Intro to Print
Mobile Post. Woot.
So I’m on my way back to Toronto after my long easter weekend right now. It’s not been a bad weekend… But it has seemed short. At least I finished my layout for print class, and I’ll be submitting it via e-mail when I get home. I’ll also attach it to this post when I publish it. I had a lot of fun doing it, as it’s on Gorillaz… Which is just an all-around awesome subject. I’m slowly catching up on all my work, which is good. GRADUATION IMMINENT!
Unfortunately, graduating presents a slew of new problems. For instance, I’ll no longer be employed by the A/V department, and I’ll have to find a real job. Life is just beginning, which just as horrifying as it is exciting.
Speaking of Gorillaz, I’ve been enjoying a lot of Damon Albarn lately. The Good, The Bad, and The Queen is an excellent album. I’ve also been enjoying Beck’s Modern Guilt of late, which I got from Max in the summer. My favourite song from it is Youthless… I like it’s lyrics and beats a lot. I like music a lot… But I’m really bad at describing what I like about it. Go me.
I’ve also been getting stomach pain of late… My side to my stomach was hurting all day Thursday, and I’ve had a weird stitch in what I can describe as under my lowest rib on my right side all day today. I kinda felt sick earlier because of it. I hope it’s nothing bad… The last thing I need right now is medical problems… I’ve gotta finish school!
Anyways, that’ll be all for now. Bye, nobody who reads this!
Blah.
I went to the gym again yesterday…
Then I ate half a pizza.
I’m going again today.
Hope it turns out better.
I’ve also gotta write a story tonight for my elective tomorrow. Not excited for that, as I’m super-exhausted today for some reason, despite getting enough sleep. Can’t find a song to cheer me up, and it seems that an extra large coffee wouldn’t help either.
Oh well. Not that I want to be away from Kim, but I really want the weekend to come. I’m in some kind of weird funk today.
Bit.Trip Beat is kind of cool. I haven’t gotten very far but I’m not very good. Could have been that I was slightly buzzed from our green-cider-cause-we-don’t-like-beer night for St. Patties. I’ve never liked chiptune style music, but it just seems to be freaking awesome in this game. More to come on this I guess?
Now… to work on print layouts. Whee!
Busy Week – Things I’m Working On…
So, this last week has been pretty busy. Last weekend my Valentines’ plans fizzled out because Kim’s grandma passed out and wound up in the hospital. Kim and I only saw eachother for a few hours, and we were both really tired, so we had a Valentine’s day nap. It was nice. Turns out her grandma had to get a pacemaker put in, and she went in for surgery Sunday night, but she was pretty much out the next day and up and about as usual. A little scary, but I’m glad she’s okay… and that through a magical medical miracle she’ll be okay for years to come!
Tuesday at work was really busy, a lot of people asked me for help with the suites. I got through it, although I didn’t get to work on a lot of work… instead, I wound up working on a vector trace for a bit because it was something I could easily leave and come back to. Kim took me out for dinner at our usual Thai place in the evening, and I enjoyed it very much. It was a nice break from going there with everyone else, and it was good to get out on our own.
Wednesday morning, Project Management was cancelled… and we almost didn’t go until we found out from Samina that our groups had showed up anyways. By the time we got there, our groups were gone… but we worked on some stuff for Aviva’s Print class later in the day. I played some e-mail tag with one of my group members, and then we ended up meeting in the first few minutes of Aviva’s class and delegated our workload. I fired off e-mails to everyone so that they’d all have it in writing, and they’re supposed to have all their parts to me tomorrow. Only one person has sent their part so far. We’re to meet Monday night after Combustion class at 7pm. Hopefully that turns out.
Aviva’s class had us working on fictional brochures for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche. Mine’s pretty simple so far, but Samina seems to like what I have. I’m not too far into it yet though.
In the evening, Kim and I got down to business on our first real Advanced ActionScripting project. We had to make a tutorial on how to make a document class. I made mine in a .pdf file. I’ll tack it onto the end of this post. I found it to be a good project because I had to go through both actually doing it, and documenting how it’s done as well as how all the different parts of the code work. It was only supposed to be 1-2 pages, but I managed to flesh mine out to 6 plus title page when I added in images and made it easy to use. Overall, an enjoyable assignment I think!
Thursday morning, we had to do a debate in Art and Technology on whether or not the internet isolates people. Our side (Kim, myself, two others) was that it does in fact not isolate people. Our side won by vote of the rest of the class… and not only did we have some good arguments, but the other side seemed very wishy-washy. Their argument was basically “the internet does connect people, and allows you to talk to people all over the world, but it isolates us because there isn’t human contact and stuff”. Two of their group members were prepared, and the other two had no idea they were going that day because they hadn’t checked their Seneca WebMail in a week. How can you go a week without checking it? Silliness.
We spent much of Thursday afternoon finishing up our tutorials, and then we headed off to Flash. We just covered different ways to load different things, and a lot of people shoved off from the class early to “Ninja Pub 12″, a gathering of Digital Media Arts students that happens periodically, and enables networking among the students, as well as the ability to meet other people working in the industry. After Tim was done his talk, we headed there, but it was very loud and everyone was already pretty drunk at that point, and we’d had a long day, so we only stayed about 10 minutes before we headed home.
Friday we went to Motion Graphics and Jasmine was showing us how to put together crazy visualizations in AfterEffects. That looked neat, but I’m still not sure I like AfterEffects as a program all that much. Video has never been my cup of tea, AfterEffects is a little heavy on my poor computer, and I’m just not that into its’ interface. I prefers me Flash.
Anyways, I’m off to celebrate a friend’s birthday soon… I promised myself I’d keep this short because I’ve gotta grab a shower and call another friend to arrange a ride so… that’s all, folks. Toodles.
How to Make a Document Class Using ActionScript 3 and Flash
P.S. – Jet Set Radio’s soundtrack has got me through the week. Kudos to the crazies who scratched and mixed that.
Rants.
So I may stray away from (read: will most likely not cover) Digital Media topics in this post. Well, I will cover some stuff that really REALLY annoyed me yesterday, incidentally involving a combination of my own stupidity and Macs (they still suck, but not just due to my own stupidity), as well as a presentation I did today and then becoming a little pissed off at the other group that covered the same topic. So here goes. It’s gonna be long.
Before I start… Sharp Cheddar Kraft Dinner is delicious.
So… yesterday started out fairly normal, other than Kim and I woke up late. Things started looking up though, when we got an e-mail from our Production Management teacher that he’d be late for class too. We ended up getting to class a bit later than the teacher, but he’d not yet started. This turned out to be the day we’d not been anticipating, as it was the day he was splitting us up into groups that were not of our choosing. Now, I know it’s “what the industry is like” and all that jazz, but, from my experience in college, Kim and I work extremely well together, and when Samina is added to the mix, we can plough through projects like nothing and our individual strengths come into play very well when combined. Now, in addition to this… a lot of people in our classes seem to not really care as much about their marks, deadlines, and quality of work as we do. So we were extremely upset about getting split into these groups. I think I lucked out in my group, as I got mixed with a couple of people I know… but the same didn’t really apply to Kim and Samina. I know it’s not a terribly huge project that we have to work on or anything, but the teacher is going to be doing the same thing for the final, which is not only a pitch like this project, it is the actual completed project as well. I just wish he’d let us pick our group. Although it may be an attempt at simulating a real work environment, it is not the same. In a real work environment, people are being paid to care about what they’re doing, and if you end up picking up the slack of someone not pulling their weight… well… there will be ramifications for that person. Not so much in this situation. I’d rather work with a team of my choosing.
Next, we had to head off to Aviva’s Intro to Print class and finish up our business cards. I was pretty tired, grumpy, and hungry by this point, and the fact that I had to get some work done didn’t help. I ended up having some technical issues (Illustrator not having the fonts I needed on the Macs in the classroom) when I needed to submit the assignment and making an extremely small modification to my project required me to fire up my laptop which I’d just shut down not a minute before. On a side note, the Macs in the classrooms are terrible. They’re supposedly top of the line, but they can’t seem to properly load a webpage half the time, whether it’s in Firefox or Safari. That’s annoying. Also I will take the time now to mention that I HATE THE STUPID HIDDEN GARBAGE FILES THAT MACS CREATE ON MY USB KEY WHEN I INSERT IT INTO THE MACHINE OR OPEN ANY FILES IN A FOLDER ON IT. I also hate when clueless Mac users think that Windows is at fault for creating the invisible files when they put their drive into a REAL computer. Anyways, I got all of that sorted out after a couple of annoying screw-ups. Being tired and hungry didn’t help. Also the stress of having to do a midterm didn’t help either.
Before the midterm, I decided to grab something to eat. I went to the cafeteria with Kim. I picked out a caesar salad and a coffee, as I figured that’d be good before a test. I grabbed some fries to take back to Samina as she’d mentioned a desire for greasy food, and Kim got a bagel. We’ve never, EVER been stopped for taking food into the computing commons. They do have signs up but nobody ever follows them (classrooms also apply to this). We walked into the commons with the food, and this random woman not wearing any kind of uniform or whatever stopped us and told us to not bring food, and said it’s not allowed anywhere in the commons, although the signs up say not past that certain point. Kim held onto the food outside the commons, and I went in to grab my stuff for the test which was over with Samina at the far end. I’d say the commons was at 75% of its’ capacity, and of that 75%, 60% had food. Just from my walkthrough. I was absolutely pissed off. Instead of stopping responsible students from bringing in a little salad, why couldn’t this woman be going after the people already there goofing off with their friends and who were a little more at risk for spilling shit on their keyboards? After Kim snuck the food meant for her and Samina into the commons in my backpack, I headed off for my midterm. It turned out that the Seneca Test Centre also does not allow food, even if the testee (? (lol, testes!)) promised not to slop their caesar dressing on the test papers. I headed off to an empty classroom to finish up my salad. I was pretty peeved at this point, and wanted to listen to some music to calm myself while I ate, but I’d left my headphones with Kim in my backpack. As I ate the salad, I became more frustrated at the fact that the croutons were soggy and mushy.
The midterm went surprisingly well as compared to the rest of the day. The questions weren’t terribly difficult, and I finished in about 50 minutes. Heading back to the commons, I found that Samina had left ten minutes or so prior, and Kim hard at work on our presentation (which we did today!). I joined her, and we got an hour or so of straight work done on it, which was good, because it was kind of last minute. After a while, one of the commons employees asked us to move across the commons for no reason. We decided to head home instead of relocating pointlessly. It was pouring rain and we got soaked. Kim moreso than me. When we got home, we continued our work on the project. Kim was using the wrong shade of black on the slides, and I was accidentally saving over slides I’d already finished. FFFFFFFFFFFFF comes to mind. Anyways, the presentation got finished, and that was the end of frustration for the day.
Today we got up, made it to school early, printed our paper, and had our presentation prepared. We were ready at the beginning of class except for the hightlighting of what we wanted to mention from the paper, so we went… 5th-ish I think? We were wired on coffee and I was a little jittery during my part, and Kim stumbled a bit, but overall I think it was an informative, enjoyable, and concise presentation. The class really enjoyed Crayon Physics, which, if you know me, I’ve been mentioning/showing it to just about everybody. It turns out the teacher even plays it on her iPod Touch/iPhone/whichever she has, I forget.
The other presentations were fairly alright. Most of them had fairly interesting topics and had information presented well. I had a problem with two of the projects though. First one, minor complaint. The topic was comparing the stories of movies and tv shows to those of video games. First problem, they said that Pokemon was a game based on a TV show. WRONG. DO YOUR RESEARCH. THE SHOW IS BASED ON THE GAME. Next problem. Someone said X-Men games were based off the movies, but technically X-Men is based off a comic book so the group shot that down… but THEN they said that Dragonball games are based off the TV show which is partially true, but DRAGONBALL WAS ORIGINALLY A COMIC AND THEY DIDN’T SHOOT THAT DOWN. GOD. I don’t even like Dragonball that much but it’s pretty mainstream and most people that know Dragonball OR EVEN A QUICK WIKIPEDIA VISIT would point you in the right direction. If you’re doing a presentation and want to be informative, at least research your topic, because if you’re not into it all that well, chances are you’re going to look like a tool in front of people that know.
Second presentation that pissed me off – the one that was the same topic as ours. Firstly, it seemed like the people making the presentation picked the topic because it was video games, and not because they were actually interested in and followed the topic on the side. They definitely came across as the “hardcore” gamer type of guys, and although it was nice to hear about it sort of from their point of view, the way they went about it seemed all wrong to me. FIRST OF ALL, a lot of the games they mentioned and references they cited came right out of MY TOPIC over at the Escapist Magazine boards. Here is a short list out of things in that topic they used:
Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars – they mentioned that they recently found out about this game and stated what the posters that mentioned it had learned from it.
FarCry2 – they mentioned about weapons smuggling and African politics, almost exactly in those words. They didn’t flesh out this part of their presentation much.
Daniel Lloyd’s Video, Video Games and Tangential Learning – was mentioned in the topic, and it was the first I’d ever heard of the video. These guys used it in their presentation, to bring the length up to about 25 minutes (limit was supposed to be 5-10, Kim and I went almost 15)
I know this isn’t a large list or anything, but it just bugs me that they found the forum, read the topic, didn’t bother to check the profile page of the user who created it, and it didn’t occur to them that the original poster who mentioned doing the presentation this week MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN THEIR CLASS. I confronted them after class, and asked if they’d heard of The Escapist or its’ board and had seen my topic on there. When they both replied no, I said how it was a strange coincidence that they’d used the games mentioned in the topic without providing any additional information that wasn’t mentioned in the topic. I had caught them in their lie and they tried to weasel their way out of it. It just bugs me that I went to the trouble of asking an intellectual gaming community for suggestions, and they went ahead and used my efforts to prolong their project and make it look better.
The second thing that bothered me about their project was that they just made up some bogus facts about the Wii, a video game system they obviously know nothing about as they seem to love Grand Theft Auto so much. They said that the Wii was concieved as a toy for children. This is an incorrect “fact”. The Wii was concieved to appeal to a wider demographic, yes, but that does not mean only children. One of the very first games developed and released for the Wii was Red Steel, and is definitely not aimed at children. The presenters said that at first the only games out for it were kiddy games, and that the pack-in games that come with it were learning experiences. The only pack-in that has ever come with the Wii is Wii Sports, which I would hardly call educational. There were 21 launch titles for the Wii, which included such mature or more realistic titles as Call of Duty 3, Red Steel, GT Pro Circuit, Need for Speed: Carbon, and Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam. The majority of these games were ports from other consoles or PC, but Red Steel was originally developed and only for Wii. There. Shot that one down too. People frustrate me.
Anyways, I’m done ranting, and my attentions are wanted elsewhere. That felt good.
Back to School
I’m back in class today… and my first class of the semester is Intro to Print with Crisp. I don’t doubt the man is knowledgeable but he certainly gets sidetracked easily and provides a lot of useless information. We are fourth semester students, and although most of us have never touched InDesign before, we HAVE touched Photoshop and Illustrator which are probably very similar. He’s going on like we’ve never seen a Mac or an Adobe program before. He also has HUEG doubts about our math skills. To the point that we’re a little insulted. Doah.
I started playing Shin Megami Tensei: IMAGINE yesterday, it’s kind of fun, yet I don’t think I’ll really be getting into another MMO any time soon. I haven’t played one seriously in a long time, and with how hectic and busy things are in my life lately, I’ll probably never find the time. Sad, really… as it has some potential to be a good game. 
I also got World of Goo yesterday… which I was initially skeptical of, but now I think that it’s excellent. If you have a PC, get it. If you have a Wii, get it.
If the annoying dude sitting next to me in class dropped dead on the spot I’d throw a party. Some of us are trying to learn. That is all.
Calendar
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « May | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||