Here’s my first few attempts. Nothing too amazing here, I know, but you can see the potential. I think to really pull off the effect there should be a gang of spartans in the screenshot. Scroll down to read a quick tutorial on how to duplicate this effect, then round up the hooligans you call friends, and try to make your own tilt shift halo pics.

Halo 3 Titl Shift ~ Click the pic for the Full Size Image

Halo 3 Titl Shift ~ Click the pic for the Full Size Image

Halo 3 Titl Shift ~ Click the pic for the Full Size Image

Halo 3 Titl Shift ~ Click the pic for the Full Size Image

If you want to create your own, just fire up that pirated version of photoshop. You will also have to get some sweet screenshots together.. duh!

1. Open up your screenshot, switch to ‘Quick Mask Mode’
2. Select the Gradient Tool and draw a vertical line thru the area you want to highlight*

You can see in ‘tutorial image 01′ that the line is only about 30% of the total height of the screenshot I’m working with. The rest of the image will become blurred out.

Tutorial Image 01 - Choosing Quick Mask mode

3. Now switch out of ‘Quick Mask’ mode by toggling it off
4. You should now see the ‘marching ants’ just like tutorial image 2

Tutorial Image 02 - The Marching Ants of the Quick Mask

5. Apply a Lens Blur (Filter-> Blur -> Lens Blur)
6. Invert your Quick Mask (Select -> Inverse)
7. Sharpen the Highlighted area (Filter -> Sharpen -> Sharpen)
8. Deselect the Mask (Control + H)
9. Adjust Saturation (Image -> Adjust -> Hue/Saturation) (just crank it up to about 30)
10. Adjust Contrast (Image -> Adjust -> Brightness/Contrast)

Steps 7, 9 and 10 are where you will make some tweaks to the tutorial. Play with the settings a bit and see what you can create. A lot of this will depend on the image you select, and whether it has a lot of bright sun, or if it’s darker.

Experiment with putting a lot of things in the frame, close ups, explosions or whatever. Find a place to upload (you guys must know how to do that by now, right?) and post links in the comments section. If I see any good ones, I’ll post them on the main page.

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Africa is so lovely this time of year.

I can't stop shooting

Here’s the Full Game Stats. Top to bottom ownage.

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I then told him that it was a good thing I was recording all this, so that he could actually hear the way he sounds to others. Hopefully, he’ll take my advice and visit the site to hear the following mp3.. enjoy, and take note of the lisp and the way he draws out the last word in each sentence. He’s either gay, or an elderly Southern woman.

You be the judge.. does this dude sound gay? .mp3

Now, Kevin, if you read this, I hope you’ll listen to the audio with an open mind. All these clips are you, and this is what you sound like. It’s OK to come out of the closet now… and, by the way, I had Samantha’s name in the audio clip and in this post, but since you were dumb enough to say her full name, I figured I would do her the favor of not posting it. There’s no reason she should pay the price for your stupidity.

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I actually logged on for a little Matchmaking with no expectations of coming away with a blog post. It was just going to be a few quick games with SquirrelBaits, who hasn’t been able to get online much lately.

But, sometimes you encounter stupidity on such a level, it must be addressed. Tonight I present to you another episode of wannabe gangster, xbox LIEvers. We’ve all encountered them, and we all know the type. Lots of boisterous claims with absolutely nothing to back it up.

(a93hb) was such a little douche, and was ready to beat my ass if only I would provide an address to meet him at. He insisted on a public place, so I decided on a small shopping center, and thanks to Google, I was able to deliver the exact address along with directions to my inevitable ass whoopin’!

The funniest part of the whole encounter wasn’t his bullshit, though. In fact, it was his insistence on calling us all gay, even though every comment out of his filthy mouth centered around him sticking a part of his body into a part of mine… or my dad’s, but never good ol’ mom. He was clearly into dudes exclusively.

I hope you find the man you’re looking for, a93hb .mp3

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Listen to the 2 dummies in a downward spiral of lies .mp3

Basically, they claimed to be able to “hack our account in 30 seconds” and of course, the old.. “I already got your ip” This is always the first sign that we’re dealing with an idiot who is just regurgitating words he’s heard other people use, with no real understanding of their meaning.

WRXJOE also changed his story a few minutes into the game, claiming that he never said a word about ips, but the audio tells a different tale. He also (very cleverly) asked if I believed that Microsoft could get my ip… wow, Joe.. you must really be a computer wiz to figure that one out.

You’ll hear a lot more of these 2 “xbox LIEvers” on next week’s Sound of Owning! Did I just coin a phrase? I always wanted to do that.

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This was our second game with Billy. He didn’t want to play the warthog map and get pwned. We exercised the crying duck veto power, and explained to him that as long as he took care of that Glowing Red Menace, we would easily win the match. I always expect to do well when we get to drive around in our 3 ton, 12.0 litre, liquid cooled M12 LRV, but I didn’t expect us to do this well..

We’ve played a few games with Billy since then. He’s not that great but he’s still not nearly as bad as the rest of you newbs out there… and I think his sister thought IsntOffensive was funny. Come to think of it, he hit it off with Billy’s dad too. Your family isn’t a very good judge of character.

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He starts out OK (mp3)

He Gets Angry and the threats start! (mp3)

Now he back peddles, but the stammering continues (mp3)

I picked on the wrong gamertag (mp3)

His gamertag is famous (mp3)

If you listened to all these messages, I’m sure you are laughing as hard as I was at this point. He claimed his gamertag was famous but a google search returned a grand total of ZERO results… WELL, Lizard boy, you’re Famous now. This probably wasn’t what you had in mind though, was it.

By the way, I am still on xbox, so what is the delay? Did your boss laugh in your face just like the rest of us, or were you just full of shit as I predicted?

I almost forgot, his gamertag was (SHOT LIZARD).. be sure to send him a message telling him how funny he was.

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Fast Forward to the end of the game, where we challenged the two wannabe gangsters to a ‘2 vs 2′ match. This is when the excuses started, along with the fake nervous laughter. They refused the challenge and I think we all know why.

• GoDz WoRsT FeaR (no one is afraid of you, loser)
• III QATAR III

Now, it’s too late and I’m too tired to go into all the ways that these 2 douchebags proved their ignorance.. so, let’s just say that their ebonics and wannabe thug attitude sealed their fate, and destined them to appear on our humble site.

UPDATE ~ The NOOB (III QATAR III) just jumped in my pre-game lobby to tell me why he couldn’t accept the challenge last night. It was.. and I quote “because my mom cut off my connection”. Thanks for the laugh. You would think a fake general would lie and come up with something more fitting of his gangster lifestyle. Maybe something like “I couldn’t play cuz I was smackin’ my bitches around”.

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wow kid you are the biggest fucking faggot ive ever met…like you seriously spend this much time of your life making fun of kids that arent good at a video game??? Wow man you are one cool mother fucker. i read how your making a film clip of one kids bad sniping…wow man you are going far in life. ur a fucking queef and you need to get some friends besides your computer and boyfriend that fucks you in the ass. peace out man…suck my fat cock. oh and one more thing…if i ever find out your real name I AM finding where you live and no im not gonna kill you…ohhhh nooo dont you worry i wont kill you…im going to torcher the fuckin shit out of you til your bleeding out every fuckin inch of your body. actually lets go into detail about a few things i have in mind for you. alright when you wake up from being your face punched in youll find a pile of blood on your lap…which will have probably come from either your cut off eye lids, nose, or ears…i still havent decided. then youll freak out and that will piss me off even more which means your fingers will have to be cut off one by one and shoved up your already stretched out asshole from your boyfriend. only like three of them will fit so im just going to take a drill to your ass and make new holes for them to go in. k im not gonna tell you everything thats gonna happen to you cuz what fUn WoUlD ThAt BE??? i am gonna tell you that the grand finale will end up being something along the lines of your own dick in through your eyesocket and out your mouth so ya. Well you have a nice day and if I were you I would not post your name anywhere i can find because i AM a man of my word…

While I do appreciate the imagination, and the fact that the man honors his word, I am a little horrified by the simple grammatical and spelling errors represented here.  Has no one explained to the young man the use of an apostrophe (not a mathematical prime ‘, mind you, a single “9-quote” or ’) for contractions like I’m?  Has his poor single mom not taken the time to explain the difference between “your” and “you’re”?  Can he really believe that torture is spelled torcher?  Have you become so complacent with your language that you allow your children to abbreviate a four letter word like your into ur, saving a whopping two characters?

I know times are tough with the clubs raising your house fees to compensate for the rising fuel prices of your high-end champaigne room/limo dances.  But this isn’t excuse to let your little bastards sit on the couch all night playing violent games on Xbox Live and completely neglecting their English assigments.  When a young man cannot express himself with eloquent words, when he becomes so frustrated with his inability to render his sentiments, will he not resort to expressing himself with the violence in which he immerses himself every night?  Will he not become just like his absent father?

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We also had another horrible teammate (slimpickins123) who was basically worthless, which effectively made it a 4 vs. 2 game of Snipers. No problem though.. we came out blazing and held the lead for a while until they finally managed to surround our base and get us back on our heels a bit. Even this strategy didn’t last long, however. They were just too shitty!

All things considered, it ended up being a ridiculously close game.

Here’s a quick video of me owning the NOOB twice in about 15 seconds. If you check the stats on the game, you’ll see he did manage to kill me a few times, but the full video in my file share tells the whole story. He only managed to pull it off when I was facing one of his teammates. Whenever we were locked up ‘mano a mano’, he fell to his knees.

Honarable mention goes out to my teammate (S0NYSUX) for actually pulling his weight. It’s so rare to find someone who can keep his K/D spread north of -10. Unfortunately, he didn’t say a word the entire game. Could he have known we were recording..?? The rest of the players in the match sure as hell didn’t.

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