Previous News02.18.2009 - Isabel Marks:First, some good news. The Fan Center has gotten another update- this time with a few new fan stories, please check them out! Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed to the Fan Center!Now for the bad news... as I'm sure most of you have noticed by now, all out sites have lately been plagued with intermittent outages. These seem to happen most around 11-12PM PST, a time when most of you want to view the site. We've been in contact with our web host about this issue, but as of now there is no news on why it's happening or when it will be fixed. If it happens, try again in a minute or two.
We'll keep you all posted of any news we may have... I'm sorry these things keep happening, thank you so much for your patience!
The other problem we're having is more on our side. since we moved to our current site host we have had no accurate way of checking what our visitor numbers are, which, quite frankly, is a pain. I've asked Terrence to look into it, so the problem is either our host hasn't done something or he hasn't. As I have no idea what's actually going on, I can't say either way.
02.10.2009 - Terrence Marks:Nothing seems to make a week go by faster than trying to write something about it.What've I been up to?Reading (books): Finished Coraline (which we also saw the movie of, and enjoyed). Isabel got me a very nice set of Terry Pratchett books for Christmas; I've gotten as far as Reaper Man so far. I had a smaller set when I was younger. It's funny; I remembered Carrot being the main character in Guards! Guards!. Re-reading it, the main conflict is Vimes vs. Wonse (and, to a lesser extend Vimes vs. Vimes), and Carrot is, like many others, an interesting secondary character but not the focal point that I thought he was.
Reading (manga): I was reading dozens of series at a time. I've put most of them down, so I can actually read something from start to finish. I recently finished Hiatari Ryoukou and Adventure Boys, both by Mitsuru Adachi. Currently reading Nine (which is his first solo series). I've mentioned Mitsuru Adachi before; he's done about a dozen sports romance series. I've read half of them They're about as different as You Say it First and Namir Deiter. So far, Nine is my second-favorite series of his after Rough. We've been reading Gokusen, as well, and picked up the anime. I recommend it, and wonder why the manga hasn't been licensed.
Playing (MMORPG): Trying Lord of the Rings Online. I need to get my thoughts on Asda Story and Final Fantasy XI written out.
Playing (console): Trying to play all the console games we have before getting more. Finished Sly Cooper 2 - would post my thoughts on the ending if I thought it'd be of general interest. Thinking about playing Sly 3, but they changed one of the voice actors. If I wait a month, it'll sound less wrong. Finished Mega Man X, X2, and X3, so that I could unlock Battle & Chase for Isabel, because it's supposed to contain Roll's Theme. It doesn't. Finished Mega Man 9, despite the fact that I gave up on Mega Man 4 when I tried to play through all of them.
I was playing Animal Crossing: City Folk until I found out about Animal Tracks. The idea is that if you run on the same route every time, it'll wear down the grass and create a path. Unfortunately, the grass damage is applied every time the game is loaded and now 80% of our town looks like a desert. I'm playing a lot less now. The idea of a thin trail running from point A to point B is cute. A townful of bare dirt isn't.Playing (handheld): Finished WarioWare: Touched (and by 'finished' I mean I unlocked most things and didn't care to grind for the other 10%). Playing Advance Wars 1, at least until I get a new game that can be played in 15-minute intervals.
02.09.2009 - Terrence Marks:Firstly, the Fan Center was updated! We got some very nice art in and have put it up after keeping it to ourselves for far too long!Secondly, there was a problem with You Say it First's First Day page (which contains the first 22 comics on one modem-unfriendly page). It turns out I missed a quotation mark, so the "Next" link didn't actually show up. I apologize to anyone who tried to read further had to go back to the archive page to get to the rest of the comic. I apologize profusely to anyone who tried to read further but didn't. It is fixed now.
02.03.2009 - Terrence Marks:I used to read comic books. DC exclusively. When I was young, I read an issue of Secret Wars II, got confused, and decided that Marvel wasn't worth bothering with. I mention this because last week we were at the Mattel Outlet and they had packs of Justice League figurines. That used to be my favorite series back during high school. I remember switching to it when Teen Titans tried to explain Donna Troy's origins.
I considered picking up a few of the toys. They had some decent characters. They didn't have my favorite characters, but they had some okay ones. Here's why they didn't have my favorite characters and why I don't read superhero comics anymore.
I remember the second-to-last issue of Justice League that I read. They had introduced a new supervillain.
It went like this:
The bad guy teleports the heros onto his space station. They're trapped in some kind of power-nullifying chairs.Bad guy: I have a Space Chess set. You heroes are going to be my chess pieces or I'll kill one of you.
Hero: No, bad guy. We refuse to play your game.
Then the bad guy kills Ice, to show everyone that he's serious and for-real. Then the heroes play the game. It was one of the most anticlimactic, pointless deaths this side of Tasha Yar. It'd be as if the microwave really exploded, killing Brisbane and Kimberly, ending You Say it First. I got the next issue in the hopes that it would be a regular comic-book fake death. It wasn't. She is, as I understand it, still dead.
Every few years I get the urge to get back into comics. I poke around a bit on what's happened. Invariably "what's happened" means that a few more of my favorite characters died. It's not just that they died, but that they tended to die pointless deaths in arcs that got very bad reviews. The deaths weren't stories. They were punctuation in other peoples' stories, like putting an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence! in the hopes that it would make the paragraph containing it more exciting.
So right now, if they made a set with The Blue Beetle, Max Lord, The Elongated Man, Sue Dibny, Rocked Red, Ice, Crimson Fox, The Martian Manhunter, and Mr. Miracle and called it "We're sorry about killing these guys, honest", I'd still wait until it went on sale.
I understand that to establish dramatic tension, something needs to be at stake. I understand that superheroics is a dangerous job. I understand that DC isn't selling us a static, unchanging world - they put out hundreds of pages each month. It's just that being a former member of Justice League International puts you at the top of the hit list. I don't intend to start reading comic books again any time soon. If I found a series I liked, it'd end eventually. Then they'd start killing off the characters when other stories needed a bit more drama.
02.01.2009 - Terrence Marks:Fortunately, we made the goal and will be doing comics seven days a week this month. Unfortunately, Isabel is still working on writing. She's got the flu, so it's been slow going.Isabel spent the weekend getting Namir Deiter's characters page updated, so go take a look at it!
01.27.2009 - Terrence Marks:Fiesta OnlineThere's a mini-map and a large map. If you click on a place on either, you don't move towards it. Quests only show on the large map. You buy your skills at a shop. This means you can't see the skill tree for your character unless you're at that shop.. There's nothing stopping you from buying skills you can't use because you're the wrong class.
How can you tell it's anime-inspired? You get three choices of hair color: aqua, blue, and violet. The starting town included blades of grass hovering seven feet above the ground. The "tutorial quest" consists entirely of walking from one end of the town to the other. I spent most of the game with no idea what I was doing and what I was supposed to be doing.
Monsters talk to you. They say things like "What's one plus one? Wrong. It's three". Now, I think talking monsters are great. It let's you give them a bit of character and gives a bit of backstory to the ten palate-swapped guys they just made up. But don't make them painfully stupid. Why was I killing them? Because some guy promised me a pair of boots and there wasn't anything else to do. They probably deserved it, though.01.26.2009 - Isabel Marks:The archive pages have been updated to both Namir Deiter and You Say it First... although neither of them show story arcs for this year (ND's current arc started back in November of last year and I have not added this recent YSIF arc yet).I hope to have a bigger web site update- at least for Namir Deiter's site- sometime later this week or next... time permitting. Hope everyone is having a good January!