alesyira

There's always random stuff you want at the top of your user page.... :)

Anyone use the torrent program Azureus, now known as Vuze? Friend me, username Alesyira.




Also, please note that this journal has a wide variety of entries, public, friends-only, and private. If it looks like I haven't updated in a while, I might just be posting friends-only rants. ;)

Homework’s going okay… 

I like listening to audiobooks during particularly lengthy assignments, but today I’m having some nasty trouble finding something I WANT to listen to.  I went through about twenty minutes of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, but that didn’t really interest me.  Then I went through about 5 hours of Stephenie Meyer’s new book, The Host.  Regardless of the time I’ve invested in it, I don’t really care to listen to it anymore.  I don’t feel any sort of emotional attachment to the two main characters – at least, nothing that makes me want to trudge through another five hours of it while I finish fleshing out these storyboard panels of Zippy and Joshua about to kill each other over a drug deal. 

Now I’ve shifted over to the audiobook version of something I never finished reading (although I started it twice), Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring.  heh, this audiobook is one huge file, and winamp lists it as a total of 1152 minutes.  Nineteen hours of audiobook should get me through this week and half of next week’s homework…  I never made it past the halfway point in the book, so maybe I’ll…  I dunno… eventually get there by next weekend.

Or I might get bored and slip into another audiobook – something packed with covert ops and special forces…  mm, action and violence.  I do have a whole folder of Vince Flynn novels just waiting for my attention (so I can finally delete them after nearly two years).

I think this all stems from me not really wanting to do this homework assignment.  :P  See?  I’m further procrastinating by writing this little journal entry to whine…

 

Maya 2009 rocks.

Matthew consulted various knowledge bases, price shopped for a few weeks, then picked up all the components required to build me a brand new computer for my birthday  (Two months early, but who’s counting!?!?!).  I don’t know if I’ll turn on my 360 EVER AGAIN.  Granted, it’s not as fast as I can imagine some really crazy machines might get out there, but I’ve got the ram, processing, gfx cards and cooling systems to run the newest games out today at the highest settings and not see a single flaw.  I’m speechless, and terribly annoyed that I have to finish homework before I can play some of these games I’ve just picked up… 

I’m thinking about taking a picture of my new workstation to post… :D

good lord, in other news, I got a Facebook request from West High to send them my mailing address to get an invite to the reunion.  I left West in the middle of sophomore year… what the hell where they thinking?  Whatever, heh.

So, another semester is well in swing.  I'm currently taking four classes:  Intro to Storyboarding, Games: Modeling and Texturing, English Comp 2: Narrative Storytelling, and Art Hist. thru the 19th century.

Storyboarding is a fun class, but it's REALLY hard to get A's.  The teacher is really critical of everything.  My first few assignments kind of bombed (Bs and a C!), but hard work has gotten me some really nice As.  I'm determined to keep getting those As.

Games is vaguely interesting right now.  Much of what we're doing (up until next week) is stuff I've done a few times before, so I'm not falling over myself trying out these new techniques.  Next week should get exponentially more interesting as we delve into Zbrush and its amazing capabilities.

Storytelling is okay... rather boring when we study these handfuls of short stories.  They aren't my favorites, but the writing assignments each week make things far more interesting.

History is just...  well, history.  It's fascinating and beautiful at times, and tedious at others.  At least I can say I've found greater appreciation for specific artistic movements over time.  It's much easier to appreciate something strange when you can understand what motivated the artist.

In other news, we started Audrey in soccer this semester.  She's enjoying it so far.  :) 

Last month, Matthew went up to the northeast to research the frigate Philadelphia (II), which was captured by the Barbary pirates in the early 1800s (might be wrong on the time frame).  A group of Americans sailed in to Tripoli under cover, snuck aboard, and set the ship on fire so that our enemies couldn't use it against us.  It's still there, waiting to be unearthed, apparently beneath a parking lot.  Anyways, the point of this research is for Matthew's thesis, and it turns out that there might be an expedition to Libya this summer to unearth the ship, which Matthew has been invited to join (he will be the only undergrad to accompany the team). 

I've written a bit and posted two new chapters in tBA.  Go me!  And now I've got to get back to a Batman storyboard (haha) for class...

Project 3 for my comp class requires an in-depth review and critique of a new art exhibit, new film, new visual something that interests us (and hopefully is related to our major). I just posted a question to my teacher asking if I might do my project on a recently released video game. XD Fingers crossed, lol...

ugh, four am... I must go to sleep now. The morning is going to suck.

Edit - The project was approved and I ended up writing a three page review on Fable 2. After playing it for many, many hours, of course.

I haven't played since 01.  I logged in the other day to show my kids, and now I'm fooling around with it again whenever I get bored.  Enough said.  =_= 

Still drawing, working on a digital piece in conjunction with a process analysis paper I'm writing for comp class.  It's rather interesting to study my methods while employing my methods...  maybe I'll actually finish something to post.  :P

Fiction-writing isn't coming so well...  well, I *am* writing, but it's coming in random chunks that haven't quite come together yet...  so the next update I manage to post will probably be about three chapters that finally fell into place all at the same time.

Procrastination is going to kill me in class...  :P

Matthew's stuck up in College Station for school; I get to see him every weekend or so.  He's bored out of his mind, but he's got the TV and the 360, so he's kept entertained.  He picked up Fable 2 the other day and now he likes to call me and tease me with all the fun he's having playing it....  I'm going to be MIA for a while when I get the 360 back, heh.  :P

November's coming up...  NaNoWriMo again!  Maybe this year I'll keep writing past day seven.  Liquid Story Binder FTW. 

...back to homework before I start procrastinating again... like I am right now.  XD

I totally forgot to update with our status after Ike tore through our city.  -_-

( long post... =_= )
more later...
p.s., still in class, and the hurricane only kept me offline for like, a week.  (It felt like much longer ...  I'm such an addict)

When was the last time you played an ageless childhood game like hide-and-seek? I know most of us are adults by now, but drag over some friends (or coerce your husband and children) and get them into a game.

I played in-house hide-and-seek last night with my two girls and my husband. We had a great time. :) For one of my spots, I managed to squeeze under the bathroom counter, and it took Matthew a good ten minutes to find me (after he'd looked everywhere else in the house), and I got so many little scratches and bruises from everywhere else I tried to hide, but it was a lot of fun.

Plus, adults are better at finding hiding good spots, so a couple of times I helped the girls into some really sneaky spots --I even cleaned out one of the kitchen cabinets while I cooked dinner, and so when we played I had a ready-made spot to stick our youngest. Would have been the best spot EVER, but she has a hard time sitting still and keeping quiet. ;)

Aside from that, we're looking to move to Galveston at the end of the school year, so that Matthew won't have to drive as far to get to school. Ugh, we wasted so much gas on that daily trip this year... :/

Matthew spoiled me with some really yummy coffee last month, so when I went back to the regular same-ol', I found I didn't like it anymore. I'm going to have to get some more of it eventually, but until then, I've discovered a strange like for hot tea+sugar+cream.

Rather than the usual stuff I stick in these random "What-I'm-Up-To"s (homework, art, writing, life, coffee, etc.), I felt the need to write today because I've got an invite to a game I'm playing that's currently in beta testing.

If anyone out there has video game interests, especially along the lines of Diablo or what the original creators of Diablo has been up to, they'll know that Flagship Studios (comprised of those aforementioned guys) recently released "Hellgate: London."

They might also know that, in the works, is an online fantasy/hack'n'slash, currently in beta testing.  It is (and probably always will be) free to download and play, and I've seen many-a-comment that this is like "brunch for those of us waiting for D3" and "it is more engaging/fun than HG:L".  As I've not played HG:L yet, I can't be sure of the validity of that last one, but this is definitely a fun game.  A new patch is supposed to be coming out within a week, I think, with a whole lot of improvements that I'm just itching to play around with.

If anyone is interested in giving this game a go, comment me and I'll send you my invite.  I've only got one right now.  :P  The playerbase is still pretty small.  :)

I don't even know what damned genre this fic is going into.

It's sci-fi, horror, thriller and mystery... action, adventure, and stuffed with misconceptions galore.

I'm either exceptionally brilliant or horribly stupid (...perhaps a little of both).

I mean, how to you set a genre for a story in which (nvm, can't say that yet!) crap.

Virtual reality gone wrong, here I come!  Maybe I'll decide on something concrete before the end of the month.  Or maybe after I kill a few more characters.

XD

Oh, I came to a happy middle-ground with Matthew and my needs to use the computer - I can let him play Halo to his heart's content, after I've set up the computer to play music and sit on an open word file.  I can freely type (and not edit anything) while he has access to the TV, and I can occasionally flip the channel over to make sure I'm still typing in Word.  It has a few drawbacks (earlier, I lost a few paragraphs due to something I pressed mid-sentence that caught me outside of Word)

I still have too much homework to do right now, though! I just cut out a whole set of body armor that I really do not feel like modeling from scratch in two days.

I never actually put any thought into what the main character's name would be in my NaNoWriMo novel, Artificial Salvation.

I wanted it to be Alice, but that's what the short version of my online name sounds like, so I don't want to be silly like that.  So I'm going to use Claire until I think of one that really fits the part.  Hopefully I find one soon before that one sticks.  ;)  I mean, nothing wrong with Claire, but I don't know if it's right for this part.


Anyways, in other news...  my xover fanfic tBA is kind of on hold.  Truth be told, after I've worked on ArtiSal for a bit, I'll probably have a million things I can add to tBA, but for now, between modeling my first 3D character and IFD homework and nano deadlines, I might just go crazy.  well... that and Halo and having to share the limited computer time with my husband...  which is compounded by the fact that our 360 and computer run on the same damned tv.  =_=

I can't complain about how pretty those graphics are, but those times when one of us is working on our homework while the other is bored out of their mind can really suck.  :(  At least we share!  :D 

ugh, 4am rambles.  need to get back to homework stuff

GAH

Some of my homework assignments are taking waaay too much time.

my 3D building ended up taking a few all-nighters because I was on a roll and I didn't want to even risk missing my deadline.

I'm thiiiiis close to being done with this last IFD assignment, and then I can play some 360!  But I don't waaaana work on it!  It's been like, six hours of the same assignment, and it's getting ooold.  I'd better space out the work a little better next week else I'll go crazy for sure.


NaNoWriMo starts in uh, less than three days now.  I'm going to have to set up my mike so I can dictate my writing as I model/draw for class.  Thank god for speech recognition!  :D

I'm sure to get a good laugh, too, when I end up with some sentences that make no sense until I read them out loud and discover what should have been put into the document.

http://www.nanowrimo.org

Anyone doing this next month?  :)

Here's me:  http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/213600

I must have signed up for the reminder just after last year's ended.  :)

1.  I'm back on xbox live, as of last night.  gamertag Alesyira, so look me up, and let's play some Halo once or twice!  :)

2.  On Friday, we went up 4.5 hours north to visit some friends (a married couple) for the weekend...  The next morning, she discovered that her husband's brother had a fatal car accident.  We dallied around in the area for some hours after we had breakfast together, then came back home.  I took a couple pictures.  (Sammy got carsick twice on the trip up, so I remembered to buy Dramamine for the trip home; no one else got sick.)  I'm still sneezing because of our friends' pets, but she made the best coffee that first morning, so I can't complain.  I feel sorry for his loss.  :(

3.  Class?  I'm loving CAPs, because I just got to start using Maya.  I was dreading it at first, but I'm really getting the hang of it.  :)  I'm not loving my figure drawing class so much, because it's not as much fun to spend hours and hours drawing something nice, then only get a B on it because my proportions are slightly off.  =_=  I'll keep spending hours and hours on my projects, though, because to do less wouldn't be cool.

4.  I actually thought about writing the other day.  I didn't follow through.

About two minutes ago, I decided I do not like blueberry-flavored things.

I don't hate it or find it repulsive in any way, but it's definitely not my favorite.  Starbucks has this blueberry creme frappucino, and I had a sip when Audrey ordered hers over the weekend.  I didn't like it.  I've got this container of blueberry cobbler coffeemate, and it's in my coffee right now.  I don't really want to drink it as much as the cup I had before, to which I'd added regular coffeemate.

Playing a co-op campaign in Halo with Matthew till three am was a bad idea.  :P  I couldn't help it!  He was pinned down in this section on Tsavo Highway, trying to get past this clutch of Brutes with limited ammunition and a damned Scorpion tank giving him hell after every kill...  I quickly finished up my ifd homework and picked up a controller to give him that little bit of extra help that he needed to push past those guys and get on to the next area.  I thought it would be impossibly hard to play on Legendary difficulty, but with two of us, it's not as impossible as I thought it would be. 

It's kind of neat that as the game has gotten harder and I've learned how to use the weapons (and finally figured out the importance of melee), I've become a bit more efficient in the kills I make.  So... it's less of "me-die-lots :(" and more of their corpses lining the play area.

We'll probably do it again tonight, and I'll probably be very short on sleep for a while.


AH!  I forgot I've got a few more school-things to post before my deadline tonight.  XD  Back to homework so I can play after Matthew gets home from his midterm.

I'm a huge fan of Samurai Jack.  I shouldn't bother with getting the episodes, but it's been a long time since I watched it, so I might as well.  I can fit an ep or two in here and there after I do my homework, right?

First Bioshock, now Halo 3?!

gah

This is pretty cool:

http://halo3.com/believe/test/shell.html


I saw those new Elites on the shelves with the Halo-themed exteriors...  those are so unbelievably sweet.


Let's see, I have a few assignments due today and tomorrow, I'll post jpegs of anything that doesn't look completely stupid.  ;)

Is anyone else out there doing this?  I want to see how Astra cooperates between Astra users, instead of just the same-ol' everything else.  ;)

Holy. Crap.

Triple overtime?  The student stands face the sun?  92°?!

People were being escorted from the stands after suffering from heat exhaustion.

So the game was incredible.  The atmosphere was intense.  There were something like 75,000 fans in the stadium, and I don't think I've ever seen a larger gathering of people.  Kyle Field, the stadium where the Aggie home games are played, was massive.  It towered so unbelieveably high that there seemed to be no way to capture the immensity with a camera.  I took a few pictures, but I was just so amazed that I forgot about the camera hanging at my side.

The students shouted and cheered, we did coordinated yells during the game, and it was really neat to see and hear the fans saying the same things at the same time.  When we were on defense, the fans constantly shouted aloud, keeping the noise levels up so high that the opposing team could barely hear one another, and for teams relying on audibles for making in-play adjustments, that can be really bad.  ;)

When we were on offense, (especially in overtime) the crowd became so silent that you could nearly hear the players getting tackled on the field.  It was such a stark difference!

Anyways, as the game neared its end, a slight breeze graced us...  and then a lovely cloud finally blocked out the sun just enough to give us some relief.  As the third overtime was just about over, rain began to fall.  It was drenching as we left the stadium after the game.

It was a horrible game.  It was a great game.  It was a LONG-ASSED HOT-AS-HELL game.  A whole lot of the Fresno players kept going down with cramps.  A couple of our players had the same problem, but not as many. 

I'm glad I was drinking water.  People complained about the price of bottled water being 4 or 5 dollars each...  well, if I were a smart entrepreneur, I'd charge an arm and a leg for water, too.  There were water fountains not even twenty feet away from the water-bottle-sales stands, for those who took ten seconds to look.  :P

hehe, about sporting events I'd attended before, Panda reminded me that I'd been to some games while in high school.  I can't believe my memory is that bad that I can't even remember those.  9_9

Matthew was proud that I showed such team spirit.  I think he was worried that I wouldn't participate like a real Aggie.  :P  I have to think I fit in quite well among the other students, regardless of the fact that I didn't know all of the yells.  You learn them fast, there...   I'm sure there is more to say, but I've got to get the girls out to go swimming before lunch.  I'll add more if it comes to mind.  :)

Time to go swimming!  Maybe I can get some more sun to hide the awful farmer's tan I picked up while at the game yesterday.