Sketches from th...
Fresh, raw, and unedited. Well, unless you count the necessary cropping and slight contrast adjustments, all done in the name of increased visibility. Surely such actions can be suffered!
I’m halfway through my Army-mandated driving course, which so far has involved more sleeping and mulling over the vagaries of life rather than actual driving, which its name would otherwise imply. Yes, I may not have had previous real-life driving experience, but after my early days in Daytona USA, and more recently, spending time with the likes of GRID and GTA IV, you’d think I’d have learned something about how to skillfully maneuver a 25-tonne tracked vehicle around a hairpin at 320 km/h.
Actually, the maximum speed of a ATTC APC (which is what I’m driving) is 50 km/h. Which, assuming you didn’t ram into a wall first, would probably cause the engine to overheat anyway if you managed to achieve that sort of speed.
Of belts and gis
Some would say that I perhaps have an unhealthy fascination with such apparel. It is apparent, especially if you look at my various doodles (and doodads) around my hard drive, my desktop, my tabletop and even my sketchbook.
I say, though, that the gi, though overused, is absolutely perfect for people who have little to no knowledge of how to best portray the human body, and instead opt to hide it beneath swaths of cotton fibre. All while making your character automatically look badass.
All this, of course, at the cost of making your masterpiece look like yet another of those Ryu-inspired deviations.
Cohesion
Is a word, a noun, usually used to indicate the meshing together of parts varied and distinct, indicating somehow that perhaps they are now intertwined, related together of sorts.
In this army, it refers to having a day off from mindless toil to spend some quality time together at locales exotic, in the vain hope that such resource-wasting events (14 bucks, to be exact; what a fucking rip-off) would somehow transcend our basic human instincts and allow us to give hugs.
In this case, our company NSFs (which basically mean conscripts) were directed towards the KBox located in Marina Square, at the very heart of our communist beloved island. Oh well. At least the trip there is miles shorter as compared to having to travel across the island just to get to my camp.
Brothers in Alum...
I’ve actually managed to ascertain certain aspects of my new vocation in the army, and upon such relevations vast, I think that I can safely determine that, to a large extent, my new job will probably not have me dead from heart failure at the end of it. It may, however, leave me needing prosthetics for just about every organ in my sad excuse of bio-machinery that you might otherwise refer to as a body.
That was not really a joke, in case you were wondering.
My new job essentially entails me the responsibility of taking a 12 ton vehicle and putting it through its tracks hard enough to give even Fernando Alonso a run for his money.
Echoes
Everyone’s probably sick of the Geometry Wars craze by now, but you owe it to yourself to at least try this shit out. Echoes is like, fucking awesome. And no, I’m not even talking Grid Wars 2 awesome (which, incidentally, refuses to run on my new rig for some abysmal, arbitrary reason), I’m talking more-than Grid Wars 2-awesome right here and now.
Seriously, try the damn thing out. It’s only around 10 MB or so. Plus it allows customized tracks of your very own choice (I find my Wipeout Pure soundtrack fits in perfectly here), to be played up high during your galactic exploits with trippy asteroids, and of course, the killing factor: it’s free.
Ok, so Grid Wars was free too, but this is better. No kidding here.
And for the rest of you who have no idea what I’m even talking about, just head over and grab it, extract it and run it. I promise it’ll take you only 30 seconds to decide whether or not you’ll be taking the rest of the day off.
A Brief Interlud...
Has finally made its way to my weary, blistered feet, allowing me a moment, or, to be more precise: a week and a half of recovery time in which I spent my entire first day taking an extended nap of sorts. This explains why, then, that this post is made on the following day after my graduation parade from the Basic Military Training School that resides on isle horride of Pulau Tekong.
And no, I don’t think I’ve found my army life so far meaningful or memorable, thousands, perhaps millions of claims to the contrary.