Feed Me Three!

After Toby (Feed Me) and Karthik (Feed Me Too) added RSS feeds to their sites, it was only a matter of time till I added one to VarunAbhiram.com. Yesterday I was bored doing absolutely nothing all day, so I ended up adding it! Look for the little orange RSS icon in the navigation on the left.



Karthik's post has a detailed write-up of what RSS is and how to go about adding a feed to your website, so I won't repeat all that here again. If you'd like to subscribe to the RSS feed at VarunAbhiram.com, or this blog for that matter, use an aggregator like Google Reader. All you need to do is to add your subscription (Eg: http://varunabhiram.com/rss is the subscription link for VarunAbhiram.com) there.

With this, I think I've added all the features I can think of to the site. Now all that remains is updating the content — that's one area I've been neglecting for a long time.

The Grunge Series

Not one, not two, but three new wallpapers to make up for the lack of updates all this while. Hope you like them. I call this the Grunge series —

Feathers

Made this around a month ago, but never got around to posting it because of continuous exams at college. This wallpaper is heavily inspired from the beautiful artwork in the Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral 11-wallpaper pack. Blended together two shots I took of a dead bird, and then heavily edited it to bring out the colours and textures. Not exactly an ideal subject to make a wallpaper of I know, which is why I went in for a more abstract arrangement of images — easier on the eyes when you can't make out what is what.

Destroyed City

Ah this is my favourite of the lot. My dad had been to New York City a while ago, and I used one of the photos he took there as a base to make this. Why didn't I use an image of Hyderabad you ask? Well, the city is already damaged by developments, so much so that you can't make it look any more destroyed than it already is. This base image was just perfect for the wallpaper, and that's the sole reason I used it. I do NOT hate NYC or something in case you were wondering. Heck how can I hate the place when I've never even been there.

Smoulder

Made this one today morning. I know it looks like a single photo, but it's actually three different images superimposed on each other, each one with a different layer/blending style. I don't really know what that is, but I think it's either the seeds or the withered flower of a plant. I really like the perspective on this image. The curve from under the title is what adds interest to main subject I think. I set one of the layer modes to "Burn" which is what makes it look like it's smouldering. And I have no idea how the smoke showed up, there's nothing in the original! Oh well, it adds to the overall effect, so I'm not complaining.

I'd love to hear what you guys have to say about these wallpapers, so comment away!

10 Videos

I've come across several fun/interesting videos on YouTube the past few weeks, never got around to posting them because I've been busy with stuff at college. The end of the semester is sadly always like this. Just tests, tests and more tests that keep you from doing anything else.

Anyway in a way it's a good thing, because now I get to make a whole post with just the videos! They would have otherwise ended up as footnotes, footnotes you'd probably not even notice. So here are Varun's Top 10 Recently Watched Videos, ranked in reverse chronological order. "Top 10" lists are always more fun than plain bulleted ones, aren't they?

10. If You Come Today — South Indian English Video
I'm sure most of you would have already seen this by now. If you haven't, you should.

9. Tale of Rock
A very well made 3D animated short film by Stevo Payne and John Godwin. It's funny too.

8. System of a Down - Chop Suey
A 2 year old kid rocking out to this SOAD song!

7. Pentagram - Electric
Indian rock band Pentagram's latest released video. Groovy.

6. Orestes — Piano Cover
I always thought Maynard's voice was unimitable. But this guy is just amazing.

5. Mel Blanc on David Letterman
Mel Blanc is the voice of classic cartoon cartoon characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and hundreds of others. Wonder how he remembers what his actual voice sounds like.

4. Content-Aware Image Resizing
A new technique of image resizing that keeps the important features of the image undistorted.

3. 300 — Speed Painting and Animation
I don't think I will ever have the patience to do something like this.

2. Linkin Park Parody
One of my friends had added this video to his favourite videos list on Orkut. I can see why.

1. Portal
And I thought people ran out of ideas for video games.

Milla Jovovich : Resident Evil

Karthik finished a drawing of Milla Jovovich ('Alice' from Resident Evil) today. As with many of his recent drawings, he was going to edit/colour it in Photoshop. I had never digitally coloured an image before, so I thought it'd be fun to give it a try. I grabbed myself a copy of the original scan and both of us started working on our own digitally edited versions of the drawing!



On the left is the original scan, and on the right is what it looked like after I edited it in Paint Shop Pro. Boosted the contrast of the image while retaining all the details. Then I started colouring it using the air brush. The colouring is pretty basic, no fancy layers for the shadows/highlights and all. Once I finished colouring it, I added the splats and the text. This is the end result —



And you're probably wondering what Karthik's version looks like, so here it is —


EDIT [ 14 Oct ] : Removed the stain from Milla's arm. And changed the flat background into a gradient. I think it looks better this way.

VarunAbhiram.com Goes Live!

After almost a month of coding and designing, I'm proud to announce that VarunAbhiram.com is finally online!

Coming up for a design for this site was tough! I hadn't done any serious web designing in years, so my designing skills were a little rusty. Sure I designed the Ciencia site some months ago, but that was a very minimalistic design. The Ciencia banner was just a cropped version of my Blur wallpaper (colorised to blue), and other than that there wasn't much to look at. Unless you're the kind of person who finds diagonal lines on a blue gradient fascinating.

Also, because this is my own personal website and not something I was making for someone else, I wanted it to look as good as possible. I ended up making several designs before I got something I was satisfied with. If you noticed, the current design has a v6.0 mentioned in the banner. These are the other five unfinished/discarded designs -



Obviously the current design is the best of them all. I almost went ahead with design #5, before I realised that a white design is not ideal for a site that has a lot of images (especially dark ones). I needed a design with muted colours, something that doesn't interfere with/take focus away from the photos and artwork. And a plain grey theme did just that. Maybe it's a little dark (it looks even darker in IE), but I prefer it that way. You'd expect a design like this to take not more than an hour or two to convert from image to HTML, but this design took me around six hours to do! Aligning the diagonal lines across multiple cells and making sure the page looks the same in all browsers was a major pain. Anyway it turned out just the way I wanted it to, so I'm not complaining.

Credits

Karthik — Him I need to thank the most for teaching me the PHP/MySQL stuff to code this site. No way I could make a site like this using plain HTML. Took me about 3 weeks or more to finish programming all my pages, but now that I'm done with it, making updates/maintaining the site is as simple as can be! All I have to do is insert one row into the database and all the pages where the changes have to be reflected get updated automatically. Oh and I don't have to bother about making thumbnails for my images either. PHP does it all for me!

Shashank — for helping me out with the navigation javascript so that it works properly in all browsers. Firebug (the addon that integrates itself with Firefox) was extremely useful in identifying the problem.

Poornaa and Pratyusha — for pointing out bugs with the Prev/Next links in my image gallery. Clicking previous took you to the next image in the gallery and vice versa. How come nobody else spotted this?

Random Trivia

Total unique visitors so far — 217

Number of Page Views — 1280

The first five people to leave comments on the site —
#1 — Poornaa (Lady Gardener 2)
#2 — Nilesh (Looking at my Glasses?)
#3 — Aasritha (Explosion)
#4 — Suresh (10:27pm)
#5 — Rajeev (Lady Gardener 2)

Okay so that about wraps up this update. Go ahead, visit VarunAbhiram.com and let me know what you think!

Weekly Traffic

I happened to log in to Statcounter.com yesterday and I was pleasantly surprised (ok, shocked!) to see the Weekly Stats. This is what it looks like —



Look at the graph on Thursday, the day I released The Outer Darkness. I don't think I've ever got that many hits in a day before! I guess I should release Doom levels more often.

The Outer Darkness

Now here's something you haven't seen in centuries. A Doom update! And an important one at that — it's a new map release!!

This level was originally made for a project called The Ninth Gate that I was working on with Pablo Dictter, Tobias Münch, Damian Lee and Karthik. The idea was to make a set of levels inspired by Episode 4 of The Ultimate Doom — basically maps with lots of wood/marble in them. We never got around to finishing it though (blame real life and laziness), so we have now decided to release the finished levels individually.

Most of this level was made during 2001-03 with DoomCAD (yes!), so the architecture is pretty simple, though detailed. The exit area was made with Doom Builder. No new graphics, except a titlepic. The level music is from Duke Nukem 3D, the other tracks were composed by Damian Lee (originally for The Ninth Gate). It plays on E4M1, and you need a limit-removing port like ZDoom to play it. Oh and since most of you, dear readers, are non-Doomers and will probably never play this, I'm going to be a little generous with the screenshots so that you can at least see what it looks like —

Download (380 KB)
If you're having problems with the above link, try here.

Credits

• Pablo Dictter and Karthik - Thanks a lot guys for the feedback and for playtesting this level on the lower skills.
• Doug "Opulent" Merrill - It was awesome to see somebody other than me playing this on UV. The demos were mighty useful. Thanks!
• Damian Lee - The music tracks rule! Especially the endgame MIDI.
• Joel Murdoch - For no particular reason. You can stop coughing now BTW.

Related Links

• [ 03/08/07 ] - Review of "The Outer Darkness" on The Outpost of Doom II (thanks a lot for the review Ismaele!)
  
• [ 03/08/07 ] - Update on NewDoom.com
  
• [ 02/08/07 ] - Update on Doomworld.com (thanks all for the comments!)
  
• [ 02/08/07 ] - Karthik writes about The Outer Darkness