plaidphantom.net

I've been playing with Inkscape, a vector graphics editor. It's really quite easy to work with. Here's a couple images I've made. I converted them to PNG images, mostly because I don't know whether IE actually supports scalable vector graphics (SVG) images.

This first spirally thing is actually the first image I made. I was just playing around with some tools to see what they actually do and happened across both transparency and blur.

This next image was the next I tried, and though it took me a while to figure out the handle, I think it turned out really well.

Here's three more mini-stories. Two are based on Box-O-Doom prompts, the other was a group thing where we all wrote zombie romances (or something like that).

View the rest of "More Box-O-Doom"...

In the previous post I mentioned Shay's Box of Doom, where you receive a person, place, thing, and situation and you have to write a short story involving all four. On something of a whim, I thought it would be fun to write a computer program that would generate these prompts for you. I didn't really care for the way it found its data files (asking the user), so last night I sat down and figured out how to make it just look in its current directory. Took quite a bit of research, but I did it, so here it is. Just unzip it and double-click on the doombox.jar file. It should work.

Download the Box of DOOOOM!

In the writing group I go to, we have something known as "Shay's Box of DOOOM!" It randomly gives you a person, place, thing, and situation and you have to write a story incorporating all of them. Being random, one can end up with some pretty odd stories at times. Here are two of mine.

View the rest of "Two Shorts"...

Well, everything on the site seems to be working, so I suppose it's time to start actually posting stuff. This first thing is a fanfic I wrote over a period of a year or so back in '05-'06 based on the French-based 3D cartoon Code Lyoko. Reading it now I can see some really dumb mistakes, but for what might be considered my first serious story it's not too bad. (There's no forgiving a there/their mistake, though. :| ) One thing I noticed is that I apparently had a small habit of pop-culture references that no one will probably get, and each time the lines seem out of character and aren't even that funny. I'm not gonna tell you where they are, but I will say that I at least reference The Princess Bride and FLCL.

Since it bugs me to hear other artists tear down their own work, I will say that I like the characterization of Odd and particularly Aelita here; I think I got them fairly close to the original characters. The twinkies may have been a bit much though. :P

Anyway, here it is. If you're not familiar with Code Lyoko, it will probably be a bit confusing, but it's fanfic so I suppose it's to be expected. I'm just posting a PDF with the story because I don't feel like re-writing this into HTML right now.

So, enjoy.