Moved the Blog

Posted by blogwithoutatopic

19 November 2011 @ 10:13 | Moved the Blog | Comments (0)

I’ll keep this one up for a while, but eventually it’ll disappear.

The new blog is at punt.nl (same blog title, so the site address is the same except it says punt instead of weblog).

Closing this Blog, Moving

Posted by blogwithoutatopic

8 November 2011 @ 12:29 | Closing this Blog, Moving | Comments (0)

Ok, so this blog has so many appalling issues after the move, that I’m going to be closing it soon.
I will move all posts to another blog, but all the comments will sadly be gone.
Here is the link to the new blog: http://blogwithoutatopic.punt.nl
I will leave this one up for a few weeks, then I will cancel it.

Testing, Testing, 1 2 3

Posted by blogwithoutatopic

31 October 2011 @ 17:29 | Testing, Testing, 1 2 3 | Comments (0)

Weblog.nl has moved to a new service, or whatever you call it. It’s now on WordPress (used to be Typepad). The move was not without issues, so now I’m testing to see if I can post and adjust the design of my blog (the old one was lost). At least I can now log in without problems and all the pictures in my posts seem to have survived the move (I mean I can see them, and I hope other people can, too). I’m alsoÂ filling out a survey about the functioning of my blog, which is why I’m doing these things NOW instead of… whenever… (It can take me a while to get to a new post).

All the categories I made are gone D:

All my widgets or whatever they’re called are gone too. I used to have stuff like a screenreader for people who visited the blog. No idea if and how I’m going to get those back.

ok, editing to see if I can upload new images

first pumpkin I carved ever. It's just two eyes and a "creepy" mouth

Random Round-up Post

Posted by admin

21 April 2011 @ 16:22 | Random Round-up Post | Comments (0)

So here's some random post about stuff I've been doing lately (with a very broad definition of lately). With pics.

I had my birthday, even before that my brothers had their birthday, and even before that it was halloween, but I already posted pics of that so I'm not going to repeat them. For my birthday people got me a new mouse (left-handed, very nice) and a new vid card that I still have to get installed.

I also scrounged some moneys together and bought a new media-player (formerly known as MP3 players). My oldone was full. I don't know why they don't make them upgradeable, like computers (or an SD-card system like cameras). Or I do know, of course.

So then I took some cloth I still had lying around and made a new cover for it. Turns out that cloth wasn't so suitable and all the edges just tore, so I took some other cloth I still had lying around and tried again. It worked out very well. Used an old pendant for a button (I like using those: they're prettier than actual buttons and I don't have to buy anything new. The cover for my old MP3 player was also made by me in the same way). I keep it closed almost all of the time: I purposefully use cloth that I can feel the buttons of the player through so I can operate it through the cover. I only need to open it if I want to charge it or put new media on it (or take some off it).

Here's a picture:
[picture of my media-player in its cover against the mostly black background of my desk. The cover is made of black cotton cloth, rectangular in shape, about 9 by 5 cm. You can see the lanyard and earphone plug sticking out from the top. The spider-shaped pendant-turned-button is visible just about right in the middle.]

It's Easter soon, and we like to indulge in chocolate. We don't really celebrate these holidays, but we like some of the traditions surrounding them. For Easter we still visit my parents. They buy us a chocolate treat in an interesting shape, and my mom hides eggs which we look for. (Yes, I know I'm going on 30!) This year I decided to try my hand at making my own fancy decorated-and-filled chocolate easter egg. You need quite a bit of chocolate to make one half of a large easter egg and some filled chocolates (bon bons, don't know if they use that term elsewhere in the same way the Dutch do). It was bloody expensive so you're actually better off just buying something really fancy from a bakery (they do chocolate here) if it's only about price, and it takes all day. But it was a lot of fun (and my back hurts like hell).

Pictures:
[picture of a chocolate egg about twice the size of my hand. It's made of milk chocolate with some pink-coloured white chocolate decorations on it]

[picture of some of the chocolates I made. They are round and dome-shaped, made of milk chocolate with little pink swirls made of white chocolate on top. I filled them with a strawberry-yoghurt mix]

[picture of the egg when it was finished. It's mounted by way of some melted chocolate on a pink white chocolate base that I made. I decorated the edge with a dark chocolate ganache that hardens out pretty well. I also decorated where it's stuck onto the base with that ganache]

For my brothers' birthdays I made a huge carrot cake and lugged it over to my parents' house. I also put number-shaped candles on it and of course got it wrong because me and numbers are just like that (The 27 was right but the 22 was not).

A picture:
[picture of a round cake covered completely in white buttercream icing, and further decorated with green buttercream icing, edible silver stars, red edible pearls, and little mushrooms made of sugar. The candles on top are just being lit by my brother, whose hand is in the picture]

For my own birthday, I made a schwarzwalder kirschtorte, scones, cookies, and muffins. Later on I had so many ingredients left that I made another random chocolate cake with buttercream icing (which I put some tangerine flavour into.

Pictures:
[picture of the schwarzwalder kirschtorte, a tall, round cake with whipped cream icing all over, decorated with peaks of whipped cream and chocolate shaped]

[picture of the random chocolate cake, a round cake covered with slightly orange buttercream icing, decorated with some lines of melted chocolate that I dribbled on there]

I'm working on learning how to make my own clothes and operating the sewing machine (my mom is helping). I made some pants so far, and am working on a simple (but huge) wide layered ankle-length skirt, and a shirt. I made the pants from a pattern, am making the shirt from a pattern, and the skirt is a copy (more or less) of one I already own which is pretty much falling apart.

And that's pretty much it for now.

Random Round-up Post

Posted by blogwithoutatopic

@ 15:22 | Random Round-up Post | Comments (0)

So here's some random post about stuff I've been doing lately (with a very broad definition of lately). With pics.

Pictures:
[picture of a chocolate egg about twice the size of my hand. It's made of milk chocolate with some pink-coloured white chocolate decorations on it]

[picture of some of the chocolates I made. They are round and dome-shaped, made of milk chocolate with little pink swirls made of white chocolate on top. I filled them with a strawberry-yoghurt mix]

Pictures:
[picture of the schwarzwalder kirschtorte, a tall, round cake with whipped cream icing all over, decorated with peaks of whipped cream and chocolate shaped]

[picture of the random chocolate cake, a round cake covered with slightly orange buttercream icing, decorated with some lines of melted chocolate that I dribbled on there]

And that's pretty much it for now.

Reviews (the Good, the Bad, and the Facepalm), 2

Posted by admin

5 April 2011 @ 16:35 | Reviews (the Good, the Bad, and the *Facepalm*), 2 | Comments (0)

On to The Lost Crown

The Good

It's a good adventure, maybe even a great one. The graphics aren't awesome, but I like them. The game is almost entirely in black and white, with occasional (and sometimes it's meaningful) use of colours. It could have just looked like a trick, but I think it adds a lot to the atmosphere in this case.
A lot of the backgrounds seem to have been rendered from photographs / real locations. Mild spoilers: sometimes something is suddenly off: you're looking at what seems like a tear in a photograph, or a stain on the lens. Usually when there is some kind of danger, or things aren't going well.
I love the background-sounds and music they use. Strange, mysterious, creepy or even bright and reassuring in all the right locations.

On to the puzzles: I really like these too. They're appropriate, not overly difficult, and I can't remember any instances of too-random, so if there are any, they're few and far between. I'm a fan of the 'taking photographs of supernatural phenomena' kind of game, too. The audio recordings were very nice as well.

I can't recall being hit over the head with disablism in this game. There was one instance where the main characters wondered if he was going crazy out loud, but it wasn't a *thing* (I hope that's understandable). It wasn't part of the plot, just a one time aside.
The point-and-click way of operating the game was, though sometimes cluncky and tiresome, very doable and not at all stressful.

The Bad

The character movement was pretty stiff and strange. Turning heads or midriffs before the legs, just a body turning 90 degrees and then walking on in another direction istead of the way it usually goes, just looks weird. A lot of it looked like characters were impersonating stereotypical robot-movement.

The game is short. Not as short as Barrow Hill, but still. These days I want more time from a game, even an adventure game that isn't big-budget. If it's not on Kongregate or similar, there are expectations.

I didn't like the intro screen music. It was wannabe-mysterious and rather irritating. It might have been better without the singing.

The interface is slow and unintuitive. Way too much clicking, badly done. With the number of games out there these days, they should know by now what not to do with menus and user-interface. The inventory system was also badly done: way too many objects and you need to scroll this way or that by clicking on an arrow far too much. It was something I was really dreading in any new scene by the time I was halfway through the game.

The Facepalm

The voice acting. I've honestly never heard anything like it. From various texts found in the game I suspect that the same person who wrote these also wrote all the voiced lines and dialogue. The punctuation is in all the wrong places and apparently the voice-actors were unable, unwilling, or not allowed to correct for this. The result is dialogue that sounds something like:
"The Result! Is dialogue that, sounds, something…… like this?"
It was also horribly over-acted.
The main character is, unfortunately, the worst offender, so you're stuck listening to that constantly. It's a good thing the game was very enjoyable otherwise, because I considered quitting and never looking back, it was that aggravating.
Other characters also speak like this, though less infuriating than the main character. There were a few half-decent sounding characters, but that was as good as it got.

Reviews (the Good, the Bad, and the Facepalm), 2

Posted by blogwithoutatopic

@ 15:35 | Reviews (the Good, the Bad, and the *Facepalm*), 2 | Comments (0)

On to The Lost Crown

The Good

I didn't like the intro screen music. It was wannabe-mysterious and rather irritating. It might have been better without the singing.

The Facepalm

Rescuing Childhood Experiences

Posted by admin

27 March 2011 @ 02:52 | Rescuing Childhood Experiences | Comments (0)

My mom notified me last week that she's going to sell her entire Sci-Fi book collection.

I read compulsively. I always have. (I enjoy this)

We lived in a fairly small town. After I'd finished everything I considered decent in our small library, and came to the end of my limited funds for buying more books, I had to have something to read. This is how I got started at about age 8 or 9 on many different types of writing-for-adults, from the Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde (Dutch Journal of Medicine) to horror novels (and my first books in English) to my mom's gigantic collection of Sci-fi (in Dutch). Just because of having to read something, anything. (I also read labels on food, cleaning agents, etc. when I was eating, showering, in the bathroom…)

So I had to go back and rescue some Sturgeon, Asimov, Simak, Heinlein (yes), and Ursula le Guin, as well as other less well-known authors. My two favourite novels back then were de Dromende Juwelen (Sturgeon, The Dreaming Jewels) and Het Roze Gevaar (Simak, Time is the Simplest Thing), so I found those two first. We also brought back many other books. There were so many stories I liked, but there are also only so many books two people can carry. All in all we brought about 15. I hope to also read them in English.

Rescuing Childhood Experiences

Posted by blogwithoutatopic

@ 01:52 | Rescuing Childhood Experiences | Comments (0)

My mom notified me last week that she's going to sell her entire Sci-Fi book collection.

I read compulsively. I always have. (I enjoy this)

Good News, Everyone!

Posted by admin

24 January 2011 @ 18:04 | Good News, Everyone! | Comments (0)

I got my old blog back! No more "bunch of posts on this address, then a bunch more at this new address".

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