From the Orlando Anime Festival

August 16, 2008

Yesterday, we (Ryan, Tyler, and I) had the pleasure of finally attending my very first convention (outside of the local county fair). Sadly, it wasn't a sci-fi convention as I would have liked, but an anime convention. I don't consider myself to be an anime nerd, and even border on disliking the genre entirely, but I did have a pretty good time none the less. The convention itself was fairly small in comparison to others, but there was still a goodly amount of things going on and plenty of dealers peddling their anime related wares.

The atmosphere or the con was... nerdy. Even so, I felt strangely out of place as I was one of the few attendees that wasn't cosplaying. Most of the costumes I didn't recognize, but there were the likes of Phoenix Wright, Yuna, Link and, surprisingly, several Snakes from Metal Gear:
The ever cool Solid Snake... and me
It still surprised me just how many girls were there. In fact, I'd say the males were outnumbered by quite a bit which, for me, is an unusual situation to be in seeing as I go to school overflowing with testosterone. Just being around all these people was probably the most entertaining part of the day.

One of the areas we spent the most time in was the dealers floor. Just about anything anime related was being sold. Mangas, DVDs, T-shirts, action figures, plushies, costumes, weapons. And that's barely scratching the surface. As you can see in the picture above, I broke down and bought a Godot shirt. I wubs it!

There were some video games, including an NES championship tournament, but it was a side to everything else going on. There were rooms showing animes, people talking about how to improve your AMV/drawings, all sorts of crazy stuff. We wound up the night by sitting in on the "Weakest Geek" game show. It was kind of like Double Dare (sans the mess) and a quiz show with the Who Wants to be a Millionaire music playing in the background the entire time. The biggest part of this game was the "Box" game wherein a picture of an action figure would be shown and the player would then proceed to try to find said action figure in a fish tank filled with more action figures and packing peanuts. It was all rather entertaining to watch and the crew running the show was pretty cool.

I'm going to wrap this post up with a video I took while I was there (and later added music to).

Tags: anime convention video

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Speed Cubing

August 11, 2008

One of the more mundane things that happened over Christmas break was my learning how to solve the Rubik's cube. My ability to do so was actually big thing in math class the following month. Since then, I've been improving upon my technique and now I'm going to show you how to solve Rubik's Cube in ten seconds or less. Video after the break.

Continue reading Speed Cubing

Tags: howto video

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Mograph - now with more 3D

July 31, 2008

Over the last couple of months I've been served a delicious helping of 3D stuffs at school. This was, of course, overshadowed by the awesomeness that was Flash. But I digress. At the end of this month our final 3D project wound up in an awesome culmination of 3D animation and my favorite motion program, After Effects. The result? See for yourself.

Tags: motion graphics 3d video

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It's Super Awesome Vacation Time!

June 25, 2008

Summer is here, and with it vacation. Unfortunately for us Full Sailors, we only get about a week of summer vacation (I get ten days because all my classes let out early). However, that's not to say I'm not going to take advantage of the time off. Quite the contrary. Tomorrow I will be heading back to the good old midwest and chill with my folks. It's been over half a year since I've seen them, so I'm definitely looking forward to going back. I'm especially looking forward to potato salad. Mmmmmm....

Interestingly enough, tomorrow is also one year from my graduation. It hardly seems like I've been here for nine months, but there it is. It probably helps that I'm usually pretty busy and that most of this is pretty fun. Though, I will admit, Flash was pretty boring. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed working on my projects, but they were small enough that I finished pretty quickly. And the last half of the course was a beginners guide to programming, something that I really don't need. So, while I did try to do more advanced things than what the project originally called for, there wasn't a whole lot of room to flex my muscles, as it were. You can check out my final project here. Yes, it is an homage to egoraptor's series of awesomeness (who I had the great pleasure of helping recently). My other class this month was 3D modelling. That class was a lot of fun. The teacher was cool, the project was fun; I just enjoyed the entire class. I'll have my final project up on YouTube sometime soon.

In other news, I have begun and am about half way through animating a real Flash cartoon, one which will be entitled Phoenix Awesome. I hope to have it up on Newgrounds sometime over break.

Well, that's about everything. I'll leave you with my MGP final project which I never actually posted on here. Enjoy

Tags: school flash motion graphics video

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Game Music Friday - Gerudo Valley

June 13, 2008

One of the first video game songs I remember really enjoying was Gerudo Valley from Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64. Back when I had a crappy computer and little hard drive space, I would listen to MIDI files and Gerudo Valley was one of the few songs that had a pretty good version out there. Of course, now that disk space isn't an issue, I've moved on to MP3s. However, I still find myself listening to more remixes than the actual original itself (because, let's face it, the N64 instrument library sucked). But, anyways, here are this weeks Gerudo Valley music picks.

Continue reading Game Music Friday - Gerudo Valley

Tags: video game friday zelda music games

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