Below is an early draft of an essay on the United Nations. The final draft will have a lot of works cited. This picture was drawn a long time ago. I think it was February of last year when I was writing the end to JF. I started out with the shape of a weasel and then made it stand up belly exposed. Then I drew a bunch of words around it. Not very interesting, is it? Well, what else can I say? You don't need a real-life model to make a good drawing. I've only seen a real-life picture of a weasel a few times and this is the product. Just think about what the weasel does rather than what the weasel looks like. The weasel runs along the ground, belly hugging the ground, really. It is very acrobatic, though, being able to capture prey much larger than itself.

Nothing really to say today. This is what I drew to go with yesterday's essay. This is a UN boot on a peace symbol. There are UN boots in real life. There are peace signs in real life. So... I can't really think of anything else. I'm watching hackers. I'm listening to it right now.

I got my CPU and mobo, hooray! It works like a dream! I copied my stuff from my Windows 2000 backup computer using NTFS 4 DOS, a sweet little program that you can get from Winternals Software. You probably don't know that Windows 98 can only read FAT16 and FAT32, and not NTFS, which is the file system for Windows NT, 2000, and XP. So anyone who has problems like I do and has a Win 98 and a Win NT/2000/XP computer, get the NTFS for DOS. It works just like good ol' DOS. ^_^ Read what I wrote last night below. But I'll tell you a bit about this image... Or not, I kinda forget. I think I was just trying to draw something rather than nothing. So I threw this and that together, really. The jpeg version is a low quality version from the actual scan. The PNG version has all the grainyiness of the paper deleted out using a simple magic wand tool. Don't leave home without it. ^_^ The trick is to mess with the tolerance. If you put the tolerance around 5, it won't get enough garbage. If you put it up at 25, you'll delete half of the lightly drawn image (like the knees there). So if you do it right, it'll be just perfect and you'll get this. It's small and it detailed. What else can I say? It's a fair drawing, but it has my normal traits: no consistency, no realism, hair is messy, and body looks abnormal. Since my computer is back online, I'm going to phase out the drawings and replace with sweet computer renderings. ^_^

This might or might not find its way into Scene 6. It is, however, the product of an hour or so of my investigation into a 3d modeller that only does architecture and is very frugal and easy to use. I simply went into MilkShape3D and built this house using mainly the mathematical methods. I also tried to keep track of exactly what I was doing and what would be hard for a program to do. One thing that is very important in architecture is ability to place doors and windows. MilkShape3D has a tough time, but since it is very flexible, it allows me to make a very low-polygon house. Two windows and one door, Indoors and outdoors, 100 faces with a single 256x256x8 texture. That is a frugal house. Of course, if you want to render 100 of these houses, you'll slow down your cpu majorly. And that is a frugal house. A five room house would take about 200 faces. That would bring a GeForce2 down to 20 fps or less. So what does a person do? Number one: portal culling. You simply split the house into two meshes: indoors and outdoors. The indoors can be very, very complex because they won't be displayed when you are outdoors. The outdoors has to be 10-20 faces. The outdoors will be displayed along with every other house when you are outside. When you walk through the door of a house, though, the indoors for that one house is rendered. It can be up to 5000 faces on a GeForce2. This is a version of what is known as portal culling. It is usually done with indoors-only games like Quake or Anarchy-Online missions and such. When you walk through a door or open a door, the program notices it and will display the stuff inside. As I said, each indoors can have 5,000 faces and plenty of textures if the target platform is a GeForce2. Windows like the one shown are a problem, though. How can you have windows if you aren't rendering the indoors? Well, check out the other windows. They are grey -- that is how. Perhaps a program could be made to render the indoors of buildings which you can see the window, but that's a bit much for me. You see, a city could have 2000 buildings each with 2000 faces indoors and 20 faces outdoors. Then at any time, you only render 20 outdoors and 1 indoors. You may think that I'm just blabbing about this "idea" I have for a new demo screenshot, right? Well, today without the aid of a c++ compiler, I wrote most of that lossless terrain compresser I was talking about. It's super fast (I assume since it's only 2 million if statements total for a 20 k triangle terrain) and it is very simple. I also wrote the code for a Accelerated Particle-2D Terrain Collision prediction algorithm. That will not only work for automobiles, but also NPCs, characters, and cameras. On the topic of cameras, I wrote the idea for a perfect camera which I have most of the code for. You see, cameras are hard to do. The FPS WASD system does not work well enough. I have an idea for a camera that will reduce calcuations by 1000%. It will use accelerated particles, but that's all I'll say for now. What I will say is today's lesson: produce. Even if your computer crashes while you're typing an inspirational paragraph, you must produce to be creative. Notice that the root word for creative is create. A misunderstood slacker is just a loser, but an artist who is misunderstood for his/her deranged work is creative loser. Even if what you create is "deranged", "evil", "stupid", or "ugly", go for it. Everyone who is creative must start somewhere. Those who are not creative do not have to start anywhere, but that's because they go nowhere. Must I brag about building my autobiographical website at age 14? What about AltSci.com at age 16? What about getting my AA degree 10 days after I graduated high school? It is the fruit of a creative mind that is the best stuff on Earth. I would not trade for money, fame, or power. Of course, I would trade javantea.com for my next month's rent, but that's a different story*.