Assignment for Design I.

“Our very notion of the world- the capitalist twentieth century’s “one world”- is like a photographic overview. The world is “one” not because it is united but because a tour of its diverse contents does not reveal conflict but only an even more astounding diversity.”

Just some random doodles I did in Design class last week.

Here’s the timelapse video for the previously posted assignment. The quality’s a bit shoddy, I’ll try and see if I can’t render a better video.

This is for an assignment for my creative processes class. We originally came up with our own ideas in relation to a certain location, wrote them down on beer coasters and then passed those around. So in the end, we ended up with someone else’s idea and we had to work with that. The idea I from a classmate was “Nature is everywhere, even where humans have destroyed.” A sobering idea that I thought fit into my style quite nicely, however I may have gone for too literal an execution, now that I think about it.

We also had a discussion in class about authorship and what happens to it when somebody else’s idea lands in your lap. Does authorship now belong to you or is it still the property of the original owner? I think that all depends on a number of things, but I mostly see it as a collaborative process no matter the degree of involvement from either party.

I have a timelapse video of this. It’ll be up soon.

In the army, you’re never alone.

Or at least you shouldn’t be, if you are, you have a very big problem.

Assignments for design class.

Anyway, not much is going on. I’m sorting out a couple of things. For one, aside from school, my highest priority now is Gaming Union. I’ve been slacking in regards to putting up news stories. Haven’t been putting up as many as I used to. It’s pretty difficult posting stuff on a netbook that takes 5 minutes to boot up.

On the bright side, at least I can still report on things while I’m at school. I just put up two stories on good old Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision. It seems he’s the person to hate nowadays. He lashed out at EA as well as saying he felt betrayed by West and Zampella, the former heads of Infinity Ward, the developer studio behind the popular Call of Duty franchise. Gonna continue posting up stuff during my breaks.

Hm what else can I babble on about? The Final Fantasy Union podcasts have been a blast. I never was the chatterbox before but hanging out with Darryl, Lauren and Chloe has been really fun. The last episode we recorded was pretty darn random, lots of strange things going on. My mic botched up as well and you can tell part way through where I start to sound like the Terminator.

Speaking of podcasts, Lauren and Darryl have started up a mini video podcast called Let’s Play Again! They’ll be going through what’s good and bad on the Sega Genesis in alphabetical order, kicking it off with 3 Ninja’s Kick Back. I did the logo, which is just a pixelized Sega Genesis controller. I’ll be working on a number of other logos for Gaming Union as well. Not to mention we have quite a big surprise coming up, I’ll go into detail when I’m allowed to, but let’s just say that we’re really looking forward to finally revealing it.

In other news, I’m saving up for a Sager NP2180 laptop. It’s got a 15″ screen with 1080p resolution. That’s pretty high pixel density. Gonna customize it with an i7-740QM and maybe 6GB of RAM. The total comes up to roughly 1200 bucks. A lot cheaper than a new or refurbished Macbook Pro and definitely more bang for buck.

Destination of the day: Fort Fish and Chips.

Letting Kagamiku decide which chowder to get, haven’t had clam chowder in ages, but went with Halibut instead since we’ve never had that before. Tastes about the same though.

The serving of chowder was surprisingly big and very heavy.

And the halibut fish and chips arrive!

Also in very big servings with lots and lots of fries.

Mostly done for practice! I sketched her out last month but beat around the bushed a couple of times before finally getting around to painting her today. Took about an hour to paint in the colours.

For some reason, I just had the urge to do a quick doodle of my favourite 90′s anime, You’re Under Arrest 「逮捕しちゃうぞ！」. Took roughly twenty minutes. I also decided to randomly record it using my really crappy camera on a dollar tripod instead of recording it via screen capture software! So if you’ve got twenty minutes of your life to waste, why not waste it on me sketching to some pretty music? Kudos to whoever is familiar with this anime!

Here’s the sketch, I’ll finish this eventually, I hope.

Why hello there. I finally managed to wake up slightly earlier today, at 0800 hours. It was just nice as the sun was coming in through the shutters on the one and only puny window of my basement.

One of the things I love about Alter’s Yoko is that depending on the lighting and the angle you look at her, there are subtle differences in her expression. She looks a bit fierce in the shot above.

The morning sun really creates quite a dramatic atmosphere, I should wake up earlier every day!

I’ll try and do more exciting shots next time, maybe even take my figures out into the yard for some fun under the sun.

I was going through my PSD files looking for something and noticed that I actually have a lot of drawings that I never got around to finishing. I should start getting up earlier in the day so I have more hours to do things. It was so easy to sleep at 2AM and get up at 7AM in Singapore since the sun simply burned my face, that doesn’t happen here in Canada though since my room’s in the basement.

I must say that the dust doesn’t collect as fast here in Canada compared to Singapore where it was a daily battle against dust bunnies bent on world domination.

It’s time to start saving again. Being a huge Saber fan, I just can’t pass this one up.

Well I’ve finally gotten about to changing/cleaning up my desktop. I ran into The Kobhens icon set yesterday and decided to try them out, neat thing is that it comes with the PSD file so I can make my own icons for apps that don’t have ‘em, like Tweetie.

For those of you who are interested, The Kobhens icon set can be found over at robertourso.com. I’m also using Glass Dock by Materia-Ring and the wallpaper and Bowtie skin (Minimal) can be found at Iconpaper.org.

I had initially placed a preorder on this bundle maybe…over half a year ago, give or take, on Otacute. Well, it’s finally here and I’m loving it. Opened the box to find the package plus an additional bonus DVD – haven’t watched it yet, but apparently it’s got an “interview with Rin Tosaka” in it, so whoopee!

Anyway, so the Type-Moon box comes packed with the PSP game, the soundtrack, an art book and a special edition Figma figurine of Saber in a sexy red dress. It’s quite safe to say that that’s one of the key reasons why I bought this in the first place.

Saber’s new dress is quite lovely. In contrast to her original blue battle dress, Saber is now outfitted in something a little more elegant. Excalibur’s gotten a pretty daft redesign too, it doesn’t even look like Excalibur anymore. Not too fond of that, but oh wells. One very neat thing about the Figma is that it can stand without any assistance. Most of my other Figmas(Saber, Tosaka and Haruhi) require the use of stands, but surprisingly, this one does not. She doesn’t topple over all that easily either.

Here’s the rest of my Type-Moon figures, as you can see, I’m quite the Saber fan! I have a scaled figure of Tosaka as well, but I kinda broke the stand – should probably get around to fixing that with some super glue at some point.

It. Is. Epic.

No doubt about it. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is one hell of a ride. This post has been a long time coming, I just haven’t had the time to sit down and write about (ok maybe not entirely since I wrote up the review on Gaming Union).

However, since I’ve clocked more than 60 hours now, I can clearly say that Peace Walker offers way more than what Guns of the Patriots ever did. While the fourth instalment was epic in its own right and definitely had plenty of moments for fanservice, it certainly felt as though it could’ve been better. Maybe I’m just biased towards Big Boss, but Peace Walker has so much in it that even after the end credits rolled, I still managed to spoil the game. How that works? Well, that’s just Kojima and his merry band of developers for you.

Being a sucker for anything Metal Gear, I actually managed to secure a copy of the Big Boss Bundle last month, thanks to my good friend April (Thanks again!). I’ve also purchased the novels and the Prima guide, which is really useful for the Extra Ops and collecting every possible item/weapon available in the game, of which there is a lot. There’s also the original soundtrack and single which you can spot in the photo above. That’s yet another plus over MGS4, the music in Peace Walker is really good, really engaging, especially when it hits the climax at the end.

Anyway, I’m still playing the darn game whenever I have the time to. If you’ve got a PSP, but no Peace Walker, do yourself a favour at get to your nearest game retailer and pick up a copy now.