09.23.16
September
22 & 23 Uploads 2016
The month end is getting close! For
this entry I'll be discussing the following videos: What
Do You Know About Canada?🍁,
Can
You Pass the U.S Citizenship Test? 🌐🚕🗽,
Infiniti
and Beyond!, Flapy
Totem: Treat Your Little Red Bird With Respect!,
and
BMW and
Mini.
I've done GM,
so now I wanted to go and check out the
Bavarian Motor Works and Mini cars. Well, not so much the Minis, but
they co-exist with them because they are owned by
them, so where you see BMW, you're going to run into Mini. Good? Bad?
Depends on how you feel about them. For me, it's neutral, but
anyways! It was fortunately yet another bright, warm, sunny September
day, so I visited to the Endras location to film these luxury German
cars. It seemed to be mostly Minis around the entrance and front, but
there were a couple of great looking BMWs as well. There wasn't that
much to film near the front, so I went further towards the east in
hopes of finding lots of nice shiny BMWs to film, only to find that
the gate was locked. Bummer.
I was hoping to film at least 10 minutes of BMW and Mini action, but
because I couldn't find any other non-invasive way of getting in,
this resulted in a
shorter than expected video. Nonetheless, I still got to take a good
number of pictures before heading over to the neighbouring Infiniti
dealership. The BMW X5 is the BMW I would take home if I were in the
market for a BMW vehicle right now.
Comedy notice:
Even though the Orange BMW was part of the used Infiniti inventory, I
felt that it was better for the role it served, though you could
argue that the blue mini behind the victim would've made more sense
to use.
A bit punny
and clickbaity probably, but hey, it really suits it! Infiniti is
Nissan's luxurious crown, so it goes beyond being your standard,
plain car! Or does it? Who knows. Unlike the tightly guarded BMW
dealer, I was able to explore the entire dealership (minus the inside
of course) so this allowed me to film and photograph just about
everything. In the video, you hear me mentioning a “forbidden”
construction area, but after taking a closer look, it
turned out that it was not as forbidden as I thought. After I stopped
filming and decided to go around taking full resolution pictures, I
discovered that it was a Lexus dealership under construction. Nice!
So this strip is going to be home to three luxurious entities: BMW,
Infiniti and in December, Lexus. Could Porsche be next? Doubt it!
There's probably no space, and it would be highly protected. If I had
to buy an Infiniti that day, I'd take an Infiniti QX80 in Hermosa
blue – Wait! That word: hermosa. It sounds very familiar... Doesn't
it mean beautiful in Spanish or something like that? Let's quickly
check—Yes!
It is the feminine form of hermoso, which indeed means beautiful, but
I had been under the impression that it might have been slang.
Ok, so the
full proper title of the game is actually Flappy
Totem Bird FREE,
and it was developed by Ajani InfoTech Private Limited. This
developer also has a plethora of other wonderful games and
applications available for the BlackBerry 10 platform, so you can
check them out in
the BlackBerry World.
I have no idea how good most them are, but they sound good judging
them
from
the
names. The app I'll be talking about from them is the one you just
read and watched in the video: Flappy
totem.
Overall,
I'd say that it's a good app, but I just wish that free version
offered a bird that does not get “injured” and
cause you to wait two minutes if you crash too frequently or
too soon. Oh well. Can't always have your cake and eat it, and they
do work hard,
so I guess they deserve some pay for their hard efforts, even if it's
a just a flappy spin-off. It's a nice one. The graphics are great,
game play was smooth, and because the character is small and light,
it makes the game to be one of the easier spin-offs of Flappy bird.
Before I resorted to nonsensical, corny narrations, the audio was
actually quite decent, but could still be better. Now about the
narrations... um... I guess after the bird got injured, I couldn't
bother with dealing with a workaround to capture the game's
audio, so I lazily just resorted to commenting instead, even though
it was horrible! Still, better than a silent game in my opinion, or
perhaps silence would have actually been a better option! Maybe.
Despite what I say about how the game should be free, you're honestly
better off coughing up that 0.99¢ if you want to play this game.
Otherwise, don't bother unless you're actually very good at playing
flappy bird, or you'll find yourself seriously
frustrated every time you have to wait two minutes from crashing too
often. Who knows, maybe
I'll actually come back to this game with the full version and
original audio this time! We'll see...
Ok,
I know it's the Canadian Test video that mentions the discussion, but
since the USA test video was done first, it means that you'll see the
problem that plagued the quizzes I've done two days ago on it first.
My first attempt to recorder the video was with the namesake
application Screen Recorder, but after I figured out that it only
recorded one minute and eighteen seconds out of fifteen minutes, I
was crossed! After that, I didn't even bother attempting to use it
again, so I just decided to use ScreenCorder instead. Ideally, I
wanted to film it in front of my microphone, but because my phone no
longer gets wifi in certain areas of my home, I had to resort to
recording in another area. “How will I record the sound?” I
wondered. I then decided to go with running the Parrot application in
the background to see how it would go, and it worked! The sound was
recorded and my voice sounded even louder and crisper than what it
would in my bedroom! When editing time came, it was a nightmare...
the audio was on point for some parts, but became grossly off frame
in
some parts. Why?! Even when I threw the unedited audio onto the
unedited video, it still wouldn't sync! What?! I tried all sorts of
methods including sliding, trimming, adjusting etc., but no avail.
When I eventually saw that I was going nowhere with this, I had two
options: one, abort the video. Two, put up an “excuses” slide.
You know what the deal is, because you're reading this and have
watched the video, so I went with option
#2
to warn people and let others know what was up. Well technically,
that was done on the Canadian test video, but the American test video
did have an annotation near the end that mentions the
off-sync audio issue. So now I'm curious: what happened with Parrot?
Did something get borked while it was recording? I know it obviously
distorted my voice sometimes, which I filled in with a beep in one of
the parts. Speaking of that, as funny or not funny as some of you may
have found them, that was the intention: to fill in unbearable
goof-ups and occasional
distorted words. I originally wanted to leave them out, but I thought
that it would've been a better idea to use fillers to make the audio
length
match the video length,
but with or without, original audio and unoriginal audio, it still
didn't work... Sigh... Next time, I'll honestly just have to find a
way to get my wifi back, but that's the problem: why the hell doesn't
my phone have reception in some areas anymore? It is the router to
blame? The house? The operating system? Who knows! Probably the
operating system, because my computer usually manages to get signals,
whether they're good or not, so it might just be that. Speaking of
operating system, BlackBerry 10 has really and sadly become such
a big
joke! It was supposed to see 10.3.3.3 or something like that from
when, and hasn't, and probably never will, despite the so called
commitment they
keep lying about. John
Chen, I'd rather you just say, “Sorry, were done with BlackBerry 10
for good now,” than to keep lying and saying that you're committed.
Now that I've spent a considerable amount of time explaining,
complaining and ranting, it's time to briefly mention the quiz
itself.
Majority of the answers I had no idea about, but as mentioned above
and in the Canadian video itself, that score was originally much
lower, but I must have accidentally clicked a link that took me out
of the quiz. This
caused my results to become skewed by the time I came back to it. The
quiz was fun, but editing time was painful
thanks
to the broken audio that couldn't sync!
Since
I already got all my negativity and complaints
out with the American entry above, I can focus solely on the Canadian
Test itself for this one. This
test was even longer than the American version
and offered no trivia, so it was quite a serious test!
Not my commentaries though. They were quite ridiculous, hilarious,
offensive or overkill depending on the way you view it. So, why did I
take these tests? Well, I haven't done any quizzes on the channel
before and
despite how I joke
about them not being games, they are indeed a type of game, so why
not? If I did America, I felt that it was only natural to go ahead
and take the Canadian test. I fared poorly on both tests and
proceeded to making cheesy commentaries on how I was not going to be
allowed to live in either countries after failing their tests, and
that I would be sent through an unsanitary ship or plane back to
Jamaica to be slapped, whipped and pick bananas. Again, if haven't
said it already, do not take this ridiculous video with it's equally
ridiculous commentary seriously,
or else you're ridiculous yourself for taking ridiculous
commentary seriously! Anyway, after the poor audio results with these
videos, I'm determined to do another quiz video in the future with
accurately synced audio this time! Don't know how I'll fix the wifi,
but as mentioned last time, experimentation
and progression
is the reasoning behind my lousy videos. Actually,
the solution is quite clear: Screen Recorder is the way to go for
mobile commentary videos, but I'll just have to shout at the
developer to fix his app!!!! Ok, so I won't shout, but you know what
I mean. It's an application with great potential, so it's a shame to
see it act so painfully unreliable sometimes!
Where
is it?! Yikes! Looks like I didn't record a session this time, but
hopefully will another time.