Yesterday's news...
(And news from every day before, too!)
(9/29/2010) Back on track?
It's embarrassing to see that it's been so long since I properly updated the frontpage, but after much, much too long of a wait, Pursuit chapter 6 is finally up and ready to read. With the Windworks incident finally behind us, it should be a bit easier to get things written- the whole thing was just so complicated that it was much harder to write than I had originally anticipated.
In unrelated news, it looks like I'm finally settling in after over two months in my new locale (Nevada), which also should help speed things along. Not being worried about where I'm going to live tends to leave a bit more free time for writing and such, doesn't it?
(5/2/2010) Stormy waters ahead, Cap'n
Well here's the next chapter up, but I just got laid off, so it may be a little touch and go here for a while until I find steady income again...
(3/19/2010) Oops!
Well it looks like my last newspost broke the homepage, which means I probably should change the way I update these posts in the near future. The rest of the site appears to be fine, I was just a little stupid when I cleared out the old posts. Nothing major, so no worries!
(2/28/2010) This is a heck of a late "Happy New Year" but...
Alright, chapter 5 of Pursuit will be along shortly seeing how I'm a fair way into it (for me, the first few paragraphs are the hardest to write). Something that needs to be stressed to all of my readers, and especially a certain few, that TRLT is being written by and for myself, which is how I think most stories ought to be anyways. I just want to get that off my chest because I've been feeling like I was trying to force myself to write TRLT faster or better for someone else's sake, and I cannot do that. I love that people enjoy it, but to be frank that's not why I write. I write for myself because it's something I enjoy and because the story means something to me, not because anyone likes or doesn't like it for whatever reason. Of course, given my traffic ratings lately, this posting will be read more by spambots and webcrawlers than by any actual audience I may have here... </wrists>
Blah, so anyways I just wanted to establish that and vent a little. Heads up for my readers though that once I'm done with chapter 5, I'm going to work on adding another new chapter to Meeting Cass before continuing Pursuit again. To those of you who've heard me say it before it's probably sounding pretty empty right now, but I really do promise that the story kicks into gear once they leave the windworks for... other destinations.
(9/11/2009) Just a little note
In case anyone who's visiting cares, I've decided to start copying journals as newsposts here whenever I get the chance. Although I won't copy over old ones, this will (hopefully) apply to all future updates. This should help keep the site up-to-date: by forcing me to actually edit something about it every so often, I should be able to notice and work on things that need changin or fixing, like the current style's colors which, as has been pointed out to me, are too contrasting. So, that's that, and have a nice day.
(9/11/2009) Quick little update (followed by random crap)
So here I am, without my all-important laptop, resorting to using a five-plus year old Windows XP machine to do everything, but at least it works. I just got a new job at a nearby sports-slash-family-entertainment facility, so it should be just inside of a month before I get my first real check and can hopefully have enough free cash to get a replacement hard disk for my Dell. As for the old one, well... I can literally hear it try to spin up and fail to do so when I try booting the laptop, so I've stopped trying until I can get an external mount and try the freezer trick with it, 'cause there's quite a bit of data (unfortunately on the order of perhaps a few gigabytes) that I want/need off of the disk, despite its hardware-faulted status. I have a friend who might be able to help me recover the data sooner, but that's a big "if" right there.
Thankfully, however, I had the foresight to see that this might happen, so I have (for a good long while now) been keeping most all of my important data and such on my 250GB Seagate FreeAgentGo. Of course I still have yet to find a practical way of backing *that* up, but at least I'm more confident in that little disk's integrity than that of Dell's OEM drives. Perhaps I'll get a couple of terabyte or half-terabyte drives once I have my laptop running on a new disk, who knows? As it is, my disk that WAS in the laptop was 80 GB, which was a 35-dollar upgrade from the 60 gig disk when I bought the thing about two years ago, but the horrible thing is that I can now find 250 GB disks for about 40 dollars on Tiger Direct! It's a bit astounding, even to a techie like me, that the price of storage media can drop so drastically in such a relatively short amount of time.
Heck, our first computer was a Windows 95 machine with no more than 600MB on a hard disk that's easily over four times the physical volume of a modern SATA disk. And I still have the DIMM chips and the PII processor from that sucker too; it had a whopping 64 megs of RAM, if I recall correctly... And I believe the whole monstrosity cost somewhere around five or six hundred dollars at the time (about mid '96). Now I could pay for a machine like that with a 20 and get change back! Not to mention the fact that you can get roughly a gigabyte per dollar on flash media, which is ridiculously faster than physical disks... It really makes you wonder what kind of capacity we'll see in another ten or twelve years, doesn't it?
Bah, enough nerdy rambling... So yeah, I'm using a pretty old PC to work with now, but it's at least got enough power to run Fireworks and Dreamweaver CS3, so I'm content with it for now. As for the story, well I've been writing that manually (gasp!) in a notebook that I keep with me at just about all times, and I've got roughly four and a half pages front and back done so far on chapter 10 of TRLT, but I think I'm barely a quarter done with what I want done in that chapter. I really want to be done with the Windworks incident, so I'm going to try and get that brought to a close by the middle of chapter 11, if all goes as planned. From there, well.. You'll just have to wait and see, won't you?
(8/27/2009) I am not dead
Despite the lack of updates, I have actually been living this past month. In fact, perhaps I've been living a bit too much- life gets in the way of writing like you would not believe... Well anyways, Here's a nominal update to announce my continued membership in the exclusive group known to many as "the living." Hah, and also to say that I've got another chapter of Meeting Cass up with another well under way, along with the beginning to a new arc of the story, "On the Road Again" which takes place about a month and a half after Meeting Cass finishes. Oh, and another note: my apologies to Alakapimp for my comments last month; it turns out he was only trying to make a bit of a joke, but none of his companions thought so, and the situation got a little out of hand, leading to the impression Nul and I got being far less than kind. Uh, let's see what else there is to say... Hmm... Nope, I think that about covers it all; I'm working on the next chapter of Cass and On the Road, then I'll work towards writing the conclusion to the events at the Windworks and picking up the story in full; I hate how slow the pacing is right now, so I'll be much happier once things can move along at a faster pace.
(7/4/2009) Complete!
Well holy crap: it looks like another chapter is done on TRLT! After waaay too long I finally finished it, and I'll say this for those that care: I actually did have quite a bit of the chapter (about half of it) done before tonight, but I was stumped as to how to word the second half. It sat like that since before the previous newspost prior to Nationals, and well... Here it is! I also want to send a shout out to my friend, Nul, who took me to Nats: we may not have talked directly about it, but simply talking with you helped me get it done regardless, so I owe you (yet again) big time. Oh, and a minor and petty thing that arose at St. Louis: I now officially hate one particular Smogonite with a passion because of his bigotry and hypocrisy: the guy chews my ass for seeing that I had pokésav on my PC- the dude didn't even see that I had an action replay, flashcart, nothing. So he chews me for doing that, and then he leaves his crap with Nul and I while he goes somewhere, right? Well his Japanese Platinum box is half-open and what do I see in there? An R4DS cartrige. And what do I find on that R4's transflash card? A copy of Platinum's ROM, pokesav.exe, legal.exe, trashbytes.exe, and a cheats.dat file loaded with AR codes. Damn it, Alakapimp (the faggot's Smogon name) you are the worst kind of hypocrite the world has known. Wait 'till Marriland (who is the head referee for the tournament) sees the photos we snapped of that crap. You may be headed to Worlds in a month or so, but I'll be damned if I'm letting you get away with that bullshit. See 'ya round, sucker! ... Alright, now that I've vented that particular frustration, what's next? Eh, the chapter's done, I'm tired, and I probably won't be able to get this online until tomorrow anyways, so I'm gonna just say goodnight, and get a bit of sleep now. Laters!
Oh, and happy 4th to any other Americans out there (So far that's the only place I seem to get site traffic from, so...) Hope everyone had a happy Independence Day, and that everyone kept all their fingers intact, didn't blow anything up, etc. etc. Alright, now I'm really gone. See 'ya!
(6/23/2009) Back, for a minute or two
Yeah, I haven't said much here lately, have I? Well chalk it up to crazy-intense last-minute physical training to get safely under the physical limits for the Navy, combined with the stress and nightmare of dealing with the travel agency that Pokémon USA uses for its winners. See, a close friend of mine won second place in the Phoenix, AZ regional tournament, so got guaranteed entry into the nationals and free travel to and from for himself and one guest. It so happens that I am that guest, but dealing with this travel agency has been frustrating at best. I won't go into the details, but I'll just say that I know what charter service I will never recommend to anyone now... Anyways, other than those two things, I've been working off-again, on-again at chapter 9 of TRLT, and I'm about1/3 through the first draft, which for me is usually the hardest part of a chapter. So I'd wager this upcoming travel might give me a fair amount of time to write, although it will take a while after that to get it uploaded- I will have to write it out while in transit, and transcribe it once I'm to a place with a power outlet, since my laptop gets just over 3 hours battery life on a good day, and I have about 36 hours of travel lined up starting tomorow night at about 8:00 PM (Greyhound bus out of Visalia). So should be getting more and more done with the story as the weekend passes, and then we'll see what happens from there.
(6/15/2009) Site: fixed, Brain: fried
Done. At last. The hard part wasn't really updating what I was going to update, oh no: that only took an hour- two hours tops. No, what took forever was writing a script to ensure that any of you with bookmarks for the old site will still have your links work. God help me if I ever choose to do that sort of nightmare again. PHP is great and all, but I don't think I'll ever rush into anything involving nested output buffers quite so willingly next time... Enjoy the changes that you probably won't see. I know I will... *sigh*
(6/14/2009) The news page is now archived
As one of the first functional changes I'm making to the site, the older news items are going to be archived. Mainly I was tired of how long this page was getting- that and the fact that it was beginning to take a while to load the page with all the text in it. You'll see that I've added a "News Archive" section to the navbar, in case you feel the desire to look back at my old (and equally meaningless) news flashes here.
(6/11/2009) A new project is in the works
I have noticed lately that I've been trying a bit too hard to maintain the site within a single page, which is this index.php you're viewing now. This is becoming rather cumbersome and has led me to make my site structure a bit too esoteric for my own taste. Over the course of the next few weeks or so I will be working on an experimental copy of the site to remedy this, but rest assured: I will not touch the main site this time around. I will be working with a copy of the entire site for the whole process, so that this site can remain up and running unmolested by my tinkering. What this means really, is that I will probably update some of this site a bit less frequently until I am done, and once I am done there are a few changes to the way you acces the site. Keep checking back for more information as I have it available.
(6/10/2009) A depressing place to leave off...
Meeting Cass chapter 4 is up now and... kind of has a sucky end to it. I don't like leaving things so depressive, but that's all the more incentive for me to get to work on chapter 5, right? Okay, that's about it for now!
(6/9/2009) Update! For the sake of updating!
Well not really, but okay. I did add a few things, not the least of which is a tutorial on how to make your own pixel-over custom sprites. Head on over to the Misc section and give it a look- I put a lot of work into that. On that very same topic, I also finished the next sprite for Project Eon as part of the tutorial process, and I've added it to the sprites page. Other than that, it's mostly just general upkeep and maintenance. A few typos here, a broken link there... Just routine stuff.
(5/28/2009) Meeting Cass Chapter 3 is... a bit on the short side
I was going to say "is... finally out" but considering how tiny it is, I... well let's just say that I do have more done, but it was going to take me a while longer to finish. So instead of making everyone wait for me to get the rest of it done and proofread, I figured something short and sweet would work nicely to hold everyone over. So it's here now, but I just realized that a slight oversight in my site coding made it very possible- easy, in fact- to read it as I wrote it... Oh well, it's done now, and I know to look out for that sort of error in the future. Live and learn, huh?
(5/19/2009) Meet the cast!
After nearly eight months of revision, I've finally finished the bios for the characters currently in TRLT. The biographies are short but sweet, and I had to trim a bit from them in order to keep certain things as secrets, for the sake of plot integrity and what have you. Also, I've added another sprite to my sprites page (check the Misc section) with more to come in due time. I'm perhaps 75 percent done with the next chapter of Meeting Cass, and it is then that we finally see the eponymous (and so far enigmatic) Cass for the first time. I've finished just about everything I can think of as far as half-done site content left over from the conversion, so I think I can safely say that the site overhaul is now officially and completely OVER! Thank the lord it's finally done with... Now I can get back to my regular (although still embarrassingly slow) update schedule. Perhaps I can convert some of this leftover site-work momentum into getting my content written/drawn/etc faster now? I certainly hope so!
(5/13/2009) Keep it up...
Well I've used the recent set of upgrades as an excuse to work on the site a bit more. I've found a few more bugs that got resolved, fixed a few links here and there, and generally cleaned up the site overall. Oh, and I finally got PHP to work with my IIS installation, so testing the site on my PC before uploading is a snap now. In addition to all that, I'm beginning to feel some inspiration for the next chapter of either TRLT or Meeting Cass, so with any luck I can work on that later this week or this weekend when I head up to 'Frisco to meet with Nul and compete in the regionals for Platinum. Oh yeah- I'm doing that, by the way: Nul is coming out for the weekend and we're going to the San Francisco regional qualifiers for the 2009 Pokémon Videogame Chapionship. Should prove to be fun, and I have confidence that I'll do alright too! Ah, one final note: I took a spell-check to the whole site and was actually frightened at how poor my spelling is so although it's fixed here I would assume that a good deal of my recent work at DA and AGNPH are also victims of my horrible typography. This should be resolved in a few days... Ah well, the site seems to be doing quite nicely now, and all I can really think of that needs to be finished structurally now is to finish up the misc section and then I ought to be done! After that it's just a matter of getting some kind of content to fill the embarrassingly empty character bios and put a little more content on the site as a whole. Ooh, and a header image that isn't a stock-photo from a Dreamweaver template- that would be nice! Hmm, looks like I've got my work cut out for me, but nothing excessively major, like say... remaking the whole site in PHP, right?
(5/11/2009) Ooh, shiny!
Well well well... Look'it what I found: a nice-looking, skinnable interaction system, compliments of Google! You'll notice the 'login' area to the right, where you can use your logon from various other sites to interact with me, the site, other readers, etc. which is great. So far I've only got the main page comments up, as well as a ratings/review system in the right margin of chapter 1. The R&R section will get added to each chapter once I have the time (and bandwidth) to get the code for each one- otherwise all comments from all chapters would show up everywhere, and that might get messy! This whole FriendConnect thing seems useful, and to be honest I stumbled on it quite by accident when setting up the AdSense bar which now graces my site, and decided: what the hell, let's roll with this. So now we can see how this will turn out, and hopefully it will let me hear from you- my audience- more easily! Minor note: I found that the chapter viewing system had been totally out of commission, so I fixed it, please don't hesitate to email me (check the contact page) if you notice anything out of place. Okay, well I'm outta here 'cause it's 12:16 AM and I haven't gotten to sleep yet, so- until next time, see 'ya!
(4/30/2009) Well that went smoothly... NOT!
Talk about easier said than done! After over a month of downtime I have finally finished setting up most of the new site, and it should run mostly the same but it's still being finished, so if a section looks a bit busted or is outright gone, just wait for a few hours and I should have it up. For a large part of today the title bar will not display what it should, the Miscellaneous section will be nonexistent, and the story page will probably be either broken or buggy as hell until I work out the kinks in it. Until then... I don't know, watch a movie, play a game, whatever floats your boat. I'm just putting this notice here because the site is back online again, and I don't want a bunch of emails telling me that the site is busted.
(3/26/2009) You may feel a slight pain...
I'm currently working on getting the site made in an easier-to-manage format, which will not change much on your end of things (post-fact note: Ha! Was I ever wrong!), but will make it a lot easier to work with for me, if it works. Basically I'm getting really sick of Dreamweaver's DWT templates and the way they work, so I'm going to try using includes for the header/footer and navbar instead of making a template out of the whole mess. With any luck at all this won't make things change more than a tiny bit on your end, but I just want to warn any readers that the site will probably be bugged out for the next few days while I work out the kinks in doing this, since the whole site needs to basically be remade, as convoluted as it seems... Gah, this is gonna be sickeningly monotonous- I can tell already.
(3/24/2009) Yeah, I'm weird...
I know it's a bit... out there, but as one particular reader knows, I'm not the only one who occasionally... is driven to do something that isn't necessarily something I'd want to do. So, I suppose that this will actually make sense to you, Nul, as to why I've decided to do this, but to everyone else this will probably seem odd. Or not, I really don't know, since I've only got two readers who have ever contacted me regularly... (read: PLEASE SEND ME FEEDBACK!!!) Anyway, here's the news: I'm starting YET ANOTHER part of my story, which will involve a point even later in the story than Meeting Cass is, and it will follow the travels of our merry band after they have reunited. This part however will chronicle more of the standard-faire trainer stuff, such as actually training, challenging Gyms (which I had never really done before), going new places- basically everything a trainer does, which I had to put on hold while... other things... took my time. That convoluted explanation aside, I should probably lay out just how the stories fit together as far as time goes, so here I will: The Road Less Traveled (abbreviated as "TRLT") is the main story, and encompasses the entire saga of Will, Tenrou, Sanakou, Axl, and a whole host of others who have yet to appear. Meeting Cass is a sub-plot of TRLT which describes the eponymous happening when Mayumi and I meet Cass, and takes place between 12 and 18 months after chapter 10 or so of TRLT. The Meeting Cass subplot, despite its eventual size, only takes up a few days, perhaps a week at most. This new ditty (which I have yet to find a good name for) will happen a rough 3 or 4 months after Meeting Cass, and will follow the group for a good long while. Basically, this will be where TRLT picks up after Meeting Cass is all said and done, and I've made a transitional piece. That said, I am probably going go to finish and upload the next chapter of Meeting Cass before I even consider uploading this work, as (by necessity) there will be a few spoilers that you won't see coming unless you've been following Meeting Cass in it's WIP page, which (as a few may know) is hidden on the site somewhere. And on that enigmatic note, I must save and close this page, as my muses are tearing at my mind, demanding that I start working on this piece. Ciao! Oh, one last thing before I'm torn away though- I can't seem to make the third-person perspective work too well anymore, so I may revert to first-person more often now, although it's not always going to be from the same character, or even who you might think it is! Keep your eyes peeled for the next chapter(s)! --Nona
(3/11/2009) Small notice
Since I recently was able to make my site's URL public in a few places (read: DA finally let me set my homepage URL), I'm guessing a few more people will be coming here in the next few days. To all of you: welcome, and please excuse any messy-looking pages, as I'm still getting the hang of how to order my Dreamweaver-gnomes around to get the site looking proper! :D One thing in particular I need to get done is a proper archive section for Meeting Cass, since the template I'm using for TRLT's archive is too hard-coded into that particular directory of the site. So the Misc section and the Meeting Cass chapters especially may look pretty bad in the near future- this will be normal, just to let anyone know. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me and let me know; my contact info should be near the bottom of the "About Me" page, where it ought to be until I figure out how to get a proper contact form set up (I'm a total noob with dynamic content at the moment, so the whole site is pure HTML).
(2/27/2009) First things first
If you're here then you probably are at least somewhat interested in the story I'm publishing online, which is a fiction set in the universe of the Pokémon series. I understand that some people won't appreciate what I have to write, but so far people have been pretty courteous in their responses, and for that I'm grateful. I suspect that upon launching a new site dedicated to my writing I may have a small surge of readers being redirected through search engines and whatnot (once the crawlers happen across me, that is), and I simply ask that the comments remain civil and on-topic. That is, of course, once I get this whole "managing a whole site by myself" thing down well enough to add a comments section to the site. For now, if there is anything that must be said, then follow the links available to either DeviantArt or AGNPH, and you can comment on my stuff there.
On a related note, since this site is my own, and indeed this was a large part of why I decided against using something like a blog, I reserve the right to moderate any and all comments made, as the whole site (aside from the template and public-domain images provided by Adobe) is made from scratch by either myself or a close circle of friends. I don't want to sound pretentious, but I also want it known that I won't tolerate any kind of crap here. Just keep things polite and relevant and there won't be any problems, I just want it out there that when I get the interactive parts of the site online that I will be the judge and jury in all moderation here. I just say this in advance because I don't want anyone bawwing about free speech or such, etc. as I've had just about enough of that elsewhere *coughchanscough*.
But that's enough depressing talk for now, I'll get on to talking about the site and what I have planned for the eventual future. Obviously I will have all the chapters posted here, and will also have any character info posted as it becomes apparent. I'll continue to post it elsewhere, but if you're only reading it on whichever other site I've put them up at, you'd be missing quite a bit that I'm only going to put here, such as various related things, like the side-story I'm working on: "Meeting Cass," which actually takes place in the main storyline, but is far enough down the road that it will be a substantial amount of time before it fits in.
As far as interactivity, I want to eventually have some form of comment board added to each chapter where they can be discussed, or where you can ask about the story and I can respond- all the sort of thing a comments page is good for. I haven't quite decided exactly how it will play out, but I am leaning more towards an imageboard-style setup, with no registrations, and usernames being verified by tripcodes and whatnot. But, like I said, it's still in the air as to how I'll end up doing it. Any suggestions are more than welcome, and you can either send me an email, or comment me over at DA, and I'll be sure to respond.
Other than the comments system I also hope to eventually have a proper way to post content for myself; it won't really affect the way things look, but it will make updates much cleaner when they happen, as (for now) I'm manually adding updates and changing all the links, pages, etc. and it's a bit of a chore. Tedious manual coding work aside, the site is actually rather simple, and I can hopefully get my own site images sooner or later, rather than the generic ones that come with the layout that Dreamweaver gave me. For those interested, the site was mostly made in Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver CS3, with fine-tuning done by hand in whatever plain text editor I happen to have readily available at the time, which ends up being Windows Notepad more often than not.
And now for the final comments to this first (and large) newspost: if anyone is willing to give me pointers on designing, running, and/or managing a site like this, please shoot me an email and let me know, as I am horribly new at this, and would love to have any feedback, help, etc. from more experienced designers or webmasters. Also, if anyone has experience specifically in creating and/or setting up comments-page-style setups, I'm all ears, as I literally have zero experience, and although it will end up working eventually, the code will probably be so bad that I could make a few experienced web designers cry if I showed them the source behind it... Yeah, so that's that, and I'm done here; now it's time to finish up the rest of the site.
--Nona