And despite being a rather lousy year in other ways, on a personal level it wasn't as bad. I'm finally comfortable in the new home, and creativity is beginning to pick up again, sometimes. At least when I'm not shooting outlaws in the Mad Dog McCree Gunslinger Pack. (Long live the cheesy acting and bad humor of the Laserdisc classics! XD)

Also, this gallery is in TERRIBLE need of some newer art pieces, so... I'm gonna go find one to slap up here!

P.S.- Pokemon HeartGold/SoulSilver and Mega Man 10... March is gonna be a good month on the gaming front, with electric sheep all around! XD

... America is in deep trouble. I expect to see a lot of 9/11 repeats, record unemployment, and heavy suppression of freedom of speech during the course of the next two years, if not the next four. I also expect horrific spikes in energy prices and suffocating amounts of 'hidden' taxes.

*sigh* It is sad to see the majority of the American people being so blatantly ignorant and uninformed, if not outright misinformed. We have truly fallen as a nation.

Well, you know the old saying, third time's the charm! It's been a few months since I've updated, and in that time, several things have changed. 1) I've gotten a broadband connection that's MORE reliable than dial-up, as opposed to two previous broadband connections I'd gotten which were actually WORSE. 2) Finally got a new e-mail address, as the old one had stopped working long before I'd even realized it (I never have gotten much mail anyway, so it was hard for me to tell). 3) DAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! (I got a Wii, and Rayman Raving Rabbids! Oh, and Mario Kart too!)

Needless to say, I'm getting a good deal more excercise than I used to.

On the creative front, there's a huge help in the form of a new version of OpenFX! Finally, texturing is no longer a pain in the rear! I love the new materials management system, and some of the new particle effects options are cool too! My only real gripe is that I now have trouble attempting to produce animated textures- it'll only accept AVIs as animated textures, but for some reason when I render it I get the flat-colored untextured version of that part of the model. Also, MUCH brainstorming has been going on... but I shan't go into detail yet.

Before I got access to this 'high-speed' internet connection, everyone who'd had faster speeds was telling me I wasn't going to want to go back.

They were wrong.

Let me say, my experience with a high-speed connection has not been the blessing I thought it would be. Sure, it's great being able to download a 300 Mb file in less than half an hour... when I can get the connection to actually start downloading the blasted thing!

On dial-up, I'd run a search on Deviantart, and wait five minutes for the results to finally show up. Here, I'll run a search, and spend that same amount of time clicking refresh to get the darn thing to stop giving me error pages and finally show the blasted search results!

Hours of waiting for something to load doesn't seem quite so bad placed next to hours spent trying to get it to start loading... I'll be amazed if this journal update actually manages to make it through successfully.

Before too long I'll be heading on out to Louisiana for about a week-long trip. It'll be a work trip, but the change of scenery will probably do me good. Not to mention that where we're going I'll have access to broadband for a change! Yay!

If only I already had a Nintendo DS... the whole global trade thing on Pokemon D/P sounds fun, and I'm interested in that DS Transformers game's online abilities. And I think this is the first time that I've heard of that instant-reformatting actually sounds like a good idea, for making your own custom character. (For the record, I'm no fan of the idea of an active Transformer changing his alt-mode instantly just by scanning a new vehicle.)

And I'm finally caught up on most of what's happened in the Naruto dub. Yay! All thanks to that marathon CN's been airing the last three days.

Things are looking good on the fanfic front! With the impending conclusion of Ultimatum on Gemma's Pokemon Rebirth site, the release of the first few chapters of its first sequal, Darkness Revealed, is finally on the horizon. In addition, I've been working on the first few pages of a comic story within that continuity that I'm hoping fans of the Pokemon Special manga might like. Hopefully this trip will be full of opportunities to continue work on it!