I'll get mauled to death by a beastie after accidentally sticking my foot in a sinkhole and dislocating both hips in the drop. Failing that, a burst aneurysm in my head from wigging out too much over the little things.

With some help from my dad, the tower's finally been pried open. Now that I can see into the case from the outside, it's very easy to see where the problem lies. The system fan sits in my power supply; my motherboard is, of course, equipped to run it and monitor it from the BIOS, and it really is sitting dead still right now.

There hasn't been much dust in the case since I upgraded my RAM, processor, and graphics card a few months ago, so that can't be the problem. In fact, there's none in there when I look.

If I can figure out an easy way to test if it's the power supply or the motherboard without spending any money, I definitely will. Until then, I think I'm just going to leave the case open to let it "breathe" better. Maybe that odd chirping noise was actually the system fan getting ready to kick it... *thoughtful jaw-rub*

I don't plan on ever selling this thing on eBay, and for multiple reasons. ._. One is that this is a custom build and while running on a 2006 P4 Biostar motherboard, is still better than half of what I might find in prebuilt systems in my price range. Another is that, well, I just recently dropped a hundred dollars into upgrading my RAM and processor, so that also kind of makes it a no-go. Still another is that this thing has been built up and upgraded over the course of about fifteen years, so, while only the floppy drive still remains of the original build (even the tower case has been replaced more than once), it still feels like the same computer dad built for me when I was six.

...Okay, yeah, I'm a little hoity-toity about the whole "buy a whole new computer" thing, but I'd like to think I am so with at least moderately good reason. I prefer to have full control over what's going into my system, both in hardware and software, and I can't really do that by going to the store for a complete PC. Now if I could just fix the car so I can get the replacement motherboard before the one I want stops existing entirely.

The system fan refuses to run entirely; it used to read at a high RPM. ._.; I'm trying to research it, but the whole thing is muddied up by all the jerkfaces wanting to slow theirs down. When I turn the system off, the smell goes away. When I turn it on, it stays gone until it starts to heat up, and then I start to smell it again, so my times on the computer entirely have been short and far distanced.

I'm hoping that looking into OS control of the thing will yeild something of a result. If it does n't, I'm going to be mad because I can't look and see what the deuce is wrong with it myself. I'll also be damned if the motherboard popped another capacitor and is causing this.

Right. So. I spent a lot of last night lurking around on the internet, and periodically I would pick up the unpleasant smell of hot plastic. I spent hours sticking my face into every niche of my desk area to figure out where it was coming from, only to find no source. Eventually, finally, I pulled the tower out and gave it a smell from ABOVE the back vent, and sure enough, that's where it was coming from.

Apparently my system has three fans, one of which I am unaware of the location (the system fan, since the GPU fan's kind of a given). When I rebooted the computer to check the BIOS, I discovered that while my CPU fan is running at a decent 4000+ RPMs, the system fan was flickering between "low" and 0.

Now, this actually feels pretty silly to ask, but should I be concerned? Because I'm pretty worried, and for some reason I can't get the case open. D8 I've done a lot of switching around with my hardware early in the year and the fact I suddenly can't open the case to check makes this new issue very distressing. T_T

Kah. Digging things up because I spent god knows how long reading through this whole thread.

Perhaps it's my bohemian mentality paired with my upbringing, perhaps not, but I don't really see what the big deal is about game nudity. : | Maybe it's part of the story, maybe that part is obscure, maybe it's a character quirk. There's a whole world of reasons for why someone might end up naked in a game that you're playing, and quite frankly, I'm not fond of the idea of stifling that, especially not when it's hasn't been put there for vulgar purposes.

I'm a fan of teaching your kids what things are, rather than sheltering them, and especially here in the US, oversheltering is a huge problem. The amount of censorship I see on a day-to-day basis is appalling. Words, gestures, benign images, a little blood. Of course there is a limit to what ought to be available to the 'family' audience, but there's a certain point where there's so little of the original content that it's wholly embarrassing.

Most games aren't even geared to a 'family' audience to begin with, and being naked is just a part of life. Sex is fine, too. I'm not particularly interested in things considered "hardcore", so I'm not going to be getting pornographic things like that, whether game, movie, or otherwise, but I'm not going to condemn the idea just because I don't care for it. If I run into it somewhere, I ignore it. It's pretty simple, really.

Maybe, maybe I feel this way about in-game nudity because of the way I view the human form. I'll admit I'm fond of it, but I am so from an artist's perspective, not from a sexual standpoint. And, honestly, in some contexts, it's just bloody funny. I use it for a good chuckle in writing sometimes.

But nudity. So what? As long as it's not obviously pandering to any audience (most commonly male, unfortunately), then I don't care. If it is, it'll annoy me a little bit, but then there's the magic of ignoring it. Or, even better, making fun of it. 8D

n_n I do a lot of writing and role-playing, so most of my pictures have some sort of backstory to them. I've tried drawing comics/manga before, but I never get very far. =/ I have that terrible disease where I start things and then never finish them. For example, see below:


This woman, Eolisenne, has been drawn probably a year or so longer than Kei has, but as you can see, she's missing a hand, and has been like that for AGES. It's partly because I have trouble with hands (and I really do. ), but usually I can muster up the will to spend a whole day getting that last detail in there.

And now because I can't not be an OCD-tastic buttface, I'm going to have to point bits out about it. ._.; She's a hybrid of two different races, one of which has a strain with an elongated face. The same one with the elongated face also grants her equine legs, and I picked a bad angle to try and draw that at. D: I also do not actually know how cloth works. And I've only just realized she's amazingly lanky. ._o

But, yeah. I have null-impetic syndrome. It'll show more as I post more works.

I am a giant art nerd, so it's probably a good given that I'll consider games as art. Many of the points I would express have already been brought up by other members here, but I'll reiterate some of them, I suppose, so I can be clear as to why.

I see a game as an artistic medium. It's like a canvas, an empty journal, a roll of unexposed film. It's a blank slate waiting to be shaped into something tangible. It's a vast collection of visual art that's been molded and integrated into images and moving shapes that resemble things we can readily recognize. It's a story, which these recognizable models act out, granting not only themselves, but said story a semblance of life. It's also a collection (usually) of intricate musical scores, specifically composed to add more life to its preceding elements. In later games, it additionally is a repository of vocal artistry specifically compiled for that work.

In its own right, it is an exhibition, but all the same, it is an art. There is too much artistic effort put into a lot of these works to regard them as anything else.

I'm going to have to argue that point about the KKK for a moment. ._.; The KKK was formed a long time ago, back when people feared African people under religious pretenses. Maybe by now the purpose of the group is different, I wouldn't know, but I still wouldn't condone what they're doing, and can't see the logic very well, because they're oppressing and killing other people.

I honestly think when people are whining over the supposed racism in RE5 (RE4 didn't get nearly as much attention, hmm...) it's just because it's something to point the finger at. I heard about all that drama even before Obama was put in office, so someone's just being a sissy. : | Oh hey, people are being infected in Africa (realistic; look at the amount of terrifying diseases that are rampant there), and now there's an American man going in to neutralize the zombie threat. BUT WAIT! Everyone is black (because they're in AFRICA)! WTF?! Ohemgees, that's so racist!

It's ridiculous is what it is. Some people are getting up in arms about the content in games just because they don't understand the medium.

Hilariously, the nose probably looks too low because it's placed for a downwardly-angled head. n_n; My art is riddled with notoriously long faces, but Kei (goth-boy) here is not draconic like most of the people I draw.

Thank you. He does look a bit flamboyant, doesn't he? That probably explains why his friends are always shoving strange girls at him. ._.;

Thank you. Yes, the avatar is also mine. That one's a little more recent than goth-boy up there. This style is primarily it, I'll admit, but it seems to be evolving every single time I draw lately, so things keep changing around. Media-wise, I mainly do pencil drawings, but I dabble a little into charcoal on occasion. Perhaps if I finish any of those works I can put it up.

I knew someone that liked to switch genders on his account from time to time on another forum. I knew him, so I had no problem with it, but it did confuse a lot of the other members. If I had the opportunity to change my listed gender whenever I so chose, I would honestly probably do it just to see what colors my name would turn here. ._. That color coding thing is pretty cool.

Thanks a bunch. I saw it upon activating the account, but it was already disabled for me; could have been a compatibility issue with Opera, unless there was a chance to set that before then. If that was the case, then I just made a careless mistake. ._.

Okay, I feel kind of silly digging this thread up after it's gone idle for over a month, but I have to ask. What partitioning method did you use, Rasenganfan, when you installed Linux? If you used guided, that's really only good for a fresh system with no OS on it yet. My dad found that out the hard way. ._.;

Noted. *nod* And good to know they'll be direct downloads. Torrents are great for unstable connections and all, but people like to not seed them after they come down, and then they kind of die. ._.

We'd need to talk to the big boss to get our genders fixed. I have the same issue. ._. *definitely a girl* I just haven't gotten around to sending Davideo7 (It feels so cold and impersonal to refer to him that way ) a PM about it yet. I'm sure he'd change it for us if we asked.

Going out on a limb here, hohman. ._.; Even when I'm on a horrible, awful, terrible slump, I can not resist the urge to whore my bits and pieces out. And they are bits and pieces, because I can never ever finish ANYTHING ever, and if I do it's holy crap a miracle. But, here we are now; most of the stuff I put up here will likely be older works because I kid you not when I say I'm eyes-deep in a muddy slump.

We'll have enough rambling out of me, however, and here we go~!



I can't actually remember how long it took me to get to this point on this picture, but it was a very long time. For those still reading, this is a boy. Despite girly shoulder posture and pretty face, it's a boy. Some of my men have kind of girly faces. ._. And for some reason it's always the ones I actually deign to draw. I've been intending to put color into this picture since before Christmas of last year, but I've been a lazy, unmotivated blob, and emo-haired goth boy has been stuck pretty much at this point for... probably over half a year by now. ...Now that I look it over again, it feels like his eye is still too high, despite how much I've lowered it. =_=; Dammit. On top of that, his ponytail looks too flat. D:

Comments, critiques, I'm open to them. Go ahead and give me your best shot. Just... try not to kick me in the face. n_n;

Perhaps I'm being silly here, but I've found that metal has branched into such a huge variety of subgenres that's hard to say what is and isn't among them. I'll admit right now that the oldest I have on me is likely my one Led Zeppelin track, but they were before the eighties. : | There's a particular element that all of these subgenres have that keeps them in the parent genre of metal, but I wouldn't be able to properly tell you what it was, because sometimes it's felt more than heard.

I'm a fan of all different kinds of metal, but what I seem to pursue the most is symphonic metal, and then industrial right behind it, whose roots appear to stem from the late eighties and early nineties. So they already bore a different sound from classic heavy metal bands to begin with. =/

Single files? Would they be torrents, or just moderately large direct downloads?

I had downloaded another version of the third disc that was split into two parts instead of eight (the second part was hilariously tiny by comparison to the first) before I posted about the first here, but I really haven't tried extracting it. ._.; The download client said IT might have a password too, I already forgot what download client it was, and where they were pointing to go, not to mention Linux has a little padlock icon on the file when I open the archive, which tells me it does, in fact, have a password.

...I wonder why the Get-Your-Rom version didn't have a padlock in it. Hunh.

Listening to:
(Kow Otani) Shadow of the Colossus OST - Last Battle

Kow Otani's work in that game was amazing.

Thanks everyone. X3 I'll be sure to poke around more as I settle in. S'nice to meet the lot of you.

So far I've probably wasted a good half hour having a gander at the themes before finally picking one. *snerk* Aside from that, I'm getting myself comfortable rather quick, I think, and I won't hesitate to ask if anything confounds me 'round here. I haven't had a look at the games room yet, but I'm sure we won't need to worry about me wasting precious work or school time there; I'm not in college yet and I can't seem to find a job. ;

Daily gender-benders are weird. : | Well, okay, not weird, but addling people's brains like that is just silly. If I remember, I'll be sure to see about asking for a fix on that, because while I might role-play as men a lot, I'm pretty sure I'm not properly equipped to be one myself.

...I'm sure after a little while I'll figure out what I want to do with my own post text. Usually I have colors, but I've noticed that the themes cover a notably wide range of them, so that just might be a no-go this time. It isn't going to stop me in my quest to unlock signatures, though. I like having a random spot to be silly or profound.