So I found this really amazing (and pretty damn cool) tutorial over at Planet Photoshop for a Mosaic Design on a Photo. (Direct Link) The tutorial was pretty easy to follow and can probably be used on other types of photos, not just photos of people. Enjoy!

So the Little Lady and I decided to make Potato and Cheese Pierogies for dinner. A friend mentioned he seasons them and fries them so I went with that method. They turned out amazingly good. Absolutely delicious. This dinner will appear again on my table in the future.

I have a very good friend who checked his one-time use cameras when flying home. They went through the deep x-ray scanner at the airport and the images are covered in noise and have become quite pixelated because of this. I am looking for help in trying to clear them up and bring them back into a higher quality. (I think I broke twitter asking for help, but I’m not sure…)

Here is the first image that I have tried doing this on my own, this is the original:

If you click on it, it will pop open in a new window at full size (1545x1024) and I have enabled scrollbars and resizing for those who are interested in helping.

The photo is upside down, so I had to flip it 180 degrees. Then I duplicated the background layer and used multiply and I applied despeckle and then a gaussian blur at 1.0 to soften it. I also had to resize it due to it still look awful at full-size.

Any help regarding this would be appreciated. If there are professionals who are able to fix the photos I am sure my friend might be interested in reasonable rates. Feel free to contact me at mnlghtrose (at) gmail (dot) com.

Thank you.

So today I was feeling pretty darn crappy this morning as Demon Week kicked off yesterday and Second Day of Demon Week is always the worst to get through. I felt as if I wanted to simply rip people apart and that’s no way to leave the house. When I poured my second cup of coffee this morning I took a lovely pill invented to stuff the Demon back into her Dungeon. After drinking my second cup of coffee and Evony going down for a 15 maintenance session I decided a hot shower would do me some major good.

After the shower I felt so good I ended up doing full blown hair, makeup and nails. Yes, nails. I decided I wanted to wear the new sandals I bought ages ago when there was still this white stuff called ‘snow’ on the ground and hadn’t gotten to wear them yet. (Pffbt, sandals.. they have two inch heels, I don’t wear sandals what am I thinking??). They are a lot like my favorite ones I wore for years and finally gave to the child since she stretched out the straps with her full size larger feet.

I did not take a photo. The only differences are that instead of the stretchy straps they buckle (which almost makes me hate them because buckles are a pain in the tush for me) and instead of a glittery, silvery over the toes strap it’s a dark, shiny over the toes strap. They are nice and I love them (except the damn buckle). So I had to paint my toes in order to wear them because I hate my feet and they need decoration when wearing sandals. They didn’t turn out too bad either, but no, there won’t be photos… maybe another day. Just the one below:

I know I have been neglecting Disillusioned and once again that is going to change. I’ve also been neglecting my writing elsewhere and other things. I have already updated Exquisite Designs to include signatures that I made for a friend, a layout that I created previously here for Disillusioned (GuildWars) and uploaded a DVD cover for a local buisness called DanceSpace. You can check them all out here: Exquisite Designs. Some images are not safe for work, or will possibly be determined that way. So, use caution when viewing!

I’ve also been contemplating the woes I have with Evony. I neglect chores and my blogs and writing when I am playing it, yet I enjoy chatting with the people I have met there and will miss them if I decide to quit. I know I can give them my info to chat elsewhere, but when everyone is in one place, why bother going elsewhere? These are the issues I deal with. I know, pathetic on some levels. I do get work done and have been doing some work for friends and also people I consider family. Always a good thing to be working.

The issue I was having with Exquisite Designs, where the images would not show up properly when viewing it through the sub-domain, have been corrected and should no longer cause problems.

Soon to follow: Reviews of two books and recent photos! (Photos will be first as I may have to quickly reread the novels I plan to review and yes, that is pathetic!) Laters.

You’re bored and have some time on your hands and keep seeing ads about this game Evony. Hot girls just waiting for you to come and ‘rescue’ them and sweep them off their feet to pump them full of alcohol, get them naked and have kinky sex with them, right? Well, I hate to kill the secret behind the ads but if you haven’t figured it out by now, there are no hot girls and a lot of the ‘women’ you’ll find there are guys who are bored and wanted something different.

I do play Evony but I have major issues with the game. It takes too much time to do any ‘one’ thing in the game. If you want to get bigger than your neighbor faster you have to spend hours upon hours on the game or spend ridiculous amounts of money for worthless items. Regarding building, you can only upgrade one building at a time, which when you get to higher levels, takes hours and sometimes days. You have to build up both city and resource farms. Each has it’s own place and you’d think you would be able to upgrade a resource and a building at the same time. Even in Evony Age II, this is impossible. The longer they keep you sitting at your keyboard, the more impatient you’ll get and spend money on speedups to make things go faster.

Now, with all of this going on, imagine being in an alliance with up to 99 other people who all have goals in mind (usually to be number one alliance on the server). There’s a host and several other positions of ‘office’ you can appoint people to. Hosts generally keep everyone in the alliance on the same goals and make sure they act properly for the most part.

Another thing Hosts do is something called ‘diplomacy’. This is where things get complicated because most people who have been playing the game for awhile on several different servers know the basic rules when it comes to your neighbors. There are no rules. It’s a WAR game. If you get attacked and wiped out, having to start over and rebuild your army and walls, that is what should happen. Instead you get players contacting hosts and whining about their member wiping them out and taking all of their resources. Which causes the alliances to go to war. Well, it is a war game. Yet there is no extra benefit when attacking and winning against an enemy other than the fact that you won and you can go back until you have all their resources.

Diplomacy with other alliances tends to be time-consuming. People all over the world play so there are issues when it comes to timing conversations between Hosts who are in different parts of the world. The game has a mail system, but you can only have 500 characters (including spaces) which doesn’t allow for much at all. While conversations take time between mail and whispers wars end up being put on hold or get out of control.

Then you have those who can’t get enough of Evony, especially on the same server, so they create alternate accounts, which according to the ToS is against the rules and you can be banned for it. These secondary accounts (or more) get created anyway, and get into other alliances that aren’t in the Coalition you’re in, which causes people to make mistakes because they end up attacking members of alliances their main account is friendly with, which may end up causing more war (yay) and then people will spend more money to get their cities back up to par if they’ve been wiped out.

Personally, there is no reason this game should cost anything at all. It makes me think of role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Mabinogi. With D&D you could play free on the server but you could not play certain dungeons unless you ponied up some cash. With Mabinogi you had to pay up in order to change what your character looked like. Once I found that out, I uninstalled it. The difference between D&D and Evony is that you actually get a character who can be modified, get weapons, magic or something else and be moved around all kinds of different places battling monsters. I am not supporting D&D or Mabinogi over Evony, or vice versa.

Evony charges outrageous amounts of money to get packages, some of these packages get sent to your alliance members and anyone else you add to a list. Those that get sent out to others require a key, which costs 30 bucks to get access to. So these packages build up in your items area (some do so whether you claim them or not) and take up space. You’d think they would expire or go away after a month of never being used, but they don’t. There are still packages from Christmas and New Years sitting in there just waiting to be used.

Main issues with Evony is the simple fact that it is a time-sucking wormhole of a game. When you log off, the game continues without you, your city gathers resources, your buildings continue being built, etc. You go to bed for the night and can’t sleep because ‘OMG I might get attacked.” or “Did I have enough food to feed my troops if I can’t sign on to farm in the morning?” because people get so addicted to the game that they become obsessed. There are people who aren’t on just one server, they are on several servers, and possibly even have multiple accounts on several servers.

There comes a time when it has to stop, though. Evony will crash and burn when people get fed up that when they look around their friends and family are no longer there or interested in them because they have finally moved on to something other than waiting for their loved one(s) to stop staring at the screen long enough to notice them. Even I have been through this, one both ends. So put aside the mouse, close the Evony window and go spend some time watching the grass grow and the leaves return to the trees. Laters.