KODA

That red paint got everywhere

Today I went up to the Butte for the first time in a while with a friend. What a great day. We walked down to the field at the bottom of the park, only to discover that it was filled with huge, towering wheat! In some places, the stalks were as tall as I am. In all of the times I have been there, I’ve never seen it like this. It was amazing. I didn’t take a lot of pictures, but here are two that I think came out the best.

Thank you everyone for making this such a magical birthday, and for making everything so meaningful. Today didn’t feel so much like a birthday as much as just a really great day.

Tomorrow I shall wake up one year older. Well, one year older by the arbitrary count of 365 days, but one year older still.

To me this will mark the achievement of another checkpoint in my life, but at the same time also another step finished in it. I find this very exciting. There’s still so much I want to experience, to discover, to do… and so much that I’m immensely grateful and proud of for having experienced.

Time to go sleep, to be able to make tomorrow an amazing day!

6:10 on the Firefox TimeTracker extension today… kind of sad. Then again, I have been making up for being outside all week… but wow. 6 hours on the web. I should declare tomorrow an Internet holiday, but I know I won’t…

Unbelievable. Just unbelievable.
After seeing the last one on Thursday, they lost any last chance of my business. Now I’m just frustrated and appalled. Good riddance.
I suppose I’ll have to be finding a new home page now…

Yesterday I was treated to this lovely deviantART subscription nag screen, which would not retreat from the site until I clicked the little “no thanks” button at the bottom. How very lame. My feeling is, if I wanted to continue using their service I would care enough to notice and renew it. As it stands, their bargain price of 8 cents a day is about twice what I pay for hosting here at NFS. I’ve been on the fence for a while about leaving the website all together, and this is pretty much the end. If I were Fella, I’d be crying at how dissapointing his site has become.

Tonight was the first real test of my Story Game with more than 3 players. I invited some friends to come play over the evening, and see how the game worked out in real usage.

Let’s just say there was mixed success. The PHP and AJAX performed beautifully… but as the number of people increased, the story became more and more disjointed. But would you really expect otherwise? Things went great in the vocabulary department, as the diversity of players broadened the range of words used, though this came at the cost of very grammatically and semantically distorted sentences. It seemed after we hit the 3 player mark (topped at 6 during the test!), the problems really began.

Today I worked on an animated “throbber” icon for Qball and the GMPC project. You’ll see it turning up in the SVN Just a fun little Inkscape/Blender project. Sure, there are hundreds out there, but how could I resist the chance to try doing it myself? After recalling reading Jimmac’s write-up of his creation of a throbber in Blender, I set out to create my own in Blender. The method I ended up using actually was much heavier on Inkscape than Blender, which instead became more of a raw animating and compositing tool in the end.

Ta-da:
Just rotation:
With In/Out animation:

The solution I came up quite simply used a single plane with two textures: an Inkscaped shape mask and a Blender conical gradient. Blender is pretty versatile when it comes to mapping, so I simply made the gradient align with the object space, and the shape with the viewing window area. That way, I could just let the camera roll and the coloring rolled with it.

It takes so much effort simply to face oneself.