Seriously. It's been a while. Well, I have been pretty busy with one thing or another, and finding the time to do everything has been difficult. BUT, I haven't forgotten all of my wonderful friends here on dA, so now I'm going to give you an update. Because so much has happened, though, it's like I'm sending several small Journal entries at once, so I'm going to divide this one into sections, starting with:


Changes
Well, it's finally happened, and I have to say, I'm glad. Mum has finally decided to officially move out to her fiancee's house. I don't want to sound terrible saying I'm happy about it; I'm not saying "good riddance." Mum had been torn apart recently, try to live two lives of commitment, one to us (myself, my Grandmother and Grandfather) and one to her fiancee and fiancee's kids. It wasn't working. It's a long story, and while I don't mind talking about it, I'd rather not, simply because I'm BORED of going over it again and again with every person I mention it to. ANYWAY. Suffice it to say that my immediate family and their immediate family don't mesh well, and also are an hour apart geographically, so Mum spending time living there and time living here meant that we were all starting to feel divided over the stress.

Gran and I had seen for some time that Mum, despite her original claims, would move permanently in with her fiancee sooner or later (and probably sooner,) so it came as no surprise to us when Mum finally announced her decision. I'm just glad that she's finally MADE a decision and committed to it; now we can all get on with our lives again!


Shit!!! RUN!!!
As anyone who watches my gallery will probably be aware by now, I play Mabinogi. A lot. It's a plague, and addictive plague I tell you, and I love it for that. So, I was playing the other day, and got into a party with four other players, headed for Barri dungeon. Barri is a fairly tough place, especially for a relative beginner like me, but it's survivable, except for the boss at the end. Five - FIVE - Ogre Warriors, each one extremely tough. I tried fighting them once; I used strategy to single them out, knowing I couldn't fight them all at once. The one I started with was barely damaged by my strongest efforts, and I had to do an emergency logout to save myself.

Ahem. So anyway, we were in Barri dungeon as a mining party. Barri contains randomly placed piles of Ore, wherein you can mine Iron, Copper, Silver and Gold, which can then be refined into ingots and either sold or made into tools and weapons with the Blacksmith skill. So, we were all having a grand old time, mining merrily away and fighting the goblin hordes. We had a couple of deaths (strictly speaking, no one dies in Mabinogi, but getting KO'd is pretty much the same thing) but because we had five people, there was almost no chance of EVERYONE getting killed at once, so we were able to keep going. There was one troubling incident where I got KO'd when two goblins ganged up on me too fast, and through some glitch I fell slightly outside the level boundary, which meant my teammates couldn't reach me to revive me. I had to revive at the beginning of the dungeon floor, but thanks to the size of the group, the resulting HP loss was quickly made up for.

Eventually, we reached the bottom floor, which contains the boss room. Now, first let me tell you something special about my copy of Mabinogi. I've replaced some music files with ones that I thin are a better fit. For instance, when I'm in the Mabinogi "field," I get to hear the World Map Theme from FF7. The same with the final floor of any dungeon; because it leads to the boss, I used the FF7 tune from the beginning, during the reactor bombing run. For those of you who don't remember it, it's a dramatic, tension building tune that pretty much says, "It's go time."

So, we get all the way to the boss room. Now, something I've learned in Mabinogi: almost every large party ends up with at least one hotshot who thinks he can take on the whole game at once. In this case, it was an elf guy who had obtained the first stage of elf transformation, "Falcon Mode." The other four of us, myself included, are sitting down, recovering our HP, and saying that we're not doing the boss, and he's like, "I've got Falcon, I'm fine," etc. So, in he goes, and starts attacking the first Ogre Warrior, which starts coming for him. The rest of us are watching from the adjacent room, and quickly realize that his attacks are having almost no effect except to slightly slow the Ogre down. Then, out of the blue, this hotshot turns and runs BACK INTO THE ROOM WHERE WE WERE SITTING! We're all like, "NO!!! GO AWAY!!! DON'T BRING IT IN HERE!!! GET OUT!!!" But he keeps coming, firing an occasional shot back at the hotly pursuing Ogre. So we're all like, "SHIT!" or at least "***!" since Mabi has a censor filter, and turn and start running back down the hall. You don't realize how big these Ogres are until you see one almost FILL UP the hallway behind you. Mister hotshot's still attacking this thing, and it's lost maybe 10% of its HP at best. We're all running like mad, and anyone who has a horse or ostrich is summoning it and moving out fast. We're getting so tense, I'm actually laughing my head off in real life at the same time as I'm panicking in the game, and I'm sure the rest of 'em were doing the same. Someone's like, "oh *** oh *** oh *** oh ***," as we keep running, while advice is also being yelled. Emergency bombs were fired, explosions filling the hall as the Ogre keeps advancing, and at one point I raced for the end of the hall yelling, "SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT". All to the tune of FF7's bombing run.

We all typed as though we were freaked out in the game, but I think everyone was cracking up in reality, just like me. It was the most fun I've had in a dungeon yet.


Computer Changes
Well, now that Mum's moving out, I get her computer. It's an excellent HP slimline model, sporting a Dual-Core 2.6GHz AMD Athlon something-or-other, a 128MB onboard GeForce 430n, 2GB of RAM, a 500GB Seagate hard drive... And Windows Vista. DELETED!

Seriously, I for one will NOT use a Vista machine. Any OS that doesn't let the SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR change the security settings is OUT. So, I've done yet another of my clean XP scrubs. It didn't go without a hitch though; when I booted up the new XP machine, it was at the barely functional level. Even with SP3 installed. I figured out why eventually: this computer is about six years younger than XP, which means its hardware uses drivers unknown to XP. A driver is basically a set of instructions that tells the computer how to use the parts attached to it. Windows XP comes with a database of drivers for all kinds of major technology brands, but being so much older than this computer, the drivers just weren't in the old database. So, after many hours of Google searching, I tracked them down and installed them one by one, so it's working PERFECTLY now. I just have to finish installing a few updates and programs, and I'm set.

Another problem was with the 500GB hard drive. During the installation, XP only recognized that the drive was 136GB in size, so I lost over 300GB. Not good. But, after some tweaking and searching online again, I've been able to recover all the "unallocated space." It's in a separate partition though, something which I can't avoid. A partition is basically a section of the hard drive, of a size determined by you, which the computer interprets as a separate drive. So basically, if you divide your hard drive into three partitions, your computer acts as though there are three separate hard drives. I'm going to call this second partition the Z drive, and install all my programs on it. My own files never take up much space anyway; my laptop only has a 10GB hard drive, and I've still got 2.12GB free. Beat that.


In Closing
So, overall, things have been good to me lately. I've finally received the Emerald Night, the latest and greatest super train model form LEGO. $99; I saved up for two and a half months. But now it's MINE!!! I'll be building it today after lunch. I've been programming faithfully for Midnight Hacker too, and I hope to have some screenshots ready for autumn.

I've also started re-opening the old project idea of Ultimate Superhero, which is a Manga idea I had several years ago. and worked on it with me for a while before we disbanded, and it got shelved. But now, I'm dusting it off and starting some more concept sketches, now that I'm better at Manga itself. I'm also having to rename two of the original characters. Betcha didn't know that Calvin Turner and Julia Hart of Oh Oh Oh Sexy Vampire fame originated as superheroes, eh? Well they did. Now that Oh Oh Oh Sexy Vampire's achieving such popularity, however, I can't keep reusing the same names in completely different stories and character roles, so I'm renaming. I use two methods for naming characters these days: one is to take an important or significant term, name or phrase, then anagram (rearrange) the letters to form something that sounds like a name. This has already been done in Oh Oh Oh Sexy Vampire... TWICE. Many of you have probably found the more obvious one, but I DARE you to find the other. For those of you that I already told it to, SHADDAP; don't spill it.

The other method is quite simple, and I got it from the creator of Fullmetal Alchemist. You'll need two books: a book of first names, and a dictionary. Flip through the book of names to a random spot, and find a name that seems to suit the character, then do the same with the dictionary to get the surname. Using this method, Ultimate Superhero's Julia Hart has now become Dawn Radix. Calvin still hasn't been renamed yet; I was up late last night.

That about concludes my recent life. Oh, and one other thing: I'll be getting in contact with dA in a while, as I feel that they've missed a very important at form, and I've got some ideas on how to rectify it. Stay tuned for my prototype idea, coming out some time in... Ohh... the next week or two?

Sayonara!