Webcomics

As a lot of the people reading this site know, I am a translator. This means that most of the time I have the pleasure of working at home. It also means that I am practically glued to my PC for the better part of a day.

If I don’t actually have any work to do immediately, I have to sit around waiting on E-mail and various chat-type programs for work to show up, since as a freelancer, often times how much work you get depends on how fast you can respond. If I take too long to reply to an email, or miss a message, then the client/company will send the work to another translator, because they have no idea when I will get around to replying or whether or not I will be able to accept the work when I do. All they know is that they have work which needs immediate attention and they can’t get ahold of me.

So, being at the computer anyway, most of my interests and hobbies have become tied up with the computer or the internet. A lot of times these are just to kill time between jobs, or even just to let me zone out a bit while I take a 10 minute or so break from a particularly mind-numbing project or whatnot.

One of those hobbies is reading webcomics.

I used to love reading the comics in the newspaper when I was a kid, but I haven’t even seen an American newspaper in years, let alone thought about buying one. Webcomics are comics which are online and usually for free. I only read the free ones.

I have this huge list of comics which I check once a day/week/blue moon depending on how often they update, and I usually end up adding new comics and deleting ones that don’t hold my interest.

There are a few of these webcomics which have managed to hold my interest for a long time which I would like to introduce to people via this website.

I will do this by occasionally (probably several times over the next few days in particular) a few strips from the comic I liked and posting the URL to the comic’s website so that you can find more if you so choose.

One of the weird habits I developed reading these webcomics is that if I find a given strip particularly amusing (i.e. it actually causes me to laugh out loud, pardon my n3tsp34k), I end up saving the strip on my pc. What about the strip I found interesting can vary. A lot of the time I look back at the strips I have saved and couldn’t say what made me laugh in the first place, but the most of those saved from the strips I have been reading for awhile still tend to make me laugh, so I will use those to introduce the webcomics on this site.

I’ve already introduced one or two, and you can always view all the posts related to webcomics by viewing the Webcomics category over on the menu to the left (or you know, click that link I just put in there).

So anyway, I’ll start this off right away in the next post.

Free Homebrew Game – Darkest Island

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Darkest Island, a homebrew 1st person shooter game created by someone and available for free download.

I finally finished Darkest Island over the weekend, and was able to give it to my friends and family as a late Christmas present. My little brother was very adamant about releasing this game online for people to play by the end of the year, so here it is. I have decided to make the game a free download. This was my practice run in making a large scale video game, and it is a little rough around the edges. But it is still really fun, and I hope everyone gives it a try.

The minimum system requirements are a 1.2 ghz processor with 512 MB RAM and a video card with 128 MB of video RAM. It also requires the latest DirectX drivers dated December 2006 which can be downloaded here. It will run better on higher specs of course.

Darkest Island is the story of a man named Daniel who wakes up in a bloody hospital bed on a remote island with no knowledge of how he got there. A girl’s voice echoes in his mind, begging for him to come and rescue her, and promising to help him get off the island. Daniel finds that this hospital is actually a research facility, and the inhabitants are no longer human. These zombie-like creatures are not the only enemies that Daniel makes. Soon he has armed soldiers hunting him as well. The story of the facility unfolds as Daniel makes his way into the dark center of the island.

Get it here

Abandoned Amusement Parks

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Website of a Japanese photographer who does a series on “ruin”. As part of that series he took a ton of pictures of abandoned amusement parks.

The website is mostly in Japanese but it’s easy enough to navigate. The white buttons at the bottom of each photo page are “Contents” “Previous” and “Next”.
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Main photo site here

Dolphin Olympics

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Here’s a neat little web-based flash game where you play a dolphin and have to control it to swim and jump and do tricks. A little hard to get used to the controls at first, but after a few tries it’s a lot of fun.

http://www.rawkins.com/games/do/index.html

Helm’s Deep in Candy

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This has been making the rounds in the “blogosphere” lately.

This past Christmas Vacation my brothers, sister, myself and my girlfriend built a scale replica of the battle of Helms Deep, from the second book of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Two Towers penned by the late, great, J.R.R. Tolkien.

Pictures and the whole story here

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