Day 22 - Movin' on up

Almost There...

Today I did not play as much Go as I had hoped, but what games I did play were enlightening. (I got a little caught up in my Zombie game, trying to code in an ammo system by myself having just learned the basics of the coding language in RPG Maker.)

It's amazing how seemingly tiny bits of advice I've gotten from opponents the last two days has helped my game. I have started to branch away from my own style of playing and into a new one entirely, as a whole new concept of strategy has begun to form in my head. Perhaps it was a collective gathering of ideas over time, and it was just the few bits of advice that made it all click? Either way, I've become very much enamored with the concept of giving and taking. Giving your opponent what he wants while also taking from somewhere else. Instead of playing with my usual, highly defensive tactics I have been experimenting with new ideas.

Another bit of advice that has helped me immensely is a small word I received on the proper use of playing a stone on the 4-4 (hoshi, or star) point versus the 3-4 point (komoku). At first I just used them blindly. I had a highly vague idea of their differences but other than that I had no clue. The main things I learned were that the star point is for faster movement, and the kumoku is for a slower, more territorial movement. I learned that while the kumoku can enclose the corner in just one extra move, the star point take a little more. Since then I have been playing one type of corner placement in each of my corners, and then noting their overall effect on the game thereafter. After testing out the advice just once it's effects were immediately obvious. It was like an great void opened in my mind and I saw the opening in a whole new way. More on this tomorrow.

With this and my new style of give and take, I have been a force to be reckoned with. My losses began turning into wins. I couldn't help but take a glance at my rank chart.



Small note: The reason I have progressed so quickly during the first half of November is because that was my first time playing Go after a 3 month hiatus. That quick burst in rank was me getting back up to speed. Before I took my break I was about 15kyu, so it would seem that I gained a rank during my time not playing! Not entirely sure how that happened. Maybe the 3 months of not playing broke some of my nasty habits, and in recovering I took more careful, thoughtful steps in what I learned?

Anyways, the main thing I am trying to point out is.. I am almost 11 kyu! This is the first time I think I've been excited about a rank change. I guess that makes me kind of a nerd huh. (Haha of course I am a nerd.) The next few days will be a fun and exciting challenge as I try my best to improve my game and keep my wins flowing steadily. Perhaps I can reach my month wide goal of reaching 10 kyu after all? Only time shall tell.

The Survivor

I sketched out the second main character of my game today. She has no name as of yet, so I will just call her "The Survivor" for now. She is the lone survivor after a horrible plague destroys her secluded farm town. Having a curious immunity to the virus, she alone takes care of the last dying villagers, including her own mother. It is a dark and especially chilly night when her bed stricken mother finally gives in to disease, then, as if in some horrible twist of fate, her dead mother becomes the first of the village to rise again. As her dead mother lashes out at her, jaws gnashing, The Survivor escapes to the nearby church, a fearsomely large scythe taken from the tool shed as her weapon.

Until tomorrow,
-BuddytheRat

Day 21 - Life, Death, Zombies

Today was a success. Not only did I play 4 games of Go, but I spent the rest of the day working on art for my game. I can honestly say this is one of the first times a vision of mine is coming to life. I am seeing new skills in myself that I did not see before in the creation of art and of storytelling. I guess all my years of constantly trying but just falling short of making actual progress has left some mark on me after all.

In one of my Go matches I was lucky enough to pair up with a very talkative fellow who reviewed the game with me afterwards. He gave me advice and told me why I lost, etc. We also looked at possible threats that were left untampered with and found a lot of things that we both missed. (HUGE holes in defenses that, if penetrated properly would have turned the entire game around.)

During this game, there arose an interesting life or death problem. My opponent did not see the threat, but because of my study from Life and Death by James Davies, I knew exactly what to do. After the game we went back and took a look at the area in question and I taught him a few things about eye space, and we looked at other possible outcomes if he had responded at the proper time. Here I present to you two Life & Death problems. One from my side (white to kill), and one from his side (black to live). The first one is what actually occured in game, and the second one is a hypothetical that we worked through in review.

(Left) White to Kill, (Right) Black to Live

I will post the answers tomorrow, hidden, although nobody reads the blog yet. (Sigh. I will stick my head out of the hole soon. I'd just like some actual content first.)

The Doctor, Edgar

As I said, I spent almost the rest of my day working on art for my game, and went off on a spiel about how my visions are actually coming to exist for once. Well, here is what I meant: The game I have been working on stars a doctor that stumbles his way into a full on zombie infestation. What began as an emergency call from a faraway village to deal with a sudden plague of disease, quickly ends up with the doctor stumbling headlong into a full on zombie infestation.

That's the premise, now for the art.

The game will include an RPG battle system, with emphasis on avoidance and survival. Basically, more realism over supremely powerful war machine characters that you'd typically find in your average RPG. With this comes the need for realistic character sprites. Since the battle screen is a separately designed entity from the rest of the game, this is where I will take the most artistic liberty and make the game my own.

A little background information: RPG Maker XP comes prepackaged with already made graphics. You have the option to make your own, but for my purposes I would much rather work intensely in one or two areas, and leave the rest to the prepackaged stuff. Certainly as I go along I can make more and more changes to the default graphics, but for now they are broad enough for my needs.

So, as I was saying. Realistic character sprites. In other words, a lot of work, but with a really nice outcome. What happened was I tried it, and the results were surprising! I found out today that I am capable of a lot more than I once thought.



Here you see the initial sketch, and then the (WIP) pixel art. The right pant leg needs some help but other than that, I am proud of my work. (This is not something that happens too often.) I had some help in the form of criticism from a good artist, and good friend, Blurrpi. She helped me get the proportions correct, which, surprisingly, did not take very much. (Made the legs longer.)

Today has made me excited for tomorrow, and I hope to continue headstrong in all my pursuits. If my progress of today is any indication, I will be creating great things in no time.

Until then
-BuddytheRat

Day 20 - Time

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Day 18 - Weekend

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Day 16 - Stress

Learning To Cope

With college comes stress, and with stress comes an overwhelming desire to curl up into a ball and hide in the corner, hoping and waiting for the world to become safe again. Of course, all we can do is cope, and do better next time.

Organization has never been my strong suit, so stress tends to hit me hard during the semester as I constantly rebound from careless mistakes and forgotten assignments. At least, that was the story last semester. I coped just enough to scrape by. This semester I have to minimize stress. I have to remove the source of my problems and thus not have to stress about them in the first place. I need to stay organized, write down important dates, prioritize my concerns, and for the love of god, DO THE WORK.

Today was an especially stressful day, as I had to deal with a funds problem that I caused because I have been up to this point too inept to properly keep track of my bank account. I had to take some money out of my college savings to ameliorate the damage.

The weeks to come will hold even more stressful days, and I will do my best to cope.

Tablets Are Fun

For Christmas I bought my girlfriend a tablet from Genius. At about 50 dollars it is an amazing deal. It is both responsive and accurate, and has already proven itself to be worth well more than the 50 dollar price tag lets on. Because of this, I have begun doing sketches on the computer, so that I may post them on my blog once again. Here I have two sketches from lastnightsparty (BE AWARE: Link contains some nudity) and one.. um.. yeah.

Click to see reference image.
(BE AWARE: Reference image site contains some nudity if you venture past pages I have linked)

Note: My good friend Travis helped a little with this one.

Go Frustrations

I did successfully study go with no music for an hour. The problems in my life and death book have gotten difficult very fast. Since I am forcing myself to figure out the problems in my head, it has become blatantly obvious that my reading skills are incredibly poor. Creating all those imaginary stones in your mind and keeping them in the right place takes an incredible amount of concentration. There would have been no way I would have made it through this book with music blaring in the background. My inability to solve the problems on the 4th chapter of the book frustrated me, so I tried playing a few games. I resigned both very early in the game. My frustration bred more frustration and I plummeted.

It was not a good study session, but I am not shaken. I will take this as a lesson. When I find myself frustrated again, I will take a step back, breath in deeply, and solve the problem slowly and surely. Frustration just makes you do worse. You think less, you act overconfidently and overplay dramatically, you exaggerate the odds that are against you and forget how to act accordingly. It is a bad pit to fall into, but determination and solid foundation can get out back out of it again.

Tomorrow's study session will be better.

Until then,
-BuddytheRat

Day 8 - Progress

I have noticed an interesting change today. I felt myself eager to do the tasks at hand. I felt the urge to continue even though I'd met a full days quota. I found myself taking my time on each of the faces I drew, working for I would say a solid hour and a half to draw about 6 faces. All of which I am pretty impressed with. Although, I learned a harsh lesson today with regards to drawing at an angle. I had the pad flat on my desk for my last face, and the 2d image projected up at me from a skewed angle. Of course, when I finished, and finally held my pad up to the monitor to compare, it was horribly skewed like those sidewalk chalk drawings that are made to look 3 dimensional when viewed from the proper direction.

I played three games of Go, two of which devolved fairly quickly into board spanning fights. I won both by resignation. I think the life and death problems have helped immensely as I have been alot more confident in secluding and gouging out the eyes of attacking groups of stones.

Another thing I did today was play a bit of piano. I've already regained some steam just from sitting down to plunk some keys every now and then as I travel past the large piano downstairs. I think I will make a goal of trying to make a real quick song tomorrow. The kind of music I like to create is a little different from what one might expect, but, I am out of time, so you'll have to just find out tomorrow what it is!

Until then, peace out!
-BuddytheRat

Day 4 - Need more time.

I had intended to write up a special post today, all about the title of this blog, "Wabi-sabi", but there arose a problem. When I want to write something well, I write very slowly, far too slowly to meet my 12:00 deadline for today. This brings even further necessity to maintaining a normal sleep schedule. Tomorrow I have work at 11 AM, so that will be the jump to get me started. So, expect that special post for tomorrow. For today it will be the same.

I did a little extra today. A small step towards the quota I intend to meet for each day. For Drawing I did two pages. One of faces, and another I did a small still life image. For Go I played two games (won one, then lost my concentration and dive bombed in the second) and studied about 6 tsumego problems.

Here are a select few of the drawings:

Click to see reference image.
(BE AWARE: Reference image site contains some nudity if you venture past pages I have linked)

Until tomorrow,
-BuddytheRat

Day 3 - ONE MONTH CHALLENGE™ could be more challenging...

Today proceeded just like any other day. Drew a page of faces, played a few games of Go. I think it's time I took this a step further, before I put the ONE MONTH CHALLENGE™ to shame. The next logical step to take is to get some fresh air, sunshine, and good old exercise. If I can brave the cold then I'll start making morning (yes MORNING) bike rides. If not then I can bust out the treadmill, which has the nice bonus of being able to read or watch television, but then again there's nothing quite like a peaceful ride through the neighborhood.

As for my Drawing and Go progress, I think it's time I stepped that up, as well.

For Drawing:

• 3 sketchbook pages a day. 1 page of faces, 1 small still life, and we'll leave the third page as a wild card.

For Go (These suggestions taken from this helpful guide written by David Mechner):

• Have 2 games reviewed by a stronger player each week.
• Completely solve at least 5 tsumego problems a day.
• Seriously study and incorporate into games 1 joseki per week.
• Once I get my books, 5 tesuji problems a day, and..
• Daily study of either Opening Theory Made Easy (by Otake Hideo) or Lessons in The Fundamentals of Go (by Toshiro Kageyama)

Quite a list there, but it shouldn't be too hard. I just have to pull my self away from the video games a little more and wake up a little earlier.

So! Drawings for today:

Click to see reference image.
(BE AWARE: Reference image site contains some nudity if you venture past pages I have linked)

These look a lot better when you don't have a reference image to compare them too...

Until next time,
-BuddytheRat

Day 2 - The Burden of the Night Owl

It's barely right to consider these days, when really it's only the first half of them. I've been strictly making these posts before midnight, even though my days go on well into the night, and onward yet into the morning. Yesterday for instance I finally went to sleep at around 8:00 AM. Definitely not a good habit to maintain, yet for the last 5 years it has been a prominent aspect of, well, being me.

Of course, when times call for it, I can break out of my night owl tendencies, with only a few slip-ups here and there. But, for the sake of properly date stamped posts (one for each day) I will stick to my post before 12 regime. Anything I do after 12 will be saved for the next day's post.

Today I played another game of Go. The player was a single rank above me, and it was an even match. I lost by about 60 moku. This is why I believe my rank of 13 kyu on KGS (Internet Go server) is a bit inaccurate, yet not matter how many games I seem to lose, I have not been dropping in rank at all.

I have been taking it easy on the Go front until my Go books arrive. The problems with my bank account should be settled soon and I can redo my order.

As for drawing, I filled in another page today. About 5 sketches of faces taken from a website called Last Nights Party. (BE AWARE: Link contains some nudity) This time, though, I have photos! They aren't the best quality since I had to photograph them as opposed to scanning them, but that's okay.

Here I have one drawing from yesterday and two from today:

Click to see reference image.
(BE AWARE: Reference image site contains some nudity if you venture past pages I have linked)

Yes, I added in the monocle. I mean, how could you imagine this guy without one?

This one not my best effort, but that's why I am making this blog now isn't it?

Criticism is welcome and encouraged, so if there are any artists that may stumble upon this post then have at it.

Expect more full featured updates in the future.

Until then,
-BuddytheRat