I was on Yahoo earlier today and found an article talking about well-known companies with employees losing hope in them. And one of them is Nintendo. Seems Nintendo has started to fall a bit. Here's what they had to say about it:
Quote
6. Nintendo's once nearly insurmountable lead in the video console sector has been lost, and its sales have fallen further and further behind rivals Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT - News) and Sony (NYSE: SNE - News). The rise of the Google (NASDAQ: GOOG - News) Android operating system has also encouraged video game publishers to make more products that run on that platform. The 2010 market share of Nintendo DS fell from 70% in 2009 to 57%. Nintendo's growth has also been damaged by the rise of the iPad and iPhone. The future is even grimmer. "iSuppli predicts Nintendo will sell 70 million 3DS gaming systems by 2015, a figure that is 21 million less than the 91 million in sales racked up by the original DS at the same point in its sales cycle," according to the Unofficial Apple Weblog. Nintendo announced an unexpected quarterly loss on July 28, and its shares plunged 20%. The stock is down from a 52-week high of 26,780 yen to 11,850 yen. In late 2007, shares reached 80,000 yen.
Not a lot, but I found it interesting, and a little surprising (considering Nintendo's success in the past). Whether or not things will continue going downhill for Nintendo, I can't say for certain. We'll just have to wait and see.
Some months ago, I made a short mv tribute to the very first My Little Pony animated movie, Rescue At Midnight Castle, which I regard as being the best early adaptation of MLP.
Is anyone going to watch this when it comes out? It's a new show coming to Fox, directed by Steven Spielberg.
The TV series involves a grim future where most animals and plants are dead and there's no fresh air. Humanity develops a time travel device and sends selected humans into the past about 85 million years to rebuild society. The show will have some invented dinosaurs due to only 10% being known from the area around this time. And no there will be no tyrannosaurus as it wasn't around at this point.
Which style of paragraphing, well online paragraphing that is; not in books, do you think is easier to read?
There's two different styles I've seen online. One is much more prominent, while the other one I've seen used only by one person, but I'm not going to say whether or not it's truly rare; perhaps there are other people elsewhere on the web who also use this style that I'm not aware of.
Here are the two styles (I'm using a scene from Ken'ichi's A Sharptooth's Heart II as an example)-
Style A:
With a nod the two of them went off. They met up with Yu and soon went off back into the caverns after letting Yu's father, Judah, know about them returning to the Alimons. Inside the caves it was as dark and cool as they remembered, and though they had a hard time adjusting to the caves' darkness and routes at first they managed to get used to things inside of them and learn a bit of the routes while on their way back outside after Rex confronted Stone. As they learned before these caverns the Rock Rangers live in are quite spacious and long, tunnels stretching for what seems like forever for first timers, impressive for creatures to live in them and know where every entrance and exit leads.
It was still a mystery for the trio on how these tunnels came to be, but convenient. It holds quite good protection from predators and weather conditions. And located near the Great Valley as well, it's like a utopia in a utopia. But even a utopia has its dark secrets. The Darkarians, rebellions, and even keeping everything Rex wants to know about his species in top secret.
It took a while to find it but the gang found and makes their way down the tunnel that leads to the meeting chamber, where Stone told them to return to as the Bright Circle started to descend. "We're almost there." Chomper announces enthusiastically before turning into a run down the tunnel. "C'mon!"
Style B:
With a nod the two of them went off. They met up with Yu and soon went off back into the caverns after letting Yu's father, Judah, know about them returning to the Alimons. Inside the caves it was as dark and cool as they remembered, and though they had a hard time adjusting to the caves' darkness and routes at first they managed to get used to things inside of them and learn a bit of the routes while on their way back outside after Rex confronted Stone. As they learned before these caverns the Rock Rangers live in are quite spacious and long, tunnels stretching for what seems like forever for first timers, impressive for creatures to live in them and know where every entrance and exit leads. It was still a mystery for the trio on how these tunnels came to be, but convenient. It holds quite good protection from predators and weather conditions. And located near the Great Valley as well, it's like a utopia in a utopia. But even a utopia has its dark secrets. The Darkarians, rebellions, and even keeping everything Rex wants to know about his species a secret. It took a while to find it but the gang found and makes their way down the tunnel that leads to the meeting chamber, where Stone told them to return to as the Bright Circle started to descend. "We're almost there." Chomper announces enthusiastically before turning into a run down the tunnel. "C'mon!"
Which style do you think is easier to read?
Personally, the first style is what I find easier. It's the most commonly used one, and for good reason. The space allows time for the eye to relax and to tell when a new paragraph is beginning. The second one, however, becomes just a wall of text to my eyes (more noticeable when there's more text involved) and it's much harder to discern where a paragraph starts and begins, not to mention often harder to read properly. I've often read sentences wrong when they're done in Style B, more so than Style A. This style may work if one were reading from the right to the left, but reading left to the right, it becomes a problem.
I've only ever seen Style B used once and that's here. I'm unfamiliar with any other usage of it, personally. I'm not trying to bash anyone that uses Style B or point any fingers. This was done simply out of curiosity.
Not sure how often this will be updated, but I figured I'd get started. I was playing the original Spyro game (first one) when this idea came to my mind. I did want to write a Spyro fanfic but never got a solid idea for one until now.
Prologue:
The Dream Weavers' realm was under attack. It was plain for everyone to see. There was a constant barrage of fireballs coming from the sky. The dragons native to this world fled inside whatever building was closest to them. The dragons unfortunate enough to get caught in the barrage of flames were severely injured. The fire singled their scales and many of them fell off. Still, they managed to get to safety before the second flame attack could get them.
Titan stood near the entrance of one of the shelters. The castles were very sturdy and he suspected they could take a lot of damage. But he didn't know for how long. He grew increasingly concerned as the fiery attacks were now focused on the buildings. Their attackers were trying to lure them out into the open.
He turned his head and looked at the Dream Weavers. He was appalled that they wouldn't turn and face their attackers. But there was no time to think about that yet. He walked up to the closest dragon to him, who happened to be the leader of this realm, Lateef. He was laying on the ground, likely knocked there after a fireball struck the building. Titan reached down and helped him up.
Lateef brushed the dirt off of his wings and said, “Thank you.”
Titan snorted softly. He could tell, from the tone of Lateef's voice, that he wasn't really grateful. But he wasn't going to press him any further. “What's the status report? Is everyone okay?”
Lateef nodded his head and gestured to the others. “Yes they're all fine. A few scratches I assume, but nonetheless okay.”
“What about the others in the other buildings?” Titan inquired.
Lateef turned his head towards the second building straight across the abyss that they floated above. He scratched his chin. “Hmm I don't know. I can't tell from here.”
Titan was confused. He could sense that something was very wrong. “But you Dream Weaver dragons have the ability to detect where others are, don't you?”
Now it was Lateef's turn to be confused. It took him a moment before he could think of an answer. “I have no idea what you're talking about, Titan.” He looked almost uncomfortable, but Titan couldn't tell if it was because of calling him Titan rather than Peace Keeper, or if it was something else. “Unless...do you mean our ability to sense when others are in distress? We do use that ability to help slay nightmares..at least we did.”
Titan felt uncomfortable himself right at this moment. “What did you mean..did?”
“I'm afraid we don't have that ability anymore.” Lateef said, sounding solemn. “That ability was...stolen from us.”
“Stolen...? By whom?” Titan inquired, suspecting the culprit already. His point was proven quickly.
“By them.” Lateef pointed upwards as another barrage of fire rained down on them.
The fireballs hit the building's structure, causing it to shake and rumble. Some rocks were dislodged and they fell on the dragons, who used their wings to shield their heads and bodies. Titan hissed to himself as the fireballs continued to crash into the building. When it finally ended, even though it would be brief, some openings in the building were now visible. Titan turned his head and looked up. He could see their attackers flying in circles overhead.
As he watched the attackers continue their assault on the Dream Weavers' realm, thoughts ran though his mind. The most prevalent was a question he'd been asking himself since this war had begun.
I've been having trouble with Youtube since yesterday. The videos aren't playing; they're remaining black. And this is true for all my browsers. None of them can play Youtube, although I can play vids on other sites like Vimeo and Veoh just fine.
Yesterday, I had installed Hotsphot Shield, a program that hides your IP and lets you access blocked videos. I only tried it briefly before disabling it. I didn't notice any issues afterwards until my brother asked me if I could play Youtube videos, and found that I couldn't. Well Firefox could momentarily, but when I closed and reopened the browser, suddenly Firefox couldn't play YT vids either.
I am not sure if HS had anything to do with this, since it was only installed on my computer. My brother's computer and my parents' computer were also effected, not just mine. I did, however, uninstall HS to see if there's any changes, and so far none. I still can't play any of the YT vids.
I did notice something that has changed since the installation of Hotspot, however. First, my network isn't detecting as many networks as before. There used to be a decent sized list. And now it's down to just two. The second thing is that I think my IP had been permanently changed. It still resembles my old IP but when I use the WhatismyIPaddress.com, the address, location, and type of internet is incorrect. When I used this site before, it was accurate on what my address was.
So I'm not sure what to do.
Edit: Oh one more thing I forgot to add. I found that I could view YT vids anonymously. I used HideMyAss (yes that is what it's called) accessed YT anonymously, and the videos were able to play. Yeah the player was way out of date, but it still played.
Edit 2: I figured out a trick that lets me view the Youtube vids without using HideMyAss. In the URL http://www.youtube.com, I just add in an s by the p. So it's now https://www.youtube.com. And now the vids work just fine.
I was reading an interesting article on Cracked.com regarding video games. The article in question was about gaming innovations that are older and came out earlier than we believe.
Three of them were handheld 3D gaming, motion control, and touch screen. Three things that many people tend to believe Nintendo created actually came out earlier. That's right, Nintendo is not as innovative or original as we think, at least not with these three techs. Other companies had beaten Nintendo to the punch.
It was quite interesting reading about this stuff, especially how the first achievements really came about and how the first real attempt at downloadable content led to America Online.
This is a tutorial on how to draw a generic raptor (scientifically refered to as dromaeosaurids). This was drawing with the mouse, however, so it doesn't look as good as it would have had I drawn it on pencil and paper.
Raptors typically follow the same formula with the way their body looks. This formula includes:
-Slender, S-shaped neck -Long, rounded snout -Long arms with three-fingered hands -Four digits on the feet (dewclaw, the sickleclaw, and the two toes that supports the animal's weight) -Long tail -Digitigrade stance, like other dinosaurs (this means they stand on their toes like cats and dogs)
There can be variations among species, however. For instance, the newly discovered balaur has two sickle claws on each foot and only two digits on the hands. Austroraptor, on the other hand, has very short arms for a raptor. In order to avoid inaccuracies, look at professional artwork and skeletal remains of the species you want to draw.
While some people do prefer the scaly look of the old-school raptors, that is no longer considered accurate. According to remains, raptors were indeed feathered. So if you want to be scientifically accurate, make sure to cover your raptor in feathers.
Some of the body parts can be tricky, but if you think of them as basic shapes, they'll become a littl easier. For instance, the thigh can be drawn more easily if you picture it like a bowling pin facing towards the ground. The body itself can be thought of as a shampoo bottle almost. However, do not use dog-like proportions for the body.
When drawing the feet, resist the urge to pad them like mammalian feet and instead look at bird feet for a more accurate representation. The sickle claw should be raised above the ground. The sickleclaw itself is not dramatically larger than the other claws.
A few other details to remember; raptors have large pelvic bones between their legs, so make sure to include this if you want a more accurate representation. They have large openings in their heads, so you want to draw an outline of these. If you want to draw ears on your raptor, present them as small holes as they did not have external ear structures. Many raptors were found with bony eye rings present. This means they could not move their eyes, so their pupils should always be at the center of the eye.
Unless your raptor has a broken tail, do not give it a bendy tail. Raptor tails were mostly fused vertebrate and used for balance. They had very little mobility on them. So the tail should always be faced straight out behind the animal, never sharply curved like in Jurassic Park.
Another thing to remember that even documentaries sometimes forget, do not draw the hands with the palms facing downward. This is an inaccurate position. Due to the ulna and radius being fused together, movement is impossible. Raptor hands, like other theropods, were always placed with their palms facing towards each other as if to clap. They did have great flexibility in the wrists, allowing them to bend up and down to a great degree than human wrists can. Also keep in mind that raptor digits weren't very flexible and likely didn't have a lot of strength in them.
When drawing their arms, do not use mammalian arms (like kangaroos) as references. Instead turn to bird wings. The shape of a raptor's arm is closer to a bird wing. In fact, raptor arms were basically primitive bird wings, just with claws and shaped more like half arms/wings than true wings.
It is believed that raptors could replace their teeth, so don't be afraid to make their teeth different sized. While all the same shape, some teeth will be longer than others. Typically the teeth start out short in the front, get longer in the middle, and then become short again. This can change depending on species or if the raptor had lost some teeth.
Contrary to what was initially believed, raptors, at least some species, are now thought to be nocturnal. So if you want your raptor character to remain faithful to how the species was actually like, portray them as being night lovers and active mostly at night, and resting or sleeping during the day. Also, raptor jaws were stronger than initially believed. Deinonychus is said to have a bite strength strong enough to crack bone.
Raptors were likely social animals and traveled in groups. Social structures might have been more similiar to a flock of birds than a pack of mammals. Since dinosaurs are closely related to birds, birds would be a better place to look for hints in dinosaur behavior than mammals.
If you want a big raptor, go with something like utahraptor (the biggest raptor of them all). Do not use megaraptor. Megaraptor is not a true raptor, with the claw going on the hand like baryonyx, not on the foot.
I might be forgetting some things, but I will mention one more thing. Do not portray your raptor as being willing to take on a tyrannosaurus. Like most predators today that would rather run away from a much larger predator, the same was most likely true for raptors. Going up against a powerful animal with one of the strongest bites in the animal world would have been suicidal. It would pretty much end like how it did in Jurassic Park.
I found out about this on Discovery, and Pangaea gave me a link to another article about it.
According to a new study, contrary to what people used to think, dinosaurs were not restricted to the day and in fact many were active during the night. The way they figured this out was by measuring their bony eye rings and comparing them with modern day animals who also have bony eye rings.
After downloading a free sculpting program, Sculptris, I played around with the controls and eventually made a headshot model of one of my characters, Axel, a vicious Darkarian female alimon.
In July 29 through 31 of this year, there's going to be an anime convention in Baltimore, Maryland. I reserved a hotel that is very close to the convention. What I am hoping to do is the same thing that me and the others at New York Comic Con did, and that was split the cost of the hotel so that, individually, we didn't need to pay as much. I was wondering if anyone here would be interested in coming with. The cost of the hotel will be split depending on how many people show up. If, for instance, a total of 4 people end up going altogether, then the cost of the hotel will be split by 4 people. Currently the reservation is for 29-31 but I am hoping to change it to 28-31.
For those who don't know, Otakon is a large (30,000+ people) anime convention. It's hard for me to explain what a convention is, but I'll try my best to give some basic details. Conventions are indoor events, ranging from small to medium to large. They can be about almost anything, like comic books, horror, anime, etc. There's usually people there selling different stuff, such as their artwork, custom made items, etc. There may be popular people there, like if they were famous for writing a book or doing a voice of a character, there may be music and bands there, games, etc. It depends on the convention.
There's also different rooms, plenty of them to visit. These could be about various things. It could be a movie, it could be a panel composed of people just asking questions, it could be about an item no one else knows about, etc. It varies. Some are panel rooms and some are viewing rooms.
I never been to Otakon before, but a long time friend of mine says that there's plenty of anime to watch and a gaming room. That isn't all it has. There's other things to visit, such as the Masquerade (a hilarious play I believe), the Artist's Alley where you can view people's artwork, and Dealer's Room where you can get all kinds of different items. There's other things to do as well.
For more information on Otakon, simply visit the website I have linked. If anyone is interested in going, let me know.
Linkara has uploaded the live On Top The Fourth Wall review he did at Magfest. My brother and I got to see this for ourselves while we were there. We were in a back row. My brother did record this as well but he hasn't put it on his computer yet.
The laptop itself isn't mine. It belongs to someone else. He wanted me to look at it because of problems he was having with it.
The original issue was that the laptop had a password on it. Windows XP Pro is what was installed on the system and it had a login screen and it would not allow him access in cause he didn't know the password. I did tell him to remove the battery and put it back in, thinking it would reset it, but at the time I didn't know it was a login password. Either way, it didn't really cause any issues cause of that.
The next thing we tried was installing a new operating system on it, but to do that, he had to boot from the CD. He first tried the boot options, around four of them, and none of them would allow him to boot from the CD, same thing happened and he got to the Windows login screen. I told him to try to get into BIOS and rearrange it so that it booted from the CD Drive first. I guess I was not specific enough because I don't know what he did, but after that, it displayed an "operating system not found".
I had him bring the laptop to me so I could look at it. I knew I had to get into the BIOS but didn't know how to, so I had to read up about it. The only keys that do anything is Esc and F12. F12 brings up the Boot Menu, which is now devoid of all choices except Enter Setup, which it won't let me do. F2 is supposed to bring up Setup, but that doesn't work.
Esc does bring up what may be the BIOS, or starting to load it anyway. The screen starts displaying some information on the computer, such as how much storage or RAM is on it, among a few other things. Once it gets to the part about detecting a mouse, or a mouse port or something, it stops and goes to the "operating system not found". Once I tried holding down F10 and this caused it to beep rapidly until I turned it off.
It did beep in other occasions as well, like when I had a CD in the drive or even when I did nothing to it at all except leave it on. The beeps are high-pitched and, unlike the rapid beeping, are separated from each other in approx 14 second intervals.
I did attempt to boot from another device. I went into Boot Menu and pressed the numbers. Even though there were no options, I thought that maybe the comp would still recognize a selection. The computer started turning off after that. It would remain on for a few seconds before just shutting off. Not so bad now, but for a while it wouldn't even turn on long enough to see the logo screen.
Anyone know what's going on with this machine? Here's the type of laptop it is: Toshiba Satellite A70-S249.
Over the past couple days, I made an mv of LotG to the remix version of Judith by A Perfect Circle. The music video itself is supposed to reflect the rivalry between Soren and Kludd, their clashing views, and their confusion as to why the other believes what he does. Some parts of the video are from Kludd's POV and others from Soren's POV.
Though I haven't beaten the game yet, I decided to do an Other M mv showcasing some boss fights. I had the song The Animal by Disturbed stuck in my head, so I decided to do a short mv. I may decide to make the mv longer but for now this is the finished product. I like how it turned out. The mv is very short though, not even a minute long.
I also recorded myself drawing the picture. I've been meaning to do at least one of these kinds of videos (ones that show the progress of a picture from start to finish), but never got around to it.
Here's an mv I recently completed using the song "If Today Was Your Last Day", a song I interpret as being about living life to the fullest. The song was originally from Mo's POV, but I later changed it to be "sung" from Littlefoot's POV in regards to what Mo told him. Mo seemed to be the best candidate for the song, thus why I chose him.
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