Cheap gaming

50 cent per hour. 

What is a good price for a game? For some people 60 € is fine, for others its outrageously expensive. I tend to lean towards the "too expensive" group of people. Which doesn't mean I wouldn't buy a game right away if I'm really curious or hyped about it.What can I say, the flesh is weak.

History however has thaught me that such behavior can go both ways. Either the game is what you expected and super cool (Starcraft 2), or its a total miss (No man's sky).

But when do you know if the price is worth it? For me I did a little research last week and checked the prices I payed for my games and the amount of hours that I spend on them. Fallout 4 for example would be 103 hours and I payed 25 € for it. On the other hand, Torchlight 2 only has 5 hours , but I only wasted 3.79 € on that one. Also, I spend a shamefull 339 hours on Minecraft. At least the time that has been kept in the statistics, I'm sure I've spend more on it but the data just got lost over time.

This gives me (price / time played = €per hour)

• Fallout: 0.24 € per hour
• Subnautica: 0.09 € per hour
• Torchlight 2: 0.75 € per hour
• No man's sky: 0.71 € per hour 
• Minecraft: 0.03 € per hour

After having done that with all my games I came to the conclusion that I have an average of 0.50 € per hour for the games that I have. Thus in the future, whenever I want to buy a game I'll just ask the following question. 

"How long do you expect to play this game?"

With that in mind I can see if the time played and the price that they offer comes close to the 0.50€/h. If it doesn't then the price is not good enough yet.

This has of course the odd effect that I don't play games when they are fresh from the AAA oven. But at least I won't burn my fingers because I'm wearing the mittens of patience.

A lot of gamers might think its strange not to play a game as soon as its released, but I find this technique to be very beneficial for me. I'm not saying its good for the companies, oh no, I'm the worst customer they can have.
But whenever I buy a game a few years later I'll end up with a product that has all its bugs fixed, probably has some free DLC in it, there'll be walkthroughs all over the net and of course its cheap as hell.

A fine example for this would be Fallout 3, it was released in 2008, yet I only bought it last week. It was the fair price of 10 € and having checked average playtimes of people I got 0.08€ per hour for this game. As this is well below the 0.50€/h benchmark it was ok to get this game. Especially because there were no bugs left, and all the DLC was already included.

All I have to do is play this game for at least 20 hours to get my 50cent, and heck that's the easy part.

Perspective

Like the good old times

A few days or weeks ago I started working on a drawing type that I had not used in years. Its made in a style that throws out any rule of perspective and can be best related to the isometric graphics style used in older games.
Back then they didn't have strong 3D engines and a lot of the games used this type of style. Me being a joyfull gamer, back then and still today, got inspired by those types of level designs.

Although its not realisticly correct, it does give you a kind of freedom to show more than you would normally be able to show. In my older drawings I usually didn't add any people, for this one I didn't bother either.
The only big problem I had while making it was inspiration. It was rather difficult to come up with an idea for the stage. Even now I feel like I should have added more details to some of the places. Too many times did I use a cheap trick to fill up empty spaces.
Whenever I had a wall I added either a piece of wood as support for the building or just painted the texture of a brick wall. Its a simple way to fill up empty space and you don't have to come up with new ideas to draw.

Most of it was drawn during my lunchbreak at work. Which of course turned a head once in a while. Its only recently that I started making sketches again during my lunchbreak. Mostly because I have the time to do so. A few years ago I had 45 minutes to eat food and draw, but when I moved to a new shop it changed to 30 minutes. Which is fine for eating food, but not enough to really get into a drawing. But as of late we got those 45 minutes again and I figured it was time again to roll out the pencils. Just got to make sure I don't eat any of them.

btw, can you see the C&S, it stands for "Clothes and Stuff".

Scary stuff

Sometimes life can really mess with your head

You can't say that I'm a superstitious person, but I do know some of the habbits out there. Basic stuff like, don't walk under a ladder, or the four-leaf clover. Little meaningless stuff, created by old cultures. Me on the other hand, I'm more of a science guy. Whenever people come to me with scary stories or odd things happening, my first thought will wonder towards the scientific explanation. Be it hallucinating fungi, rats running in walls or simply just people playing tricks on you.

All that being said however, the mind is a powerfull tool that can really mess with you.

For example:

A few nights back I went to bed at my usual hour, much later than the responsible grown ups sleepy time. I had set my alarm for the next day and left the real world for dreamland. Then during the glorious hour of 1:33, i.e. the middle of the night, my alarm went off. That's 1:33 am for people not using the 24 hour thingy.

The beeping noise woke me up and I rushed my hand towards my phone. Eventhough I had just woken up I knew this wasn't the time for my alarm to go off. After checking the time I was wondering what the hell was wrong with my phone, because I knew for sure I had not chosen that time to go off. It seemed very odd that my phone would pick a random hour to go off.

Strike one..

Confused I turned around and tried to go to sleep again, thinking it was a one time thing. However, what I did not realise at the time was that in my haste I had pressed snooze instead of turning the alarm off. So, at 1:38, five glorious minutes later my alarm started beeping again. Now remember, in my mind the alarm was turned off and there wasn't a single reason for it to go off a second time. I rushed up and slammed the button multiple times while in my mind I was thinking, "what the fuck is going on here".
Still sleepy and not thinking straight I was getting a bit worked up. Its kinda like when you just wake up in the morning and that pile of clothes looks like a person or dog sitting in your room and you think, "how did he get in here?". I was at the same stage right now, half awake, wondering what ghost was haunting my phone and by God if it went off a third time I would freaking move out of the house.

Strike two..

For some reason however I was able to fall asleep again with very little effort, but then came the dream I had. In hindsight its very logical I dreamt this because my mind was already set for haunted things, but let me tell you what happend.
In the dream I was doing some random stuff, going to the store to buy some bread, but there wasn't any bread left anymore so I stood there for a second thinking I should just go home again. Right when I was about to turn around I heard a voice wishpering from behind me. A silent, whispering, ghostly voice right next to my ear softly calling out to me. "Stiiijjjjjn" (for the english people it would sound like "Stan", but long "Staaaaaan")

I woke up the second I heard that voice and actually said out loud in the middle of my room "What the fuck!" Now I was really fucked up and I turned on all lights (which luckily I was able to do because the lightswitches are right next to my bed) and prepared myself to check under the bed for monsters. While carefully pulling away the sheet I already kept in mind what object to grab first in case I actually encounted something. The space underneath my bed was clear, which was a huge relief.

Strike three.

Luckily that was the last thing that happend that night, but my mind was going crazy with scary stuff and I did not go to sleep for the next hour, I refused to. I kept the lights on, pulled the sheets a bit higher over me and took my tablet with me to browse some of the funny sites. Only an hour or so later I was back to my normal self and was I able to realise the sillyness of the situation. The rest of the night however was very short because I had to wake up for the early shift at work. Needless to say I was a bit tired the next day.

After that odd night I can say that I did not move out, even though I had three strikes. Strike three and two are just silly things that my mind turned into something far scarier than they actually were, but that's what happens when you wake up in the night and your mind isn't fully awoken.

However, I have not yet found an explanation for my phone going off in the middle night...

Look at me adulting

The beauty of adulting

Today I went to the supermarket and bought myself two brooms, one to sweep the dust of the floor and another to clean the floor with water. People in the street probably thought to themselves. "Well there go's a man who wants to keep his house all tight and clean. A real responsible adult."

Truth be told however, I haven't used a broom for quite some time. I have a vacume cleaner, and when I want to clean the floor with water and soap I actually do it by hand, and not with a broomstick. Seems kinda oldfashioned, but its a good workout.

The real reasone why I bought these two brooms has nothing to do with cleaning. Far from it actually.

During lunch I was reading one of the magazines my collegues had brought to work and in it was a comic about the things you could do during a lazy summer vacation. You know, things like picknicks and breakfast in bed, that kinda stuff.  One of the options was to build a fort in the living room and watch movies in it.

From the moment I saw that example I knew in my heart, nay in my soul, that I had to do that. So, all day long I was thinking about how I could build the perfect fort in my home, but then I realised I didn't have a broomstick. As many of you people might know, the broomstick is the foundation of a good coughfort. Luckily for me, my local supermarket actually sells brooms. After work I made a quick stop there and got me two of them floorsweapers. The second I was home I started the construction works.

I had to move the sofa a bit to the side and needed to pile up some of my lego containers to build a support for my brooms. Sadly one of the brooms wasn't long enough to bridge the gap so I had to get creative with a tube I had. But in the end I was able to put everything up. All that was left was to fill up the camp with fluffies.

"Being an adult allows you to do things you wanted to do as a kid without a grown up trying to stop you."

Because I am a child in spirit I already had a giant crocodile fluff and some other soft stuff that I could put in the fort. After some finetuning I had the perfect resting space for me after a hard days work. My first plan had me put a projector inside the tent to watch movies, but in practise it would be difficult to pull it off. That idea was scratched, and I'll stick to making sketches in the tent and maybe reading books in it. Depending how long I'll keep it standing.

For now I'm happy with the cozyness it provides and the childlike nostalgia it represents.

Music all the way

In memory of my old MP3-player 28/06/2010 - 03/04/2017  

Yesterday I bought myself a new MP3-player. The old one had a malfunction with the sound socket. Sadly I had to get a new one, but its years of service will not be forgotten.

Whenever one of my previous MP3-players stopped working properly I tried to do something fancy with them. If I remember correctly I belief the screen of my very first MP3-player stopped working. When you can't see in what part of the menu you are its kinda difficult to properly use the machine. So I changed its function from "portable MP3-player" to "stay at home player/usb stick". It was so long ago it didn't even have a gig of memory, it was still calculated in megabytes.

Yeah, that's a turtle from TMNT, it used to be this mini castle when you opened its shell. I had to burn two holes in the sides to give the cables an accespoint. That way I could still plug it in and put files on it, even listen to the songs if I wanted. But after I had reconstruced this one I quickly got a new player. Can't go out in the open without a machine to ignore the people, aheum, I mean, to listen to music.

That new MP3-player was the shuffle type of machine, so it got changed way faster then anticipated. I think I really missed having a menu to browse through. Also the previous one had a microphone which this one did not have. So after much consideration and because my mouse also had died that day I build me a mouse/usb stick.

Pretty cool stuff, worked like a charm as well. The only sad part is that I have no idea where I put it. Knowing myself I might have thrown it out thinking it was a regular mouse. Then again, I havn't checked my trunk of junk yet.

That trunk of junk includes a shitload of VHS tapes featuring "Married with children", "Teenage mutant ninja turtles", "Buiten de zone" and some cartoons. There's a load of other crap in there, but I honestly have no idea.

Anyway, back to the MP3-player of today. Its soundsocket malfunctioned so I have a new MP3-player, same type only a newer version. I have not yet decided what to do with the old one. Putting it in a dead mouse again would be cool I guess, but it wouldn't be original. Another idea was to get a stuffed animal and put it in there, though I'm not sure if that would be a fire hazard or not. I'll definatly keep it for a while, and I'll keep you posted if I make something fancy with it. 

For now I'll take that new MP3-player and enjoy some of the new songs that got published this week.

Apples

When it comes to big projects I can be the best procrastinator out there. 

Back in 2010 I started the "Apples" project. This was an animation I wanted to make, with fancy sounds and wicked animation. In the end it turned out just basic. But still, I got to finish it, which is pretty amazing for me.

It took me up until 2013 to actually finish it. Most of the basic work had already been done in 2010. Stuff like the storyboard, timing, and even a whole bunch of animation. But then I got to a speed bump where I stopped working on it for a while, but that "while" turned into a few years.

That speedbump was something stupid that I did to myself. I had chosen to put the outlines of the character in different colors. With that I mean that a grey hat would have a darker grey outline, while the purple hair would have a darker shade of purple for its outline.
This of course meant that I had a lot of colors to put down, not only the inside colors, but also the outlines. Let me tell you, putting ten different colors on the outlines for each of the 24 frames in a second adds up to a whole lot of painstakingly slow work.

Being a massive procrastinator, that speedbump made me lose interest in the project. Thus it was only in 2011 that I continued working on the project. However, it could not be helped, again it fell in my folder of projects that I'm still working on and it stayed there for a long time. Apparently I did make two extra frames in 2012.

The real finish was in the summer of 2013. You know that moment where you look at the kitchen sink and you see a pile of dirty dishes, and suddenly you get the feeling its moving, sort of breathing maybe? That moment where you realise you better clean that shit up before you end up calling a biologist with the good news you discovered a new creature.
Yeah, that's the moment I had with my animation as well, I just had to finish it. Most of the work had already been done so it was just a matter of finishing up the last frames of animation and doing some slow repetitive work. So in August I finally uploaded the finished animation on devianart.

Back then I had no idea how to convert .sfw files into video files for youtube. Thanks to my Dailywulfy project of last year I learned of a program on Newgrounds that allows you to transform any flash file into a moviefile. It was a revelation.

Anyways, here you go.

What a world we live in

Looks like I'm not procrastinating right now.

You know those blogs which have died a silent death, but then years later they make a new post and are all like "This is it, from now on I'll post every day and this'll become the best blog EVAR!"? Usually those blogs die off again after that one new post and you'll hear nothing of them again for the rest of eternity.

Yeah..

I'm pretty sure my blog belongs to that group, about 87% chance of it. Nonetheless, it is now time to start ranting. Enjoy.

A good point to start is the following question: "What the hell have I been doing in the past five years?". To awnser that question I could write a whole bunch of posts, explaning in excruciating detail what has happend. But to hell with that, here's the short version.

tl:dr:
Vacation to Canada, brother having a kid, changing work location, living on my own, grandparents died, became godfather of two lovely little buggers and I did a year of making animations every day.

Oh yeah, look at that, its even in chronological order. You can thank my journal for that. Yeah I said it, I have a journal. Not that I use it on a regular basis, far from it. Usually there's a month inbetween the moments I write someting in it. However, I have been using it for the past two decades. Because of that it has accumulated a lot of thoughts, lost mindsets, opinions and ideas. Most of them are as foolish as they are long.

An example: (translated from dutch for your comfort)

A minute ago I was sittinig at my window, looking at the moon. It occured to me that next year or the year after that people might be flying around the moon again, courtesy of SpaceX.  It would be the first time in my life that I could look at the moon and know that I'm not just looking at a dead rock, but also people who are actually there. Wtf.

After that I started looking at the stars and for the first time I realised that around each and every one of those stars there is probably a planet. In the past I only saw stars when I looked at the night sky. But tonight I gazed at the stars and I saw more, in my mind it was not just lonely stars, but stars with a planets floating around it, maybe even more then one planet, heck maybe even a  planet with actual life on it. Its fascinating to look at the sky with this in mind.

  

Its not that I didn't know this before, but with scientist discovering more and more exoplanets lately, the idea becomes more and more realistic. Kinda like a kangaroo, I have never seen a kangaroo in real life, yet science/photo's has shown me that they are real. Just like those planets, I have never seen them, but science has shown me that they are there, floating around those little bright lights in the sky.  

I like that idea, its comforting in a way.

In case that it isn't obvious, I like science. More specifically, I like spaceships, spacetravel and the fact that I live in an era where I might experience a new space revolution. The only sad part about it is that I do not have a degree in rocket sciene and thus I cannot participate in pushing the space science to the next level.

So I'll just sit around here and entertain whoever that reads this blog. I might need to bring some snacks and drinks if I want to keep people interested.

Zodiac stuff

I'm an Aquisces!

For those of you that don't know this, the Zodiac in magazines can be quite annoying when it comes to the date. Its something I have noticed through my 27 years of experience on this planet. My birthday is February 19. This is by wikipedian standards the last day of the Aquarius sign. In some magazines however I noticed that my birthday was in fact the first day of Pisces!

Now you should also know there is this thing called "Cusp" which is a name they have given to the people who are born on the borderlines of the zodiac signs. For my cusp moment you have the period of February 16 to February 26. If I am to belief wikipedia I would be called a Pisarius. Now don't get me wrong, its nice that they gave us a name but really, PISarius?

Luckily for me I didn't know about the existence of these cusps before I created the list below, hell I only discovered about those cusp names because I was doing research for this blogpost. Yes I can be daft sometimes. Belief me or not but when I started making the names like "Aquisces" or "Gemancer" I felt like shakespear, a noobish one at that, but still, I was happy about the names I had created.

All completly original names...


..

1. Aries -> Taurus = Arus 
2. Taurus -> Gemini = Taumini
3. Gemini ->  Cancer = Gemancer
4. Cancer -> Leo = Caleo
5. Leo -> Virgo = Lergo
6. Virgo -> Libra = Vira
7. Libra -> Scorpio = Librio
8. Scorpio -> Sagittarius = Scorius
9. Sagittarius -> Capricorn = Sagicorn
10. Capricorn -> Aquarius = Caprius
11. Aquarius -> Pisces = Aquisces
12. Pisces -> Aries = Piries

With Virgo and Libra I had come to the same conclusion as the original name for it "Vibra", but if you are old enough you may know why I didn't want to use it like that. Vira sounds more feminine and independed. Lergo is exactly the same as the original cusp name, just like Arus. Gemini and Cancer is called a Gemincer by cusp standards, so I only had one letter different on that one.

The mayor trend hower is this. I worked from left to right, but most of the cusp signs work from right to left. I used the first part of the first sign, and the second part of the second sign.  They however used it visa versa, the second part of the first sign, and the first part of the second sign.

(Sagittarius, Capricorn)=Sagicorn
(Sagittarius, Capricorn)=Caprittarius

I'm not really sure why its like that, their technique isn't chronological or in the right reading direction. Unless of course it was made by somebody who read from right to left. I guess they just wanted to be creative.
 
In the end however I like Aquisces way better then Pisarius, first of all because Aquisces sounds more sophiticated, like the word "eloquent". Secondly, because it doesn't start with pis.

Webcomic translations

Why don't we have a wikipedia for webcomic translations?

Last night I was reading some of the webcomics I follow and for some odd reason I also jumped to wikipedia to check something. In some cross reference minded twist I connected these two sites and a hybred was born.

"Wikipedia for webcomics translations"

As of this moment I'm wondering why we don't have that type of site on the net. There are of course the logical reasons about intellectual property, copyrights and some other paperwork stuff like that. But those rules also apply to any of the encyclopedia articles that have been written in the past centuries. Yet we have wikipedia.

So why would it be impossible for an artist to say: "Hey, I don't mind posting my art on this webcomic-wiki. As long as people translate it I'm cool with it." Though some professional artist might dissagree with freely sharing their comic pages, I guess a lot of the lesser known (or cooler professional) artist might enjoy this type of site alot.

One of the other big issues is of course the practical application of such an undertaking. Making a site isn't the problem, but providing the endusers with the right tools to blank out comic pages, or put text in the bubbles in propper and easy way, that is the hard part.

In most cases you'll need extra software like photoshop to blank out the bubbles on the original webcomic. Putting in the text is also a bit tricky with the limited space of the bubbles. Although this slow proces is not impossible it would stop a lot of users because its not as fast and easy as making a new article in wikipedia.

All legal issues, artists restraints and technological issues put aside, I think it would be a splendid idea to have this type of wiki. I checked the internet and only found one or two sites that are involved in this type of practise. One of the sites "comic influx" has translations available but not on the comic pages themselves. Only as text next to a cover image of the comic.

There are some webcomics who have translations available of their own. In most cases however its only in one or two languages and the number of translated pages is about 10% of the total number of comic pages.

I'm sure there is a way to create either a wiki or an app for easily translating webcomics by the thousands. My only hope is that some webdeveloper is going to either read this blog or think of this idea and create a site for it. Where artists can submit their webcomics and users gladly translate any comic page that is presented to them.

A collaboration between endusers, webcomics and webdevelopers to make a better translated webcomic world. Ah, good old utopian feelings.

Cloud Earth

There's a rouge planet in collision course with Earth! ... bummer.

The line above is sort of the main idea with which I started a week long sketching project. It seemed like a cool idea to take the idea of Earth being destroyed by a rouge planet from outer space and make a series of sketches or drawings based on that. A week or seven sketches seemed like a nice amount of drawings to give me time enough to flesh out the story behind it and also just not to long to bore me in the long run.

So every day I made a sketch. I started out with some simple ideas and global ideas of what happend and who would survive and where stuff would go to. But the more I thought about it in the passing days the more it intriged me. Did the physics work out? Does water boil in space? What about the problems that could arise?

I think it was on the fifth day that I realised that if the Earth was destroyed we would lose the magnetic field and so we would also lose our protective shield for the suns radiation. This revelation popped a serious hole in my imagination, cause the science didn't fit the story anymore. For as far as I knew. So I had to fix that with adding "Artificial magnetic field generators" in the story somehow. Which in turn brought me towards "Artificial gravity field generators". During the week I posted a sketch on facebook with a little bit of storyline.

Monday:
"Somewhere in the future another planet pops up in our solar system and crashes head first into the Earth! Where there used to be Earth there is now only a cloud of meteorites, dust particals, lost ozon and frozen water. the few survivers who saved themselves by hiding on the dark side of the moon will have to try their best to survive in this new and harsh world. Will they ever get back in contact with the mars collony's that were created only two years earlier? Are they even alive? That and many other questions float around in the minds of the Lunians, Survivers of old Earth. "

Tuesday:
"Survivors of old earth united themselves on Moonrock base. At first it was a moonbase for scientific research. When news came of planet x crashing into earth they transformed it into a bunker for survival. The inital strike destroyed the entire earth and the moon got hit pretty bad as well. Luckily being on the dark side of the moon was a smart move to avoid collision with any schrapnel coming from earths direction. These days, Moonrock base has grown into a small city with a lot of outposts and mining camps on satelite meteors nearby. Soon they'll be able to gather enough resources from the surrounding area to start one of the first explorations towards "Old Earths Remnants". What will they find on these barren rocks? Death, ruins, or just nothing at all? "

Wednesday:
"The survivers of Old Earth have to look, on a regular basis, for new sources of minerals and materials. Once in a while they encounter something that reminds them of the Old Earth and the beauty that it used to be. Whenever they find the ruins of human civilisation from Old Earth they try their very best to bring them back to Moonrock base. There they hope to either investigate the ruins, reverse engeneer them if possible, or just make an exibition out of them for a while. In a worst case they can still just recycle the material they get from it. The very first ruïn that they found was put on the central square of Moonrock base. As a reminder of where they came from and what used to be. "

Thursday:
"Moonrock base is the only human city that exits in Cloud Earth today. There are a few extra camps and mines created by these humans, but besides them there are none left. Of course there are urban legends about humans that did survive the big crash, which suposidly now live in small spacecrafts floating around throught the meteors of Cloud Earth. But no one has ever seen such spacecrafts and all the radios on Moonrock base that are activly searching for any sign of life are only hearing noise. Some say that this is normal. Its almost impossible to get a good signal out to one of the mining camps because there are constantly rocks and meteors floating through the path of the radio waves. So they say it would be almost impossible to catch the radio signal of a lost spacecraft somewhere on the other side of Cloud Earth. Though technicaly correct the leaders of Moonrock Base don't encourage the search for lost Spacecrafts. They'd rather like their people to be zealous about survival instead of looking for past ghosts of Old Earth. Dum vivimus vivamus, as long as we are alive, we should be living. "

Friday:
"With the loss of the Earth the human survivers also lost the gravity of the planet and the magnetic field that surrounded the Earth. This brought new challenges to the survivors. They were able to invent artificial magnetic fields which could protect the smallest human and even the largest base from the radiation from the sun. The biggest challenge however was gravity. It took them a while to discover ways to harness its power. While they were researching this, a lot of different inventions were made. One of them was the anti-gravity pulse generator, or in laymens terms, the poke gun. It sort of creates an anti gravity field around a certain area. Instead of being attracted by the gravity source anything will be repelled by it. It turned out to be very usefull to get rid of those annoying little meteorites floating around Moonrock base. It was even better to protect fragile equipment that had to stand outside on the rocks, like satelites or solar power generators. Some bold scientist once claimed that the destruction of the Earth wasn't so bad, because of all the awesome new discoveries that had been made. He soon discovered that people weren't that apprehensive of his statement."

Saturday:
"Growing crops on earth wasn't always easy with the little annoying bugs. In space however, after everything on Earth died, there were very little to no bugs left. Which helped the farmers on Moonrock base a lot. They only had to worry about gravity, radiation, water supply, roots growing through the soil into the meteorite, sunlight that has irregular hours of light, going from 3 hours sun, and 12 shadow, to the opposite and some more strange problems you get from getting your planet blown into smithereens. Because it is very hard for anything to grow the lunians concider it a miracle if anything grows, even if its a fungus. When they first created Moonrock base a wide variaty of plants was brought to the base. Sadly enough a lot of accidents, fires, meteorite crashes have destroyed a lot of the original stockpile. The natural diversity has been diminished to a mere 1024. The strange part however is that, from the 1024 different spiecies, there is one of them which doesn't match any of the spiecies from Old Earth. Some say it might have been a random plant hitching a ride on another plant and nobody noticed. Other people hower say that it is a plant from the other Planet. They believe it must have infiltrated Moonrock base during one of the accidents and that it may be proof that there was alien life on the other planet. Though no scientific proof has been found to back up that urban legend."

Sunday:
"A lot of things changed with the destruction of the Earth. But a few things stayed the same. Hollidays stuck around and eventhough there weren't any more christmass trees, that didn't stop them from decorating something that looked like it. One of the strange things that got the Lunians by suprice was snow. Thought in the end it was to be expected but nobody actually thought about snow in space. Having a planet that had about 71% of its surface covered by water was a good source for snow and ice in space. Thought this time it isn't seasonal anymore, now it all depended on the flow of the material in Earth cloud. If they were lucky they'd hit a snow cloud. If such an event would appear they'd go out and make some snowmen. Once in a while though one of those snowmen gets hit and destroyed and the remains float in space again. A sad reminder of what happened to earth, but also a happy thought about that smily face floating around in the cold space, never to stop smiling or being happy while its still alive. Dum vivimus vivamus. "

Now that the week is over I'm glad that I was able to take an idea and work it out way further then I expected when I started. Now there are many ideas floating in my mind about this imaginary world. In a way I'd love to work more on it, draw more of the ideas and storylines that still linger in my mind.

There are still the colonies on Mars that I didn't flesh out or the aliens that might have lived on the other planet. Heck, I havn't even begun on working out the layout of the other planet, was it alien, earthlike, or was it baren like mars or venus. So much ideas and questions that I still have in my mind. Not sure thought if they'll ever see the daylight. Being a procrastinator I fear for the worst. But luckily I already have these seven drawings and a storyidea that could actually work if I ever were to finish it.

Watching a movie

Time to spare

This sunday I went to the movies. Not just like that, but with a plan. You see, I wanted to see a movie in the cinema before 12 a clock, cause then we only have to pay 5,30€ instead of the 8,10€ I'd usually would have to pay. So off I went, happily to the busstation to catch the first bus I could find. This resulted in me being about an hour too early at the cinema.

With this much time I didn't want to just sit there all the time, just waiting. A good thing that I had anticipated this. With my sketchbook in my backpacman and a curious look on my face I walked a bit around the block, looking for some fun stuff that I could draw. After passing two women discussing something in front of a café, and walking through a small street with nothing but closed shops I arrived at a small square with three benches and some trees with yellow leafs.

I dropped myself on one of the benches and started making a drawing of the medieval tower. Fun fact: There was a hotel build around the tower. The people in the dinning room had a view off the tower if they looked outside. Before I went back to the cinema I had the basic idea sketches out on paper.

The movie itself was "The adventures of Tintin, the secret of the unicorn" Being from Belgium myself I just love the idea of hollywood making a movie about a character that was made by a Belgian. Of course I hoped that they wouldn't destroy it by hollywoodifying it. But after seeing the movie I was fairly pleased. Though I guess I missed the original soundtrack a bit.

The graphics were very sweet, and althought the story in the movie is a mix of different comics it wasn't bad. There were a few moments where you could notice that the part was added by the American "we need action" idea, but all in all I left the cinema with a good feeling about the movie. I'll definatly be curious about the next Tintin movie.

Now, to continue the story of the day. After the movie I went back to the medieval tower, to draw all the details. Sadly the bench that I had used earlier was occupied. Nothing that couldn't be fixed by wasting some time with walking around a church that was just sitting there on the other side of the square. So when the bench was available again I continued.

I still find it both funny and annoying when people start looking at me drawing. The annoying part is that I feel watched and judged. Though I guess that is not so bad after all. The funny part is that they all try to be inconspicuous about it. Walking behind my back, looking over my shoulder, or just walking a bit closer to steal a glance of the drawing.

Normaly I would have spend an extra two hours on the drawing, but when I felt the first drop of rain hit my hand, I stopped drawing and decided it was time to go home. The only thing I still had to draw was the tilles on the roof, but I fixed that while I was sitting on the bus. Which isn't allways that easy when the busdriver likes to take sharp turns.

043 30102011 by ~thedailywulfy on deviantART

What are dreams

Strange ideas? Lets just make one more.

Last night I had a dream with an interesting idea. There were three characters. A guy(hero), a girl(might have been his sister) and a magician. The guy and the magician were at a school-like building and somewhere in one of the halls there was an ancient worldmap. Apparently the magician came from a universe inside that map. It wasn't like the map was a small version of that magical world. More like there was a world hidden somewhere inside the material of the map.

But at one point in the dream the girl had been kidnapped by evil birds or something, taken away to be eaten alive. Terrible way to meet ones end. At the same time the guy/hero and magician escape the normal world for whatever reason and they flee to the world/universe inside the worldmap in the hall. There was some cool animation zoom/blurr/morph effect while traveling to that world.

Once in that strange world the guy had a strong big demonlike body, with devilwings on his back and a face like a monster, the chest had the shape of the bat from batman. But eventhough he looked strong and dangerous he was still trying to be herolike. They appeared on the edge of a cliff near a shore or mountain, but just as they showed up two monsters attacked.

The creatures looked like a lower level version of the hero's monster body. You could say that they were just level 20 monsters while the hero was a level 85 or higher. I'm sure its needles to say he got rid of them in a quick and effective way.

Since the area was safe after that the magician told the hero that he would swap bodies with the girl. She was still being attacked in the real world and he had to safe her from a gruesome death. He was willing to sacrifice his own life for it. So a snap second later the girl was safe in the hidden world of the map while the magician was back in the real world. (Though I think he was probably going to kick those birds asses since he can actually defend himself with some powerfull magic)

When I woke up I thought a bit about the dream and wondered what dreams were. With the magical world being inside the material of the map I figured it could be like those, "the universe is endless" type of things. If there was a galaxy inside the electrons of the atoms from that map, you could say that the magician had actually traveled through space somehow.

But I'm keeping it simple for now. I've read some funny ideas on the internet about quantum entanglement. Now I'm sure I'll have the propper idea about it all wrong, but for the funny idea about dreams I'm using the following parts of the theory.
Two electrons that are entangled will have an effect on each other, even if the distance is so big that it crosses the stars. They will, in a way, communicate information to each other (like a space telephone).

To hit the idea a bit further down crazylane I figured that these electrons could be entangled with not just two but even more locations in space. Then combine that with the idea of the multiverse in which any possible event or idea has, is or will happen.

So now you got electrons from all over the universe communicating with each other. The electrons flowing in my brain will thus receive the information from out there in the vast galaxy. So here's the fun part. If we are awake we are so distracted by all the information around us on the planet earth, but when we are asleep we are not. Thus, when we sleep we can actually receive this information from the outer galaxies of space.

Of course we will perceive them as dreams and treat them as none other. Once we wake up we lose contact with the dreambrainwave and lose the information very quickly, unless we make an effort to store it in our memory. What we wouldn't have realised then of course is that we've actually seen a part of history from out there in the galaxy. We might have been the silent witness of some great event millions of lightyears away. (though lightyears sounds too little for the distence that I'm talking about when using the multiverse theory)

The reason that I'm using the multiverse is to explain those dreams in which you dream about friends or things that you know. The explenation would simple be that there is somewhere a universe in which an alternive you is running around doing other things. Specificly the stuff from inside your dream. As your brainwave and his are entangled with each other you can receive his life experience from that moment.

Of course, the scary part of this idea are the nightmares we have. Cause it would mean that somewhere your worst nightmare is actually not imagination, but a true fact.

But yeah, that's my five cents of crazyness for today.

tldr: When you sleep you receive videomessage from the multiverses and perceive them as dreams.

A day off

A free ticket, first class for one day? Sounds good to me.

The NMBS (railwayservice here in belgium) had given all its customers, who had a subscription in a certain period this year, a first class free ticket for one day any trajectory. I was lucky enough to have had a 3 month subscription in that period, so I got one of them golden tickets. Most people will probably use it for a long trip to the sea and back. But I figured, lets exploit this as best as I can.. legaly.

So I planned a small trip through Belgium. Around 5:45 in the morning I took the bus to my first train station. Londerzeel. Lovely place, and very "classic" in the way of being a station. From there I took my first train, which went to the coast. "Zeebrugge strand". The beach was alright and the temperature soothing. But the town itself had, besides some fun architecture, nothing to offer. I only noticed one shop where you could buy something.

On the beach itself I saw a few people measuring, what I imagine to be the amount of sand available. They were really into it, placing little sticks inthe sand with markers on it. They even had a cool golfcart sorta car to drive them all over the place.

A bit further there was one lost shoe half covered in sand, waiting for a new master. Though I fear it might get lost under all the sand. Before I left the beach I grabbed a small sample of sand and put it in a plastic transparent "Hello Kitty" container. My next stop was the complete opposite side of the country, about 150 kilometers in land.

Or as we like to call it "d'ardennen". Though I only went as far as "Namen/Namur" Which on itself was a nice place, lovely station and an ok town. On this journey I tried to pick up two "geocachings" on the road. One was in Namen, but I didn't find it at first and a lack of time prevented me from searching thoroughly.


After that the next train brought me to Liège-guillemins. Let me tell you, that station was the best I have ever seen in my life and might as well be the best I'll ever see. It was so futuristich, modern, smooth, light, open and just plain amazing. If I could I'd take it home with me and place it in my garden I would.

In the background of the photo you might see two big constructions. Those are monuments for victims of war, probably the world wars. I didn't really check the history. But that was the location for my second geocach I was checking out today. Luckily I was able to find this one.

But the treasure itself wasn't the biggest fun, the real awesomenes came from the location itself. Right now they've started to renovatie the monument, but most of the area is still covered in weeds, plants and general "I look post apocalyptic". Going from a hypermodern trainstation to regular city, to postapocalyptic scenery made the entire trip worth while.

After forcing myself to leave this awesome place I continued my journey. I went to Hasselt, which wasn't that spectacular for me, continued to Leuven and then to Veltem where I crashed at Lieven and Carla's place. Which was togheter with some food, entertainment, a nice drink and company a nice ending of the day.

In the end I travelled all through the country in first class, saw an amazing bunch of cool locations and had a good time, all for free thanks to that special trainticket.

PS: If I had paid for all that it would have cost me 87,60 Euros or 123,81 US dollars

The cathedral

So yeah, its rather big.

The 3th of June I decided it was time to build a church in minecraft. I had found a few cool churches already on the internet from other people who had build some. Some of them being pretty amazing, others being normal and so on. But most of all they always felt too small for my taste. I wanted to find a church that was BIG. You know, the kind that makes you go, echooooo.

Besides, the smaller you build in minecraft the more abstract you have to make things. So I figured, "if you want something you gotta do it yourself". In Ms-paint I started to make a construction plan, one pixel for one block seemed ok to me. After the basic idea was put on paper I checked ingame how it would work out.
At first I had to find some mods, so that I could dig with ease and have an infinite amount of building material at my disposal. But once that was out of the way it was on to building, building, building.

The first 10 days of my quest were actually spent digging. I hadn't yet realised there was a mod that could help me dig out the entire place at the click of a mouse button. But after a hundred mega-dynamite-explosion I thought it was time to find something more efficient.

Thus the actual building proces started on the 13th of June. Which is by now 1 month ago. In that month I've spend on average 3 to 4 hours every evening. I'll probably need another month to finish it completly.

Maybe more, maybe less, depends on what time I'll have available. I do know that I've already used 64000 blocks of sandstone for the walls, 15000 noteblocks for the rooftiles and 3800 blocks of rail. I hid some rails inside the walls, to travel faster from one side to the other of the church.

For decorations I'm going with a game themed wall paper. I got a tetris one already on one floor, and I might go for a giant pacman at the center of the church. You might notice some pixelated images of games on the construction plan. But a lot of the images are to big to fit on the walls, so thats a bit sad. But i'll figure something out for that.

Right now the mid-floor is done and I'm going to begin work on the highest roof and the big tower in the middle. Including a big bell, maybe more if I have enough room. The biggest problem I have right now is height. If I take one wrong step and I fall down its death, and hopefully I didn't destroy the last spawnpoint. Though sometimes its usefull to just dropkill me and travel a big distence by just respawning at the right place.

Its little travel tricks like that which make life easy. I wonder what that would do to the world if we could travel like that in real life.

Flying

I can fly, but so can you.

Its not even very hard to fly. The only thing you have to do is jump. When you jump you actually go up into the air. All the way up to that point where gravity catches up with you and pulls you down again. A jump is two parts, the first "going up" or as I like to call it "flying" and the second "going down" or "falling".

To make sure that I have a bit of science in it I present you with the definition of flying and falling. For those that are to lazy to click the link.

Falling:
To drop or descend under the force of gravity, as to a lower place through loss or lack of support.
Flying:
1. Making flight or passing through the air.
2. floating, fluttering, waving, hanging, or moving freely in the air.

Adventure

Chinese food and treasure, what a combo.

What a week, absolutly nothing spectacular happend. Well, besides some chinese diner with some friends and some geocaching treasure hunting. But besides that, a boring week.

The geocaching was rather interesting. I stopped at a trainstation on my way home to check one of them out. I had to walk about 400 meters to the end of the station to get it. But after I had found it I was lucky enough that I could just relax a bit in the warm sun, the silent trainstation and the lovely summerly smell that was floating in the air. The other ones weren't as easy to find so that was a nice challenge.

The chinese diner was fun and I had a nice time. The funny thing was when we got our soup. The waitress had the exact same number of bowls, and one of the soups was the same as the one that the kid next to us had. So she had mixed the two tables. So here I am, with a bowl of soup in front of me, and then she's snatching it away from me and puts it on the right table. Hilarious situation if you ask me, I aught to make a comic about that.

Adventure by ~wulfnstein on deviantART

sketchy sketch sketch

Just needed some practise

The sketches that I'm posting today are some of the practise sketches I made during some boredom time. I figure I ought to draw more of those things. I'm getting to mellow on the drawings, not focusing enough on realism or just plain correct anatomical stuff. I tend to lose focus on being correct and just go with a flow that some might call my "style".

To the one who found my treasure chest

For future adventurers

I had a little playtime with a keyboard that I found in my box of computer material. I figured it would be fun to see what was inside the keyboard. While unscrewing the little screws I discovered there a whole bunch of them, about 17, for just one keyboard.

Inside the keyboard there wasn't that much except a thin plastic sheet with lines on it and a tiny little electrical board that controls the keyboard. I thought there would be more to it, but apparently a keyboard is "simple" stuff.



Sadly enough I couldn't press the key directly on the thin plastic thingy, so I couldn't play with it anymore. Right now the keyboard has been demoted to trash, but hey at least I discovered a little bit of keyboard insideness.

Talking about discovering, I'm planning a little adventure. Not for me, but for somebody else in the world who will be curious enough to follow the trail of crumbs that I'm going to leave behind. I'm going to put together a small treasure chest, make a map about its whereabouts and then drop some hidden clues here and there.

Inside the chest will be a letter with a link to a "hey you found the chest, awesome!"-clip. Maybe even a little bit of other treasurehood.

I hope that somebody will find the treasure chest somewhere in the future and hopefully that person will enjoy it as much as I would enjoy it if I suddenly found a treasure hunt at work. Recently I've been very curious about the building where I'm working, its big, has a lot of different rooms and hallways that connect in odd ways. It really speaks to my imagination.

Finding out what is in those rooms can be rewarding from time to time. But it would have been even more awesome if I had actually found a treasure in one of those rooms. Since I haven't been lucky enough I want to give another adventurer like myself the chance to be that lucky.

Finding the right book

Books ..

Some time back I went to a store to check out the book section. I hoped to find a nice thick book that I could read. My previous treasures were two collection books. One of Arthur C. Clark and the other from Asimov Isaac. I also got a thick sandwich book of "The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy". Right now I might try "The lord of the rings", but I'm not sure if I'm all that ready for fantasy books.

What I noticed in the shop was that there were so many series, and not enough single stories. I don't mind reading if the story is good, but I do mind spending a lot of money on all those books, even if they would be awesome. I guess that is something I'll have to make peace with. How else will I ever be able to read all the stories from good ol' Pratchet's Discworld.

If anyone knows a good science fiction story in a single book, or a series collected in a single book, let me know.

In other news, the sketches that I post here today are just some practise I worked on during my spare time on the train to work. There's this free newspaper every day, and once in a while there's a nice picture to draw. Since it was apparently a happy birthday for the movie "A clockwork orange" I thought it was a good idea to draw that one.

Not as easy as you might think with a train going hobeldy hobbel on its rails.

Cleaning up a bit

Woops, forgot about that.

With "that" I mean a mountain of drawings that I have lying around on my computer, but not yet ordered in the correct folder. So right now (after this blog actually) I'm going to be sweeping through them all and put them in the correct folder.

Its going to be "fun" again, deciding what is concidered "little humans" and what "humans". The original idea was that little humans would be any cartoon-like human, or chibby look-a-like. The human folder would be the realistic drawings of humans. Sadly, I always end up with stuff that is somewhere inbetween the two concepts.

The easiest part will be all the stuff that has no humans in them. Thats just one big folder of "drawings. The "comic" folder will be pretty easy as well. Just now I checked what the other folders were and I realise now that I have one folder named "3D" Its kinda funny actually cause I haven't made anything 3D in maybe three or four years. So it really isn't that up to date anymore..

In other news, the sketch is a nice building on "the meir" in Antwerp. I had some spare time and thought it would be a good idea to draw it. Lots of the buildings over there have nice statues and images on them. Probably with a lot of history behind it. I could check out the true history, but I sorta like to make up my own. Its probably a lot more exciting then the real story.