I'm rather uncomfortable "blogging" but i want the achievement so here goes. You know what, for my very first blorgh i'm actually gonna talk about just that. Blarghing or twatting and facepaging is all weird and disgusting to me. I know it's been going on for quite some time by now, but i'm still weirded out by it.

The stupid thing, i know, is that theres no escaping and eventually i'll participate in all that crap. I used to be one of those people that thought mobile phones were stupid. I tried to hold out but eventually i caved, social pressure is a powerful and scary beast. Still, though i feel like having sold my soul... I remember why I used to dislike mobile phones and why I now hate social media. It's actually pretty simple, since text messaging started in the late nineties and we're now digging a deeper hole with social media... It's all contributing to the trivialization of communication. I realize i'm acting like a grumpy old man but smalltalk is useless and stupid and what social media boils down to is using superawesome impressive spaceage technology for trivial bullshit!

Incidently, i'm a professional 3d modeller for games. If you want to scope out my stuff, please visit my blog! (i know, i'm a hypocrite): www.jeroenbackx.com

Heres a sample of the type of stuff i like to make:

Hiya and welcome!

Awesome turtle. I enjoy a good turtle.

Welcome to GB, nice work duder. I think you can easily make a game based around that Turtle Tank.

Thanks for the kind words of welcome guys! I've been visiting GB for longer but hadn't really made an effort to mingle in the community, the reason for that being that I'm socially awkward as made apperant in my first blog post :-P But obviously I shouldn't have been so withholding, the GB community seems totally awesome!

@Hector, I did design the turtle as a potential boss character. The model even made it into the U3 engine, although just as a test. You can check out the vid on thispage on my site if you're interested in taking a look.

@r3t: Awesome video. Cool to see the cannon retract into the shell.

Very impressive modelling work, keep it up. As for the social media stuff I rarely agree with the view that a communication form is inherently bad. Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, these are all things which may encourage people to communicate in certain ways but communication tools don't create bad content, people do. I don't think smalltalk is boring and useless, I think it's something important and undervalued which consistently brings us happiness in our lives, but it's certainly not something that was born out of the internet anyway, the large majority of real-life talk is smalltalk and that's why social networking is also largely used for smalltalk. When it comes to social networking sites though they're not just a platform for smalltalk, they can be a place to discuss more important issues, be they personal or academic, and they can be great places to share content. I also don't think you should lump blogs in with other social network tools like Twitter, and if anything I think blogs are a force for good, for one thing they're encouraging people to write more, not less.

Even if you do think we're using all this impressive technology to communicate trivial bullshit, by the same token you could argue that we use the impressive brains and body we have to communicate trivial bullshit. I think there are people out there who are letting social networking negatively affect their overall communication skills and lord knows, the majority of people don't have the ability or understanding (and often even the inclination) to produce anything that interesting with social networking tools, but that doesn't mean that they're all bad and if you want to see a change in the way they're used you can start using tools like Twitter and blogging sites to create and spread content that you think is important. Heck, you already are. Why so vehemently oppose other networking tools you haven't even tried out yet though? And why rant and rave so much when you blog yourself? Anyway, just something to think about. Welcome to the site duder.

welcome!

@Muerthoz: Thanks man. Cool that you made it that far into the vid... I made the mistake of showing off the details first and then starting the cool animations. I should've done it the other way around. I've been meaning to fix that but.... you know.

@Gamer_152: Hey man, thanks for your reply, the kind welcome and your comments on my modelling work, it's very much appreciated.

About the social media stuff. I have to admit that I wasn't looking to start a discussion, i just thought I'd write something to get the blog achievement. I didn't even intentionally put it up on the forum, that kinda happened by accident. I'm still getting accustomed to the site. However, I don't regret my post ending up here because i very much enjoyed reading your reply. It's a perspective I hadn't really taken myself before but theres definitely truth in it. At times it seems like anything that happens on social media is completely random and dumb but every now and then you stumble upon something relevant or inspiring. I suppose that's enough to make it worthwhile. I'll remain hesitant to posting my mood or silly things like that but maybe i shouldn't be as defiant. My own "blog" is intended more as a portfolio than anything else but yeah... I know it seems like a double standard but it was intended as a little bit of a joke. And, like I said... I didn't think anyone would actually read it. ;-)