Thaddeus Roscoe Robison Boyd stands on the threshold of becoming a college boy. The ground quivers. The Fourth Seal screeches, grinds, and then blasts open. Thad cackles. But one seal remains before he is admitted to the Guild Hall...and his hair is getting longer.
The Phoenix has risen. My destiny is true. Watch your backs, gaijin!
JustinParker: Have you [heard] anything about a Sonic movie[? S]ega said they bought the rights to some script[.]
[....]
KenPenders: [....]Ben Hurst and I have been discussing such a project, and Ben is putting together a first draft[.]
- Chat 00.06.01
Booyaka.
I've been meaning to update...I finished my last high school play, and an era of my life is sorta over.
But more to the point, I've started playing Suikoden again.
...Tossed April stuff into Archive. Put links to it on the other archive pages.
This update should've occurred about two weeks ago.
At the very latest, one week ago.
In point of fact, I have actually managed to obtain some (two) rabid fans (Ian MacLean and Rey Duran) who have asked me to update.
I told them I would soon.
I meant to.
But I didn't.
It all boils down to the fact that Flash is a piece of shit.
At any rate, I only managed one update for the whole of May. As such, it would be kinda stupid to put up a May Archive. Therefore, I'll leave my May material on the index page and have a combined May-June Archive next month.
Added brief correction to Life.
Oh, and I took the mailto link off Jessica's name on my pic. Because she's finally gotten rid of that account after not reading it for two years.
For more information on why Flash is a piece of shit, see my new Stream, Flash Is a Piece of Shit.
Oh, the humanity!
Flash. It's...really bad.
Just testing i am graduit!!!!!! online. It's...really bad. The sound synchs the worst it ever has. ...Well...on the first scene, anyway. The second scene's actually pretty good.
So, I suggest one of two things:
1. Don't watch it online. Instead, please download graduit.html and graduit.swf to your hard drive and open graduit.html from there.
2. Open graduit.html, but don't watch it. Turn off your audio and don't look at your monitor. Better yet, leave the room entirely for five or ten minutes. Then, after it's already loaded and gone through once, leave the page and come back.
Of course, if you have a really fast connection (...Brad...), it's kinda moot.
Thor finally went ahead and leaked Sharkey's "new" URL, so I've updated my links page. While I was at it, I took the opening spiel off the top since it no longer really applies. I'm considering doing that with the opening spiel on this page, but I'll save that for another update...I think I'll retool my massive (13.5k) sig first.
Finished Suikoden; new Stream and Life.
Changed the page intro, because I really can't say I'm "returning from a two-year hiatus" now that this page has been up for six months.
Tacked a quote onto the end of said new intro. If you can name the source, I'll give you...something good.
As hinted last update, I have retooled my sig. This mainly involved removing my half-assed attempts at centering and <gasp> actually deleting two quotes for the first time in years. For archival purposes, I have uploaded my old sig, and tossed a corresponding link to it at the Top.
Thinking about it, I should probably take my old intros and toss them onto their respective introductory months' archive pages. Maybe next update.
Went and saw the Desert Foothills Theater production of The Wallace and Ladmo Show at the Herberger Theatre last night. Added a Stream that shouldn't make any sense to anyone outside Arizona. ...Of course, there's some stuff at the end about Suikoden 2...
Created some animated ads in case anyone wants to link me.
New Stream.
Yesterday, just for the hell of it, I looked at my FP Hacks Page again. At that point, I realized it didn't look nearly as cool as I'd originally envisioned it. I thought about it long and hard, and there was something of a battle royale between the HTML minimalist in me and the monkey who likes shiny things in me. (Ummmm...I probably could've chosen a better way to word that...) Ultimately the monkey won out. So, while there's no real new substance on the FP Hacks Page, I made it prettier by tossing some tables onto it.
I also noticed I didn't include </TD> tags in my Link Me Page yesterday. Yeah, I know they're unnecessary, but I'm obsessive about using "good programming techniques". Hell, I still use </P> tags. But I draw the line at "...that's just silly.
Anyway, there are some invisible updates on the Link Me Page. Yay.
And finally, I thought the Sonic banner table...dammit, what do you call those?...you can't call 'em frames, because frames are something else...cell, that'll do nicely. I thought the Sonic banner table cell was ridiculously large (about 3x as big as necessary in 800x600, 5x in 1600x1200), so I finally decided to do what I've been meaning to do for awhile: make it a separate item from the sidebar table so it's only as big as is necessary, and toss the What's New section right under it and immediately to the right of the sidebar. The effect doesn't look as good in 800x600 as it does in 1600x1200, due to the size of the sidebar, but OTOH, now the Sonic cell just looks way too wide in 1600x1200.
First and foremost, as you can see at the Top, Ken and Ben (mainly Ben!) are working on a script for a Sonic movie. Things are looking up! But I'm keeping the banner up; you should still sign the petition.
Rewrote portions of my Links page and added links to Lily Swan's page and timmybighands.com.
Finally, I decided to upload BRR, a script I wrote my junior year in high school (a year and a half or so ago). It was never performed, but hey, if you like inside jokes and obscure references, you'll dig it. Available in both HTML and MS-Word 6.0/95.
It being the last day of the month, I've crammed everything into an Archive Page. Corresponding changes have been made on the other archive pages. Also, as I considered earlier, I've added my two slightly-different original page intros to the December-February Archive. Also fixed a broken link on the April Archive.
Also, as Sharkey's moved to www.solidsharkey.com, I changed the Links Page.
And a new (short) Stream.
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Last week, I reached the end of twelve years of shutting up, standing in line, and organizing folders the way people told me to instead of any way that would make sense to any human being.
I made it to a place that only twenty-two out of every two hundred people who started kindergarten in the great state of Arizona thirteen years ago made it: I became a high school graduate.
(Actually, I did not start kindergarten with my class. I skipped a grade. So I suppose that would make me a #23...cool.)
To commemorate the event, I thought about sending a long, ruminating message to a few close friends, as is my custom.
Then I considered putting a long, ruminating message here in my Stream of Consciousness section.
Then I just decided to make a Flash movie about graduation.
Over the past couple weeks, I pieced together a really bitchin' movie, which I call i am graduit!!!!!!.
Unfortunately...Flash is a piece of shit.
The first hitch: Flash, while it boasts support for both standard frame-based animation and tween animation, fails to mention that it won't combine the two: that is, you can't have a four-frame walk along a specific path. Which, correct me if I'm wrong, seems stupid as hell since even Mario Paint could do that.
Second, I found that Flash doesn't seem to do images with transparent backgrounds (if it does, the method is so well-hidden that I never found it). Therefore, I couldn't do a field of grass as one image, a character icon as another, and a translucent text box as a third; I had to have all of them as a single image made in another program to get the transparencies I wanted. So if the grass doesn't sync up perfectly from one frame to the next, just remember...Flash is a piece of shit.
Third, interestingly enough, Flash only seems to want to do TrueType fonts. This wasn't too big a deterrant, but it still seemed pretty stupid.
Fourth, in the cleanup phase, I noticed Flash had a nasty habit of allowing for redundant graphics, and, apparently, for leaving objects still existent even after the deletion of their visual representations. I got to play a game of "Guess Which One of the Five Instances of This Graphic Is the One It's Actually Using and Delete the Other Four".
Adhering to our good friend the Law of Fives, the fifth, final, and most evil, heinous, and damned inconvenient reason Flash is a piece of shit: the framerate changes when you render. After spending hours getting my music to synch with my video, I found that it didn't. I tried several more hours to get it to synch properly, but all for naught. And before I had a chance to resample and recrop my musical selections, I left for a vacation (which was very nice).
That was Sunday. Today, I returned from that vacation. And, biting the bullet, I finally decided to recrop my BGM. Sitting there with my stopwatch, I found out how long the final movie actually took, as compared to how Flash reported it to take (which was incorrect because Flash is a piece of shit). Then I reconciled that with appropriate endings of phrases in my two musical selections (the first one doesn't really end at an appropriate point, but damned if I was going to try to add frames correspondingly when I didn't even know the framerate). In doing so a second time, I effectively wasted several hours' work. Because Flash is a piece of shit.
The damn thing is, at last, finished. It's 3.4 megs. Hope you bastards enjoy...lord knows I spent enough time on it.
I s'pose I might as well go ahead and link it one more time: i am graduit!!!!!!
Oh yeah...Flash is a piece of shit.
"Became president of the Toran Republic, and..." ...vanished suddenly in the night?!
While some aspects of the end of Suiko transfer quite nicely into the sequel (Varkas was put in charge of border patrol; Cleo stopped fighting and now guards Teo's mansion, but, as Pahn's off on a journey, that's why you don't see him there with her until you bring McDohl back; Hix and Tengaar and Humphrey and Futch segue right into their appearances in the sequel), others don't so much. I thought it was kinda odd how they said McDohl became the president and Lepant went home to lead a quiet life with his family. ...Course, at the end, it DOES show McDohl (and possibly Gremio) leaving Gregminster in what appears to be the night...still, though, Lepant's bio doesn't exactly make sense.
And Leon sure as hell didn't spend the rest of his life in his hometown.
And if Kimberly managed to force herself into Tai Ho and Yam Koo's household...where is she in the sequel?
And Max obviously didn't retire from knighthood. ...Seems like they say the same thing about him in the end of 2...so maybe he'll be back in 3.
And talking of Max, Sancho is conspicuous in his absence in Suikoden 2. So there goes his "continued to serve his master" line.
And as for Lorelai...it says she went off in search of adventure, but she's right back in Gregminster when you end up there in 2. Yeah, I guess she could've come back on her way somewhere else, but...
Oh well. The odd thing is that these continuity glitches really don't bother me as much as the spelling-related ones ("Barbarossa", "Silverburg" vs. "Barbarosa", "Silverberg"). Maybe I'm a bit too anal retentive, but when I see something in the sequel spelled differently from how it was in the original, it interrupts my train of thought and immediately sets me thinking, "Hey, that's something in the sequel spelled differently from how it was in the original." ...So, adding to my belief that video games desperately need editors, I must also suggest that they need continuity experts. After all, "Barbarossa" and "Silverburg" aren't spelling errors, but they're noticeable continuity breaches.
Anyway, on to Suiko 2...
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If you're not from Arizona, or are just a few years younger than me, you probably don't know Wallace and Ladmo. It was a local children's TV show, and, over the thirty-five-plus years it aired, it became an Arizona institution.
Last night, I saw a stage production entitled The Wallace and Ladmo Show.
It was good.
Really good.
It brought back a lot of memories.
Now, you must understand that my age group was on the absolute tail-end of the Wallace and Ladmo phenomenon. I engage in no hyperbole when I say that when, a few months ago, they pumped the theme song through the Tempe High intercoms, juniors and seniors stopped mid-sentence and looked up grinning, while sophomores and freshman didn't get it.
(I'm sure a few sophomores and freshmen got it. I think I was eight or nine when they did the last episode.)
At any rate, I was surrounded by family members who remembered it from the '60's, so I was a bit out of my depth...but I certainly enjoyed it nonetheless.
My dad actually made it onto The Wallace and Ladmo Show when he was a kid. ...Or maybe he wasn't on it; I'm kinda hazy. But as I understand the story, he sent in a joke which won him a Ladmo Bag as a prize.
(Ladmo bags included all kinds of stuff...candy, chips, coupons for car washes, and Dad lucked out and got a cast photo in his that he still keeps on his dresser.)
The really cool thing about that story is that, some years after Wallace and Ladmo went off the air, and a matter of months before Ladmo died of cancer, we ran into him after he did a show at Big Surf. Dad introduced himself, told him he'd gotten a Ladmo Bag for sending in a joke, started telling the joke...and Ladmo nailed the punchline.
...I guess you have to be from Arizona to understand why that's so goddamn cool.
I may not be a huge fan of my state, but I will say unequivocally that Wallace and Ladmo was something Arizona definitely got right.
Anyway, the play was cool. The plot (a few guys have a smalltown gig, one becomes a huge success and has potential to make the bigtime, but sticks around rather than leave his friends) was something that you'd almost consider hackneyed and outright silly if not for the fact that it was true.
And it included a bunch of clips, cartoons, and even old, stupid, politically incorrect commercials.
And Bob Sorenson, who played Pat McMahon, had the voice down amazingly.
Anyway, if you get the chance to see it, do.
And if you're not from Arizona...maybe you should just take a glance at wallaceandladmo.com and try to understand what you missed.
At any rate, I promised Suikoden 2 talk at the end of this.
How many of you have played a game twice at once?
See, I'm trying to get all 108 Stars and complete the Clive/Elza subquest. The Clive/Elza subquest entails jamming through the game to a specific destination in under 20 hours. It's pretty damned hard to get all 108 Stars in under 20 hours. As such, I've determined a method of playing through each area twice: once to read dialogue and get a feel for whatever area I'm in, and then another time to blast through it as fast as I can, skipping over all dialogue. ...Lemme just say that it's a bitch when they put a half-hour between save points.
I've also been keeping three instances of the FAQ open at all times: one set to the part of the game I'm playing, one set to the next character I need to get, and one just there for me to browse through when I want to find something else.
Oh, and another rather curious translation discontinuity I forgot to mention last week: Viktor refers to his hometown as "Northwind" in Suiko 1, but it's North Window in 2.
Oh...and I also told Ruth I'd brag about her in my next update. So I will. My girlfriend dug Transformers: The Movie. Worship me, you ignorant masses.
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Boys and girls, a moment of silence for Clerks: The Cartoon. ABC, after airing only two episodes (only one of which I caught =P ), has decided to replace the rest of the run with Spin City reruns. Dumb bastards aren't even going to show the remaining four eps. Hopefully they'll get a video release or something.
Today, for Ruth's birthday, I hauled out my old NES and played my way through Super Mario Bros...and finally overcame one of the things that has haunted me. Fifteen years after the release of SMB, I finally beat it. ...That's right, I never beat Mario before today.
Read some more about Mega Man X for Game Boy Color. Turns out it's not a repackage of the SNES version, but includes some of the same Mavericks (a la Mega Man I-IV for Game Boy). ...I'm worried about how they're going to manage the dash without a third button...my guess is just the alternate tap-forward-twice stroke, but the bitch about that is that it makes dash-jumping off walls pretty well impossible. ...The graphics look like hell too...most likely because Capcom decided to make it compatible with the original Game Boy rather than Color-only.
Dragon Warrior I&II looks pretty sweet too. Looks like all the graphics and text have been redone. Odd seeing a black-on-white menu in the battle screen, but other than that, it looks like it'll be quite sweet.
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Having just finally reached the last straw with Mozilla's mail client, I finally went ahead and got me a copy of Eudora. I then proceeded to convert over a year and a half's worth of mail archives, spread across fifty or so files, from Mozilla format to Eudora format. Manually. Because Mozilla doesn't have an export utility and Eudora's import utility sucks ass. Now, you must understand, the message folders themselves are the same format (with different extensions...good God, why can't anyone end a frickin' plain-text document with .txt?!); it's the interpreter files that are incompatible. So, I copied my fifty or so files with no extension, renamed them as .mbx, and created corresponding empty files with .toc extensions. Eudora proceeded to read these as "damged table of contents files", and "rebuilt" the interpreters.
All this to say, I have a new mail client, which was a pain in the ass to set up. And now it's proven a pain in the ass to get the sound I want for it.
See, I had a brilliant idea for a "new mail" sound to use:
<Massive belch>
Krusty: Coming, Eudora!
After my search of about ten different pages each claiming the title "Ultimate Simpsons Sound Archive", and about twenty of other titles, I still haven't been able to turn it up.
Dammit.
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Games:
Got my copy of Suikoden back. ...I actually looked up babynames.com to find a good name for the Hero that began with "M"...because Suiko 2 is weird and for some reason tosses capital letters in over their corresponding letters in "McDohl" ("HoJu"="HcDJhl").
Finally came up with Magnar. It means "Warrior of Strength". It even sounds like sickly-translated Japanese!
Games, Addendum: Actually, "HoJu" yields "HcJohl".
Games: Finished Suikoden. About to move on to 2 with an FAQ in hand so I can get all 108...hey, it's not cheating if you've already beaten it under your own power.
Books: More Vonnegut: The Sirens of Titan.
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