Not much to say other than the on-board graphics for the computer doesn't seem to be the problem. I bought a new graphics card and installing it didn't change anything. So I'm at a stand still and I don't know how long it'll be this way.

To pass my free time I've been watching a lot of Criminal Minds and Ghost Whisperer marathons on the ION channel and WETV (for more Ghost Whisperer). I get teary eyed after every episode of G.W... *sigh* Ah, well, I enjoy the show a lot.

Other than that, I think that's all I can think of saying, so...

Till next time.

It's a mere six days until Christmas...and I'm not as excited as I thought I'd be. It's my favorite holiday and season of the year after all.

There could be factors contributing to this. One of which is boredom. I haven't had a working computer since the first week of November. I'm pretty sure the on-board graphics died, so the monitor displays nothing when I turn the computer on. Everything else works as I hear the start up music when windows starts. There are occasional instances when the monitor flashes a garbled and glitchy mess that seems to wave in a z pattern down the screen before going black again. I can't do anything about it now since I'm poor.

So, to pass my free time I've been playing games; mainly Soul Calibur IV. And I recently played through Star Ocean IV again after having not played it for 2-3 years. I remember that I just completed a universe playthrough and was working that file so I could get the 100% quests complete and 100% IC items made achievements before stopping. I completed a new galaxy playthrough to familiarize myself with the game again. Once I did, I loaded up my universe playthrough and got to work. First order of this was making ultimate equipment to face the Ethereal Queen. Once that was done, I made item preparations for a long trek in the Wandering Dungeon that would have me defeat the E. Q. five times in row since I need five of her feathers for IC. I accomplished this just two days ago, and it took me just over eight hours...Never again! Now, I'm farming magical clays so I could duplicate any items I need for IC. Then after that farm more magical clay to duplicate items I can't make in IC for shop order quests. That's it for that at the moment.

Another factor is I've been summoned as a grand juror for the January term. Does that mean I'm going to be in an actual jury in an actual trial--multiple times? If it does, then I am officially freaking out. I don't know if I can handle the decision of giving the parties involved their ultimate fate. Gah!

I think that's all I can say at the moment. I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

P.S. I'm typing this through my wii, so this took a while. Like I said earlier, my computer starts up fine except for the whole display thing. Thank God, the internet automatically signs in.

Till next time.

One of my favorite holidays of the year fast approaches, but I haven't really done anything to celebrate it. Last year, I watched and played a bunch horror themed movies and video games. Here's a short list of what a watched and played last year.

Movies:
-Friday the 13th parts 1-8
-Nightmare On Elm Street parts 1-6
-Gremlins 1 & 2
-Child's Play
-Killer Clowns From Outer Space
-Silent Hill
-Hocus Pocus
-Ghostbusters 1 & 2
-The Monster Squad

Games:
-Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
-Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin
-Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
-Castlevania III
-Castlevania IV
-Ghostbusters the Video Game

As of today, I haven't really watched or played any horror themed movies or games. I did catch a few movies on the Syfy channel and AMC, but other than that it's been uneventful. I want to watch something, but I don't know what. I'll be watching The Monster Squad for sure, though, as it's a tradition at this point. I've loved that movie since I was a kid and still do. As for games, I'm not sure. I might play Ghostbusters again, and maybe Silent Hill Shattered Memories. Other than that, I'm not sure. I don't seem to be in the Halloween spirit at the moment.

*sigh*

Till next time.

I'm not sure how many people still visit my page or watch ludas animans, but I'd like to say I hope you all had a happy new year.

The past week I've been playing through Tales of Vesperia on the xbox 360. I've been playing it non stop, in fact. The last time I played it was two years ago or so when I rented it when I bought myself the 360 arcade for christmas that year. If remember correctly, my last save back then was when I just got my flying transport vessel. Since that time I had been trying to find it to buy, but never found it at any store. So, two years later, my younger brother asks me if I wanted anything for christmas. I honestly couldn't think of anything at the time as I had given up on finding ToV at a store, and there was really nothing I wanted at the time (the only games I'm looking forward to right now are Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Dragon Age II). I did kind of mention my failed battle of finding ToV in passing, so he walks off and comes back a minute later and tells me how ordered it on Amazon and that it'd be delivered in about two days (it arrived on December 28th) . I was left speechless for a moment, but let out a thank you afterward. So, yes, I finally have ToV and am enjoying it immensely (currently clocked over 83 hours, and haven't even beat it yet). I decided to start over from the beginning, though, as it has been too long since my last play of the game.

Now, I know some might think that I could have ordered it online much sooner, but to be honest, I'm paranoid about ordering anything online, plus I don't have a credit card anyways. So it was fruitless endeavour on my end.

Once I finish ToV, I need to work on my lastest flash project. I have three links left in the chain, two of which are action sequences, and each action sequence are to be at least 30 seconds long each. It doesn't seem like much, but anyone who has read my comments on ludas animans knows how long it takes me to come up with and animate action sequences. I finished the last link I did in late October, so yeah... I haven't worked on the project in the last two months! Procrastination is a annoying *****, but I seem to suffer from it all the ****ing time. Gah, I really want to finish this project so that I could work on ludas animans again. I miss it...

Anyways, I think that's about all I can think of saying at this point, so see you all later!

I was playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl online last night and was playing Team Battle With Anyone. I mostly played as Zero Suit Samus, but sometimes switched to Peach, Pikachu, Ness, or Lucas. Anyways, there were two other people that never left after the matches. One was a person who only used Link and the other person mostly used Ganondorf and Wolf.

I played matches with these two guys (and a random 4th player that was never constant until the very end) for around 3-4 hours straight. I was paired with the Link player the most, but that's kinda irrelevant. I thought the matches were pretty fun and even, though Wolf is a hassle to deal with for me (I consider myself average at Smash).

Toward the end of this online binge, after a disappointing defeat at Hyrule Temple (from a "running away from me the entire match after I lost the first life" 4th player), I just felt like I was cheated against and wanted to exact my vengeance on the 4th player. I was Pikachu, by the way.

When the next match started, I was paired with the Link player and we were against Ganondorf and the 4th player who chose Kirby this time. By this point, I think the Link player, Ganondorf player, and myself were feeling pretty mellow. I'm not sure how it started, but Link began attacking Kirby with arrows and the boomerang and I stood still and kind of assessed the start of the battle and noticed that Kirby wasn't really doing anything against the onslaught. The Link player then knocked Kirby toward the right edge of the stage (the battle was on Final Destination), which was where I was and did a simple headbutt and Kirby fell off the edge and didn't attempt to recover. Ganondorf was hanging on the right ledge and had been taunting up to that point. I think I might have knocked him off the edge with the headbutts I was doing. I think the Kirby player was away from the controller or something so I thought to myself "Man, this isn't fair to the Ganondorf player..." So while Link was just shooting arrows at the stationary Kirby, I did a fully charged skull bash to end Kirby's second life. Immediately after that it was like we all just suddenly asked ourselves "Why are we fighting?" And just started spam taunting and doing other silly things the rest of the match, we didn't attack each other or anything.

I don't why that happened, but it just tickled me as it was happening. We did this spam taunting, fooling around for like 5 or 6 straight matches (the 4th player was still away from the controller during this whole duration until the very end of a match at Shadow Moses where it was a Sudden Death. As usual, us three were just spam taunting waiting for the bombs to start falling to see who would survive last. When out of nowhere Kirby comes back to life and hammers Ganondorf and KO's him exactly when the first bomb spawns right next to Kirby and KO's him second. Link and I are still spam taunting when all that went down, but I was the third to go and finally Link immediately after me.

I saved the replays of four of those matches since it was something that was just so unexpected for me and because of some things that I consider highlights, which include:

Final Destination:
-nothing really of note other than this is the match that started it all
-Ganondorf spamming Warlock Punch and me spamming Thunder simultaneously

Bridge of Eldin:
-breaking our own shields
-throwing ourselves into the pit of the bridge like lemmings towards the end of the match

Shadow Moses:
-blowing ourselves up with blast boxes (Ganondorf and me)
-running continuously into a bumper that was on the side of a tower (Ganondorf and me)
-just focusing solely on breaking down the towers
-the sudden death I explained above

Anyways, I wish I knew who those two players were because I'd like to play a game with them again.

...Yeah, useless post isn't it?

Sorry for the late update. I knew I said I would update in one or two days after my latest update, but I just didn't know what to write at the time. I have been working on phase 3 since Saturday though.

As I said in the previous update, phase 3 is sound insertion which includes sound effects and music. I've already hit an obstacle in the sound effect department. I need the sound effect from Chrono Trigger that plays in the intro during the scene transitions. The one where that tattered-on-the-edges black screen whooshes by. I tried recording it by turning off the music channels, but the sound effect gets messed up if I do that. So right now I had to skip inputting that sound and continue on. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do about that sound effect though... I might have to replace it, but I don't really want to.

Another thing that has me thinking is whether or not I should use Tales of music for this episode. Right now none really seem to fit any situation in the episode, but since this episode is themed on the Tales of series I think it would be weird to not have some music from the series in there to add to the theme. At the moment I thinking of maybe using a battle theme from Tales of Symphonia for the goblin action scene, I have three in mind which include:
-Full Force
-Like a Glint of Light
-Keen-edged Blade
Since the scene is kind of desperate, "Like a Glint of Light" sounds too positive and hyped up for the emotion I'm trying to portray. "Keen-edged Blade" sounds like it could fit, but the first half of the song is kind of slow. As for "Full Force," it's the one that could fit the most, but there's something that I don't like about using it for this particular scene, like it could used to a better effect somewhere else. Anyways, I'll still think about it some more, since I have a little while before I start adding the music to the episode.

It's already Thursday and I wanted to release episode 8 before Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out because I will be playing that game to death when it comes out, but it looks like episode 8 won't meet that deadline. If episode 8 isn't released by Saturday, it will definitely be out sometime next week. So hold on until then, just a little longer!

Animation of ludas animans episode 8 is complete. Mostly, anyways. I don't animate the menus and credits until the very end of production. So, I'm now on the second phase of production. This includes touch up of animation and text. Basically making sure everything about the episode is as good as can be. I'm currently proofreading and revising the text where I feel it's not up to snuff in its current state. After that I'm going to be adding "advance text" icons to the text boxes because there's a mix of automatic text and button text in this episode, and it could be difficult to tell which is which.

Once all that is done, I'll start the third phase which would be sound insertion. I'll talk more about that in the next blog update, which will hopefully be in one or two days.

Till next time.

Production of ludas animans Ep. 8 began a few weeks after the release of episode 7. It was pretty much right after I dealt with the problem episode 7 was having with loading for some users.

For episode 8, I wanted to tell a little side story not totally related to the overall plot. I mean what's the point of making a flash series about video games without actually showing the main character interact with main characters of other games? So far the one of the only main characters Chris has interacted with was X. Lou is a main character from his game, but he's a solid ally for Chris and is seen in every episode with no real threat of him leaving the group any time soon. Other main characters that Chris will interact with will most likely be guest characters that will join him in a few episodes.

The guest characters for episode 8 up until this story arc's finale will be "Tales of" characters. If you didn't know, I'm a huge Tales fan and I've been dying to use them in some way. I was thinking about doing this episode since the production of episode 7, and maybe had fleeting thoughts about it even before then. So finally being able to animate some of my favorite tales characters in ludas animans is like a dream come true.

I breezed through the dialog scenes like it was nothing. In fact, I think I may have finished the dialog scenes in the first couple of months of this year. Of course, I was hindered on one particular scene I was trying to convey. It was a flashback scene, and it took me forever to think of how to do it. I eventually did, but I'm still not too satisfied with it.

Episode 8's guest characters are Frio and Kyaro from Tales of the World: Narikiri Dungeon 3, and Presea from Tales of Symphonia. You won't see much of Kyaro until episode 9 though. The premise of the episode is that Kyaro was kidnapped by goblins. Chris and company help Frio try to save her, and they seek Presea's help along the way.

Dialog scene screen shots in upcoming posts. Also, make sure you view these posts backwards, as in this post is the first post, but is actually numbered 16, so the next post would be 15 then 14 and so on.

Recap time.

Will Mikagami and Harpuia get involved in the monster horde event?