Jahled

Just a quicky Scathe dude, but just because humans have the ability to think and thus create concepts such as a divine creator or whatever, and that most of them don't have the luxory of time to truely explore with this ability to think, this very belief system; it doesn't mean the majority are right does it? Of all the evangelical preachers who reap-in millions of dollers healing people and other wise performing miracles, I never seen or seen any documentation of one regenerating a lost limb. And outside of the mind what would be the differance?

*curses dial up connection*

I'm actually of the belief that in the three prequals we get to see the 'evolution' of advanced fighter design, and it is skewed to prototype TIEs. Look at the fighters in RotS, especially in the opening battle. The clones are in what looks like prototype X-Wings, especially with the 'lock wings,' command, whilst our two Jedi are in unmistakable early TIEs; the wing design, and the front view port. This along with comments from Imperials in a New Hope, like 'they're nothing but antiques,' lends belief that in George Lucas's mind that the TIE was a far superior fighter. You have to ignore the expanded universe, which GL has completely ignored, to see this though I guess...

The problem is that the expanded universe was allowed to grow so foolishly. A simple comment from Ben about a TIE fighter has made all Imperial starfighters by definition crap in the expanded universe, and for the crapest of logical reasons. Figure: Yay squadron, you're of to face the mighty rogue squadron today, you've no shields, no hyperdrive, in fact no real estimatime of surviving, SO GOOD LUCK! Sort of works in the long run for a galactic empire.

Completely nicked of the web: http://www.dukeofprunes.co.uk/weebuggers/knifethug.gif Death to...errr...kittens... EDIT: Where is Lord_La_Forge?

Goodish post. But: Well the first thing that's sort of in your face is in one of the Infinities comic books Yoda plunges a Death Star into Coruscant there-by killing billions of people, and dare i mention what would realy happen, the enitre planet... sooo, not so a wise Jedi Master concerned about life etc. In general, my personal belief is that the various comic interpretations of the Star Wars saga are simply pathetic; from glory boy Rogue Squadron-kill-at every-panel-without-appropriate-losses, to the the shear grandiour of the crap that is Dark Empire... Just my own own five pence...

12/10. The exact point, and why should western society be tolerant of Muslims marching through places like where I live like London chanting 'Death to Freedom.' Islam needs to calm down a bit. And get it's own house in order. Again, no Hindus or Slavs making prats of themselves shouting loudly where I am at least.

Thousands were evacuated from Ethiopia to Isreal during the 1980's by the Isreali's as 'one of their tribes,' or what not, but I don't know any!* The fact that the entire Christian ethos is based on the fact that Jesus was originally a Jew doesn't enter your scope? So the quote: Thanks for the link btw, I had forgotten how much rap singer's ego's bore me... *Given I live in the UK

I know nothing about the Rolling Stone issue you refer to, so I guess the final line of you post is in somehow related to the story. But the final line deeply disturbs me... perhaps a fluffy link to enlighten me past what could be blatent racism might be in order dude!

It's Deep Thought having a think...

I like Photoshop. That's a method I didn't know about and looks like it's much quicker than playing about with opacity levels in PS and saving them as seperate images. Top tip Mad!

Yes, that is brilliant.

Chairman Mao got rid of the lower status of women, about the only positive thing that has come out of his communist ideology...

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y214/liquidbrilliant/mrm.jpg

Yep! Each frame can have a unique frame-rate.

Yay and woo DC!

I seem to remember on the last two occassions the Chinese head of state visited London Tony Blair did his best to make him feel very welcome. The last time the Chinese delegation stayed at Buckingham Palace with the Queen with all the pomp and splendor that entails, and the previous time human rights protesters were airbrushed out of the picture by the police. I think China is economically to important for our economies to risk offending. It's also one of the five permenant members of the security council, which is about the only real power of the United Nations.

I tend to broadly agree with roughly what that article is on about, like the destruction of those two Buddhist stutues by the Taliban, which were a priceless legacy of ancient civilization, but given even the Iranians viewed the Taliban as fanatics, I think we can safely assume that they are. I'm struggling to see any other faith in the world today yelling and shouting so loudly about this or that in the faith's name as if it agrieved or wronged by this or that, as if everybody else has to tip toe around it adjusting their way of life and societies to suit Islam. I can't recall the last time Buddhists took to the streets waving banners in protest because someone made a saterical cartoon of Lord Buddha.

Beat you to it M dude! Aghaa! Of all the questions to ask on a Sunday Scathe!! Ok. Let's make an animated of Leia smoking a fag. I'm going to guide you through this using Photoshop and then Image Ready. Virtually all the work is done in Photoshop. We use Image Ready to animate our gif. It's just like regular film, all a trick of the eye. First off we need a source picture. I found this one of Leia lurking on my HD. Open it up in Photoshop: >Image>adjustments>auto levels >auto contrast >auto colour If you think any of the subsequent adjustments are to dramatic you can fade the adjustment by going to Edit>fade auto level or whatever. Next step,find a picture of a fag and copy and paste it in to the Leia picture.You will see in your Layer window in Photoshop you now have the fag as 'Layer 1.' You can adjust how the fag is proportioned by going to Edit>Transform>skew (or whatever-the options should be obvious). Give it some simple blur as well depending on the contrast of the fag picture's source. Leia now has a fag in her mouth. Cool, or bad, depending on your stance on smoking, but this is a galaxy far,far awar right, plus she's a slave in Jabba's court, and is probably bored out of her mind. But anyway. Next step: Layer>new layer. We want to creat a third layer inwhich to create a smoke effect, because if we didn't have any smoke there wouldn't be an animated gif and this tutorial would be pointless.Whilst in this third layer use the rectangular marquee tool to create a reasonably thick rectangle just above the tip of the fag running up the length of the picture.Edit>Fill>50% Gray This body of gray in our third layer is going to be our smoke. Put it at about 80% opacity, a descent amount of gaussian blur(Filter>Blur>Gaussian blur)and smoke ripple distortion(Filter>distort>ripple) It now more or less looks like smoke. Save for web as something like Leia_fag_01. This is our first frame of our gif. I reckon we'll need about five or six or so to create our visual illusion. Filter>Distort>ripple (again, or shortcut Control F). The smoke has moved. Save for web as Leia_fag_02, and repeat this process about six times saving each subsequent change. You can also play around with variations of motion blur and gaussian blur, but try to keep it as undramatic as possible!)If you think each variation of the ripple isn't strong enough you can adjust it's strength in the ripple menu. Right, we're done with Photoshop with our seven saved Leia_fag_ pictures saved somewhere sensible like our desk top. Open Image Ready and open all of your Leia_fag pictures up. Grab the first one and in the animation window click the arrow and click New Frame as many times as Leia pictures you made.You'll see duplicates appearing of the first Leia_fag picture. Go to the second Leia picture you made, click the arrow and press Copy frame. Go back to the first Leia picture click the arrow and press Paste frame with the second frame highlighted. You'll see the second picture pasted in. Repeate this process with all your pictures. If you now click play you'll see some simple animation. Yay! It's a bit manic though, as if the smoke is on steroids, so we need to slow the frame speed down. Under each picture frame you'll see it's time; adjust this to 0.2 seconds. We are done. Go to the Optimize Window and use these basic settings: Gif, selective, no dither, lossy:0, 256 colours, gif 128 no dither, and save optimized as Leia_fag. You can preview your gif in your browser to see how it looks btw, and also check out it's file size. As a rule of thumb 200kb should be absolute max for most gifs, multi-megabyte gifs are utterly pointless. Use flash instead. I got mine at 30kb. All done! Make yourself a cup of tea and sit back to admire your gif. http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e253/Jahled/leia_fag.gif

Sadly I think you're right. Their economic clout is simply to huge to take an implacable moral stance and not trade with them. China has gone through dramatic changes than even the China of ten years ago, perhaps democracy will evolve.

No broadband. But I will offer to make the winner a lovely banner for their signiture... It could say something like: "2006 Rebellion tournament winner" sort of thing

Oops! I hadn't thought of that! I assumed the google.cn server thingy would be within the great Chinese firewall... You must admit dude that the fundermental differences in the nature of the search results are black and white! The free world gets the site of a massacre, whilst the Chinese, protected by their firewall, get a lovely square... sort of thing. I forgot to also point out that he's my oldest mate and it's the sort of thing that is mentioned when you ask someone how are things going over the course of several hours when you haven't met someone for roughly a year. That is simply how things are done in the business world over there! I seem to remember a sentiment that Hong Kong would change China when handed back to the mainland and not the other way round. It looks as if Communism is evolving into a free-market economy; let's hope the respect for human rights can catch up!

His mum and mine met in the meternity ward, and we've been life long friends. I haven't mentioned his name, and will not. And googling 'Jahled' will get you nowhere. His business undertakings and my interest in Star Wars are sort of completely seperate...

Here's something to try: Do a google search for Tiananmen Square, you should get roughly 1,750,000 results. Now do it on http://www.google.cn and you get 13,600. Yay for good ol'google, especially after they made such a song and dance about being principled not so long ago. My last note: My mate lives in Beijing and owns a business. Last year he forked out over $20,000 in bribes, gifts, and backhanders, because that's how things are done over there. To get there flat they had to give a party official a top of the range TV by way of a gift...

The one's I made were in the early days of me using Image Ready, and I hadn't really sussed out that a 350 kb file is a little large for a promotional gif... I don't where the one's I made are anymore either....