Wishing everybody out there a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Wanted to try my hand at creating something with the tablet from scratch. Additionally, I wanted to test out some SAI stuff I'd learned by watching some speed paints. This is the result.

SAI - 2 hours

Tsukasa Hiiragi and Ren Kagamine are copyright of their respective owners.

I was watching a Christmas Carol with my family the other night (the Patrick Stewart version for those curious) and I came across an interesting realization: Scrooge is experiencing Inception. Let's suspend our disbelief for a second.

Requirements for Inception - As the movie states, the dreamer must be three layers deep for Inception to work. This requirement is met if one considers each ghost of Christmas it's own layer (past, present, future). Of course, this requires a particular level of sedation. Scrooge complains of indigestion, so his food could easily have been drugged. By whom? Marley, of course. His ghostly face appeared on the knocker of Scrooge's house, so we know he'd already been there.

The time required - At the end of the story, Scrooge is surprised that the spirits managed to do everything in one night. He easily satisfies that thought with a "Oh, they're spirits. They can do whatever they like." Inception tells us that a dream is several times faster than real time and each level of dream adds to that. This allows for an exponential amount of time especially as Scrooge was three layers in.

The setup - Everything up till now is good, but here's where things get tricky. One would think that the layers of dreaming would go in the order presented in the story: past, preset, future. However, careful observation of the time each layer tells us that the opposite is true. Past takes the longest, so it has to be the last level of dream with present and future going up the chain. There is a complication that this brings: in future (first layer of dream) Scrooge remembers present and past. There are two possible explanations:

1. Most probable - Scrooge, upon entering the future, is immediately put to sleep. Upon entering in present, the same happens. This kicks him automatically to the third layer where everything can play out working backwards.

2. Scrooge is actually experiencing all three dreams at the same time, each layer's experiences adding to the previous in real time. Since the bottom layers play out much faster then the previous, all the information required would be in place for the story to play out as seen.

Whodunnit? - Given we assume all of the above is true, who is the person that started the whole thing? Who is the architect. A simple question - Jacob Marley. He's already a ghost, let's face it, but his closeness to Scrooge puts him at an advantage to know all the key points to hit upon.

So, there you have it. It seems Christopher Nolan's seemingly original idea was actually conceived by literary genius Charles Dickens in the 19th century.

Or perhaps I just have too much time on my hands...

We are at, again, the end of another year. As I am wont to do, I watched anime again and I am here to review it for you, my fine reading populace. However, my anime watchings is not something I do alone with a bucket of Haagan Daas in hand. I watch it while downing manly drinks and filling myself with sugar in the company of a couple of my many brothers. So, this year, I'm turning this series of reviews into a family affair. Since they missed out last year, we'll also be touching on some stuff I've already reviewed. Enjoy!

Outlaw Star

Synopsis Another entry in a long line of 90s space westerns. Gene Starwind and Jim Hawkings are the purveyors of a business that handles various odd jobs (think Han Solo). Through one of these jobs, they find themselves with a highly advanced spaceship which leads to many a crazy space adventure.

Matt I do not have many kind words for Outlaw Star. The largest problem with this show was the plot, They set things up for something large and arcing in the first couple episodes, but then dropped it until the last two. Everything in between is useless filler that doesn't do anything for the plot or characters. Adding to that, the dub was bad and the visuals were inconsistent at best. At least it had one good closer song. 2/10

Jeff Don't watch this shit, dude. Most of time it's going nowhere, and when it is moving foreward, it only does so in small steps that are completely outweighed by the amount of useless drivel that serves only to bore or annoy you. -?/10. No, I do not think my score is harsh.

Chris Outlaw Star? More like Outhouse Stall. I can't count how many times this show promised something more and then turned around and kicked me in the balls. Throw in some super annoying characters and crappy character designs and you have one of the worst shows ever made, not even taking into consideration the beach episode(in a sci-fi show?) which scarred my eyes in ways razor blades and nails never could. I'll give it a point for the accurate physics on that prison planet, though. 1/10 See our other reviews after the break.

Continue Reading

After many, many months of development and fretting over design, I've finally completed the latest iteration of dxprog.com! There's quite a bundle of changes in this version both under the hood and... over it? Here are the highlights:

• New look The most obvious change is, of course, the new look. I've opted to go for a super clean look with more attention paid to the textual layout.
• Unified content model This means that items from my portfolio, artwork, videos or blog can all be displayed in the same list yet be treated differently for display. It reduces a lot of code and makes for a much nicer, streamlined presentation.
• Commenting upgrades In addition to being able to use your twitter account to sign-in, there's now the option of Facebook and anonymous. Also, comments are broken down into pages of fifty (there's only one post where you can see this in action).
• Speed I've done a lot of changes to the backend structure to enhance load times. The average load time as I'm writing this is well under a tenth of a second.
• Comics As much as I loathe some of those comics, dxprog.com is meant to be a repository of all my work. As such, you can view the entire Digital Double archive by clicking "Comics" up on the top nav. I'm going to work on getting the newer stuff in as I finish importing content.
• Sidebars There have been many tweaks and additions made to the various sidebars. The first I'd like to point out is the "Most Popular" which, as the name implies, is a listing of the current most popular items on the site. Another interesting one is "Last Listend To" which displays the last song I've listened to through my Music Page. Finally, the archives and tag clouds have been given some nice overhauls.

Of course, these are just the noticable differences. The amount of changes in the codebase are wide sweeping and quite substantial, but will allow for a much more maintainable codebase in the future. I plan on releasing the source within the next month or so after I've had a opportunity to watch it in the wild and fully document it. Until then, I hope you enjoy the new site. If you're having issues or have a suggestion, please feel free to leave comment!