Masochism - MITAH

A post in which I exclaim why I am both insane and a potential genius.

As you may or may not know depending or not if you're me, I started an animation project a while back on my Youtube channel called 'The Man in the Ant Hill', which I envisioned as a series of animated shorts based on the 1960's comic story of the same name (The origin story of Marvel's Ant-Man if you're interested). My plan of action for this idea of mine was to animate the various stages, record my progress and then stick it onto Youtube, in practice so that potential employers will take note of my initiative and masochism.

Why masochism you ask? Well, a masochist is defined as somebody who feels some kind of weird gratification from being punished, and I think the fact that I chose to use the animation method I find the most difficult is definitely masochistic. Namely that doing frame by frame animation on a graphics tablet is about an exact a science as doing a life drawing with an icicle onto some bedrock. And never planning on letting up shows that I seem to derive some kind of glee in deliberately punishing myself.

Now, what I COULD have done when writing up this project was to, say perhaps, animate using a pre-existing rig of some kind or create one at my own pace. Things which, while comfortable with using, am definitely no Richard Williams at just quite yet, but instead I chose the method where I have to draw each individual frame in the long continuous sequence with no breaks because there are no camera alterations (Fun fact, the average drawing time of one frame is 10 minutes).

My original reason for punishing myself so was because I was using the 'Original series Goku from Dragonball' endurance test method of practicing at something. That is to say, rather than building up skill and endurance with steadily escalating smaller challenges, instead master the hardest method first and becoming virtually godlike in the easier methods because nothing feels quite so sweet after the back breaking pain that is trying frame by frame animation with little skill.

I would just give up, except I know that my punishingly low level of self esteem demands that I get just this one victory out of the way before settling for lesser victories, which ironically makes me more confident in myself and determined to work, which is always a plus. 

Clarification: In the original series of Dragonball, Goku exercises
with a several ton turtle shell on his back for six months and becomes
virtually unstoppable with his prodigious strength despite
having no formal martial arts training. The origin of my awfully phrased
metaphor.

Nonsense

Haven't posted about my life here in over a year, blimey Kris, do the words "Decent speed for a glacier" mean anything to you? Not really, also stop stealing dialogue from Zero Punctuation. Ah well, I guess I'll let you know what I've been up to.

Previous Course!
First of all I've finished that Animation course that I loved so much around this time a year ago, I got a Distinction + Merit Merit, which is pretty hefty spoils to say I didn't like lots of my work, though my Final Project which you can view here is quite simply magnificent, not without errors of course but nothing is unless you're Sherlock Holmes. I'm going to miss that course because it changed my life in ways I couldn't describe.

Current Course and also Animation!
After finishing College I went back to College to do a different course, instead of Animation it's a more generalised Art and Design course, it's not REALLY going how I wanted but I've managed to teach myself how to be a better drawer, which has slightly rubbed off onto my Animation skills, not that I've Animated much recently, unless you count my clever idea MITAH where I'm working on a larger project but showing you all of the smaller elements because it'll take too bloody long otherwise.

University Applications!
In similar Animator-y news, I've sent off my University Applications about two months ago, all for Animation related courses naturally, I shan't give any details as to the identity of the Universities however I'll wait until I've properly been accepted to share such a detail, because it's best not to show bias at this stage, but rest assured I'll be in good hands for almost whichever one I go to.

Health!
I have not been as healthy as I used to be for this past year, I've had a fair few unusual stress attacks that four doctors can't agree on the exact nature of, I'm better now and that's all I'm really gonna say on that matter.

Current Work!
As said previously, at the present time, I'm on and off working on a small animation project entitled "The Man in the Ant Hill", it's a short story originally written by Marvel, being the origin of the character Ant-Man, and I've decided to adapt it into an animated feature because really, it's just dying to. I upload the various stages of the process onto Youtube for the pleasure of all, I'mma gonna link to it a second time for luck.

I'm notorious for starting personal projects and then not completing them due to lack of interest on my part and the part of whoever finds out about them, so I've decided to simplify the project making process and remind myself repeatedly how much I wanted to make it in the first place. This inspiration coming from of course the excellent Jack Howard, a guy on the internet who makes funny videos I'm a fan of, you ought to check him out.

I want to frame this and put it on a wall.

Well, that's all for now, I should really get into the swing of this again, it'd be nice to talk about my life stuff in greater detail, almost like a real blogger.

Interactive Storytelling is Impossible

An open letter then, to everybody with an opinion on videogame stories.

I've heard a lot of people complain about the ending to Mass Effect 3 (I should stress I haven't played Mass Effect, and that this is based off my own personal opinion.), and about how their actions didn't affect the story, and how they wanted the story to end in a certain way because of what they did.

Nonesense I say to that.

Stories do not work that way. A story is a linear structure, a piece of art created by an author, generally, the beginning and end is written first, and the middle is incidental stuff.

What Interactive Storytelling actually is, is just cleverly disguised simulations. A simulation, by it's nature, tries to replicate reality, a stimulation is cause and effect, something an interactive story also attempts. If an event is driven by the event before it, then the final event will not be an ending, it will just be a final event. And reality does not have an ending, nor does it have a beginning and middle, because life is not a narrative, life is just driven by cause and effect, it's never building up to anything. 

In a story, the beginning and the end is what's written first, because you want a story to mean something, a writer then writes the events in the middle because in a story based on what happens afterwards, effect precedes cause. But in a game, cause precedes effect like in real life, and like I said, real life can't be predetermined. It's essentially the difference between Science and Art. In Science, one thing causes another thing and it can only happen one way, in Art, the emotion that the effect creates defines the cause.

If a game has a story, then the game must steer you onto the path of the story, if a game does not steer you onto a path, it can't have a story.

Two good examples of what precisely I mean off the top of my head, Portal and Minecraft.

The story of Portal is thus, a person has being stored in some sort of facility, you travel through the facility by doing tests, and the game ends with you (seemingly) killing the villain. That's a story right there. You start off, and the story goes that you solve all of these tests and eventually find the villain, and the reason the story progresses this way is because that's what every player will do, and every player will do that because, acting as the character, they'll want to complete the tests like the main character, they'll want to escape from the tests because to not escape would mean death, and they'll want to fight the baddy at the end because if you chose to not fight, you will be slowly poisoned.

Portal, has a narrative. And it has gameplay moments part of that narrative, for example, halfway through the game, you are ordered to destroy a cube that the villain mockingly stated was your only friend, at the end of the game, you then kill her in the same way, because it's ironic. 

See what I mean? They wrote that ending first, and then later wrote that middle point to add a narrative reason for it, because that's exactly how a story is written, the narrative being in the form of gameplay. The gameplay itself is flexible though, as you aren't forced to do anything, you just want to see how the story progresses.

Now onto my point about Minecraft.

The setting of Minecraft, is that you are the only human on Earth (Or you and some friends if you're on a server.), and that's about it. Every single person would react differently to this scenario, some people might explore the world, some people might build a shelter to protect themselves from monsters and make food to keep themselves alive, some might create artwork with their now infinite resources, some people might set fire to a forest for a laugh because there are no consequences beyond not being able to acquire wood. And you can do all those things, but it doesn't amount to anything beyond the direct consequences of those thing.

There's no ending to Minecraft, because Minecraft simulates a man alone in the world, rather than explaining a man alone in the world. The game ends when you get bored, or circumstances beyond your control, like death or a broken computer, stop it.

What I'm basically saying is, either you railroad the player into a story. or you don't railroad them and don't get a story. If you try to compromise, you'll get Mass Effect 3, and Mass Effect 3 had a lot of complaining fans.

What I think people want is to do certain things and for them to have certain consequences, which is neither of the two archetypes I mentioned. They want to do what they want, like an open ended game, but they want a specific consequence, like a story.

And what that sounds like is a whole third archetype of game, the only solution I could think of would be some kind of mechanic that lets the player write the story and then enact it, but that wouldn't have the narrative of a story, nor would it have the open endedness of a sandbox, what that actually is is just a fantasy. Just something that would satisfy you personally, and I don't think any mechanically produced game would be capable of that unless it involves ridiculously advances AI or is just plain manned by humans. In which case it wouldn't even be a video game, it'd just be a service, like laser tag.

SUMMATION.

There are four types of game.

1. A game, you do things to complete the game, that will have the result of the game being completed and you being challenged.

2. A story game, you do things in order to see the progression of the story, that'll have the result of experiencing a story and hopefully being challenged.

3. A sandbox game, you do things just for fun or to see what happens, that'll have the result of being amused or interested, but you won't be challenged unless your challenge comes from outside the game.

4. Some kind of Theoretical "Fantasy Game." in which you do things because you want specific consequences, that'll have the result of possibly being challenged, you'll have fun, and you'll feel satisfied by the way events panned out.

The only possible way I can see option four existing, is if you designed a game personally, then wiped your memory of the game you'd made, then played the game, anticipating every decision you're likely to make during the design phase.

FINAL WORD

There may never be true Interactive Gaming, there can only be approximations like Mass Effect 3, it's not because Mass Effect have bad writers, they might have good writers, they just not physically capable of writing an ending that everybody'll like.

Rubbish you don't care about.

The most descriptive title I've yet put on my blog right there.

Stoof has been marching on recently, not entirely unusual in itself, because things can only be homogeneous for so long before I get bored enough sit on my behind eating everybody's Easter Eggs for two weeks, bar occasional homework.

First of all, that. I finally completed my homework/project of modelling a car I designed in 3D. Your milage may vary on whether I succeeded in making it look good or not, but I think it looks passable. Something I really ought to be doing better on, 3D modeling has not been my ally in the great quest of College, so I think I need to do some extra practice of that here at home.

My tutor tells me that we're starting on 3D animation using a rig when we get back, which I currently have mixed feelings about, because on one hand, it's probably easier than hand animating 2D drawings, and hey, it's some form of aimation, but on the other hand, I don't get to practice 2D animation, my ideal future career, quite as much as I had wanted to. So I'll have to do some small one-off projects here at home in between those projects.

Of course, I currently have two personal projects that'll help hone my skills in more or less everything I'll need to know. One is a webcomic with original characters and a (relatively) original story, which should help me hone drawing and script/story writing skills, which I'm certain will be essential in the grand scheme of things. And the other is an animated series spoofing Doctor Who, which will help me learn to animate better and also do hilarious, laborious comedy writing, (and also contains excessive Doctor Who references). I'm sticking with the first idea at the moment (though possibly making it an animated webcomic), because hey, I need to draw still things before moving things.

I have a new obsession, and creation chose to name my obsession "Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann". It's a 27 episode long Anime series, which currently holds my place for 'Favorite Anime' and 'Most epic thing ever'. The story begins with a child finding a robotic mech head and fighting slightly bigger robots with it, and ends with the same person controlling a robot which is described as 10 million Light Years tall. And that, my friends, is the reason fiction exists.

Also, I started playing the Yu-Gi-Oh card game recently, I can't imagine why, because the Anime and Manga for them don't make it look like a lot of fun, they make it look like the card game version of psychological warfare. But it surprisingly is, so say that I've won exactly one game to date so far, time will tell if I collect many cards though and actually build a deck.

That's about all the random rubbish I can conjure up at the minute. Until next time invisible people!

Recent Stoof.

So, it doesn't seem like a whole lot has gone on for me, but it seems that I haven't posted on here in months, so I'll do my best to seem interesting.

In College, all is well, I've been working on a 3D Design project in Maya for the past few weeks, which I will post here once it's textured and slightly rendered. It's all very well trying to model things in 3D, but trying to add cohesive textures to a slightly complex 3D object is like pulling teeth if you don't know what you're doing, which I never did. For example, one of my objects was basically a cylinder with no roof and the top of the walls of it were all worn and broken down, and that took me a week to figure out, maybe it's because of my own personal idiocy but it really did take me a while to grasp how to do such things. Course actually drawing the textures was where my skill lies in this project currently, since it's basically just drawing on Photoshop, which I have experience with.

I have a week off for half term, so I'm continuing with that since our tutor allowed us to carry on even though we ought to have finished it by now. The rest of the week, I'm spending doing a multitude of things. Levelling up my Pokemon so I can beat a friend of mine next week in a battle, more on that later. Updating a practice animation of mine so it looks halfway decent, learning about the area I live in so I can gather courage to use public transport eventually, and generally practicing drawing.

Anywho, back to the video games. Said friend has been recovering from the effects of having surgery recently, so I went to visit her to cheer her up the only way I know how...by playing Pokemon. It was quite a fun time, we bet Pokemon on the outcome of battles, meaning I lost 7 Mons including three legendaries, silly Crispee. But I'll try to win them back next week with any luck. :D

Also, I've been trying to find places online where I can order comic books, because I'm currently interested in the final story arc of the Yu-Gi-Oh Manga (Yu-Gi-Oh: Millenium World), as well as wanting to read more of 'Y: The Last Man', the first volume of which looks interesting.

Well, that's all about my life for now, until next time nonexistant readers!

Tosho-Con

So I went to Tosho-Con last Thursday on the 28th!

What's that? What in zee poo is Tosho Con? Glad ya asked. Long story short it's a mini-localized Anime convention that took place at a Library near me that I swear wasn't there before.

So, I was invited to this here convention a few weeks ago (by College friends), and agreed to go without thinking much of it, as it happened it was actually pretty awesome and I would go again in a heartbeat.

Truth be told, I'm not a massive fan of Anime and Manga, I enjoy Yu-Gi-Oh and the occaisional Dragon Ball, as well as trying to get into Death Note, but apart from those three I wasn't terribly familiar with any of it. It turned out that I didn't need much experience to be capable of making friends at an Anime conversation because they are all extraordinarily friendly, in addition to being as mad as a box of hungry cats. Meeting people was, unusually for me, easily my favorite part of the event.

Also, the actual events included watching cosplayers make fools of themselves, which is like watching a man with no legs fall over, whilst showing off their really cool costumes (incidentally, do male Bakura cosplayers exist?). It certainly encouraged me to consider some form of cosplaying in the near future, though I'd definitely not start off with the Androgenous ones first. I should look into that in the future.

Also, there was a drawing session being presented by a chap called Rob Deas, who is a comic artist who specialized in Anime/Cartoony comic style drawing, I'd not heard of him before or read any of his work but after meeting him and seeing what sort of things he's done I am entirely considering giving it a look. His deviantART page is http://rdcomics.deviantart.com/ for those interested, and some of his works include a Manga based adaptation of MacBeth and a strip in the UK based comic book DFC. (plugging over :D)

There was also a fair amount of random hugging, groping and glomping going on, which anecdotes read on the internet tell me is entirely normal, each one of which was performed at me at some point.

Well, that's all I have to say without repeating myself, but in short, Tosho Con was amazingly fun, thanks again guys. :D

P.S. Also it was my birthday on the 30th too.

College, if you can call it that.

Yoeth:

So I finished my first week of College, if I could call it that, and I can safely say that I enjoy it. Allow me to go into uncanny detail about it, since it's the most recent important thingy that happened recently. If you strongly dislike reading incessant ramblings about people's lives then I suppose you can leave your computer and do whatever there is to do there.

Day One:

On the first day, admittedly nothing important much important happened. I walked in and found my room with almost everyone there, since everybody was staring at me I looked for an empty chair is casually as possible and enjoyed the silence. There was definitely of lot of that on the first day since none of us knew each other and my fellow classmates seem like they're capable of being nice to me, which they all have been so far, which is a massive relief.

No actual work on the first day, we just did a mini task where we had to do a quiz about the College for some really arbitrary reason. Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are all three hours long, or that's the idea anyway since we finished an hour early that day.

Day Two:

Day two in my humble opinion was rather important to me, to because we did any important work, but because I actually semi made friends among the people in the class I was working near that day. Tuesdays are seven hours long and doesn't involve Animation so it doesn't look like I'll enjoy these days an awful lot, we started out doing some task of such importance that I completely forgot what it was by now. In the afternoon was where the fun really began.

Bottle Rockets.

That's right, Bottle Rockets. What this has to do with the Art of moving images will remain a mystery to me, but it seems that the purpose was becoming familiar with each other, and it worked surprisingly well, especially since many of the people acted the same as and strongly resembled people I knew at my old School, the normal people that is. So me and another dude who's name escapes me made a Bottle Rockets, it wasn't the most well thought out design since its wings we uneven and it span when we fired it into the air, not even my 'go faster' stripes were enough to help, and also out parachute concealed in the nose-cone of the Rocket failed to deploy, likely because we were idiots enough to give the parachute no way of escaping. While the dudes to our right made a Rocket that was also a Ninja Duck for some reason, and still flew better than ours. And the dudes opposite the table made their unnecessarily heavy and complicated by adding a flag to it rather hilariously, which remained intact upon hitting the ground, everyone elses I forgot by now.

Day Three:

This was the day we actually did some honest to god Animation for the first time in several days, it consisted of doing a series of drawings on a strip of paper and inserting it into a Zoetrope and then making it spin around very fast, thus giving the illusion of animation, mine was the best I saw so I'll assume that mine was the best out of everyones. Being three hours long I only managed a total of three of these before packing it in and going home, it was rather fun and easily kicked the arse of most School days, yet I imagined it'd be boring compared to whatever I'd be doing in the future.

Day Four:

Today, more animation ensued as we did some pencil animations of a wavy thing being wavy, I chose to make mine the tail of a Monkey because I've been watching the original Dragon Ball recently, the second was a bouncing ball, which was solid enough but very jerky not entirely unlike people I disliked from School. And being three hours long again that was all I managed, but we have the option of carrying on tomorrow of we want, which I'll probably do at home since I 'borrowed' necessary equipment. The actual idea behind this animating was pretty much just taking pictures of 16-17 images of stuff in the process of moving and inserting it into a Mac program called FrameByFrame, which I'll download since it's apparently free.

This next bit will be similar to mentioning that rain is wet, fire is hot and Jack Thompson dislikes games in that it's painstakingly obvious for normal people to notice, but whilst trying to talk today, I remembered my prominent fear of doing so and promptly stopped. And if you ever fancy having a chuckle, then you should watch me staring at people and trying to Psychically tell them to talk to me since my voice box wasn't up to the job. Maybe soon will be the day that I talk like a normal person, but there's no way of knowing for sure.

Teh Edn:

Well, that's everything interesting I have to say the for moment, I might give an update next week if anything exciting happens and I'm feeling particularly bored that day. Overall I like my course since it largely involves doing something I like with people I have things in common with (or so I assume).

Until next time none-existant readers, and also xxninjacookie if I've made you read my ramblings again.

Results and College.

Several significant things have happened recently, both in fact on the same day. I finally got my GCSE results and enrolled in College successfully, my results are:

1 A* in ICT

2 A's also in ICT

3 B's in Science, Additional Science and Maths

4 C's in Art, English, English lit and Media Studies

2 D's in Design Technology and French.

Even though I could very easily have guessed those results, I was significantly underwhelmed by the turnout, sure they were useful in getting me into the Animation course I had my eye on, but to say it basically decided my future from that day forward I didn't feel all that excited, maybe I was hoping I had gotten grades higher than a B in some of my better subjects besides ICT (which incidentally, I barely even tried on, go me.), but still I imagine several people I know predominantly got E's in their worse subjects, in fact I hope that the people who I didn't like and never studied got lower than a B at the very least, I deserve at least that much for my efforts.

Another noticeable lack of emotion on my part was that I was leaving my School that I had spent 5 years of my life at, and had several life changing events at, for the very last time. Ok maybe not the last time but the last time I was required to go in, and even then I didn't feel all that upset. Sure I may have been tremendously bullied by people who were under the impression was a giant, verbal 'Kick me' sign for a long time, but I also met several people who could summarily be described as 'friends' there and knew several other people who were very nice to me, I'll certainly miss those guys because I doubt I'll be seeing a lot of the people who aren't going to the same College as me in a foreseeable future.

Significant life event 'numero deux' of that that day (24th August) was me enrolling in College, after the incredible bowel evacuatingly anxious moments of slightly doubting if I'd gotten the right grades, it was a relief to merely worry about having to talk to strangers instead for the whole enrolling process. And to my surprise that wasn't even a huge deal, especially since there were hundreds of other people present doing the same thing as well, so I quite literally was given a raffle ticket and had a random chance of beginning the enrolling process. And I wish I was making that up but it was true. First section was giving personal details to a stranger who might well have been secretly signing me up to a criminal record database for all I know, the second was talking to my Course Tutor and showing him my results, which were thankfully more than enough to allow me in, he then gave me various information, such as my Time Table, which I'll get back to in a sec, starting date and equipment list.

Back to the timetable. If I went back in time and showed the College timetable of the Animation course to my 13 year old self who had literally just discovered such a thing exists, his forehead spots would likely have burst in glee because it's the most easy going time table I've had thus far in my learning experience. To give an example of how big a leap it is, I should mention that the average school day for the last five years has been at least 6-7 hours a day of doing lessons I largely found astonishingly boring. In College it's three hours long on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, and 7 hours on Tuesday, and all of it is stuff I give a toss about, that being Animation and Animation related Paraphernalia. So in short, bring on September 6th!

Well, rambling over folks, I intend to fill you all in my first week on my first Friday off on the 10th of September perhaps.

Until then, seeya later none existent readers!

Phase one of being utterly bored.

As you may have gleaned from seeing me talk pretty much most places on the internet, I am extremely bored with having nothing to do. As I have also likely explained, I've been trying to occupy myself by writing, storyboarding and eventually actually animating a Flash animation about a character that I actually made myself rather than endless Sprite Movies.

So far with that, I've written what was meant to be the first draft, but if I know me (which I like to think I do.) then I'll probably end up using that script and just make the dialogue marginally more humourous, which is rather difficult when I'm consciously trying to be funny. The story so far on that is that my main character (named Brockson) randomly avoids getting squished by a Meteor containing a Wizard from Space, it then later revives Brockson from death after having mind controlled him into being dangerous, and thus he becomes a very Charcoal-ish Zombie. More on that in future blog posts perhaps.

Also in my day to day life, I got an iPhone recently, I intend to have it last the rest of my naturally born life because buying the ferking contract for the thing was hard enough the first time around. Aside from that one thing, as well as the instructions for making an iTunes account being as helpful as the talking paperclip from MS Word, I like it, sure it's got abysmal battery and memory compared to some of the ones that are already out but it's surprisingly useful, I found the walking direction to my soon to be College using the SavNav type thing they have on there, granted I got lost a few times, but my map reading skills from playing so many Zelda games proved quite helpful eventually.

In approximately 32 days if my timer is to be believed, I get my results for all the exams and coursework I worked very extremely hard to get, I'm unsure of how well they're gonna be but I'll probably make several blog posts on my various internet holes if they're good. As well as play 'Best Day Ever' on my new iPhone to all my ex-fellow students as I say seeya to them for finally the last time. Then a further couple of weeks before College again and I'll have moved up from 'Doing Sod All' to 'Doing A little Bit More Than Sod All That I'll Enjoy Doing'.

So that's all the news I have to give so far, once again, thanks for reading my indistinguishable ranting non-existent readers. Until whenever I can be bothered to post again.

New crap.

So I had my Art Exam last week, so I'm gonna talk about that.
It was pretty easy, but since the exam was ten hours long over the course of two days it did terrible things to my fingers and will to live by the time I'd finished it. The not quite final piece is up on my deviantArt profile is everyone's interested, although I still seem to be allowed to carry on working on it well beyond the allotted ten hours, and despite my Art teachers claims she couldn't help us, she certainly does an awful lot of that. It was drawn in pencil, pencil crayon, a black felt tip and now acrylic paint apparently. So it's looking pretty good if every vague compliment given by anyone who looks at it is any indication.

In similar school related news, they gave us our current grades today, and apparently I must be better than I thought because if it was my final results then I would've passed pretty much every subject with the exception of French, of course I'm terrible at paying attention to that anyway so I don't hold it against the teacher personally. Surprisingly even my most hated lesson, where I have to venture into that wretched hive of scum and villainy, the Tech rooms, where they forgot to tell the teachers that we're not sweatshop workers who can make a product in five minutes with bleeding, stitched up fingers.

Since shit has apparently hit the fan when it comes to school work, I suppose I should probably not spend every waking moment on the internet talking to friends. Of course, if it's Emma then that makes the choice all the more difficult since I enjoy talking to her more than my lower intestine enjoys breaking down carbohydrates, that previous sentence alone should say that Science is one of the things I need to swot up on.
'till next time non-existant readers!

P.S. Since there's a high chance that nobody's reading this I seem to be treating this blog of mine like an increasingly personal diary rather than an actual blog.

School and other stuff.

So lots of school stuff is happening recently, I got high grades in most of my subjects, one of my classes is changing, I have quite a bit of Media Studies homework to do and my college interview is on Monday.

Seeing as I choose to spend most of my free time on the internet you can probably understand that I'm not a good speaker in real life. So I'm pretty nervous about this interview, any random advice would be helpful. Although I plan to take in examples or arty stuff I've done and just let it speak for itself to avoid actually do talk.

The weather condition that the news is imaginatively referring to as 'The Big Freeze' seems to have ended today, meaning I can once again walk the streets without being worried about falling over or a chav throwing ice at me that they think is snow and laughing at their comic genius.

Back to talking about school, I don't have many months left before I leave there for good. Although I'd never admit it to the face of anyone who goes there, I'll probably miss school and my friends there quickly, even the unhealthy percentage of people who have irrational hatred for me and my friends, even them, so I hope they're proud of themselves for that.

That's all that's on my mind so far, so until next time, Au revoir non-existent readers! Except for YOU!

Avatar.

"The following blog post was written when I was 16, this stupid thing is no longer my opinion."


This is a message to every organic carbon-based life form within a few light years. Go and watch Avatar this very instant, because in this blogger's opinion, it is the best movie I have seen in a while. Here is my review of it.

For those reading this blog who have taken refuge in a very dark place with no contact from the outside world, Avatar is a 3D movie, in that you wear 3D glasses throughout it and that the characters appear physically there, and let me say just this, if anything, the 3D in this movie is the best 3D in the history of 3D, it's so good that I'm keeping the 3D glasses on top of my head in the event of watching it again. One possibly intentional coincidence I've noticed is that you get really immersed into the movie in the same way the main characters are immersed into their 'Avatars'.

The story is thus, some dudes have discovered a planet they call 'Pandora' and they've set up colonies there in order to study it's ways, there's several alien races living there which all look like they individually took years to design they're that detailed. The smarter citizens of Pandora are some blue humanoid looking dudes which a name mentioned with such frequency that I already can't remember it. So they bring a paraplegic ex-marine called Jake Sully there in order to control one of the avatars that belonged to his never-again mentioned twin brother.

It turns out that Jake is quite good at controlling his Avatar, as he runs around a lot and generally gets the hang of it, he gets lost in a forest-y area by way of jumping off a cliff while escaping from some hostile animals. Later, one of the blue dudes, whom the Avatars are meant to resemble rescues Jake from some tiny creatures he could probably just step on if I'm honest. Later, they offer to teach Jake their ways, so he does just that with his Avatar, whilst his real self relates it back to the people he works for. I won't spoil the plot for you but let's just say at the climax of the film is a battle between a dragon/pterodactyl creature and a giant walking tank. Which in itself justifies watching the film.

My only complaint is that when this film inevitably is transferred to DVD and Blu-Ray, the 3D effects will have lost most of the impact they had on the big screen, I.E. they won't be nearly as awesome as they looked in the cinema. Words don't quite do justice to the incredible visual effects in the film, if this doesn't win any awards for it's 3D effects then I might actually go and massacre whoever made that decision.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that this film is to 3D film making to what the English language is to grunting and biting each others ears off. It's just that good.

With that said, I should mention that I only reviewed this film because I had particularly outstanding comments on it, so I may not review films that are decidedly average, if at all.

Until next time non-existent readers!

Holidays started.

Well, I've officially finished for the holidays, although it wasn't nearly as fun as most other years where we did colouring in christmas-sy pictures because the teacher decide they should be allowed to arse around as well.

I went in school for two hours today to do some coursework, I only need to finish a bit of it at home, which I will likely do tomorrow whilst everyone else is at school, and then I'll probably sit on the couch scratching myself, again, whilst everyone else it at school.

So, it's christmas in a few weeks eh? This december seems much shorter than usual, maybe it's because I'm actually looking forward to the christmas part of christmas rather than getting presents, which makes a nice change from my usual 'Christmas is for presents' attitude, I think it means I'm growing up. On a similar note, I intend to physically purchase gifts for people this year rather than making things out of bits of paper and glue, helping people pay for gifts for other people, or just flat out forgetting that christmas isn't my birthday and that other people get presents too.

In other news, I plan on drawing three of my dA friends christmas related pictures, if you're reading this blog of mine, chances are you're one of them so that's the only reason I mentioned it. In similar news still, I'm going to also finish a flash mine I've been working on for the smallest part of a week, and this time I'm gonna damn well try and put more effort into it, after that and another flash I'm already planning, I'm going to stop sprite movies and focus on making original flash.

Until next time not-existent readers!

Hello world.

Good evening world, my name is Kris, nowadays on the internet though I go by 'Crispee' or some variation thereof.

I'm 16 and I live in England, it's just as exciting as it sounds, I.E. not very.

When I'm not at school, visiting relatives or whatever, I'm most likely on the computer browsing my various lurking zones on the Interwebs. such as Newgrounds, deviantArt, or other places. I also like gaming, drawing, and generally arseing around.

I have a website, though I might as well not due to the small amount of time I do anything on it, I'm planning on changing it all soon though.

Well, that's all, until next post. :D