As I previously mentioned, I’m loving COD: Black Ops and all it’s new features. Yesterday I played a few matches before work (as I usually do – I love to kill dudes while I’m drinking my coffee) and I managed to max out my character. I decided to “Prestige“, then spent a few minutes messing about in the Theater. I made a montage of a killing spree I went on (7 or 8 dudes I think!) but didn’t realize it had to be shorter than 30 seconds if I wanted to upload it to my Youtube account. Oh well…

Here’s my first screen shot. It’s me calling in a mortar strike on hostile territories my squad is attempting to capture (just after killing those 7 or 8 dudes mentioned above), and not me trying to order a new pair of pants from Sears because I pissed myself (it kind of looks like I pissed myself). Clicking it will take you to the full version.

Here’s my first video. It’s just a short clip of me diving (my new favourite thing to do in COD) into a prone position, and neutralizing a hostile tango attempting to capture and destroy an allied headquarters. I swapped the audio with some lame techno song offered on Youtube. Enjoy!

This clip is my first successful attempt at making a montage of clips in the COD Theater. Think of it as a trailer or ad for a killer for hire, showcasing my awesome skills and battle tactics, set to some beautiful melody provided by 2 seconds of search in the Youtube audio swap “instrumental” libraries.  I think it fits just fine. The kill at the end of the clip was a game winner / ender by yours truly. Unfortunately when you render the clips so they upload to Youtube, some of the details are left out. For example, that car I dive beside… it was on fire and smoking like mad in the original clip, making it look infinitely more bad-ass.

The top photo is my Player Card Emblem. I designed it, and it’s proudly sported on all my guns. I’m guessing a million people have seen it by now, since it flashes up on their screen while I’m dipping my nuts in their mouth after killing them.

Well last night I got my new work load from James at around midnight. I was in the process of defusing an enemy I.E.D. when the phone rang and I had to let the terrorists win. He wanted to go over the text edits he’s decided to make after spending a few months with my layout.

He suggested we go about it page by page since he doesn’t want to give me his copy and then not have one. I don’t care one way or the other (although I suppose I should bill him for the hours and hours it’s going to take to get this all done over the phone) but I am surprised at how much a tiny amount of writing (with a pen??? wtf??) can start to hurt my wrists and finger joints. We spoke for a little over an hour and a half and got through about 38 pages of edits.

I now have plenty of work to do for a few days, but it’s only the beginning. I also have to add a bunch of photos to the layout, but I’m still waiting on James to supply me with them. On top of that there is still a butt-load of appendix and glossary information that needs to be added yet.

And as my luck would have it, just as I get a new workload my mouse decides to stop working with no explanation at all. That’s it up above, still in pieces but fully functional. I’m not sure how, but I managed to fix it. I won’t be surprised if it dies for good soon, as in the last 12 months I’ve been through 3 (although one of those broke with some assistance when I smashed it into pieces).

Here is my latest rendering of a possible new blog logo. I changed the angle of his cone, and moved the text based on Mary Beth’s suggestion. I like this one quite a bit, but I wish I had a more powerful machine to render this stuff. I guarantee it would look so much better if I could let it render fully, but I need my machine for other things, and can’t do much while anything is rendering.

I’m hoping that once we get a new PS3, I can setup the old one with Linux (with the help of Jon and I’m sure lots of Google), and use it either alone or networked with my machine to render things a lot faster. I’m not so sure it will work, but if it does I imagine it will greatly reduce rendering times. The PS3 is a graphical powerhouse I’ve been told.

I messed around with this image in GIMP for a few minutes while sizing it up for this post, and I made a couple variations I kind of like. It’s interesting to me how I can spend hours rendering something and it looks cool, but then I can click a few sliders in GIMP or Photoshop, and bwammo! it’s instantly even cooler.

And then there’s this one, which I really like, but it’s a weird contradiction. I spent all those hours rendering, and then you can’t even see the details. However, it still looks awesome in my opinion. I want to try making a logo that looks very 8-bit, and very Cobra Triangle-esque

Sort of like this, but better. This is just be tweaking the contrast in GIMP, but it’s given me some ideas for how to make it cooler using Sketchup. It’ll have to wait for now though, as I have lots of work to do on the book.

Soon I will be able to take beautiful, crisp photos and videos once again. My camera is in serious need of repair, but I have a feeling the cobra matriarch will save the day in the not too distant future. In the meantime she’s provided me with her old Cannon DSLR. It’s large, and I have no clue how to use it properly, but it’s got a working flash and a clean lens. I’ll upload some pictures I took with it later. Now it’s time to stop blogging, eat something, whizz, and get to work.

Yesterday I got a bunch of work done on the final drafts of the bent drawings, then sent an email to James last night with about 25 more finished final drafts. I have up to Fig 37. finished so far, but realized last night while sending emails, I missed Fig 38. completely! I thought for sure I lost or deleted it, then I remembered it was a drawing  that James’ original was a huge bizarre shape, because it was two drawings merged together old school like (pre-Photoshop) with tape and creative folding. Because of that, it had two different perspectives and made it look wonky. At some point I made a decision to leave it until the end, then completely forgot about it.

Today I was supposed to go play Halo and other games with my brother, but I’m thinking he’s busy or sleeping, and I missed my ride with Holly this morning. So, instead of pwn’n noobz for Remembrance Day, I think I’ll smoke some weed and see about doing some work. I’m not really feeling like starting to work yet, so maybe I’ll model a robot with a poppy.

I began a new robot last night while Holly was at the dentist with Roan – who gets fillings at 6:30pm?. It started out looking like Hitler, but at some point began looking more like James Bond. I think when he’s done I’ll name him Secret Agent Bitler.

Above is Blingbot, now with his bling and pinstripes. I need to either stop making robots, or figure out something to do with them. I was thinking painting them and trying to sell them, but I don’t know if I can pull it off, or if anyone would even buy them. I was thinking I could create a comic with all of them, but I have a feeling that will take a ton of time. Although it would be fun I’m sure.

I was looking over the stack of corrections I need to make to the first draft of the bents drawings, and I realized I’d missed one of the first drawings in the book. It’s one I never had an original version of, so I had to create it based on the text description. It took a few hours, and then I spent a little time creating a new robot. He doesn’t have a name yet, but he’s definitely a soldier in some army. A breast cancer aware soldier.

Last night I moved my computer stuff finally. The new desk has much more room, but I might need to customize it. There still isn’t enough leg room for me. It was nice to sit there today though. I have enough space on the desk to have my laptop on there as well as my other monitors. Which is handy because I don’t have a wi-fi card in my new desktop. I still need a better chair, preferably one that reclines somewhat.

The new kitty is now loving life here, and is trying her hardest to declare herself Oliver’s girlfriend. She loves up to him constantly, comes running whenever he’s making noise (constantly), and demands head licks on an hourly basis. She also comes running to the kitchen whenever I’m waiting for the kettle to boil, and does laps around my legs. Her and Oliver were napping on the bed today, and I intended to join them, but before I could finish what I was working on they split up and went back to ignoring me.

I’m tired now, and plan to watch Parking Wars and fall asleep. Before I do I’d just like to say that I wish I could get all the seasons of Canada’s Worst Driver in some format other than tiny streaming video off the Discovery Channel website, and I fucking hate Sony, and Microsoft. I hope their cats piss on them in their sleep.

In the middle of some amazing Nazi Zombie matches with Jeff the other day, my PS3 disc drive decided to stop working. Of course this happens just after I find a cheap headset and can finally play online without the use of speaker phone (thankfully we live in a time of digital phone). I called Sony today, hoping to find out they had service like Xbox. They don’t. They want me to pay $200 to have anything fixed. Disc drive, L.E.D. light, scratched case, all are $200. A new system is $299. Sony can go fuck themselves, and have just forced me to create a new category for the chronicles.

My brother brought me his Xbox today (his doesn’t play discs, and I have no Internet, so there is no point in me having mine), figuring I could at least hook it up and play my arcade games (I got TMNT Turtles in Time a few months ago, and I’m dying to beat it), but without an Internet connection, I have no way of recovering my gamer profile which is linked to all the games. So I have a PS3 that doesn’t play shit that isn’t on the hard drive, and a 360 that won’t play anything but trials of games I already own.

I have terrible luck these days.