Oh yeah, it feels good to be 16. I’m all old, manly and cool. Well, old and manly. Well, old. But the point remains, I’m 16 and it rocks. I’m also sick and can hardly speak, but I comfort myself with the knowledge that I’m now one of those guys that I used to look up to and say “Wow, I wanna be like him! Older and responsible. He has HIS OWN fish and a phone!”.

Speaking about things that are mine, I have the coolest birthday pressie ever. My new Wacom Bamboo pressure-sensitive tablet is amazing. The cartoon above was drawn by me, on Photoshop! It’s so freaking cool! I haven’t used a mouse since. Buy one!

Ethan bought me a professional dartboard so we can play. I haven’t played properly before, but it’ll be a cool skill to have when I get a bit better. Sam got me a cool leather wrist band and two surfesque necklaces. They’re pretty cool. Hannah painted me some awesome paintings. The Superman logo, the Batman logo and some other indescribable thing, it’s pretty cool. Photos shall be uploaded soon.

I’ve also recieved a drum kit which is just amazing, but I doubt I’ll be getting any presents again until I’m 18. It’s a red Yamaha Stage Custom and it just sounds so good. My new drum teacher (he’s my sixth!), Nobby, has taught me how to tune the drums, another cool way to set up the kit and a couple of beats.

Last night Mum, Dad, Hannah, Ethan, Sam and I all went out for dinner at Frankie and Benny’s, then had a couple of games at the bowling alley. I won the first, but absolutely lost the second. This weekend I’m having a party (PARTY party, not dinner party) with some friends of mine. Leah’s birthday is on the sixth so we’re having a joint party. It’ll be cool.

I’ll stick a blog post up about it on Sunday. Until then…

The three Germans assigned to be my partners were Martin, Micah and Samantha. Martin was 18, Micah and Sam were 17 and they were really cool. Normally I got assigned 12 year-olds, but I was the oldest ‘English’ person on the trip apart from the teachers, so I became a helper. I just had to do head counts and make sure people didn’t mess around. That’s what my partners were doing on the trip, so I was assigned them.

Throughout the week we went to the National Sealife Center, my school (we did karate workshops and a tour of the school), Black Country Living Museum and we went to the town hall and met the Lord Mayor. The current one is the third Pakistani Lord Mayor, so that was cool. We were given soda water, orange juice, tea and sandwiches. How very English of us.

At my place we had Indian takeaway for dinner and played cards until the early hours. It was a game my parents and I had never heard of, Micah had brought it along with her. It’s called Phase 10 and we liked it so much, we ordered it from Amazon immediately. Eventually we all got too tired to play properly so my parents, Juliet who was playing with us, and the girls went to bed. Martin and I went on the computer and watched Batman Begins. We fell asleep about half an hour from the end. Our plan was to watch that, then Donnie Darko, then Transformers and Forrest Gump. Wake everyone up at about 8, have breakfast and go to the airport. Oh well…

Flock

The developers of Flock say:

However, my dad keeps finding little things to criticize about it. He says the RSS feeds are a little broken. He wants it to only show him the one’s he hasn’t seen yet. But it won’t. I don’t really read RSS feeds, so I suppose Flock is better depending on your needs.

For instance, I’m writing this blog in Flock, using the blog writey thing that lets me blog without being on my site. You sign in and type away. It’s more basic than the Wordpress editor, but good for if you get a ’spur of the moment’ idea.

Another blog-related tool that comes with Flock is the ‘Blog This’ option. You can select some text, right-click and click on ‘Blog This’. This opens up the Flock blog editor with the text pasted into it. Awesomeness…

Lately my best friend, Ethan and I have been watching ‘The Batman’ (Best animation of Batman I’ve seen yet). We’ve watched all of season one, and are trying to find season two. Whilst doing that we have watched ‘Batman and Robin’ and ‘Subzero’ (The animated version of ‘Batman and Robin’ that makes Alfred look French).

I have started watching ‘Batman Beyond’ also known as ‘Batman of the Future’. The plot line is pretty much, Bruce Wayne is old and can no longer be Batman, so he finds a seventeen year old boy whose father has been murdered. It’s pretty cool, but the animation isn’t as good as ‘The Batman’ and apparently, Ethan likes Bruce Wayne, not Batman.

I figure, if Bruce Wayne thinks the symbol of Batman puts fear into the heart of the wicked, then surely it doesn’t matter who’s behind it. A long as it isn’t Dick Grayson. Stupid man…

I’m considering making a Media page, with videos I like, Batman and other awesomeness. Yay Batman.

EDIT: Apparently I will not be making a media page because my hosting site – Go Daddy – is fairly strict on distributing stuff that is copyrighted. The only way I could get Batman Beyond episode 1 and 2 would be to upload it, thus rule-breaky. Oh well.

That’s my avatar (in-game representation of myself) on the right. Not a great picture, but I’m not exactly a whiz on the screen capture tool in SL yet.

The main features of SL are: Chatting to other people from all over the world (mostly America), creating objects using primitive shapes (or prims) like squares, triangles, cylinders e.t.c. You can also create scripts to make your objects do things, like talk, move, or change how your avatar moves.

There are three main ways of travel. Walking/running, flying (every avatar can fly) or teleport. This makes travel to other areas in SL very easy. Teleporting is the most common form of travel, as there are several ways of doing so. You can access the map of the whole game world, and double-click to teleport anywhere. People can send you teleport invitations which take you to them. Some areas give you a notecard which, when double-clicked, takes you back to that area. The least common way is to have an object that teleports you somewhere, such as the area of its creation, creator, or character of your choice. This is uncommon because it takes a long time to make such an advanced object.

There are many areas for new avatars which have free objects like clothes, hair, textures for customizing objects, guns e.t.c. The two most common places are the Nix Bazaar and Oasis.

I am not a very experienced builder or coder, but I like to think that I help new avatars get started. I show them how to do simple camera controls, give them stuff for free (which I normally got for free), and occasionally charge a small fee for such freebies (thus making them feebies?). They normally do not pay however, so my avatar remains extremely poor.

A download link for Second Life is in the sidebar.

I have recently discovered a new, free game. You play as Death Worm and have to eat animals and people, whilst dodging bullets, mines, electricity radius things, bombs, tanks e.t.c… it gets increasingly hard.

You can download it here, and please post your high scores.