I recently purchased the Railroad (Team Fortress 2) Litho print. Have to admit the quality of the print is awesome and now takes pride of place on my bedroom wall. You can also see my collection of Valve plushies the only one i’m currently missing is the companion cube.

Some website updates as well, first major one was updating to wordpress 2.5 and i’ve also fixed the issue with my site breaking in IE5.5 and IE6 by using overflow: hidden;.

The comedy and timing is spot on as with all of Valve’s “Meet the…” series. The animation and quality of directing is excellent and i would literally kill to have a weekly show produced.

There’s an interesting article over on eurogamer.net about how well GTA IV could sell.

It’s a total of about 4 miles. Currently I’m running roughly 9 minute miles, so 35-40 minutes start to finish. Not my best, but not a bad start after 4 months of sitting on my ass in the pub drinking beer :).

Step 1:
Start by creating a blank canvas (I’ve chosen to go with 800px*512px) and click ok. Fill the background with a colour or gradient of your choice.

Step 2:
Create a New Layer and select the text tool. Pick a font that is fairly strong then enter a word and choose a colour that stands out.

Step 3:
Right click on the text layer and select Blending Options. Check Outer Glow, the image below shows my settings but these will vary depending on the font and size of the text. Try and match the proportions in the image.

Step 4:
Create another new layer then Ctrl + Click the text layer. This will create a selection around the text. Now make sure you are on the new layer without loosing the selection and fill it with white and deselect it Ctrl + D.

Step 5:
Now select the Elliptical Marquee Tool. Drag the tool over your document to create a squished circle and position the center in the middle of your text. Make sure you’re still on the new layer that we filled with white and hit Delete.

Step 6:
Clear the selection and lower the Opacity of the layer till your happy with the strength of the shine on the text.

Step 7:
Duplicate the text layer then create a new layer. With the new layer selected and above the duplicated text layer merge them together Ctrl + E. With this new merged layer selected go Edit > Transform > Flip Vertical. Now hold shift and drag the layer down till it snaps just underneath the original text.

Step 8:
Right Click the layer and select the blending options again. Check Gradient Overlay and create a gradient that’s the same colour as your background and transparent. Click ok then set the layer Opacity till your happy with the reflection effect.

That’s it your done

Now Guinness is not easy to drink, it’s like blending up a Sunday roast and serving it in a pint glass. But it seems common practice now that if you manage to down 4 pints of the stuff, you’re rewarded with a cheap felt hat (see above picture) most likely made on mass in China. How very Irish.

We purchased our first 4 pints only to be told they had run out of hats. Apparently the 100’s that were stapled to the wall in order to dress the pub couldn’t be taken down. So i took it upon my self to steal a couple off the wall. Unfortunately some other people had the same idea and i lost out to bigger boys.

Gem insisted that she needed a hat to complete her first every…legal…St Patrick’s day. So i did what every good boyfriend would have done. I sat back down and finished my pint. Lucky for me a very jolly man with green face paint was handing out extra hats, Gem was every so slightly please when i returned hat in hand…i think she was drunk, but assured me otherwise. (i will get hurt when she reads this)

p.s, I’ve now actually made it onto the photo wall inside the pub…i think it’s time to visit another pub.

An old core friend of mine (David ‘Zaphod’ Marsh) is working on go kart racing game called Zero Gear. It’s shaping up to be a very pretty looking game. I can only hope that i get my grubby mitts on it soon to see if it plays as good as it looks and knowing Zaphod it will.

Check out some of the latest screen shots and videos at NimbleBit.

NNNeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaawwwwww.

Jeff Dunham is quiet amazing in how he’s able to keep a joke going over 3-4 different characters at once, all the while making you believe these puppets are alive and not from a single voice.

As for Jeff Dunham himself, he’s a pretty good stand up comedian though this often seems to get overlooked because of the puppets. All in all i suggest you spend an hour or so on youtube looking up clips .