Jacob’s Escalator

While I do not (or try not to) assume that whoever I might be talking to understands the faces I make in internet conversation, I do tend to make these faces anyway, out of reflex, to express emotion. It has been brought to my attention that frankly, you have no idea what they mean. So, I hope to clear this up, on the off chance I use them in my posts. That, and because evidently, my writing amuses you, and you haven’t had any of my words for a while, so why not? Read More »

http://www.fairgamed.org/fairgame.htm

ENEMY :

SP Order. Fair game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.

Absolute0SK (3:09:45 PM): How come they’re allowed to exist? > >
Absolute0SK (3:09:48 PM): I don’t think that’s legal.
Mavrick882 (3:10:22 PM): Anon’s get followed home, killed, raped, whatever the f*** they feel like doing to us. And Scientology protects them within the law, so if you don’t have a mask…Do one brave thing, then run like hell.
Mavrick882 (3:10:54 PM): Scientology hides behind being a “religion”.
Absolute0SK (3:11:05 PM): Religions are not allowed to kill people.
Absolute0SK (3:11:07 PM): That’s legal no matter what.
Absolute0SK (3:11:09 PM): *illegal
Mavrick882 (3:11:24 PM): Scientology has some of the best damned lawyers.

To say “algebraic expression” is vague; it can be something simple like 4x-1 or it can be a long and complex mutli-degree, rational or radical function, perhaps even an implicit equation with more than two variables. No matter what, however, algebra is constant. The procedures are always the same, no matter how complex the equation. With the mathematician’s expertise, the complexity of solvable equations increases; it’s merely a matter of confidence and familiarity with the concepts and procedures at hand. The most skilled of mathematicians can build and solve equations with several dozen variables and even hundreds of terms, given the value of a few variables. Such an equation rarely has much of a bearing in reality, but nevertheless, the skill is certainly there and it takes a lot of practice to get there.

Programming is interestingly similar; the novice programmer can write a few lines, which produce a minor effect. Sometimes they can even write one effect that depends upon user input (a variable). Given time, the novice could write their own version of the classic calculator on all computers. As a programmer gets better, he can write larger and more complex programs, ones that deal with more variable on a grander scale. The best programmers can write a program that depends on many, many variables to produce a specific result.

Is it interesting to compare these various fields to each other? Further, if they are so similar, is it surprising that I find them all so amusing? So interesting?

I think I am interested in these three “different” things because I see them as very similar. They are all mathematical in nature. Yes, I am comparing writing to math. Fiction writing, at least, is very similar to an algebra worksheet, and because of that, I enjoy it, just like I enjoy long, complex algebra problems that are simple but require a lot of work. Read More »

If you’ll recall, CommandoMan is my fictional MMBN character. He’s a powerful Navi who resembles a hacker in the Matrix, in a way - he has a few hacks and edits available that he can use against his enemies (one of my favorites being a “lock”, which prevents Navis and programs from leaving a certain area of the internet. Using this, he can force a target into fighting. Fear the Agents who get ahold of such a weapon!).

CommandoMan’s specialty is versatility, adaptability, the ability to have no weakness. He has changed as I’ve gotten older. The first few versions of CM were before I learned how to sprite; the shape was the same as the first few sprites I’ll show you, but his weaponry was a little off. He’s always had the sky-blue sword, but his other arm was a vulcannon (the MMBN name for a machine gun). He had a variety of other weapons/attacks that focused mostly on swords and artillery attacks. He was also mostly heartless in my mind.

As I got older (and better at MMBN), his weaponry changed. An awesome-looking stick I found in a friend’s backyard was responsible for the vulcannon edit below. His “folder” (a collection of once-per-battle special attacks) evolved to include various elements, so that he could counter any other elements.

Read More »

If you look across the index, you’ll find all my posts - save the Anon overview - have 4 comments except the literature one. I also logged in today to 4 comments awaiting moderation (all of which were spam).

Maybe I  shouldn’t have approved yours, grandpa…

Anonymous is a strange entity.

They have their own sort of religion, in a way. Anonymous is everyone; everyone is Anonymous. They’re a group of people on the internet who are… bored. They hide out on the internet where anonymity is easy to preserve and discuss many things. What separates them from other ‘groups’ of the internet is that they act.

If you are bored enough, search Youtube for a video on Fox News’ report on Anonymous. Be aware before you search that Fox News is - pardon my italian - retarded. They don’t know anything about the actual Internet or the actual Anonymous. (I don’t know or care if they can be trusted but I heard a comment on Youtube somewhere that stated that the Fox News anonymous they did a report on wasn’t at all related to the actual Anonymous.) Read More »

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As a younger schoolgoer, I hated English class. First it was my natural expertise at spelling and grammar that bored me; then it was the constraining styles of writing that frustrated me (Five-paragraph essays are WORTHLESS). However, as a younger student, I also enjoyed the reading portion of the class. I liked the novels they gave me to read. I enjoy childish, fairy-tale type stories, the stories with conflict and fighting and difficulties, but a somehow happy ending (or sometimes not very happy, but somehow satisfying). They also stick to themselves. They don’t try to reach out and mess with me, or point to things outside of itself.

As I’ve gotten closer to college level classes, however, things have changed. The average writer’s skill gets closer to my own, so more freedom is allowed, and I can use my skills as much as I please. Writing is a pleasure, even those boring essays. The situation has… inverted.

So has the reading situation.

College-level literature isn’t hard. It is not particularly difficult for me to understand. It’s merely intolerable. I hate it.

I like to read a story that’s only a story. I like to read a novel that’s all about plot and characters, and whose plot advances by a character’s actions, not by what happens to them. (If you can’t imagine a story that advances by events, think of tragedies - all the characters seem to just be watching each other die.) I like a story that’s told for the sake of the story, like the Dark Tower, like Night’s Dawn, like Orson Scott Card’s books and Stephen King’s books and Robert Heinlien’s (spelling…?) books, not these collages of symbols and themes. Read More »

As I have said in a previous entry, Digital Artwork is fancy longhand for “sprites”, in general. There may be others - “graphics” - but those are more rare. This post will focus on sprites but will give a general overview of what graphics are, too.

Sprites have nothing to do with lemon-lime sodas or little tiny faeries. It’s a term used in game programming - mostly only in very old games, but they’re still used sometimes - to describe a series of images that represent an object and its motions or animations. That’s the weird, jargon-filled technical definition. I’ll break it down for you into some simpler terms.

Let us say we have Mario.

Do you all remember the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System, for you who are confused) Mario game? That one that came with “Duck Hunt”? It runs off of sprites, for the most part. So, let’s say we have a picture of that horribly low-quality Mario guy, taken directly from a game. That’s a sprite. Any other pictures of Mario doing anything - jumping, dying, running, swimming and climbing are the only ones I know of - are also sprites. All the pictures of Mario in one game are assembled into what is called a sprite sheet. A game can pick appropriate sprites from the sheet depending on what Mario is doing.

When Mario swims, there is a small animation that occurs whenever you try to paddle, isn’t there? That is simply two sprites switching back and forth (if I remember correctly). When Mario’s just floating, it stays on one sprite (once it’s in the game, or otherwise animated, I call them “frames”) until you tap the A button. Then it switches to the second frame for a moment, then back to the first. This gives the illusion that Mario is actually swimming. All of Mario’s running, jumping and climbing animations are made in the same manner. So are the animations of all the enemies and their movements.

However, I work with far more intricate sprites than old NES Mario. My own version of NES Mario would take only a few minutes to create a full sheet from scratch, but I work at a much higher resolution, so my sprites are of much better quality. Pretty much exclusively I take sprites from Megaman Battle Network and edit them to suit my needs and desires. This produces a tolerable profile and distance shot of whatever being I wish to create.

That’s a basic explanation of sprites.

Graphics are something else entirely. A “graphic”, in the foruming internet world, is an image of some kind that is assembled using renders, effects, and other various goodies. Skilled graphics artists make very pleasing images with interesting and sometimes abstract effects. The banner of this blog is a good example of a simple graphic - it contains a stock/render - the picture of me on the escalator - and a simple lighting effect.

Note that graphics are not neccesarily the children of Photoshop splicing (that is, taking two pictures and using Photoshop to put them together).

“The Celebration of the Initiation of the Activation of the Emancipation Proclamation” - Eric Claybrook

I didn’t have the heart to explain that the Emancipation Proclamation came several decades prior to MLKjr’s civil rights movement.

With this post I introduce a new category, In the Thunderlight, where I shed a little bit of light on my interests that most of you don’t know much about. What I’ll try to cover are the kinds of things I might reference often; please feel free to ask questions, if you have them.

My first Thunderlight examination shall be MegaMan Battle Network. MMBN, as I shall now refer to it, is a series of Gameboy Advance video games based off of the MegaMan phenomonon I’m sure pretty much none of you konw about. In MMBN, the premise is that society has advanced to a network-reliant stage, where nearly everything is electronic and connected to the Internet. Everyone also has a wonderful PDA-like device called a PErsonal Terminal or a PET. Almost everyone has a brilliant programming wonder called a NetNavigator - Navi for short.

Navis are incredibly complex AIs that have the ability to think and feel, with the capacity for personality and moral knowledge. They are as good as humans, only they exist on the Cyber plane, whereas their human operators exist in the “Real World”. Navis are used to make PET functions automatic - they’ll open your email and read it to you, take your phone calls, remind you of things you need to remember, and all sorts of things - as well as their primary use, an Internet surfing program that can delete attacking viruses and interact with other programs.

It’s easiest, however, to think of a Navi as a Cyber-human.

The main characters are Lan Hikari and MegaMan, his Navi, who (spoilers) is actually a Navi created from the DNA of Lan’s dead twin brother, Hub (end spoilers). I will not waste my time and kindness trying to say Lan is “not that bright”: he’s incredibly dense and downright idiotic at times. MegaMan is often much more relaxed and intelligent.

Some other important characters are Mayl/Roll, Chaud/Protoman, Baryl/Colonel, Bass/Forte, and my own personal creations, Kayle and CommandoMan.

Mayl is Lan’s “best friend” who is, at the end of all six games, consistently trying to make him understand she wants to be his girlfriend. (I cannot possibly imagine why.) Her Navi is Roll. Neither of them are all that brave or powerful, but they’re bright, and good friends.

Chaud is an Official, which is like a member of the government. He is actually a bit younger than Lan (by a year, so in MMBN6, he’s 14 or so), but is far more mature, cool, and calculating than Lan ever could be. Chaud is also rather cold and introverted, but opens up after MMBN5 when he and Lan end up working together for an extended time, and they finish the series good friends rather than bitter rivals. Chaud’s Navi, Protoman, is one of my favorite Navis in the entire series. ProtoMan is all business, deadly serious, focused on his work and all but emotionless. He is a speed and sword master, and recognized as one of the most powerful Navis known to the world. If you’re a criminal and you hear ProtoMan is after you, you should first be honored, then run like hell.

Baryl is a mysterious Netopian man (that’s a foreign country - in the original Japanese version, the country’s name is Amerioupe, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence), who has a military background. He is also a cool, calculating tactician, who is single-minded in his mission, whatever that may be. He only shows up late in the series. His Navi, Colonel, is a bit like ProtoMan - slower, more tactical, but also bears a powerful sword arm, with the addition of a cannon and some excellent versatility power.

Bass is the English/American name of the next character, but the Japanese name, Forte, is far cooler. (Bass is not pronounced like the fish. I wish it was, that would be tolerable.)
Forte is a mysterious Navi who hails from the beginning of the great network society, when the internet became mysteriously self-aware and destroyed all appliances connected to it. Forte was mistakenly blamed and nearly deleted by his human creators. From that incident he gained an extreme hatred of the human race, and seeks every opportunity to destroy them. Forte does not appear in the MMBN main storyline much, but he is in every game nonetheless, as a secret boss. In battle, his trademark weapon is his busters, which have the power to obliterate quite a mass of enemies; his other attacks change game-to-game, but Earth Break - a burst of energy that has more power than the entire Net exploding - and Darkness Overload - similar to Earth Break, only in a wider area - are common.
Forte is apparently given such a high role because of his history in the earlier MegaMan series.

Kayle is my own personal addition to the MMBN world. He’s like Chaud’s kinder counterpart, which is in turn a lot like me - quiet, reserved, but not particularly cold or unfriendly. CommandoMan is, likewise, an edit of ProtoMan. He’s not restricted to the sword; he has various other weapons to choose from as well. Versatility, the ability to have no weakness, is his business. He has pretty much no emotion save humor and remains quiet most of the time, willing to keep to himself and do as he is told. Because everyone creates a being that is better than everyone else’s, I tend to put CommandoMan’s power level somewhere near Forte’s… but you probably don’t care about that so much anyway.

The Thunderlight is fading but lightning does have echoes. If you’ve got questions, leave ‘em, and I might come along to answer.