DarthTofu

I'm looking forward to TFU Ultimate Sith Edition. I'm going to see what the reviews are for PC, and if it's good, I'm gonna run around slashing up Wampas as the apprentice on my compy. Hee-

Life is what you make of it; so long as you do not regret the past, there is no such thing as wasted time.

...so I finally have something to contribute to this thread. Well, sort of. I'm working on something to contribute to this thread. http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a169/DarthTofu/Vader.jpg This is my project for Graphical Communications so far. The project is, literally, "Make something cool in Solid Edge." I don't know if anyone else uses the program, but it's a pretty awesometastic alternative to AutoCAD Inventor which, while good, is left in the dust by the newest version of Solid Edge. Anyway, that's what I have so far, but I'm encountering some difficulties. Namely, I don't like the, for lack of a better way of putting it, "Cheekbones" of Vader. Right now, they aren't high enough. They look alright without the eyes in place (This model looks particularly amusing with eyeballs, since I revolved a whole sphere, which I then intended to extrude around), but when the eyes show up, it's obvious that I extruded incorrectly. Any ideas on how I could make these work better? Here are my strategies thus far. Strategy 1: Draw the front profile of the cheekbones on one plane and then, on a parallel plane farther back, draw the back edge of the cheekbones, and do a taper. The issue with this: Solid Edge freaked out and decided that it wanted to be a jerk and stick some random curves in on just one side of the taper (the sketches were made using a mirror command; IE one side ought to be, quite literally, identical to the other). Strategy 2 (the one that worked for this): Draw a large, solid block behind the "mouth" grill piece, then make a plane by three points and shave off excess material until I have the cheekbones. The issue with this: While it works, it's tedious as hell, and though you can't see it in the picture that I posted, the mask looks odd as hell behind the "point" of the mouth grill. It should just come to a pyramidal point, but it doesn't; rather, there are about three little troughs where the point ought to be, the result of having to be careful when protruding and extruding, and doing this partially freehand, because I can't always snap to features when my plane is angled. I can use strategy 2 to make new cheekbones that work, but I wanted to see if anyone else had some expertise to offer before I did anything.

Double post bump- I saw Inglorius Bastaerds, or however you misspell it last night. I jumped in around Chapter 2, and nearly vomited at one point. I'd not recommend the film; the entire thing is more violent than anything I've ever seen, and it's just plain disgusting numerous times. The scene that won't go away is when Brad Pitt sticks his finger in a bullet-wound in someone's leg. I couldn't sleep for a good solid hour after seeing that. All of the Nazis are pitiable, and are shown none. They talk about wanting to go hug their mother, or about how they have to live, because they just had a son, and the troops just laugh at them and slaughter them. It isn't the black-and-white, good-and-evil stuff that you generally see when Nazis are involved; it was quite the opposite, with the Jews as, I hate to say it, the bad guys, really. The movie is sick, twisted, and wrong. I strongly advise you not to see it. I almost threw up.

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No MMORPGs for me; I don' want to get addicted. Freaking Runescape came far too close to hooking me back in the day; I'm not going to risk something like WoW. I play TF2 and L4D online. I might break out the Civ IV at some point, but not until I get a whole lot better at it. I have Age of Empires 2, but I haven't actually played it- somebody gave me a free copy a while back during Fast Track Calculus, and I haven't had time/the desire to test it out.

... Not from personal experience, but I'm pretty sure you can't smoke crack. In fact, I'm almost certain it's absorbed through the skin, which is one of the primary reasons people snort it.

So, on a totally and completely unrelated note to all of this stuff (one might even call it "randomness"), I just started out on Solid Edge, my school's 3D modeling program of choice. The course in Solid Edge is, without a doubt, the single simplest course I've ever taken. Graphical Communications (my solid edge class) and College and Life Skills (a joke class) are my only two classes on Wednesdays. I don't have to get up until 11:00 for CLSK, and despite the fact that Graph Com is supposed to go on for three hours, I finished the first day's classwork/homework in less than an hour, and I spent the last half hour finishing the classwork/homework that's to be done using solid edge through to week three. It rocks pretty hard. Anybody else ever use solid edge? Because if you've been using AutoDesk programs, I'd recommend you try the switch. I used AutoCAD Inventor 9 for a while, and while I liked the program, the latest Solid Edge blows Inventor out of the water, totally and completely. It's so ridiculously easy to create and model in this program; I almost want to learn to animate in it at this point. Drawings that would have taken me fifteen minutes in Inventor take me a third of the time, now. I'm particularly enjoying the ability to stick a reference plane into the surface I'm modeling wherever I want that reference plane; it was always a pain in the neck when I had to graph something in Inventor that involved a cylinder with a hole on the curved side; extrusions required a surface to go through, so I typically had to plan in advance and create some sort of a box to extrude off of in advance so that I could make a hole through the entire cylinder, then delete the box, then extrude half of the cylinder in order to fix the hole on one side of the cylinder. With Solid Edge I can simply extrude off of the x-plane, or locate a plane in the center of the object and do a cut; it's so much easier. I'm loving this program!

How old are the Wolfenstein games? And am I the only one who spent a couple of months as a small child thoroughly convinced that it was a combination of a werewolf and Frankenstein, having never played the games? Also, I recently got ahold of a copy o Civ IV again, with all of the expansions... I'm learning loads in college! lol

Most impressive! My one complaint is that the TIE fighter appears to be bigger than a Lambda Shuttle, but oh well; it's still pretty darned awesome, mate. If this is ever up for download, I'll probably be among the first to snag it. Are you going to try to make it multi-player, or give it an AI?

Odd- a bunch of folks I know saw it last week and said it was great. I didn't watch it with them, but they claimed that it was "perfect." I finally saw Fanboys. It was a decent movie, but not quite so nerdy as I would've enjoyed. Some of the humor was just there for the nerds (Ray Park's cameo, Carrie Fischer (sp?) saying that she 'knew' Bottley loved her, etc.), but the majority of it was silly poop and wee-wee jokes. It had its moments, and it wasn't bad, but I wouldn't break it out above two and a half, maybe three stars. Though I do give props for the best closing line in movie history. If you know what it is, you ought to be laughing right now, too.

Heh- I'm trying to compensate for the lack of people on the forum? I didn't realize I'd spammed that much. Quite frankly, I was under the impression that my PPD was dropping considerably as a result of college. I may wind up only showing up once in a blue moon; college is just too cool.

Heh- I got The Orange Box, which includes HL, HL Ep 1, HL Ep. 2, Portal, and TF2. All sorts of fun. This week was (reportedly) the easiest. Next week is supposed to be a bit tougher, and then the last week is nothing (I suppose so that people who have have performed unsatisfactorily up until this point have a chance to improve their work and study skills and still pass the course). Ah, well- I'll likely go into lurk mode a while longer. Be sure to let us know when you head of to the Uni, Mad!

On the upside, the first link no longer links to anything; looks like one of these cheap jerks might have been taken out. Anybody here ever played Settlers of Catan? It's a board game, not a video game, but it's a whole lotta fun. I just learned to play on Friday- it has elements of Risk and RTS to it, though you don't ever get to attack your opponents directly... almost like Checkers, trying to see who can be the biggest jerk with road building and the like. Oh- and I'm finally coordinated enough to do a few songs on "hard" on Guitar Hero. Go me.

Tractor beams allow larger ships to stop smaller ships from moving around so much. Thus, an ISD can grab a carrack and leave it helpless, so I think that your fleet will take longer to flee/ you will lose the carrack if you try to leave whilst under fire.

Well, there's always actual videogame design. I know that 's a popular one- Georgia Tech and Decry are churning out the best in the league for that field at the moment. As a budding young MechE, I'd recomend that, but then, I'm rather biased. All the same, don't feel that you're limited to what you have schooling in. I knew a girl who had her masters degree in mechanical engineering; she works full-time as an instructor at a kayaking reserve in Natahala Outdoor Center.

Sorry to be late posting, but college is a rather awesome and new experience... slash I finally installed and started playing Half Life 2. I spend my fifteen minutes before class starts playing that stupid game- took me forever and a day to get out of stinking Ravenholm... Anyway, in the real world, things are pretty interesting. I've found out that racketball is really popular among the other Fast Track Calculus students, which is awesome, because I'm a big fan of the game myself. I played for a few hours today, and had a blast with it. It's nice to be off of the island, because some of the people here are a lot better than my old racketball contacts. I'm still pretty much undefeated, unless you count a pity match I gave a kid after winning three in a row before that (I literally gave him some of my points). Anyway, weeks 2 and 3 have seen considerably easier homework assignments. Last week I was finishing up around ten at night, which I considered a godsend after the long amounts of time I had to stay up for the first week. This week is only two days in, but both days have seen us finishing up some time around three or four in the afternoon. I'm enjoying the free time- I swap it out between playing sports, cards, and Half Life 2... and correcting a few homework assignments. For some reason, they don't like my variable names here. I generally name them "one," "two," "three," etc. Works fine for me, because there's a series of steps that I have to take that stick in my head each time I do a problem, but they apparently bork everyone else up when they look through my code. I'm gonna have to start being more creative. Anyway, today has another interesting footnote. Anybody know who the Indianapolis Colts are? They're a professional (American) football team, and are all paid ridiculous amounts of money to play the sport. Anyway, they do what constitutes Summer Training on the Rose-Hulman campus, which we were originally bummed about (go figure, nobody who's into Calculus cares about professional sports teams), but now find awesome. Sure, they have half of the dining hall curtained off so that we can't even see them. Sure, they took over more than half of the parking lot. Sure, we can't use all of the gym at any given time because they're almost always in there. Sure, they make fun of us while we play racketball if they happen to be walking by the massage tables. But you know what? We get all of their leftover food the day after. Dinner tonight consisted of our choice of the usual hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches and the like (which some fools still chose), turkey legs covered in barbeque sauce that were about two-and-a-half feet long and six inches in diameter, or lobster tail. Day-old, sure, but it's freaking lobster tail and massive, prehistorically-large turkey legs. I had one of the turkey legs (I'm from Florida- lobster's not that big of a deal) and had to stop halfway through- there was that much meat. I gave a man award to Jack Pringle, wo managed to polish off a lobster tail and a full turkey leg, plus a side of broccoli, all by himself. Anyway, that's what's going on. Hope you're all doing well.

So I'm still alive, and I got my laptop (else I'd not be able to write this to you). Fast Track Calculus is a lot like an analogy. Okay, that made no sense, but oh well. Presently it's Friday night. We're not allowed to do homework for all of Friday afternoon, because we spend the whole of the week (and a large chunk of the weekend) working on it. It's very, very intense- we've gotten through everything that Calc I would have consisted of if we were going through college. That's a quarter's worth of work compressed neatly into five days of hell. The day goes a lot like this: 1) Go to bed (optional.) (You're still up after midnight working on homework. Five or six folks had to pull all-nighters last night). 2) Wake up at around 7:00 in the morning. 3) drag yourself over to the dining hall to eat breakfast and hopefully contact your mouth with your spoon or fork. 4) Go to class. Get lectured at. Do homework. Get lectured at some more. Do some more homework. 4) Go to the dining hall for lunch. 5) Come back to the classroom to continue working on homework. 6) Go to problem sessions, where you find out how you did on the previous night's/this morning's homework. 7) Work on homework some more. Go to dinner. 9) Come back to the dorm hall. Continue doing homework. Repeat Despite that, I've been having some fun. There are 53 other Fast Track students, some of whom are international. Simon, Yile, and Victoria, all of whom are from different parts of China, are all some of the nicest people I've ever met- and that includes the Midwesterners here, who have a reputation for ridiculous levels of politeness. Everyone here is easy to get along with, and the mutual suffering of staying up until three or so in the morning and needing them to help you with your homework (and them needing you to help them with their homework) builds bonds quickly. There are a few folks who I don't particularly enjoy the company of (personality lacking, or else just obnoxious (Moreso than me,even!)) but not to the point where I can't work with them, or actually dislike/hate them. Like I said- the work is intense... and Maple 13 (our calculus program that we have to use for all of our homework) is rather evil. I've renamed it "Bitchweed 13," as it doesn't remind me of a Maple tree in the least, but more of a weed... combined with a swearword that won't upset too many people. The assignments have thus far varied from 23 problems- the first assignment- to 51 problems (our weekend assignment). It doesn't sound that bad, but a typical problem has three parts, so multiply everything by about three and you have a slightly better estimate of the workload. And keep in mind that you're projecting vectors onto one another, finding the equations of planes, optimizing stuff, etc. Oh, yes- and fighting Maple code to make it actually plot your stuff for you. But it's going to be worth it- 20% done. I'll probably try to post regularly on Friday nights (after I've contacted my family for what promises to be a weekly catch-up conversation), but no promises. Hope everyone's doing well. -Tofu

Just in case any of you want to make plans to spend more time on the end Internet as a result of this, I'll go ahead and let you all know that tomorrow I head off to college for the Fast Track Calculus program, which will likely occupy a significant chunk of my time for the next five weeks, leaving me effectively on hiatus for the next month-and-some-change. That may or may not change depending upon how tough the course work is/if I'm still as good at Calculus as I used to be, but we'll see. I'm all packed, I broke up with my girlfriend (not as awkward as I'd expected it would be, as she'd had the same thoughts), and all that's left to do is wake up in five hours and head for Indiana. So goodbye for now, guys. It's been a pleasure. - Tofu

I saw harry Potter 6 last night, at the midnight showing. As always, the book trumps the movie- there's no getting around that. To date, only the first and second movies stayed almost completely accurate, but oh well. That being said, the sixth film was well done. As six was my favorite book, I was disappointed for every element they left out, but I understand that some of it had to be left out. Other bits seemed foolish to do. Scenes that, in the book, consisted of, "Let's throw on the invisibility cloak and spy on this conversation!" were replaced in the movie by "Let's go through an elaborate scene where we hide behind walls to eavesdrop on other people's conversations!" That was just plain silly, especially considering the cloak's importance when we get to the seventh installment. Some spoilers follow, so hi-light if you want them. I particularly enjoyed the Quidditch scenes. After a conspicuous absence from the last three movies, this was Quidditch in full, brutal color, much like I always envisioned it being in the books. Very well done, and ace stuff, even if it only lasts for a few minutes. I also enjoyed how they did Ron's love scenes with Lavender Brown. It's such magnificent, over-the-top tomfoolery that it really makes you fall over laughing. Sadly, I can't claim that it's over-the-top, as it's completely and totally believable for teenagers to act that way. Less impressive was the chemistry thing between Harry and Ginny. That didn't feel the way it did in the book at all- from the first scene where you saw them together, they were already looking at one another too meaningfully, and there were too many, "Ooo, lovey dovey" scenes. A similar note of contention for me came from the character of Snape. He wasn't pulled off with his usual flair, and the foreshadowing that the directors forced in was, well, forced. He constantly seems indecisive about his Death Eater role, with making the Unbreakable Vow, and with Killing Dumbledore. In the book, he's completely cool, calm, and seemingly rational for all of those scenes, which makes it more of a shock when he turns out to be a good guy at the end of seven., acting on Dumbledore's orders to kill the old man. Further, his character didn't get as much mention of motives as it should have. His role in delivering the prophecy to Voldemort ought to have been mentioned, at a bare minimum. But, like I said, despite all of my complaints (and mind you, these are fan-boy complaints) it's still a very good movie, and worth seeing. Maybe not worth going at midnight on the night of release, but oh well. You live and you learn. And, if you haven't already, you read the books.

You are riding on a beautiful white horse. On your left side is a drop off. On your right side are several ostriches being chased by a lion. In front of you are four large gazelles that won't get out of your way and you can't seem to overtake them. Behind you is a stampede of horses. What must you do to get out of this highly dangerous situation? Answer: Get your drunk @$$ off the Merry-Go-Round!

Based on a true story.

So now that Mad's back in working order, we can return this thread to the all-important original subject: Me! (Kidding, of course) But on a related note, I used my graduation present from my parents last night, and went to see an AC/DC tribute band live. It was impressive, to say the least. I was apprehensive about whether or not they'd be able to find anyone who could do the legendary voice of AC/DC (the show was entitled "Back in Black.") They performed the entire album, from Hells Bells clear through to Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution, took a break, and returned to do the "greatest hits." Those included Highway to Hell, Let There be Rock, Girl's Got Rhythm, Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, and a few others which, sadly, I didn't recognize. Still, they sounded rather epically awesome for every single song, and the lead singer had the voice pretty much nailed. I think they had a little bit of a backup track (there was one disembodied scream partway through the show), but even if they did, they performed excellently. Four guitars, one set of drums, and one singer- it worked. And all of the guitarists started doing some of the signature guitarist dances in the middle of the show. Heehee- it was awesome!

What was racist in Phantom Menace? The face that they had a black dude as chief of security shooting folks, or that the main bad guy was an alien who had either red or black skin? I didn't spot anything "racist" in any of the Star Wars films, unless you want to count that only one black guy managed to make it out of the series alive (Lando)... or maybe that there are next to no Asian people in the series.

I'm sure your group was up there, LLF. And still- you got to visit Cairo! I'll bet that was a pretty awesome experience, eh?