Links I Like





pitas
A Fan's View
Anime News Network
The Queen of Swords
Silvestris.net
Jareth.com
Studio Kyrn
8-Bit Theatre
Silence the Comic

Tuesday, February 8, 2005

Bleh. Just to let you know, if you sent me an e-mail and are waiting for a reply from me - I've been hit with a flu bug which has left me with little energy to do much of anything other than moan piteously and empty the contents of my stomach on a regular basis. So it might take awhile until I get back to you.

A long while....Blurk....

Friday, January 28, 2005
My life has just gone from "suck" to "blow". I was reading my e-mail tonight and I found this annoying little buttnugget from my friend Kevin (who also happens to be the author of several of my Thumbnail theaters.):

I have some really bad news. I just got an email from some Canadian company informing me that they own the trademark to the term "Thumbnail Theatre", they apparently think I am using it to advertise a business, and sent me a cease and desist letter. I intend to send them a nasty reply, but as a precaution you might want to temporarily reword the pages just because I don't want something bad to happen to you or your website.

Oh great. This was all I needed. I've got 5 thumbnail theaters posted on my website (each of which are comprised of dozens of pages) and I'm supposed to pull them all because some sue-happy bacon-chewers think I'm using THEIR term to promote my own business. Feh. I didn't even INVENT the term, or the genre format it was created for, (and anyone --even a Canadian-- who has more than one working brain cell can see, upon examining my Thumbnail Theater sites, that they are fanworks not at all connected to anything I do for profit. (At this point, I must resist the temptation to lob scathing, toe-curling insults in the Canadians' general direction, lest they sue me for slander or some other such thing. God forbid people be allowed the right to free speech in THIS day and age.)

I wonder what's next. Am I now gonna receive a cease and desist letter from Mr. T's lawyers because I cut and pasted his image humourously interacting with a bunch of anime characters in a parody comic? (Why don't we just go all out and ban all fanworks and fanfiction EVERYWHERE? I mean, we ARE using copyrighted characters after all. Names and images and storylines that belong to someone else. Why the hell hasn't fanfiction.net been shut down yet? What gives US the right to use other people's intellectual property? We should lock up all the cosplayers, burn all the fanart and make sure NOONE has the right to express their love of any story or character which has NOT been created by themselves. Then, and ONLY then, can the businesspeople of Canada truly consider themselves safe...)

Feh.

Another thing that's aroused my wrath this evening: I just started playing Suikoden 4. Why am I so mad at it? Just think of what would happen if you were to suck all the fun out of a console RPG. What would you have left? (If you guessed "tedious overworld travelling" and "mindless random enemy encounters," you would be correct.) Now, imagine a game where those two elements made up, oh, 95 percent of the gameplay. Congratulations! You're now playing Suikoden 4! (Okay, so the game isn't really THAT badly skewed, but it's sad to see they decided to drop all that pesky "character development" which was so prevalent in the series' previous installments... And the game just seems so much more dark and depressing... much like my life...Why would I want to be reminded of that? *Sigh.*)

Sunday, January 23, 2005

We finally got ourselves some measurable snowfall which means that it's finally starting to look as if it might actually be winter around here. It also means that my "leaving the house-o-meter" has undergone a radical recalibration. (Whereas before it hovered somewhere between "whenever the hell I feel like it" and "whenever I really, really need something that I'm unable to make myself or steal from a family member", it's now been ramped firmly up to "only if the damn house is on fire and ONLY if there's a warmed-up limo waiting for me outside with a fully-stocked mini-bar, a big-screen TV, and a chauffer that looks like a young, buffed-out Sean Connery." ) Needless to say, it doesn't look as if I'll be going outside very often in the coming week. Which of course, gives me plenty of time to tweak my website.

First tweak: I've futzed around the Escaflowne Thumbnail Theater, tightening it up in a few spots and making it more Mozilla-friendly. (I may do the same for my other Thumbnail Theaters if I ever manage to work up the necessary ambition.)

Second tweak: I've gotten myself some free webspace and am now using it to host my Bored of the Rings Fansite. Unfortunately, like most free webspace dealies, this one comes with servers which have all the functionality of a stale marshmellow and the ftp upload speed of a lobotomized elephant whose trunk has been cut off and tied 'round its legs. So the site with its requisite files might not be entirely up by the time you read this. (I know this is one of my more popular pages, and quite frankly, that's the PROBLEM. I'm now getting bandwidth warnings in the MIDDLE of the month instead of at the end. Most of the traffic, I realize, is due to my armormaking site, but the BOTR fanstuff contributes greatly to the bandwidth suckage and, as I don't feel it's nearly as important as the art and armor stuff, it has to go.) I had thought about leaving the site on my personal webspace and placing a paypal link on the main page for support donations, but I figured that that would probably work as well as all the OTHER paypal support buttons I've placed on my website, -which is to say, not one fucking bit.) I certainly hope this allays the bandwidth problems. (If not, I might have to take more DRASTIC measures... and I certainly wouldn't want to do that as I probably seem like enough of a cheap-ass jerk as it is...)

Friday, January 14, 2005

Coldest night of the year. Luckily I don't have anywhere to go this weekend (which is a good thing, as I imagine my car, if I were to get into it and attempt to turn it over, would crumble apart like a rose that's been dipped in liquid nitrogen.) I'm plenty mad at ebay now for its latest fee increase. Mad enough to sign a petition to protest the latest fee hikes even though I'm well aware that online petitions tend to be as effective as... something which isn't very effective which I'm unable to describe because I'm too tired to come up with a suitable metaphor. *Sigh.* God, I need to work on getting my circadian rhythm back on track. And I need to work on my wiriting skills.... writing skills...whatever....I'm too tired to spellcheck...YAWN...