Pages

Subscribe:

Friday, December 31, 2010

Christian Double Fail

Epic Fail #6
Rated 'F' for Fail




HAPPY NEW YEAR! I'm back for now, so just read this fail even though it might not be funny, but it's still a fail! :D


Note: The format of the epic fail posts and the "F" images used here are from Evo. Do not use them without his permission.






"OMGz Hillsong is the BEST THING my mom ever said about!"
"You don't understand what was that about, so shaddap, pusseh!"

Hillsong is still the best thing a mother can say. Why? Because you don't "understand" what's going on.



Submitted by Rail and uploaded via Blogger Image Uploader.
Source: Facebook

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Clubbing Win

Epic Fail #5
Rated 'F' not for Fail but for Win




Note: The format of the epic fail posts and the "F" images used here are from Evo. Do not use them without his permission.







Clubbing is a social problem. And so is Parental Control I guess.


Submitted by Rail and uploaded via Blogger Image Uploader.
Source: Moral Education Slides

The Worst and the Best of 2010

Gathered from actual comments made about The Crown Conspiracy from people I’ve never met.

On CROWN
This was quite possibly the worst written book I have ever read and am absolutely amazed at the high ratings others have given this.

Although I have only read your first book I must say that it is probably one of the absolute best books I have ever read!

Do yourself a favor and avoid this atrocious book.

On it's own The Crown Conspiracy is good but as a series The Riyria Revelations is brilliant.

No serious fan of the fantasy genre will enjoy this book.

THE CROWN CONSPIRACY re-kindled my love of the Fantasy genre in a way I didn't even realize it needed re-kindling.

On WRITING

But worse, far worse than any of that, is the actual writing style. It is, quite simply, the worst I have any seen in any printed material in my entire life.

The writing is easy and flows with a voice that is decidedly deft. Sullivan has produced some great writing that is efficient and to the point.

These made me rethink my initial opinion but were short lived and again ruined by the poor writing.

The pacing is pitch-perfect. There is not a page unused or wasted in the whole book. In a less skilled author’s hands, this could have been a far longer and more tedious read, but again Sullivan leaves me in awe as there isn’t a sentence I’d say isn’t required.

The English language was absolutely butchered in an almost insulting way.

The man creates the world with a simple prose that brings to mind things like woodsmoke from a stone chimney, rain spattering a windowpane, snow gently falling outside while a candle burns silently away in a shop window, or a lazy river meandering its way through the lush countryside.

It's amazing that such a poorly written book could receive such high ratings.

Michael J. Sullivan has written a book I will read over and over again and it most definitely will always reside on my favorite’s shelf.


On CHARACTERS
The characters are like cardboard cutout stereotypes and entirely predictable. There is absolutely no subtlety at all and, if the characters are easy to understand, it's because they have so little depth.

Royce and Hadrian are two well-developed characters shrouded in mystery and written with a delightful dry wit that few veteran authors could emulate.

For me, the characters never evolved from simple, ordinary constructions found in any fantasy novel to somebody with life, reasoning skills, or emotion.

The characters are entertaining and evolving, without turning cheesy and predictable like they do in so many fantasy series.

They were as dead as paper. Honestly, I couldn't bring myself to care about a single one.

At first I wasn't sure if I was really going to bond with any of the characters, but to my delight I found myself loving Royce and Hadrian.

I felt the characters weren't as developed as I would have liked.

Royce and Hadrian, the two protagonists, are complex

I could not get behind the shallow characters and their motivations.

The characters were witty and likeable, and the story was very believable, something you could actually see happening.

For the most part, the prince was the same character all the way through and then just developed all of a sudden at the end.

That’s not to say the supporting cast aren’t equally impressive, as I think Alric’s personal transition is amazing.

Characters made in a completely stereotypical cookie cutter form. They are completely lacking in motivation and actually just downright stupidly unlikable.

One of the great things about the novel is its realness, the characters are alive in their own right whether it be the silent and snarky Royce or the warmer Hadrian, the sometime hindrance Prince Alric or the lovable and curious monk Myron; you'll fall in love with the characters as much as the action.

There is not one believable character who talks or thinks like a living being.

Your characters are intriguing, touching, and real: My heart ached for Hilfred when he was on the stand; I felt Myron's sorrow at not being able to become a part of the world in which he is now thrust; and Royce reminds so much of my best friend during high school that it is his face I see speaking Royce's lines.

I could not get behind the shallow characters and their motivations.

Perhaps it is simply that the characters’ presence in the here and now is so fully-realized that everything else is merely secondary; regardless I’m excited to learn more rather than disappointed that I learned so little.

On LANGUAGE
His portrayal of an ancient wizard, using what he thinks is archaic English, made me cringe from start to finish.

The wizard has been locked up for 900 years and the way he communicates with the heroes is realistic and funny.

On PREDICTABILITY
I almost never found myself being really blown away or surprised by the plot twists and turns it was rather predictable.

The plot was not straightforward and it kept me on my toes trying to figure out which characters were good guys and which were bad guys. It takes a great writer to weave a tale that surprises me, that keeps me in suspense.


On COMPARISONS
If you like new fantasists like Peter Brett and Robert Redick, or skilled world builders like George R.R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Guy Gavriel Kay and Joe Abercrombie, there's a high likelihood that you will find this as unreadable as I did.

It reminds me of George R R Martin's "Song of fire and ice" except on a lighter, much less confusing and difficult to comprehend at times scale. Needless to say, if you just want a good fantasy novel, pick this one up.

I have always loved fantasy and I enjoyed this book as much as I did when I first read Tolkien.

It was like combining the styles of Neil Gaiman to that of George R. R. Martin, and it really worked for me.

On ORIGINALITY
The writing/imagery is basic, the characters are one-dimensional and undeveloped, and the dialogue is tired old cliche after tired old cliche.

It doesn't follow the regular rubric of so many fantasy books.

On Dialog
Characters banter painfully in modern American English

The characters are fresh and engaging, I absolutely loved the banter between the two main characters.

On Length
As this book stands, it's too darned short!

It may be shorter then some of the books I have read but it sure does pack quite the punch. I say “The smaller the package, the greater they are”.

What can an author take away from all this contradiction? I can take solace in the idea that this list consists of almost all the negative comments I have seen, but doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the positive ones.

One final note:
There are two emails I received this year that, in all honesty, make everything here appear so trivial it’s silly. They are private and very personal messages from fans that I refuse to tarnish by making public, but I am glad to say they were very positive and more than any other comments or money earned--made my year. Thanks Renee & Cort and thanks Major Hill.

C Новым годом!

Девочки и мальчики!
Постоянно читающие и случайно забредшие!
От всей своей души поздравляю Вас с новым годом!
Новый год всегда связан с чудесами. Желаю, чтобы Ваши мечты и желания, об исполнении которых Вы даже думаете по секрету от себя, стали такой же реальность как и сегодняшний день.
Любите и будьте любимыми, чувствуйте радость от каждой минуты жизни или хотя бы смейтесь над тем, над чем порадоваться сложновато :)
Балуйте себя, а еще балуйте меня: своими замечательными рукотворилками, на которые ТАК приятно смотреть.

Праздник к нам приходит. Праздник к нам приходит :)


Quilled flower birthday card

I made this card for one of my coworkers who has a January birthday. I quilled the flwoer and added pearls and beads to the center and petals. The embossed silver was aluminum foil glued to a cereal box. I then ran the foil covered box through my cuttlebug using and embossing folder. I stitched the panels onto the base of the card and added a ribbon at the top. The sentiment comes from my Mark's Finest Papers set called HEARTS, HEARTS, HEARTS.
Posted by Picasa

2010, an excellent year for raytracing!

What an exciting year this has been, for raytracing at least. There has been a huge buzz around accelerated ray tracing and unbiased rendering, in which the GPU has played a pivotal role. A little overview:

- Octane Render is publicly announced. A demo is released which lets many people experience high quality unbiased GPU rendering for the first time. Unparallelled quality and amazing rendertimes on even a low-end GTX8800, catch many by surprise.

- Arion, the GPU sibling of Random Control's Fryrender, is announced shortly after Octane. Touts hybrid CPU+GPU unbiased rendering as a distinguishing feature. The product eventually releases at a prohibitively expensive price (1000€ for 1 multi-GPU license)

- Luxrender's OpenCL-based GPU renderer SmallLuxGPU integrates stochastic progressive photon mapping, an unbiased rendering method which excels at caustic-heavy scenes

- Brigade path tracer is announced, a hybrid (CPU+GPU) real-time path tracer aimed at games. Very optimized, very fast, user-defined quality, first path tracer with support for dynamic objects. GI quality greatly surpasses virtual point light/instant radiosity based methods and even photon mapping, can theoretically handle all types of BRDF, is artefact free (except for noise) and nearly real-time. No screen-space limitations. The biggest advantage over other methods is progressive rendering which instantly gives a good idea of the final converged image (some filtering and LOD scheme, similar to VoxLOD, could produce very high quality results in real-time). Very promising, it could be the best option for high-quality dynamic global illumination in games in 2 to 3 years.

- release of Nvidia Fermi GPU: caches and other enhancements (e.g. concurrent kernel execution) give ray tracing tasks an enormous boost, up to 3.5x faster in scenes with many incoherent rays compared to the previous architecture. Design Garage, an excellent tech demo featuring GPU path tracing is released alongside the cards

- Siggraph 2010 puts heavy focus on GPU rendering

- GTC 2010: Nvidia organizes a whole bunch of GPU ray tracing sessions covering OptiX, iray, etc.

- John Carmack re-expresses interest in real-time ray tracing as an alternative rendering method for next-generation games (besides sparse voxel octrees). He even started twittering about his GPU ray tracing experiments in OpenCL: http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2010/08/is-carmack-working-on-ray-tracing-based.html

- GPU rendering gets more and more criticized by the CPU rendering crowd (Luxology, Next Limit, their userbase, ...) feeling the threat of decreased revenue

- release of mental ray's iray

- release of V-Ray RT GPU, the product that started the GPU rendering revolution

- Caustic Graphics is bought by Imagination Technologies, the maker of PowerVR GPU. A surprising and potentially successful move for both companies. Hardware accelerated real-time path tracing at very high sampling rates (higher than on Nvidia Fermi) could become possible. PowerVR GPUs are integrated in Apple TV, iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, so this is certainly something to keep an eye on in 2011. Caustic doesn't disappoint when it comes to hype and drama :)

- one of my most burning questions since the revelation of path tracing on GPU, "is the GPU capable of more sophisticated and efficient rendering algorithms than brute force path tracing?" got answered just a few weeks ago, thanks to Dietger van Antwerpen and his superb work on GPU-based Metropolis light transport and energy redistribution path tracing.

All in all, 2010 was great for me and delivered a lot to write about. Hopefully 2011 will be at least equally exciting. Some wild speculation of what might happen:

- Metropolis light transport starts to appear in commercial GPU rendering software (very high probability for Octane)
- more news about Intel's Knight's Corner/Ferry with maybe some perfomance numbers (unlikely)
- Nvidia launches Kepler at the end of 2011 which offers 3x path tracing performance of Fermi (to good to be true?)
- PowerVR GPU maker and Caustic Graphics bring hardware accelerated real-time path tracing to a mass audience through Apple mobile products (would be great)
- Luxology and Maxwell Render reluctantly embrace GPU rendering (LOL)
- finally a glimpse of OTOY's real-time path tracing (fingers crossed)
- Brigade path tracer gains exposure and awareness with the release of the first path traced game in history (highly possible)
- ...

Joy!

Christian Fail

Epic Fail #4
Rated 'F' for Fail




Note: The format of the epic fail posts and the "F" images used here are from Evo. Do not use them without his permission.







Hillsong is a college. Sayings like "I love you," "Take care," "I'll always support you," and so on are not as good as Hillsong.

Note: As pointed out by Deric in the chatbox, this can be a figurative speech. I mean, anything can be a figurative speech. It is basically to say that Hillsong is the "best" thing at the moment. But it doesn't matter, it will still be here.


Submitted by Rail and uploaded via Blogger Image Uploader.
Source: Facebook

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Моя мама мной гордится :)


Так она сказала :)
Не помню, говорила ли она это, когда я закончила школу или поступила в универ, даже не помню, говорила ли она это когда я его окончила с красным дипломом, но моя мама точно знает каково это сделать КРАСИВУЮ (скромно да? :) ) вещь своими руками.
Поэтому так приятно :)

А поводом стала серебренная медаль Юкико.






Мой мишка -
серебряный призер конкурса

МИШКА ОКТЯБРЯ






"Главное - ты не оч. переживай, когда твоя дочь будет штанины вверх ногами пришивать! Чуть-чуть подождать, и будет медаль!" - еще написала она. Я однажды шила себе штаны и сшила между собой штанины заднюю и переднюю часть вверх ногами :) Еще и отстрочила :) Порола дня два :)

Sketch challenge 313

For SCS's sketch challenge 313, I made 3 cards. Two were for male co-workers who share January 1 as their birthday. They were so much fun to make, and all three have their own unique qualities.
Layers of Color- Joyful Noise
Unknown stamp set that I got at a rummage sale. "Groovy"
Mark's Finest Papers - Bold and Free
Posted by Picasa

Нашим педагогам!

Уважемые учителя! Поздравляем Вас с праздником! Удачи Вам и понимающих учеников! Пусть каждый год теперь будет годом учителя!

С Новым годом!!!

Дорогие мои ребята! Поздравляю вас с самым добрым, волшебным, желанным праздником! В новогоднюю ночь пусть сбудутся ваши мечты! А Дед Мороз придет в гости и обязательно принесет подарок!
С Новым годом!
С Новым годом!
С песней,
с шуткой,
с хороводом!
С небосводом,
полным звезд,
с белым инеем берез,
с блеском
елочных огней,
с верой в счастье
новых дней!

 

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Винтажное украшение-штучка на шею

А вот как его назвать-то: и не кулон, и не ожерелье, и не подвеска. Маша в подобных случаях пользуется словом "штучка" :)
Так что это - украшение-штучка на шею.
Как всегда мои любимые Swarovski Rivoli, бисер тохо и бронза во всех видах и обличиях.



Один экземпляр оставила себе, потому как оказалось, что украшение-штучка подходит ко многому из моего туалета и не вычурная, как прежние мои творения для себя.
Второй экземпляр - моей ПИФочке Оксанке. Заказывала украшение - получи, распишись.
Третий экземпляр может стать вашим за 870 рэ :)
Адрес для связи на правой боковой панеле.

Победа!

Мы в числе призеров по результатам фотокросса "Новогодний". Молодцы!
"Новогодний автопортрет"

Red hats for the teaparty


The cards for today's teaparty are all about red hats. The teaparty destination is for a lady named Joyce who has been struggling with health issues with her cancer that have left her with stroke like symptoms. I hope that this card will bring a little joy to her day. I quilled the hat and used a sentiment from Mark's Finest Papers HEART HEARTS HEARTS set. My husband and kids got me a border embossing folder for Christmas. Of course I had to give it a try.

Holiday Vacation: Swimming in the Topics

As an author, writing a blog is a bit strange--or maybe it is just strange for me. I don't know what to write. (Which accounts for the few number of posts I make--well that and I don't have that much time.)It's not that I don't have ideas, or topics I could pontificate on, I have plenty, but does anyone want to read about them? I have no idea because blogging is this odd, one-sided discussion. I ramble about stuff to people all the time, and their expression usually tells me when I should change the subject or shut-up entirely. I don't get that in a blog. Occasionally someone will leave a comment, but never does anyone post, "This was great, but what I'd really like to hear about is…"

I mean, do you really want to read about how great my books are doing? That sort of thing is interesting to me, but I can't understand why anyone else would really care? It also strikes me as a bit self-absorbed.

Would you rather I wrote about writing? I know several readers of this blog are aspiring writers, so would tips and methods be interesting? Some of you might love that while others might be invisibly yawning.

What about lifestyle? Is anyone interested in what it is like to be a full-time author? How I spend my time? Would it help to inspire those working toward this goal to see what might be behind door number three? Clearly I am no Fitzgerald or Hemingway, so I have to wonder if that would be appealing.

How about rants on the industry? A number of authors have made a fine following by posting impassioned opinions on the publishing business. I have to wonder how interesting that is to read for someone who isn't in the industry.

How about my opinions on my genre, what I think is wrong with fantasy books these days, how I feel it could be improved. I don't know. While I have lots of opinions here, I can't think of too many ways to present them without attacking fellow authors, and I'd rather not throw stones given what pretty, big windows I have.

I could talk off-subject, ramble about general news items, politics, religion, the state of PC games or the weather. I'm not sure even I would want to read that.

Creative writing? Would you be more happy with little stories? That tends to be time-consuming, time that would be better spent working on my books, but I suppose I could do that.

Biography? Would to like to hear about my storied past? Would it be interesting? Comforting? Frightening? Inspiring? to hear all the trials and tribulation I went through?

Maybe if you gave me a hint I could do a better job at this as we go into 2011. Miraculous changes are coming so I feel I need to nail this down better.

In the meantime…

My books are doing phenomenal, right now. Robin is beside herself watching the numbers grow like a Christmas Chi-pet. Yesterday I sold 750 Kindles, that's in one day, and that's just Kindles. It wasn't long ago that I was happy to sell one book every three days, and now, if sales continue as they have been, I will sell 10,000 this month. This is just silly. Sure, there are a lot of people out there with Santa delivered e-readers, all looking to fill them, so the numbers are skewed. Still, I thought the same thing last year, but the numbers stayed high, so who knows.

Thanks for helping to make this another great holiday season, and here's looking forward to what appears like it will be an amazing new year.

(If you'd prefer not to post on this blog but rather email me directly with questions or suggestions of something you'd like me to blog on, you can write me at: michael.sullivan.dc@gmail.com.)

See you in 2011.

Всем ребятам веселых каникул!!!




Газета по проекту "Мы в ответе за тех, кого приручили"


Совместная газета по проекту тут

А помните, когда-то у нас был урок на улице...

Урок рисования. Сентябрь 2010. Фото тут

Monday, December 27, 2010

Winter Photos

These icicles were near the door at work. The sun was just setting and shining through them.
This bald eagle was flying over the Mississippi River.
There was a heavy fog last night that came through the area. When the fog lifted this morning everything was covered with a thin layer of ice. When the sun hit the trees, it looked like they were covered with thousands of little diamonds.
Posted by Picasa
новогодняя анимационная картинка  весёлый снеговик с кодом.

Global illumination with Markov Chain Monte Carlo rendering in Nvidia Optix 2.1 + Metropolis Light Transport with participating media on GPUs

Optix 2.1 was released a few days ago and includes a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sample, which only works on Fermi cards (New sample: MCMC - Markov Chain Monte Carlo method rendering. A global illumination solution that requires an SM 2.0 class device (e.g. Fermi) or higher).

MCMC rendering methods, such as MLT (Metropolis light transport) and ERPT (energy redistribution path tracing) are partially sequential because each path of a Markov chain depends on the previous path and is therefor more difficult to parallellize for GPUs than standard Monte Carlo algorithms. This is an image of the new MCMC sampler included in the new Optix SDK, which can be downloaded from http://developer.nvidia.com/object/optix-download.html.




There is also an update on the Kelemen-style Metropolis Light Transport GPU renderer from Dietger van Antwerpen. He has released this new video showing Metropolis light transport with participating media running on the GPU: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xo0qVT3nxg



This scene is straight from the original Metropolis light transport paper from Veach and Guibas (http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/metro/metro.pdf). Participating media (like fog, smoke and god rays) are one of the most difficult and compute intensive phenomena to simulate accurately with global illumination, because it is essentially a volumetric effect in which light scattering occurs. Subsurface scattering belongs to the same category of expensive difficult-to-render volumetric effects. The video shows it can now be done in almost real-time with MLT. which is pretty impressive!

Новогоднее поздравление

Поздравляем всех читателей и гостей нашего блога с Новым годом! Удачи, радости, успехов!!! Эта музыкальная открытка для Вас!

Новогодние игрушки

Выполняю своё чеснапионерское обещание: каждый год делать на елку самделишние украшения.
В этом году это сердечки с декупажем.
По периметру вышила бисером. Уфффф нелегкая это работа обшить 6 сердечек. Зато мне в Машкином садике даже грамоту дали на конкурсе игрушек :)
Прославилась :)

На фото не особо видно, но борода и помпончики украшены глиттерами (такой блестящий клей), который я еще к прошлому Новому году купила для скрапбукинга, но применила только сейчас. В реале очень блестит :) Ляпота...


Вот :)

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Фотографии из "Нового поколения"

Ребята, ссылка на Web-альбом тут    Фото

Отзыв по произведению Е.Шварца " Сказка о потерянном времени "

Мне понравилось это произведение тем , что
ребята не остались стариками и смогли
победить волшебников . Я извлекла для себя урок
" Не трать понапрасну время ! "

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Голосование по Новогоднему конкурсу начинается!!!

Итак... внимание! Наш конкурс не смотря ни на что состоится! Свое желание на участие изъявили 26 человек, а работы прислали только 5! Вышивок на конкурс не поступило, поэтому конкурс будет только скраповый! Будет 3 призовых места, победители получать почетные грамоты и что-нибудь для скрапа! Итак голосуем!

Нужно выбрать 3 понравивишиеся работы и написать комментарий по следующей форме:
1 место - работа №...
2 место - работа № ...
3 место - работа № ...

Оставлять свои комментарии с голосами могут только зарегистрированные блоггеры. Итоги конкурса будут подведены 8 января 2011 года.

Работа № 1 - "Веселая парочка"


Работа № 2 - "В ожидании чуда"


Работа № 3 - "Волшебная елочка" (с шоколадкой внутри)



Работа № 4 - "Зимнее очарование"



Работа № 5 - "Снежная зима"
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Blog Archive