Hi there, 
A selection of recent images from my blog: medieve.blogspot.com 
 

 

 

 

Hey all, so I'm missing what I feel are important relics from the good old days and I was wondering if there happened to be anyone with a more complete archive than me. Specifically I'm looking for the Face of GW 2007 picture and some of the GW Art quilts.


I have my fingers crossed and hopefully someone who has them sees this!

You have 72 hours to respond.

Whats up?

I guess I'm back to check out how GW is and see what sort of changes up from the sell. I think GW has lost a bit of weight.

Anyway, wanna look at some pictures I drew?





Also I plan on seeing if I can't work with Sonic on this rp system, I've been meaning to pick up a nice project with a bite-sized element. I know a lot of you guys think rp systems are distasteful, but I like it so hooray for me.  ​

Oh, and since I've been gone I guess I'll update on my life.

I have since stopped working at Sony Online Entertainment as a freelance as I got hired as a concept artist at a studio called NetDevil and there were some issues with working on two mmos, conflict of interest and all of that. But it wasn't a hard thing to let go because I'm working full time. I'm working with an ongoing project at Netdevil, the Lego MMO thats supposed to come out later this year. I don't have a lot of personal work to show because 1) I don't have a lot of energy to be drawing as much as I used to (which wasn't much at all really) 2) My personal computer exploded so I lost all of 2009 images. And of course, concept work for Lego is wrapped up in a non-disclosure agreement.

I've also just picked up making miniature gaming terrain-creation as a hobby as well as getting a membership at the gym. I'm also looking into buying a house to get Obama's $8000 credit by the end of this year.

And now heres me doing dorky finger poses

 

The last few weeks have been very frustrating for me, I've been getting a lot of graphics card-related BSOD and random hard lockups multiple times per day. It seems very random, I can lock up while playing games, while browsing the internet, or just a few seconds after windows comes online before I've actually done anything. I can't move the mouse, can't ctrl-alt-del, and the screen just freezes in place, there's no distortion in the display. I don't seem to recall what happens to sounds but I assume sound disappear.

My computer:

AMD Phenom  9550 Quad-core 2.20 GHz
RAM: 4.0 GB
Graphics card: ATI Radeon HD 4800 w/ default settings *not overclocked
Windows Vista: Service Pack 1

Temperatures look fine otherwise. My graphics card floats around 50C and my CPU/HD don't go over 40C

We don't have a welcome/farewell forum anymore so I guess the general forum will do. I wasn't actually planning on making a topic because I was afraid my leaving might cause other people to leave, but TFT insisted I use the topic icon.

I've been on GW for a long time and have been a mod for a long-ass time, I think someone said that I might be the longest-term moderator, I haven't confirmed it, but what a neat title. I came to GW because it was exciting and there was plenty of people to provide support and it was a great forum to show my work. Over the last two years, GW has been on a bad slope as we've begun upgrading the site. I've always held on because there were still people that I felt like I could help and make the forum a fun community to be a part of. As members disappeared, I started waiting patiently for the new site. I don't really mind hang-ups in its progress because I was confident in its ability to support the community and bring in new members.

But, I'm no longer confident about the site doing what I want it to do. There are people fighting for a fuller vision of the site, and I could have put energy into helping design the site and help in the debate to push the site towards something I'd be happy about. But honestly I'm very tired of GW. I'm very tired of the language here, I'm tired of the culture, and I don't want to be working against it. I've become more active in another community where I'm talking to peers that are in my industry, has a lot of great energy, and provides support both personally and professionally. Its hard to justify investing my energy into building this community into what I want, where I could be putting that energy into establishing myself in a community that -is- what I want.

That being said, I'm not burning any bridges. I haven't actually been coming to gw and posting that often, mostly to glance at the picture topic. So I don't really think this is a, "NOO, no more Medieve postage!!!" And this is a good time to reiterate that my initial feeling was that a farewell topic wasn't necessary.

IRC also deserves a paragraph I think because I've become somewhat of a frequent lurker if not a talker. Certain channels are on my auto-join and I don't really see a reason why I would remove them unless I think having the tabs up would be annoying. But I do expect to still be an active member of #darkling and CENSORED CHANNEL.

As far as my current projects in GW:
I'm very disappointed in the turn-out for Face of GW, I never put in a deadline but I thought people would have given me portraits by now if they were interested in the project.
The Great Game was a forum-wide event I advertised a year ago. We lost a good number of members since then and I don't want to run such a massive event that depends on people's activity with the forums in its current state.


And... I guess thats it. Questions?

Hey guys! So I just double checked when I posted the last face of GW and it seems its been a little more than over a year ago since I've posted it. Its been mentioned on IRC to me that I should get a new one started! So here's your advanced warning topic. If you don't know about or don't remember much about it: http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?topic=2982.0 I composited faces collected from GW people to make a kind of child. Now some picture taking guidelines:

Winter is coming upon us but I'm asking everyone to try to get some fresh pictures outdoors.

Do NOT take photos in direct sunlight, rather, try to find whatever side of your house has good amount of ambient light.
-or-
Find some time to spot a day where there's good cloud cover
-or-
Make a wall/tent of white cloth (bedspread etc) which will diffuse light coming through <= hardcore option
-or-
Just make the best of your lighting as you can, I can do some photoshop tricks but shadows are problematic

Keep hair out of your face, this is VERY important. Depending on how much, I will not be accepting your photo if you have a swatch of hair on your forehead.

Plain backgrounds would be good, not completely necessary though.

**New Rule: No grinning! Smiles/frowns are okay but no teeth!!

Please do everything in your power to make sure the photo is a full frontal image. We should be able to see both ears, and your eyes should line up with the tops of your ears (don't be tilting your head back) here's a template:


*Please note that template is the minimum size of your head, you may submit larger pictures (not needlessly large, maybe x3 at max)

I'll be collecting images until I think I have a suitable number of acceptable images. I think the last time I used 8 images but I really want a much larger sample size this time.

Hey guys,

So there has been some discussion between Sarevok and myself about reviving some D&D games on IRC. Commonly, we'd post topics like these in the roleplaying forum, but obviously that can't be done. But this way we'd probably be able to reach out to people who otherwise wouldn't have known about this.

Some information:
We play in #darkling on the whahay IRC server
While we are open about other games/versions, Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 is the mainstay edition we're looking to play
Whether you know how to play or not is a non-issue, I will personally be running educational lessons
We are looking for are people who want to play and believe they can commit to a weekly/bi-weekly game
New Dungeon Masters are VERY welcome

Feel free to post here and share your play experience, playing preference (Player or DM), time zone, and play times that would be good for you. Also feel free to drop by the #darkling channel to get more information/express interest.

Disclaimer: While you may be excited to play, keep in mind that timezones and schedules tend to be extremely hard to matchup, and depending on the DM's schedule, you might simply not be able to make it to certain scheduled sessions. We can't promise that everyone can play and it wholly depends on the variety of DMs we get.

If you are worried about not having the materials to play, I strongly ask that you visit us in #darkling, we have a lot of resources setup to support people looking for D&D-related materials.

New players might also try out this official "demo" of D&D (its still 3.5) http://www.wizards.com/playdnd/playdnd.asp

I can't imagine that this will generate too much discussion but I was reading through the rateyourstudents site when I came across this gem. I know a few of you liked my signature so I thought I'd share this. Also, what do you guys think of the rateyourprofessor site as well? I know several of my professors say they know the rateyourprofessor site very well (apparently its one of those things that professors chat about on their freetime) though it surprised me to find that not many people know about this site.

Pedagogical Pete here again. In this week's column we'll talk about the "written comment," one of the most vexing parts of grading for new instructors. It's important that we provide timely, supportive, but correct feedback for our students, and when they spend several days or even weeks on an essay or paper, it's even more important that we take the time to prepare an insightful and useful written comment. See what you think of this real world example from one of my colleagues. Does he provide enough concrete examples? Does he make an attempt to connect to the student?


Megan, this is a first rate essay. I believe you’ve accomplished what you intended with it. The thesis is strong, and your analysis of the text is thorough, but not overwhelming.

I also love the font. It tickles me. It’s just, I don’t know, fun. You’ve done a great job with the margins, too. Broad, bold. Lots of room for me to really get my pen in there and move it around. The opening is really inviting. The narrative really flows.

What’s missing, however, is a firm hand. I’d think someone could really take these ideas and mold them, shape them. Your ideas need structure, sort of an old soul to really help them fly. I’m still not sure of the grade, though, and I think we need to schedule yet another individual conference to discuss it. My office is getting painted (again!), so let’s just meet at the Coffee Klatch on the west side of town. It’s so quiet, and their biscotti is so yummy.

See you, okay, at 8 pm on Wednesday? Do you still have your roommate’s car? Do you need a ride? I could pick you up if you need a ride, say, at the corner across from the Kroger? You know my car, don’t you, the Nissan, the big one, the SUV, leather seats, Satellite radio. I’ve really been listening to some of those bands you wrote about in your first essay, The Chins and Arcade Four. Really ROCKIN’. So, okay, Megs, this is like the end of my comments. I can’t wait to see you soon.

Your pal,
Dr. Wiggelsworth


So, now that you've read the comments on Megan's paper, please answer the following questions on your own.

   1. What essay elements did Dr. Wiggelsworth put his focus on?
   2. Will Megan know what revision strategies to use based on these comments?
   3. What brand and model stun gun should she carry?

So after waiting for some more submissions and not getting any I decided to pick through the faces I've collected and chose 8 pictures that I thought were high quality, had the right angle, and fulfilled all of the other requirements. I don't want to post the original faces but I'll post the six composites that I used to make the final. The project was pretty fun, I think it seriously helped me as an artist figuring out all the variations in the facial structure and interpolating them in the process of the project. I'm a bit sad that I ended up only using a fraction of the faces that were submitted but a lot of it had to do with people being too lazy to take a photo for the project. A lot of people simply submitted the best they already had which didn't meet my requirements, a few ridiculously so. Some people who did meet the requirements but didn't get into the final face should've in been but the math didn't work out. I simply couldn't reach the next tier of faces to make all of the pairs to boil down to one face. I plan on doing this project in a couple of years and maybe people will have time to prepare for it and I'll get a bunch of photos. I also figured out that the method that I was using to do this project in was actually degrading the final image after every composite which lead me to have to go back and tweak the final face so it didn't look so compressed. I hope you guys approve of the face that we ended up with though. 

I'd like to thank Darkpriest for his huge smile that made the composite of mkkmypet and myself not so depressing to look at.



And the final has Trujin's hair because A. The final's blurred brown blob was unattractive B. Its awesome and C. He had his photo on a white background which made it easy for me to copy over. (It also "pushed" the face to look more like Trujin, but thats okay)

FUN LITTLE FACE POSTER INSIDE!

So I've been interested in various projects that involve creating a non-existent person by blending together people's faces, creating a sort of "child". Well, I have a program to do it, and I was thinking we should get together and make a Face of GW. I'll be collecting photos of everyone and then pairing them, creating mixtures of each, and working through all the pairings until we have a conglomeration of all the submitters. There are limitations of course, not everyone will have a camera or have the capacity to post their picture, nor will everyone feel comfortable posting their photo. So we won't have a "true" face of gw, but we can acknowledge these limitations and do the best we can.

I've uploaded a template so that it would make it easier for me to match all the faces. Try to keep plenty of padding around your face and send the photo in a fairly high resolution, maybe a little bit smaller than the raw image that most camera give out.
Requirements:
- You must be looking straight ahead
- No glasses
- No hair in front of your face (bangs and whatnot)
- Don't slouch
- Its important to be facing straight so that both ears are in view (or should be in view, ie hair hiding them or whatnot)



Please be aware of lighting conditions and try to get a picture of yourself against a white or a solid wall. You may post the picture here or pm the picture to me. I'm hoping to hit 20 pictures and so I'll keep submissions open for awhile. For lighting, it should be taken either outdoors but without direct sunlight (under an awning or something) or indoors with the best ambient lighting you can get. I can color correct most pictures but I can't control big glaring spots on your forehead, but do the best you can do.