I’m sorry for the lack of blog postings and I certainly hope that nobody tries to bite my head off for it. :V
I have been busy this past month, working as hard and as much as possible before it was time for me to leave Killeen on the 19th of August and move into my apartment in College Station. After three days of spending a fortune and cleaning this place, I believe that I finally have everything more or less pretty situated. The apartment is about 30 years old and it’s quite clear that the couple that lived in here before did not take good care of the place. On the plus side though, I have a new tub and carpeting. Numerous things are still broken, but the maintenance team has been working hard to get all of my requests taken care of in a timely fashion. The only major thing I have left is to have that dreaded kitchen sink replaced. There’s at least three layers of paint chipping from it and it’s disgusting.
School starts in about a week. I’ll be focusing on getting all of my finances straight and everything else situated before then. Here’s some stitched panoramics of the place.
Bedroom, everything I need.
Living/Dining. Eh. Who needs couches.
My close buddy Anthony, also known as imaGenius, is a passionate enthusiast when it comes to exploring the very unique aspects of music and everything that it has to offer. Today, he has released Garage Sale, a well organized assortment of thirty tracks featuring various sampled tracks that promotes music in the old school hip-hop style. If you have any musical listening interest in hip-hop, rap, pop, house or lounge, or even enjoy music from artists such as Lupe Fiasco, Common, Will I Am, or Kanye West, then I would encourage you to take a few moments to listen and enjoy it for what it is. Below you’ll find a just few of my favorite tracks as well as the download link to the entire mixtape so that you can experience it for yourself.
Download Here
When I Wake Up
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Your Life
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See
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Three
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I know where you got this one from, lol.
These days, I have been committing to a lot of things. Running for miles to raise my stamina. Reserving time for my wonderful ‘miles-away-but-oh-so-close’ girlfriend. Studying two different languages. Korean for my family, and Tagalog for hers. And just simply working hard in preparation for moving to College Station and starting my university career at Texas A&M. One thing that I have not been committing to anymore though, is Street Fighter IV. *gasp* Yes, that’s right. The game that I have unwisely played for an accumulated 23.2 days in an eight month period has been placed on the shelf. I’ll gladly play whenever I’m with friends but I just don’t have personal time for it anymore. But one thing I want to note: while in my Street Fighter prime, I had a small passion on the side for modifying MadCatz SFIV SE Arcade sticks. They were really fun to take apart and be creative with. I don’t think that I will see myself modifying anymore arcade sticks anytime soon. So with that said, below you’ll find all of the arcade sticks I’ve worked with in the past and a little bit about them. Consider this as a small tribute to the end(?) of my Street Fighter IV career.
Women of Street Fighter
This was my first arcade stick mod. After learning about how easy it was to modify, I decided to give it a shot. I wanted it to feature Crimson Viper, the main character that I fight with. Because Viper is a new character, finding decent artwork for her was tough. I chose this work of art primarily because the Viper work was very well done and also because it features every other female character in Street Fighter. If that’s not something good to look at on an arcade stick, then I don’t know what is! SFIV has a design concept of using brush strokes as a way of illustrating the art of ones moves. With this in mind, I added colored brush strokes to the buttons to place emphasis that the template is more focused on SFIV than Street Fighter in general. This was also my first time using Lami-labels from Fedex Office. Though the print quality was top-notch, the quality of the laminate was questionable. Cut it wrong, and you could end up tearing the paper that the laminate was supposed to protect. I ended up going back to the store three times to get it reprinted due to small mistakes while cutting it. All-in-all, it was a quick job and ended up looking great.
Inverted Viper
I quickly became tired of how the “Women of Street Fighter” stick looked. Giving it color seemed to be a good idea. For the template, I changed the color to black and used the official SFIV artwork for Viper. To have her match with the black environment, I inverted all of her neutral colors while retaining all of the rest. I didn’t change out any buttons so the brush strokes from the WoSF tempalte stayed. For this design, it was the first time I’ve painted an arcade stick. Though it was easy to do, I failed to do it perfectly and it was only moderately satisfied with the result. The paint began to peel after a few months. The print was also lami-labeled and revealed small air bubbles all over the print due to the black background.
