Our university exhibition thing has taken more twists and turns, but everything looks to be on track. Hopefully I’ll be able to find some way to make a camera track some funny symbols and report their position/type back to a flash engine. Fun.

Also, the layout currently looks mishmashy because I’m yet again trying to work more on it. I hope to find some spare time in which to make it look less ugly and more finished.

I might as well write down what I remember of last night’s dream while it’s still relatively fresh.

I’m not sure where it started, but I remember ending up inside a well-furnished house. It had nice polished floorboards and looked modern without being one of those artsy designs. From what I can remember it was a three level house built into a bit of a hill, so that the second level had the main front entrance. The first level was half-underground but it also had a backyard entrance and at this time of day it was well-lit by sunlight. The garden had a bit of a security-orientated wall built into the garden surrounding the house, in a way that it just looked like an artsy part of the garden rather than a wall.

It felt familiar but not my own house, like the house of a close friend. I vaguely remember talking to the wife of the house in that same ‘close-friend’ type of relationship. This was all probably related to my dream self, which I should probably explain…

At times I saw things in first-person but most of the time it was third-person-ish. From what I can surmise, I was some type of clone, made using the DNA of the house-owners’ son. When I met the father he wasn’t anything like my real dad, and by extension I don’t think I looked anything like my real self either. He was something like an FBI or other type of secret service guy, possibly retired, which kind of explains my existence as a clone. He talked to me in a familiar way, he knew me as a sort of a family friend, but I guess it had always been subtly unsettling for him that I looked just like his son. In the dream I never got much more information about his son other than this, I’m not even sure if his son was still alive or not.

It never got explained, but I’m guessing I was the result of some sort of secret cloning experiment. I could phase through walls and change shape as some sort of liquid shape-shifting creature. I had definately been built for combat. Maybe I had been rescued by the FBI father guy, which I suspect must have irked his bosses, but I also suspect he was too good of an agent for them to be able to ’say no’ to him. He probably had an uneasy relationship with his bosses, sort of like Noah from Heroes. I guess he had been looking after me in a sort of ‘adopted father’ sort of way, but I don’t think I lived in his house too much, just visited often. I guess he must’ve built a safehouse for me to hide in. The house was eerily familiar yet not, as if I was remembering the house through the echo of his son’s memories.

At the start of the dream it had just been me wandering around the house and saying hi to his wife. I went downstairs to the first level and started having a chat with him. We must have talked quietly about something semi-important, but I can’t remember what. It might have been about his son because I was feeling awkward about being a clone experiment. I got the feeling that he was worried about something, but he didn’t say. Mid-conversation a ‘friend’ of his from work arrived unexpected through the back door. He wasn’t pleased to see the guy, and out of reflex I felt really defensively hostile towards him. I immediately stopped being liquidy (I think I was practicing or something, probably out of habit because of how awkward the conversation was) and tried to appear like a normal (solid) human, but even if he hadn’t walked in unannounced like that I suspect he already knew all about me.

The guy must’ve been there to ‘collect’ me or such, because at that point there was a lot of agents swarming in on the house. I started fighting them off with my super-liquid-shape powers, mainly big blobby punches and throwing things at them. It was the kind of angry brawling that didn’t have too much thought in it, because if I had been properly trained I would have been using my powers as very nasty knives. I guess it’s an ironic twist that a lot of those agents would be beaten rather than dead BECAUSE I hadn’t been trained as a killing machine. At this point the dream kinda started going offtrack and unfocused, and I eventually woke up.

It was a very interesting plot concept though, enough to stick in my head after these serveral hours after waking up :) It would be great to make something out of it someday. I think I’d have to practive my drawing of humans first though D:

This is my last sememster for my University degree, so maybe I’ll use this blog as an actual blog for once and put in some updates about it here. My Design Studio 4 class is going to be putting on an exhibition at the end of the sememster so that project is definately going to eat up a lot of my time. It’s about ‘embodied playfullness’ and involves putting together interactive exhibits. For our project me and my group are planning on building a little ‘city in a bottle’ that is influenced by physical objects. Like blowing into a fan messes with the wind and changing a lamp (w/ dimmer switch) changes the time of day. Not quite a game but then again the exhibition is about playfullness.

Ohh and one more thing, if anyone’s interested I’ve made a new 1.0 version of Leonardo. Enjoy.

The Sudnay before last I went to the Supanova expo at the Brisbane RNA grounds. All the people with fancy game and anime-related tshirts made me feel really boring by comparison. I almost got lost trying to find my way there, but luckily I spotted some cosplayers. God bless cosplayers. I was originally going to get in for free as a voluteer, but stupid gmail put the email I needed into the spam folder so I ended up paying $20 to get in. I spent most of my time volunteering anyway because I felt like it. It was almost all shops there, next time I go to a game/anime convention I should remember to bring actual money.

I probably should have mentioned sooner that April 9th (last Wednesday) was my birthday. I guess I’m just scatterbrained. I had a birthday party on the weekend and invited some friends around Brisbane. My parents came up to visit and brought their projector (which, by the way, is still here and Carrie has been playing Metroid on it :P ) Unfortunately a bunch of people couldn’t come so it was just Myth/Jen and one of my friends who lives next door to me. Still, we had a good time :) We played some Magic the Gathering,
sung to Singstar, and watched Myth’s DVD of Happy Feet. We also ate a lot of cake and snacks :P

As for presents, Rosheen (Carrie’s girlfriend, our new flatmate) gave me a DVD of “Tales from Earthsea“. I’m waiting for a good time to watch it, since it’s a Studio Ghibli movie and it should be good. Carrie bought me a little plasmaball. It seems to eat up batteries so I should get an adapter for it. I also used a gift card to get a $20 iTunes card and buy Peggle for my iPod. It’s the most awesome game for the iPod ever :D

Another awesome present was this huge new 22 inch widescreen LCD my Dad gave me :D It’s 1680×1050 resolution. Sitting it next to my old LCD it’s like having an extra 1.5 monitors :P I’m overwhelmed by the amount of screen real estate I now have. I don’t even know what to use as a wallpaper XD

First of all, I’ve been hooked on playing flash games on Kongregate. The site adds to the games by offering “Badges” and a point/level system. I’ve worked my way up to Level 5 at the moment :D Submachine is a fun series of games even without Badges.

It’s like the Xbox Live of online flash games, so to speak. I’ve certainly played some of the games longer than I would have normally just to get a few extra points :P And apparently they recentally added Cards, which can be collected through weekly challenges, and are for an upcoming collectable card game they have in the works.

I also started using Twitter for some reason. One day I just randomly signed up for it. I’ve sporadically added a few things here and there, but I’m not quite sure what to do with it.

If you have an account at either of these two, let me know and I’ll add you to my list :P

Edit: I’m fickle, Comicpress doesn’t seem to suit me that much at the moment (especially with a lack of actual comic material), so I’m switching back to the previous layout. Hopefully I’ll get my butt into gear and fix up the previous theme I was working on…

Well anyway, onto the proper stuff, not the crazy stuff :P The main(-ish? it’s hard to tell in a dream) character was a human-sized dragon. I’m not sure what he was doing but I think he was trying to save somebody or something equally important. Anyway, the only stuff that happened before I woke up was some kind of zealous archer started firing arrows at him just because he was a dragon, and so he had to hide behind a stone wall. He probably said something along the lines of “Why me?”, because he’s not much of a terror at human size, so he’s kinda trapped there. Some adventures came by (can’t picture them well) and he started pleading to them to help him out and to not smite him just because he’s a dragon.

So yeah, sorta disjointed, but all my dreams are like that. Some other interesting things was the idea of a “safe haven”, which is an area of ground that magic can’t touch, so it protects from anything other than regular weapons. There was also (I think) a tent or something that belonged to a wizard-like fortune teller guy. He had made his own “faux-safe haven” area along a boardwalk to protect his visitors/customers. Also, there was a lake under the boardwalk and I think this was also the reason why the archer was shooting instead of running up and attacking the poor dragon dude immediately.

On the up side I’ve decided to re-activate trackbacks, here’s hoping that these plugins will stop all those useless spam trackbacks from appearing.

Also, I’ve been thinking about changing the theme to something else instead of this half-finished theme, so don’t be surprised if everything looks different all of a sudden.

BTW, I could seriously use tutorials for drawing pixel art background scenes.

So, anyways, some much-needed news/ramble!

I bought the Orange Box (& Garry’s Mod) over Steam and a new iPod Nano with my Christmas mula :D

Portal was hell’a fun! It’s short but jam-packed with concentrated awesomeness! The ending song wraps it up so nicely (and gives me something to repeat endlessly on my new iPod 8D) It’s got the mind-bending portal puzzles mixed in with a great script and voice-acting! The WCC is a freakin’ INANIMATE CUBE, but he’s got a giant fanbase already XD. I wish I could find some good fan-made maps to sedate my lust for more portal content.

Also, getting Episode 1 & 2 prompted me to finish playing Half-Life 2 and I ploughed through all of them lickety-split! I feel like a real FPS guy now! I CAN’T WAIT FOR EPISODE 3! YAAAAAAY! GIMME GORDAN WITH A PORTAL GUN! :D

… and I haven’t even tried out Team Fortress 2 yet :P Btw, my SteamID is KreeTheBasilisk

The iPod was a bit of a sudden splurge (that I could have bought Mario with D: ) but it’s awesome fun to listen to the Joystiq podcast when I don’t have anything to do. Also, sorry my poor DS Lite, but this iPod is also way easier to lug around with me in those gaps of travel time.

Apart from those two things, we mainly ate tons of candy and nuts for Christmas :D Fun family times. Also, my brother got Cluedo. CLUEDO! XD ‘Tis fun. Also, I ate all my Gourmet Jelly Beans and now he doesn’t want me to mooch any of his :P

Ohh, before I forget, back before Portal and HL2 consumed my soul, I played a lot of Kyntt Stories. It’s free and artsy, try it out! There’s extra map packs and more in the forums. “Within a Deep Forest” is also a blast.

So yeah, there’s my long-winded update of what I’ve been up to. Feel free to poke me with countless probing questions! :)