Mucho

Phew! Lot of pics for you today!

First, tomorrow we should know whether we get the house or not. If so, we'll probably get our internet service ASAP, but it will take 8 days for them to set that up. Also, in 8 days (or less) we get our brand new Chevy Vivant.
Anyway, I've been attacked by mosquitoes quite a bit. I guess they can't resist me. Here are some yummy pics! Here's one I got on my elbow...



But as you can see it got better. Then a few days ago I got bit again. This time on my hand!

That one has also gotten a little better, but they both still itch a lot. I also am amused by the one on my hand because as you can see, if I close my hand, I can make it puff out more, and it looks scarier that way. X-D Frickin' 'squitos, they hit the jackpot! Darn my over-sized veins, or lack of fat...probably both.



But enough of my insect endeavors...here are some more pics! First off, the front patio thing of the house, second is the kitchen, third is...me, in the living room, and lastly me being choked by a little fat girl (my sister). ;)











As for today, we've been in the house all day. Uhm...a lot of stuff...that I already forgot about probably happened, too bad for you. Tomorrow I'll try and get some more "scenery" pics and maybe more of the house. And now, I leave you with the best soda you can have, the Red Stuff, Colombiana!

Casa

Well, we're probably gonna buy (or actually rent) a house today.

My dad also went...somewhere, to try and get his shofar back.

I just realized a Friday went by and we didn't go to Youth Group. GASP! Hopefully nobody noticed, being as quiet as I was, it shouldn't have been much of a difference. (my online nick is Stealth ya know...) Except maybe a lack of bass during worship (unless Jared played! PLAY JARED PLAY!) ;)

The weather here is just like Florida, except maybe a bit breezier or cooler at night.

Uh...what else? OOH! I forgot to mention a little scare we had from the start. When we arrived at the airport, the lady who stands around the front of the line said we were late, and had to "authorize" us to get on. We almost didn't make it. o.o

K, bye.

Stuff

We saw a house we might rent for a year. It looks great...

We are also looking for a car. Which will be interesting seeing as how my dad doesn't have a Colombian license, and my mom, who dislike driving more, has one...except highly outdated. Perhaps my American license could come in handy...? :D

My allergies are a little better.

The Wii costs $477 here, and there are only 3,000 in the whole country.

That is all.

Extras

Random thoughts/blurbs here:

I can't stop sneezing. I think I'm allergic to this apartment. It's extremely annoying and I think my lungs will come out soon...

I'm about half-way done with Yoshi's Island DS...

Advocate is a noob...

We found Rice Krispies! I thought I was doomed. Last time I remembered, we had the same problem and could not find my favorite cereal.

I feel so American. In fact, I'm still speaking in English. I want to make some Spanish friends, but wonder how to go about doing that when I'm not in school. I guess I'll have to wait till we move into a neighborhood, or find a church. Either way, when I do make friends, I will still speak to them in English, whether they like it or not! X-D Hey! If those immigrants in Miami can do it, so can I...

The chicken here is great, but I have had a lack of rice intake, and I think that's probably why my immune system has weekend and has caused my allergies to become so powerful. I knew it...

Plus photos...

Preweekend

So, as the second day here comes to an end (in some 6 more hours :P) I thought I should give a lil update:



So, the day we arrived was quite interesting to say the least. It turns out that some animal laws had the police very conspicuous about our shofar! They've kept it for now until further "investigation" or whatever can be done. It's just laws protecting animal commercialization that has caused so much trouble. Oh well. Either way, the head police army guy was kind enough to give us a ride to our rent-apartment-place. He gave us a nice little tour on the way as well. We stopped at this point, where you can see the whole city (we tried a panoramic shot, but I'm too lazy to stitch it together right now :P):



Anyway, we visited a mall and stuff...that was about it. Here is a picture of my cheap plastic utensils snapping as I eat some steak:



Some interesting things to note are:

50% of cars are taxis. There are also a BUNCH of buses that constantly drive around, unlike in FL where you gotta wait for half an hour or so for that one in the specific route.

There's more Wifi than I thought. In the malls they advertise it, at the airport it was available, and they even have WiMax (it's like a city-wide WiFi) available for those who want it!

I will never drive here. It is scary as heck. The dividers on a 2 lane road...yea, they're worthless. People use the horn as a form of communication or something.

Anyway, here's some photos of where we're staying:





The place looks great, although a bit under-developed (Miami is probably the closest thing you can compare it to). Adios!

Greetings!

From Colombia! I'm here eating in a restaurant at Bogota, waiting for our flight to BucaraMANGaaaaaa...

So far, we haven't crashed into a mountain. That's always good...

Paint

Good morning. I just saw this interesting video. A guy drawing a car in MS Paint. You know, the paint program that comes on your computer.

Also, I fixed up the avatar of our company (for my tournament). You can see on the right the avatar for the 2 Lieutenants.

Countdown

3 days left. This is gonna be interesting...:P

Meh

Sunday: My birthday, was all right. I ate lunch at Bennigans, went bowling with my family (and, unusually, lost) and then went home. But I was surprised when the Diaz's, Mike, Jared, and Justin all came over and took me out to eat at "Steak and Shake". We then went off to Gameworks and had a little fun there too.

Monday: Crap. Woke up at 6:30, went off to the embassy to get my blood taken, picture taken, and hands filled with ink. Come back home at 12:30ish only to leave right after to go shopping (although I admit we bought some cool stuff, I did not serve a purpose for the outting). We get caught in some traffic, come home about 6:30PM for dinner. Finally it's over.

Today: Started 4 hours ago. I found this funny Flash thing. Find the guy with the hammer and the lever and stand on the end of it, so he can fling you into space. Then find the UFO. It's awesome...

Soon

Well, there have been some updates on our moving. From what I could tell, we're going to be shipping our stuff very soon, within the next 2 weeks. Next Friday will be my last Friday at Youth Group. :( I think it's finally getting into my head that I'm leaving. My carefree attitude has done me well, but I can tell it will not sustain the whole sadness of the situation, as I will dearly miss all my friends (and even more so my closer ones, who I hope will keep in touch).

My birthday is this Sunday. I am going to be 18, which I suppose is special because you have to be that old to call in to most of the stuff on TV. I am not excited. First off, I've been way too busy to even think up of what I wanted to do to celebrate, and as of yesterday I decided to do nothing. I'm turning 18 and not celebrating. BAH. I will just use tomorrow's Youth Group Bowling Outting as my "final friend reunion" time, and enjoy it then. Secondly, the next day I have to go to the Colombian embassy and get some final paper work done I believe. Thirdly, I'll just feel the same as if I was 17. :P I'm gonna have to find a more optimistic point of view for this...

In other news, I have a teaching that I really want to share with the Youth group, but don't know if I'll be able to due to their moving into a new place. I'll probably make a blog post of the teaching some day, especially if I can't share it at Youth Group at one of the last 2 Friday's we'll be there...

DVDs

Boy! This week has been pretty busy. I've been put in charge of converting all the old home videos (in VHS) into DVDs, and it is no easy task.

First off, all of the work is done on the fastest machine in the house...my dad's! :P So I am running back and forth across the house because the computer is in his room. (I was actually thinking what if his PC and my sister's swapped places. It would make sense, as she is mainly in school, and being next to the teacher while my dad gets an actual desk for his REAL PC...but whatever...)

Anyway, so besides this new exercise I'm getting, there's also the actual process of conversion. First, I hooked up the old VCR to output via RCA into the back of the TV card we bought a while ago. One of the problems with this stuff is that to record, you have to let the whole video play in realtime! Unlike if you were ripping a DVD, I believe the speed at which it rips depends mainly on how fast your DVD drive is. Anyway, this time consuming process fortunately uses low CPU power, so I am able to convert previously recorded videos (which output to MPEG) into a smaller compressed Xvid format.

So the process is:
-Record video tape on computer
-Convert recorded video into a smaller file (Xvid)
-Burn video on DVD
-Move Xvid video on 200GB hard-drive in mom's machine & Delete from dad's

Oddly enough, my dad's computer rejected a 200GB drive for no apparent reason. So now instead of being able of just saving it there on that machine, I gotta whip out my 80GB external passport drive, jam the videos in there, and THEN transfer to the main drive. My dad doesn't want to clutter his machine with the videos as he will probably be using that machine as a work computer when we get to Colombia.

So I believe that is enough reading for you today. Go play some video games or something.

Borked

So, I was trying to run BeUp, a homebrew MSN client for the DS. The latest version supposedly fix a bug that was brought up, because Microsoft changed the MSN servers, so the client never logged on. Unfortunately, when I ran the program, it corrupted my whole flash card. Luckily, I looked for a recovery program on Snapfiles before I reformatted (because I HAD to get back all my saves, like Big Brain and Metroid Prime), and found PC Inspector File Recovery. Awesomely enough, I was able to recover everything (except the videos, I don't know what happened, but I guess I didn't select that folder to recover) so I had all my data safe. Now I know to back up my card more often. :P

Also, I'm looking forward to seeing this thing getting released, as I rather have a see-through/black DS, with louder speakers and stronger hinge. Depending how much it is of course. ;)

Explosion

Ok, here is a status update of me!

Uhm...well, my first week of not-work has been fairly...boring. Hanging out with friends is hard when they're all in school. :P I have however been hard at work with many things. For instance, I finished an animation for my comic the other day. That was pretty hard to make, atleast 3 hours were spent on that final frame-by-frame animation, that only lasts about...15 seconds? -.- I'm also working on a poster for our General, Saptiva. She loves pirates and hence it is a piraty poster.



I still think I need to add something there on the left. A word of sorts, be it "YARR!" or "75AD", but I don't know...

And now, for the geekier news:
All right, so I've updated both of my machines (desktop and laptop) to Ubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10. The laptop upgrade went a lot smoother than it did on the laptop, as I had to completely reformat and reinstall Ubuntu on my desktop. Whatever. Anyway, after getting both all nice and setup, I installed the Nvidia beta drivers on both of them so I could use Beryl without XGL. After some more tweaking, I got both of them running it silky smooth, and it all looks great. And so ends another adventure in Linux.

Resignation

Today is my last day of work. Hurray? Too bad, it was a good job. Oh well.

Besides that...there's not much to say. Actually, there is a lot of Linux news I can relay here, but I should probably get to work on this animation...X-)

Reviews

Well, I haven't posted for a week. So here is a recap...
Monday-Friday: Work

Saturday: Party at Paula's, for Jose/Jared? No one knows. jose is leaving to Colombia and then Israel for some weeks, and it was Jared's birthday too. We had an intense game of "Spoons" and then Pictionary. I like Pictionary.

Sunday: Grandma...

And here we are. Today. Anyway, also in the past week I have been playing some new DS games I downloaded and stuff. I have actually downloaded MANY DS games, some which I like, some I don't, so let me do some quick reviews here:

Racing - Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Burnout Legens, Asphalt, Mario Kart DS - All these games suck EXCEPT Mario Kart. I really don't know what it is, maybe racing games are mainly about the hot looking graphics (which you can't have on a DS :P) but the controls suck as well. Mario Kart however plays excellent, just like on the N64. I don't play it too much though, it is Mario Kart and I got bored on the 64 fairly fast...

FPS - Metroid Prime Hunters - This game is pretty neat, like Nintendo's Halo or something. It's quite difficult to do the run and shoot stuff with the left trigger and stylus. I think if I had smaller hands it would be more comfortable...

Puzzle - Meteos - Meteos is a very cool, and fast-paced puzzle game. Kinda like Tetris Attack, but less Bejeweldy and more Wario Wood'sy. It's all about the vertical sliding. I should probably buy a real copy of it since I've played it so much.

Sports - Mario Hoops 3-on-3 - OMG...this game rocks. I don't know what it is, but the game looks awesome and the B-ball gameplay (although not true basketball) is still enjoyable. Next time I go to a store, I'll have to pick-up a copy of this since I've played it so much.

That's what I can remember for now, I'll post any other reviews later.

Gadgets

Teehee! It arrived...


New packaging is nice...


4 inside jokes, 3 of which only 21CW people will understand. Maybe not the best idea? X-)


It's pretty much the "iPod Mini 2". Atleast I don't have to waste money on a protective covering now...


My 3 favorite gadgets (assuming you can call a laptop a gadget, and can't call your desktop one)...




Am I a geek? Nah...
(those last 2 pics show about $1900 worth of electronics :D)

Seconds

I sold my old nano and am buying a new one. Apple recently released the 2nd generation nanos, which are pretty much the "iPod mini 2". I got mine in silver, because it was suggested to me the most...and I guess it's better than the blinding blue and green. Nothing was wrong with my old one, incase you were wondering. It just turns out that 2GB wasn't enough for me, so I'm doubling it up to 4. Hopefully most (not including all the podcasts I have, just the main stuff) of my music (and future musics ;D) will fit.

Also, that M3 I bought (post below) rocks so hard. I can almost fit my entire video collection, favorite music (this is not to replace my nano, nano has most of my music, this is just for my very favorites) and a bunch of games on that one 2GB chip! AND if I ever run out, just drop $40 and I got a whole 'nother 2GB to play with! Super sweet...

Also, check my comic (link is to the right, Just Deserts). I made a flash animation today, which is one of the first (as far as I can remember) to actually make myself laugh. :D

Homebrew

See those 2 chips there? The orange one is about 1.25 in. wide, and 1.375 (11/8) in. tall. The other one, same height and an inch wider. These 2 small devices can now unlock all the power within my DS Lite. I can now play music, movies, homebrew games (games that regular people, not companies, programmed themselves), and run Linux off of this!

Also, I can technically use this to run games that you can buy, but are downloadable off the internet (i.e. I never have to buy a game again). BUT I WON'T, as I plan on supporting companies for making a good game (for instance, I still gotta go out and buy Big Brain Academy, and whenever Yoshi's Island 2 comes out, it's mine!) Unfortunately, I can't use them until I get my little memory card on Monday. In total, everything has cost me around $150, which is a little more than buying a whole 'nother DS Lite! X-D Oh well.

Retirement

I plan on letting my boss know that I want to resign at the end of the month. As awesome as my work is (in terms of...payment :P) I would really like to spend the last month hanging out with my closer friends before we have to leave, and I can't do that with work consuming my afternoons. Oh well. So that's about $600 that I can add to my savings before I have no more income.

In other news, I recently (last week or so) broke 300 strips on my comic. No one will actually get it unless they're in my tournament. But you can still enjoy the flashy animation and funny voice-overed music.

Let's see...what else. I plan on buying this game for my DS Lite called "Big Brain Academy". I downloaded a demo while I was at Best Buy yesterday and the game is addictevly fun. It does a bunch of little puzzles, in which you must complete certain categories of, in a certain amount of time. Then depending on how you did on all the categories, it will "measure your brain" and tell you how good you did. Of course this is no standardized national IQ test, but it's still fun to see the scores. Plus, it's a game that my whole family can actually play (both my mom and dad enjoyed it).

Canes

What a disappointment...the frickin hurricane that was suppose to passby was too wimpy and died all over South Florida like a little depression or something. I demand my moderate wind levels. How else am I suppose to use this garbage-bag parachute to fly? GOSH!

I'm fine and you?

Wireless

Goodness gracious, I must have the worst luck with Linux-friendly Ubuntu devices. Lemme do a run-down aight?

Some days ago my dad bought this little guy from Newegg. I told him to go ahead, because according to the Ubuntu compatibility list, this card worked fine (scroll down to see SMCWPCI-G). But what do you know, although I have the same card, turns out that this one has a whole different chipset.

Now let me explain something here. All wireless cards have a certain "chipset". It's the special hardware inside that does what it does. Now different companies use different chipsets. There are some chipsets (made by other companies) used by multiple companies that make the wireless cards. For instance, there are chipsets known as Atheros, Prism, Broadcom, etc. The companies, like SMC, Netgear, Toshiba use a certain chipset (in this case Atheros) in their wireless cards. Got it? Ok. Well, this card was suppose to use the Atheros chipset, which is a very compatible chipset with Linux. (You see, the companies that make the CHIPSET sometimes don't give out the specific details (once in code, this is known as a driver) on how to actually use their chipsets with other Operating Systems besides Windows. So some hackers make their own, but they never work as well as the official drivers. PHEW! A lot of parenthesis...) Anyway, it suppose to be Atheros, but it turned out to be one by Realtek, an RTL8185.

So what happens? The drivers for the chipset (both by the official company, and the ones made by those kind programmers) suck! It freezes the computer on boot, or while conencting, so they are worthless...and now I can't use that card in Linux.

Before, that machine (by the way, it's my mom's PC I'm talking about) used this wireless adapter. (Yes, another SMC product. Last time I buy from them) After some extreme headaches and hax I somehow got those things to work quite well in Linux. But after messing around so much trying to get the other card to work, I somehow disabled that stupid wireless key, and now neither of them work. >_<

And so now, I've bought this guy and await his arrival eagerly. It's supposedly another Linux-friendly adapter, we'll see about that. :P But for now, my mom is booting into Windows (which has the proper drivers, and has that wireless card working fine) and doing her internet surfing there.

Darn drivers...and Windows...and companies...

Haircut

I never posted my photos! :D

Before:


After:


After, driving home from Youth Group:

Monkey

Miss Eileen (A friend I met at this conference, teacher's assistant, who it seems I still can't call by just her name :P) recently blogged about a trip to the zoo. Which reminded me of my last trip to the zoo in Colombia. In the monkey exhibit, specifically the spider monkeys, it turned out one of them had gotten loose. He was actually hanging out in the trees hanging above the cage of his fellow...family and/or friends. It was quite amusing (and slightly troubling) to see he was not caged, but I really can't see whose gonna catch that thing. :P And speaking of monkeys, that reminds me of this video of a silly gibbon messing with 2 tiger cubs. Yea...

Projects

Geez man! I'm not doing school and I still have a bunch of work coming at me. Atleast, this will actually help me for future events, and is more enjoyable. ;)

Lately, it seems I've been needing to get a little more organized. I'm forgetting to do a lot of things (one of which is reading my Bible in the mornings, which sucks because I had a nice habit going before we moved :P), I got a nice amount of requests that I just can't seem to start working on, and besides all that, I have to actually go to work. :P So my solutions so far:

Well, for work, I have to work. But I plan on resigning at the end of September. I'd like a nice month of nothing, perhaps do some final hangouts with my friends before I leave to Colombia in the following month.

Post-it-Notes! I downloaded a little program that sticks em right on my desktop! Very useful, except, they are very annoying (I guess that's the point) and so they hover over all my windows and stuff, and sometimes I need to move/hide them to close my programs. Problem is, if I use the "hide all" feature, they're gone, and I won't remember to turn them back on. X-)

Bible, I don't know what I did before...I would like to read my Bible for real, as in, not briefly read a chapter, pray, and continue. I'd like something a little more deep but don't know how to go about doing it. Or maybe I do but I don't take time out of the day to do it. I guess I need to find an alarm or something to kick me off the comp and tell me to go read it or something...

Anyway, what might I be so busy with you ask? Well...
- I got a logo request for a friend's team
- I have to finish an animation for my comic's 300th strip.
- I was suppose to do a comic page for my tournament's new campaign
- I need to send Jose my flash file again
- I also need to draw a banner for our division's servers (see www.swaw.us for the last one I made)
and probably a couple other things I have forgotten...

WOOOOOOO!!!

-.-

Uggh...I've been feeling nauseous for some 2 weeks now. Not terribly bad, but it seemed odd that I had it everyday, be it a little or a lot. But today, geez...I stood next to the toilet and sink for about half-an-hour waiting to blow. I've been more anxious than a chihuahua in a thunderstorm...I hate it. I hate feeling nauseous. It's one of the only "major" fears I actually have, I don't know why. But ever since I was a little kid, being nauseous made me crazy. I was one of those little kids that loved schools. But even with my love for it, after lunch I always started feeling nauseous and me thinking it was a stomach ache, I was always at the clinic. So much so, that they knew me by name over there. My teacher talked to my mom, knowing that it wasn't some method of skipping school as I wouldn't do that, and it turned out that the jam I was eating, had way too much sugar, and was not going good on me, hence causing the nausea.

And yet, to this day, I still can't get over it. I become very finicky, start walking around my house, become aggitated very easily, and go through these battles in my head telling myself that I'm not gonna barf. Gosh...and I don't understand why. Yea, no one likes to barf, but why do I get such an immense stress out when this happens. And mind you, its not just when I'm "a little nauseous". I only get like this when I actually think I'm gonna blow. So here I am, not at work, writing about my biggest fear on my blog. Is it helping? I suppose, as long as I keep my mind off of it, then I have nothing to worry about.

Another thing I don't like is the appetite aspect of it. Today, I've eaten a total of about...9 crackers, some spoons of rice, 2 cups of water, and 2 bags of baby carrots (One of the few foods I seem to be able to jam down no matter what). What kinda crap is that!? I would think that by eating, I can fill my stomach with food, instead of gas, which is probably causing my nausea right now, but no. Everytime I start putting stuff in my mouth, it comes back. GARRRAHRH!! And I've burped plenty today, and sure it's a nice relief...for a few seconds. I don't get it. I'm hungry, and feel weak, and I can't get rid of this nausea...so yea...can you just add me to your prayer list? :P I know it seems like such a trivial thing, but it's really stressing me out. i have not felt my heart beat so hard in my life (nausea makes me nervous, and when I'm nervous I get nauseous, so its an evil loop that happens and you can literally see my body tremble and pump to my heartbeat. Or even a pillow, or bed, if I'm in it, shake a bit)...

:,(

Comments

Wow, it appeared I had comment moderation on and I actually had some comments on this blog! Altough most of them, to no surprise, were just people trying to refute stuff in my earlier "bible lesson". Oh well. :P Now you can see them too.

Reality

Wow, I just heard the awesomest sermon ever. It confirmed a whole lot of things in my mind, and I'd sure like everyone I know to hear it. Here's the link. Definitely a strong message for everyone out there who calls themself Christian.

Weekend

Ooh was this weekend a blast (specifically Saturday :P). Paula had a birthday party and it was immenese fun. Mainly a pool party, we also did some slip'n slide'n, water gunnin', volleball'n, Gamecube'n! Well, during the slip'n slide we also played with shaving cream, and I got a faceful of it...twice, in my face. Cream up your nose is quite uncomfortable, lemme tell you. Luckily, my long hair seemed to have blocked most of the cream from getting in my ears! X-)

UNfortunately, during the pool time, I saw the downside of long hair, as it likes to smack my face a lot (ya know, eyes, forhead, my hair is not THAT long :P). We also had an unfinished game of Chinese Checkers, I owned at Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey. Another unfortunate thing was that one of the CDs we gave her had already been given to her the day before by someone else.

Oh well, we still stuck in another one, and 2 burned ones that (from what it seemed) she did not have. And if anything, I had already given her a 1000 cents gift card for Starbucks (yes, that was the price I put on it) along with this hand-made card. I shoulda just bought one, as apparently my grammar/cursive was not the best, as she seemed to have had trouble while reading my poem. :P But either way, the party was overallally awesome. I wish we coulda hang out more, but she will start school again soon, and my afternoons are destroyed by work. And to make it all worse, I have only have 3 months left in Florida before we move to Colombia. -.-

Oh well...and Sunday, Michael stood me up on a bowling game. :P I think he was scared I would wipe the alley with him, too bad.

Sigs

Check it out, I finally finished after 2 weeks! Now to finish mine. :P

In other news, I was handed my insurance thingy last night. Nothin' special, as I tihnk I mentioned it before...but oh well. I also bought a new program called Pixel. It's a cross-platform (i.e. can run on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and more) Photoshop-clone. Looks pretty interesting, hopefully I can get used to this so I can stop using the "shared" version of Photoshop I have. ^_^ Anyway...uhm...have a nice day!

Memory

Snap, I come back from work. Another boring day staring at a screen for 4 hours. I was thinking about something that I was gonna blog on...and now I forgot it! You gotta love it...

Let's see, what's happened since Monday? Hmm...nothing really. Tomorrow my insurance is finalized or whatever and I can actually drive by myself. Uh...I still have 2 more sigs to finish, I need to shave my goatee tomorrow cuz its getting messy. I also need to finish an animation for a friend, and I need to find out what the heck is causing the Soldat poly bug in WINE! BUSY BUSY!

Dignity

I lost it...CHECK IT OUT! :D

Pass

Yes, I passed. Despite some mistakes...:D



In other news, I got LMMS 0.2.1 to compile on my laptop. The last version (0.2) had errors, and would not detect any of my sound libraries, but they fixed it. LMMS, or Linux Multimedia Studio, is pretty much a Fruity Loops clone, but for Linux. Its to make mixes, using a sequencer and stuff. It looks really cool, and has a very nice snythesizer feature thingy (I am not music expert, I just like sounds :P) that can make some old retro sounding bleeps and peeps! I'll probably add a sound clip when I make something sound good.

And here, have some more sigs...

Requests

GAH! I'm horrible with blogs. I need to add something to my e-mail program, to remind me to post something every other day...

Anyway, we ended another campaign in my tournament. And, like every campaign (for the last...couple :P), I started a thread on the forums requesting signatures. Apparently people like my cartoony-style and the first 20 slots usually fill up within the first day...>_< So, I've pretty much been drawing ALL week, trying to finish before the end of the week (the first 20, there are a lot more requests, but only the 20 are guranteed to be drawn ;D)

So here are some of them:






And in other news, I am gonna take my driver's test within some hours! Let's see if the Floridian Department of Motor Vehicles will allow ME to roam these crazy streets! ;)

Work

And so it begins again, the part-time drainnage of my afternoon hours at the company known as...Lorien Technologies, where I burn my eyes starting at monochromatic documents all day, sorting through each one and matching their correct serial numbers with what was inputted into the database.

In other words, I started working again. ;) My job is actually really awesome, in terms of it's probably the easiest stuff you can AND you're getting paid GOOD money for it (I'm a 17 year ol' getting $9 an hour! YEA!). PLUS when they run out of work, it's cool too, because you're getting a small vacation. In fact, I didn't have work all summer, and it perfectly matched my no-more-school summer vacation for ULTIMATE SUMMER FREE TIME. And what did I do in that time? Nothing. :P

I wanted to hang out with my friends more, but that was an utter mission failure. I don't understand why I find it hard to do that. I'll probably be getting my license on Tuesday, so I think that should help, in some form or another. I'll probably by some bowling shoes and do a little of that, because I like bowling...:P

Other than that, no I haven't been able to shade the pants yet. Umm...but I will leave you...with THIS:

Pants

How do I SHADE THEM!?

Fireworks

Happy 5th of July! :P

Hmm, I haven' updated recently, I suppose I should give you (you being...myself) a status report. o.O

We moved last Sunday, to a nice little townhouse. I a cool 2-door room, unfortunately it has become the office, so my sister pretty much lives in here too. Meaning I don't get the little privacy I would probably want (i.e. if I'm on the phone or need to change after a shower) but then again, it IS my room, so I can now stare at her computer screen and watch what she's doing if I ever have the urge too. ^_^ I rather have her use the laptop though. :P

Not many updates on Saptiva (the lady with the gun drawing), except maybe some bad shading on the pants. I have no idea where the creases and such should go...I'm really bad at this. ;)

And something amazing probably happened in the past weeks...but I forgot.

Strands

Here's a little comparison on the shaded (on the right) to the non-shaded (left) hair.
(sorry bout that odd line through the right image, don't know what happened there :P)

Vibrance

Fully colored Saptiva, time for shading. Look at that PKM!

Stare

Here's some coloring done on Saptiva:





Also, I've been assigned as supermaintainer of Soldat in Wine.

Stratus

Finished her:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/34669224/

Time to trace and line Saptiva!
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/34656703/

Bluier

More shading, more hair, more shoulder :P

Progression

Well, I finished drawing me...
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/34435051/

And have done a little more work on the blue-haired girl. I should probably give her a name or something.



The scene will most likely be a very cloudy, field of grass or wheat, looks like it's going to rain. Probably some drops falling already. Clothing color is something I'm pondering on, white shirt and black skirt were what I first thought, but we'll see what happens...

Me

I'm putting the blue girl on hold until I can:

1. Figure out a new position of the rest of her body (as I just drew the head, and the body sketch sucks)

2. Figure out how to proportionally draw her hands

3. Not mess it up

So, I decided to do a quicker work of anime, this time more "chibi" like, but not completely. This time, it's a guy...in fact, it's me! :D

Blue

Once again I am drawing up another anime girl, this time, as "animeish" as I can. :P Uhm...yea. Also, no tracing from video game sprites. ;) Here's what I've got so far...





There you can see the 2 differences between me drawing the lines by hand in Photoshop (first image) and then me doing that same line with the pen tool and the "simulated pressure" option (second image). Obviously, doing it by hand is crap, which is why I prefer drawing stuff in Flash (as Flash will auto-smooth what I draw for me, unlike Photoshop).

Again

SATs tomorrow...
Internet constantly dropping...yet school is over and I'm off of work. I guess it's all balancing out. :P

Drowning

I dropped my cellphone in the toilet yesterday. It was an accident, my sweater's pockets are pretty much horizontal and it just fell...-.-

1 more week of school. Actually, I plan on finishing by Friday. :P

Queen

I guess you can't really call her "King of Fighters" but whatever! It's the name of the game :P Here's a wallpaper I made myself of a completed (for the most part I suppose) Vanessa. Image quality is probably a lot crappier once I upload it here...



2 more weeks of school left...YES!

Vanessa

All right, new Photoshop progress. Her name is Vanessa, she is one of the characters from King of Fighters (2002).


Now this IS a trace. As much as I hate to admit it, for the first time in a long time, I traced the character, although, you gotta see it wasn't a line for line type of deal.



As you can see, I didn't have a WHOLE lot to work with. A very pixellated picture is the only reference I have in terms of color and for a vague outline. The gray outlined human shape though was made by me, to try and get the proportions right. I can pretty much draw it on paper now, although usually I'll get something wrong (legs too short, torso too thin). So its not a compelete trace, but its enough to have my sister rag on me. :P Either way, this wasn't really about drawing an actual person (like you might consider my other military chick to be) but more on the coloring. I'm trying to get the shading on the skin, hair, and clothing, as good as possible. With some help from some Deviantart tutorials I found, hopefully I can become a little better at it ;)

Completed

Well, I finished the military chick, generally speaking. I might tweak some more shading, and add it to a wallpaper or something of the sorts, but I'm pretty much done. :)

Vectorized

There you go. Finally finished (or pretty much finished, might smooth out certain parts, etc.) the outline. Redone completely with the pen tool, for the vector smoothness...now for more shading!