Get in on the John

Alright people, blog posting time. See that space above these words? If you have windows media player installed and an activeX plugin in your browser ( apparently firefox does not come with an activeX plugin. Lotta fun spend discovering that.) you should see a black box with some play buttons and that kinda stuff. If you don't see anything and have firefox, click here. That'll learn you how to get firefox to hop onto this multimedia bandwagon. Now, that being taken care of, those of you with fast internet connections will have your senses promptly caressed by the music video of "Girl" by Beck. And such an awesome video ( and song, of course. ) it is. Those of you with worse internet connections will have the doo-doo scared out of you when your computer suddenly starts blaring music for no apparent reason half an hour from now after you forget to close my blog's window and continue surfing the internets oblivious. ( Yeah, that happened to me a couple times when on my adventure to find out how to get the darn music videos to work. I thought my computer was possessed and only remembered that the tab I had left open in my forth firefox window contained a music video after I had attempted to exorcise my computer with a handy baseball bat. Wow, this was all in parenthesis? My writing skills are amazing. I am now going to be a rebel and choose never to close that paren. Hahaha. Take THAT laws of the written language! Take that indeed!

Oh, and check this out! As if we needed another reason to be in awe and wonder of he who is so humbly called The John ( a.k.a. Me ), I have made the jaw-dropping picture that follows while in a photoshopping war trance. Or more like a Gimping war trance. But that just sounds wierd, so I won't say it even though I just did. Seen men in black?
*FLASH!*
What you think you just read was actually the light of the planet Jupiter reflected off of swamp gas.
Anyway, what got me started was my good buddy Alex Rehn ( Blog link to the right. ) sent me some Prince of Persia Pics to resize and send them back so they could resume living their meaningful lives with him as AIM avatars. The resizing didn't work out, but while I was messing around with The Gimp ( Sorta like a free version of Photoshop. Kinda. ), I discovered the wonders of masks, which basically just lets you add/remove/transparencify bits of a picture really easily. Which led to me discovering the magics of paths ( save selections for reuse without selecting again.) And then the greatness of layer effects.
Do not worry if you just sorta dozed off though all that.
Just WAKE UP now because it is time for you to make "OooOOOo!!" and/or "Aahhhh!!" sounds ( other forms of amazement, awe, or astoundment are also acceptable.) as you witness the incredible wonder that is my opus.

Come, you may rise from your prostrate awe my children. For, while it might not seem believeable right now, I am but a mere mortal who has simply been blessed with god-like photoshopping skills. I have this picture set as my background right now. I am so proud. ( As you may have noticed by now. ) If you can't already tell, what I did was the following:

• First, I noticed the ressemblance of The Prince of Persia to what I imagined a Freeman from the dune series by Frank Herbert would look like and decided to make his eyes blue.
• Then I figured that a freeman should be in the desert, so I got a desert picture and stuck that in the background.
• While his eyes where blue, and he was in the desert, I still felt like he could just be some random guy in a desert with wierd eyes, and so I set out to find a useable sandworm ( or shai-hulud to us dune fans ) picture, and used the awesome powers of layer masks to insert it into the background and even managed to make it's sand cloud look pretty ok. I am awesome.
• And finally, just so no one mistook it for a Tremors picture, I added those moons in the sky, actually the "real" moons of arakis from a pic I found on GIS.

Feel free to tell all your friends about the awesome picture I made. Also feel free to gush to them about how great my photoshopping skills are. Go ahead. Be my guest. Everyone who doesn't think it is the greatest picture ever made is just jealous. Which is totally understandable, considering.

Well, enough of that. Consider ego trip over. One more thing before I let ya'll get back to not throwing up in your mouths from a conceited overdose of John-worship. I have recently discovered the joys of SUDOKU!! I love it. In fact, I love it so much that I am in fact married to it. All of my fortune will inherited by it upon my death. We have three lovely children named Sue, Doe, and Koo. And I have not yet explained it to you. It is easy to get side tracked when you are blinded by love.
Sudoku is a puzzle game akin to a crossword puzzle or a word jumble in that it is something you fill out with a pencil and it is included in newspapers and etc... , the main difference being that I do not hate Sudoku like I do those others. I would be less inclined to hate the other puzzles if they did not require absurd amounts of pop culture or english language knowledge, but that is another story. No, Sudoku, whose name means single number in Japan where it gained popularity, has more of a universal appeal in that it requires only logic to solve, a fact which certainly augmented it's spread to world wide popularity earlier this year. ( March I believe. Excuse me if this is old news to you, I happened to be in Africa at the time. )

Sudoku is fairly simple at it's foundation. The concept is this: Fill in the grid so that every row, every column, and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9 with no repeats. That's it. But as with any good game, while it is easy to pick up, it is suprisingly hard to master. Clicking on the Sudoku link will take you to a wikipedia page filled with different techniques used to fill in the boxes. This is another place to learn how to solve them. These games can get crazy hard, I think I spent 5 hours ( straight!) trying to solve one of them, and strangely enough, the level of difficulty does not depend on how many numbers they give you to start with. No, the difficulty depends almost entirely on the placement of the numbers and the logical leaps needed to fill in the empty squares. Sudoku has been my only faithful companion during boring lectures, saving me from the dull droning of the professor and transporting me to a happy world full of bright green grass and singing birds and trickleing rivers where I feel like a genius after finally filling every one of those little boxes with precisely placed numbers. It is great. I think it's popularity hit great brittain the hardest, and it's always been pretty popular in Japan ( even though it started in New York, I think, where it was largely ignored. ), but even here at heart-of-america USA it is difficult to find a school newspaper where it has not been already torn out ( difficult to finish in one sitting with the hard ones.), or where some or all of the boxes have been already filled out. Anyway, I highly recomend it if you don't have something better to do ( Like listen in class. ).

Alrighty then, let us review what we have learned today. First, Beck is awesome. Second, the Dune books are awesome inspiration. And lastly, Sudoku is awesome. *Contented Sigh* What a fruitful post this has been, I am indeed content.
:]
Anyway, sleep beacons and I hasten to it's soothing embrace. Thank you for reading! Night!

[EDIT] Please comment and tell me if that video worked for you. That would help me out alot when deciding if I should put more up. Also, if it didn't work, try pushing play or reloading the page. Hope it works! Good song! Um, also, you can get the solution to that Sudoku puzzle by clicking on it. Just so you know. :)
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