Friday 27 May 2011

A quick reminder.

The official soundtrack for Beatmania IIDX 15 : DJ Troopers still holds the award for most awesome cover art ever



feel free to prove me wrong

worthy mention goes to A PICTURE OF FINN FARTING (which renard is offering for free :O )

This guy makes some amazing music videos





edit:

Have one more from a different artist



edit2: and one more...

Thursday 26 May 2011

Oh god (league of legends)



We have some smurfs on the US league of legends server, my summoner name there is Twilight Sparkl3

(We also still play on the EU servers where my summoner name is Mengplex)

If you dont play yet? Then you fucking should. (and use my referral code so i get cool shit)
http://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c209680df1ef

Wednesday 25 May 2011

Realization: 'Platinum Games' are straight beastin.

So games dev 'Platinum Games', just... cant make bad games?

Even before they platinum games, most of the staff came from Clover Studio which made Viewtiful joe, Okami and God Hand, and then they go on to form Platinum Games to make Madworld, Bayonetta and Vanquish?

And now they're making anarchy reigns, which if you havent seen it - looks fucking amazing. I only hope its more of a Spikeout (ARC) clone than the MOBA they seem to be advertising it as.

So yeah. this post goes out to Platinum Games, making flashy, challenging and fun games since whenever the fuck they were founded.
Keep at it son.

Thursday 19 May 2011

LabLife

So we're coming towards finishing the second week of my laboratory work, 2 more weeks to go (i think)
I feel like we havent actually got much stuff done, and im worried about getting results i'll need for my project work, as I mentioned in a previous post,  the lab is supposed to involve making some synthetic genes to put into plants and then seeing what happens, but with only 2 weeks left im not entirely sure we'll be able to do that - how long does it take to make a gene? and then how long will it take the plant to grow? (surely >2 weeks total)

<No pictures of inside the actual laboratory yet, i'll try and get one soon but its always so busy in there>


^ Picture of my workarea in the glasshouse, where I had to pull the flowers off of these plants, the flowers as you can see if you click to open fullsize - are the little white/yellow bits on the ends of the stems. I had to fill 20 1.5ml eppendorf tubes with the flowers, with each tube holding maybe 100? (so around 2000 probably)
I Did this over 2 days, about 10 hours work ~.~



(The pictures in the glasshouses are weird and look like someone taking a picture of a SDTV because of the special lighting they use in there for the plants)


^ The next job involved  taking sliques from the flowers (essentially a small tube of seeds), pulling the petals off and then slicing both ends of the tube with a razor blade, these things are on the scale of.... maybe if you imagine about 33% of a grain of rice? (really tiny)

Then there was the flower grinding using liquid nitrogen...


and then finally...




^ The microscopy room, where various microscopes are rigged up to computers (that one on the left has a 30" monitor). They are used for various things, for example putting fluorescent markers into cells or just phenotypic analysis [in english: put radioactive stuff into cells, microscope can see the radiation and shows it as fluorescent green, alternatively they can be used for looking at shape/structure of stuff]
I was tasked here for a few hours to photograph some seeds for analysis of size, the seeds of course were seriously tiny, smaller than table salt, hence the need for the microscopes. I also had to make sure the seeds weren't touching by using a needle and - using the monitor/microscope for guidance, separating out the microscopic seeds

update:1 - Liquid nitrogen video up
update:2 - greenhouse vlog up

By the way, what do people think of video blog style stuff? Im not saying its something I would do on a regular basis, but as you can see - my phone can output some pretty decent quality video...

Sunday 15 May 2011

The vidya.

Spent yesterday playing meatboy and trying to do dark world and get bandages, now have world 1 and 2 at 100%...

This morning, kind of impulse bought Deathsmiles from a buy it now auction on ebay, so that'll hopefully be coming in a few days to play.

also.
This game looks like fun, although kind of scary that I can play 37's on Pop'n Music (the difficulty goes up to ~42) and cant follow this shit at all

Saturday 14 May 2011

-insert betus blues here-

Not a huge amount going on at the moment, Feels like im essentially working already with all these 9-5 days. Its annoying because I cant really stay up late for gaming without seriously fucking myself over the next day.

Have been playing alot of Super Meat boy, trying to grab all the bandages and finish off the Dark World (and finish off the cotton alley of the light world :/ )

After asking my supervisor for some additional reading material he basically printed off a review paper (for non academic people, basically a summary paper which compiles information from about 80 journal entries) which was published in January 2011 by people in the group - And its pretty much my lab project in a nutshell, so it should hopefully let me write up the entirety of the introduction with minimal hassle.... In theory anyway.

In other news (i mean you'll already know if you follow my twitter or even just look at the right of the webpage at the twitter feed) - We're going to Ibiza! Booked the holiday last week, we're going there for 4 nights, So probably lots of faffing about in the sun, at the beach and then getting drunk as fuck at night. Will take my phone and hopefully take lots of pictures for you to all see.

Monday 9 May 2011

Here we go again!

My next few weeks...

may 9th  -  June 3rd (4 weeks)
9-5 weekdays in the lab, probably involves being very confused and not know what to do, failing experiments and ultimately getting nothing done and no conclusive results

June 3rd - June 16th (<2 weeks)
Frantic frantic dissertation writing, 2 weeks to consolidate all my results, make up some bullshit about why the experiment didnt work and what should have happened. Word limit is 8000 words, last time I did a 3000 word essay it took me about 5 weeks... So... yeah... 2 weeks for 8k words is going to be fucking ass.

>June 16th
Freedom...?

~June 25th
Possibly holiday to Alicante (spain) for a few days with the housemates

July 19th
Graduation

July 23rd - July 30th
1 Week holiday with family to Mallorca

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Went home for a long weekend (had monday off because lab supervisor is too busy to help us get started) , Played lots of MVC3, played through Portal 2 Co-op (Which is WAY more challenging than the singleplayer), played 'Vanquish' which ive deduced is essentially a fun version of gears of war with weapons which actually feel like they do something, I also got Outland (XBLA) - the game which is essentially touted as Ikaruga the platformer, and its pretty much exactly that, reminds me a little of metroid as well with the whole character skill progression stuff, its pretty good but maybe a little linear, havent finished it yet.

And now I guess I need to figure out exactly what my lab project is / requires...

Oh also, on the 360 situation, have decided I should probably wait until I finish my dissertation to get one, I got a little too caught up in 'exam freedom', and forgot that after exam freedom essentially comes 'Lab project Hell'

~~~~~~

TITLE OF PROJECT: Cell-specific expression of small-secreted peptide ligands in plant reproductive tissues

BACKGROUND TO THE PROJECT

We have identified a group of peptide ligands in Arabidopsis, and mutations on these genes show pleiotropic developmental defects. These mutants carry T-DNA insertions in these peptides, which are thought to regulate cell-cell communication between neighboring cells.

AIMS OF THIS PROJECT

(i) In order to investigate how development is abnormally regulated, the student will conduct a detailed phenotypic analysis of these mutants using microscopy.

(ii) In order to get clues to the mechanism, by which this mutation affects their function, the student will engineer synthetic genes to assess their function in plant development.

METHODS TO BE USED

Plants will be grown under long-day conditions in a control environment. Tissues will be harvested for analysis by confocal microscopy. mRNA will be extracted, transcribed into cDNA then used as template to generate synthetic genes. These synthetic genes will be cloned in a binary vector for Agrobacterium transformation.

Friday 6 May 2011

Exams Over! (6/6) and the immediate future...

So i finished exams yesterday, last exam went... alright...
Enjoyed my first bit of freedom by basically going to a barbequeue straight after the exam (like... exam finished -> go to tesco to get BBQ food -> BBQ)

Being warwick university though, freedom doesnt last long...

The day after the final exam was the ol' Lab induction - starting at 9am.
We were given a little introduction to the facility and introduced to some of the staff.
It looks like im going to be able to play with alot of cool chemicals and stuff , we were shown where they store the ethanol, the chloraform and liquid nitrogen (we got to see some of it, it was all smoky and cool and shit)

I'll be spending the next 4 weeks in there, so I guess i better get used to it.

Tuesday 3 May 2011

Exam update 5/6

Home Stretch!
The 2 exams today were.... Okay....ish.... I guess....
Both generally consisting of 1 alright question which I could answer fine, and then a 2nd question which I kind of cobbled an answer together for and hope that its right. This especially applies for 'modern approaches to human disease' exam, which asked for "evidence that glutamate is involved in brain damage in stroke" - and I just kind of rambled on about glutamate in general, stroke in general and brain damage in general, without actually talking about evidence (because I didnt know any) :|
Lets hope it'll be fine eh.

Last exam is on Thursday morning , then I wont know what the hell to do with myself.
Im considering going home for the weekend just because I havent been home in a few months now (last time i went back was for MVC3 release), I imagine there wont be much partying going on in general because its only us Bio students that will have actually finished exams, alot of other students will be beginning to start to take theirs.

Im also really seriously considering buying a 360 so i can mod it, it feels like for the price (£80?) its just so much more worth it than trying to run new games on my old PC. Of course a drawback with this is that i'll have to open it up and tinker around with shit and have absolutely no idea what i'll be doing - Ive modded a PSP and Wii myself but those are all firmware hack based and dont involve opening up an expensive piece of equipment (okay so i built my PC, but thats a piece of equipment meant to be opened up)
Not that anyone ever posts comments, but if anyone has any experience in modding 360's with LT+ stuff, let me know how easy it is. I would kind of like to Jtag but that shit requires solder and resistors and all sorts of stuff I dont trust myself with - even though I used to be a boss at Systems and Control back in school (which involved circuit boards, soldering and so on, probably one of the few actually useful classes I took)

Also, I feel like the post looks too empty without a picture or youtube link, so here you go.