Some interesting websites.

http://www.portal2sounds.com/

Here.  Here’s a site that has pretty much every sound byte from Portal 2, readily playable at any moment.  You can search by key phrase, content, and character.  It’s a lot better than popping on YouTube and digging through the loads of other unrelated content for a gem.

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/

Here’s a wonderful website.  Incredibly well done pixel art and calming sounds, like the sound of water breaking on the beach.  I listen to the ambiance on here whilst doing homework.  Calming.

http://pen.io/

This is a website where you can easily publish a bunch of text, without registering or anything.  I absolutely adore the concept of this, but I have yet to find a direct use for it.  Sadly, Google Docs usually offers similar service to this.  But if ever need be, I’m sure I could paste a bunch of links related to a school podcast or something on a pen page and then send the page to someone.  I’m looking forward to using this in the future.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

Ah yes.  The beloved Humble Bundle of the gaming world.  This website distributes independent, DRM-free games to people.  (Yes, this means you don’t have to install the game!  Just pop it in a USB and open it on any computer!)  You can choose where the money you’re spending goes.  It can go to Charity, the Humble Bundle Website, or the developers.  It’s just such a brilliant concept.  If i had a credit card, I would buy every bundle that comes out.

Rant time!

I’m a jerk.  I’ll say it openly before this, so you won’t have to wade through my text to figure this out.  I’m rude, I’m blunt, and I’m quite the picky fellow.

So I’ll get to the point.  I hate it when people make really dumb comments on YouTube that get around 200-300 likes.  I really hate it.  It bothers me way more than it should.

“What comments are you referring to”, you ask.  Well, my good fellow.  The comments I’m referring to are the comments that say things like “99 people who disliked this video are earthworms”.

Come on, guys.  Come.  ON.  Honestly, finding that sort of drivel funny is shameful.  It’s disgraceful, really.  Everyone has some degree of originality, and you should exercise it by writing something funny and fresh, written in PROPER ENGLISH.  It’s not hard to put in the 2-3 seconds of extra effort to go back and do a brief skim through what you’ve read.

But really?  Using the same format of a joke over and over?  They’re just as bad as knock knock jokes, really, but what bothers me about these jokes is that they’re encouraged.  They’re encouraged and they’re beloved by people.  It doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever.

I’ve had yet to encounter a situation where these have been funny to me.  At all.  They’re not funny, they’re unoriginal, they’re not fresh or unique, and there are usually crippling typos that ruin the punchline of a joke.

Yeah, I know.  I’m taking these way too seriously.  But you gotta understand, these people roam our streets in droves.  You gotta feel a bit disappointed in them.  I believe people should try their hardest to be the best they can possibly be, and if being unoriginal and uncreative on a daily basis is how they’re spending their life, it’s kinda discouraging.

tl;dr – Don’t make those “99 people who disliked this…” comments on YouTube.  Please.

Stuff. And things.

So I’ve been doing a lot of stuff recently.

I’ve still been pouring out pixel art, by request.  I’ve been making a bit of improvement.

You might recognize this fellow from somewhere.   I was requested to draw the nyan cat in a slightly different style, so I did.  It’s lacking legs, however, because I thought that looked hilarious.

AM I ANDY WARHOL?

This was particularly difficult to draw, and I’m not very pleased with how it came out.  I could have done a much better job, I feel.  The shading for the top bit is off, and it doesn’t look very cylinderish.

It’s a trumpet.  I actually like this one, although the shading on the bell is wrong.  It’s one of my better creations.

I originally thought this would be incredibly difficult to make, but as I made it turned out to be a simpler process than it thought.  I just had to differentiate layers by shade of yellow, so I would know what I needed to add, and where to add them.

Yoshi egg.  My client was quite pleased with how this came out.

Client.  Oh man, that makes me sound professional.  Like that would ever happen *snort*

But yeah, that’s all the pixel art that I have on my Mac at the moment.  The rest are on my PC, so I don’t want to really bother going to my email and pulling em out.  I’ve been doing a lot of pixel art, honest.

Yeah, but I have done other stuff.  For example, I’ve started playing Terraria with a friend of mine.  We stayed up quite late, killing worms and slimes, and rushing to break pots for bombs and potions.  We managed to do quite a bit before we had a cease and desist.

For those of you who don’t know, Terraria is similar to what a 2D minecraft would be, but better.  There is a village system that revolves around NPCs spawning in houses that you built, there are boss monsters that spawn, there are random night events that trigger that cause the moon to go blood red, and there are just a chock full of interesting items available.  So much to do in the game, and it’s pretty much 10 dollars.  Miniscule amount for a good video game.

I’ve also been watching films again.  Since this post has been dragging on for a good while, I’ll just make a short list of them, for your and my sake, since the bell is going to ring in a few minutes.

The Aviator

Donnie Darko

The Human Footprint

Single Father (not a film, but still good)

Glorious 39

Downfall

Batman: Under the Red Hood (Surprisingly good)

Speed Racer

So yeah.  I’ve been quite a busy lad, with all of this entertainment, art, and school work.

So I’ve been quite busy

doing a lot of stuff.  Since I lack any artistic inspiration, I’ve opened up free requests on my Facebook wall, so that people can request any sort of pixel art at any time.  I’m putting out around 2-3 pictures in a day, from a queue of requests that’s built up.  All free of charge.  Since hardly anything other than listening to the new Lonely Island album and finding brilliant new music has happened in my life, I’ll just show you some of my work.

Yeah, that’s bacon.  This one was one of my earlier ones.  I didn’t bother with shading because this was such a quick process.  Besides, lighting doesn’t really change on bacon that much.

It’s bread.  I had a reference picture for this, so I’m not particularly proud of this in any way.  Finished this one in about 2 minutes?

This is probably one of my favourite ones.  No, it’s not root beer or beer.  It’s hot chocolate in a glass mug with whipped cream.  It took a surprisingly little amount of time to make, and it looks quite nice.  I like this one.

Oh, perhaps I should have mentioned.  Portal 2 has taken up a huge chunk of my time when I’m not pixel arting.  I’ve played through it around 3 times in a row, consecutively and I still have massive amounts of fun.  This is Wheatley, a character from it.  It took around 30 minutes to make, particularly because working with circles in pixel art is such a pain in the arse.  I think it turned out positively brilliant though.  People are saying it’s my best work yet.  My “Magnum opus”, as some cleverly put it.

This is my personal favourite.  If any of you know anything about me, you know that I love Pepsi.  It looks nice, tastes nice, and sounds nice.  This sorta echoes the niceness of Pepsi, I feel.  It’s really simplistic, and although some people have said that the simplicity takes away from it, I feel that’s part of its charm.  I love this piece to death.

I just noticed the cap isn’t shaded properly so it looks a bit off.  Blimey.  I should probably fix that.

It’s a donut.  This is a pretty good one.  Didn’t take that long to make.

So you may be asking me right now, “Jacob, why on earth does so much of this art pertain to food items?”  My answer: stop talking to your computer monitor, you look ridiculous and you’re upsetting the neighbors.

No, but in all seriousness I love the way food looks.  Particularly baked goods and beverages.  The guys down at packaging do a brilliant job of catching the eye, particularly the guys down at Pepsi.

So yeah.  I’m going to be posting up a whole lot more pixel art as I make new drawings.  I’ve still got a huge list of requests left, so expect to see a bunch more in the coming weeks.

Another blagpost? Oh noes!

Guess what?  I’m still doing pixel art, and I’ve just been getting better and better.

Lightbulb that I’ve done.  It came out much better than I thought it would.  It was something I did in about 2-3 minutes, bored and ironically idealess.

Here’s a mushroom that I drew.  It came out pretty nice, I reckon.  The stalk shading could use some improvement, but who cares, really?  It looks ok.

Here’s something different.  It’s the side texture of Minecraft grass!  Hoorah!  I’m in the midst of making a Minecraft texturepack, and seeing as grass is pretty much the icon of Minecraft, I thought it would make logical sense to create this first.  I’m currently working on the stone texture, so I can move on to designing the ores and such.  It’s coming along a little slow, however.  Slower than I’d like it to be.

A piece of cake that i drew.  One of my best works so far, other than the shading.  It’s pretty good, from what I heard from my peers.

A desktop I made.  I’m currently using it right now.  It’s one of my favourite things I’ve done so far, seeing as I love firefox and I love pixel art. It looks quite aesthetically pleasing.

So yeah.  My art’s coming along quite nicely.

Blagieicmxpe

I’ve been on a binge of watching films I’ve already seen again.

http://drhorrible.com/

Here’s something you should definitely watch.  It’s a Joss Wheden film that’s released on the internet for absolutely free.  And if you know anything about Joss Wheden, you know he only releases the most quality of things.

This movie is no exception.  By all means, if there is a film I say you must watch, this is probably one of them.  It’s a MUSICAL.

NEIL PATRICK HARRIS SINGS IN THIS.  SO DOES NATHAN FILLIAN.  NATHAN FILLIAN IS MY HERO.  HE IS AN ACTING AND COMEDIC GENIUS.  I SHOULD PROBABLY TURN CAPS LOCK OFF.

Yeah.  This is probably one of the most amazing musicals ever.  It’s compelling, hilarious, original, emotionally involving, creative, etc. etc.

I particularly enjoy the ending, which is a different turn from the original light hearted and kindly theme of the entire movie.  It really really hits you how much it emotionally affects.

I’ve also watched Fantastic Mr. Fox.  I also enjoyed this film as well.

It’s one of those films that are reviewed rather poorly, but are still very much enjoyable.

I particularly love the art style in this.  It’s a nice combination of classic claymation and CG.  It’s incredibly well done, and would be very difficult to imitate.

My only complaint is that some of the story elements weren’t well accented as important.  If we were given some hints as to the future importance (or foreshadowing), it would have been much better.

So yeah.

The Crucible!

For the past few months, I’ve been involved in KIS’s 2011 production of the Crucible.

It’s a whole lot of fun.  (That’s a bit of an understatement)

Every practice is loaded with laughs, and I’ve made a bunch of new friends.  Although the play was quite serious, we still managed to take the most serious of lines and turn them into the stupidest of jokes.  For example, in Act IV, there is a line where John Proctor (Hyun Woo) screams “BECAUSE IT IS MY NAME!”

As you can probably imagine, we took that phrase and used it to answer questions asked to us.  We even went as far as to scream it out at random intervals during the day, perhaps even when meeting fellow play members during the school day.  It was absolutely brilliant.

We even found humor in the mistakes made.  For example, at one very climatic moment, Danforth (Bobby) flubbed up his lines and yelled “HANG THEM HIGH OVER THE TOWN!  WHO HANGS FOR THESE, WEEPS FOR CORRUPTION”.  There’s something a bit off with that, isn’t there?  He flipped around ‘hangs’ and ‘weeps’.

What was even more amazing is that we all kept straight faces until the end.  Then, there was an explosion of laughter.  It was absolutely brilliant.

And of course, the play also has the underlining plot of Abigail(Sarah) and her ….connection with Proctor.  There was much teasing going on with that.  Especially when Abigail tries to seduce Proctor in Act I.  Mr. Johnson had to get up at one point and show Sarah how to properly flirt with Hyunwoo.  It was one of the most amazing things that had ever occurred in the history of the universe.
The play is on the 21st and 22nd of April.  Attend, friends!  I promise you it’s worth your time.  I swear to you on the excess of my left thumbnail.