January 20th, 2009
I didn’t openly publicise the platform game I’ve been working on recently, though I did put it on my Projects page. Basically, Puff is a video game to go with the comic book I’m working on. After spending time playing Sonic games, I just had an overwhelming urge to play around with Game Maker. Playing around turned into utter smittenness. Therefore, I present to you the first tech demo of Puff!
Puff! First Tech Demo on Yoyo Games
If you install their player, you don’t even have to download and run it locally. Unfortunately, it only works with Windows.
The controls are: keyboard arrow buttons for left and right movement. Up arrow for flying upward, down arrow for ducking while on the ground. Space bar for flame breath attack, Enter for pause, Esc for Exit Game.
Do let me know what you think of it! It took a lot of work to get it the way it is (I had to develop controls, attacks, object behaviour, even where to stop falling – let alone all the different graphics for character poses and tiles. Game Maker is NOT for the faint of heart!).
Tags: comics, Projects, Puff
Posted in Projects, Puff | No Comments »
January 18th, 2009
Awful hacking business aside, I got into the NEIS program, meaning on the 27th of January I am to begin my six week course to build my business plan. If I pass, I will then be funded about $450 a fortnight for 12 months while I get my business earning profits, and in the meantime I can still be working part time at Woolworths!
And as well as that, on Thursday morning I obtained my full driver’s licence! This means I no longer need my green P plates, plus my BAC is allowed to be above zero (I can eat a liqueur chocolate if I want, or have a beer a couple of hours before driving), I have more points on my licence and I can drive up to 110km/h (speed limit controlled, obviously). Oh, and my licence lasts five years before I need to renew it. Hurray!
Tags: ambition, driving, goals, Projects, Work
Posted in Personal News, Projects, Web Design and Development | No Comments »
January 18th, 2009
So I discovered tonight that my host, Servage was hacked, with nasty code of some sort added to each index.php page I have. My first indication came yesterday, when I was in my NEIS interview. My interviewer loaded my portfolio and tried to access Parallelax, my webcomic. It failed to load. So this evening I went to investigate. Turns out that the code the hack inserted declared some function twice, which crashed the PHP. I am glad of that, since it allowed me to find this out.
I’m really, really pissed off at this. I trusted Servage for security, but it can be so easily hacked on such a wide scale?? I feel that I should take my business elsewhere…
Tags: Hackers, Internet, Websites
Posted in Internet, Personal News, Web Design and Development | 1 Comment »
January 12th, 2009
Shark Attacks Snorkeller at Windang
Close to home much? I live one suburb away.
There goes any desire I had to go to the beach this summer…
Tags: News, oh crap, summer
Posted in Personal News, World News | No Comments »
January 9th, 2009
Today, I signed up for NEIS, as well as its prerequisite, Newstart Allowance; the same dole I was on when I first returned from my travels. But it was a means to an end. The New Enterprise Incentive Scheme is funding for a year as well as a six week course in business planning.
So, this is the biggest step I’ve taken this far into making my Web Design Business. It’s terrifying, to tell the truth. But, I’m okay for now.
I’ve been kind of pushed along by my Dad, which I have mixed feelings about. Time will tell if I am ready or not to go through with this. For now, I still feel like a directionless child. I’m thinking it’s psychological, because I know intellectually that I am pretty mature and capable. I guess it’s just my past motivational issues coupled with my huge problem with people. I’m just crap at talking to people… for the reasons detailed on yesterday’s post about teasing. Yes, primary school people that teased me, it’s largely your fault I am this way. I trace most of my problems back to school years 3-6. The kids at Laguna Street absolutely vilified me. I was one of the major targets, besides Chris and Cameron. I never knew what I could have possibly done to invite such relenteless teasing. But I digress.
So, I’ll obviously continue to update you on developments. The next stage for NEIS is an interview, and I’m supposed to hear from them in the next few days. If I don’t get through, I may actually be a little relieved. But, it’s not like I want to stay working ten hours a week at Woolworths.
Also, last night I came up with the name “Site Flight Web Design”. I wanted to tie it in with an owl motif, since I collect owls and all. So “Site Flight” is the best I’ve come up with so far.
I’m not going to ask for suggestions (if I can’t even think of a name I’m pretty useless), but I would like to know what you think of it.
Tags: Projects, Work
Posted in Projects, Web Design and Development | No Comments »
January 8th, 2009
Ah yes, it felt like I’d never left. Unfortunately.
That’s right, today I went back to work for the first time since I broke my foot, back on the last Friday of November. I was given the all clear for my foot on the fifth. It, however, has s ome discomfort now that I have been on it for work. It’s a slight worry, but the doc said it would heal itself. It’s been near on six weeks now, which is how long it was supposed to take, but clearly it hasn’t healed entirely yet. It’s not really posing a problem, though.
I guess this kind of hails the end of my good times. Well, I don’t want to think of it that way. I should think of it more as “back to the routine”. The past week or two has been pretty lazy for me. I have spent a lot of time playing Sonic games. An unhealthy amount of time, even. I have also been spending a lot of time browsing the forums of Sonic Retro, as I came across their Sonic 2 HD project, which looks utterly tasty. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is the first game I ever loved. It started while watching my eldest sister Kelly’s boyfriend (and now husband) Glen playing it on his Sega Mega Drive. The Sonic 2 HD project will be the same wonderful game, just with updated, beautiful graphics which are based faithfully on the original sprites, just High Definition. Example:
Forgive my geekitude, but I just CAN’T WAIT for them to make this game. Despite my current projects, I’m toying with the idea of contributing, if I can get their “uber” art style down.
Anyway, that’s it from the world of Natalie today.
Tags: broken bones, sonic, time off, Work
Posted in Medical, Personal News, Projects | No Comments »
January 8th, 2009
Reported in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph: New research has found playful teasing develops social skills.
Just what the kids needed, a new reason to be a bully. Just where is the line between “playful teasing” and bullying anyway?
I am pretty much the opposite of what this article describes.
New research has found playful teasing, and being called names such as “ranga”, could be good for young people because it helps them bond and develop social skills.
Not in my case. From my experiences, I may never be able to “bond” with anybody beyond distant friendship.
It may even make “victims” more likely to take on leadership roles in the long term.
Again, not in my case. I have terrible anxiety now. Leadership? Never. I will do what others ask of me grudgingly, but I can never tell others what to do. It is part of my problems that I can never let anybody see me as authoritative for fear that it will translate as seeming mean or unlikeable.
“They learn how to respond to playful criticism … that can be useful in later life,” she said, adding that teased kids could end up in leadership roles – and became strong enough to come back with witty comments.
My response to any kind of criticism? Offense. Embarrassment. Shame. Blow to my self esteem. Takes me right back to my days in the playground. Intellectually, I can tell what kind of criticism it is and how I should respond, but I just don’t.
This is terrible advice. This article is dangerous. Really, really dangerous. Take it from me, I am utterly effed up.
Tags: bullying, News, research, teasing
Posted in World News | No Comments »
January 4th, 2009
Me and my computer have had our ups and downs. It started when I bought it. My first mistake was buying a Dell. Now, I have come to love this Inspiron 1501 notebook, but it is a conditional love. It seems like Dell make their AC Adapters intentionally bad quality. I’ve already been through two official ones, two eBay ones, and finally I have one I bought from a website which seems the best quality of the lot, and it’s not even Dell branded (though it somehow miraculously works with this computer – more than I can say for the second adapter I got after about 8 months of use). Anyway, when I first bought it, it came with Windows Vista Home Edition. Worst operating system I’ve used since Windows 3.0. Blech. So I “downgraded” to Windows XP after a week. After that there were some debacles with the AC Adapters, and basically the hinge of the computer is stuffed. It’s coming apart at the side, though I admit I didn’t use it carefully.
I was playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles on it earlier, and I paused it to go with my sister to buy a new computer (more on that shortly). When I returned, it was off. I picked it up and tried turning it back on. The light popped on and I heard the fan start, then it switched off immediately after that. It felt hot. Really, really hot. I don’t know what the Genesis emulator did to it, but it was really overheated. I was worried, and let it sit for a while. Fortunately, once cool, it worked again. Better that it powered off instead of melting something, I suppose. But, it scared me quite a bit. I don’t want to lose this computer in the way I lost my IBM a couple of years ago. That one developed a design flaw that caused the monitor to go blank, and when my uncle was tinkering with it, it died completely. I was just lucky that I had backed up the hard drive when the bug first started to make the screen intermittently go blank.
So, anyway, I went with Allyson today to Harvey Norman, and she bought an Asus Eee PC for her next trip – she is going to America to be maid of honour in her friend’s wedding in San Diego.
It is a 7.8 inch (I think) netbook that runs some version of Linux. It’s really user friendly (well, once we got over problems with the wi-fi), and came with OpenOffice.org, Skype and Firefox already installed. I think it is excellent! But I can’t believe my sister got Linux before me!
Oh well. Anyway, it’s been an interesting day. Now I need to spend my evening working on my comic, which I haven’t been doing, instead procrastinating with Sega games (I got Hyper Sonic in S3&K, that’s got to count for something!). My nephew Jake is eager to read it once I’m done, so I have to make it, if only for him.
Tags: computer, glitch, laptop, linux, netbook
Posted in Personal News | No Comments »
December 31st, 2008
Winner’s badge I created.I got stuck into it nice and early today, and I’m proud to say that the first draft of my first ever novel, is now complete! Exactly in the timeframe I was shooting for, too.
The grand total word count is 121,601, at least according to yWriter. This is an incredible milestone. Not long ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed I could actually pull something like this off. I thought I was far too lazy to keep chipping away at something so enormous. And yet, I did 121k in just two months.
Now, by all accounts, the best thing to do is let a fresh batch of novel cool for at least a month before starting on the editing. It makes sense, because I view my current novel as a piece of crap not worth touching right now anyway. In a month or so, I will be able to view it objectively and edit it as such. I’ve never edited a story before (presumably why I was always marked badly in creative writing at school), so I’ll be borrowing a book about it from the library. I have the gist of what I should be doing, but mainly plotwise. The quality of writing, I will likely need help with to some extent. Probably one of my biggest pitfalls is that I don’t read much fiction. It’s pretty good for originality (no plagiarism from me), but very bad for sentence construction, ideas for similes and metaphors, dialogue, that kind of thing. I think I did a decent job for someone who read The Mists of Avalon by Marion Bradley a few years ago, then didn’t pick up a single piece of fiction until midway through November this year (I read Playing For Keeps by Mur Lafferty, by the way).
But anyway, it’ll still be quite some time before this novel is ready for the public eye. But I will keep you updated.
Tags: drafts, NaNoFiMo, NaNoWriMo, Projects, writing
Posted in Drawing the Line, Novels, Projects | No Comments »
