“He was talking with what’s-his-nuts….” - someone at work

“I’m not a snow bunny, I’m a snow fox.  I eat snow bunnies” - Danielle

Blogged with Flock

I received Super Mario Galaxy for Christmas and I must say that I’m quite happy with the gift.  This is the most talked about Wii game for the end of 2007 and not without reason.  Everyone who’s into gaming kept mentioning that Mario Galaxy is the true successor to Super Mario 64 on the Gamecube.  Pretty much everyone, myself included, thinks that Mario Sunshine was a piece of sod that should never have been made.  Mario Galaxy, on the other hand, has a lot of the same charm that made SM64 so much fun to play.  My only complaint, and this is a very tiny one, is that the puzzles are a bit easier than Mario 64.  I remember racking my brain with my brother trying to figure out how to get the each of the stars for SM64.  With Mario Galaxy, I feel that most of the stars are a lot easier to get.  However, as I write this blog post I realize that I played Super Mario 64 approximately 10 years ago, so it’s possible that the puzzles that were so hard for me back then would not be quite as hard now.  That said, I beat the game in two days with about 20 hours of gameplay.  That is, I beat the final Bowser, but was only about half way through collecting all of the stars.

This year I decided to mainly support technological causes.  I donated to the F ree Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  I think that rms and the rest over at the FSF are really doing a lot of great work to preserve our freedoms.  I especially like the Defective by Design campaign they’ve been running.  So this year they get the lion’s share of my money.

The EFF has been doing a lot of work with other things I care about such as opposing the broadcast flag and overall protecting our electronic and Internet freedoms.

Welcome to 2008!

We are!

I wanted to wish a Merry Christmas to my readers, however many (or few) of you there are.

I hope this is a time of happiness and family fun for you. And, if you’re Christian, I hope this can also be a time of reflection for you upon the sacrifices Jesus made for you so that you don’t have to go to hell.

“She made him into a monster” - Danielle “Yeah, a gay one” - Christine

The electric company gave us a letter today stating that they’ll be doing some work on the lines and we may/will lose power on 27 or 28 Dec. Because I’m going to be extremely busy with my family at that time, I may not be able to get the server back up until 1 Jan 2008.

Sorry if that keeps you from enjoying my blog or Andrew’s blog or drop the bomb productions. I’ll get it back up as soon as I can.

You’re probably asking yourself two questions. 1) When did Eric get awesome at modeling humans? and 2) What are these bald, naked women doing on this site? In fact, you probably asked yourself those questions in the reverse order. Extra points for the MakeHuman team if you didn’t even realize those were computer images and thought they were real.

So, to start off with question 1, I didn’t model those humans in the traditional sense. In other words, I didn’t start with a box or plane and build up a human from there. Instead I used a program called MakeHuman which has similar goals to the commercial software Poser. Poser, as those of us into 3D art and animation know, is software for the posing, animating, and rendering of humans (and occasionally other creatures). Both software packages exist because animators may not want to also be character modelers. Instead they may wish to use a package such as MakeHuman which creates the character meshes and materials for them and then work on the animation. In such a context I wouldn’t call it cheating. After all, in a studio, most artists specialize on one part of the animation (eg animation, modeling, texturing, etc). I may even see myself using MakeHuman or Poser if I wished to have a realistic human character in my animation.

Lauren: “When are your fingers the largest?” J: “As a girl you should probably know that”