Greetings. Another day, another Making of Hack Mars. Excuse me if I am slightly more brief than yesterday's terribly long rant about robotics. Instead, you get an incredibly insightful rant about three topics: old alarm technology, the image, and two website aide pics. Today, I slept in. ^_^ I slept a full 8 hours and I'm happy about it. I was planning four hours but I forgot to set my alarm to auto. I need a new alarm because the alarm set button is almost totally broken. It's the oldest alarm clock I've ever seen. It was from back in the early 90s, I think. It doesn't have a date on the outside. Maybe I'll open it up when I get a new one. It's a JC Penney 680-3041 if you want to look it up. I could take a few webcam pics if someone is really interested in ancient technology. ^_^ It's one feature is a button on the side which turns the alarm off which requires absolutely no pressure to activate. Unlike most alarms which have buttons (or worse, a toggle switch), this is a very easy way to turn the alarm off.

You may recognize tonight's lovely picture by her octopus lips. She is no less than Gally from Gunnm, aka Battle Angel Alita. I like her so much that I'm going to put her into my video game, Hack Mars. Brilliant idea, or what? Of course, Yukito Kishiro probably has a good copyright lawyer, so I am going to call her Gally (a non-copyrightable name) and give her a face that is reminiscent of Gally (if likenesses were copyrightable, my father would have sued me already). Then I'm going to give her a good spot in Hack Mars with her own plotline and such. When the voice actress prepares to say Gally's part, I will play her a few good emotional scenes from Battle Angel, the anime that corresponds with Battle Angel Alita Vol 1-2. That way, I will have Gally. Why go to such great lengths? Because Gally has been a major inspiring factor in my life and I want to show my extended appreciation by making some public comments about how Gally is possibly the most philisophically realistic character ever portrayed in a work of fiction. Gunnm Last Order aka Battle Angel Alita Last Order is a must have for Gally fans as well as anime fans. The graphics are unbelievable, the plot is mind expanding. What are you waiting for?

Warning: Plot giveaway hidden below My plot for Gally will be tragic yet inspiring much like Battle Angel Alita. Gally, a Martian nerd with skills in martial arts is tragically paralyzed in a battle with Peacekeepers. Gally does not give up hope, but builds herself a cyborg body that can tear steel like paper and run at 60 km/h in the airless Martian atmosphere. She vows revenge and fights the PKs until they are ejected from Mars six months later. She learns that means do not justify ends. (This is one thing I learned from reading Battle Angel Alita at age 16.)

Gally was drawn, scanned, and vectorized as all other characters in the Hack Mars database. One thing that I wonder myself is how was I able to create a decent Gally replica without tracing. I am terrible at drawing what I see, so I don't even try anymore. I can't even trace very well, so how was I able to replicate Gally? Well I have three explanations if you'll hear them. The first is that I have read Battle Angel Alita and Gunnm Last Order so many times (dozens, I swear) that her face is imprinted on my brain. That's a likely explanation. But I've seen many other things the same amount of times. How is it that I can't replicate them? The second explanation is that I was in the zone where I can accomplish anything I think of. This "zone" happens often with me since I actively attempt to cultivate it (with music, anime, and video games). It would explain how I was able to draw, scan, vectorize, and skin 40 characters in ~100 hours compared to the thousands of hours I put into fruitless drawing. The third explanation that makes it for me is that Gally is a local maximum in the character histogram. This histogram explains the fact that artists often come up with similar results without copying. The theory of the histogram says that if you put a large number of artists working to draw characters, certain characters will show up in certain amounts. The mathematical basis of this is fairly solid. It hasn't been proven, but there are math projects attempting to do the same for audio to detect hit songs before an audience ever hears them. Is this cheating? Is it unethical? Is it robotics at it's worst? I won't answer because it requires a full argument on morality which I am not willing to go into today. I was willing yesterday, but I just scratched the surface. A full ethics report would take hundreds of hours to produce with experimental data and third party opinions. I would be interested in reading it if anyone would be willing to produce it. But who needs another fucking blog rant? You came here for the lesson/tutorial and that is what I plan to give you today.

I found a way to display my e-mail to the masses without it being spidered by spammers. Simply put it in an image.

You might think: oh! the waste of bandwidth! But think about my wasted bandwidth due to spam. And what happens when I change my e-mail address? I have to go into my XML database and do a search/replace for my e-mail address. Then I have to do a full web generate (a few seconds) and upload all the files (30 minutes). With this, I just change the image. I also created a little icon for favicon.ico as well as to end my rant with. It's only 270B, so don't cry about the bandwidth waste unless you're on a 2400 baud modem. It's at the bottom of this rant if you'd like to see it. I like creating these type of graffiti style pictures because it makes me feel like a rebel. A rebel without a cause, because I am. You might want to also use an icon to finish your page. There are bugs in certain ftp software that cuts off the end of the rant. I have found this in a few places including my own work. Wouldn't it suck if an important blog was cut off right before it made it's point? =)