Sam Gower:
nothing sony does interests me
in the slightest

Charlie.:
I’m a “mature gamer” according to sony. One that doesn’t like games.
THEY WANT A MULTIMEDIA EXPERIENCE! SHIT!
AND LIKE, FREE WIFI AND COFFEE!
HEY MAN CAN WE BUILD A COFFEE MACHINE INTO THAT?

Sam Gower:
i would totally buy a console/coffee machine

Charlie.:
Sony’s will make better coffee, with less types of coffee to choose from.
Microsoft’s will allow you to make frappachino and has 7 kinds of sugar to choose from, as well as biscotti.
but you’ll have to pay a recurring fee for 3 of the extra kinds of sugar and the biscotti.
and you can’t drink Nintendo unless you throw it around around.

Thank you and goodnight.

Dark Millennium

Thats right, they’ve finally named the Warhammer 40k MMO.

Words cannot describe how excited I am for this game. The graphics look fantastic, Click here for some swedish site for screen shots. We’ve got lots more news and information still to be released however the game is scheduled for release in 2012. I for one cannot wait.

Metal Gear Rising.

Since day one the entire world has been waiting to be able to play as Grey Fox, and Sons of Liberty did stem that desire with it’s final boss battle, for a time. But after seeing Raiden in action in Sons of the Patriots, the best way to explain how bad ass we all thought he was is as such: A dude with a beard riding in a convertible T-Rex transformer though space, to choke god to death with his bare hands. That is essentially Raiden’s role in Sons of the Patriots.
Now from this trailer I have deduced that they are probably going to try and integrate Playstation Move into the PS3 version, I kinda hope they don’t. If I have to move my fucking controller around to select the direction I want to slice someone in half, I’m just going to rage, and look for the keys to my T-Rex.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

It would be wrong of me not to touch on this game, even though I have denounced it as my savior. FOR THE EMPEROR!

I must say, this trailer is fantastic, although I am not particularly happy of the change of tech from Knights of the Old Republic.
Okay sure, Swords vs Lightsabers was kinda stupid, but it was awesome.
The fact that now we’re moving a bit closer to the clone wars, and we’ve already got soldiers in Clone Trooper armour is just kinda gash. The old republic was always good because it was so separate from the main Star Wars lore, and they could pretty much do anything within the constraints of the universe.
It still looks epic, and I am still planning on giving it a try, even if all the Sith players are 13.
Republic, it’s the new Horde.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

What more can you want from a warhammer game? Orks, Space Marines, Blood + Gore.

If only they had chosen a chapter with some actual background. Bloody Smurf Marines are the worst of all.
I Don’t have much else to say on this matter, except that I’m still buying it, and I’m still going to mash thousands of orks into a bloody pulp with my powerfist.

I’ll probably add some more to this entry later, but I’m pretty happy with this so far.

Anyway, I thought I’d do a quick update on everything that has been happening recently.

PPUK

I recently joined PPUK, and decided to get interested in politics, and I’ve picked Pirate Party UK to invest my time in, as their stance on copyright reform and surveillance is in line with my beliefs.
I’ve been following the party since they registered last year, and only decided to join now they are taking donations.
They’ve got 10 candidates running in the general election on the 6th of May, so if you’re in any of these constituencies, please get involved and support your candidates.
The party is also currently fund-raising and taking donations to support our candidates so if you can spare some money, and feel strongly about the issues involved go here and either donate, or become a member. At the time of writing we’ve raised £4000/£10000
It’s in your best interest to do so!
I guess I better finish off those posters from last year.

University

If you haven’t already guessed I turned down my place at UACB I was offered last year, due to it not being a particularly interesting course and having to pay for it.
I applied at several universities this year for degree courses, and got accepted onto Web Design at UWE and Digital Media at Portsmouth University.
So if all goes well I’ll be heading off to one of those soon.

Music

Uh, I reached 86,000 plays on last.fm recently I guess that’s cool.
Coheed and Cambria‘s new album leaked recently – I got the opportunity to hear it, and it sounds like it’s shaping up to be an awesome record. The levels on this release are not great, the vocals don’t seem as defined as in other albums but I bet it’ll be fixed for when it’s released officially.
Below is track 2 of the album, which I assume is the single. It’s pretty cool.

I might as well plug Chris Watts’ new musical endeavour, a solo acoustic project. Ex-Son of a Fox vocalist has fun with guitars and his brothers.

Obviously by now everyone has heard of The Midnight Beast but their new video is genius. “Lez be friends”

Anyway, with that I’ve run out of interesting stuff to post.
It’s good to be back.

Introduction
Photo manipulation often goes unnoticed today. The ability to create and digitally alter an image has become an invaluable tool to the media, photographers and digital artists around the world. It allows the photographer access to tools that can be used on digital images, as counterparts for techniques in the darkroom.

The darkroom allowed photographers to create compositions of multiple negatives, by cutting them up. Another technique was to use ink or paint to draw in the missing elements, or remove the parts of the photo that was unneeded. One of the earliest recorded photo manipulations was by Matthew Brady. The image created was a composition of Abraham Lincoln’s head, with the body of a lesser politician, John Calhoun’s body in 1860. A few years after another of his images was edited to add a missing officer to a photo of all of General Sherman’s officers.
As time passed and digital photography gradually replaced traditional photography as the main media, new tools had to be developed to allow the same kind of techniques for photographers as those found in the darkroom.

Chapter 1: “The Rise of a Giant”
Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard to manipulating photos, and a magnitude of other jobs. It began life in 1987, as a program for viewing images simply called “Display”. Its creator Thomas Knoll and his brother who worked for George Lucas at Industrial Light & Magic, worked on creating the first version of Photoshop for Adobe Systems which was released for the Apple Macintosh in 1990. When it was first released it gave users the ability to edit images digitally, using basic tools.

Photoshop is such a widely used program because it is very flexible. It’s used by many different people for many different tasks. It can be used as a photo correction tool, a layout design tool, an animation suite. The fact that it can be used for so many different tasks is key to its success as a graphic design forerunner.
To date there have been 11 Versions of Adobe Photoshop, each being the forerunner in the Graphic Design Industry. Each time a new version of Photoshop is relapsed new features are added increasing its uses exponentially. In the most recent version Photoshop CS4, a feature called “Content-Aware Scaling” was added that allowed you to crop images without removing key elements. The program would recognize which areas of the image needed to remain the same size, while cropping out areas of background to reduce the overall width or height of the image. Other revolutionary features that have been added though the previous versions of Photoshop would include the ability to edit the textures of 3D models inside Photoshop, without having to view the applied texture in another software, The Clone Tool and it’s variants (Spot Healing Tool, Healing Brush, Patch Tool and the Pattern Stamp Tool). Each of these allows a user to take a section of an existing image and fill it using another area of the image. These tools are often used for removing blemishes in portraits, lens artefacts in photographs, and other unwanted areas of images for example a person in the background of your photo.

As a user of Adobe Photoshop since Version 6, I have come to appreciate the changes over time, and the addition of new features. My favorite feature to arrive since I have been using Photoshop is “Actions”. It works similarly to a macro in most programs, allowing you to record a list of instructions that can be re-applied to any image. This is useful for processing batches of photos; “Actions” can also be saved and sent to other users of Photoshop, to allow them to use your Action on their images. Having used other programs since starting to use Photoshop, I personally believe it is the most powerful and intuitive program on the market and I find it hard to believe that anyone uses any other program for altering photos.
Adobe has been involved with several lawsuits with other companies over the user interface found in their programs. Macromedia Inc was accused of violating an Adobe patent over tabbed palettes (a interface element that allowed multiple sets of tools and options in the same space). I felt this was relevant to mention as it shows how other companies are eager to copy Photoshop’s intuitive user interface.

Chapter 2: “Thine Eyes Deceive”
Photo manipulation is widely used in the media and nearly every day you will encounter images that have been altered to fit a layout or altered to make the subject look skinnier or blemish free.
Photoshop is widely known to be used to touch up models and make them look more attractive.
Some campaigners in Berlin have actually vandalized posters of Pop stars by posting Panels from Photoshop onto the existing billboard advertisement to generate interest into their cause, and to poke fun at the producers of such adverts. In the photos provided by Gizmondo.com you can see the History Panel, Layers panel and the Tool Box. I love the attention to detail in the panels used, making sure that the History Panel was full of uses of the Clone tool, and naming the layers appropriately makes it much easier for non-professionals to understand.
The “Girlpower” website has gone into detail about how each part of the female figure is enhanced using Photoshop. It shows how the eyes, face, hair, waist and all other parts are enhanced in Photoshop, and the change is very impressive from an artistic point of view; however changing women’s appearances in magazines leads to low self esteem in young and teenage girls.

“Hook me up with a great photographer, a clever stylist and an expert retoucher, and together we create a beautiful illusion.”
- Heidi Klum

I think that this part of photo manipulation has only recently gained exposure in the media, when newspapers caught on to the “Size Zero” scandal and have been neglecting to publish pictures of size zero women. I think that in the future there will be limits on what can be edited for an image to be published in the mainstream media, allowing for a more truthful representation of women in the media. This kind of influence in the press stems from all types of advertising, magazines, newspapers and television.

Chapter 3: “Smiling Politely”

In politics photo manipulation is a touchy area. When it is discovered it can often leave a party candidate or government with a very awkward explanation as to why the image was originally altered. An example of this was in 2008 when the Iranian government released images of a missile site, with a clearly cloned missile. This was later explained by the Iranian government as an attempt to hide the unfired missile and launcher. Another recent example of Political distress caused though photo manipulation would be an image of Sarah Palin, a vice-presidential candidate in America’s 2008 election. A picture of her wielding a hunting rifle in her stars and stripes bikini was discovered as a composition created by an unknown artist, Propaganda like this can attribute to lost votes and embarrassment for the candidate.

Throughout history photos have been altered for political reasons; most notably in countries with a totalitarian government. You can find many examples of altered images from the former USSR and from Nazi Germany from during world war two. Hitler and Stalin were known for having people removed from photographs when they died or were no longer sympathetic to their cause. A famous example would be a photograph of Stalin and Commissar Yezhov stood near the Volga Canal. Yezhov is removed by inking in a wall and repeating a section of the canal by combining two negatives. During this time all media was controlled by the government in these countries and therefore was regulated into propaganda. Today however the media is much more a free tool, and even when some sources are one sided in what they display the other side of the argument is still being heard.

Currently anonymously posting propaganda is rather easy on thanks to the internet. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Photoshop can upload anything to a forum or to youtube.com. This means the lines between journalists and the public are blurring. Things that are reported on the internet as images or videos are not necessarily the truth, and could have been manipulated.

I’ve included a poster campaign by a Russian radio station “Galaxy FM” The artist has used images of Hitler, Stalin and Chairman Mao to create a humorous campaign. I think these are particularly good photo manipulations as they only look edited because of their funny appearance, if you were unaware of the figures in the images they would seem very believable.

Chapter 4: “Painting is Dead”

Photo manipulation could be referred to as an art. There are many digital artists who incorporate altered photos and images in their work. Many who use these techniques exclusively without any traditional art based media. Digital Art, like traditional art comes in many styles, and there are many techniques and programs which are used in sync to create final pieces. Some artists use “Fractals” which are complex computer generated shapes, some artists like to paint, only using a computer and many like me like to use photographs and edit their content to change their meaning. Many artists use photo manipulation to enhance their drawn images and create compositions of mixed media.

RAW is a new format, developed for use with digital cameras. Raw is often referred to as a digital negative, because once taken from the camera it can be edited like in a darkroom. You can change the exposure, brightness and contrast, white balance and other attributes that can be affected by the settings of the camera when the image was taken. This is very useful for artists as light and exposure can play a pivotal role as to whether your manipulation looks realistic or not.
I think that without the introduction of Adobe Photoshop, Digital art would still be a developing art form, and not something anyone could jump into without a degree of training.

Conclusion
First I want to mention a new tool that is being developed for Adobe Photoshop. It is known as the “Clone Detection Tool” and it has the power to tell where areas of an image are recurring, allowing the user to spot if an image has been manipulated. I think that this is a brilliant advancement, as so far there have been very few tools to detect photo manipulation and this should help stop manipulated images appearing in the press.

I think that as an art form, photo manipulation should be unregulated and artists should be free to express themselves as they will, however in published works especially the news there needs to be strict rules over what can be published, as it will save a lot of people time and money.

There is already a code of ethics written by the National Press Photographers Association, which has one rule regarding the altering of photographs taken for the press.
“Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic images’ content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects.”
I think that this is a good start, but more specific rules need to be created to regulate what makes its way onto the front page.

The best feature I’ve found is the “Wonderwheel” I’ll let you watch Google’s video to find out how it works.

as people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems.
Google Blog

As if the internet is getting smarter, jeeze.

Wolf Am I (And Shadow)- Kinetic Typography from Justin Lawes on Vimeo.

Completely, and shamelessly stolen from Tristanahoy via facebook, I thought I’d make a post about Kinetic Typography. The video above is possibly the only good example I’ve seen off the TV. Alot of the “projects” based on Kinetic Typography appear to follow this formula: “Take a quote or sample from a film and animate it so it looks really shit.”
I could link you to countless bad examples of Kinetic Typography, and that would be just from searching the words on youtube.

Hopefully I never encounter such a project.

Myspace
Messily coded, horribly designed and always broken. “Tom” kept adding features to an unstable website, and something was ALWAYS broken.
The only thing that was good about this website was that it wasn’t bebo. The “profile” customisation wasn’t so much customisation, more like “copy paste HTML from 1000′s of websites, and add glitter text.”
This site seemed to be used mainly by older/alternative people, mainly because the music section of the website is used by almost every band in the world to promote their music.

“I preferred bebo because myspace had all the stupid, annoying code things, for like.. layouts and stuff”
Kizzie Hall – Bebo and Facebook user.

Bebo
For code and design this site seemed a bit more organized, all of the site followed a consistent theme, and there was an “easy” way to customize your profile. You were able to pick from thousands of user generated themes, and could create your own by uploading images to replace the original ones. However this site was still full of glitter text and “WHAT MY LITTLE PONY ARE YOU?” quizzes.
As a whole the users of bebo seemed to be the more than 90% “Chavs” and people that were put off by myspace’s complexity.

“I don’t even know why anyone uses bebo any more. I always get emails from it but I just ignore them since they are all from fake people anyway, it’s always spam”
Tom Barnes formally from myspace, now from facebook.

The Solution
In comes G-13, we set up a consistently designed, functional, secure social networking site using OpenID, AJAX and other relativity new web technologies to create something that was fresh, attractive and simple to use.
Originally Codenamed “Olympus” we aimed really high with what we wanted to do – many of the features we had working in an early alpha state have recently been implemented into Facebook and Myspace. Most notably “facebook chat”. Another concept we were using is the 2 bar system, a menu at the top and information and chats on the bottom bar.

Used concepts
I wanted to talk about some of the stuff we wanted out of a social network in 2005, and how it has ended up on the web today. The concepts we had below were all part of our much larger plan for world domination.

• Favourite Contacts

recently added to Windows Live Messenger, Favourite contacts allowed you to group your friends into groups like “Family”, “Friends” “Other” etc, but you could pick contacts out of those groups to appear in a group that is always at the top of your contacts list called “Favourites” so they are easy to contact at all times.

• Favourites

Similar to services like del.icio.us and magnolia, Olympus would allow you to have a “stream” of bookmarks, that friends could see, along with private bookmarks to allow you to transport your bookmarks to any computer you used.

Unused concepts
I’m going to write a little bit about some things myself and Sam designed/planned on doing with Novus.
By this point the codename for our social network had changed to Novus, this was due to the imminent release of PHPbb 3 also named Olympus. Anyway, onto the concepts.

• Site wide music playlist

The idea behind this was to add a playlist to the bottom bar of the website, for example next to facebook chat, with a playlist, and all the other features you’d want from a music player. The idea was to allow you to add tracks to a playlist from bands profiles, like how youtube allows you to create playlists, but it would allow you to continue to use the site without having to stop listening to whatever band you liked. Other sites that follow a similar concept have started up, Last.fm and Pandora, along with Spotify, but not what we had in mind at the time.

• Useful Applications

The creation of external applications was going to have very strict rules on what could, and couldn’t be added to the site. This was to stop all of the spam, and the “WHAT MY LITTLE PONY ARE YOU?” quizzes. There was also going to be applications created by us, as sort of “addons” to the website, thinks like calculators, clocks, etc.

• Homepage

A useful homepage, which allowed to to add your own “widgets” to it. RSS Feeds and the like. The best description of this would be a kind of iGoogle and Facebook home mashup.

I’m going to include a video from Scared of Dinosaurs new EP. Just because this song made me giggle.

It’s basically a breakdown of our deepest fears; masked men, homoerotic dancing and healthy food.
Jamie Norquoy

Original Youtube Page
“Fox Mask”
“Cumslut”
“Camerawork”

Now, today I’ve received an email saying that I’m £45 overdrawn, and because I don’t have an overdraft they are going to charge me £15 per day, and then £15 per month until I pay up. However, to my knowledge I’ve not used my debit card for at least 2 weeks, and apparently I tried to make “a series of purchases” on the 24th of February. I’m going down to the bank tomorrow to try and sort this mess out, hopefully these assholes don’t end up making me pay for this shit.

And to think I was happy when I got in today.

I forgot to mention that I think these two things are related.