Quick announcement

Alright, I haven’t been blogging much lately. Even despite that there was quite a lot going on but I just didn’t find the time but rather will to write about it.

Here’s just saying I’m now working on a new website design, this time I’ve decided the top priority will be the content so I want to launch it with actually something interesting there to be found. That would be my musics, models, graphics, games, etc. Also I have created a musician profile on facebook to put my stuff on, definitely better than uploading mp3s and linking to ‘em on here . And that would be this: http://www.facebook.com/pages/MagNet/39204063482 Check it out, it should suffice until the webby will be done.

See ya soon, hopefully with a more informative and enjoyable post.

This is my Reason™

Two posts in one day? Oh my what’s happened to me?! Pretty much just feeling like my posting break was way too long to post just one thing today so here it goes, this is for all of you chaps (chap).

Some of you may know that a few years back I came over this amazing music creation tool by Propellerhead called Reason which next to being downright awesome recreates the look and feel of hardware synthesisers, samplers, mixers, you name it. Even despite it’s kind of complicated look I fell in love with it and created, well… one of the crappiest tunes that ever graced the face of planet Earth. After trying a few times again with the same outcome again and again I left the program to pursue other interests (laziness).

Now recently I’ve stumbled upon this glorious piece of software again, now at version 4.0, and attempted to do something musical once again and this time it wouldn’t rip my ears of, yay. It’s still far from perfect and definitely not at all the genre I’m aiming at but everybody has to start somewhere right?

So here it is, my best music production so far (still crap I know, and the hosting isn’t anything to be proud of either):

• Magnetic Chips – A high pitched melodical tune with chiptune inspirations.
• Magnetic Chips Two – A little bit of everything, call it what you like but it is indeed Magnetic Chips Two.
• Oranga Banana Board – A name that came up randomly in a steam friends conversation, what can only be hiding beneath this mysterious title?

PODCASTING HUZZAH

For the last few weeks (starting back in August) I’ve been doing this podcast with a bunch of guys over at gbatemp, namely MR_COW, TeenDev and sometimes ChuckStudios focused on NDS and PSP homebrew with a hint of TI-84 and some other homebrewish stuff. Obviously since it’s a podcast most of the show’s time is taken by senseless chatter that nobody cares about yet everybody so anxiously listens to it. Ah well.

By the way if you happen to be one of those people that listened to a podcast under the same name a while back this is done by the same guys and is basically a revival.

Anyway if you ever happen to feel the urge to listen to this stuff it can be found over on homebrewcast.net and in case you don’t want to waste your precious bandwith on episodes without me (or the other way around, that I’d rather believe) here’s a list of episodes I’ve co-hosted so far:

EPISODE THREE
EPISODE FIVE
EPISODE SIX
AND OHMYGOD EPISODE NINE

Oh, blog, yeah

Heh, I know. I haven’t posted here for ages, and it might eventually happen again after this post. The reason I’m posting today is because I’ve got a new page design ( www.magnetpwnz.com ) and that’s pretty much it. There is of course a lot more going on but I don’t really feel like blogging about it right now. Also I’m not even trying to pretend that anybody reads this, there’s pretty much no reason to do so as of now.

It might change tho so keep your eyes peeled!

Hosting exchange and blog data loss

So the hosting I had the magnetpwns.com site and the other blog on ran out, it wasn’t mine so don’t blame me , I’m still thankful User. hosted my stuff, anyway that means the site and all the stuff that was there has been deleted, I have all of the files that were removed so it’s not a big problem except for the blog I’ve never backed up, that means I’ve lost like 2-3 blogposts which I know you would definitely enjoy.

So the site’s up on a new host, with many thanks to KPunch, but I probably won’t move the blog this time, wordpress.com is a bit more reliable imo.

New blog address

blog.magnetpwns.com

First day in school + the week before.

So after two months (and a week) of not going to school I began again. Just with the difference that it’s a high school now.

The first day in school wasn’t really bad, it’s gonna be worse when we’re actually gonna begin learning something harder than where the classes are
I didn’t have to learn the names of my classmates ’cause I know them already because of the last week (back to that later). With the school change I’ve aswell changed the city I live in, I’ll be still going back to Tábor for weekends and holidays time to time but still I’ll be most of the time here in Prague.

Ok now to the week.
It was a school organized trip to get to know eachother in the class, pretty neat considering how long it would most probably take trying to do that in the school. And knowing everyone in the class would be quite a problem.
The week of course wasn’t only about knowing each other’s names, we’ve been doing quite a lot of teambuilding stuff.
And another positive thing about this is that I was able to see the people somewhere else than in school because people often act a bit different there imo. Of course I’ll be with some somewhere outside the school building sometimes but still better sooner than later.

And I might aswell say that I’ve noticed that my portfolio website (magnetpwns.com) doesn’t work, I guess the guy that was hosting it didn’t pay for the hosting. Oh well hosting from facepunch members isn’t really reliable.

End.

Two movies I’ve watched today

Ok so how you could’ve guessed from the tile I’ve watched whole two movies today. The first one was Eraserhead, which I’ve got from the interwebs and the other one was Pirates of The Carribean 2.
So I guess I’ll share my impressions, I’ll start off with Eraserhead since you sure know the second one and I don’t really think that what I’ll say about it will be something that you wouldn’t know.

So here’s a description of Eraserhead, a movie by David Lynch from the year 1977.
“Is it a nightmare or an actual view of a post-apocalyptic world? Set in an industrial town in which giant machines are constantly working, spewing smoke, and making noise that is inescapable, Henry Spencer lives in a building that, like all the others, appears to be abandoned. The lights flicker on and off, he has bowls of water in his dresser drawers, and for his only diversion he watches and listens to the Lady in the Radiator sing about finding happiness in heaven. Henry has a girlfriend, Mary X, who has frequent spastic fits. Mary gives birth to Henry’s child, a frightening looking mutant, which leads to the injection of all sorts of sexual imagery into the depressive and chaotic mix.”
And now my own words. Well, it’s quite an interesting movie. As the description says, it’s depressive, at least a bit. The main guy there is depressed as hell lol. The mutant kid there is done really well, I thought about modelling it later maybe, here’s a pic:

It’s so cute ^_^, ok not really but it’s well done. And in the movie it moves and stuff, I don’t want to spoil the movie but the scene where this thingy dies is impressive . And there’s also one scene where Henry has a dream (it’s a dream most probably) where his head comes off and some guys make pencils with erasers from his brain. I guess the name of this movie comes from this. I sure wouldn’t say it was a waste of time watching this. I know it’s sounds like something utterly stupid but it isn’t imo.

And now to the second movie. Ok Johnny Depp is awesome and it was fun… the end kinda makes you watch the next one too much. I really liked the effects, really some nice computer work done there.

500GB extra space for porn… erm stuff.

Today my 500GB external harddisk which I ordered few days back arrived.

I can connect it using firewire or USB (2.0 of course), I highly doubt I’m gonna have any space problems anytime soon and I can start editing a movie I’m filming with few friends aswell soon.

Yay.

Some stuff I got my hands on recently…

In the few past days I got FlatOut 2, modo and ZBrush. What are my impressions of these? Well continue reading!

FlatOut 2
So, I’ve been playing been playing this game quite a lot these days. My XFire profile says 18 hours but believe me, I played it more.

It really has some nice improvements from FO1 which are for example:
> Less flying out of car (Those who played the first one sure know what I mean, you flew out on almost every crash even when you were driving quite slow), now you fly out really only because of _huge_ impacts.

> It’s faster, at least I think so. And I like that.

> More cars, more tracks. It has 3 whole classes (derby, race, street) which all have quite plenty of cars. Each class has as many or even more vehicles (didn’t count but there are enough) than whole flatout 1 had. Plus bonus cars, those are fun. So if you like old, rusty yet strong wreckers or new, shiny, nfsu style modern sportcars you have always a choice.

> More physical objects. You can smash almost everything on track (Ok, it’s not really realistic all the time but it’s plenty of fun and that’s what matters, right?): Start signs, billboards, greenhouses, pipes, you name it. The only problem is that some of the objects are extremely light (and I’m talking about those that shouldn’t be, like concrete roadblock, etc.) and some (which you wouldn’t expect to be) are extremely heavy.

> Ingame online play. No more lobby software needed, what a nice addition. Well, unfortunately it’s not completely debugged so it crashes time to time when searching for servers (too many servers… maybe). Netcode could be improved aswell, the cars are still a bit laggy when they crash, etc. A really interesting thing is that playing over LAN (tried yesterday with bro) ends up in huge lagging sometimes. And when I say huge I mean it. Opponent’s car hopping forth and back, not a nice thing to see when playing with pings less than 10, eh?

> You can blow up enemies even in race. Hard to do but it’s sure worth it.

> + some other nice thingies.

Yup, It’s sure not a bad game, I like it. The problems I stated are quite annoying tho. I hope they’ll get fixed aswell as compatibility between the european and american version. And last thing I’ll say is that in my opinion the soundtrack was definitely better in FlatOut 1. I like unknown bands

modo
This isn’t a bad modelling software but I think I’ll be staying with my beloved max . (modo is a modelling program aswell if you haven’t guessed, if you want to know more, follow this link: http://www.luxology.com/whatismodo/ )
If you visit that site you can find out it’s a texturing tool aswell. Painting the texture right on your models is hella fun but I can’t really say you can do as good stuff as someone who has leet skills at PS. And a big problem of modo is the projection mapping, at least on my computer. It has to load everytime you move the view, etc. Takes some time. And without projection mapping you can’t do really anything more than in PS, but oh well, comes handy at times.

I didn’t try rendering anything with modo yet but I might try since the renderer doesn’t really look bad.

I tried modelling with it but I still think that 3DS Max is so well done I just won’t be able to leave it

ZBrush
Got this interesting tool yesterday. I’m sure most of you heard about it, it’s really cool. Sure handy for creating normal maps and stuff.
Haven’t really tried out it’s texturing capabilities much but from what I’ve seen (bundled ZScript tutorials, handy stuff) it does the job better than modo.
Someone might find bad the fact the only really 3D thing you’re able to manipulate with is the last drawn object it might sound really bad but it’s not that hard to deal with it. If you accidentally draw another object and had been editing the last one you just undo few times and draw the first one again since it saves the object’s last state.
The modelling ways of this program (ZSphere modelling and Edgeloop modelling) are really interesting but take lots of time to master… ok I got it yesterday but they seem like that. And I still think max is better for the stuff I’m doing so what I’ll probably usually use ZBrush for is texturing and normal map creation since it has some neat tools for that. And of course supports importing models created in other applications.
Really hard to describe ZBrush’s capabilities in a blogpost, check the official site and go to the gallery or the forum to see what it can do.
http://pixologic.com

Any questions? Feel free to ask via comments!