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| Here are the previous Weblog Entries, Enjoy. |
| Solarstone Enterprises Archives |
| WEBLOG 3 : 11 : 2thousandfour Wow, It's been a while. I try to update once a week, I really do but it's just been a bit hectic lately. 3 concerts in 2 weeks, approaching finals, & class registration have pretty much eaten up my time. I got lumped into the last priority registration group again this term meaning that when I logged on to sign up for classes there were a grand total of 2 still open for me. Thanks a lot osu, really, I enjoy spending 3 days walking from department to depatment asking teachers to let me into their already overcrowded classes. That's just loads of fun. Anyway, I did manage to do some drawings, 2 are me messing around with photoshop's displacement maps and there are also the first 2 color, all-digital sketches. It is hard to draw with a mouse, but not impossible. I also found an interesting file online, It's a mod of Blizzard's Starcraft game in which the terran & protoss forces have been completely changed into units from the anime Mobile Suit Gundam. It can only play the custom levels but it's still pretty cool. it's in the site o' the week. One other thing: Banzai! the japanese game show is coming to comedy central thurs. night, yes, it's back on the air. CD Player: Burn it Blue, Frida Khalo OST |
| 3 : 11 : 2oo4 Slacking off on updates due to spring break. More content when I buckle down for school again. CD Player: Knock on Wood, Mighty, Mighty Bosstones |
| 4 : 7 : 2oo4-ish Well that was a nice long break wasn't it boys & girls? So maybe I wasn't on break the whole time I was slacking off but doing my work is a pretty good reason for not updating right? OSU's spring term has begun. & now that I have a full schedule of classes & a new program of peices to practice for band I'll be busy for the next couple of months. This term I'm taking mostly requred "core" classes: Power & discrimination, Math 105, Geography, Wind ensemble, an Adobe Illustrator class, & horn lessons + labs & recitations. 14 credits in all. So the math that I've been avoiding since sophmore yr. is back to sucking up my day again. At least this is the last math class I'll ever have to take. Ever. Think about it. Anyway I had a long day yesterday(20 hrs to be exact) so that's all for this week. Check back soon, a major site remodel is coming. CD Player: Improvise Instrumental, Jet Grind Radio Music Sampler |
| 4 : 14 : 2oo4 Aahh the refreshing smell of update. What've I been up to you may ask, Last weekend was easter & my grandparents are in town so they drove me down to salem for a relaxing weekend. Lent was finally over & I made it (no meat but fish for weeks & weeks!!) We celebrated easter with a huge barbeque. D**n that tri-tip tased good. On the art front I've returned to an idea I had for a spoof manga several years ago. It's a similar setting to Mobile Suit Gundam or SDF Macross(Robotech if you're American). So I've been working the last couple weeks trying to come up with a distinctive, new, realistic style of mech that doesn't look like I just traced a picture of a gundam. This is harder than you might think, but I've made a lot of progress largely through looking at a wide variety of sources, so far Macross, various Gundams, Gasaraki, Maddox-01, Armored core, & Big O. I still havn't quite got it, but the good news is I've filled up at least ten pages front & back with drawings. I'll probably post those sometime this week. CD Player: Forever Broke, Cowboy Bebop OST |
| 5 : 9 : 2oo4 What a week it's been. Well more than a week but who's counting? Last week was a blur of class, homework, food social events, video-games and sleep (yes, prioritized in that order). This week is looking to be the same way, I looked back on Monday afternoon & could have sworn that it'd happened sometime this morning. I can't really remember what happened last week but I did enjoy the weekend. By the time I finished class Fri. I was dead tired, estoy muerte, burnt out. I was too tired to pack my clothes & definatly too tired to haul my clothes & euphonium all he way downtown to take the Greyhound back to Salem. After a nap, Kevin, Sam, Steve, & I walked to a nearby deli that was giving away sample subs. When I got there I was D**n tired again, but after a sub & some Mt. Dew I was feeling downright chipper. I spent the next few hours hanging out with Bill & his friend John, after wandering the campus for a while we ended up @ the climbing wall, pretty much the only thing to do @ osu on the weekends is workout & workout we did. I quit after an hour or so of hard climbing to go back to my dorm & play video-games for several hours to rest up for the Salsa dance taking place downtown later that night. Insert another couple hours of walking. Bill & I showed up a bit early so we ened up walking around downtown looking for a place to eat. The dance itself was awesome, after watching a few amazing pairs of dancers to get some ideas I was teaing it up but after an hour & a half Bill & his friend Craig had been less successfull & felt it was time to go so we walked back to the only place near campus still open; Pita Pit, & got some late night snacks. By the time I got back to my dormroom I realized if I'd stayed @ the dance any longer I probably wouldn't have been able to hobble back. Total time not standing up that day: 4-5 hours, Total Mt. Dews: 5-7 Saturday & Sunday were uneventfull except for a multiple hr. Uno & catchphrase bout with people from my dorm. Sunday I got up early to play video-games for a while before waking up @ 4pm & realizing that I only dreamed that I'd gotten out of bed. Lately progress has stalled with scanning of art & Army of Z-nor because of my latest addictions: Guilty Gear X for the PS2 (the absolute best 2D fighter that's not named Street Fighter, & most mentally consuming game not named Power Stone), and the manga Initial-D (extremely addictive street racing story). If I can pull myself away from those I might just update the gallery and continue with SSE version2.0 revisions. CD Player: Fly High, Ayume Hamasaki |
| 6 : 2 : 2oo4 updates temporarily suspended due to obscene amounts of pre-finals work. Will return June 11th after end of school. |
| 6 : 20-ish : 2oo4 Aaaand. . . We're back. after quite a long absence I've returned to this website & my plans to update sometime in the near future. The end of school was a whirlwind of studying, final projects, sleep deprivation, partying, & caffeine. It's finally over now (including my last math class EVER!!11). I'm back in Salem, my stuff is more or less unpacked, & now comes the fun task of trying to find a job. After being suckered in by a knife sales scheme under the company Vector-Cutco (I got out after 2 days) I've resumed the hunt by touring downtown Salem with resumes, this year there were actually a few "Help Wanted" signs up (unlike last summer). Kate threw a pretty good goodbye party for Doug Bowen, that's right, the time has come for Doug to go on his mission to Brazil. He'll have to learn Portugese during his year there. It was cool to see everybody again, & I learned that I suck at bowling, but don't really get worse as I get tired, so after about 3 or 4 games I'm relatively decent. I've added the first section of the mecha project, I'm trying out a new format I'll probably use for all of the Concept Galleries to save space. I'll continue the section as I complete and upload it. CD Player: Cloud 9, Funk Bro.s |
| 7 : 1 : 2oo4 It's been a week of hedgehogs & hermit crabs. Several days ago My sister & I went on a Sonic the Hedgehog Binge. We were on the old Sega Genesis for several days. After playing through Sonic 2 and 3 I finally accomplished something I'd never done, despite owning the game since I was a kid. When the game Sonic & Knuckles is connected to Sonic 3, one can play through both games on one file and unlock "hyper" characters by beating extra-hard special stages. I had beaten every stage but 2 and this week I finally got it. Despite the outdated graphics & limited reaction time, It's still really fun to beat something in a game that you've never bean able to before. Good stuff. In larger news, I got a summer job. I spent several hours downtown going from business to business handing out resumes, & several days later I got a call! So now I work @ the Salem Center mall, @ a cart that sells hermit crabs. The job itself isn't too bad, I talk to customers, stir up the crabs to keep them scuttling around, and keep the cart clean. There are only 3 things that bug me. 1st of all I've never enjoyed standing up for 6 hours in a row (we're not allowed to sit down, at all), 2nd is the fact that the cash register seems to have a grudge against me. Every other time I use it it's "ERROR" or "PAPAR JAM", & 3rd is the closing procedure. I don't understand how we can make any profits at all with the amount of paperwork we do, After cleaning the cart and taking care of the crabs I have about 5 or 6 forms to print, fill out, tape, staple, and fax. I havn't been pinched yet, but I do get at least one papercut each day. Overall I work about 6 hours a day. CD Player: Chicken Bone, Cowboy Bebop OSt |
| 7 : 26 : 2oo4 Wow It's been awhile since the last update. But there is good news. I've put some more planning into SSE web's version 2 and come up with some ways to streamline it & conserve space for the good stuff like art. First of all I'm getting rid of that gallery of other artists. To tell the truth it was really just supposed to be a placeholder until I got some art of my own online. Second I'm dropping the Archives section. Instead of being a whole section I'll just link the last week's items from the update page. As far as the Special section, I'll probably keep a few things like cd mixes, & maybe a profile but get rid of everything else there. The other big change is that for now I'll probably be doing most of my editing in Microsoft Word. It's not that Word is that great, but it should be adequate & Geocities' editor has been giving me a lot of problems(Know page). Until I get things sorted out on this site check out my new account on Deviant Art, linked to the left. CD Player: Move Your Feet, JrSr |
| 7 : 27 : 2oo4 It sure feels good to be off. I don't have to be at work till Thursday so I can just chill till then. It's really not a bad job, there's just a lot of crap to do. 5-6 pages of paperwork to print, assemble, & fill out every day, total inventory of storage and the entire cart (gagg sputter gasp) every Sunday, & bathing the crabs every Saturday. That's right, bathing 500+ flailing pinching hermit crabs (they're afraid of the water). There are a couple things I've learned from working here. 1st of all: few things stink as badly as dead hermit crabs and starfish. 2nd: people set off the alarm at Borders (right above the cart) at least 10 times a day. 3rd: the song "Video killed the radio star" (the guy in the cart next to me plays it constantly) sucks. 4th: the fact that it's 5 minutes from closing, there's a stack of unfinished paperwork on the desk, & I'm wiping down the tanks with windex will not discorage people from coming to the cart and interrogating me. 5th: people are not observant. They will walk up to a cart with HERMIT CRABS written on it, stare at them climbing around for 30 seconds, & exclaim "(gasp) They're alive?! What are those?". you would be surprised how often this happens. Oh yeah, I saw anchorman the other day, It had gotten mixed reviews but if you like Will Farrel or Ben Stiller's style of comedy you'll like it. A pretty large part of the movie did seem like they just had Farrel improvise but it works well. CD Player: Top Gun Anthem, Top Gun OST |
| 8 : 1 : 2oo4 I'm holding off on redesigning the site for a while. A new project has emerged. I'd celebrated my birthday on the 29th with cake, gifts, & lots of Mt. Dew, I had a good time but around Midnight I found myself much too caffeinated to sleep. I wanted to work on something but my current project, the Starcraft mod Army of Z-nor, was a strategy game and wasn't fast-paced enough to satisfy my hyperactive mood. An earlier project, A mod of the old mac shooter Marathon was far too complicated to get much done on in such a short time. Then I remembered Mandala, a simpler mod of Marathon that I'd thought up several months earlier. I'd never taken it past the concept stage but it was a smaller project than the other 2 & would result in a fast-paced shooting game. I grabbed another Mt. Dew & got started. |
| 8 : 7 : 2oo4 I made the unfortunate mistake of buying the transformers game (PS2) causing a total 3 day gap in productivity. Now that I've curbed my addiction slightly I'll continue on day 5. |
| 9 : 3 : 2oo4 Man a lot of things have happened since the last update. I know it's been a month but I really do plan to keep trying to update once a week, more or less. Promise. Now then, what have I been up to? Plenty. First of all band camp, After the traditional year off after my senior year of h.s. Ray & I were back as chaperones. Unfortunatley I had to leave and comeback to Salem for the middle 3 days because my bosses wouldn't give me the whole week off from work, but it was still cool. We mostly were there for night patrol, making sure all the campers were staying in their cabins all night & enforcing lights-out times. this involved hiking around camp yamhill all night with flashlights looking for rulebreakers & wild animals & playing games to keep from dozing off. Aside from that we just helped out with various small jobs around the camp & slept all day. All in all it was a pretty fun week. An unexpected bonus was being up in the mountains at the height of the Pleinid meteor shower, Without even paying attention you could spot upwards of 6 shooting stars a night. Once I got back There was a flurry of stress & preparations for my little sister's departure to her 6 mo.s in Japan. We saw her off @ the airport from which she flew to L.A., spent the night, then flew to Tokyo. She spent a week with her program, American Feild Studies, adjusting to the time change(she's 16 hrs ahead into tomorrow) and getting ready to meet her host family. Right now she's with them starting her Sr. year in Shizuoka, a town near Tokyo. The other major news is that I've quit my job @ the Hermit Hut in the mall. I left in search of a workplace with more than 2 employees & less than 5 supervisers, A place where the managers don't call you up on your days off and demand to know why you're not at work, A place that doesn't take every opourtunity to avoid paying employees their full salary. Such a dream job may not exist, but after buffing up my resume, I set out to find it. In site news I've added a Game Log recording my progress on the marathon mod Mandala. check it out. I've also added a link to my site on Deviant Art to the navigator, click on the running eggman to see my latest art. CD Player: Hybrid Rainbow, FLCL OST |
| 9 : 16 : 2thousandfour Well the summer is winding down for me which means both a flurry of last minute preparations & a passive-aggressive state of denial that Sophmore year is really about to start. Today I opted for the Caffeine-feuled blur of productivity. Unfortunately as college starts I'll be unable to work on my mac game Mandala, (no way to fit 2 computers into a dorm room) so the Gamelog will switch over to display progress creating the pc game Army of Z-nor. About the site itself, I'll be starting some of the changes I've been talking about so if you want to check out the Special, Archive, or Gallery sections see em soon because They should be gone next update. I'll be changing the site to focus more on drawings and videogames. Unfortunately I recently bought Halo for pc & it's been sucking up every spare scrap of free time. I'd developed enough skill with first-person-shooters to start out decent at the game which means I've blown through about 3/4s of the game in about 3 days & could also easily spend hours in the online matches. I'm starting to see why Bungie has such a following. CD Player: Real Emotion, Koda Kumi |
| 10 : 6 : 2oo4 I've been doing some pretty large-scale stuff under the surface of this site getting ready to gut it & start putting in fresh pages. I'll write a more thorough entry in a couple of days. The short version: Oregon State University, Wind Ensemble, Japanese, Bible Study, ViGa Symphony, Labs, Kendo, College Democrats, Graphic Design(massive). )Whew( |
| 10 : 20 : 2oo4 All right, for those who may not have guessed, I'm back at school for my Sophomore year. This is the busiest term so far as it decides if I get into Oregon State's graphic design program. I just finished my first of 3 projects & had to pull 2 consecutive all-nighters to get it done. I also got into osu's wind ensemble this year, despite a dissapointing audition. Great group, intense new director but also a lot of work. Our first concert is November 4th @ Noon in osu's Memorial Union. I'm also studying Japanese this year, I have 3 years of spanish, but the spanish classes here fill up amazingly fast so I'm taking a shot at tri-linguality. Also new this year is Kendo. There's a club on campus affiliated with Obukan that meets twice a week. There's just a certain juvenaille satisfaction in getting to swing a sword around, I find myself looking forward to next practice even though I screwed up my leg in the last one to the point where I've been limping around campus. Anyway that's the news so far more good stuff to come. CD Player: Gateway, Cowboy Bebop OST |
| 11 : 18 : 2oo4 Good news everyone, I'm still technicaly alive. Project 2 is done & I'm well into the 3rd one. It looks like with how busy I am this term I'll be updating monthly but I should have time, at least, to put up my graphics projects & sketches & fresh quotes & links. Basically I've been just really freakin busy. Cd Player: The Trial In Concert, Chrono Trigger |
| 12 : 3 : 2oo4 This is about as tired and sore as I've been since high school(remember band camp with the 6-hour practice blocks?). Due to a sadistic twist of fate all of my finals & final projects for this term are coming due this weekend. That's right: Japanese skit yesterday, final kendo practice and the Quark final project that night, Japanese oral exam this morning, critiques today & tomorrow, solo performance & the all-important gallery showing on monday, and the Japanese written final on tuesday. At least I get to start my break early. The reason I'm so sore is because of the aforementioned Kendo practice. As of thurs. night I am no longer a beginner in Kendo, now that our class is done with the begginning term, we can stay for the second hour (the advanced students attend the beginner class as a warm-up). That means 2 hrs. of Kendo in a row. That may not sound bad to those of you that haven't tried it, but by 9:30 my muscles were sore, my hands and feet were blistered, and my knuckles and fingers were bruised to h3ll from bashing into peoples' swords & hilts (did I mention that we don't get protective gear yet?). Anyway it did feel cool to start getting into the "real" practice. As for graphics, I'm feeling pretty good. My project found it's direction late, but once I did (& pulled off an insane amount & intensity of work) I got about 90% done in about 3 days. Now I just have the process book and all the gallery work to get done this weekend. But, after the showing & the solo, & the Japanese test I can head back to Salem on wednsday. After a couple days there I'll be off to spend Christmass in Santa Barbara, Ca with lots of relatives. CD Player: Benny & the Jets, Beastie Boys |
| 12 : 3 : 2oo4 And we're back. After a horrendously busy term & an insane final week I've been vegitating @ home watching tv, playing videogames & catching uIp missed sleep. I rejoin the world refreshed & envigorated. Most of my gift-shopping is done & I've got a few days before I fly to California on wed. On a trip out to Southern Oregon yesterday I stopped @ McDonalds & noticed that theyre giving out toys to promote Sonic Heroes. That's right, the game that came out almost a full year ago. We never said Mcdonalds was cutting edge. On a related note I caught the last half of Spike TV's videogame awards, it was pretty lame. I know many people don't take videogames seriously as a medium but if you're doing a whole award show about them you might as well do it well. Instead of meaningless awards like "most-addicted-game-feuled-by-Mt.-Dew" how about Oscar-style awards like best effects, soundtracks, acting, or physics engine? I suppose that just wouldn't be as entertaining as Snoop-Dogg making product placements. CD Player: Ending Theme Remix, Tenchi Muyo Game Console: Guilty Gear X, PS2 |
| 1 : 5 : 2oo5 Welcome back to SSE Web 2oo5! The Christmas break is over & its time to get back to business. I've returned from Santa Barbara CA. & a great holiday. Though my sister is still in Japan the rest of my family went down to california & I spent time with both Aguirres & Weavers. I got to see about 25 relatives that live down there including about 5 or 6 new ones. Even the passing storm cluster & mudslides didn't dampen our spirits. Last year most of my gifts were dvds urging me to spend the new year in front of the tv. This year the bulk were books. I got The Daily Show's "America: The Book" which causes whoever reads it to burst out laughing at random intervals, "The Tao of Pooh" an introduction to the principles of Tao-ism using stories from "Winnie the Pooh", & a great old textbook collection of the classics from Homer through Goethe. I also got a couple stylin hats, a trenchcoat, a few cds, a good pair of headphones & a new kendo shinai. I was able to do a surprising amount of work on Army of Z-nor considering I couldn't use a computer most of the time. Updates are in the Gamelog. I've also been putting some time into designing a cd collection of music from Sonic the Hedghog games & animations. I'm planning 8 discs, one for each major character. I've already got pretty much all the music I'll need, I've just been sorting through the 12 hours or so of audio to pick out the good stuff. Now that I'm almost done with that I'll just have to whiddle down each cd to an hour & finish the disc & case designs. When I'm done I'll put them up on the site so anyone that wants one can get it in the mail or make their own. CD Player: End Theme, karaoke version, Sonic2 Game Console: Armored Core Nexus, PS2 |