MIT’s Sloan School of Management Open Courseware
MIT recently released most (if not all) of their courses online for free. I discovered today that that includes their famous school of management. I’m all for education, especially if it’s free, and wanted to get this link out there to people that want to learn like me. 🙂
I found this over on LifeHacker today and thought it was pretty sweet.
Here’s the direct article link: A Primer on Electronic Communication
Basically it’s a guide on how to guarantee responses to your emails. It’s a pretty good read and applies directly to the game industry and applying for jobs or contract work. It’s a good read.
Here’s a couple useful snippets:
Write a clear and descriptive subject line. The reason for carefully crafting the subject line is two-fold. First, you want to make sure your message is not filtered out by a program as spam. Second, you want to make sure the recipient does not delete your note manually, assuming it is unwanted junk mail.
and
State your reason for contact. Start out by explaining why you are contacting the person. If you have a more elaborate question, first just state the general motivation in a sentence and proceed with more details further down in the message. You want to get your point across quickly, before the recipient loses interest or thinks this is spam.
There’s a lot more in the article… go check it out!
I just ran across a website on accident that has a few people ripping on me and my site. It made me laugh, and I wanted to post it here.
Here’s the IndieGamer forums post.
And here are the highlights:
What a shit website. That guy sucks and is full of it.
I just can’t [listen to Jon Jones], because he calls himself the smARTIST. Next!
“smArtist” may be the dumbest name since “Wii”
the term “smArtist” made me cringe. My first thought about what it meant was “Smart A** Artist”. 😀
You guys made my day. 🙂  In all honesty, I am HONORED to be important enough to be criticized! You can’t please everybody, and I’ve been waiting for a while for someone to speak up against me. I’m sending this to all my friends!
It was also nice to see a couple people stick up for me, including good ol’ Gianfranco over at GBGames! Thanks buddy! 🙂
Hey, I’m in Texas! I’m staying with my good friend Eric.
Yesterday we drove up to Fort Worth with a friend of ours to go trawling around in a condemned and heavily damaged dog food factory, and then onto a massive grain silo in a very scary, very bad neighborhood. The purpose? Taking cool pictures.
I’ve always wanted to do urban exploration like this of extremely weathered, decrepit spaces because I love going places and seeing cool things. It’s remarkable seeing what mother nature can do to utterly destroy a place all on its own, without human help.
The best part is, the whole thing can be incredibly dangerous, but rewarding. The dog food factory had immense structural damage and a ridiculous amount of leaks everywhere.
The grain silo was even better. It was about ten times larger, and roughly 40 stories tall and full of incredible machines and awesome details that I had a lot of fun capturing.
It was an incredible experience, and very exhausing. I’m going to do it again as often as I can. Anyway, here’s the main page of ALL the pictures I took:
http://www.jamesart.com/kits.html
File this under “Artistic reference.” These are some amazingly beautiful stylized resin model kits of the most breath-stealingly beautiful cartoon women in the world.
Definitely NOT SAFE FOR WORK.
But I use these as form reference for whenever I make a female model at work. They’re stylized to the brink of being absurd, but there’s an underlying understanding of anatomy and beauty that’s communicated extremely well through these. Most of the female models I tend to make are about 50% the style of these.
I really wish Mike James updated the site with new models, and I also wish he delivered them painted. 🙁
I heard that he’s a talented programmer that made a KILLING off a deal with Hewlett-Packard and retired on the ridiculous amount of money he made and developed this site as a side hobby of his. Good for him. I hope that someday I can make an obscene enough amount of money to be able to do the same.
In any case, hey, enjoy!
I usually don’t post quick things like this, but I just found something too beautiful not to post.
I was doing some random browsing while waiting on something extremely CPU-intensive and ran across a website selling extraordinarily beautiful dolls.
www.dreamofdoll.com – hit the English link in the lower right.
I’ve never seen anything like this before. The craftsmanship is amazing. I’ve never seen hair and eyes that good on anything that wasn’t actually a person. Here are some of my favorite images:
Take a look around the rest of the site… BIG images, and everything they have is absolutely amazing. I can’t believe something this good exists. Beautiful, just beautiful.
I know a lot of you have asked to see my art and that I haven’t had anything recent to show off. Well, that’s no longer the case!
Here’s a sampling of the art I created for a government-funded kids’ cancer awareness 3rd-person action platformer called NanoLegends, right before I came to work at Ready At Dawn.
This stuff’s been done for almost two years, I think, and only now am I able to show it off! It feels great. 🙂 It’s one of the things I’m proudest of having worked on, and I wanted to share it with you guys. I’m swelling with pride right now.
Once the game is released, I’ll post more info here.
My friend Eric recently started a worklog detailing his free-time foray into developing an original intellectual property. It’s already shaping up to be a really interesting read, especially if you’re interested in writing or IP development.
Check it out here: Eric von Rothkirch’s Quantum
