Extra Life webcast

Come one, come all to visit my live streaming of the Extra Life event, LIVE at my place: www.justin.tv/brokendesign 

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 1:06 am EDT | Permalink | 1 Comments

2nd Annual Extra Life Gaming Marathon

On October 17th, I will be taking part in the 2nd Annual Extra Life 24 hour gaming marathon to help raise money for research and treatment of pediatric cancer. Some of you may remember that I had participated last year as well in memory of my friend Megan from high school who was taken before she was able to live the full life she deserved. Texas Children's Hospital is a fantastic place to donate, there is no child refused for care, regardless of financial or insurance status, so it is incredibly important to keep the efforts of this organization going strong.

For more information on the event, you can visit the official website for Extra Life. If you want to make a donation, please visit the donation page that I have set up through Texas Children's Hospital. 

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 12:54 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

fLAN 09

Just got back about an hour ago from Scuba's House of fLAN 2009, a LAN party hosted by a friend of mine out in Kansas. It was good fun, there was a lot of games played, lots of profanity thrown around and a great deal of general debauchery. Maybe not so much of the last one. Primarily we were kicking it with Rock Band, Halo 3 and Gears of War 2, got some Halo Wars in there as well, and even dipped into some FEAR 2 and Killzone 2. We also took some time out to see Watchmen.

The event pretty much solidified all of our notion that we're pretty much done with Halo 3, seemingly always matched up against people vastly better than us and on a team where at least 2 people drop out before the match even begins. To us, matchmaking in that game is completely broken and we really don't have much fun because of it. Sure, we could play just us, but we don't find that to be as fun as being on a team against others. So, instead we'll continue to fall back on Gears of War 2 with its wonderful, wonderful bot support so we can either have a challenge with a higher difficulty if we so choose, or kick it against some casuals and just have a good time. People online take things way too freaking seriously, always seeking out exploits for maps and crap like that. I'm also a huge fan of the bot support in Killzone 2, got to play with the guys in 2old2resist on day 1 and that was a blast. Hopefully will do that again soon.

Watchmen was quite phenomenal in almost every way, an exceptional job was done translating the novel to the big screen. Definitely a great deal was chopped out, especially the huge amount of back story that's told in-between chapters through different forms of correspondence and news clippings, as well as the graphic novel within the graphic novel that paralleled the occurrences. I believe the movie still managed to really flesh out the characters and bring the overall story to life, and remained very relevant. I'd really be interested to hear what Alan Moore thought of it, especially since he was pretty appalled by previous adaptations such as V for Vendetta (which I hear he requested / demanded he not be in the credits for in any way). I'd bet he's not happy with it, but it's his baby and not everything can go through in the adaptation. The costume design was quite good, really gave things a modern feel while still being respectful to the original costume design in the novel. The ending sequence had a location change, kinda. I guess not so much a change as just making things somewhat seem a little more "plausible." I won't spoil.

It's certainly not a movie for the timid, however. It is GRAPHIC. Holy crap it was a brutal film. There were a couple in our party that would shield their eyes from some of the parts because they did get pretty gory. I'm wondering if they'd have gone at all if they read the novel originally because there are certainly no punches pulled there, it's a very unapologetic satire. There were a great deal of people who did not get that memo, particularly the stupid moron who took his 5-6 year old son to the movie! WTF! It's things like that which completely drain me of all faith in humanity sometimes, the sheer naïve actions that stem from complete denial of years of scientific study that shows such imagery can be damaging to people. And the fact that dad over there covered up his son's eyes only when there was nudity? How completely backwards is that? We were all pretty disgusted at that. Anyone who takes their children to see a movie that graphic and thinks that it's not going to affect them at all is completely inane. But whatever, rant over.

Can't wait for fLAN '10. :-)

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 10:40 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

TV.com

Just downloaded the free TV.com app for my iPhone to check out. Not a huge fan of CBS (really, TV in general), so I wasn't massively thrilled about that, but I figured I'd see what it was all about. There's other stations as a part of it, like Showtime, CW, CNET, etc, so there's certainly more content than I initially thought there would be, however so far I'm not finding any full shows that I'm interested in. Californication is in there, but I really wasn't surprised to see it's only excerpts from episodes and interviews and they're all censored, so that's a drag too. Mostly this gets me thinking (as well as the YouTube app, of course) that a Hulu app is quite possible and really needs to hit the iPhone. It would be majorly awesome. What's Hulu waiting for, I wonder…? Considering who it's owned by, my guess is money.

From searching through the app, I'm seeing that most things are excerpts and not a whole lot of full episodes, most of which are CBS shows. At least now I get to watch MacGyver  wherever I am, FINALLY.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 7:26 pm EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

Pixelmator may be nipping at Photoshop's heels

For any creative pro out there, Photoshop is about your only option for photo manipulation and composits, things like that. Pixelmator, from the Pixelmator Team, is pretty quickly becoming a respectable alternative, though in its very early stages. Certainly the Photoshop juggernaut offers a tremendous amount more flexibility and has a laundry list of features that don't appear in Pixelmator, but bullet points don't always equal a superior product. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the creative community can drop PS for Pixelmator as the new standard anytime soon, but I've found I'm using it more and more for my projects whenever I can, when it doesn't involve a need for using smart objects. In the last week, Pixelmator 1.4 dropped with a new paint engine that now allows all PS brushes to be used and it really showcases how PS has become new features piled up on the same old, rigid framework of the original versions, if not the first version.

Some PS tools work marvelously and some make you wonder why you're still using the same archaic dialog windows from long ago, such as all the filters from earlier days. For example, the radial / zoom blur dialog in PS gives you a blank white square and a crosshair and you have to guess where you want the effect to originate from. Get it wrong the first time? Undo and try again. And yes, if your canvas is oblong, you still get a square to place the crosshair in. Pixelmator, on the other hand, gives you a white circle on your document itself and allows you to move that around and see in real time how the effect is going to look. The circle is tethered to a dialog where you adjust the intensity of the effect.

The new paint engine is marvelous, too. I was able to bring in all of my PS brushes without any issue, and it was yet another reminder of how Photoshop needs a complete rewrite. If you load brushes in PS, you're given an icon representing the brush to help you choose the one you want. The problem with that is, if your brush is also an oblong shape, the icon is stretched to fit a square area. Not particularly helpful, I have had a great number of times where I'll think "this brush should work well," only to find the actual brush looks a great deal different when not stretched. Pixelmator now also shows you what the brush looks like over the document before stamping it, which is a very welcome addition. Before, you were given a crosshair—not at all helpful.

The Pixelmator interface is also very nice, based off of the Mac OS X 'bezel' appearance. Photoshop, however, is still trying to shoehorn their old interface and display style into the new 'panel' layout, which is suffering from terrible UI bugs. For more information on that (and much more amusing, though quite NSFW), you can visit adobegripes.tumblr.com. Personally, I think it would be quite rad if the Pixelmator Team partnered with some vector app like DrawIt or Line Form, and perhaps some other company start a pro page layout software, that way there could be the option for really tight integration like Adobe now offers that, quite honestly, is really what keeps me from kicking it to the curb. And on the page layout topic, anyone who suggests Quark I will scoff at. Quark is dead to me and should be dead to everyone else. And dead in general.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 12:46 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments