My Avatar Progress

Last tuesday my super buddy Will gave me a tutorial of how to make a Master Cheif helmet in 3DS Max. I was pretty happy with this as I was worried that my 3DS Max skills wern't as developed as they should be.




(The brown helmet is mine and the green on is Wills.)

I've been thinking about my avatar over the last few weeks and what he should look like:




After some thinking I decied to incorperate the helmet I made into my avatar. Obviously I wanted to change it from the helmet Will helped me made because he spent so long working on it I didn't want to just rip him off and take credit.
Avatar so far:



As you can see it's really only the jaw that i copied from the original, and I plan to do some more work on that to make it more original.

If You Love Music...

http://musicthatmakesyoufeel.blogspot.com/

That's all i'm going to say. You can thank me later.

This Is What I'm All About

Frequently I'm asked "Jay why is the internet so great" or "Why should I keep on living?" I simply reply to them with a link to this video



It gets less blury further in so keep with it.

I'm Sorry, Don't You Know Who I am?

I was giving some thought to the avatar that I am going to create for myself. While doing this I thought about the avatar I have already created for myself on online. Possibly my biggest hobby is computer gaming, and if asked to pigeon-hole myself I would consider myself a Gamer.

For the last 3 or 4 years I’ve been calling myself/avatar Radical Ewok. I’ve play numerous online games such as Counter Strike:(1.6/Condition Zero/ Source), Day of Defeat:(1.6/Source), Command and Conquer:(Tiberium Sun/ Tiuerium Wars), Battlefield: 2142, Team Fortress 2, Quake 3&4, Guitar Hero 3 and World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft was defiantly the game where I felt the strongest sense of community. With thousands of people playing on each server it's hard to stick out of the crowd, although if you socialize enough on both the game and the forums then people will recognise and remember you. I once stopped playing WoW for around 4 months, then within a week of playing it again I’d had people approach me and tell me they remember me from a guild I was in with them from over a year ago.

What I look like online:

World of Warcraft is really the only game I’ve played where appearance is customizable.

The Century of Self

We were told to watch a documentry called The Century of Self and write an analysis of it. I was quite sad to see that the video was an hour long. Not because I have little patience, but because streaming videos with my student accomadation internet connection takes forever. I tried to load the 6 parts of the video during the daytime. This took almost 3 hours to do and only the first 2 of 6 parts loaded properly. As a result i've had to wait untill internet activity is at a minimum so that the videos will stream and play instantly.

Sadly due to the typical night life of a student it would be i'd be awake untill at least 3am before enough people went to sleep and stopped refreshing there facebook homepage.

From what I picked up The Centry of Self is about how propaganda/public relations was and still is used to controll the masses and there violent basic instincts.

I need sleep, this will be continued tomorow between my first lecture and tutorial.

Idea for 3D Tracking Sensors

Deborah showed us a video in one of her lectures about tracking sensors.
We were asked as a task to think of new ways that this technology could be used. The video reminded me of a scene from a TV show called Firefly. In one of the episodes the doctor character uses a tool which displays a human brain as a 3D interactive holographic image.

In the video Jonny Lee uses an LCD screen to display a more detailed map ontop of a large projection of a basic map. I think if you combined this with 3D holographic x-ray it could help train surgens with complex operations. It could also be used to simulate risky operations that are about to be undertaken so the surgen can play though the senarios that may happen during the precigiour and practise and problems that might occure.

Modernism Vs. Post-Modernism

Last week we had a lecture with Simon and he explained to us Modernism and Post-Modernism. Before the 18th century most things happened and existed for the glorification of religion this changed during the age of the renaissance, when people started to celebrate science instead of religion. This sudden change known as the “enlightenment” was the beginning of modernism.

Modernism is about logic, order, simplicity and the celebration of “the machine”.

It was the thought that great ideas come from individuals, or “the author” whereas post-modernism celebrates the death of the author and believes that all ideas come from creative communities and have no clear beginning, like a rhizome it has no beginning and no end.

MURMORPERGUR Seal Online

I thought i'd post some pictures and talk about my progress even more in Seal Online.



There isn't alot of customization that you can do to your chacter, beyond hair and gender, but that doesn't really bother me. I was kind of bothered that which ever gender you pick and customize you still kind of look like a girl in game, that coupled with not being able to jump in the game gave me this awful flashback to a Guild Wars free trial weekend I once took. If it wasn't for SealO's music, which reminded me of the many wonderful sleepless nights I had playing Monkey Ball, I probably would have done the same to SealO as I did to Guild Wars and uninstalled it before you could say uncle buck.

So off I went into the world of Seal to vanquish my cuddely foes with my UBER X-TREME GREEN HAIRED... himaphrodite warrior. There are many skills that you can learn like fishing and sleeping. Fishing allows you to catch fish which you can eat to regenerate your health and sleeping regenerates your health also much much more slowly.



I found myself not really using the sleep skill much as almost ever creature drops an item called newbie eggs which also regenerate your health.

After leveling up abit I found that I had enough money to buy the first newbie teir for the warrior.


At first I thought i'd been conned, it looks like i've just finised a shift in an ice cream truck. Supprisingly enough though it's completly overpowered. Rabits that used to hit me for around 30-40 damage now hit me for 1 or not at all. Considering that I have just over 1000 health thats quite alot of rabits i can kill before i'm dangerously low on health.

MMO Adventure Take:2

After recieving no help at all from blizzard support I decided to stop wasting time trying to fix Worlf of Warcraft (WoW) and to turn to another online game. I had already tried Secondlife and I found it painfully boring, buggy and pointless.

It turns out that quite a few people in my tutorial group and some more people in my seminar group started playing a game called Seal Online.



This is an MMORPG (you may find me calling these "Muh-Mor-Per-Gur's"), like WoW, apart from it is much more basic. Although the gameplay is much more simplifed (as i write this my character is fishing with out any input needed by me), the interaction seems to be a little higher.

In WoW you will rairly find people in the starting areas, and if you do they tend not to be very chatty or want to group with you. This is probably due to the fact that the early levels are boring and the fastest way to level past them and into more intresting areas is to do solo quests as fast as you can. I'd be intrested to see how interaction develops in SealO as you level up.

"Se"XBOX - My Thoughts on Fox News Journalism

After watching this segment from Fox News, about a new computer game called Mass Effect, I felt I had to respond to how poorly the news is delivered to the public. First of all the person on the against side has no background experience in the effects that computer games or any other media types have on people. The soul reason for her being there is to plug her new book.

Secondly the supposidly neutral journalist sides on the against team almost instantly. During the intro of the segment she talks about the game "In some parts of the game it features full digital nudity" which is not the case at all as there are no graphical scenes in the game.

Cooper Lawrence, who has also not played the game, starts her argument saying that this game has damaging effects on the development of adolecent males because it protrays women as objects and because you're in controll of the character it means that they feel they would be in controll over women in real life. Geoff Keighley rebuttles by stating you can play either a male or female character in the game. Also he goes on to say that the featured "sex" scene in the game lasts for two miniutes, where as the whole game lasts somewhere around thirty hours long, meaning that that one scene is very insignificant. This doesn't stop the missinformed ignorant journalist and aparent pshycological specialist from talking about the game as if it is based on that miniture part of it.
Cooper brings up some research from a university in the United States and quotes them saying "boy that play video games can not tell the diffrence between what they're seeing in the real world and a video game if they don't have the real experience". Unless that came from the University of "I'm going to talk shit and pretend it's fact" (from which Cooper probably graduated with a first) I'd have to say that she was lying or was just terribly missinformed. There is no proof at all that shows a violent video game caused someone who played it to do something violent in real life.

Even if there was a case where one unstable person choose to do something violent due to playing a violent video game then that would be one case out of the hundreds of millions of people that have played a violent game.

At the end of the segment they go to a panel of 4 people each has no experience in the effects of video games on people, let alone experience of games at all. The journalist keeps repeating that it's games like Mass Effect that make parenting even harder than it already is. This in my opinion has no relivence as the game has been cencored "M" for maturity which means no one under the age of fifteen is legally allowed to buy or play that game.

I'd rather let my hypothetical children play a violent game with partial nudity than let them watch Fox News.

By the way this isn't just a one off from the fox news team:

Spring Break Serial Killer - A segment on a serial killer at large in Florida. The picture in picture frame are clips of people on spring break which is pretty much just people drinking alchohol and women in bikinis. It has nothing to do with the story at all.


9/11 Tribute Show: Lube Wresteling - This segment is from Fox News' Bill O'Reilly's 9/11th Tribute show. Almost half of this segment has lube wresteling full screen, not really in keeping with a tribute to thousands of people who died in that tragidy.


If you want more extreme right wing, stupidity journalism I recommend you check out this extreme left wing fanatic's youtube page http://youtube.com/user/jsjkim