AFTERGLOW USB wired XBOX 360 controller

STEAM is having their Holiday sale! Every day until January 3rd, they're having different games on sale. Yesterday I bought Final Fantasy 7 and 8 for the PC! Okay honestly, I know these are old games but 7 was $4 and 8 was $8. How does one say no?

So naturally, I bought a controller to play on my PC. I've actually never played any PC games with a controller so I felt compelled to get a new controller. This isn't an official XBOX controller, which I know a lot of people frown upon since 3rd party controllers tend to be more cheaply made and thus break easier. Unfortunately for me, I'm a creature that is easily lured by 'aesthetics'. You know, like buying something for the packaging. In any case, I read some reviews on Amazon before purchasing these, and they seemed decent. Plus, they're cheaper. Anyway, here it is!

Oh did I mention it glows? Yeah. I'm sucha sucker for translucent, glowing things (as you can tell from my keyboard...). *sigh* It does look pretty damn cool though, right?

Let me know if you've ever bought gaming gear purely because of how it looked and if it absolutely came back to bite you in the ass. lol

Until next time,

Lo 101: FANTASY EFFECT, PHOTO EDIT TUTORIAL

I've had a couple people ask me to do tutorials of PHOTOSHOPPING pictures. I'm actually terrible at executing tutorials of any kind.....but I'll try my best to break it down as easily and as elaborately as possible.

I do photoshop a lot of my pictures but more than just for vanity reasons, most of the time, I just don't capture or have the lighting I want and the colors turn out way off if I'm not using my DSLR. Especially webcam or cellphone quality photos, they tend to need a lot of editing to look "nice". One of the reasons I started photoshopping my pictures was because I have the world's shittiest lighting in my room and every time I wanted to take a nice picture of myself, I find that the image comes out rather blah looking. Sure, I think I LOOK nice, but when the picture in general looks so bad, I just can't even stand looking at it. So it's safe to say, I deleted a lot of pictures of myself off of my photo booth program. The lighting makes everything look green and dark and it just wasn't worth it. But then I started experimenting with photoshop on my own shitty quality pictures and found, they can actually turn out quite well! In a lot of ways, it's like salvaging bad photographs. I do a lot of photoshop work as a graphic design student, but doing it on my own face is definitely new.

There's no "easy" way to make a bad picture look GOOD. There are quite a few steps to make your picture look much better, but if you have basic PS knowledge, you can follow these steps to some of the basics of editing your photographs.

For the purpose of this tutorial, I'll do the theme of the edit on something specific -- I'll call this "FANTASY EFFECT".

We're going to take THIS (the lighting is "okay" here because I used my mini vanity light)

And turn it into THIS

I know you might be thinking, "But that's wayyyyyy fake! Why would you do that??" Well the purpose is to show you how much you can really do in just a few minutes to drastically change a photograph. A lot of bloggers tend to photoshop their faces for the purpose of their banner or something of that sort. It's boring to see a regular old photograph of someone's face as a banner, so as a way to look more aesthetically appealing and unique, something as dramatic as this ps edit might be what most people are going for.

So if you're ready, LETS BEGIN!