art_work

They say that writing about art is like dancing about architecture.

Just kidding, I’ve never heard anyone say that. But I wanted to record a little formal history of how I started making artwork, explain some of the different kinds of pieces I make, talk a bit about process and such. There will be a smattering of personal details and hopefully very little philosophy about the meaning of art or its practice. There are few questions less interesting than “what is art?” and I do not intend to indulge the inquiry here.

Without further ado, a brief history of my journey with art.

Continue reading art_work

replay

In January, my friends and I embarked on a project that has become, for me, a serious creative outlet. We decided to start building a town on our Minecraft server. If you don’t know what Minecraft is, that’s okay – all you need to know is that it’s essentially multiplayer Legos. This post is an attempt at sharing some of the amazing creations and the process behind the town’s development.

We didn’t have any idea what would go on it and we didn’t set any rules for what could or couldn’t be made. We just started making stuff. The location we chose was nothing more than hills and trees. Sitting in the middle of nowhere, the first creation was a statue of a bug with a sword plunged through it, and some signs (note – these are all recent shots, unfortunately I don’t have any from the beginning days):


By Ben

Here’s what the signs said:

The Bug King as he was found in 1388, after having been slain by the Bug Slayer. The Bug King’s death marked the end of the Insectowars, and ushered in a century of peace and a new golden age.

Continue reading replay

Doubt

Interesting two days. I got in the mood to take pictures again, although these really aren’t as great as they could be – if I had a clue what I was doing with the camera I could probably make these a bit more accessible, but as is, they’re best viewed in a dark room, and the thumbnails don’t even come close to doing justice.

South Hill:

A kind of bizarre tree/street light shot:

My favorite, just the road and some lights:

A tree against the night sky:

Another road shot, the house at the end is mine:

The moon, obscured by trees:

Student housing, obscured by chain-link:

The moon, obscured by clouds:

An apartment complex sidewalk:

Mmmm. I should really invest in some better equipment for this, very few of those shots came out like I wanted them to.

Stage One: Complete

The attic has completed its first stage of awesome. I’ve attempted to capture the results.

The main area of attraction:
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I’m planning on putting a quilt over the window to keep bugs out and provide ever greater privacy. It’s the same thing that’s on the opposite window, seen momentarily. Note the fridge in the bottom left (barely visible).

The stuff:
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The fridge is off the screen to the left. On the left is the subwoofer, then I’ve got about ~800 CDs of music in those booklets. To the right I’ve got all my N64 and SNES games. The baskets contain the various game systems and peripherals. To the right of the TV you can see my MP3 player and the jack – I’ve set it up so you can put whatever audio device with a headphone output up to the system, although it only outputs to 3.1 speakers. I also brought up my brother’s collection of DVDs (after taking the picture), so there’s a decent selection of movies up there as well. This is where bigger TVs are needed.

Oh, and that big black thing is a VCR. You wouldn’t believe how many people asked what that was.

The other side:
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That’s where I need more rugs/carpeting.

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The stairwell:
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I switched out the single rung of colored lights with white lights, as well as the hanging lights. This works a lot better – those lights are good for (a) finding the lightswitch when the lights are off and (b) finding/navigating the stairs when the lights are off, so it’s better to go with the more simplistic colored ones. But, fear not, the colored lights are not out of the picture.

The whole room:
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The roof:
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I would have preferred the disco ball over the blacklight, but the disco ball decided that it no longer wants to provide its disco-tastic light anymore, which may or may not be fixable. All of these lights and the fridge came from Ben, and a few new posters came from Zach (most notably the Ocarina of Time poster, visible in the first picture). So, basically all we need now is more posters, more TVs, more rugs, and then it’s truly where I want it to be. I’m gonna see if I can get my old computer up there (Christopher has it right now, I don’t think he’s using it), and then hopefully I’ll be able to connect to our wireless network, or drag this 50ft ethernet cable from the house to the attic to get connectivity. That would be beyond hot.

My hopes are high.

Pseudo-Picture Post

I’ve been out and about taking pictures. Here are my results so far, placed onto Flickr. Not all of my shots would fit onto Flickr, and they have, of course, been massively downsized, so I’ve got the originals and the extras. Pre-warning: other people are seeing the Flickr too. Relatives, parents, people that you would do well not leave…shall we say, questionable comments around. Keep comments clean, for my sake.

Flickr, ftw.

The ones that aren’t on Flickr, raw form.

All pictures, raw form.

This stuff is fun.

Oblivion

[geek]

I’m finally taking the effort to talk about Oblivion. Yes, shoxxorz and awezorz.

Oblivion is a really, really weird game, in that it there are many comparisons that can be made with Fable. Not in the actual gameplay, but in the realm of it not exactly living up to expectations. What makes this weird is the fact that in all reality, Bethesda never lied and didn’t drop features left and right – Oblivion is what they said it would be. Yet, it still isn’t what they pumped it up to be.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Oblivion is a great game. However, contrary to my original thoughts, this really isn’t the best game ever made. It would almost certainly at first appear that way, until you really start to break the 50 and 60-hour barrier in terms of gameplay. Around that point, you start realizing that even though there’s gobs more to do, you don’t want to do it.

My favorite example is the environment. When we first saw Oblivion, we saw pictures of lush forests that truly are beautiful and well-made. Then we saw more. And more. By the time I started playing the game, I was already familiar with almost 90% of the game’s environment. Everything outside of the cities (and technically inside, too) is just green forest. Exploration simply isn’t fun – everything looks the same! Strangely enough, the dungeons and cities do not suffer the same fate, which is nice, however the entirity of the outside world (with very, very few exceptions) is just green, green, green.

On the note of exploration, Bethesda made an interesting trade-off with the ability to traverse the land – the cities themselves are insular, totally separated from the outside world. You cannot freely travel between the cities and the world, because of the required loading time, which is only triggered by entering through the gates. With several cities, I found obscure ways to scale the walls and jump outside of the city, at which point I found a totally untextured and decisively ugly world, devoid of buildings or people. I love exploiting games and all, but Oblivion was supposed to be about free-form playing, uninhibited action and exploration. That just don’t flow right. This is also probably why they removed the massive jumping and running spells that made Morrowind so fun to explore. You can’t jump 10,000 feet into the air. You can’t levitate. You’re stuck.

Beyond these issues, the another main problem lay in the myriad of quests you could do. Many of the quests, in general, were quite the same. With some very cool exceptions (entering a mage’s mind and solving puzzles, jumping into an artist’s painting to kill paint trolls), all of the guilds were just different variations of eachother, with minor exceptions. I didn’t do all of the quests, but, I did go quite far into the Fighter’s Guild, the Dark Brotherhood, the Blades, and finished all of the Thieve’s Guild quests. The Thieve’s Guild had an absolutely spectacular final mission that required you to sneak past veritable legions of powerful enemies at once, but such espionage was not to be found in many of the other quests.

My final complaint lies with the enemies. Variation was a strong issue here, as well as balance. I often avoided dungeons completely because most of them contained really creepy undead that I didn’t want to fight. I just don’t want to fight undead all the time. Outside the dungeons was a little better, but in general, I found myself meeting the same enemies regularly. Strength was a universal problem – later in the game, if you do not turn the difficulty down, you will not be strong enough to kill anything. This may have been fixed within the 1.1 patch, but, I do not believe so.

All that said, Oblivion is a great game. The leveling system is wonderful, as is the character creation all around. The world is totally immersive and responsive. The game improves upon tons of the issues of Morrowind and so much more – plus, the game is just really good looking. That’s all I can really put it at – Oblivion is just great.

Holy Captions Batman!

So, about those pictures from camp. These are actually Benjamin’s, but I figure I’d give them proper captions. Wohoo. One day, my own pictures may get developed.

[2012 edit: lost forever]

“All…your base…are belong to us? What? Isn’t that from some game?”

(i’m willing to bet not many of you will actually catch that one)

[2012 edit: lost forever]

“Heavens above! It’s Jack Thompson!”

[2012 edit: lost forever]

“No.”

[2012 edit: lost forever]

“Heavens above! It’s Jack Thompson!”

Ow, ow, ow.

After spending 4 or 5 hour’s in Sho’s clothing, I am fully acquainted with women’s apparel (no, i did not wear it all, sickos). I accidentally ripped her jacket trying to get it on, and her shirt and pants just barely fit. Ugh, I’ve done it once, I’ll never do it again.

In case you’re wondering, I was not, in fact, a transvestite (like Ben or Zach), but an emo child. Pictures are soon to come (everybody seemed to find it extremely amusing). Just so you know, I went out with the intention of wearing a robe and a beanie and just looking normal, but no, that would not do. It was not willingly done.

The night as a whole was not super great, but I’ve never actually had a very good Halloween, it seems to be a tradition. That’s okay. I’m feeling more upbeat than previously posted, somewhat thanks to you folk out there. Thank you.

I just hope Sho’s dad didn’t see me. That would be awkward.

EDIT:

No way. I’m not making it easier for you to find those pictures.

[2012 edit: hotlinked for the lols]

The Glorious

A few changes to note – I have put links into the header images. The only one that actually takes you somewhere is the files tab. I’ve set up a semi-primitive photo gallery with which you can browse my collection with great ease. The template is probably about as developed as it will get (it matches the color scheme, displays fine, and reads fine, good enough).

The wedding trip was good. It caused a lot of trouble as far as school goes, which I’m only just now recovering from. All of my teachers have been unhappy with my attendance record thus far. And I’ve failed more than one test. But, I’m getting back on track, so I expect things to go back up.

We left Friday morning, had an uneventful 9 hour drive, got to the town “Chelsea, Michigan” at about 9:00 PM, had some nasty pizza, greeted our host (don’t know their names, they were a little odd), and sprinted off to the theatre to catch the 10:15 showing of Serenity. My friends, if you have not seen this movie, do yourself a favor, and see it. It was extremely good.

If you are unaware as to the nature of Serenity, it’s a movie based off the series Firefly. Firefly was one of Fox’s ‘create and cancel’ swarm, lasting only 10 episodes because every episode occured on a different day at a different time each week. It’s a sci-fi thing, but it’s not an in-your-face type in which each character’s personality is defined by the hyperbalinrakonater in their respective weapons. If you know what I mean. It’s good stuff, go watch it.

Saturday afternoon we ran off and visited Josh, John (I forgot to take pictures of them, sorry), and my Uncle for a few hours before the wedding. I had some good talks with all of them, and as always, that good old Froehlich thing makes it all a lot cooler. The wedding itself (that is, the wedding of my Uncle, and I guess my “Aunt Pat”, as of now) was short and sweet, lasted about 15 minutes, occuring in a tiny Methodist church in town.

The coolest photos come from the ride back. It was at night, and I was bored, so I took photos with a 2-second exposure time. The bumps in the road and a little manual jittering gets some cool effects. Here are a few of my favorites.

The rest can be seen here.

And now for story time. He’s got me some pictures and told a handful of stories and stuff from his experience in Iraq, but I’ll start from when he got home.

Mom and Dad got to see him arrive while I stayed back for school. Upon getting home a few days later, he handed me this, a product of his layover in Ireland. Much happiness ensued, overall, and Mom made lots of really good food.

Anyways, we were sort of in touch while he was in Iraq – we talked on the phone two or three times, and exchanged two or three letters. He didn’t have much access to a phone, limited access to a computer, so letters were the main form of communication. Basically, his day was something like this (get ready for a bulleted list here, guys):

  • Wake up in the afternoon.
  • Clean up, eat.
  • Work from evening to morning (12 hours).
  • Eat, do something recreational for an hour or two (basically either play guitar or play cards, or maybe work out), go to a meeting, clean up.
  • Sleep.

He always ran 12-hour shifts, but they’d change the time of them every 2 weeks, so he could never adjust to them fully. He would work 6 days a week (days off on Sunday), but couldn’t go anywhere on his day off. The only time he left the camp was for an escort every few months, basically meaning he’d sit in a Humvee for the majority of a day. And the camp is not an exciting place to be. Just look.

Not exciting. It’s a very bleak place, completely surrounded by walls. Of course, if you put 3 different groups of people that all hate eachother almost as much as they hate America, then you have a little more excitement. The detainees in the camp are all mostly worthy of being there (estimated at a little over 90% were true threats to the American presence in Iraq, note I say in Iraq), and more than that portion hated the soldiers. But, interestingly enough, there were three factions (names escape me) that hated eachother and would be at eachother’s throats any time they weren’t fighting to break out or kill the soldiers.

Riots would generally break out about every week or so. These consisted of one compound (basically a fenced in area where the detainees stayed) screaming, chanting, and generally making noise, and then proceeding to burn anything and everything they can. “Wait!”, you ask, “How can they burn things?”. Thanks to the morons at Abu Ghraib, “the safety of the soldiers is being sacrificed to the media gods”, as he put it. This means an inspector comes in every week to make sure that the detainees have everything they need – this includes a mosque, a Qur’an, prayer mats, portojohns, beds and tents, clothing, hand sanitizer, cigarettes, and a lighter.

Every one of those items were actively used by the detainees to kill the soldiers or eachother. The American (stress the American here) soldiers are not allowed to enter the mosque, the Qur’ans, or the prayer mats. This means whenever they do shakedowns they are not allowed to search there. A translator would go with them to make sure they did not touch a thing. Dozens of times, they would find knives (they’re fond of the knives) pouring out of this stuff, but they couldn’t do a thing about it.

Here’s an example riot. This is how they begin, with a big gathering. It looks less intense because you don’t see them jumping up and down and screaming in Arabic. The picture in the center is some religious leader (trr’rst), not of importance.

Here’s where the other weapons come in. Most of these guys are issued jumpsuits. These jumpsuits come with nice, large, elastic bands. Combine that and fist-sized rocks taken from the ground and the cinder blocks that make the foundation for their tents and beds, and you have unbelievably destructive weapons. These things go through 4″ bullet-proof glass like paper.

To disperse the crowd to make them easier to manage, they use helicoptors. It’s pretty smart – they bring them in about 30m above the ground, at which the force from the blades will easily knock a guy over, as well as any unstable structures. Like portojohns.

Here’s where the lighters, tents, and hand sanitizer come in. Meet the Purell bomb.

These are makeshift molotov cocktails, made of their headdresses, hand sanitizer, and thrown at anything. Highly explosive, and pretty darn destructive.

The hand sanitizer is mandatory, too. As for the tents, they’re just massively flammable. The canvas is usually coated in kerosene or some other sealant to improve durability, resist insects, and weatherproof it all, but obviously makes the entire thing a disaster waiting to happen. After burning the tent down, they make some more permanent holdings. Meet the ramparts of the desert.

All these do is protect them from the barrage of rubber bullets. That’s right. Through all this, the soldiers get rubber bullets, and some CS gas. Neither of these come close to stopping any determined detainee. What happens if they climb the two barbed wire fences? Oh, no problem, they just request ammo from the ammo dump outside the camp. The Americans aren’t allowed to bring live ammo into the camp unless it’s a hostile situation. Again, I stress the American part, not because it’s not an American camp, but because whenever the British or Australian troops stop by, they have live rounds. In fact, they’re not allowed to enter inside the compounds because of incidents with them killing inmates.

After all is said and done, the compound is pretty much wasted.

But of course, it’s all back up in the same day, just like it was before. Pretty efficient, I say.

And that’s a prison camp for you. There’s not a whole lot else to tell, really, except for a few amusing stories.

Portojohn graffiti is a standard in the armed services, and one such example was a soldier’s infamous mother. What was she infamous for? Nobody knows. But apparantly “V’s Mom” is etched in every portojohn in the entirity of Iraq. There is no exaggeration here.

Some of the world’s worst enter the military out of sheer inability to do anything else. One such soldier found his way into an Airborne unit at the camp. This man’s lack of personal hygene was astounding – his seargants had to escort him to the shower every morning to make sure he showered, and had to routinely check to make sure he had washed his clothes. This guy always failed his PT tests, was generally just a completely unreliable guy. Now, on his uniform, he had a patch on his arm that said “Airborne” below his rank, signifying his status. After having enough of this guy’s crap, a few guys snuck into his bunk, took his unforms, removed the “Airborne” patch and replaced it with an almost identical patch, stating “Shitbag”. This guy never noticed his new found status, and the highly ranked officers in the camp were too baffled by his incompetence to correct him. And thus it stayed on.

Many of the worst detainees in the camp are those who are friendly, speak English well, and fluent in their actions. These are usually the ones who reported directly to known trr’rst leaders. One such trr’rst was known for being a complete jerk, starting fights constantly, always out to make as much trouble for the soldiers as possible. He was constantly in and out of the isolation block, as well as the median between the two, a small fenced area seperated from the rest of the compound. This guy doles out a lot of grief on the soldiers, so he was generally hated more than the others. One soldier found him particularly bad, and felt the need to express this. He expressed this by entering his isolation area, dropping his pants, and spraying the inmate with urine in the manner of a helicopter.

The camp is a pretty big place, and empty compounds are steadily getting filled up by more inmates, so more units come in to handle them. The first night after a compound had been occupied, a controlled fire was seen within the camp, it was large, but not spreading, and no chaos was evident. The next morning, it was revealed that the new unit had gone through every tent and burned all the Qur’ans, prayer mats, weapons, hand sanitizer, lighters, and cigarettes that the inmates had, in one big pile.

Anyways, that’s about all I have for you guys. I hope you enjoyed it.

It’s Beer!

I’ve known about these for a good year, but Zach and Paul reminded me of them recently. For your viewing pleasure.

One, Two, Three, Four!

These are in fact beer commercials, you are warned, for whatever reasons.

[WoW]

I’m up to level 26, making rather nice progress. I’ve been through the stockades and deadmines, and have yet to go through BFD. In true rip off style (because ripping off is in), here are some amusing screenshots.

Here we see a glitched gnoll, and 4 people all leveling their weapons by leaving their guys there for hours. Amusing. Even more amusing, was that I came back 5 minutes later to find them all naked. True story.

A classic joke.

Sometimes, immaturity is funny.

Zach has funny moments. This is one of them. This was queued from me saying “I can start making silk soon.”.

When LFGing goes wrong.

I have funny moments too. D:

Burned.

<3

[/WoW]

Church wasn’t as exciting as normal, since Greg wasn’t teaching Sunday School. The Mapes did it, and of all the topics to pick, they did evolution, which was minorly awkward. I kind of wanted to jump out and say “uh, no…” a lot, but, I can save it for another day. One thing that I didn’t get to comment on was their belief that God should be included in public school teachings. As much as I’d love for that to happen, I’m fully aware that other religions exist, and if we’re to be a fair country (and not a theocracy), it’s either everybody’s playing field or nobody’s. This plays in with my disagreement with ID beliefs, as well, fully bringing to mind the concept of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (do a google on it). Benjamin and I had a good few chuckles glancing back and forth at eachother, anyways.

So, plans for college. I might have mentioned it before, but hey, whatev. I’m pretty darn sure I’m off to TC3 after the good old high school is over, for two years, and then it’s off to RPI or RIT. What’s nifty is that the tech classes get me credits at TC3 and RIT (that is, if I pass the tests RIT gives out). Irony. The AP classes are less likely to earn me credits than the tech classes. We’re looking at a work ratio of 3:1. But the AP classes are cool, so it’s all good.

Off to homework. Woo.

It Won’t Be The Same (O.o)

I bring to you the fabled Colorado post, minus one picture (which happened to be the one I looked forward to seeing full-size the most) which my dad deleted. This is what I get for letting my dad touch that camera. *grumble* All my mom and dad’s pictures turned out like crap – they’re barely worth putting up. It ticks me off a lot – the scenery is completely ruined by a crap disposable camera and poor photography skills. *more complaining*

We left Sunday, landed in Denver about dusk, picked Christopher up from Clair’s (cousin’s widow, for those who forgot). We drove on over to the Johnson’s, which was a two hour drive with 20 lbs of luggage on my lap. It’d been years since the 5 of us had been in the same car, so this was something to be savored, in that bitter kind of way. We got there about 1 AM, greeted by the Weimeraner known as Tenzing (after the mountain climber).

Entrance:

Driveway (that’s our rental in there):

Tenzing (poor picture, apologies):

We slept, and spent Monday adjusting to the elevation of 10, 800 ft.. Christopher ran out and bought a Gamecube on a whim, and rented Mario Kart, which supplied Jonothan and I some amusement. He had a Gamecube, but it was stolen a little while back. Poor Christopher has a hard history with robbery – all his possessions were stolen from a storage facility when he was 18 and had just joined the Army (that was a lot of stuff). Not too long ago his laptop and other major appliances were stolen.

Yes, we woke up to this view every morning:

We stayed in the bottom portion of their house. Their house by the way, is custom, completely wood, and disgustingly nice. Not rich kind of nice, but non-standard kind of nice. Retirement kind of nice. The bottom portion has two bathrooms, two bedrooms, a den (with TV, VCR, DVD).

The downstairs main area:

The upper portion is wide, lots of windows, and shockingly bright in the morning. I took most of the pictures around dusk, so it’s not bright, as the mountain blocks the sun.

The living room (there’s a huge wall of windows to the right (you can see them on the east side picture), but for obvious reasons I can’t take a picture of that):

The kitchen (facing out the south side):

The entry (facing out the north/west side, with my back to the windows):

The outside is very much like a log cabin. Pictures tell more than words, though.

The north side (the outside pictures are going in something of a circle, you should be able to get something of an idea of what the outside looks like if you follow it):

The east side (this ones a jump, sorry):

The south side (you can see the porch that’s in the east side picture on the right, for reference):

I won’t supply many skiing pictures, simply because it’s a lot of work for something that isn’t going to tell much. So, skiing. We skiied Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I didn’t actually ski though. Christopher, Jonothan, and I all snowboarded for our first time on Tuesday, and stuck with it the entire time. It really hurt the first day – you fall down a lot, it sucks. You run out of breath so fast at 11,000+ feet, we were sweating up a storm that first day.

Tuesday was Copper, which is the biggest resort in the vicinity of 1.5 hours. It has about 125 trails, a dozen or so lifts (speed lifts, at that. if you didn’t hear this last year, they’re lifts that go about 3 times as fast as normal lifts. they detach onto an alternate rail at mount and dismount, which goes about half as a fast as normal lifts. the convenience of this is indescribable). We took a lesson that day (and only that day) to make sure we got the basic techniques and stuff. The lessons were so much better there – it’s amazing. Greek Peak’s instructors do this “do this, no you’re not doing it, you have to do this” kind of thing. Our instructor, Jeff, gave us all kinds of tips for how to do all the stuff, it was really nice. We found that when we applied the rules he taught us, everything worked, it was amazing. We just did the bunny hill that first day – and that was hard. It hurt. It hurt bad. When the lesson was over I decided to go attempt a green, and wow was that a mistake. Apparantly Copper stops grooming about mid-season, so on the mildly steep parts of greens, there are moguls. Understand, moguls are completely different on a snowboard. If you don’t know what you’re doing (me), you can’t do crap, whereas on skis you can at least run over the moguls and ruin them. I fell about 30 times on the run, and I wore myself out badly pushing myself across the straits. I was about ready to go back to skiing the next day, but some encouragement from Brian and the brothers kept me at it.

Wednesday we went to Cooper – the smallest resort, but the highest at 13,000 feet. Towards Cooper is about the size of Greek Peak in terms of amount of lifts and runs, and even layout. The runs are still about twice as long, though. I forgot to mention – the runs at Copper are generally half a mile to three-fourths. The green path I took made for a 20-minute run, with a 4-5 minute lift ride. That’s about four to five times as long as Greek Peak’s. And about half to a quarter the lift ride. Amazing, yes? By the end of the day we braved a mild blue. Two days, and a mild blue!

Thursday we went back to Copper to meet up with Clair. We spent half the day floundering on these really bad greens – most greens had “traverse” zones, where snowboarders have to detach their back foot and push for a few hundred yards. This is really tiring, and just frustrating. We managed to get some advice from some seasoned Copper-goers and took a few nice and steep blues, which really made up for the first half of the day. The last run, though, we went to the top to try another blue to discover that it’s really, really steep and had moguls. We actually did ok, but we split when it came to a fork in the path. I went down first, and stopped at the fork. It forked between a blue and a black. The plan was to take the blue, but Jonothan and Christopher missed the blue and went down the black. Jonothan did ok, but Christopher wasn’t feeling too hot and just detached and walked back. Three days, and harder blues!

Copper, at the top (crappy camera):

Friday was Monarch, the middle-range between Copper and Cooper, but all the trails are of far greater difficulty. This is by far the best resort, IMO. It has a lot of unmarked forest trails which are really fun and challenging, they all have huge jumps, lots of powder, huge moguls, all created by skiiers. We did one trail, called “Turbo” 6 times. It’s about the equivelant of Olympian on Greek Peak, the hardest black on the mountain, and yet it’s blue. The first four times were pretty tough, we didn’t know how to handle the moguls. By the 5th and 6th time, we had it down to a science of jumping and braking, it was far more dynamic than it is on skis. FOUR days, very steep blues with a lot of moguls!

Snowboarding has it’s perks, but I think I’ll stick with skiing. Skiing has a lot of conveniences, like poles, seperated feet, and is generally more mobile. Also, you can’t really do back-trail snowboarding around here, as you’d have to push yourself everywhere. Anyway. Monarch had a few ok pictures. There was a professional photographer at the top taking pictures, so one is good.

That was our last day of skiing. Saturday was nothing, I just ran around taking pictures and such. There are a few left of views of the scenery. These are the good ones.

This is of Buena Vista, from the windows:

Night time:

View to the west:

View to the north:

We packed up and cleaned the rooms Saturday too. I ended up vacuuming with a vacuum older than my parents. So old, there was no date on it, anywhere. I took a picture to immortalize this antiquity.

The trip wasn’t just fun, though. It was (and this is said at the risk of sounding corny) a really good family bonding experience. Every time I spend time with my brothers, I realize how much alike we really are. It helps that I’m old enough to really have fun with them now, and not constantly be left behind. Our family sat down for about 3 hours just talking about problems we were facing and prayer requests, it was nice like that. It’s a little weird looking past the outside stuff that bothers me about the family and seeing what’s really worth looking at. It wasn’t gooey, soft, and pretty, but was definately heart warming. Anyways.

And a poorly taken picture of our final feast:

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We left Sunday morning to Denver airport, sent Christopher off to San Antonio, and moved on to Denver. We checked in at the hotel and just…sat, basically. We didn’t do anything until we saw Tim and Joyce Hume (this is the guy I’m named after, remember). It was really good to see them back together (they’d been seperated), and with a child no less. I really enjoy my time with Tim, he’s an awesome one. No pictures, for some reason. Monday was pretty boring, we just kinda sat around, had dinner with Clair, and that was it. We left Tuesday morning, and got back to Ithaca at 12:00 AM Wednesday. They lost Mom’s and Jonothan’s luggage though (after the flight was delayed, too), so we didn’t get home till 1:30 AM. For obvious reasons I didn’t go to school, and that was my trip. Exciting, to be sure.

O.o

Christmafying step III!

This is an ornament Jonathan made back in his elementary years, which is a favorite of mine:

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Elvsers!!!

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I’ve always like this one…

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Before…

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And a some light-room after pictures!

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And some dark-room pictures…

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That’s about it. That’s just the livingroom, I decorated the rest of the house too, but that was the main piece.

O.o

Update stuff:

New Christmas List is up on the archive, and my Halo 2 stats are up over there as well. A note about the list: it’s not a guideline for what you should get me, it’s just there for my own amusement and to see what you guys thought of it. I don’t want you guys to get me anything as I can’t give you anything back, if you really want to, go ahead, but that’s just my personal preference.

Don’t be stupid on the comments, post however much you want, but there needs to be a point to the post. I will present to you my step-by-step process of Christmafying my house through pictures! Step 1: the tree and boxes.

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Step 2: tomorrow!

O.o

Well, I’ve had a lot of fun with this pictures thing…a few people I don’t know from here, that I’ve never met got to see my picture, and I’m sure you can all feel much more informed with true, live, pictures to look at. Unfortunately, the camera sucks up batteries at the rate of 4 per 4 hours of running time, so I won’t be going crazy like today…but I don’t think I expect to.

^^

This was easier than I thought! This is AWESOME! Here’s some picture of stuff….a few of my room, two of daisy, two of sam, one of the front of our house. Heeheehee. This is so cool!

This is DAISY!

And this is SAM!

That’s mah rooooom! [Before I cleaned it up, obviously]

Here’s what it looks like cleaned up!

I won’t post too many at a time, to save some of you dial-up people a pain. Wow, this is fun…

^^

Let’s have a w007 to DIGITAL CAMERAS! My dad just ordered one, I’m installing the software now! I’ll have some pictures up of my airsoft guns, my computer, and my house and stuff ASAP. I don’t think any of my friends from school have actually seen my house….well…the people on my bus have seen the outside…but that’s beside the point. It may take a while to get the hosting done, I doubt I’ll have pictures up before the end of the weekend, but we can hope!