4/2/2009
Hey Officer Robert Powell: you're a douche bag.
1/18/2009
Don't worry Philadelphia. One out of five ain't bad.
You don't mess with that kind of stuff!
They had Bela steal the Colt?! I like of liked Bela (or more specifically,
Lauren Cohan), but having Bela steal the Colt is like crossing the line.
If you ask me, she signed her death sentence by stealing that gun.
I can already see where the Supernatural folks are going with this.
The next time we see Bela, the boys will have found her and demand that she
return the Colt. But Bela will have already sold the Colt to someone
halfway across the planet. So she'll brag for a bit about the money she made,
and maybe make a tasteless joke at the boys' expense, then the boys will
curse at her and maybe threaten to kill her (yet again.) Then the real
villian of the season will be revealed (perhaps this villain will be linked
to saving Dean's life), and--lo and behold--it turns out the boys will need a
certain demon killing revolver to defeat him (or her.) So our heroes spend
a few episodes searching for the gun that "can kill anything", and in the
season finale, they recover it with Ruby's help. And of course, after a gory
showdown with our big bad villain, the boys use the Colt once again to
literally light up a demon and the day is won. Just like how season 2
ended. The same, only different. I don't like how the show's producers
have handled our favorite gun lately. The Colt is Supernatural's deus ex
machina. The gun is practially holy. It can kill anything.
ANYTHING
. Except for some random witchcrafting demon?
Even the Yellow Eyed Demon was powerless against the Colt, but some demon
we've never even heard of before can stop bullets from the Colt in
midair? I don't like it.
I understand that the Colt can't be used to resolve every conflict, but
they should not undermine the power it represents. The Colt represents
hope, it represents the one chance that our mortal heroes have against much
more powerful demons. By giving the Colt weaknesses, you take away some of
the hope it stands for. And now they had a thief steal the Colt. What
now, the boys just start splashing holy water on anything with black eyes?
Yeah, that's entertaining television. Don't screw with the Colt. You just
don't mess with that kind of stuff.
Axe Knights were so ahead of their time. Even today, they look cool.
As I progress through my DirectX book, I'll be posting some screenshots of my work here.
Phong (per-pixel) shading
"Toon" shading
Wireframe fill mode
Colored waves
Basic multi-texturing
Multi-texturing and texture animation
×
=
Texturing arbitrary meshes
Alpha blending (semi-transparency)
Stenciling (Mirrors and shadows)
More shadows
Arbitrary meshes
Mesh hierarchies
Terrain rendering and height maps
interesting websites:
GMU Department of Computer Science
d3dcoder.net
MSDN
AnandTech
GameSpot
amazon.com