JsinOwl

Supplies arrived today and everything was in order. Well done dickblick.com. I also have two MDF panels 2' x 4' x 1/4" thick cut up into a variety of sizes and I just put the last coat of primer on. Tomorrow this ship pushes away from the dock...

I love color and the 'qualities' of color in the same way I love sound. Half of music to me is simply the quality of the sounds—and I don't mean the quality of the recording. I mean the properties of the sound, it's timbre, harmonic richness, etc. Paint something dude!

Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer - What is it? Relation to the story: For the uninitiated, The Reapers are the primary antagonists of the Mass Effect story. They are an ancient race of sentient semi-organic machines that spend most of their time in hibernation in the empty space beyond the limits of the Milky Way Galaxy. Every 50,000 years they return and purge the galaxy of all advanced life. They do this basically because they think any organic race allowed to advance unchecked will eventually fuck everything up. Well, the shit has hit the fan, the Reapers have arrived and they're intent on wiping us all out. In ME3 multiplayer we play as special operatives representing a variety of the galaxy's most prominent races: Asari, Salarians, Turians, Quarians, Krogan, Batarians, Volus, Drell, Geth, Human, and one Awakened Collector. We form four person squads and attempt to complete critical missions in the struggle against the Reapers. To complicate matters, the reapers aren't the only enemy in our way. There are a faction of Geth, the Heretics, that worship the Reapers (or Old Machines as they call them) as gods and fight on their side. Cerberus is human terrorist organization with its own twisted plans. The Collectors are an ancient race that has been broken and indoctrinated by the Reapers to serve as semi-autonomous minions. These are the enemies arrayed against us. Format: ME3 multiplayer is 4 person co-op in a horde mode type format. Before a game. you select the character you want to play and equip them. Once the match starts, you must survive 10 waves of enemies with special objectives to complete during waves 3, 6, and 10. You earn experience, advance in level, and when you complete objectives you get credits. Credits can be spent in the "store" between games. You buy packs, similar to trading card games, with each pack consisting of five random items. This is how you unlock new characters to play, new weapons to use, strengthen the weapons you already have, get weapon mods, and consumable items. As you advance in level, you earn skill points to spend on your character and customize them to suit your playstyle. Not only is the game a straight-up blast to play, but the variety of characters, build possibilities and weapons keep things perpetually fresh. You'll find yourself wanting to keep playing so you can buy another pack and see what new possibilities it contains.

Do you have any advice, witty anecdotes, or stories of tragic romance you'd like to share on the topic of painting? Have you painted on both stretched and glued down canvas? Recall the differences? Once I realized I could paint on just about any piece of wood, I didn't look much further into surfaces, especially since I'm in the beginner/learning/my-shit's-probably-gonna-suck phase. If I have success, I'll be willing to invest more $. With the advent of teh interwebz, you can get decent quality paint at a modest price. Modest as in, less than half what you'd pay in a brick & mortar store for the exact same products.

Talk to me about how you play Volus Adept. I go back and forth between Stasis Sniping with orbs maxed out for recharge and a more adepty build with orbs maxed for offense including the rank 6 expose evolution. //Connections were extremely wonky last night.

Do have pictures of said paintings?

Your link is to Canvas Panels, which occupy a sort of middle ground between stretched canvas and board. I checked out that site and found that after shipping, the cost is about double what a board and primer would be on a per square inch basis. The cost is still reasonable, so I may get some anyway just to try it out. Stretched canvas is what's really expensive and is considered by most to be the "standard" format for oil painting. Whatever that means. My goods have shipped and are due to arrive Saturday the fifth; I didn't realize FedEx delivered on Saturdays.

AWESOME

I didn't get that far, looks like I need to try again...

My personality requires that I over-complicate things. That's just how it is. I need to understand things as much as possible even if I then turn around and simplify it. I enjoy learning about things anyway, so doing the research was part of the fun. I'm going for a very specific effect and I was trying to figure out the best way to accomplish that. Not for the foreseeable future because I'm going to try painting on board. Pre-stretched canvas is way too rich for my blood, and doing all the stretching and preparation myself is more effort than I'm willing to put in at this point. When I started looking into this, I recalled seeing a lot of oil paintings done on wood in museums. Sure enough, not only is it possible, it has some advantages and is far more economical.

Just placed an order at dickblick.com (tee hee) for painting supplies. I've put a monumental amount of research into this; it is by far the most complicated hobby I've ever gotten into. That includes setting up a small recording studio. It is bewildering the different types of paint alone (acrylic, oil, water, water-mixable oil) but then different grades and properties within a type: transparency, lightfastness, pigment type/cost, consistency. Then there's the surface—canvas, linen, board—and all the prep that goes with it: sealing, priming, coating with gesso (or not), and coating with a base film (or not). There are different philosophies when it comes to a color palette: 3 primaries, 6 color split primary, 6 color secondary, and son on. People can't even agree on how to thin paint, like oil paint for instance, do you use mineral spirits or turpentine or a mixture of solvent and linseed oil, what should that mixture be, is it different for different layers of the painting. Finally the tools, brushes, knives, easels, palettes and figuring out what works for oil on board to achieve the result I'm going for. Next step: hit Home Depot for some masonite board and primer.

Dude, I didn't ask if anybody wanted something because I like the sound of crickets. And the fact that you know of etsy makes me suspect you have secret love affair with crafts...

Measure the circumference of your head where the bottom of the hat fits, like starting at your forehead, going across the ears, around the base of the skull and back up to the forehead. Would those be the colors you want?

If you took pure fun and densified it into a roughly spherical shape, it would be a Volus Engineer.

Anybody want something? I'm at a loss as to what to make next.

This started off as a blue circle... *shrugs*

I like how the Hawk staggers mooks, that's really all I ask of it. The match I played earlier was versus Cerberus and it essentially let me ignore Troopers, Centurions, and Nemesis while I unloaded on Atlases, err, Atli, whatever. The muti-frag makes quick work of Dragoons and Phantoms, all in all, I felt unstoppable. I finished with 150k points, 75 kills, and zero consumables used: no rockets, no medi-gel, no ops packs, no thermal clips. I think I went down twice. It was awesome. To a lesser extent, if a character has a unique and/or distinctive ability, I feel compelled to make use of it. If I want to play a pure weaponsmith with frags, I can play the human soldier. Speaking of which, I played some Battlefield 3 soldier today and did well. I had the Particle Rifle on him and skipped Carnage entirely in favor of maxed out passives.

http://www.artrage.com/ This is the program I use to do my thing, I love it.

One series I should reread at some point is Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept trilogy. According to my hazy memory it was very different, quirky, and entertaining.

I stopped reading SoT after Faith of the Fallen for the same reason. lol Have you ever read Ayn Rand? I've read Atlas Shrugged like four times. Terry Goodkind is an Ayn Rand guy and it becomes really really really obvious in Faith of the Fallen. Which I was fine with, but I've read a fair amount of criticism that Terry got too philosophical as the series progressed. The Belgariad, Mallorean, Elenium, and Tamuli are all basiclly the same story reskinned. I read them when I was quite young though and such things didn't bother me.

No sir. Though I will say Devastator Mode is one of the best passive weapon buffs there is.

The Typhoon and Destroyer go together like Peanut Butter and Jelly. I love this class so much, I'd marry it if I could and make little Destroyer babies. http://kalence.drupalgardens.com/me3-builder#28!1F04555!!..Z5!F88.GO

Brandon Sanderson right? My brother loves those books, haven't gotten around to reading them myself. I used to read a ton, now hardly ever. I've reread the first four books of Stephen King's Dark Tower series a few times as well as David Edding's Belgariad and Malorean seriesesses (sp?). I will be rereading the entire Wheel of Time saga; I stopped after Crown of Swords and decided to wait until all the books were published. Guess it's time to get on that.

There needs to be a way for me to TURBO-LIKE that post.

Quite dismal I'm afraid, I'll post when I have something slightly less humiliating .