Computery things have to wait

I've been pretty busy with school. More posts soon.

Vector vs Raster

Raster images are built one pixel at a time and often look jagged. Sometimes they look great, but as soon as you increase the size of that image, it becomes very jagged.

A friend of mine was thinking of painting his son's room in a pirate theme. But none of the effeminate looking Johnny Depp pirates of recent. He's looking at the old click adventure/puzzle Monkey Island PC games. They have a digital projector that they would use to project an image on to the wall and then paint it. The problem with this is that since these games were made so long ago (the picture on the left was from the 3rd game) that they character graphics are very low quality (by today's standards) raster images.

So I have been vectorizing the image so that he could do this if he wanted to. A vector image is made of lines and fill colors. The lines are more commands to represent lines, so when the image is enlarged the lines scale to the size of the new image. The graphics retain their clarity.

The image here on the left is of the original character graphic on the left and the traced vector image on the right. This image is actually a high quality raster image, so if you try to enlarge it then even the better quality graphic on the right will get pixelly. This is a jpg image. A better file format for vector images would be pdf or png, depending on the planned use for the image. As far as I know, this is the only vector, or at least cleaned up, image of this character on the internet. I looked for a while and didn't find anything else that someone had made. I expect to find this file copied all over the net fairly soon. Maybe not. We'll see.

High Dynamic Range (HDR)

If you like to manipulate your photos to raise the content of awesome or are an avid photographer, you may have heard of High Dynamic Range or HDR photos. I understand the principal, but unfortunately don't have much experience with this method of photomanipulation. The basic principle, to my understanding, is that by taking several different exposures of the exact same image you can combine them in various programs to bring out the detail of shadows and highlights in the same picture.

This site shows 35 very nice HDR photos. [Link] I would love to make pictures like these. They really are beautiful. I'm going to look into software that can do this (or help you do it), I'd like to report which is easiest and which is the best for the money. These programs include Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Photomatix. If you are reading this and know how to do it, or want to check it out, please comment here with usefull information for a new HDR initiate.

Books Are Just As Bad As Videogames And Television

It turns out all those times that people told you that videogames and tv were horrible for you and that you should free yourself by reading a book, they were falling into a vague, downward spiraling delusion of false information.

"Tales from George Orwell's 1984 to the movies Network and Videodrome are all about how people are so controlled by television that they'll do anything. Usually, books are presented as an antidote to a TV-controlled populace. But now a new neuroscience study reveals that books control people's minds and emotions in exactly the same way television does."

[Link]

The secret life of Portal?

Apparently the game Portal is for girls that like girls... Some people will say anything about anything just to make a fuss, won't they?
[Link]

Video of the Week

I run across a lot of great web videos during my browsing. I'm going to try to post something awesome on a weekly basis. I may have to resist the urge to do it more often... no guarantees on that though.

This week: BATMAN

Is it time for Batman to tone it down?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvxoz5DSQp8

(apparently the video is so popular they won't let you embed it, so you'll have to tclick the link and go watch it for yourself.)

Other great Batman related finds:

Hi, I'm a Marvel. I'm Batman...


20 every day items if they were designed for Batman.

Baman sure could use some exercise:

BTW

So the choice of the name soft kore gamer came about due to other things I wanted to use weren't available and to emphasize that my gaming is not so hard core that I go out and spend tons of money on hd tvs and brand new game systems. I carefully plan for what I want, saving up slowly.

I also don't spend most of time gaming. I may have used to, but now I have more important things to do. I still enjoy gaming but my time has to be more concentrated, I have to be more picky about what I play/do. I'm also more of a social gamer now. I still like Warcraft 3 and the various great FPS games available (I don't just play DDR), but I enjoy them 200% more when I am playing with friends that I can communicate with while playing.

that's all I got to say bout that