Goodbye Sweet Lawn Shoes 2010

OK, I'm not sure how long I've had these shoes, but they have been my lawnmowing shoes for a long long time. Today, I must sadly part with them, for they served me well for long enough. Goodbye, sweet shoes, goodbye!

Zombatar

Here is my Zombatar!

Audio Career

Well, folks,

As of this Monday, I have officially begun my career as an audio dude. I went part time at work to focus on my voice acting, music, and sound effects business. I'm nervous, but spectacularly excited about it.

13 on 14

Just playing catchup here. I was able to take off my ear-guard which was amazing because it was pushing so hard on my head and causing me a constant headache. So now I've got that off and you can see the bandage that covered where they took the skin graft from to help repair my inner ear. Warning: could be gross!

12 on 14

I've taken the pictures, but I haven't able to keep up posting. Here are the shots for 1-12-2010.

11 on 12

OK, so I didn't get around to posting pictures yesterday, so here they are now. I'm really not in that much pain, but it is very uncomfortable. I've got splints in my nose, so I can't breathe through it, so my tongue constantly becomes a dry piece of leather. I also have to sit and sleep with my head propped above my chest, so that makes it a little hard to get good sleep. However, I am still very thankful that I am in very little pain and that I'll be able to breathe better and hear better soon!

Surgery Image Blog

Hi Folks,

As usual, it has been a while. Tomorrow morning at 6:50 AM, I am reporting to Methodist Hospital, where I will have two procedures done: Deviated Septum and Ear Drum repair. I figured it might be interesting to have some before and during recovery photos of my face. So, here is the day before surgery.

I hope to hear from you guys soon. Hopefully much more clearly.

Android

I've got AT&T and I want an Android smartphone.  I don't want a freakin iTunes.  Oh wait I mean iPhone.  Nope, I meant iTunes.

Damn you AT&T get on the boat so that I can get on the boat!

Please.   Please.  Please.Please.

Discovering old CD's

I'm currently in the process of ripping all my CDs.  This is an extremely scary and daunting task, because I've bought way too many and I was a member of BMG way back when, so I've got way too many.

I still want to keep some CD's so I can have a nice snobby collection for display (tempered with some of my guilty pleasures of course).  However, I have two tubfulls of CDs and I'm slowly going through them.  What a task.

Anyway, I ran across a CD by Plain Jane Automobile.  It's just a little 5 track EP that I picked up when they were opening for Ours I think.  I don't too often buy CDs at shows because I usually have the artist's I came to see music already and I am rarely too impressed by the opening band.  Anyway, I picked this up because it was superbly energetic and the lead singer's voice was great.  I had forgotten about this and just wanted to give them a little shout out--great band.

Check them out.

F'ing Macs Y'all!

BTW, I don't how Quicktime updates behave on Macs, but it's really starting to feel like Realplayer to me.  First off, it auto-installs iTunes-I don't remember if I could uncheck it or not, but when it is a "trusted" software I usually don't read though any of the update notes, I just click yes.  OK, that sucks, whatever--I'll uninstall iTunes.  Whoah, now if I click yes one more time without reading, it will install Bonjour.  That I can uncheck to finish, but that's sneaky-mean.  Oh wait, crap now it needs to restart my computer.  OK, I restart my computer for iTunes.  Now I want to uninstall it.  Oh sweet, now I have to restart my computer again so that iTunes can finish uninstalling.

All just because I clicked yes to a Quicktime update.  Does it suck this much on Macs?

:(

Quicktime=Realplayer 2009?

Art of War

So tonight, we debuted our movie at an actual theatre.  It was awesome.  There weren't as many paparazzi as I expected, but there were also more people to view it than I expected, and it was amazing fun to actually see all of our combined work put together and displayed on the silver screen.  Congrats to everybody who worked on it and thanks to everybody who showed up.

Here are some pictures that I took whilst there.

Kit Kat

We just got a cute new little kitty named Kona.  Sara had the most terrible idea to go to the humane society--you know, just to look.  That doesn't really work, though, when the kitty looks up at you with those cute little kitty eyes and then says, "Could you please take me home so that I can stop crying these little kitty tears of abandonment?  I don't mean to guilt you, though."

Yikes, is she cute.  We'll have to see how our other cat Maui feels about the whole situation.  We've got Kona confined to our bathroom and the two are glaring at each other underneath the door.

TKs Games

I started a new blog called TKs games where I'll be posting most of my gaming related stuff. I will also review stuff, too. Yay for things.

Illustrator Blues and Greens

OK, so here's the first sort of illustration I've made that I'm going to continue working on. I know what you're thinking--gee, Tori, that looks like a 5 year old drew that. I know I know, and I agree. However, I'm doing this mostly to learn how to use Illustrator because I think it could be a great tool to develop my website with. So, at least for now, check this out.

P.S. any Illustrator Pros out there who see this and have some great tips for me, please don't hesitate to let me know!

Learning to Draw

I'm trying to learn illustrator right now and it is kicking my butt. Adobe makes wonderful products but they are insanely user-unfriendly. Yucky, homes! But I shall prevail. Unless I don't.

Conan 2

So I've been playing Age of Conan a bit and it is rather fun. However, it suffers, as all MMO's do from the old just killed that overlord quest that I've been working on forever and he just respawned ten seconds later. I just end up feeling like the world isn't changing around me. So, when I get to feeling like that, I take a little break. However, I will be back and I just wanted to throw up some screenshots that I have been taking. It's weird-now that games are really starting to look so good, the screenshots sometimes almost taking on a slightly artistic look. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy. And as always, leave me some feedback. I'll probably eventually do a best of gallery sometime in the future. Cheers!

Mass Effect

So I'm playing Mass Effect for the PC right now and I'm completely blown away. The graphics are great--the loading isn't too bad because it appears to be using the streaming tech developed for consoles--load crappy textures first, then the hi-rez. I do wish there was a force-load button in the console (maybe there is) that would force-rez all the high textures in the area. But anway, the voice acting and the story so far are just stellar. Truly stellar. For the first time I actually feel like I am controlling a movie. I wasn't a big fan of Kotor (though I do generally love Bioware products -- Baldur's Gate anyone)? So anyway, I'm gonna gush about the game more later because right now I just want to play some more. But, I thought I'd upload a few choice screenies that I've taken. Of my character and other cool stuff. I didn't realize how generic of a military-lookin dude I ended up making, although in my defense the nose and eye options aren't too shattering. However, the fact that your character really does end up looking pretty fantastic when you are done is a testament to the handling of the engine. Anyway, here are a few pics and now I'll shut up and play.

So I've been doing a buttload of voiceovers at work lately, and I'm really enjoying them, so I've decided that I'm gonna see if there are any other venues that I can do voice work for. It's all about collaboration, y'all!

Conan Zazzle

I've now started a new venture: Zazzle, where I will be putting up designs, clothes, bumper stickers, all that stuff and see if I've got a knack for that kind of thing. You know, see if I can let my creativity somehow fashion me a living at some point.

I've also started an online game called Age of Conan which is superbly fun and very addictive. I've joined a guild called Knights of Malta through the good will of my bud Nate. I also am currently playing a Barbarian on the Cimmeria server and am only level 19 right now. I have an unfortunate desire to finish every quest that I see, so that ends up taking me a little extra time. I'm hoping to be able to start helping to plan our city layout soon. Cheers, folks!

-TK

Dimensional Understanding

So I was having a discussion with the boys tonight about dimensional things--like what does a fifth dimension mean or whatever. I had an intellectual breakthrough for myself tonight. So, as mathematical/physics theory has it right now, something will exist in all the dimensions. However, it occurred to me that a being that was able to perceive a higher dimension should then be able to perceive things much easier in lower dimensions than vice versa. For example, if a higher being were able to navigate time, it could much more easily observe another being that did not have that power. The lower being could only perceive the higher being when their time axis intersected. If the higher being could also see through time, then it could perceive the lesser being without being noticed.

Basically all I'm saying is that humans right now have senses that were made for survival in the third dimension and although we are aware of time and can observe it's passing, there's nothing we can do about it. But if we could navigate it, it would vastly change our perceptions.

I'm gonna stew on this a bit and see if I can explain it better in the future.

-TK