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Kairi Li's

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Aug 17, 2008 - 05:25 PM

History as to why the hell I'm bilingual

I was born in Hong Kong, then move to Sydney Australia when I was two when my family freaked out over the 1997 handover to China, and wanted to make sure we end up with dual citzenships as a backdoor exit plan. Stayed there till about 4-5 years old, learning Cantonese and trying to learn to speak English with the outgoing hyper Aussie girls in kindergarten, while I attempt to shy away into a corner like some timid Chinese girl.

And then one day I was whisked back to the island of cynical bitchy people who barely know English at all. What happened? I got HELD BACK, in frigging NURSERY SCHOOL, because apparently my Cantonese and Chinese writing sucked balls. English was pretty damn good though despite the fact I have virtually lost all people I converse in English. Properly.

Luckily my parents were able to afford a tutor from Britain, who also taught in that same Nursery school though I never was placed in her class. As I grew up, I enjoyed the English language more so than Cantonese and Chinese writing, but I had to endure that shit cause back then no one thought about tossing me into a international school. Instead I got stuck with the Hong Kong education treatement for over a decade. In a girl's Catholic school no less.

The experience? Was mostly crap. While everyone was gabbing over some hot HK pop idol magazine I was too busy reading English books. It was mostly girly crap you guys would scoff at like Baby Sitters Club or Sweet Valley books my sister bought, and I end up reading them when I was old enough to. I also as a kid read some Enid Blyton books, especially "The Faraway Tree" series. But let me say, when you're the only person who reads this stuff, school gets lonely and boring fast.

And 90% of cartoons I watched were all in English, Batman TAS, Sonic SATAM, Disney cartoons and movies, Land Before Time, Superman TAS, Gargoyles etc. The remaining 10% were Cantonese dubbed anime, which most girls in my class watched.

Classes were dull as hell cause we keep reading stuff that was simply too easy for me, I mean jeez when I reach middle school we read an abridged, simplied version of Pride and Prejudice. God it was terribly simplified, and no one in class like it. A classroom, consisting of only girls, didn't like Jane Austen. I for one loved it when I read the proper version.

It didn't help that Chinese, Mandarin, Chinese history, and some other Chinese lesson BS was mandatory, so I had no escape whatsoever. The worst is? In the middle school I was in, if you did incredibly well in the English entrance test, you get placed in Class 1A and you can choose French to replace all the Chinese bullcrap. Extra lessons are used as study periods. Guess what happened? My mother insisted that I keep the Chinese crap to retain my heritage.

All through this time I had a tutor and watched only English TV shows and movies, any Chinese listening or reading was used purely for Anime and Manga, which is popular in Hong Kong instead of being niche like in the US. It came to a point where aside from the tutor, I had no one to converse in English. Who can I talk to about Kevin Conroy's awesome voice acting as Batman? Or the amazing animation? Who do I know has even heard of Sonic SATAM? I had people to talk to about certain animes and mangas, but I didn't feel comfortable conversing in Cantonese in comparison to in English.

That's when two things happened. The internet became popular, and the idea of me going to Sydney to study.

Well, the Sydney thing didn't work out cause aside from language issues, I also have alot of issues with school in general, and after hopping about, I went back to Hong Kong to study in an international school instead, a place that was like the perfect hybrid location of East meets West. I have Hong Kong and Western friends that I can talk to.

As for the internet, it enabled me to find and talk to people I have in common with, be it video games or shows or films I liked that I thought no one else did. At some point I even got a guy's number so we can talk with our voices. (Back then voice chat didn't exist.) Eventually when voice chat became more popular, I started talking to people across the globe and eventually met the man who one day became my fiance.

Said man is an aspiring writer and his huge vocabulary has increased mine significantly. He himself has stated however his first concern with voice chat was that I might have a Chinese Accent, (He played MGS1 on the PS1... Guess he assumed all Chinese girls sound like Mei Ling?) so he was pleasently surprised that I speak fluently, with a no distinct accent since I was taught by Australian and British teachers, but I spend my youth imitating US cartoon characters. It was a weird combination of the three, where most of my accent sounds American, but certain words or phrases sound Aussie or British.

So thanks to the web, it has allowed me to converse with many people who actually speak the language first hand, and I got to learn many things I didn't know about other countries. I got to make more friends and learn people's different perspective and points of view on things I have never though about before. It was an eye opener.

So that should sum up most of it. I was simply a girl who prefered English over Chinese, but barely had anyone to converse with for over a decade. The internet has given me a chance to talk to others who I have same interests as I do, when I was stuck in a place where I felt no one understood or knew me. I hope I can learn more and talk to more people as time goes along.

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Bilingual , who else? by Shenlon

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Aug 15, 2008 - 01:26 AM

How to enhance images for Avatars

After posting in the Samurai Pizza Cats Avvie Sig thread , I realised that many use screencaps and sometimes magazine scans for their avatars and sigs, but most of them don't know how to enhance them. Here is my tutorial on how to enhance your Avatars and subsequently signature images.

All you need is Adobe Photoshop, mine is 7.0. And maybe MS paint. (I use it to crop images to a specific pixel)

I will now use this crappy screenshot of Speedy, not from the better Tsuneko encoding of episode 1, but the crappy video quality Japanese fansubbed version I found on another site.

Looks like crap doesn't it? Don't worry, we'll fix that!

First, crop it so its in the correct ratio to GFF's Avatar size, or whatever ratio you need it to be in for Sig purposes.

Now before we begin resizing to the actual correct resolution of 105X150, go to Filter tab>Blur>Smart Blur.

Set radius 3.0, threshold around 10.1, quality low and mode normal. Then click Ok. The Threshold number may vary depending on how many "blocky bad video encode" stuff is on your image.

Smart blur helps get rid of the blocky things that pop up in a bad scan or a bad video encode. Those blocky things especially show up in an action scene from badly encoded videos. It's subtle so you may not see it in the above image, but it makes a big difference in alot of scans/screencaps I have worked on.

Once that's done, you can resize it to 105X150, but I found usually if I make a huge jump from the original resolution STRAIGHT to the resolution I want, the edges of the character comes out jagged.

This defintly happens when I enhance large anime artbook scans to wallpaper sizes. Jumping from 5000 ish pixels to 1280 pixels makes the image look jagged.

I recommend making small jumps of 50 pixels or small % ratios a few times when resizing, since that's the way I found that will stop the jagged stuff to show up.

Now your image should be something like this:

Next comes the contrast, colors and lighting.

Go to Image tab>Adjustements>Brightness/Contrast.

Most images I have worked with have the contrast up no further than 40. Depending on the image you have, it may be from 20 to 40. Brightness can be from around 5 to 20 depending on your image.

Its all about balance, that the colors stand out, but not too high of a contrast that it ends up looking like a bad VHS tape.

Brightness needs to make the image visible, without making it look like someone cranked up the TV's brightness cause she was playing Silent Hill, and now your movie's border looks grey instead of black.

For Speedy here, these were the settings.

After you are satisfied with the contrast, go to Image tab>Adjustements>Hue/Saturation.

Saturation can go from 10 to 30's depending on the image. The point is to saturate the colors to make it stand out even more, but not to the point where it ovesaturates and stuff like this pops out.

Big no no to the colors above. That is way too high.

For Speedy here, +12 saturation should be enough. You can also adjust Hue a bit. Having it +5 or lese, or -5 or less can give it a more reddish tone or yellow tone. Play around it a bit to get the desire tone you want.

The result should be like this now.

Afterwards, the colors should be alright, so its time to sharpen the image.

Go to Filter tab>Sharpen>Sharpen.

Then IMMEDIATLY go to Edit>Fade Sharpen. That option is right under "Step Backward".

Have the opacity in "Fade Sharpen" Go down to 50%. Mode should be normal.

That is how most of my images get sharpened.

However, some crappy images, like the Speedy one here I am demonstrating, may actually need to be Sharpened TWICE before using the fade sharpen feature. So for Speedy it was the Filter>Sharpen>Sharpen option TWICE, then Edit>Fade sharpen, and I have the opacity at 30%.

It's all about getting the right sharpness that is not jagged, but not too blurred either.

Now Speedy looks like this.

Now the final step before its ready. This is a trick I learned from some LJ Icon tutorials.

First, duplicate your layer.

Then right click on the TOP layer and select Blending Options.

Now make sure you are in the blending options default selection. Under General Blending, change Blend Mode from Normal to Soft Light. Then have the opacity be from 30% to 50%.

This option lets the light and shadows stand out more, giving the image a bit more dimension. This trick especially works well with CG game characters, like Square's FMV character models. It makes it look more 3D.

So we have now gone from this:

To the final finished product:

Remember, the numbers in all the settings I have given is simply a range. It is best for each of you to watch what happens to your image and to re-adjust each setting to your own liking. Here are some more examples of what I did for my own avatars, as well as for some others.

AcerBandit did this with a Falcon avatar he was working on using the same instructions I have above, which I gave him via MSN. This is his result.

So there you have it! Its pretty easy. Give it a try!

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