To Europe!

    Once again I leave my home for a faraway place, but this time we are departing to a world I have yet seen - Europe. I am excited to see the Tower of London, Red Square, and many more places. In the ten days of actual summer vacation I have enjoyed in my own home I've yet to see the sun. That would normally mean good things for fanfiction and deviations but I have been so uninspired to write or Photoshop this last week that I have produced close to nothing. However after lunch I am going to buckle down and pump out at least three chapters and perhaps finish some oneshots for I Choose You…!; Christmas For Naruto Kun!; and some other fanfics that I have not published yet. The reason I have not uploaded these stories is because I have a horrible tendency to start a fic and put it on hiatus for any reason, such as ICY, CFNK, Ranma Ranma Climax!, and some others which I have just abandoned and deleted off the web. Before the end of this year expect another Naruto fanfic and fics of some other smaller series you may not have heard of such as a Vandread / Pilot Candidate crossover and a Gatekeepers fic. Perhaps I'll finally release those request fics that I had finished but had not gone over and edited yet - I think I have a Tsunade x Naruto, a Naruto x Temari, and a Ranma x Ukyou fic due.

    On a side note that's big news for me but little to you (at least until I post) I have felt the urge to release some information regarding the Unknown Person (Unknown Fighter, Unknown Traveler, etc) appearing in fanfics such as I Choose You…! and Ranma Ranma Climax!. His involvement does seem wholly detached from the plot of the story and looking back it was probably unwise to include him as a developing parallel plot. I should have instead placed him in foreshadowing in an epilogue of each story. Then again, RRC could not be changed to fit such a shift. If I have time left after finishing the chapters I'll upload today, I will write a short teaser about the Unknown, Rowan Star and his partner Melanie.

    Hopefully I get everything done today. Visit my MediaMiner.org and Fanfiction.net profile pages for updates. On a side note, I went on a NaruHina dev fav rampage yet again. Here's a link to my dA Favs. Some very good artists to watch… . Nekozumi has great Naruto and Bleach fanart, Artgerm has some fantastic Street Fighter deviations, and dannex009 has some amazing Naruto x Hinata fanart. There are several dev's which make me nosebleed, such as one of Hinata sucking a banana innocently, of Naruto and Hinata making out, and one of a barely clothed… well, you might want to see for yourself. I've got nothing new for deviantART worthy of posting. I purchased a new camera the other day (a Sony Cybershot) and was taking some random pictures with it, and discovered a new technique for highlighting color just by using layers and layer filters - I never needed to click on anything on the actual picture. I love discovering new ways to automatically touch up an image because then I can script and batch edit pictures on the fly. It makes life much easier. But, anyways, none of those shots can really be called art so I won't upload them.

    Enough blogging, I'm starving and I'm burnin' daylight. Gotta get to work… 

Firing it Up

    It lives! *thunder and lighting crash and clash as rain pummels against the window… light flashes on Vincent's newest monstrous machine…*

     I have finally reformatted and rebooted my computer. It took several whole days to hard-format the drives, then reformat them for Windows, then install Windows, then reinstate my programs and documents, and finally to customize the settings of everything to my liking. I have decided to save myself some pain and have installed Windows XP on it instead, relying on deviantART for themes, skins, and mods instead of myself. Usually when I build a new computer I invest days and days of time in it, coding, creating, and constructing everything myself. But, with the Europe trip around the corner, I just do not have time. I have since become more impressed with the devART community once again - a single search produces an abundance of skins of all kinds for me to use.

    I inadvertently stumbled onto the Rainmeter utility through viewing a skin on dA: BlackGlass

    Interesting program indeed. For those who don't know it's a very open-ended (skinning wise) utility that allows you to display graphics for the date and time, hard drive and memory usage, net transfer rates, etc. I did not find an official site for Rainmeter - just Google it. I also did not install Trillian and opted for, in my opinion, a less user-friendly but more powerful multi-messaging client Miranda IM. I stumbled upon this skin and loved it: Crystal QIP

    I removed many buttons and such from the windows and boxes because right now I want some simplicity and minimalism to ease my headache. It's great that IM programs can video chat and file transfer but right now I just want a freaking box where I type words into . On that note I grew tired of third-party operating system interfaces (such as Litestep) and was delighted to find a section of devART categories (Customization > Skins & Themes > Windows Utilities > Visual Styles) which run as Windows XP Themes that you paste into WINDOWS / Resources / Themes or some directory like that. currently I'm using: SHADED

    Very nice skin indeed. I wish I had IconPackager  or some other equivalent to use icons for this Theme, but I don't really like the icons that come with this - they all look too alike and are too bright; when I'm trying to find something I wouldn't be able to tell where it was. That's minimalism to a fault.

    Ah, what the hell. One more deviantART link. I guess it's just Whore dA Day or something: Blue ThruWay

    That is my current desktop. The wallpaper looked cool as it caught my eye browsing dA. And that is currently the visual build of my computer. For the sake of completion (if there exist such stalkers who want to clone my desktop) Xfire has the CleanX skin (from the official site) and Winamp is running smpl [Gray] (by Bunji of dA). By the way, windowed programs and games look pretty cool with these Visual Styles, for example Guild Wars or Yahoo IM (with the skin disabled).

    My future plans for this desktop: I wish to streamline everything on the desktop. Phase One would be to have all programs coded to autorun (for example, modding together all the skinlets of a Rainmeter skin and using the Rainmeter source code to create a standalone program). Phase Two would be to then unify - or at least package - all these programs together so that they initialize with one click. Perhaps after that's done I can also create a self-installer for everything, seeing as I've always wondered how to create an Installer - a useful talent I have yet to learn.

    But it will have to wait. Europe in a week! I'm excited. Oh, shoot, I still haven't posted that chapter I finished. Let me read it over again and I'll try to have it posted by tonight if I have all my errands finished by then. 

Back Home

    Home once more.

    I'm finally home again. Got back from the Philippines last night at around 11. If you love In N Out, try going a month without it, then eat extremely bad (airplane food equivalent) food and nothing else for about 17 hours, and then eat an In N Out Cheeseburger. Nothing will taste any better .

    This years departure - or arrival back home - was made even harder because I am leaving behind those I love. Then again, I plan to attend college there, at the University of the Philippines. I just have to gather my papers and mail them. It's kind of a big life decision, moving to another country, but… it's not a sacrifice at all. I'm hoping my feelings survive. It's easy to be so sure in your mind at the moment only to have it change tomorrow. "I love her! / I love him!" Such words with no doubt, no uncertainty. But time is life's strongest force, not love.

      I hope I am wrong. I hope life proves to me that love is much stronger. We shall see.

    My mood seems to be slipping already. *slaps self*. I have been given much inspiration. Of course, such inspiration is sometimes awkward when translated to fanfiction and my fandom of some female characters in certain anime series (Hinata! xD). But, nevertheless, my ability to write has been borne again. Perhaps I can even crack open the file to my book and continue writing. Yes, I might even be able to do that. I am optimistic .

    On another note, I cannot retrieve my works from my desktop computer. I have exhausted all my plans, and short of sending the hard drives to the manufacturer and paying hundreds of (maybe a thousand) dollars to manually bit-string together every single kilobyte of two 300gb drives, there is no way. However, because of vacation, nothing can get me down. My mood high so far has lasted a week (incredible!), and with it, I will blast music and write away… expect a chapter from Christmas For Naruto-Kun within a week . But, then, I'm off to Europe in a week, so then you'll have to wait a while for the chapter after that x_x.

    I'm off to eat breakfast. Can you believe that the Philippines does not have Rice Krispies? The blasphemy. I must be sure to pack one of my two balikbayan boxes next year stock full of Rice Krispies cereal boxes (no joke '-').  Alright, enough blogging. Time to eat!

the gears keep turning

    You know, I never believed in Biorhythms, or zodiac Signs for that matter, but for the last few days Gemini seems to be predicting my daily mood. And, I just realized my mood follows a long but repeating cycle. I still am dubious of zodiac signs, but Biorhythms…. to Wikipedia!

    I have just completed my research on RAID hard drive configurations, and the moment I touch done home I will attempt to salvage my works on my old computer. However, it would only really be recovering about half my works, because I have already rewritten some chapters. But, then again, I really want to recover those to-be deviations that I really don't want to remake. I will begin reposting chapters to Christmas For Naruto-kun, I Choose…!, as well as begin fanfics such as Nirvana on Zion, completion of Ranma Ranma Climax! and finally another LunaStar Organization Masterpiece whose title I shall withhold upon its release (The title kinda gives away what the fanfic is about ).

    Other notes, I have given up attempting to find the member list of old LSO. I just can't find it, after 3 years of searching. In that case, I wish to recruit! This means that we will be collaborating on fanfics and fanart. It will all be for fun, no paid commissions or anything like that. I already have some plans in mind (as in, works that I desire creation and completion of, but would be much too difficult to make alone). I can't freehand draw for shit, but I love writing scripts for doujin or webcomics. 

      Speaking of webcomics, I have been recently linked snafu-comics.com. Ever After, PowerPuff Girls Doujinshi… I can't get enough! Please update! So now currently I read snafu-comics.com (EA + PPG), megatokyo.com, questionablecontent.net, lfgcomic.com, vgcats.com, drmcninja.com, xkcd.com, and I also watch this one doujin site called Oranges In The Sun (see Links section). Oh yeah, I better add snafu there.

    I do STILL owe some people their fanfic requests. I probably have forgotten some, but what I remember were the following oneshots: Naruto X Tsunade, Naruto X Hinata (gladly xD), and a Shikamaru X Temari; a Ranma X Akane; and finally a Ichigo X Toujou (No dammit it's not Bleach) . If I missed anything, please comment here. Don't use the CBox, that's for unrelated random chatting ^^. Either that, or e-mail me at biyabo6@hotmail.com - I check my e-mail more regularly than I visit my blog, but it might end up in my spam folder in which case I wouldn't see it (I don't bother checking the spam, when there's like 1,500 e-mails on average monthly that go in there).

    Hm, I better put some clothes on, I think I'm going somewhere. *scratches head* hmmm….? It's vacation, and I'm in the Philippines, which means I have no watch, no schedule, and no brain. Oh well, I better go. Ja! 

First Post

    Funny that this is my third physical post because it's my first real blog post….

 PHEW!

    After a few days of hesitant yet curious discovery of my friend Gubbeh's blog and the free domains (skeptical, I was, of the fact that there was so much being offered without a catch), I sat down today, or, yesterday (It's 1 A.M. now…), and from dinner until now  worked on this blog. It took so long on this dial-up connection! I almost can't believe it's complete. I've always wanted a site of my own but dismissed blogs as useless wastes of time - then as the years past by blogs became more comprehensive, more flexible and powerful, with media uploading and site customization, that they began to draw my eye. I finally came across Gubbeh's blog and in my head I was thinking how cool it was that not only did she have a blog with her own layout, posts, and pictures, but on top of that the address was her own custom domain. It was visualizing in my head what biyabo.i.ph would look like in the address box of FireFox that finally toppled my hesitation.

    Perhaps I'll use this blog to actually… blog. Or, maybe it will die. But, I can at least say I toiled to create it into a site I call my own and I can say that I owned a blog. Worthless might that claim be, considering this blog is free . Oh well… . This is not much of a 'first post', but, hell, I'm tired. Perhaps when I wake up three days from now I can post some more. Good night.

                 Biyabo