Who Cares What They Thinks

I’ve seen examples of people who are so weak minded and conditioned to believe that they don't have a choice that they just stick around in a situation that is physically or mentally damaging or humiliating. I once saw an example of this on the internet as a clip (which I won't go into too much details), I was so shocked by what I saw and tried to forget it and wished that I had not seen it, the suffering I saw effected me in such a way that I had to write this article.

I mean all she had to do was just walk away but she didn't, instead she just try to cover the humiliation with fake laughter which soon turned to tears.
Why did she not just got up and leave? if someone hurts you, you don't have to stand there and take it no matter who is watching. I believe she was too weak minded and being on TV probably gave her the impression that she has to co-operate or she would be looked down upon by the media for putting on a scene. By the way this person is an adult, which stress' the fact that many people still don't have enough courage to say no and walk away when it counts even though they are matured and grown up.

The lesson to learn here is do not let others do to you what you do not want and learn to say no. Even if you have to make a scene and break something and have everyone look at you pointing and staring just do it. Some people will do anything (or in the earlier case - nothing) to fit into the crowd to avoid too much attention even if it means being miserable and not being able to express how they truely feel. This is a very sad reality, so much people out there who do not have enough courage to express themselves, I'm not talking about the little things but then if you can't express yourself with the little things how you can do it in the big situations when it really counts.

I'm still working on the little things, trying to do stuff without caring about what other people will think. For example me and my friend went to the cinemas and got a bunch of flyers off the holder and just started handing them out outside the cinemas just to see who would hand out the most, This was to develop courage. I stole a packet of chips once, not a very constructive way to approach the fear so I don't recommend anyone trying this. I started doing things by myself like watching a movie, eating out, etc. I started being honest ALL the time since i know not many people can do that. Everything is a challenge, I do my best to face every fear I have everyday to strengthen my courage and I suggest everyone does the same, start small and build up.

Lucid Dreaming

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A lucid dream is a dream in which the person is aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is in progress. During lucid dreams, it is often possible to exert conscious control over the dream characters and environment, as well as to perform otherwise physically impossible feats. Lucid dreaming has been researched scientifically, and its existence is well established

Well there you have it, if it comes from the Wikipedia it deserves a second thought, at least to me it does. While reading some forums I stumble on something called Lucid Dreaming, not knowing what that was and on seeing how everyone think its so cool and stuff I had to check it out. I’ve been trying to get into lucid dreaming for a while now. I started out remembering my dreams every once a week to the point where I could remember up to 3 to 4 dreams per night. Up to now I think I've had up to 4 lucid dreams, the first 3 was cool but kind of cloudy, I just can't describe them clearly enough to be satisfy.

My Personal Experience
The most recent lucid dream was vivid and fantastic. I had just woken up to go to the toilet, still tired and early I attempted to go back to sleep by curling up to the heater. Tired but conscious, I felt a hand pushing at my back as if helping my soul push forward out of my body. Previously I’ve been trying to get an Out of Body Experience (OBE) without any luck – more about OBE on the next post. So feeling this invisible hand pushing at my back I welcomed it and tried to go out, then in the darkness from my closed eyes, I saw a glitter of sparks fly up and outwards, then suddenly I see myself flying through the darkness in 3^rd person perspective. I’m not sure what was going on but who cares flying is cool.

After a short while I just felt silly flying through the darkness, so I sent out an intention to be flying over a sparkling ocean. The darkness ended and I’m finally over the ocean with sparking waters. The feeling was the most wonderful feeling as I can feel the wind in my hair and the trickles of water particles hitting my face as I sweep past the water below me like in Dragon Ball Z. At times I was going really fast too, and at some point I notice I had followers behind me flying with me, not sure who they were as I didn’t bother to look back, I just know they were either my friends or angels, what difference does it make, I’m Flying over the ocean and that’s all that mattered.

I classified this as a lucid dream because even though this might have started out to be what I thought was going to be an OBE; I ended up flying over oceans feeling great while still aware that I’m lying in bed next to the heater. As I felt tremendous freedom and joy I felt a warm glowing light heat up somewhere in my chest, not sure what that was about but yeah.

Why bother learning lucid dreams
So what is so great about lucid dreaming? For experience lucid dreamers it is possible to control the content of your dream, for example, you can bring about anyone you want into your dream and interact with them; for example you might want to dual out with Jacky Chan - I had that dream a couple of days ago even though it wasn’t lucid. You could go on a date with Jennifer Aniston; arms wrestle with Arnold Schwarzenegger … and win, beat Freddy Cougar at his own game, beat up your worst enemy, etc. Aside from manifesting people, you can manifest objects, environment, superpowers/abilities, the skies the limit people.

On average we sleep 8 hours a day, that’s a third of our lives spend doing pretty much nothing, why not use that time to be having fun which is another reason to pick up this cool ability. Another reason I found on the Wikipedia site is quoted here:

People who suffer from nightmares would benefit from the ability to be aware they are dreaming. A pilot study was performed in 2006 that showed lucid dreaming treatment was successful in reducing nightmare frequency. This treatment consisted of exposure to the idea, mastery of the technique, and lucidity exercises. It was not clear what aspect of this treatment was responsible for the success, though the treatment as a whole was successful.

Methods of practicing lucid dreams
So now you’re convinced and want to give it go, but where to start? From what I learnt and from my experience, I think the first most important step is to start remembering your dreams as vividly as you can. I mean what’s the use of having a lucid dream if you can’t remember them the next morning? It’s like having a cake and not able to eat it too. Anyhow most of my friends that I speak to can’t recall any of their dreams like how I did when I first started out. When I as them “so what did you dream last night?” they just shrug their shoulders and say “I don’t have any dreams”. Truth is we dream every night, in fact we have 4 to 6 dreams every night due to slipping in and out of REM (Rapid Eye Movement). I’m not really sure what REM is but you can read that from the Wikipedia.

Back to the first step of practicing lucid dreaming, every night before nodding off just put out the intention of remembering your dreams, and in the morning try recall anything, and I mean anything. If all you can remember is a cat, good work, throughout the day when you’re free just try to figure out what the cat dream was all about, even if you nothing comes back it doesn’t matter, the important thing was you tried. As time goes on you will start to remember more as you keep trying. I have this theory that your subconscious is playing a part in this somewhere, if you keep thinking about your dreams daily, your subconscious will start to get the idea that dream recall is something you really want to do, and so throughout the week you will gradually remember more and more. It very useful to have a dream journal or just get a notepad to just jot down anything you remember from your dream.

The second step is to actually try to be aware that your dream while your dreaming, an obvious step. This is done through many techniques, most of which is described in the Wikipedia website, here’s the link:

Lucid Dream (Wikipedia).

Here is a link to Erin Pavlina’s fantastic podcast on lucid dreaming,

Pavlina-010-Lucid-Dreaming.mp3 (Time = 11:38, Size = 5.3MB)

She clearly outlines the steps the she personally uses to perform lucid dream, by the way she has had numerous lucid dreams and even OBEs and knows what she’s talking about.

For me I just try to do what Erin suggest, as I don’t have much experience in inducing a lucid dream, the most previous lucid dream I had have was an accident so yeah, however I can recall my dreams way better than any of my friends.

Well, all that I know on lucid dreaming; as I mentioned earlier I’m still practicing. There are still so much to learn, best of luck to everyone trying and keep practicing.

How to Air-Brush people with PhotoShop 7

How cool would it be to know how to air brush someone? What I mean by airbrushing someone is given a photo of someone you wish to edit to make them look better by removing skin imperfections like scars, pimples, freakles, etc. This can be done using Photoshop if you know how.

One day while using a toolbar program called StumbleUpon which basically when clicked on takes me to a random site that has high "thumbs up" rating and relates to my interest. How does it know what i'm interested in? Well i'll leave that for another story, but in case your interested here is the site for it Stumble Upon. Anyhow back to airbrushing, so I found this site on airbrushing people tutorial. Seeing how cool and useful it was I decided to make a tutorial myself, but then i just can't do it better than the original tutorial without looking like I just copy and paste. So i'm just going to pass you all the site : Airbrush A Person - Tutorial

Here is a my favorite picture of Tifa from some cosplay thing, at first I thought this was a CG (Computer Graphics) person, turns out to be a real life person. I think this is done using airbrush, otherwise I want to know this girl and go out with her - REALLY SERIUOSLY.


The following are before and after from me doing airbrushing on some of my friends:

(Click on any image to englarge)

I find this a useful thing to know, also it doesn't take that much time, I would say these took around 20 to 30 minutes max. Although i have done pictures that are so big and defined that it took almost an hour or two, eventually i gave up because I couldn't make it look realistic enough - well, I'm no expert so yeah.

Hope this helps someone out there.

Mozilla Firefox

Have you ever stumbled on to a site in the hope to find free downloads for your favorite mp3, pictures or avi movie/anime only to be disappointed and then clicking back and later finding out that you have been contaminated with a spyware or two? This is why having an antivirus or adware-preventional program is important in the protection of your computer, but with the amount of program available out there which ones do I choose? And why do they cost so much?

There has to be a cheaper, simpler way to surf the net without worry right? Well, fortunately there is. I've been using the net for years, and had many unpleasant experiences surfing here and there with the suspicion that the sites might contain an annoying virus, spywares, adwares, worms, trojans and website Hijacks only to get them anyways since i don't have any programs to guard against them. So what is the solution? The cheap one that is? Use a different browser.

The Mozilla Firefox is basically an internet browser similar to the standard Microsoft or Netscape Explorer containing features like the back, forward, refresh, stop, home, favorites, etc. However unlike the popular Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox offers a safe web surf and guard against harmful websites that are often developed to exploits the weakness in the internet explorer.

So how does it work? Basically since Firefox is a whole new browser/program, it does not contain the same weaknesses/vulnerabilities as the older browsers like Microsoft, and so offer safer surfing. However, do not confuse higher security with total security. What I mean is even though it’s a lot safer with the Mozilla Firefox there is still potential risk in visiting suspicious sites that usually offer free mp3, game patches, cracks, etc.

Click on the following pictures to enlarge

Back to the bright side, since switching from the Microsoft to Firefox browser I have not caught a single spy-ware of any sort. Other great features that comes with Firefox is it’s’ ability to block many annoying popup usually for advertising purpose. Another benefit that I enjoy is its’ tab features, where you can run multiple sites in one browser window using a tabs for each site instead of opening a window each time. The Firefox is user friendly and also free for download; click here to go to the download page Mozilla Firefox.

iGoogle

Now just before i begin with the topic of this post, i just want to say 'yes' i have slowed down on posting new post here, only because i have ran out of pictures to upload, and not to mention that i have exams this week for my Tafe course. Even though Tafe is easy for me and i spend more time playing than studying i do still have to sleep early and take better care of my health, however i still do have time to update my blog as i have been doing for the past week. For example i have changed the pictures to now show before-and-afters with an orange arrow to indicate the change. I've posted some comments and added some feeds from my favorite blogs.

One day while browsing with my favorite home search engine - google, i decided to just click around and see what those little links at the top right of the page was for, they have been there all those times but i just thought they were for help or advertisements. Then i discover the igoogle homepage customisation page, Here you can costomise your google homepage to have themes, tabs, windows that can show anything from the time to your personal horoscope. You can even add specific feeds from your favorite blogs like i did. By the way you need to sign in with a google account to do so. Otherwise just by clicking on the igoogle link you won't be able to add any new google-windows, or change the themes.

Click on the following thumbnails pictures to enlarge

I think the Themes are the best part, google has created some great themes with nice colour and animational background. That's not all, the themes changes by itself according the time of day and locational weather. How cool is that! So if your at home on a dark raining night then your themes will include night and rain in them. the only downfall is that there is only 6 themes to choose from, and aparently i notice one of the themes i.e. city scape doesn't change according to weather and time of day, i'm not sure why.

For those people who do not know what an RSS is - which is most people i think. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, so what does that mean you might ask, well here's the definition from Wikipedia :

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed," "web feed," or "channel," contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that's easier than checking them manually.

RSS content can be read using software called a "feed reader" or an "aggregator." The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

Basically igoogle is a considered a feed reader, or some might like to call it newsreader. So if you want you can add feeds from any site that has the RSS link.
The Mozilla Firefox browser can identify sites/blogs that has RSS enabled, if so you will be able to see an orange icon like this:

(Also taken from Wikipedia)

This icon will be rather small and can be view at the status bottom left hand side of the browser in the status bar. If you see this then it means that there exist a RSS link somewhere. So when you find the link for subscribe somewhere, just right click on it and select Copy Link Location (or Copy Shortcut in Internet Explorer) then go back to the igoogle site to the add in your RSS link.

for example at the end of my home blog page there is the RSS link called Posts (Atom). The image below show an example of how to copy the RSS link.

Well, that was abit of a lecture, hope this helps and if your still confused and want to know more, then go and borrow the "Blogging for Dummies" book from a library near you.

PhotoShop Pics - G4

Eyep, Another days worth of posting up my pictures, the following are Before and Afters once again with Photoshop. The ones on the left is before and right is after for those who are confused.

Come to think of it, i've been mentioning the word "Photoshop" in every post so far, and then there's the blog title, hmm ... it's making me look like i'm trying to help the creaters advertise the product - which i'm not, otherwise i wouldn't be so poor.

Anyhow here they are:


This is Urumi Kanzaki from GTO, i just took this out of their manga-scans and edited it.


This is Kaede Nagase, I drew this one by hand then scan and colour them with PS.


Man i used to have a huge crush on this girl, she is Marina Huynh, whenever she was around it was like i was under a "oh my god its her, hide" spell, but i recon if i meet her nowadays i can talk to her like how i talk to other people, not worshiping her like a queen or something.


Anyhow, carry on, here's another one i drew in my skectch book then just cleared out the smudges and made it more presentable, it's my favorite page.


This one i drew for Dianna, which most of you reading this won't have a clue who that is, but then you don't know who the other guys are like Dat and Steven and Harry so there. Again i just made it more presentable.


This Lisa person is another crush i had, this time from uni. I didn't have a picture of her so i had to turn her to anime/manga. Again its handrawn and PS edit.

Well thats all i got with the PS edits. The rest is just another version of the same image, for example the Kaede picture is taken out and placed on a wallpaper, nothing new. Enjoy.

PhotoShop Pics - G3

Oh man, i'm supposed to leave these pictures for tommorow's post, but i'm a little impatient, so here they are. ( *thought* - What am i gona do tommorow ? )


Alritey, like i promised here's Dat using his superspeed to cross the road and avoid that speeding bus, how scary. Other powers to be revealed next time.


Just look at how calm Harry is; even when face with the fact that he's about to fall to his doom. Lucky for him Dat was around to save the day.


This is me showing off my colouring in skills with Photoshop, obviosly the one on the left is the orginal and the one on the right is my final product, how do u like that ay.

oh man i spent the whole day doing these images, how crazy, gotta eat and sleep now, once again enjoy.

PhotoShop Pics - G2

Oh Man, just got up - its 12:18pm, i had a late night yesterday trying to edit more photos. Now that they are done its show time.


OH Look its the asian version of smallville starring Dat as Clark Kent. We're gona be seeing more of this guy showing off his other powers in later post - stay tuned.


Here's one of me doing the Tai Chi. Yes This is Exactly the same as my display picture on the left, but now it's upgraded to have the left hand moving also the surround is motioned blured for greater effects.


Didn't you guys know, i was part of the Nickelback band, but i usually try to take the lead singer on so i was evicted, dam, I'm gona try to join Linkin Park next, just watch.


And over here we have Steven being mind controled by his friend Sharlean (not sure about the spelling). It looks like an episode of Supernatural or Smallville.

Well that's all i got up to yesterday, Enjoy !

PhotoShop Pics - G1

Today is awlfully cold, its raining elephants and hippos too.

I've been searching the setting and posting and couldn't find a way to post all my photoshop photo's on this blog, until i realiese that this site is not like those msn space and yahoo360 where they allow photo albums. But thats ok, i can still post the images in my post.


The one above is of Dat using his heat vision to fry a fly that got in the way of his singing in the City's Kareoke.


Here's Another one where i gave him superpowers with photoshop skills. The ball in the midle is actually a lenz flare. The fire ball looks kinda like a nice gift instead of an attack - oh well.

Welcome - The Reason

Hello everyone,

This is of course my first post but not my first blog, I did that one on yahoo360.

I don't really have much to say at this point so i'm going to be brief this time.

If your thinking that his is just another online diary then your really mistaken. I've seen and read enough of those boring things to scream. I mean they have their place and all, like you make one so your friend or family can read it. But who has the time to read those, especially when you write them daily. To me its a waste of time and effort writing about how my life went, i don't have enough freinds to care.

My blog is going to be about personal development ideas, opinions and pictures of friends or art that i create or altered with Photoshop 7.

I have to admit i'm a newbie with this whole blog stuff even though its been around for ages, i got some catching up to do - but hey, this is my stepping stone, and i've got the "Blogging for Dummies" to prove it.

Well, its actually 1.12 am right now, i'm hungry and tierd, gotta go.