All posts by Mike

Avery Later

General, Internet, School

It has been almost ten years since I first publicly embarassed an old classmate of mine in fifth period creative writing class by turning him into a tragically clueless cartoon character in The Adventures of Avery Later. Ever since I started collecting my old website stuff in an archive, I have wanted to put the original Avery website in there for completeness’ sake. Well, it’s finally arrived, complete with all the original graphics and even the few comics that were available to download.

I still have the comics (my favorites, the Star Wars-inspired ones, are sadly missing and may have been lost to time), and would like to eventually put them all online when I get the motivation and the free manhours it would require. In the meantime, enjoy what was probably the biggest in-joke from my high school years. It is probably worthy of mention that my online nickname was derived from Avery’s insatiable appetite for bagels.

I did make some necessary alterations to the pages to remove the RSAC rating since they are defunct and have fixed all broken images. Any external links (especially the email links) are unchanged and do not work. You have been warned!

Fun With Illustrator

General

I have been playing around with Adobe Illustrator for the past few days, since vector images have always fascinated me with how they scale to any arbitrary size very easily with zero loss in quality.

As I wanted to actually make something in the program and not just tool around with it for hours on end, I took a drawing of an old patch for an Air Force bombing squadron my grandfather belonged to many decades ago. I wanted to make a vector image out of it since it is perfectly suited to this sort of thing and my dad wanted to include an image of the patch on a copy of the crash report for a crash my grandpa was involved in. So, there were multiple reasons for me attempting this.

Anyway, I will be posting the actual images later on. I’d do it right now but I have a pressing engagement. Expect comparison material, a “finished” version and a version in SVG format, just for those Firefox 1.5 early adopters 🙂

F.E.A.R. Is Awesome

Gaming

I got my preorder of F.E.A.R. a couple weeks ago, and have spent some quality time with it. I loved it, and am very happy to see the positive reviews that are still popping up here and there.

I decided to hold off on picking up Quake 4 until the prices settle a bit. The reviews are mixed and for some reason the hype wasn’t very strong with this title. Despite the lukewarm acceptance of the game, I will be picking it up eventually as I am a Quake fan deep down in there somewhere.

F.E.A.R. MP Demo Out Now

Gaming

Today the F.E.A.R. multiplayer demo was released. I took some time to play it, and was very impressed. It plays great and the graphics are quite nice as well. Sometime I’ll do a more in-depth analysis, but that time is not now. I liked it.

In fact, I’ve preordered the director’s cut version. It will be mine!