Posts tagged chess
Photoshopping 101
Feb 4th
As mentioned previously, I’m taking another class this semester, Digital Imaging which is basically a Photoshop course focusing on the manipulation of photographs.
I was dreading the first few weeks of this course since I’ve gotten fairly familiar with the basics of Photoshop in the past 6 months of me fiddling around with it. So taking a course explaining what all the selection tools and stuff do…ugh. Not exactly an interesting time in the classroom. The actual instruction has been about what I was dreading when I went in, but I have picked up a few little things that I didn’t know about previously. The teacher is good, thankfully. He’s very knowledgeable and actually excited about photography and image manipulation. And he knows how to teach. He’s a bit of a sticker for rules (no music while working during lab time?? What’s up with that??) but I can live with it.
Our first project is to do a composite image. Basically, we take one photo (the host image) and take elements from other photographs and add them into the first one to create an entirely new image. I was really stuck on an idea for something cool to do (I really didn’t want to just do a boring “take a random image and toss stuff into it” sort of project). Wassy, who was originally taking the course with me but has since dropped due to the demands of the rest of her schedule, mentioned an idea involving a chess board with pictures of monuments that I had from Washington DC. But all of the pictures that I had were from below looking up which wouldn’t work on a chess board at all, so I had to scratch that idea.
I was kinda floundering around again until, the day of class I woke up at roughly 5:30am before my alarm went off but with a cool idea: Two pawns playing chess with a board full of little people. I had to scramble around to get the pictures I needed (and I need to retake my host image because I threw it together fast and didn’t have quite what I was looking for), but I got enough to get the project improved by the instructor.
This course is another reason why I’m considering picking up my own DSLR. It seems like it’s going to require a lot of original photography (especially for the final two projects) and even though I can borrow Wassy’s camera, it’d be really nice to have my own. Especially since some of my shots might require me to travel around a bit and I don’t feel comfortable doing that with her camera (I’m deathly afraid I might break it or something). I’m going to need to take basic photography next semester too…
Whoops, there I go, rationalizing again. Anyway, I’ll post up the finished piece (if it’s not crap anyway) once it gets done.
Weekendy Goodness
Nov 24th
It's Monday. So…aside from being back at work, it means it's time for the update on my weekend activities.
Friday evening I found myself over at my parents house where they had invited me over to watch a movie (I Am Legend specifically). Lured by the promise of real, old fashioned popped popcorn, I headed over. After sufficiently tiring out the dog, we started working on the popcorn popping process. Which was…quite an ordeal. I was reading off the instructions on the popcorn, and my mom and dad both had different ways in which they popped popcorn on the stove. Somehow we managed to combine all of these separate methods into something that worked. One quick note about the popcorn: the buttery flavored oil had no actual butter in it. Scary.
I thought the movie was good, but my parents seemed to not enjoy it as much. I didn't think it was awesome, but it was a good mindless sort of fun type movie. I did determine where my lack of bravery comes from as I witnessed my mom nearly covering her eyes at some points and hugging the dog. This proves that the ability to tolerate scary movies is genetic.
Saturday I went over to my friends, Rock Band in tow, as has become the ritual. Wassy had to do some work, so I played a game of Chess with Jay (well…several games of chess…I had forgotten to turn off the 10 minute per game timer so he ended up losing 2 times in a row before I figured it out). It was an…interesting experience. It seems that Jay has a habit of scheming out loud.
Him: How much do you value your knight?
Me: Very much thank you. I have two of them.
Him: Or do you…?
Me: Yes I do!!! They're both right there on the board!!
And so on. This is the first time we've played when we're in the same room, so I didn't know about this before. It seems he does it all the time. From that moment onward "Or do you…?" or variations of that became the catch phrase of the day. Especially during our scrabble game later in the evening. Speaking of scrabble, we watched the Word Wars documentary (about world champion competitive scrabble) using Netflix while we were hanging out during the afternoon. It was good but the people they chose to focus on were some of the biggest losers and jerks on the planet…There was nobody sympathetic, except for one of the guy's parents who said when asked how he was doing during a scrabble tournament: "I'm kicking ass!"
Sunday was my day of cleaning. Since I finished Fallout 3 on Friday, I have to wait for Gamefly to send me a new game which probably won't actually arrive until after Thanksgiving due to how the mail is this week. So I've decided to spend some time doing a really exhaustive cleaning of my apartment. I got my bedroom mostly cleaned up yesterday and did a lot of living room organizing in the evening. I picked up wall-e on DVD and was watching the commentary while cleaning up my living room.
I also attempted a new dish for dinner. Chicken Fettuccine Alfredo to be specific about it. Making everything from scratch including the sauce. It ended up being pretty good, but I need to adjust a few things with the sauce. I let it thicken a bit too much and I need to add a little more cheese to my next attempt (a side effect of the thickening…didn't want to add too much cheese or it would have been WAY too thick). But there will be a next attempt…oh yes…
This week is going to be a long short week. Short because of having only 2 days of work this week. Long because that's followed by 5 days off, Thanksgiving with the family being one of the days. This week is going to be…very strange.
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