Random bits

Hope you all had a great Christmas, and have fun tonight. I’ll be over at some friends, enjoying some time off before the shitstorm hits next week. I have to work my way through a 200 page textbook, write a paper, code up a flash game, launch a new website layout, draw a few comics and a request, build a demo and play CoD4. Woop-de-fucking-doo. Still, It’s all good.

Here’s some things I’ve been meaning to post, some random bits.

There’s a Heroes convention in the UK (as close to my country as they will probably ever get) in March. If we were rich, me and a friend would have totally gotten the gold pass, which lets you meet the cast, get your pictures taken with them, and attend an exclusive cocktail party, with them! But that would run around 500 pounds for the 3-day event. So no thanks. We need to keep an eye on this one though.

In lieu of that, I am still content that people think I look like Sylar:

I love technology. With my old PC, I used to shut it down around midnight when I went downstairs to chill, because, well, it was loud and very warm. Now, with my laptop, I just close the lid and it takes a nap while I go watch Comedy Central. Then when I get back up I can flip it open and muck around for a bit. This can present interesting situations, like last night, when I came back up at around 3 AM, and saw that iJustine was doing her weekly talkcast over in Pittsburgh, USA (where it was still morning!). I hadn’t been on Talkshoe for a while, and I had forgotten about such late night escapades into the podcasting world. They’re like crack, really. Especially when these new media people do them.

Allright, see ya later.

Kristen

The colored version of this drawing. I’m liking this tri-tone coloring method. Each surface has a base color, a highlight color and a shadow color (I just left out the highlight tone in this one). It’s easy, fast and very animation friendly too.

Kristen (sans color)

I’ve been practicing my skills at life drawing lately, anatomy especially. This is a digital drawing made with my tablet over a traditional sketch that I scanned in.

Freak out!

Last week our college celebrated it’s 20th anniversary, and they threw a big party(HKU Freak Out! 07) on wednesday(!)night. Luckily we didn’t have to go to class the next day. So we stayed over at a friend’s place in the area because the party lasted till 2 AM. At least, that was the plan, but because of poor planning of the wardrobe system it took us about another hour to get out. Despite that we had a great time!

Here are some pictures taken by me and Tom:

Vincent, Bas and Adriaan having a good time.

PARTEEEEEEH!

Vince and Aad are knackered after some intense drum n bass.

Paul there with some of the few girls from Game Design; Cherida, Charissa and Sandra.

Me amidst the chaos on the right there. Marc had to strike a pose . Behind me there is one of my 6(!) namesakes in this year’s Game Design class. And the redhead in black is Selma, also a game designer.

For the rest of the pictures, check out this Flickr set.

And with that our second semester is over. We had project presentations on Friday, all went well. I had to do tech support for a few other groups aswell. I can’t recall the times I had to lug my laptop back and forth and dive into the control panel, but it all worked out. It was a pretty laidback project, we had great management, I hope we get to work with the again sometime soon. In two weeks we have a testweek, but for now I’m going to enjoy my Christmas vacation.

Happy holidays!

The Paradox of Choice

Great video from TEDtalks 2005 by Barry Schwartz about the paralyzing effect of too much choice that was shown during a recent Game Design class.