I’ve never been a fan of reading. I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve read in my life. Most of those fingers would be accounting for books that were required reading for a class. You see, it’s not that I don’t like books. In fact, I don’t particularly dislike reading. However, I was diagnosed with ADD at an early age. ADD, for those of you that don’t know stands for Attention Deficit Disorder. Feel free to wiki the term to gain a broader knowledge. In my experience ADD is a vicious and extremely annoying. Essentially my mind wanders, especially while reading. I can be reading a book that I have a lot of interest in, or one that I don’t particularly care for and it will happen all the same. My mind will start to think of some random event or thing and that will dominate my attention. I will continue to read, in that the words will continue to be processed by everything but my brain. It is only after this has gone on for a good paragraph, a few sentences at least that I realize what is happening and have to refocus, and start the paragraph over.

This can make it very difficult to get through a book, or even a chapter. I’m currently reading a chapter in a book for my speech class and I’m having a bear of a time. Along with the fact that I have ADD, this has caused me to avoid books in general. As I stated, having read around 5 books total in my life, I haven’t had much practice. This equates to me being a slow reader. In fact, I just took two reading tests and one told me I was reading around 154 wpm and another rated me as between 150-200 wpm. That’s only double what I can type (74 wpm typing). So, this chapter I have been reading for over 2 hours and I have 17 of the 34 pages completed.

If there is one thing I could say to parents regarding their children, encourage them to read. At this point in time, it is one of the best ways to procure knowledge. Sure people can be taught information, but this requires another individual with the knowledge, and commonly costs quite a bit of money (college courses). A truly affordable way to gain knowledge of any subject is to be able to read well. And as they say, practice makes perfect.

Good reading skills are important! There is a wealth of knowledge in books.

And now I’m off to continue my battles and finish my reading. Only 2:54 am, maybe I can finish before the sun comes up!

As the title states.

I’m currently attending college and I’m about to finish my ATA in MIT as a Web / Graphics Designer. In an attempt to earn some extra cash, I’ve decided to enter a few design contests online. If you’re not familiar with exactly what a design contest is… well, I was going to link to one of the sites that does this, but they don’t deserve the traffic, so I’ll just explain.

Ok, if you don’t know, a design contest is essentially where someone in need of a design service, as in graphics or web design, posts a brief explaining what it is he/she needs or wants. Then, stupid people, myself included, foolishly do the work on the sometimes 1 in 1000 chance that we will “win”, and earn the prize money.

This process only works to benefit the person in need of the design. For every one contest, there ends up being one happy person, and many people who wasted their time designing just so the purchaser can say… “Sorry, it’s just not my style.”

Please, heed my advice designers. While it may seem like a good idea at the time, don’t do this. It is encouraging those in need of design services to seek there results in this manner, thus further decreasing the amount of quality work that is available. And not to mention, the majority of these contest’s prizes are well under where they should be.

I have entered many over the past week, and won few. I’m done with these contests, and you should be too.
That rhymed.

For further consideration: http://www.designers-who-blog.com/index.php/archive/things-that-suck/ and http://www.creativelatitude.com/articles/article_0804_habib.html.

Edit: Thank you for the comment regarding http://www.no-spec.com/. I’d like to point out that NO!SPEC has a good way that you can represent your feeling in regard to design contests.

Supporting the cause!

http://www.no-spec.com/

Wow, seems like just yesterday I was hacking and slashing my way through the cathedral in the original Diablo. Since then, hewever, Diablo 2 has come and gone, and now Diablo 3 is making waves. Blizzards Diablo 3 site, over at http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/index.xml works well to get my imagination pumping.

They have so far announced 3 character classes, The Barbarian, The Wizard, and The Witch Doctor. While I have to say that it’s nice to see the Barbarian back again, it’s also nice to see a few new classes. Although the Wizard appears to be different from the Mage of Diablo 2 in name only, there will (hopefully) be more differences in the game play style of this character. And then there is the Witch Doctor, a completely new class which looks quite interesting and fun to play. I’m really hoping they continue along this line and introduce new, never before seen classes. While I like the old classes very much and hope a few of them return, it would be very difficult to ignore a class that is not based on magic or physical damage.

Since the beginning of gaming, there have been two major forms of damage dealing, physical damage, such as a sword or a bow and arrow, and then magic damage. Magic damage has seen many adaptations, such as fire damage, cold damage, even holy damage, but one thing remains… this is all still magic damage. This is annoying, because even if you see that there are 10 classes in a game, odds are they are nothing new or unique. Just more of the same-old same-old.

Consider this variation. There are mages which are able to wield magic at will, and then there could be wizards who rely on magically imbued rods / staffs, or other pieces of equipment. This would add an interesting dynamic to the game. You could then have a class that would be something along the lines of a mentalist. They would maybe utilize psychic, or psionic abilities to control / influences the minds of their enemies. Perhaps give them the ability to posses an enemy, while there own body temporarily disappears. They would still take a percentage of “mental” damage that the body they are possessing takes, and when the body is destroyed they have to wait a certain amount of time before they can posses another. This may make them a little like the necromancer of Diablo 2, but without the army aspect. With only one “minion” at a time. After the body they have possessed is either destroyed, or the duration of the ability expires, they will have to fall back on secondary metal abilities in order to deal damage and dispatch their enemies.

Some food for thought.