Onekey Nitrome Game

Ack, I haven't posted for a while. Anyway, Nitrome made a new game a few days ago called Onekey. Basically, you help this little guy get to the end of the level by pressing the spacebar to trigger stuff. Use it to open gates, make him bounce, float, etc. Very cute. :)

I've been using my tablet these days too. Making a frog on Paint right now.
On Friday, we had art homework, so I went afterschool to pick it up since the drawing wouldnt fit in my binder. The door was locked, so I asked the next-door art teacher, and she said that she was on her shift and would probably be back in in 15 minutes. So I couldn't go back in once leaving the building because the people in the hallway would stop us. Since I carpooled with my friend and she was already outside, I had to go out too and wait. After much freaking out, we decided to sneak into the art hallway through a door a little bit further from the front of the school. And we got in just as my teacher went into her class, and safely retrieved my homework.

School

Hmm. Well, first day of school today! I have some pretty awesome teachers, although I haven't met all of them since we had a blackout and missed our last few periods. And I lost my schedule. I'm going to ask and see if I can get another one. Otherwise, I wrote it down in my agenda, but I prefer the normal schedule. Not much else to say. Need a new book to read?

Otherwise, my tablet is just wonderful! I still can't trace things very well on-screen, but I think I got the hang of using it as a cursor and doodling with it. Corel is so awesome! I never knew it had such an interface with all those different types of brushes. I'll post a screenshot of it later. It even has a palette you can mix colors in! and it follows my stylus nicely and adjusts size well too. :)

o_o

Wow, school starts tomorrow...
I have a tablet...
I have braces...

Hmm. A lot changed this summer!
Oh well, the first day is always exciting. I'm going to have to change my sleeping schedule drastically though. Ok, my friend said that granola bars have fiber, which give you energy... So maybe I should get some? But which granola bars are ok for braces?

In other news, the Corel Painter Essentials program that came with the tablet is so cool! Having a lot of fun with that. :) Still trying to get used to the stylus, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it.

It just doesn't feel like school is tomorrow though! I hope I have a good schedule and classes with friends. Although, I can't find a school map! I don't know how I'll find my way to homeroom without one.

Things usually dont turn out the way I expect them to, which is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I guess I'll just prepare for tomorrow and wake up early.

Oh, and wash off the nail polish from yesterday from my fingernails. No matter what color, I am not wearing nail polish to school. Unless its clear. I'm keeping it on my toes though, its fun to watch it change color. :)

YAY!

I'm so happy! I got a tablet today! YAY!!
Well, we went to a bunch of stores and stuff, and we found a bunch of tablets. I wanted the $100 one since that was the only one I had enough money for, and the one I planned on getting in the first place. But then my parents said that if I was going to get one I should get a good one. So in the end we got that $300 one that I had wanted from the very beginning, but decided not to get it because it was so expensive. So now I am wonderfully happy! Except I only have 25 minutes to try it out since I'm leaving soon. I am so happy! (I really need a synonym for happy that also means omg-I-got-a-dog happy)

Intuos 6x8~ Yay! The box is beautiful and just the right weight. :D Now I can't wait to OPEN it!

:D Did I mention that I'm really really happy?

I'm Done!

Yay! I'm done with my 4 things! :D

Hint: They're in a box

Nothing else. Fish is perfect for braces.(without bones!) I dont usually like seafood, but this fish was spicy! And I love spicy stuff! :D

4 Things

I'm making four things for my friends. Maybe three, since I might not have enough time for my own... Anyway, I can't really talk about it since some of those friends read my blog.

Hint: I used glue.

Well, guess that counts out candles and homemade popsicles. :) I think I'm going to give a hint out every day till the weekend. It won't help you much in figuring it out though. Muahaha!

It's taking a while though. @_@

New Link

Hello! Does this work? I just added some html I learned when I was examining blog spaces when I used to play Neopets. :) Basically, I was like, hey! This looks interesting. *copy and edit* :O Thats cool! *implements into memory* So yeah. I'll stop so you wont get dizzy.
Heres a link to the powder game! Im just doing this so you'll have a harder time clicking it. :)

I added a new link to the links list.

Polyvore: A place where you can make a collage of images you upload, or images it already has. It has many different clothing images, so you can make an outfit with it too.

Well, I sent the pictures of the monsters I made and sent them to Nitrome as fan art. Hopefully they'll find it.

Oh, Firefox got updated. The 3D wall Add-On is really cool. o_o
I also went back to DeviantArt and actually posted some stuff. Someone actually commented! Yay!

Oh, and I think I'm going to post an interesting game every Wednesday. If I remember.
So here's the first one!

Coign of Vantage: Very cool. The idea is pretty different too. Basically, a bunch of pixels appear on the screen, and there is a small pixel image on the upper-right corner. You move your mouse which drags the screen around and all the pixels move, and you try to get the pixels to make the image. Its really hard at first, but somehow, you manage to figure it out after maybe 3-4 pictures. The first picture I tried, I was like, "How in the world am I supposed to get through this?". Oh, and you have a limited amount of time to complete as many images as possible. As always, the review explains better than I do.

Review and game here: http://jayisgames.com/archives/2008/08/coign_of_vantage.php
I got 253790 points. @_@ 1313170 more to get on the high scores...

Hmmm. Should I make this "featured game of Wednesday" on the side of my blog? I can't decide. Its always fun to add a new something to the side though. :)

Braces

Well, I got my braces and thankfully that was pain-free, since all they did was glue the braces and wire them and stuff. But my teeth ache everytime I put the slightest amount of pressure on them @_@ So now I have to chop up bread when trying to eat it. I also picked light blue and light green for my braces. :) I hope the achey-ness goes away after a week since I don't know how I'm going to survive school lunch this way. Now I brush my teeth about 5 times a day. @_@

Some letdowns on braces:

• Acheyness/pain
• Feel funky
• No sugary, chewy, sticky, or hard kinda food.
• No soda
• I don't care about hard candy, but chocolate will be missed(especially hot chocolate!).
• Worst of all- No Tapioca!
• Brush a lot

I think that's it so far. Anyway, I made some grilled cheese today. They taste good. I have to chop em' up with a knife though. Also, I have a sort of idea of what I can eat. If someone can tell me, that would help. Can I eat rice? Chicken? Sandwiches? Salad? Fruit(I know, chopped up apples and corn)? Noodles? Fish? Sweet Fruit? Watermelon? Lemonade? Orange Juice? Ice cream? Right now, I'm eating grilled cheese, rice, yogurt, soup, and noodles. Kind of limited.

What else? I love my new jeans. :) And khaki pants, strangely.

Orange Monster and Comfort

Ok, I'm back from Comfort. That was an awesome trip! I have a bunch of pictures to upload too. Anyway, I need to upload that orange monster. Its been on Flickr, I just didnt have time to get it on my blog.

Click for a bigger image. :)

Ok, a bunch of news. I'm getting braces today. T_T Hope it doesnt hurt too much.
I'm waking up earlier now thanks to Laura and her earlier sleeping time during Comfort.
The thing starts in a week! Must get back-to-thing stuff. Maybe the prices are lower before the thing starts?
I got souvenirs from West Texas! Oh, and some interesting videos and stories to show. Although, Laura will probably write about them too in her blog. The trip involved many animals.
I almost have enough money for a tablet! I just need to make $7 and then I can go get one.

Skywire 2 & Jack Frost Drawings

Yay! I got to level 30 on Skywire 2. :D
Although I really dont like level 30, since his teeth keep on CLOBBERING me. *sigh* Well, now I love Skywire because none of the levels really seem impossible. And it only uses two arrow keys, and has tons of different monsters and bosses for every ten levels.

I'm going to outline those pics I drew... Maybe I'll play Skywire later.

-Edit-

Ok, since this post is small, Im just going to add to it. Here are the pics of the drawings I made of the green and orange monster in Jack Frost. Go to Nitrome and play it if you want to know what the real monster looks like. And you know. Click for a bigger, better image and all that.

Ok, I photoshopped the second image and this is the result.

:)

Drawing

I'm drawing monsters in Jack Frost. :) They're all so cute! I'll post pictures of them later. For some strange reason, I feel like drawing and writing right now. I like drawing, I just don't free draw very much, and so I think I'm going through a draw-random-stuff phase.

Also, powder game has a new feature. Its called loop. Basically, if you use that feature and erase the block border, anything touching one side of the screen will transfer to the other side of the screen... It's sort of hard to explain. Basically, if a fighter runs to the right and to the border, it will come through on the left border. And if powder or an element falls down under the bottom border, it reappears at the top, making a never-ending falling something. Just try it, it will make much more sense once it works. Oh, and fighters and players still die if they touch the bottom or top borderless screen.

Hmm. Nitrome rocks.

Type

A cool link to a bunch of stuff using letters and stuff. My favorites are the "Weight" and "Emotype".

http://www.typorganism.com/ - Click "typorganism" to start.

Hmm. That was a short post.

Also, Google has a different little "picture" every day for the Olympics, if you go there.

Dwarf Fortress

Well, I found this new game called "Dwarf Fortress" which can be downloaded on Windows and Mac. Its a pretty small file size for a very big game. This game has dwarves as its main species. There are two options- you can build a fortress and assign the dwarves jobs or be an adventurer and travel and go on quests. The whole game is made in ascii, which is letters and numbers and symbols.

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Saving the game is slightly complicated. You have to press Esc in game and choose Save Game. Then go to the zip folder you downloaded to load the game and open it. Then open the dwarfort.exe file and extract everything from there. Open the data folder and then open the save folder. Click the region1 folder and copy it to a safe folder. When you want to load a saved game, copy it back to the save folder and play. Don't overwrite files, since it might leave some leftover stuff.

The game has its own Wiki online which is really helpful since the game is huge and its in-game instructions are very long. It took me 2-3 hours to read it all. Its a bit overwhelming at first.

The link below will tell you what you can do in the game, along with its features.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/features.html

Bought some cute flats yesterday. :)

Ok, Im still learning the game. o_o Once you get through the whole deciding what to bring to the fortress stuff, you have to save to close the game. Dont click abandon fortress or anything because it will delete previous info. Thats what I did, o_o Although, I had back-up since I copied the save file to my other folder...

Olympics Ceremony - Wow~

Whoa. That Olympics ceremony was awesome. It was four hours long, although most of that was the national march. Now I'm going to describe as much as I can remember of what happened. The stadium was built in Beijing and was called the Bird's Nest because of its shape. On the top of the inside, there was a screen that went all the way around the stadium. At the beginning, there were 2,008(Get it?) drummers in this rectangular format. Every time they hit the drum, it would flash, so they made patterns and stuff with that. They also did this countdown using the drums. Many fireworks were used throughout the ceremony. Oh, and most of the commercials were much better than they usually are, which is awesome. There was also this part where this giant scroll unrolled itself and these people painted a picture on this piece of paper in the middle with their bodies. The part that was slightly confusing was that the paper started lifting off the ground and later floated in the air. Of course, we later learned that the scroll was actually a giant LCD screen, although it did unroll itself.

Later, the screen opened and revealed these printing blocks that went up and down and made waves and words. Although it seemed like they were programmed to do so, the tops of the blocks opened and people came out in the end. Obviously, a lot of thought and time went into all this choreography.

Then, the scroll opened up and a giant planet floated from it. Then, the planet would change into Earth, then Mars, then Jupiter. These people on it would run around on it. Remember, this thing is floating in the air. The cool thing was that the gravity looked like it was pulling all the people to the planet, so the people on the bottom were running upside-down, and the ones on the side were running sideways. Right before commercials, these fireworks would set off around Beijing.

There was a lot more stuff, but I'm going to skip to the end. Once the torch was passed to the last person, he was lifted off the ground and ran sideways around on the top of the screen on the rim of the stadium. He made it look like he was actually running on the screen, which was pretty cool. The giant torch was huge and had a giant red ribbon around it. Once he got to the torch(which was amazing), he lit a fuse that went around the torch on the ribbon and then burst into flames at the top. And then, of course, a huge fireworks show ended the ceremony. Among the many fireworks was one that depicted the five rings for the Olympics.

I tried looking for a video of some of the stuff, but I couldnt find any that I liked and would actually show everything well.

Although, I did find some pictures of the pyrotechnics for the Olympics. Some of them show how big the stadium is too. :)
http://www.nbcolympics.com/destinationbeijing/photos/galleryid=183811.html

They spent 450 billion dollars on this ceremony, although it still came out 100 times better than I thought it would be. Also, many people got married today, because 8 is a lucky number and since today is 8/8/08, its kind of like extra good luck.

Also, if you looked at the picture below the ones of the pyrotechnics, (pageantry) I really have no idea where they got those pictures from, since I didn't see them in the ceremony.

You know, here's a pretty good review of it.
http://www.nbcolympics.com/newscenter/news/newsid=184784.html
Oh, and here are some pictures of the costumes.(and more fireworks)
http://www.nbcolympics.com/destinationbeijing/photos/galleryid=162109.html

The whole thing was just really, really stunning.

-Edit-

Ok, I found a video of it all! (The drummers are at the end-ish part)
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/share.html?videoid=0808_HD_OCB_HL_EN197

Olympics

Wow, the Olympics start this Friday! Well, I made a photoshop image because of that. It glows. :)

Oh, *fume*. There's always this slight disappointing process of uploading stuff I make. I would be ready to email it to my friends, and then I remember my blog, and I just HAVE to give them a link. So, I open up a window on blogger. Then, I realize that I need to upload it on Flickr so that when people click it, they can get a bigger image of it. So I open up a tab. After uploading, I've got to change the html, because if I upload directly from my computer, it doesn't give a link. If I upload from a link, it doesnt show the image! So I have to add the html thing to them all(Thank goodness for my HTML phase). I'm at the flickr stage right now.

Haha, I love how Flickr says hello to you in different languages at the frontpage. Thats where I find the words to greet Lily with on im. :P (Now you know, Lily!)

Ok, here is the image:

It looks weird that small, so please click to see it in its original size. :)

Oh, and here's the song I was listening to while making this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FVc-2xNkzQ - Suddenly by Ashley Tisdale

My lack of apostrophes is really bothering me for some weird reason. It usually doesn't, but now I go back and add in all the apostrophes. Aha! Like that "doesn't" word. Hmmm. I must be turning into a punctuation freak.

Anime Face

Ok, I outlined that anime face in photoshop today and colored it. Here it is:

That took me the whole day! It was probably because

a. I used Photoshop 6, an older version
b. I had to taper all the lines with an eraser
c. I switched to youtube to replay a song every 3 minutes

In the end, I played around with everything and made a bunch of versions for it. I'm only putting up two- the original and soft light ones, because its late and there are too many of the others.

Click them for a bigger version. Please?

:)

Some Random Drawings and Lots Of Words

Well, I was just drawing a few things. I made a full-body anime person (though I dont think it turned out very good), a manga head, and two other random doodles.

I drew everything in pencil, so I decided to outline them all in pen. Unfortunately, the pens I use dont work too well with erasers. If I dont wait long enough(longer than usual), the ink will smear. And then, if I try to use an eraser over it, the ink will fade. So, I just decided to just trace it with another sheet of new paper. The only problem was that its kind of hard to trace things in pencil through printer paper. :/

So, I created a handmade lightbox! :D Well, it was sort of a temporary-last-bit-effort. I could just get a nice flat plastic container and a flashlight, except our flashlight ran out of batteries. And all the other mini-light things (book light, book light 2, book light 3) were all used up. And they didnt provide much light anyway. So since we have a big black pane of glass on the table(the glass worked well as more table room) and I had a small-ish lamp on a tabl nearby, I just moved the table to the lamp and stuck the lamp under the table. It actually worked pretty well. Later, I just didnt want to leave my room to outline(It was the source of music!) I got a flimsy plastic container and stuck some shiny aluminum foil under it. That didnt work very well, but after I made my pencil lines darker, I managed to get everything outlined. Except the manga head, which was a bit more complicated than the other 3 pictures, so it was hard to tell all the lines apart. Thats why you see a few pencil marks around it. :)

I also find that its much more fun to work with music on, just like many other people. And the cool thing is that the music doesnt really distract you from whatever your drawing, it actually encourages it. I was listening to these songs while drawing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEafJTTALlQ&feature=user - "Breathe" by Michelle Branch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMBrDYwe6jI - "Who I Am" by Jessica Andrews

I love the chorus on Breathe. Almost everything in the living room is now in my bedroom. Why? The vacuum.

Anyway, here are the pictures. Click them for a bigger version as always. And they look better that way. :)

The anime head I made. It actually turned out better than I thought, except I guess the headband distracts too much. @_@ Its my second original anime face :)

The manga person, which I dont like much. The knees look small and a bunch of stuff doesnt go together naturally. And the shoes. Oh, the horror!

The roasted marshmallow. It actually looks better in the picture with the other surreal picture and itself, which is in my photostream.

The bubble picture. This is one of my favorites because I just love it for some strange reason. :) The lines close to the water might have something to do with it. And the fish's eye. Trust me, this looks much much better if you click it.

Oh phooey. I missed the daily deadline by an hour and 20 minutes. *sigh* I guess that stops my record of daily posts. Unless the time is different on blogger... :)

"If I just breeeathe in
fill the space between
I'll know, everything is alright..."

Pictures and Poll Info

I made another poll on room styles for a friend of mine who cant decide between them. This poll is only here for a week so dont forget to vote! I took a picture of the manga stuff I tried...So here it is!

Eyes

Head

Profile and stuff

Tapioca & Manga

Honeydew tapioca is really good. I like it best after the ice melts because otherwise its too sweet.

Well, I've always liked Manga. So I've tried drawing and all, but I'm really bad at it. The only thing I'm ok at are the eyes. So usually, I try it...and then I stop because I keep getting the proportion wrong or something. @_@ And then I go back to it, and so on. So now I started again. I started with the eyes, and I'm "trying" to draw the face. I outlined a few of them in pen. Unfortunately, the ink fades if I erase too much. Anyway, I'm just going to post a picture of what I've drawn so far.

(Will post pictures later- Im still drawing :) )

Some Pictures

Ok, a few pictures to share.

First up, the lollipop-flower drawing I made.

And here is a lace heart I made at Laura's on a hanky.

Some flowers I made on Scribbler. :)

The extra ribbon bookmarks I made.

Click on any of them to get a larger version of it. It looks much better that way, :)

Graphics Tablet

Well, it started with this lollipop-flower I was drawing randomly on a piece of paper. Anyway, after drawing it, I decided that I would try to make it with Adobe Photoshop. Except the swirl on the lollipop section was always lopsided and strange. I've been wanting a tablet for a while now, since its so much easier using a stylus than a cursor when drawing.

So, I'm going to save up some money and try to buy one.

Currently, I'm aiming for one of the Wacom drawing tablets. It's the Intuos3 6x8.

It comes with a grip stylus(with an eraser! No batteries needed!), and has 1204 levels of pressure sensitivity...o_o It also has little touch strips and shortcut keys for changing things and maneuvering... And a 5-button mouse. Now that I've seen the two extra buttons on the side of the mouse, I wonder why no one else has though of it, since most people put their fingers there. It also has a few programs for editing and stuff.

The only problem is that its very expensive... $329. ._. Oof.

But the 4x6 just seems way too small! I hope it doesn't lag too much.

-Edit-

Ok, I researched a bit more, and I think that Ill start with something simpler and cheaper. The Bamboo Fun Small, also by Wacom. The only real big difference is the size and the pressure sensitivity. Compared to the other tablet, this one is much more affordable: $99. It got a 15 5-star rating reviews on Amazon, so it must be a good product! And you can write with this one too. :)