popularity is truly frightening. the entire concept just kills me. i've touched upon this in the past, the dilemma of staying small, tightly knit, and stable, or to grow without abandon, recieve praise, and feel important to more than just 20 some people. as i've said elsewhere, i'm currently becoming more and more worried about popularity. popularity has a great destructive power. bandwidth is no longer an unlimited resource, let alone a cheap resource. neither is space. popularity claims and destroys both. and this all sounds horrible. i can't adequately convey the range of emotions i'm going through right now. i haven't been able to figure out what it was i was going to do tonight because i keep thinking about bandwidth usage trends, estimating what level file download limiters should be at, projecting how many hits i should expect for april, and when the first wave will probably end. there's also all the worry. who will be the next forum-ite to go apeshit? who will i have to delete next? what will i do if i hit 20 gigs of bandwidth usage? what happens if my databases dissapear again? will the server transfer really go smoothly? what's going to break next? what if ping falls off the planet again? what if i stopped caring? what if we get hacked? what if the server speeds never go back up? what if i can't migrate the forums to phpbb2.0? i can only begin to answer one of those questions. there's just so much. so much can go wrong. so much already has gone wrong. so much will go wrong tomorrow. i know it will because something always will. the database will explode, or i'll get 8-billion e-mails from the server thinking it's broken, or someone will go apeshit on the forums, or someone will dropkick geometry down the stairs.

what's worse is that tomorrow is already today. there is no off-time. no time for me to calm down, gather my thoughts, and continue with a fresh start. i just have to keep going, because it's now expected of me. [04.02.02@02:54]

and now i feel right again. skizzers is in slight disarray, due to geometry fading in and out of existance every few hours, and the phpbb2.0 forums at jedi-outcast.com can't seem to keep working for more than four hours, but what can i really ask for? it can only get better untill the forums explode for the fifth time in one day. better is here, and it's what we've always had, we just didn't know it yet. this is the point where we embrace slowdowns and learn to love downtime. bandwidth? where we're going, we won't need bandwidth.

now that our obligatory depressingly delusional server status update is out of the way, lets move on to other things. the goons uncovered a wonderful archive of all kinds of really really really high-dpi scans of anime stuff. so i went on a wallpaper-making binge. the results are the recent files in the wallpaper directory.

today i finish my preparations leading up to beating ffx. i plan on picking up two more ultimate weapons [yuna's and auron's, i already have tidus' and rikku's], one more aeon [the magus sisters come as a free bonus^tm for picking up yuna's ultimate weapon], and possibly a few more jecht spheres to get me auron's higher level overdrive attack. overall i plan on finishing this game by the end of the week. wednesday at earliest. nowthen, to go watch battle royale before lab. [04.09.02@07:02]

status check. ffx: completed, 68hrs logged. super monkey ball: beginner, advanced, and expert modes completed, infinite continues attained, lots of hours logged. skizzers forums conversion: phases planned, phase 1 completed, phase 2 starting in a matter of hours. fraggle rock archive: season 1 - 38% complete, season 4 - 7% complete. the tick archive: season 1 - 15% complete, total - 5% complete.

the end of ffx was depressing. they tried to go for a last battle like in ffvii. in ffvii, you defeated jenova, then came in to watch sephiroth go apeshit and become the one winged angel. then you beat his ass down and have one final battle. one on one, cloud v. sephiroth. the camera changes angles dramatically, and you get to watch cloud take sephiroth out close-up. it went really well at the end, and fit. ffx, however, tried to do something like this, a symbolic battle at the end, but instead they failed. its like they sat there and said "hey! i really liked the end of ffvii, lets try and do something like that!" and then went overboard. the next bit is spoiler-tastic, so if you're already pissed that i ruined the end of ffvii, you'd best head out now before i ruin ffx for you aswell. after you take out hulk-tastic jecht, you go to some magic surreal fucked up world. i really don't know, the game kinda lost me at this point. apparently the end "boss" of the game has the gimmick of being able to posess summons, because he's some l33t summoner d00d. so you get to this messed up place and summon something of yours, and then turn around to kill it. but for some unknown reason, the ffx team decided to give all 9 members of your party auto-life. INFINITE AUTO-LIFE. why1??!!! WHY!?! IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE! i got that far in the game and was ready to lay some heavy smackdown, and what do i get? i have to fight a battle where my normal attacks can take out the enemy, and even though they can't do enough damage to kill me, i have auto-life on, so IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO DIE. this pissed me off to NO END. the end battle was long, granted, but you can swap party members in, and it wasn't hard, and you have access to using ALL your healing items since its the last battle. but no, it was ruined by adding auto-life for no discernable reason, plot, gameplay, or otherwise.

the game as a whole, though, was very well done. it had an extremely in-depth minigame [blitzball], which i could tell was well done, i just had absolutely no interest in it at all, so i never bothered with it. i only had to play it once in the entire game, and i didn't have to win. and i wasn't penalized for losing. it was essential to the building up of one of my characters, but he wasn't very useful in the first place. however, i can see that if i liked the game, it would've turned out rather good. for some reason, ffx really felt *different* from the others. i guess it's because it's more like ff8 than any other, and i never really played 8. it was a major departure from 6, 7, and 9, where everything was customizable, but there were clear limits. with ffx, there were limits, but they were so far out in the statosphere, that i could concievably gotten another 50+ hrs out of the game by doing random junk. my party was at around half of max health, but there's a modifier that was "break hp limit", so what does /that/ mean? so much of it was like "well, you can do the normal junk, OR YOU CAN GO OVERBOARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". i really didn't bother with most of the extra-over-powered stuff. my party load-out for the majority of the game was my two fighters and a variable third. i always had auron and tidus in my party because they were just all-around good, and in late game they could do retarded things. my third character was one of the girls, yuna, lulu, or rikku, purely dependent on the situation. if it was just basic fighting, i'd have rikku in there. if i needed to take out something big in a fast manner, i'd break out yuna and one of my extra-large summons. if i needed to take out something with an abnormally large elemental weakness i'd bring out lulu and beat it down. the quick-switching ability made this really easy to do, so i could make any of these changes on the fly.

it really was good, though. square almost managed to tell a unique story, or at least once again tell the same story uniquely. going back forever now [ff6-ish] it's been the conflict of nature/religion/magic vs man/science/technology. these things all come up in ffx, but i think for once here ffx comes down to defiance. defiance of religion, tradition, self, everything. it's the story of the destruction of destruction. woo for circles. anyways, the sun's up now. i should go back to coding. i hope to have the skizzers forums converted in some way by late tonight. [04.13.02@04:55]