Date: May 6th, 2008

Hari ini gue dalam perjalanan pulang ke rumah, gue lewat jalan layang.
Waktu lagi liat langit dari dalam mobil, gue kirain ada pelangi. Karena bentuknya melengkung. “Wah, tumben ada pelangi, udah lama gak liat,” gue bergumam dlm hati.

Ternyata setelah diliat lagi, “lho, warnanya putih(?)”. Ternyata itu bukan pelangi, tapi awan.
Kerennya lagi, awan yang satu ini bentuknya kayak semburan semburan air ato kembang api. Cuma bedanya ini guueddee, melengkung, dan puuaanjang.
Mungkin hal ini sudah biasa bagi orang laen, tapi bagi gue, ini adalah sesuatu yang baru. Karena selama ini gue liat awan bentuknya begitu2 aja.
Sayang, gue gak bisa motret krn lagi ada di mobil. Tapi gue seneng bisa liat awan unik itu hari ini ^_^

Posting some last remianing shots of Bhongir Fort…

....

Stairway to Heaven ?

Bhongir Fort

Bhongir Fort is about 70 kms from Hyderabad (from Gachibowli area). It’s pretty much a single structure that’s the remnant of what-was-a-fort, built atop a massive rock. While the fort itself is okay-ish, the climb up the rock to get to the fort is pretty nice.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: Bhongir Fort was built on an isolated monolithic rock by the Western Chalukya ruler Tri-bhuvana-malla Vikram-aditya VI and was named after him as Tribhuvanagiri. This name gradually became Bhuvanagiri and subsequently Bhongir. It has a unique egg-shaped construction with two entry points protected by huge rocks, so the fort was considered practically impregnable by invading armies. The Bala Hisar or citadel on the top of the hill gives a bird’s eye view of the neighbouring area. According to legend, there once was an underground corridor connecting Bhongir Fort to Golconda Fort.

As you enter the gate

En route going up the rock

Halfway up

A runway – car; into frame from Shenandoah skyline drive, Virginia, USA

A car on its runway

Shenandoah National Park >>

Chances are that you probably haven’t heard of stalker…So why the hell are you reading this…Oi, get your arse back here this instant! And this is most likely due to the fact that such a game tends to stick its head out of development, and then skulk around back alleys wearing a trench coat and being generally shady. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I am drawn to it, or maybe it’s the immense amount of pretentious satisfaction I get out of feeling like a niche gamer…back on track. For those of you who haven’t heard of stalker, to loosely describe it, a second Chernobyl blast erupted from the plant that evidently runs on pixie dust, showering the countryside with a variety of colourful accessories such as crippling radiation, horrid mutation and a surplus of acoustic guitars. But not all is as it seems as our lone adventurer Marked One ventured into the zone one day and uncovered a labyrinthine tapestry of mystery and deceit. But I’m not going to spoil the story subsequent to assuming the role of the audience surrogate and being thoroughly pissed off when I did. Suffice to say, S.TA.L.K.E.R (yes I did resort to making that a macro) Call of Pripyat comes out later this year, and I for one am excited. This got me wonder, “just what the hell do I find so damn appealing about these games?”.

This is a point I find genuinely baffling since I can wholly agree that these games frustrate the hell out of me whenever I play them, usually because of the punishing difficulty, but also because they are the type of games that always have the though in your mind of “Why didn’t they do ____”. I quite honestly felt satisfied upon starting Clear Sky because a lot of those wishes were address, but evidently they impose some kind of arbitrary quality cap over there at GSC Game World that caused the story in Clear Sky to be boring and substance-less, whilst the gameplay and level design underwent significant improvements… but I still had a couple of issues. If anybody actually reads these posts, then they will know that the thought of high quality exploration in a game makes me weak at the knees, and clear sky almost delivered. It had a fantastic ambience, amazing art direction, very natural feeling levels and a ambient lighting system that made you want to gaze in delight every time you stumbled across a breath taking vista, but the problem is it all felt a bit wasted since the game once again made use of small, fairly linear levels. I’m not saying that I am going to go around making unreasonable demands to the effect of a map from something like Fallout or Oblivion; I’m more than content with this kind of expanded linearity, I just want to see it a little more expanded. But back on topic since I kind of digressed off the cliff and into the sea, why do I find the games attractive? Well I guess you could say I found Shadow of Chernobyl attractive because of its engaging story, and truly frightening underground components which neither felt forced or arbitrary. I guess I liked the first game for its shear originality, something which a sequel can never quite live up to. So I guess the reason why I am in such a state of anticipation for Call of Pripyat is because I so sorely want to see a story as great, if not better than the first game with improvements upon the refined gameplay of the second one, and improvements on the RPG system. But for all its worth I might as well bundle up all my wishes into a cardboard box and blast them into the sun since I find it hard to envision the creative direction straying from their somewhat inconsistent formula, that and I doubt they have their magical scrying telescopes with them to look into the ineffable genius of my imagination.

Blue – A color whose hue is that of the clear sky or that of the portion of the color spectrum  lying between green and violet.  In your dream, when you see a blue color in your dream, it indicates you have peaceful mind and it symbolizes the contentment of the feelings.

In the new Surfer magazine Pacifico used my Joel Tudor image for there ad. They are giving away a trip for 4 to Hawaii…

   Sinceramente nem esperava mais updates de STALKER : Clear Sky, mas a GSC Game World tem lançado sim, e corrigido principalmente o multiplayer. Também adicionaram (1.5.09) Ambient Occlusion, a nova moda em efeitos gráficos.

   Para quem não conhece, STALKER é um excelente shooter com elementos de RPG. Se passa em Chernobil e tem uma atmosfera esquisita e envolvente, além de combates difíceis e prazerosos.

   Para quem não conhece Chernobil, que tal dar uma passada lá por perto?

Download de todos os patches possíveis aqui

Aguardamos anciosamente : STALKER : Call of Prypiat.

ivy climbing a building Copyright 2009 Bryan Moore

For the first time in almost a month I was finally able to get out for at least an hour to go take pictures.  It has been raining in NY nonstop and it was nice to see some blue in the sky for a change. I was mostly out taking pictures of architecture, but did photograph a few people as well.  This shot was taken a few years back and usually I can remember where I took my  shots but I am having trouble thinking of where this was I want to say it was taken down in atlantic city one day when I went down to gamble.

I will never look at clouds the same way again.

I, the Cookie Lady, flew for the very first time in my life, this past weekend.

Yes, it’s true!  I’ve never flown commercially before.  Never trusted someone else with my life, that high off the ground.  I would rather learn to fly so I could take myself on a trip! 

However, I had an opportunity to visit a dear friend from college, plus meet his wife, and the excitement totally outweighed any nervousness I felt.  So I stepped onto my very first Boeing 717, as giddy as a schoolgirl.

Take-off was GRAND.  I giggled and grinned broadly, as the force of acceleration pressed me into my seat.  “Sweet!” I thought, as the plane lifted off the ground. And then the feeling of… nothing… beneath my feet. 

It was awesome.

The day was particularly clear, with only cotton-ball clouds scattered here and there, and some thinner clouds above.  As we climbed through the sky, I was totally mesmerized by what was around me.  We ascended beyond the first layer of the atmosphere with the cottony clouds, and into the second.  The view was breathtaking.

I now understand the concept of land looking like “patchwork.”  I noticed the higher we got, the more the intricate details disappeared, to reveal a grander scheme.  A more complete picture of how everything fits and works together.  I took notes, believe it or not, of the things we passed over, hoping that my map-minded husband would be able to assist me in tracing our flight path, once I got back home.

As I watched the scenery below, and gazed into the vastness around us, many concepts became much clearer to me: the idea of a “heavenly perspective,” of God lifting us above our circumstances, to be seated with Him in heavenly places, to mount up with wings as eagles… all these concepts have a much richer meaning to me now.

So I gazed out my window, across a vast sea of… nothing.  Just a clear sky with only a few stratus clouds.  I stared in awe and wonder, and then suddenly thought, “it’s all in layers!  And you move from one layer to another!”

Now, I’m not stupid.  I’ve known all along that the atmosphere is in layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere… each layer serving its own purpose over the earth.  God designed it that way.  And it’s pretty cool technology.  :O)

But it’s one thing to read about the layers, and it’s another thing to experience the layers.  And this experience is one I shall never forget.  Because as I peered out my tiny airplane window into this vast expanse, I realized all of life is in layers.

We build upon our history with the future, as it becomes the “now.”  We “layer” our lives with the things we experience. Sometimes those layers feel quite comfortable, like warm layers of protection one wears when going out to play in snowy, cold weather.  Then there are other times the layers are harsh experiences that wound us, so they fit about as well as a sweater four sizes too small, and we feel uncomfortable.  And sometimes, in an effort to forget a harsh experience, we bury it under other layers, like a shirt with a stain that we cover with a vest.  We think it must be gone if we can’t see it anymore.

But it’s not.  It’s still there.  Like in ”The Princess and the Pea,” the experience we’ve tried to bury under so many other experiences still effects us.  We can say it doesn’t exist, or we can say it no longer matters, but it still has an effect on every other layer that comes after it.

The only way to not have layers to deal with later on, is to take care of them before they get buried.  But sometimes that doesn’t happen.   So God has to go back in and peel off the layers, or carefully cut through them, to get to the offending layer and clean it up.  It’s not always pleasant while it’s happening, but once it’s done there is peace instead of irritation.  Like a buried splinter that has festered and then is removed, the skin can heal and become “new” again.

There are so many other analogies that I can make about this travel experience, but the concept of layers stuck with me the most.  Maybe it’s because, for the past year, God has been going through some layers in my life, in an attempt to get to a root problem.  Well, after a year, we’re there.  The “pea” has been revealed, and now we are in the process of cleaning the affected layer, and putting back together the layers above.  It wasn’t easy getting to that little incident that was such a trauma in my very young childhood.  But now that it’s been dealt with… the layers sit much more comfortably.  And there is peace.

I noticed at one point, while at our highest altitude, that the sky above me was taking on that characteristic “darker hue” and suddenly, my heart began to race.  I thought, “Come on, just a little higher! Come on! Go just a little bit higher!”  I’ve always had a desire to orbit the earth.  We weren’t anywhere close to achieving orbit, but boy it sure felt like we were close.  And all I wanted to do was… go… just a little higher.

And that’s the desire that resides in all Christians, to finally achieve that point where the circumstances we live through don’t affect us, where we don’t get weighed down with all the nitty-gritty details, and we are released from the things that so easily beset us.  If we could just… go… a little higher… 

So life, like the atmosphere, comes in layers.  Layers of experiences, some good and some not.  Deal with them as they come; don’t bury them.

May the Lord give you grace to see your life from His perspective.

War Memorial; into frame from Washington DC, USA

War Memorial

Dogwood blossoms, in our garden, against a clear sky…

© 2009 D L Ennis, All rights reserved.

NOTE: Permission for the use of my images is granted for personal websites and blogs but is to include a link back to this site and proper credit given to me, D L Ennis. Link to be used…(Visual Thoughts http://dlennis.wordpress.com/)

NOTE: Commercial use, and the creation of prints, must be purchased! For more information you can contact me here.

I would just like to say thanks to all the people in Halifax, and the rest of the world, who observed Earth Hour!

Hopefully more people will take a little more time and effort to use our natural resources and energy wisely.

I was amazed at how clear the night sky was! (My reason we should have Earth Hour more often) I love looking at the stars and finding constellations. It must have been a great night for anyone who had a telescope!

I’m down for doing another Earth Hour, at the same thing next month… What do you guys think?

rarely people know when pain is about to arrive in my case today i probably know , in about 2 hours when this antiseptic wares off, i just had a tooth out went fairly quick considering,

anyways today is monday heres some things that sum up my day

powerade blue

clear sky

passion flower or 'clear sky' flower im doing botanical gardens as an exam project for graphics atm , so i think this sums up the beaaty in flowers dont you think?

dead tree..

red stairs

sunflower

bad monday ? probably .

Descriptions:
Stock photos: iStockphoto Dollar Bin files, your last chance at these images, give them a chance!
Small fluffy animals will be harmed if you don’t buy these shots

• Clock tower with blue sky background
• Vandalised sign post and iron gate into field
• Washed ashore after a high stormy tide
• Closer shot of a washed up fishing net on the beach
• Bent nail in a piece of drift wood
• Composited version scans of charcoal mark making
• Volcanic thermal mud, Rotorua, New Zealand
• Paint texture printed onto white coated paper with Gouache
• Printed with gouache and scanned
• Grungy scratched texture in Mono
• Cruising down a Klong (canal) around Bangkok, a typical canal-side Thai house
• Fallen Leaf with shadows from fence
• Blue Swirl weird background texture
• The view down the jetty from Wanaka in New Zealand, near to Queenstown

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