that came up from my archive... So... An ice troll... What do they need... lol, tissues!
A giant ice troll, living high in the mountains, composed mainly of gnashing teeth and bulging muscles, blowing his nose, cuz it gets damn chilly up there! Always the threat of a terrible cold, or even flu! =P
That's weird enough for that =P

A quick other creative note
A group of three travellers have made their way into the marshes. Something is strange about these marshes tho, for water is always a degree from freezing, and a permanent frost grips the land.
Later that night, one of the travellers was awoken by a strange sight. A glowing ball of fire, vaguely man shaped, but more of the sorts of a demon. He quickly awoke the wiser of the other two, "What's that! What do we do!" "Be quiet, he is of no risk to us at the moment. He is a permafrost beast, an Ice Cursor. They suck in the heat from the world around them, giving them life, form..." "Are they dangerous?" "Only if you are foolish. They are no raging beast, but if you are near them when they begin to burn out, you may find yourself frozen in seconds. They merely do not attack us now, for it would be too much trouble for them"

GO THE ICE CURSORS! =P

Anyway, that's it for today. Dinner is here (McDonalds =P)

sigh

2004-06-03T17:08:00.000+10:00

*Listening - Nothing, just got on*

Hm... You may notice I'm not pumped up and excited. Well, it's that time again! The world's crumbling around me, and I'm trying to not fall by clinging onto things that may not be there. To clear that up:

The world's crumbling around me - To explain, my family is extremely confused at the moment. Believe what you will, but a smaller family doesn't make it any easier. The only time I see my dad is essentially when he tells me to go to bed or catches me up in the middle of the night. My mum isn't feeling well recently, stress seems to be getting her down. My best friend is having a rough time, but I'm not depressed about that, just a little worried. I was asked on the bus "How old I was" when they noticed I was reading an animation book (*hint hint* to illustrate some of the concepts they used cartoons...) I've got a crush on a girl who probably only notices I'm alive because I accidently nudge her with my locker (It's not her fault she doesn't know me though =) ) and overall, things are looking down.

I'm trying to not fall by clinging onto things that may not be there - I'm hoping that by being a generally good person things should work out in the end. That theory is still under scrutiny though *sigh*. I'm also hoping that I'm good at CG. Or at least get better. Or discover some hidden interest. Something! Time will tell...

Anyway, =)

Exams
Got 19 out of 20 for my creative writing, and it wasn't prewritten! =)
The given topic was "Nightmare", and I came up with an idea of a guy getting drunk, and waking up a few hours later to see a huge sparkling diamond on the finger of his girlfriend =) Marriage for him is one helluva phobia lol
I think a majority of my marks would have come from some of the sentences like:

She gave him such a cute look that it made bunny rabbits seem aggressive =)
Ryan walked into the kitchen, wearing a grimace that would make the dead feel sorry for him

Of course, these aren't the exact quotes, mainly because I haven't gotten the story back yet

Of beautiful people, conversations, arguments and romance
Beautiful people are commonly thought of as a little stupid, but is that true?
My personal thoughts are that "normal people" usually spend much more time reading or something similar to that, even if they are quite active socially, but with "beautiful people" they spend a very large majority of their time on a superficial basis, parties, friends, walking around and showing off, etc. I wouldn't take me as the best resource by the way, just a personal theory =)

----------

Conversations & Arguments
I'd like to try and find out why the main conversations and arguments take place. Here's my small compiled list so far... (by the way, thought about this while on the bus)

Actually, I won't list them quite yet. I just noticed as I was writing them down I was making a sweeping generalisation in some of my comments. Not very realistic at all. But the main one is that people usually find things interesting if they are immediately related to themselves. For example, I asked on a mailing list, instead of "What should I do to get into the industry" I asked people "What would you do if you could start again?". From that, people listed a vast resource of things they HAVE done, and whether that worked, and what they WOULD have done, and how they thought that would work... Very thought provoking stuff they wrote

----------

Romance, Romance, Romance =)
I'm always wondering how you should go by "romance" (instead of love, I use the word romance, because it isn't just love. Love doesn't come and go like the tide, and it doesn't relate to the lower level feelings like having a crush or an attraction etc)

Should you ask any and every girl you have a chance? Wouldn't that make you a little sluttish, and also, wouldn't you compare all the girls with other girls you have had before? Won't you just begin to expect more and more?

Should you wait on that one who you think is the dream of dreams? What happens when you find out you've been building her up in your head, having a fake perception of her? Or when they turn you down, and you've been thinking for all this time that she is the perfect? What then, fallen one?

Should you try to separate yourself completely?

Or should you wait till someone comes to get you

In wrapping
My mum has just arrived, or will be arriving soon (I thought I heard her car, I guess I was wrong) there are about a million things fighting for attention in my head at the moment, and none are getting that which they deserve... Strange huh

Sorry, the planet you are attempting to destroy is incompatible with your Death Ray =P

2004-06-02T19:46:00.000+10:00

*Listening - Bring Me to Life

Oh man I love making up quotes =P That was pretty weak I assure you, but it's none the less a good way to start the post.

Exams
97.54% in Computing exam... Oh yay... =)
Obviously you may notice my lack of enthusiasm. At my school, I don't seem to really have a choice to skip Years for my computing studies, but I am SO far ahead of everyone it isn't funny. *sigh* Time will tell...

Of midnight and drawing
At a few minutes before midnight last night, my dad caught me drawing... Dang eh? The really annoying thing is that I go to bed at midnight, that's my time to go to bed. If he had come in only 5 minutes later he wouldn't have saw the light coming out of my room. My dad really doesn't understand that my dad never works out how it's supposed to, and that night for me is the only time to make up for the mistakes of day. Getting better at drawing though. Only marginally, but if I don't have that I don't have anything eh? =)

Commitment of Interest
To make sure I keep improving in my attempt to become an artist (unlike others I do not assume that I am an artist, being an artist is much more than drawing on paper or making a beautiful model)

Every week I shall attempt to produce:
* At least one purely original drawing
* A 3D artwork
* Attempt to write in my blog and come up with some creative/crazy ideas =)

Just a note, I will not be posting everything I write, draw, or render up here. I don't have the webspace for it, and I don't really think there is an audience to be listening.

To want to do so much, and yet achieve so little
I want to write a book, become a traditional (pens, paint, paper) and digital (3D graphics, digital painting) artist, and to be happy, and all of these seem to be out of reach to me... Maybe I am diluting my interests too much... Maybe I'm talking more than I'm walking... Whatever it is, it's not going well... Gotta work on that =)

Wrapping up
Well, it's 9:37 now, and I can feel that my dad's going to walk up to me, try and steal a peek at my screen, and then say in childish tones "Time to go to bed Stephen, without sleep you won't be a good boy..."
Either way, I'll stay up quite a bit longer, how at the moment I'm not exactly sure, but by the time I finish cleaning my teeth I'll have an escape plan ready =)
(dad just switched off the kitchen light, he's coming for me)
Nitey nite, before he gets a peak at my screen =)

For the craving of creativity

2004-06-01T18:27:00.000+10:00

*Listening - LotR _again_*

Creativity... Creativity... The real sense of the word, the inherent genius behind the gears of the world's clock...
And I'm not born with it... lol...

New Technique Coming Up!
Okay, while browsing the Daily Sketch Group, I have arrived at the conclusion that my previous method is good, but could possibly be more advance. Considering that in the world there is an infinite number of ideas and choices, letting my humble mind bumble down to only one conclusion is a little shallow.
So, I am thinking of a new way to add some creative iterations.
Categories include:

Time - Future? Past? Present? Have a pick from the history of the Earth! You have a hunter,
Is he a hunter of the past, spear in hand wearing an outfit that would make Tarzan blush,
Or is he from the not so past past, a knight armed with a traditional mace and chain, wearing heavy leather armour following tracks in the mud,
Or even the present, (mad detective style) featuring multiple layers of magnifying glasses, wearing a slightly singed and dirtied suede jacket, staring at a group of select cards in his hand (lets say for insanity's sake its a joker who's got a sling shot, a queen just saved by a Prince only to find he is already married, and a king who has a suspiciously ominous shadow!)
Or the future, with a sly female spy agent against a wall, pony tail wrapped into a tight spray of fine hair, lipstick in hand. Well, maybe that's going a little strange =)

Angles - Smooth? Sharp? Angles exhibit the creators geometrical fascinations, and is commonly used in evil instruments and architecture, while smooth may exhibit the plump face of a friendly barman.

Ample? - Is the character fat (wealth, carelessness for personal image) or thin (undernourished, poor, self-conscious)

Movement - Is it a slow lumbersome movement, meaning great mass or age, or a quick darty movement, emphasising youth and agility.

Social Class - Rich, poor, famous, common. All these influence certain characteristics about them. Could you imagine a poor dragon, who ends up using passed down flames or burrows =P

Fusion - Already got a goblin? Throw a crown into the mix, ta-da! Goblin King, owner of the deeps, danger of the wealthy travellers.

Antithesis - You have a kind old bunny rabbit, carefully sitting ontop of a present, happy to see the world go by... Boring right? Well, ok, a fat mean bunny rabbit, who is viciously ripping apart your present, pieces of wrapping paper flying into the air like a spray of limbs =P

Human Or Animal - Are they based on mainly human or mainly animal characteristics... Earl Bird? etc etc

Anyway, got to go, dad's about to rip my head off...

Some people here! O_o

2004-05-31T22:36:00.000+10:00

*Listening - still to LotR, more specifically Howard Shore's Two Towers piece*

I was having a quick browse here, and was awefully shocked to see some people had written in excess of 200,000 words! Unless they've been on here since the beginning of Blogger, these people may have some worrying lives. I'm a nerd, first and foremost, I'll be first to admit, yet even I have a limit, and personally, a blog is merely to keep a log of what you are doing day by day in your life, like a digital diary of sorts, not something amazingly important!

Though, I admit, some others may use it for book ideas, or something extremely heavy like that, theres got to be some limit. You cannot spend your life talking about the world if you have not been out there and seen it!

I do enjoy writing this, merely as I know I myself will end up re-reading this in the future, and I have a very high regard for recording the journey of my life for myself later, as if you don't, it seems that your life has been washed away, which is certainly not the case. If ever you get depressed, stop for a moment to look how far you have come, and through what fields you have fought.

Anyway, good night for the last time, I still have to do homework and if my parents catch me, *eek*

Fare the well! =P

A Hope Rekindled!

2004-05-31T21:33:00.000+10:00

*starting now, every time I start I'll tell you what I'm listening to, so*
*Listening - Lord of the Rings Soundtrack, by Howard Shore, a phenomenal composer!*

DLF, a resource for Aussie Artists
Over the length of the weekend my whole idea on the world has once again skewed, in a good way I hope!

Recently I joined a mailing-list specifically for Australian CG artists (Digital Labourers Federation, site here) and after observing the posts for a few days I asked a question, and an overwhelming response!

Hello, I'm currently a Year 9 student. Been to two AEAFs (or as some of you refer to them, DMW Festivals) and have grown to love CG =)
I am using Blender (www.blender.org) and Maya PLE for my CG, and have had about 2 years experience now.

But, to my question =)
If you could restart your paths in CG and do it all over again, what would you do? What skills do you think employers would prefer to see in a prospective internship/student?

At the moment, my plan is to go on to Year 12, and then to try and pursue an internship (Rising Sun Pictures offer a 3 month paid internship which looked quite interesting). If I'm not at a high enough grade to get into an internship, I'm going to try and get tertiary education (I'm doing TAFE in my spare time at the moment) and go from there...

Anyway, I'd be thankful for any help you can give, and I'd like to say hi to you all =P

From this simple email, I got almost 20 responses, from people who do the major commercials and adverts for local TV stations and also from one of the artists at Digital Domain, who brought The Day After Tomorrow to life!

Of tertiary education
The weekend past I also went into the city to investigate one of the academies I am thinking of going to. So far it greatly interests me, as it can move from a grounding in all the essentials of a CG artist to a degree and diploma. Extremely expandable, and the institution itself is great!
The teacher himself also ended up being part of the AEAF Education Panel in 2002, and did something in 2003, although I'm not fully aware of it! =P From my short talks with him, I feel quite pleased, though in the end I do hope that I need not go down that route and merely get a job straight in the industry! lol (BTW, one of the best things he said to the group was 'And even if you don't chose to be a member of this course, I expect to see you as a fellow artist in the industry')

Of 'Art'
Occasionally I've been accused of acts of art =P Creativity, insanity, drawing, dancing (not so much, but what the hey) and the occasional form of writing *cough cough* Anyway!

This is for a short animation I'm planning! *WooT!* This is my own concept, and will feature a beautifully animated cuckoo bird as the clock's aforesaid owner.

Please note this is only a WIP, especially the base, and is more only a 3D concept of my 2D version!

And, as I promised myself, creativity exercises everytime I post (or at least every time I feel bothered!)
Today I'm going by a bit of a stranger method, go to Dictionary.com and browse the "Previous Word of the Day Archive". Grab some strange word you seem to like and go with it. I have chosen chicanery - The use of trickery or sophistry to deceive (as in matters of law)

Because of my love of Norse/Viking (both the same, just different names, prefer Norse personally) this reminds me heavy of Loki, the god of trickery! (funny old chap, quite evil and vicious in his own rights, and the cause of the worlds earthquakes [long story, don't worry] but overall lots of fun!)
I see him as a kind of crazy teen, a wicked smile on his face, with hair as if he'd been electrocuted during a 70s Disco [WooT! lol], sitting on a giant crate next to train tracks. He has one foot on the box, in a semi-crouch position, holding a rather large and important looking screw. In the background, smoke arises from a recent traincrash, obviously nothing to do with poor old Loki =P

I really like that idea =P Maybe I'll make a sketch on it! *hee hee hee*
Anyway, one more for tonight (really quick, my dad's trying to force me to bed, and is 'interested' in this... more of an annoyingly joking way of course, but hey, better than most fathers =P), one more word from Dictionary.com

didactic: conveying instruction; teaching some moral lesson

Well, my brain isn't quite kicking straight into gear with this one, so I'm going to go to strange old habbits. Now, my first idea was of a student sitting at the front of the class, feet up on a desk throwing a paper aeroplane around with a teacher stalked infront of a blackboard with the word on it 'RESPECT', but obviously that's a little too plain and simple... So, blackboard reminds me of water for some reason... (don't ask me why lol), water, dark, pain, red, sun, ... Well, I have teacher, student, blackboard, water, dark, pain, red, sun... Weird eh? lol
Okay, a teacher is standing at one side of a frame, scribbling mathematical equasions onto a blackboard, his hand a blur with speed, as all the environment to the left of the teacher begins to lose life and fades into a mere wireframe version of the world, with the formulae and equasions responsible for the beauty of nature overpowering the beauty of it all, while the student stares into a deep pond, among green plains and a beautiful sunset, avoiding all of the manifestations of the literary world and focusing specifically on the beauty infront of him, not the one found in books, written by those who have never explored it...

Well, so much for short and simple lol. Not as good as my first one personally, but it at least has a deeper philosophical grounding, although strange in the abstract =)

Good night, and remember, Knowledge is power. Power corrupts. Study hard. Be evil =)
(not my own quote, but don't you love it! lol)

Accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative

2004-05-26T18:13:00.000+10:00

Or that's what they tell you =)
Supposedly it isn't necessarily depression, so my GP is just kind of easing me onto the possibility of other problems effecting me... It's all good =)

Creativity
Now, I'm generally searching for a topic in my head to babble to myself about. My main idea, is unfortunately creativity, of which I have little. I'm right handed, and my brain usually lacks any creativity, until I'm on the border of falling asleep. Vivid crazy things then, of which little I can remember (These aren't dreams by the way, but it's a lucid state. One weird thought I had was a bunch of dwarf party crashers, one filling himself up with helium! Oh that was fun lol)
The way which I usually come up with strange out of control ideas when I'm non-lucid *sigh* is mainly a form of trickery. Basically, you think one thing then lead onto others. So, you take the most normal thing, and go on from that, for example Rock

A rock has moss growing on it, moss grows in forests, forests are wet, wet is clouds, clouds have birds. So from that strange thing, my head has assembled an idea of a stalky bird carrying a giant boulder on his back and with rollerskates (don't know where I got the rollerskates from, but =P )

That's basically how I get my "ideas" from. I have a few other weird tricks, mainly involving an archive of about 7,426 pictures, contained in 307 folders and taking up 721 megabytes... Thank god for today's hard drives!
I might do one of the creativity exercises everytime I post just for practice. (Even though 0 people read this! wooT!)
Another good idea is to go to Concept Art.org's Daily Sketch Group which always have a strange variety of ideas and topics, and at the moment 439 days of logged ideas and thoughts =)

School
I go back to school tomorrow... *sigh* And I'm in a worse state than before. When I get back I have to catch up on an English Common Test (on POEMS! *eek*) and then on my Practical Music, and then accept the annoyance of my band conductors (I'm in 3 bands, Concert Band, Orchestra and Jazz Band) about missing so many rehearsals near a performance (we have Showcase night coming up). But in truth, I really do like band. Yes, I hate getting up at an insanely early time in the mornings, and the occasional insult from a few other members (at heart they're nice, so I leave it at that) it's all good. And music, even though I may not necassarily be great at it, does help to relieve tensions (as long as the music you're doing isn't due for a practical exam tomorrow lol)

Self Taught CG... Ouch...

2004-05-25T18:26:00.000+10:00

Okay, I've been home alone all day today, since I had a really serious migraine, stinging pain in the right eye. Hopefully won't happen again, but hey, I'm out of school aren't I? (unfortunately, being out of school caused a whole lot of other problems, like my English common test being readjusted and Music exam going out of wack, but...)

Now, I spent half of today in bed, fearing all bright lights and trying to avoid a little puppy dog (his name's Monty) who kept jabbing me viciously in the ribs to play ball with him =) The other half I spent readjusting my RAM and booting into and out of Linux trying to get my Windows partition to work (if you're not a nerd, don't worry by what I mean, just computer troubles), and then the rest watching Fellowship of the Ring DVD and doing some quick tests and tricks in CG.

Well... Depression became an onset. Hopefully due to some of the pain it was under, but I'm guessing quite a bit of it was not. By the way, this is the kind of depression where you just don't feel productive and think you're wasting your time, not the quite brutal and vicious kind of depression that therapy is needed to fix (well, hopefully it's not... lol)

I feel that I'm not making headway with my CG, feeling worried that I'm going to fail myself... That's the biggest problem with being self-taught, failures has no reassurance, only that you are to blame. I'm trying to work hard, but I'm just not making any progress, and then I get the fears that I could be wasting all my time and that I may need to be born with a specific mindset to be successful, like left handed people being more creative (and I'm right *sigh*)

So, in desperation, I turn to the only place that has really ever helped me... The Net... My parents, although loving and supportive (as any good parents should be =P ) wouldn't have a clue about computer graphics (tho my dad is on the thoughtful and philosophical side and my mum is quite a techy, works as Web Content manager for IBM's IBM.com/au site and taught me HTML in Year 3! =P ) and some of my friends are wacky enough to start up their own cartoons (and I'm sure some have lol) none of them can offer the help I need.

CGTalk (which I noted earlier) is the home to thousands upon thousands of artists, and is a larger version of my home sweet forum Elysiun, which is much more friendly but not quite as advanced.
Searching it discovered this thread which may help me! Even if it doesn't help me progess, I've been broken out of the slum, usually only broken by a good night (or good nights) of sleep and a morning that would make Dory from Finding Nemo look knowledgable! =P I am also underage for any alchohol consumption, which people have hitherto told me that it cures depression, only resulting in a mild feeling of being on fire the next morning =P

Of the greatest help in that thread so far is Mooncalf's comments... People like that I respect, they don't simply go on a forum to get the highest post count, and even if they do, they get to the highest post count posting helpful information all the way. Apart from Mooncalf's awe inspiring approach, the others suggest DVDs and training videos... *sigh* If I had the money... of course... I'm a Year Nine student, who is even legally allowed to work yet, living in Australia with most of the DVDs being American... I would have to pay for a DVD in Australian dollars (I hate the price of the dollar at the moment, whether or not we get more tourists lol) and then ship it all the way around the world and hope they don't stuff the 8 for a 4 and get my package delivered somewhere in the red centre... *sigh*

Maybe I have bi-polar depression lol!
*after doing a quick Google* Hmm... This isn't good... After checking out the five main types of depression, bi-polar does actually fit me very well... The site here describes bi-polar, with the very unfortunately snippets of -

I doubt completely my ability to do anything well. It seems as though my mind has slowed down and burned out to the point of being virtually useless. I am haunted with the desperate hopelessness of it all. (sound similar to above to you?)

At first when I'm high, it's tremendous...ideas are fast...like shooting stars you follow until brighter ones appear...all shyness disappears, the right words and gestures are suddenly there...uninteresting people, things, become intensely interesting. (if you know me on a hyper day, this is me...)

The individual often will deny that anything is wrong. In its early stages, bipolar disorder may masquerade as a problem other than mental illness. For example, it may first appear as alcohol or drug abuse, or poor school or work performance.
(Quote from above - By the way, this is the kind of depression where you just don't feel productive and think you're wasting your time, not the quite brutal and vicious kind of depression that therapy is needed to fix and look at the bad work performance part, I feel that I'm not making headway with my CG, feeling worried that I'm going to fail myself...)

Well, that's not great... lol...
Maybe I should get that checked out... I'm going to have an appointment with my General Practitioner anyway, may as well bring it up (preferably with my mum out of the room, not that that'll stop her finding out lol)

Anyway, was just on the phone with her and already told her... No freaks, just an overtly calm mother saying "oooookkkk.... Remember, 9:30 tomorrow, I'm going to have to get you up early... Well, actually, you'll be getting up later than usual... anywayyyyyyy...." =)

Exams are over, paradise ensues! =P

2004-05-23T14:00:00.000+10:00

Exams are over, and the wretched stench of hard work and stress are finally beginning to wash out of the air.

Overall, cramming didn't go too badly (apart from one night/morning when I had to study for three exams the next day... Not fun! =P) Of course, now I can joke about it, but if you caught me two or three days ago I wouldn't been a possible homocide case lol

Anyway, paradise is ensuing, and I'm starting to relax. I also bought Lord of the Rings Fellowship of the Ring Special Extended Edition (the names nearly worth the cover price itself lol). Excellent making ofs (two DVDs) and high quality widescreen movie discs including commentary. Overall, darn excellent (not as good as Pixar, but who can beat them? =P)

Quick thought < I think that even with piracy of movies in todays world, if DVD producers supply extra content worth the price, people will buy it anyway. No-one wants to merely buy the movie, but if extras, trailers, sound clips and other small things are included, people will want it for that, and not merely the movie anymore

Also, quick note on exam marks, 93% in Latin (non difficile est), but 85% in Maths (starting to show the midnight burn, but I am in top class, which is pretty good for it being my worst subject). Others should be coming back soon.

----
I also did a quick artwork, relating to an award competition in 3D, link to the JPG here

(copyright as this is my actual work, if you want to use it slip me an email)
Basically a spun polygon mesh, some procedural textures, ambient occlusion, new angular mapping (same technique used to compress HDRI images) and of course good old Blender for all the 3D! =) Just a quick work to get the rust off of my fingertips. Really could have done better on the handles, but apart from that I'm happy

Tradgedy and Art

2004-05-16T01:06:00.000+10:00

Well, may I just note here and now, I only post what's worth reading (hopefully lol) Not everyday like a diary, only when I think it's important.

Two things btw, it's 1:08 (1:28 as I reread this lol) in the morning as I type this, and in two days I have exams (of which I haven't studied for, but I always do reasonably well just by cramming), so excuse incorrect grammar or spelling (also, I'm at the point where I feel guilty for not studying and therefore am not doing anything productive, neither studying nor my hobbies, but spend my time by reading forums like CGTalk etc... [not nessacarily a waste if I think about it])

What really shocked me tonight was a story about two brothers, both into art. I was reading their interview here and absolutely loved some of their work. They're twins, and work closely together, and both go under the alias "Twincruiser". I was just imagining how great it would be to have a twin brother work with you, share your successes and happiness, talents and fun... (Just a note, I have no siblings, so I know little of the hair pulling and backstabbing normally associated with brothers and sisters =P )
This made me extremely shocked, when, going to their website to look at more of their work, I saw this...

To my dear, loving Brother

Why did it have to be so quickly...

You and I were destined to walk this life forever...

You knew that we could have done so much things together...

Still, In my heart I know you are here with me...

Thank you for the joy, inspiration and lessons you gave me...

You will always be with me, my brother.

His twin brother died only a month ago... I don't know the details, all I know is that it shocked me... I had a perfect image of paradise, two brothers working side by side together doing something they love, and then bang, it was all gone. The worst part was I was thinking to myself "Hey, they like mythology, this and that too, they sound like me!" and I felt I almost knew them... Bit of a shock eh?
Anyway, their artwork was and still will be excellent, they worked on many of the Warcraft manuals, and their work is stunning! Check it out if you have a chance.

Anyway, that's it for tonight, I'm going to be going to bed now since I really should get some sleep in preparation for exams (just another point, I hate the idea of sleeping, to me it's a waste of a perfectly good 8 or so hours which could be used for so many more things, and I also love the idea that people perform almost as well on 20 minutes of sleep [REM is the most important form of sleep and only occurs in the first 20 minutes]) Also, to note, if I was to be reincarnated, let me be a dolphin! They can rest each hemisphere of their brain seperately, thus never actually sleeping, only being awake in a dumbed down sense =P

The main problem though is that I suspect tomorrow I'll freak and spend hours and hours studying =) Got Latin up first, then Maths, then English, Geography (do History next term), Music, and finally Computing, which I won't have a problem in the world with =) I know that even if someone tested me at this very moment I would get in excess of 80% for every test (my brain works amazingly well without having to study, I actually find a lot of the stuff I learn interesting and as such stays in there) but I'd still love to get 90-95%... I studied about 2 or 3 days in advance very heavily in Year 7 (first time I had ever had exams, I was freaked) and because of that I became an Order of Merit student and subsequently got a 25% scholarship at my school (well over AU$10,000 a... quarter I think... not sure, ask my parents, they get the bill! =P ).

Anyway, here's for hope and a good nights sleep! =P

Announcing the New =)

2004-05-12T17:48:00.000+10:00

First post! This is the perfect place to babble about my insanity, eternally WIP (work in progress) projects etc etc.

Quick background about me first, just call me Smerity =) I'm currently in Year 9 (at the moment with mid year exams in one week *eek*) and have the greatest passion towards computing and other related fields, and reside in Australia.

My main interest at the moment is computer graphics (and art in general), which I do with a fabulous free and opensource application called Blender! Blender, other than what the name suggests, is a 3D application, featuring modelling, texturing, animation and rendering capabilities, clutched from the hands of its previous owner (Not A Number, gaming company, and it was closed source) with thousands of Blender users digging into their pockets to raise a 100,000 Euros (I'm Australian, I don't want to deal with conversion rates, but simply put, it's a lot!) Anyway, more info is available onsite, and while the interface is daunting at first, check it out, you'll love it in the end!

BTW, I discovered Google's Blogging service thru a news item on Slashdot (News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters =P) about the curators of Google themselves getting a blog (Their Blog Here), then them linking me to here... Weird huh!

For my first main thought, TERMS OF SERVICE! While signing up, I read the Terms of Service on the site. Yes, all of it, lots and lots of it =) My main concern was whether they held any rights to my content, which they don't (Thank you Googlers! You guys always treat me right!) thank heavens. But my main thought was how many people actually read those things? Do you? I know in my time I've glossed over the contents (and quite often finding I'm not allowed because of being "underage"), but obviously there are times where there might be a serious matter. Copyright issues etc

Just something for you to chew on, and... Welcome to my (encoded into English and represented graphically using a strangely simple and not quite a real programming language HTML) world! =)

Oh, ps. Terry Pratchett and JRR Tolkien rule! (Both book authors, and if you really don't know who at the very least JRR Tolkien is, do yourself a favour and go grab the Lord of the Rings from the local library! Really, how big a rock are you living under! =P)