I am ashamed
» Written on January 31, 2007 at 8:23 AM «
Of having to truncate this post in terms of content, due to the fact that it is already half an hour past midnight, and I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow. I’m also ashamed of the fans I witnessed just in the National Stadium, as I watched my country’s soccer team take Thailand out in the first leg of the finals of the Asean Football Championship. Seriously, I don’t even know whether they’re really Singaporeans, or people from lands distant out to besmirch our country’s reputation. If this is what the non-elite of our society is like, I think they completely deserve whatever Wee Shu Min says about them. Honestly, jeering at Thailand fans is perhaps understandable if it’s done by a minority, but the whole fucking stadium chanting vulgarities throughout the entire duration of the match (ironically, they were chanting in Malay) is just completely disgusting. That’s not taking into consideration some of the other atrocities committed during the match which annoyed me greatly, which I will be detailing later on in another post.
But I have a preview of things to come.
The match on the pitch wasn’t exactly all squeals and giggles, admittedly; it was really quite amusing, and well worth the two bucks I spent for a ticket as a joke show. Unfortunately, it failed completely as an example of what good football should be like.
Anyway.
I’ve been fiddling around with math-based art, specifically speaking, vectors generated from pure mathematical functions written in Java. I first chanced upon it when visiting Lafkon‘s portfolio, and then followed links distant towards a new little utility which I’m struggling to get the hang of. It’s open source too, which makes it that much more appealing to me.
I’ve also found out about Scriptographer, which is somewhat similar in concept, but functions instead as a plugin for Adobe Illustrator, which I think is more suited to my own personal workflow. And yes, it’s open source too. The built-in scripts are also quite amusing; I’ll post some 10-second creations here when I get the time to do so.
In any case, I didn’t want the start of the new month/end of the old one to be left behind in the cold without a post to commemorate its passing, and thus my resolution is fulfilled. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll get some spare time to elaborate on said happening. For now, homework awaits instead of rest, as the world would place upon my shoulders.
The Proficiencis...
» Written on January 27, 2007 at 9:30 AM «
It’s not perfect until he says it is. Now in a humongous size for your own reshaping needs.
Is ‘proficiencist’ even a proper word? I don’t know, but someone sure as hell hates it; it’s even been slashed wide open.
Anyway, as you can probably tell, that’s what I’ve been working on over the weekend. The story behind that character actually goes a long way back, since my days in Secondary 4 (That’s Year 10 for you US junkies), in fact, starting out as random doodles in class after watching too much Samurai Jack and playing too much CS. Maybe I’ll upload some scans of my early pencil sketches of him. (I think I actually have the original somewhere, but I’ll have to dig through my scraps to find him. Yes, I do actually keep my doodles, even those done on worksheets and assignments. In fact, I started doing so since Secondary 4, coincidentally.)
In any case, here’s the one I did with my Wacom for reference purposes during his transition to vectors.
I changed a lot since his initial conception, after a little research on Wikipedia about the traditional outfits, or Gi, that samurai are supposed to wear. (I do believe I used the plural form of that particular noun right there) For instance, I remember initially giving him a more kimono-ish outfit, especially with regard to his lower garments. I only decided to add the folds that bear a slight resemblance to aikidogi after some thought and a taste for black and white. Seriously, everything looks better that way.
The snow (you can see it if you look really really closely) was something I threw in as an afterthought, after considering what kind of environment I wanted for this piece. Originally, this was going to be a two-tone stylized piece which I intended for placement on a T-shirt, but in the end, I decided that this would be an excellent opportunity for me to demonstrate to myself just what I could do with Illustrator’s Mesh tool. After seeing some of the work on Life in Vector, I was kind of inspired to try something with what everyone else had gone through. Besides, the irony struck me as oddly amusing; here I would be attempting a stylized, almost cartoonish piece with the kind of detail normally given to full-out illustrations like the one I did with Blues, except that I didn’t even touch the mesh tool at all when working on that particular illustration except for the girl’s mouth.
Irony is what drives all of us, anyway.
The bamboo, cliche though it may seem, is actually highly significant, and I do believe it was in my initial sketch of the concept itself, before Nick La got his own skilled hands to work on his own renditions superior. To say that his work did not filter into my mind while working on my own Chinese touch would be a lie; however, I’m quite certain that everything you see in thumbnail and fullsize above comes entirely of my own two hands and mind, without external guidance. Not to say that his bamboo isn’t good enough for my character, but I wanted something with a little more rustic feel to it. Besides, it’s going to be sliced by an extremely sharp (and polished) katana; we wouldn’t want that happening to fresh green bamboo, now would we?
I do realize that if it were really snowing, that there’d be certain snowflakes present on said bamboo, but goddamn, a man can only draw so much a day. Or take so much crap, actually; I had yet another altercation with my own family again after a very, very rough dinner. I won’t go into specifics, but let’s just say my mother was involved as usual, and we all know what that means.
Perhaps I will elaborate when Sitesled finally comes back online and lets me publish this post. Honestly, they seem to be going down more often these days.
But everything has an upside; BiTMAP has let me onto a certain tip that just revitalized my torrents from bytes per second to screaming kilobytes; I just needed to turn packet encyrption on. It appears that my ISP, Starhub, has finally started to throttle BitTorrent traffic, which is kind of sad in itself, as I always held a certain level of respect for it. At least they aren’t actively blocking it, but still, this can only be a sign of things to come.
Such as DRM in Windows Vista, which is only a few days away from being released commercially. I can’t wait to get my oily hands on a new rig with said OS pre-installed, maybe with an Ubuntu partition to go along with it. The DRM is a drawback, though; I’ll have to see about that, like I did with my PSP, which, by the way, is nearing that certain point where it can finally be downgraded back to version 1.5 firmware; I hear even TA-082 boards have fallen prey to the homebrew community now, and such news makes me cackle with glee as thoughts of turning my PSP into a portable Linux station filter through my mind.
Which, by the way, is already thinking about how to turn this critter into a T-shirt design worthy of such branding. Perfection must be achieved; proficiency must be attained.
UPDATE: Since Sitesled was down yesterday, I got around to scanning some of the older sketches I did. It certainly brings back memories.
Here’s the original one I did, circa 2005 or so.
Another early one. You can probably tell by now that I didn’t want him to use a katana at first: I was thinking more about rapiers and such, as I was fascinated with them thanks to playing MU Online in those days.
Yet another. The idea of having not bamboo, but an arm/hand flying off with a bloodied silhouette in the background held some appeal to me, but in the end sanity appeared to prevail. Curses!
A completely different take on it, but still inspired by the same theme. And maybe just a bit of Ninja Gaiden.
I was actually going to do something like this, with the character having a piece of bamboo out of his mouth, before deciding against it.
This one was actually kind of weird; I was drawing a lot of cartoonish stuff, and end ed up with the Proficiencist himself as an afterthought.
You can see a little remnant of another doodle I did right there. I was going to use a pose like this, actually, but I decided on something less aggressive in stance. Also, you can probably tell by now that my decision to switch from a simple cloth cover to a slightly more complicated (and black) folded lower gi was recent.
Anyway, I also updated the wallpaper with a new, improved version: I’ve fixed a minor few annoyances that were annoying, such as his hands and a certain area of the gi. Nothing too major, truth be told, but I’m a perfectionist.
Such history behind this character! In fact, the only other doodle I’ve transformed into such reality after times longest would have have to be Hard Life, except that I haven’t been working on it at all as of late. I’ll have to get cracking on that soon though.
Oranges are red ...
» Written on January 25, 2007 at 6:19 AM «
A very, very slight shift on the colour wheel, I assure you. This was confirmed via my various eyedropping tools in Illustrator. Of course, I am babbling bullshit here, but basically, the reference picture I took for a little new T-shirt design turned out to have odd lighting, to say the least. The shirt design was originally to have been on plain white, but I realised the Web 2.0 gloss didn’t exactly pop when placed against such contrast pure. Besides, red kind of fits Chinese New Year, which served as the inspiration for this design, anyway.
Perhaps this would be a sign of things to come. (For Illustrator junkies, contrary to what you may think, I didn’t use any 3D plugins of any sort to render the orange on the right. It’s really amazing what you can do with gradients without relying on computer algorithms to render depth and substance. Almost scary, in fact, when you look at things that come out from places like these.
Anyway, as an extended treat for myself, I’ve cooked up two wallpapers, intentionally kept simplified to allow for extensive customization, as to your own individual needs. I believe they are of a large enough resolution for most of your desktops.
The Dragon design which I did earlier, as I had originally intended it to be before deciding to keep the wings and the dragon head separate:
And the new Orange design, though in a palette more complementary than Asian-themed. I prefer cool colours as compared to warmer tones. Do with it as you see fit for your own desktops. You do know how to use the Magic Wand tool, right?
Indeed, the urge to order one of my own designs for the approaching festivities becomes more difficult to withhold. Maybe if more people bought my goddamn designs, then I’d have enough profits to purchase one of my own designs.
Hint, hint.
Anyway, Vista is only a couple of days away, and the wait is just about killing me. I can’t wait for it to be released, because it marks the start of the rig race, one in which I do believe will involve me finally getting a brand-new workstation for my vindictive pleasures. And of course, I’ll finally be able to play GRAW the way it was meant to be played; the memories of going 15 FPS at 320 x 240 still lingers, and haunts my nightmares.
EDIT: I just realised that the table in my Oranges wallpaper isn’t anti-aliased. I apologize; usually I work with bare pixels, and those require a lot of auto-smoothing algorithms in Photoshop to be turned off. The problem is, I always forgot to turn them back on when I’m working on normal stuff.
School is cool
» Written on January 3, 2007 at 7:15 AM «
With the recent spate of rains, I’m not surprised. What’s more surprising, however, is that the advent of air-conditioned classrooms is finally a reality. I already knew this was going to happen, heck everyone knew this was going to happen, but somehow I held on, clung tightly to my last glimmer of hope for the future of our unspoilt generation.
I was too weak.
So now every single classroom in the goddamn school has two brand-spanking new air conditioner units, the better to waste electricity and resources on people who will probably earn nothing but colds from such a privilege. Even worse, colds could spread.
The mere thought of it terrifies my nerves.
I got off not completing my holiday assignments today on a mere technicality: remember how I said I was bringing my Nikon to the party to help capture the memorable experience for my juniors? Well, it appears that those who do so automatically get a get-out-of-lessons-free card for the entire span of the orientation. Plus I get additional Community Hours credit for it.
Now some might say this is a bad thing, sacrificing my education to fulfill my temporary interests. But I say, fuck them, and just because this year is a crucial one in my educational life, that doesn’t mean I have to give two shits about it.
I do give a shit, though, but that’s not the point. Relax, I’ll read up and play catch-up during the second week; it’s not as if they really teach much during the first few days.
My previous General Paper tutor and Civics Tutor (Yes, they were the one and the same) has left Singapore for shores distant, Caracas, I believe; her mother appears to be suffering, and she apparently couldn’t stand being away from such love. I wish her the best, even though she wasn’t really a good teacher. But she had good character, and that would be enough for humane respect. Our new, uh, tutor, is a delight of sorts. I found him via Google in less than 30 seconds. The email address he gave us, fcsonic [at] hotmail [dot] com did indeed seem familiar to me, and a check with my logs confirmed my suspicions vast; he had indeed tried to add me to MSN before, though I didn’t know who he was at the time, and promptly removed him from my list, obliterating those bytes which contained his very essence. He apparently plays DoTa like other nonsensical people my age, though, we’ll have to see whether he’s interested in other genres.
In other news, I hear a new downgrader has been released for the PSP, which revitalizes my hopes of getting homebrew to run on this contraption of mine (I’ve already updated it to 3.01 firmware, the shame) someday. Take that, Sony. After that advertising fracas, I’m not even sure I want to see another PSP advertisement. They really need to take a leaf out of the other products that Sony offers; I thought the new Walkman advertisement was pretty cool. Kind of reminds me of my Audiophile shirt.
And I really need to go work on my Economics Essay, like, now.
Of cameras and w...
» Written on December 30, 2006 at 6:51 AM «
That currently would consume my attention at the moment.
Chiff has only just returned from his journey to the land of those who speak Chinese, on yet another bold and noble quest to seek enjoyment. I don’t think he’s actually found it, but he deems it a success, and who am I to break the fabric of reality?
I’ve also finally started using my Nikon for High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, as I wanted to in the first place when I got it all those months ago. It was only today, actually, that I was reminded of it after browsing around on Flickr and admiring my own collection. Call me self-centered, but I actually enjoy browsing through the shots I’ve taken once in a while, all without any post-production of any sort.
Well, I guess in HDR photography, in order to bring a 32-bit Radiance image down to an 8-bit JPEG, there is a slight amount of post-production involved, but since not everyone owns $50000 HDR displays, I guess some leeway here is acceptable.
My first two tests didn’t go off so well, mainly because I didn’t vary my shutter speeds enough and ended up with about .5 EV stop difference between the exposures (I used 5 exposures for all of today’s HDR tests)
The final test, done later on, turned out much better, and as such it has earned its place in my Flickr page.
I’ll probably fool around a lot more with this (I was actually planning to go out tonight and try a few nighttime exposures, but I’m lazy), and see if my skills will help tomorrow, when I head down to Marina Bay at the Esplanade waterfront to catch the celebrations for the New Year.
Not that I’m a party guy. I just want some pictures of fireworks in my portfolio.
Just when I thou...
» Written on December 25, 2006 at 8:46 PM «
It’s starting again, that sinister urge to code something up.
So SimpleBits has talked about microformats for quite a while now, and while I wasn’t interested then, the recent frenzy of getting this site standards-compliant has now renewed my interest in such a methodology of presenting information in a semantic manner. In case you have no idea what microformats are:
Yeah, anyway, for those who still don’t get it (like me), from what I understand, it’s basically aiming to be a standard of sorts for posting certain information such as resumes, business cards etc. while continuing to embed them in your XHTML. Sounds fine to me, but we’ll see if the About section of this site can be marked up as such. Standards are all the rage these days.
Also, I’ve just recently started uploading stuff to my Flickr account, which I’ve had for some time now, but favoured Photobucket over. After some consideration, however, (plus that fact that Flickr finally decided to spruce up their free hosting services with extra space), I think I’ll use my Photobucket account exclusively for uploading entire image shoots, while Flickr will probably be for one-off shots of random stuff and images that I like. Perhaps even some of my portfolio shots will be in there, though I doubt it. I’m aiming to try and maintain my no post-production mantra for the photos at Flickr, while those in a portfolio, well, they do need some spicing up, right?