So, my computer chair has entered into the next phase of its neverending bid to kill me.
A while ago, one of the five legs broke off, which has led to me falling over numerous times, besides the fact that if I get out of the chair with the gap behind me, the weight of the back causes it to fall over.
Since then, I have managed to break off both arms, which were just big plastic pieces held on by cheap screws. The first one snapped the heads off the screws when I ripped it the fuck off in a fit of anger, probably at a game…the second one broke off later, as I was leaning to pick something up, as I recall. Fucking potmetal screws…
After that, the plastic outer on one of the other legs started to come off. The legs are a plastic outer, with a tubular metal frame, and for some reason, the casters stick into the plastic outer part… Nice design choice there, assholes.
So, if the plastic outer comes loose, the caster is liable to just come out from under you instead of moving when you try and move the chair… Bloody marvelous. That was fixed by putting two self-tapping sheetmetal screws through the bitch. Temporary fix, it still twists a little. Of course, now the plastic outer on the leg on the opposite side of the gap has come off, and I’m out of screws.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, yesterday when I sat down at my computer, the seat felt like it moved in a weird way, and I heard a soft metal-on-metal ‘klink’ sound, and something landing on the floor… $%$@#…
When I went to get up again, it became obvious what had happened…because as I stood up, the seat pitched forward and damn-near dumped me on the floor. Seems the bolts that hold the seat cushion assembly to the metal chassis broke… Just in the back though. But why is it pitching forward like that? Well, that’s easy. Because some idiots decided it’d be awesome to bolt the backside to the chassis, and have the front end bolted through big rubber things that let the front end act like a fucking hinge.
Who came up with this shit? Fuck it. Buying a new chair. Need to replace the chair at the other computer too anyway.
Leave a comment | PermalinkWell, windows is reinstalled, almost all my software is reinstalled and everything is working… I still have the problem where I have to keep rebooting until all my partitions come up writable… But I have conceded that.
I’m even less motivated now than I was on Tuesday… I feel like I just climbed a mountain or something and am entitled to laze about for a while…
Anyway, I have a lot to do once I get my ass in gear. Here’s the most pressing ones:
- Build my sister’s website/storefront so she can start selling online.
- Get a drupal site up and running on my new site which I have yet to unveil.
- Help my father learn how to do shit like that.
- Make progress on my big game project.
- At some point put together a drupal site for the new GPMoD.
Yeah, I’ve got my work cut out for me.
Leave a comment | PermalinkSo, yesterday afternoon I was bored and unmotivated, it was still two days before my package of books was going to arrive, and I really just wished that Thursday would hurry its ass up and get here, or I could find something to keep me busy for two days.
That would be when my computer decided to take a massive shit. It had help though. (More about that later) So here it is, Wednesday afternoon, and I just now have a working computer again. (Not to say I was computer-less, we would all be dead.)
The ironic part?
MY PACKAGE ARRIVED A DAY EARLY!
So, here’s what happened… Ever since I built this machine, there’s been a problem where some of the partitions (Usually just one.) will come up write-protected after a reboot. And I have to keep rebooting until all of them are writable. Now, this is fucking ridiculous to begin with, because windows provides NO WAY to write-protect partitions, let alone UNDO such a thing… Apparently you SORT of can… It brings us to the next act in this fucking Greek tragedy…
DISKPART. It’s a windows commandline tool for editing disk partitions (Duh.) The stupid thing is, it has this really annoying interface where instead of telling it to ‘do x to y’ you have to go through and select the ‘y’ and then tell it to ‘do x’ to the currently selected disk/partition/volume… There’s a command for editing volume attributes, one of which is the READONLY flag… So I tried it… Nothing. My F: drive still didn’t become writable. So I looked at the commands again…
I saw a command with the description ’sets the active partition’… That’s what it called it, the ‘active partition’. Is that anything like the ’selected partition’? No. No it isn’t. What this FUCKING TRAP of piss-poor documentation and software design actually does, is set the BOOT PARTITION.
So, after unknowingly setting the boot partition to F:, and giving up on fixing the problem, I reboot the computer… Which greets me with a friendly ‘Insert Bootable Media and Press Any Key to Continue…’
GODDAMNMOTHERFUCKINGSONOFABITCHSHITBAGFUCKNUTASSHOLECOCKSUCKERWHOREMASTER!!!
Okay okay, don’t freak… I should be able to put in my windows CD and use the recovery console to fix this. BZZT! WRONG! The standard XP Pro x64 CD, despite being three years newer than XP x86 (And basically a different product, since it’s based more on Windows2k3) doesn’t have SATA drivers… So I have to nLite a new windows CD… Fine, whatever.
After plenty of trial and error, I get to the recovery console. OH LOOK! It has DISKPART! …uhm, this is a completely different tool.
What. The. FUCK.
Yes, that’s right. The Recovery Console DISKPART tool and the windows commandline DISKPART tool are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. The Recovery Console version only allows for the creation and deletion of partitions. This is IN NO WAY HELPFUL. In fact, after a bit of digging, it becomes readily apparent that…wait for it…
THERE IS NO WAY TO CHANGE THE BOOT PARTITION FROM THE WINDOWS RECOVERY CONSOLE
What the shit is that? Who the fuck came up with this shit? ARRGH! So anyway, I boot an Ubuntu linux livecd I have lying around, go in, and look… And my RAID mirror shows up as two sets of identical partitions… I don’t even want to fucking TOUCH them… FDISK is being a bastard and refuses to access any of the drives anyway…
After a couple more hours of trial and error, I try Ubuntu again, and this time I use CFDISK, which is a text-based GUI version of FDISK. It let me remove the boot flag from F: and put one on C: VICTORY! …not. Windows BSODs. Windows BSODs. Windows doesn’t NOT BSOD, regardless of how I boot it… That’s where I left it last night.
Today, I downloaded the latest Ubuntu, made a for-real full nLite’d install CD for windows, since I had decided there was no helping a full reinstall. Booted Ubuntu, copied the contents of C: to my storage drive, tried to install windows… No go.
It said there isn’t enough room to install to C: and if I continue, Setup will format the partition. Okay. Do it. There is not enough room to install to C:, press ENTER to return to the partition selection screen. Wait, what? What the fuck? FORMAT IT! ARRGGHH!! Futz around with it for an hour, finally just reboot to the recovery console, format C:, then installed… And that takes me to about an hour or two ago.
I have moved through several states of dementia with this fucking thing, but I have windows reinstalled, and didn’t lose any data. Oh, but F: is write-protected again… MOTHERFUCKER.
We’ll see where it goes from here.
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That was weird. Got woken up at 4am this morning by the power coming back on… Seemed it was only out for a couple minutes at most, according to my mIRC timestamps. Looked outside, there were no signs of a storm or anything. Weird.
Anyway, I got some new HDDs today. A 500gb to replace the one in my RAID5 that went bad, and another to add more storage to my newer box.
I’ve been learning a lot about Drupal, I think I’m definitely going to use it for the revamp of GPMoD. However, first I’m going to use it for my new site. This new site will be the site for my various projects. I will unveil it when it’s finished.
Leave a comment | PermalinkYes, well. It turns out that writing what basically amounts to interactive anime porn is really embarrassing for anyone with so much as a single moral fiber left in their being. Apparently I qualify. I also might have alienated a few people who know me…
Of course, it may just be the fault of western culture in-general. *sigh* I blame the misfortune of my birth.
So yeah, I decided that, instead of trying to make Owaranai no Natsu just yet, I was going to make a short story. I had sort of had this idea for an ero doujinshi in my head, but it wasn’t fleshed-out…so to speak…
More on that later, as I’m not sure I’m ready to reveal it…so to speak…
Leave a comment | PermalinkSmith Micro (The company that acquired e-Frontier) announced, at San Diego Comic Con, their release plans for Manga Studio 4 (The English localized version of Celsys’ ComicStudio, one of my favorite applications EVER.) Lincy Chan, OEL Manga artist for TokyoPop, was on-hand to demo the software at their SDCC booth, and from a brief forum exchange with her, it seems she’s had the privilege of betatesting the English localization. (Like me, she’s been using the Japanese version for a while now.)
This is the first definite news most people have even heard of a localized CS4, and to hear that it’s going to hopefully be on shelves this fall, is really welcome news. If you have any interest at all in comic illustration, or just anime-style illustration in-general, this is $300 you’re going to want to keep handy for the next several months.
ComicStudio 3 was already a pretty damn great tool, ComicStudio 4 makes some serious improvements in a lot of areas, besides adding some new features. ‘Totally worth the price of admission’, as they say.
Leave a comment | PermalinkWell, I haven’t attempted to make any further progress on the game prototype yet, as I’ve been concentrating mostly on the lack of art. I experimented with doing 3D characters and rendering them to 2D, and that’s still a possibility, but for the moment, I’m trying to level up my drawing skills as that would actually serve to accomplish more goals.
I did make quite some progress on the 3d modeling though.
First celshaded render of v0001 body.
More progress. / Another angle.
This is where I left off. / Celshaded version.
After running into problems time and time again modeling the arms and legs, and wrestling with the fact that my model was not stylized enough for my needs, I ripped some models from Illusion’s celshaded 3D eroge, Schoolmate, and decided to look at how they were put together. I started a new model using those proportions as a guide.
But then I got sidetracked with drawing. As most of you know, I went ahead and dropped a king’s ransom on an Intuos3 Special Edition 9x12 tablet… I would have liked to have gotten a Cintiq, but I like my organs more.
Anyway, I cleaned up my desk a little to make room…which also allowed me to finally put my other 19″ LCD back into service. I no longer have a workspace, I now have a…PWNSPACE!
Wacom’s Intuos3 Grip Pen is quickly becoming one of my favorite writing implements, just behind my Rotring 600 series mechanical pencil. Hopefully I’ll have something to post before the weekend is over. I find I am steadily improving, if only from ’shit’ to ‘crap’ so far.
Leave a comment | PermalinkWell, I’ve been doing a lot of stuff… Of course, most of you can’t tell because I seem to be asleep or just waking up most of the time. I’ve gotten into a sort of a cycle… Get up. Have something to eat. Get down to work. Work until I start getting really tired, go lie down and play Disgaea on my PSP until I can’t keep my eyes open, sleep. Rinse and repeat.
The problem is, this cycle doesn’t have an exact period or duration… Anyway, enough about that…
As some of you may know, I’ve written a story called ‘Owaranai no Natsu’, but having no drawing ability, I was unable to make a manga like I’d wanted to. Time and time again I’ve hit upon the idea of modeling characters in 3D and going from there… I’m very good with Lightwave Modeler, but cannot model organics for the life of me…
Putting all that aside, I started looking at other aspects of this whole thing… Like how to tell the story. I came up with the idea of doing a Visual Novel. After searching around a bit, I found Ren’Py (A portmanteau of Ren’Ai and Python) a Visual Novel / Ren’Ai / Eroge engine built on the Python programming language.
From the website, it looked difficult to write for. After downloading it and trying for myself, it made a lot of sense and was very easy to get a handle on. (As evidenced by the fact that I of all people can write for it.) I made a little test program to learn basic functionality. (The character artwork is a downloadable from the Blade Engine website.)
But again came the question of art… Just what was I going to do?
-UPDATE-
I’ve updated the test program. I’m going to try and keep this post current with new releases. Though I will probably move this to a dedicated post after a couple more revisions.
Version History
v0.0005 - First public release.
v0.0006 - Added character portraits, progressive text display, and Click-to-Continue indicator. :D
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So, I have this fire mage in Disgaea… She was one of my first characters. Right now, she is the highest level character I have. Mostly because I’ve been using the item world to level her magic… She can clear the first ten levels of any item all by herself. She has like 500HP and 700SP.
Another of the many over-engineered aspects of Disgaea, is that you can create new characters at any time. And all your characters earn points that allow them to do things like create characters. A newly-created character is the apprentice of the character that created them. This has many side effects. A master and an apprentice are far more likely to execute combo attacks, and a master can use any of the spells their apprentice knows if they’re in adjacent tiles, first at level 0, but if you use it a couple of times, it reaches level 1, and the master has PERMANENTLY LEARNED THE SPELL. This can be used to your advantage. (I forget the exact terms used in the English version, I’ve been playing the Japanese version…)
For instance, that fire mage? I had her create a white mage, and one each of the other two elemental mage types. So now, besides her regular fire spells (Which she has learned up to the ‘giga’ level), can use cast wind elemental spells, ice elemental spells, and healing spells.
I think it’s time to level other characters… She does twice as much melee damage with her staff as Laharl does with his sword. Yeah.
What I’ve been doing is, just having her step out of the level entrance, and stand there casting spells on the closest mobs as they move in. She can reach damn near a quarter of the map with that shit.
There’s something decidedly bent about a girl dressed like a maid letting out a girly little giggle, and then unleashing a spell that does like 1000 damage over a wide area of the map.
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