HalcyonSpirit

Seriously, you are too awesome.

I've been following it since Ep.6. My impressions as a writer and an amateur animator: Storyline leaves a little to be desired but isn't actually bad in any respect. It's a bit predictable and the pacing is inconsistent. Dialogue leaves a lot to be desired; as a writer, some of the dialogue is just... ugh. Not a fan of this part. Animation quality is superb for sprite animations. Aside from a few small things each episode, the animation is fluid and natural-looking (that said, this is after Ep.5; prior to that it was a bit less impressive, though still pretty good). I watch it mostly for the animation itself.

... It's October already, isn't it? FFS, I hate college when it gets like this. I haven't had a chance to breathe, let alone write... Completely lost track of time. Well, there's only been 3 entries so far for this competition, so there's an automatic 1 week extension for anyone still considering submitting! Please, let's get some more participation here... I don't want to see this competition fall apart under my watch!

It rocks. That is all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Awww yeah! Happy Birthday!

Fix'd. I want to buy the new album, but I wonder whether it's going to be released for free at any point in the near future...

Assuming I can get all my work done prior to then, HELL FUCKING YEAH!!!

Yeah, I did. I made sure hidden files were shown and that system files weren't hidden in the folder/file options. Still nothing. Oh well, kind of a moot point now.

I couldn't find that boot.ini file anywhere on any partition. Odd... Well, I wasn't going to screw around with it any longer, so I just wiped the partition. I can always reinstall if I need to. However, I tried expanding the W7 partition to incorporate the newly-released space, but the partition manager that comes with W7 apparently can't do that for one reason or another (something about where the space is located on that drive, I think). So right now I have a newly-formatted, 60GB NTFS partition. I can use it, but does anyone know of a way to merge it with my W7 partition without data destruction? There's got to be something out there that can do it...

I did. When it tried to boot, it came up with an error about a missing file or something. There shouldn't be anything missing, I didn't touch the OS files.

What? No, like I said, it's just a guideline. Your comment just reminded me of it, and I needed to make note of it.

*eye twitch* Jaaaaaaaaam... are you trying to make things harder for me? Seriously! Damnit... the letter of the law does say that we're only supposed to write within the competition's submission stage in order to qualify, but the spirit of it is practically that if you wrote it in a single month and didn't touch it since, it wouldn't be giving you an unfair advantage (which is why the rule was put in place). The problem with following the spirit is, obviously, there's no way of knowing when you wrote it and when you stopped modifying it. I prefer following the spirit of the rules, but in this case it's just too prone to abuse. Unless a majority of submitting authors object, I will have to disqualify it, Jam (You can write something else, though! Please do, I enjoy your pieces!). However, I am making it a priority for myself to review it in earnest, so you will be getting some mileage out of it regardless. You can probably expect it around a week after this submission stage ends, though I make no promises about this deadline; I happen to love the whooshing sound deadlines make when soaring past. Oh, and for future reference, please try to refrain from commenting on submissions until the voting period for the competition is over! Jam's piece is obviously exempt since it can't qualify for submission, but seeing Neblix's comment made me realize that this particular guideline (not rule, guideline) hasn't been mentioned recently.

Still useful information, but only for future reference. Since I can't even boot into XP at all, there's nothing I can do about it from there. I'm pretty sure I saw something similar in 7, but it only shows itself as an installed OS. I imagine it operates similarly to how 7 recognizes other OS installations for the bootloader, so that's no surprise. The only alternative solution I can think of is installing a flavor of Linux and hoping its bootloader works properly with both XP and 7. But frankly I don't like the idea of hoping it works. I'd much rather have a separate drive entirely for Linux (which I plan to do anyway as soon as I can get home and retrieve one of my old IDE drives from an old computer). Anyone have experience with Vista's (or 7's, they're the same thing) partition manager? I think reclaiming the partition may be my only option.

It would probably fix the problem for me if I had XP installed on C rather than D. As it is, using EasyBCD makes it want to boot XP from C. But 7 hasn't been giving me any problems, so I might just wipe XP and try to reclaim the partition with 7's partition manager.

Holy crap. This is awesome. And I mean for both getting the opportunity to do the demo song and the song itself. Congrats!

The issue at hand is that I can't boot into XP. Here's how it went down: Prior to this, I had two installations of XP on my computer, both on the same physical drive but obviously on different partitions. The first, on the C partition (system), was a 32-bit version of XP Pro. The second, on the D partition (logical), was a 64-bit version of XP Pro. I'd been using the 32-bit version less and less, so when I got my copy of Windows 7 Pro (64-bit version), I decided that I would get rid of the 32-bit version of XP and keep the 64-bit version. I went through the Windows 7 installation procedure, including doing a format of the C partition to get rid of the XP installation, and now I have W7 running fine. The problem is that instead of giving me a dual boot option with XP, the computer just boots into W7 automatically. There's no entry for XP in the boot file. They're on the same drive, so I can't change the drive boot order. I've tried using EasyBCD to add an XP entry into the Windows 7 boot file, but it won't let me tell it that XP is installed on the D drive; it will only let me put it on the C drive, and so it won't work. I've tried using the XP Recovery Console to rebuild the boot.ini file (or something to that effect), which would make the computer use the XP version of the dual boot screen, but it can't find any Windows installations for some reason. I've tried the dual-boot guides online, but they all assume that either XP is installed second (which gives it the XP boot selection) or that W7 is installed second with XP on the C (system) partition. Neither of these is true in my case, and thus nothing has worked for me. Any suggestions?

My best so far: 5029m Addicting little game. I approve!

Yeah, more or less. Really, if you've been around long enough, you know that a contest starts every other month and that it follows the "Freeform->Short Story->Poetry" rotation. So as soon as a competition month starts, you're free to begin writing. No need to wait for me to formally announce it. Straziante, you're in the clear, don't worry. I'm quite jealous that you can write so quickly. I normally can only write a few paragraphs at a time. You're ok too, neblixsaber. The word count is a little flexible, but I just checked and you're under the limit anyway.

All necessary information is in the first post. For the record, submissions are due by the end of the month at 23:59 UTC. Also, Straziante (and really anyone else, as a reminder), we have a rule about submissions: stories need to be written within the submission period. Now, perhaps you did write your submission in the few hours after the start. I know there's some people that could do that, so I don't discount the possibility. If you don't say anything, I can't really do anything since there's no way for me to know when you wrote it. But if you didn't write it during those few hours, I do ask that you do the right thing and write a different story for submission. Everyone, remember, we rely on people to honor the rules here, since it's somewhat hard to enforce certain rules except in extreme cases. Please don't abuse this trust.

Good to have you aboard, Straziante and neblixsaber! I'm looking forward to seeing what you can do! It's past 00:00 UTC, so we're now into the SEPTEMBER 2009 SHORT STORY COMPETITION! In addition, as already announced, the voting period for the July competition is STILL OPEN! So if you're going to participate in the Short Story competition in any way, and even if you're not, I strongly urge you to take a few minutes to vote on the July competition as soon as possible! Get crackin', because I sure am!

So how come it's going on the 31st and I still only have one vote?! I mean, seriously, I know I haven't been able to send out reminder PMs this round but you shouldn't have to rely on them to remember to vote! The next round (Short Story) WILL start on schedule! The July round voting will remain open until I've got enough votes to call it, so get cracking already! Jeez...

My lack of computer is really screwing up this voting round. I never got a chance to sent out reminder PMs because my computer, despite getting it's new motherboard, still doesn't work! So I'm extending the voting period until... well, until further notice. I've gotten only a single vote in so far, but I can't complain too much due to the computer failure situation. Still, I was hoping for better despite it. Get moving!

Many thanks, Schwaltzvald. Awesome image is now more awesome. I'll post some of my images once my desktop is back up and running (I'm waiting for a part to arrive so I can reattach my CPU heatsink...).

Is there a high-res version of this? I want it.

I just burst out laughing at 4:08 because it seemed so completely random. I wasn't expecting it at all and for some reason I found it hilarious. That is all.