Author Archives: Alan V

Random updates

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For people who are interested in Student Wars, the second-to-last expansion (Internships) has been uploaded for your playing pleasure. I’ll work on Loose Ends eventually and wrap up the game.
In related news, work on the graphical cards for the STD Card game, work on the base sets for the Supernatural card game and RPG Get! card game system, and work on Student Wars v2 have all been delayed because I’m busy with school and other life stuffs.

I photographed Tom and Car yesterday as the first part of my next assignment for portrait.
Feedback on these would be helpful, as I don’t want to do horribly on another portrait assignment.
Bleh.
Most of these have been slightly cropped, but the framing still bothers me (if anything, the recropping to try and confirm to what the professor considers “good” is what bothers me, since I like the full frames on many of these)… not sure what to do about that.
Meh.
How is it possible to hate photo so much, given that I immensely enjoy photographing?

In the full version, part of her elbow is still out of the frame. I tried cropping it down, but it still looks weird. Bleh.

Cropped too close to her head, maybe?

I like this more than the full one, where she is more centered in the frame.

Not sure about the cropping of this.

I’m torn about this one, because I really like it, but I feel like my professor won’t.

I like this one.

Once again, arms being partially out of the frame, and unsure how to fix it…

God, what is it with me and partially cutting arms out of the frame? It’s not something I’d normally notice, except it was one of the (few) things specifically pointed out to me… but the thing is, it doesn’t bother me that they’re cut off, and so it’s not something I think about while photographing. If anything, it bothers me when you see the entire arm in the frame, because it looks weird.
Is it my fault that my artistic sense doesn’t conform to the general sense? Things that I find artistic never match what other people like. And if it wasn’t for the fact that it affects my QPA, I wouldn’t care.
I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate photo -_-
I just want to go out and take photos and not have to care about this stuff, because I enjoy it, and the stuff comes out good *enough*. Why am I spending time stressing about this? Grargh.
I swear, if I was less anal about losing half a semester of work, I’d drop this class and be so much better off for it.

Content is continually being added to CMU Adventures. I’m currently working on the Doherty 1/B content, and will start on Wean 4/NSH soon. If you haven’t yet, creating an account and playing would be much appreciated, as the game could use all the testing it can get.
…
At least there’s something I’m good enough at.
*sighs*
*stabs photo with a big stabby stick*

Stuffs

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Life is going well, I think. Still busy as hell with stuff, but I’m still finding time to destress, so I guess that’s good.

I’ve been working a ton on my final project for webapps. I suppose that I should post the URL now that it’s officially hit Beta and I’ve finished the framework.
http://adventure.alanv.org
Create an account and try it out! Let me know of any bugs you find and whatnot. I’m still working on content for the game, but there shouldn’t be any fatal flaws in it.

This morning was my phone interview with Viz/GDC4S. I think it went fairly well. I dunno. I’m hoping they’ll want to interview me more/hire me, but we’ll see what happens.

Whee.

I couldn’t get this picture to come out right. Meh. It looked better in real life.
I hate photography -_-
*is still seriously considering dropping portrait*

Also, George W. Bush’s resume
-_-
How is that man still in office?

Yay for life

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The past two days have been full of awesome and fun.

Felt sorta sick yesterday, so I went to bed early the night before (around 8 PM) and slept until around 3 after getting up for lunch. The weather was amazing, so I pulled a ghannema and Jordan to go walking to Squill for pie ingredients (more details later). We took a roundabout back way to enjoy the weather, and met up with jgrafton and matthewj by Phipps. Took a bunch of long detours, played on a playground, and generally had an amazing time. Had yummy dinner at a kosher deli and then went geagling. Afterward was games and coffee/tea at Kiva Han followed by super secret fun that certainly didn’t involve going places on campus with rlambert and Ben.

Woke up today to klipper’s offer to drive me to Monroeville mall. Tagged along with him and Grant, and had a good time just walking around and playing DDR eXtreme at the arcade there. Didn’t buy anything, but meh.
Then, tonight was the pi day party (March 14!) hosted by ghannema and rlambert. There were 5 dessert pies: two kinds of apple, homemade peach, peach/cherry/apricot, and chocolate pudding. There was also amazing spinach cheese pie and steak pot pie. So much yummy pie, so much good company….
I haven’t been this happy in a long time.
:D






GIF files FTL :-\
Someone needs to invent a widely-supported millions-of-colors animated image format.

I hate photography (classes)

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I swear, every time we have a portrait crit or I get a segment grade back, a little part of me dies and I just want to never touch a camera again, at least in an academic sense.
I mean, if I suck so much, what’s the point of even trying? I’d rather be photographing and printing because I enjoy it (and oh god, I used to enjoy it so much).
I wonder if I should drop portrait. The class is killing my love of photography, and stomping every bit of enjoyment I get out of it into the ground, and then stampeding over it with a herd of deer, and then running it over with a steamroller. I technically have all the requirements for my photo minor already. It’s just that I always feel bad dropping a class, even if it’s a class I absolutely late (read: graphics last semester). I’d rather just stick with it until the end. The unfortunate thing is I don’t know if my QPA can afford the hit it’ll take from staying in the class (especially given Networks and Graph Theory this semester, neither of which is going well). Just have to work hard to make sure my other two classes are A’s.
Blaahhhhh.
To be fair, I don’t completely disagree with the grade I got on this assignment (I do think I could have done a better job)… what gets me is the lack of feedback and the fact that I tried really, really hard for this assignment (probably the most work I’ve done for any single photo assignment ever)… and that I was actually *happy* with my work (then again, I’m usually happy with my work, but it apparently sucks anyway).
I wish I knew how to fix my portraiture.
Someone tell me how to fix my portraiture.
Am I bad at framing? Am I a bad judge of lighting or angle? Do I just print horribly? Is my artistic sense just screwed up beyond repair? How the hell am I supposed to improve if I’m never told anything beyond, “Crop your prints better,” and, “These suck, do better.”?

Yeeeah, I think that ruined my mood for today. To think I was all happy this morning upon waking up too.

Today is clustaring, working on my webapps project (which I actually enjoy doing, and am apparently good at given that I’ve gotten 100% on every webapps assignment so far) and dinner with Alisa (yay all-you-can-eat pasta). Then, tonight, there is a campfire of yummyness.

No picture. I can’t stand to look at my camera or any photos right now. Hopefully I’ll be up for piccaring again by tonight (because campfire shots are always fun).

I did, however, download 6 CDs worth of new music from eMusic today. A bunch of great stuff, and a little not-so-good stuff, but meh… it was only $20, so I don’t feel bad about it. Yay for cheap, legal, DRM-free music that doesn’t support the greedy RIAA assholes. You should get some too, especially since March is the Boycott-RIAA month.

…
…
Wow, I feel really, really, really shitty now.
God dammit.

Foo

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Break has been full of awesome so far.
I got our networks routing daemon (mostly) working the other day (with only one late day). The thing I spent 4 hours debugging manefested itself as 3 or 4 different bugs in different parts of code, depending on how I ran it and what the network topology looked like. I finally traced it back into the tree-generation algorithm, in which I found the error….
A loop inside a loop, where I had mistyped the “j” as an “i”.
Don’t you hate it when you do that?

In any case, yesterday was full of awesome gameness with Tim, Mars, Dan, and Ian after an amazing dinner with Christina and some exploring with Ben. Today was full of piccaring with Greg and matthewj, followed by games with Alisa, rlambert, damo, Alex, and Brian. Whee. I’m also managing to get a lot done for CMU Adventures.
Yay for breaks?

Piccars:

He’s got branches growing out of his head. I can’t decide whether I like it or if it detracts from the image. It’s less distracting in the full version because of the depth of field though. Meh.

Teh matthewj photographs well.

Whee photos!