One of the oddest things I’ve seen around the neighborhood and certainly the most bizarre since back in Israel on holiday. When visiting a friend’s new flat this afternoon, I took a look at the view from her parking lot and couldn’t believe my eyes:
Animal Crossing is probably one of the games that I play most often - the game card for Animal Crossing: Wild World is just short of being glued to the slot of my Nintendo DS and is one of those games which really have that long-term playability many game companies try to infuse into their games, with little success. If you’re not familiar with the Animal Crossing franchise, a short description would be that it’s a series of real-time games with no end goal or common end-point. Live in a town, plant flowers, explore the surroundings and try something new for a change. If Second Life comes to mind, rest assured, it’s nothing like it. Animal Crossing is full of lively and interesting AI characters, fun things to do and absolutely no pressure to do anything but have a good time (well, almost).
“Animal Crossing: City Folk” is the newest game under the Animal Crossing umbrella, announced by Nintendo during the E3 conference and set for a Q4 release date for the Nintendo Wii. What’s interesting about this specific release is that it has online networking capabilities very deeply integrated, making this specific release really one-of-a-kind.
Katsuya Eguchi, creator of Animal Crossing, tells a little about what motivated him to create the game in this interview for the E3 conference. He explains the vision of Animal Crossing and talks a little about what fans should expect from the new version. It’s worth a watch.
My journey with art and design on the internet started somewhat early. In 2001, I joined skinz.org, the then-bustling social network for designers. Needing more “room to breathe” on my non-digital works, I joined DeviantArt in January 2002, a small social network for artists and designers to showcase their traditional and digital works. During what I fondly nickname it’s “renaissance age” in 2004, DeviantArt was home to thousands of the web’s biggest and most talented names in design. This was back when the term “social network” hadn’t yet been coined.
Sometime in 2005, the term “Web 2.0″ started floating around the internet, and more young and upcoming artists sought the releases of the internet to promote their works. DeviantArt became huge, and it’s “work submitted in the last day” page turned into “work submitted in the last minute”.
And then came the influx of what I’d like to call “artrash”. Thousands upon thousands of pieces flooding the site depicting badly-drawn fanart and various instances of copyright infringement turned finding art and design works on DeviantArt into the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack. I found myself logging in less throughout 2006. When I did, I found that the quality of feedback left on my work had dwindled into single-word comments. Their frequent server crashes had wiped a good portion of my downloadable works (photoshop brushes and icon packages) off their servers and with a recent hard drive crash of my own, I was unable to upload the works back onto the site.
At present in 2008, DeviantArt is the web’s largest and most successful art and design-based social network. I have 579 unread messages on DeviantArt, a sign that I need to either increase my involvement with the site, or leave it altogether. I’m debating the latter.
Throughout the years, DeviantArt has played an important role in my development as an artist. The feedback I received early on has helped me find my “weak points” and put the effort into my work where it matters most. DeviantArt has also done wonders for my self esteem. To date, my works have had 321,968 pageviews and my most popular work on DeviantArt (which I had to re-upload several times due to DevianArt’s server crashes) has been downloaded over 63,000 times.
All of this in mind, why would I want to leave the platform? It’s time for me to move on. Part of my new year’s resolutions for 2008 was to try and minimize my infatuation with beating dead horses, and this horse is so dead, that’s it’s been reincarnated into an emerald beetle and is living happily on the side of a tree in Brazilian rainforest.
I’m weighing my options, but it seems that I’ve comfortably settled myself at the Behance Network. I feel that the way Behance is built and it’s portfolio/project-based display ensures that the bar stays high - something I wish DeviantArt would have done in one way or another. An extraordinary amount of designers, animators, artists and photographers showcasing their work at Behance are mind-blowingly talented. I find myself browsing member’s portfolios on Behance for fun and inspiration, something I haven’t done at DeviantArt in a long, long time.
You can find my profile and works on my Behance profile page.
To my friends who work or have worked at DeviantArt, please understand that this is not personal. I admire the dedication to the DeviantArt community throughout the years and wish you well in your future endeavors.
My MOO cards arrived the other day, and I was so thrilled with the outcome that I decided to post and share the template I made.
You can download this template for use in Photoshop (PSD) or any graphics program (JPG). The dimensions are exact and include 5mm inner margins (photoshop guides) for easily positioning of content (don’t forget to remove the grey border layer when you’re done, otherwise it’ll come out in your print). Share freely and enjoy!
DOWNLOAD:
PSD (Photoshop and compatible)
JPG (Any graphic application)
If you like this template, please share it with others.
*Note: Moo’s default business card backs are vertical. This template is horizontal, however you can use the template easily enough for a vertical design by flipping it sideways in your graphics program.
*Note2: No graphics app installed? Try The Gimp, it’s free!
DISCLAIMER: Use this template at your own risk. I shall not be held responsible for borked business cards or oogly cards due to lack of design talent.
I’ve been collecting toys for a few years, both designer figurines and random toys I get as gifts or find in the toy store’s bargain bin. I keep most of my toys on this shelf in our work room.
A video tour of my toy collection from Liron Tocker on Vimeo.
Tel Aviv - Travel & Hotels - Destinations
Tel Aviv is not what you think it is.
Full stop.
Tel Aviv is an amazing, culturally diverse, colorful and happening city, nicknamed "The city that never sleeps" by it’s locals. It’s hard to take this city as a whole and provide generalizations which would define it - within itself, Tel Aviv is incredibly multi-faceted city and a feast for the eyes and senses.
The city of Tel Aviv is broken down into a lot of smaller neighborhoods. I spent a lot of time during my post-teenage years working and partying in the center of the city, which includes most of the landmarks Tel Aviv is famous for, including it’s beaches. There’s lots to see and lots to do regardless of your fields of interest. Tel aviv should be a great destination for families with children as well as the older crowd or young party-goers.
The harbor area is famous for it’s nightlife and Tel Aviv’s "Shibuya" intersection of King George, Allenby and Shenkin streets provide the young-n-hip shopping district it’s flair. Some say Shenkin St. is the center of the world, sometimes I agree - one walk up and down this street and you experience the colors and cultures of Tel Aviv. Travel a little bit north and you’ll discover Tel Aviv’s Museum of Art (see separate review) and the Eretz Israel History Museum, as well as Yarkon Park (the largest in central israel), Sporthek and fairgrounds.
The Tel-Avivians are a generally liberal and talkative bunch, don’t be alarmed if some locals strike up a conversation with you while waiting for the light to turn at the crosswalk (if they wait in order to cross, that is).
Public transportation to and from Tel Aviv is good and is excellent inside the city - however parking spots are rare. If you’re visiting, worry not as all street signs are also in English, all the locals speak English and you’ll find English menus for almost every restaurant.
Avoid Winter in Tel Aviv. It’ll rain up to your knees and street-level drainage isn’t superb. Avoid the height of Summer, too. You’ll be boiling in 40c+ and will have to elbow your way through the rest of the tourists trying to get out of the sun.
Recommended months: April - Early July, September - October.
Insider’s tip: Public transportation in Israel is charged on a per-ride basis and not by destination. Ask the bus driver for a day pass ("chofshi yomi")for your needed zone and you’ll save a good amount of money.
My friend Yoav and his super-talented band Bend played at Arlene’s Grocery in NYC a few nights ago. For those of us who weren’t able to attend, here are a few videos from the show.
You can download their new 5-sing EP “The Helpless E.P.” here.
“See It Clear”
“Unpredictable”
Don’t get me wrong, I love my new phone, but there are some things about it that make me want to do various things to it, like hurl it in the path of an oncoming train or drop it into the Alster. Here they are, in no particular order.
- By the time it finishes booting up, we could have gone through another cretaceous period.
The N95 8gb may boot up quicker than it’s predecessors due to it’s increase in memory, but it’s still slower than a snail. 15 seconds to boot up a mobile phone? My Macbook Pro from boots up quicker than that. - No support for multiple calendars
This one is pretty infuriating. I might not be the most common use case, but I have 3 different calendars that I use on a daily bases (personal, shared, work) and the phone merges them all into one. This is not a problem per-se until you introduce syncing into the mix. - It’s big.
- Varying photo quality
The N95 8gb boasts a 5mpx camera with autofocus and zoom, none of which are particularly useful if the quality of the camera is often crap. I get some great photos with this camera and so do others, but more often than not I get a grainy, smudgy, washed out image. - Random reception dropping
This is probably one of my biggest gripes with this phone. I lose reception all the time in all sorts of various places. My reception sometimes flats out entirely for a few minutes when outside in the middle of the city. - Screensaver in landscape mode
This is actually somewhat of a petty gripe, but the screensaver on this device is always in landscape mode, and this can’t be changed. Particularly annoying when attempting to use a screensaver you got from a friend, or downloaded off the internet. - Can’t eject device normally from computer in PC suite mode
When connecting the phone to a computer, you can choose several modes, one of which is “PC Suite” which allows you to connect to Nokia’s media application on the computer. Since it’s not mounted to the computer as a “device” when in PC Suite mode, that means it can’t be ejected regularly and safely like other external hardware. Unfortunately, someone at Nokia Dev forgot to add that option into their software, so the only way to disconnect the phone from the computer is to “rip it out”, and hope no data is lost or corrupted. - Empty music folders/tags don’t get deleted when the music file is removed
If you delete tracks from your phone, the device won’t remove the remembered tags from the database, so you’ll always see the album name and artist in your music library menu, regardless of if the music file is there or not. - No support of synchronizing custom contact data fields or notes on Mac OS
- Closing the slider does not hang up the call
I believe this is by “design”.
The N95 8gb is one of the most technologically capable mobile phones in the western market and is even on-par in terms of capabilities with those quirky Japanese Keitai (minus those ridiculous TV tuners, and their brilliant mobile payment system, and their gaming capabilities, and their… whaiddaminit…).
Honstly? it’s a good phone. Give me a few minutes to have a good think and I could give you a list of 10 things I dislike about every piece of technology I’ve had (don’t even get me started about my Linux box), hopefully Nokia will sort out these oddities with their upcoming handsets.
is copyright Liron Tocker 1997-2007.