Suikoden II Wallpaper - "Luca Blight: Vae Victus"      
800*600   (283kB)
Well, that's a surprise. I've gone and made yet another Suiko wallpaper.
          This time, the theme is Luca Blight and his insatiable bloodlust. I accidentally happened to notice that using a filter called "psychedelic clouds" turns a regular marble texture into something very much resembling blood (though green blood... the entire process can be seen here), and thought "hey, cool". Then I thought about it: hmm. Blood is cool, but how do I use it? Most obvious answer? Luca Blight wallpaper, duh! So I used one of the pics from the Suiko card collections, and the "green blood", and some cut-and-paste, and ended up with... this. I didn't really have to do anything I'm not already familiar with, but I did discover the fact that there are two versions of the Suiko2 intro movie on the PAL CD: one where the title is simply "Suikoden II", which is used in the Eng. version, and one where it's "Gensosuikoden II" - the one I used here - which was presumably used in the Jp. version. File under "cool but useless knowledge", KPLZTHX, and enjoy the wallpaper. I believe it's one of my best so far. =)

Chrono Cross Wallpaper - "Fargo of the Caribbean"
800*600   (210kB)
This is a silly little thing I cooked up after being brainwashed by way too much Chrono Cross and way too many Pirates of the Caribbean ads. It's plain and simple, Fargo against a sunset at sea (which is teh 00gli, but deal with it), where the sun is a compass made from a clock (seriously! They're selling these 1337 little Chrono Cross clocks on ebay!). And then there's a logo. W00t. Oh, and everything's in cool sunset red-and-orange. I don't have much to say about this one, really. -_-;

Breath of Fire II wallpaper - Yua / Patty
Version I (scanlines) 800*600   (232kB)
Version II (no scanlines) 800*600   (213kB)
A wallpaper featuring Patty the Phantom Thief - most likely my favourite NPC ever! (Gimme a break... she's a dragon and a thief; it doesn't get much better than that.)
          ...anyway. There aren't that many good BoF wallpapers around, and I've only seen one with Patty, so it's not like I'm flooding the market or anything. -_-
          I'm quite pleased with this one. Thanks to it, I figured out how to make the steel looking thingy I've been seeing all over the place (and here I thought the "Add Noise" tool was completely useless!) in PP, and nothing in particular gave me any serious trouble - the most troubling part was the design. (Why doesn't everything go this smoothly?)
          I used the only available art of Yua - one as a kid, for the dragon tear, and the one of her as an adult for the larger pic. (Speaking of the Dragon Tear, the one I used is a screen capture from the ending of BoFII, taken with an emulator.) The dragon in the background is also official art; a part of a larger image. I made the borders from a text effect in PP ("metal text"; I just nicked the edges of the characters), and I finally found a use for the "wood" texture. The logo is simply cut and pasted (although I removed the dark stuff around the text).
          I decided to make two versions of this one - I'm not certain which one I like best, so just take a look at both of 'em and see which one you prefer.
          All images except for the logo and the Dragon Tear are from dragon-tear.net (Ah! The irony!).

Phantasy Star Wallpaper - "The End of a Millennium"
800*600   (390kB)
...sorry about the überlarge file size; the image just wouldn't compress without trouble, so I had to let it remain huge. Blarg.
    This started out with me, google and a query with no results. Okay, so there were some results, but they all pointed to my stuff. That means I have a Responsibility! (Eh?) Well, actually, I don't. But it does mean there's a lack of PS wallpapers on the web (although "Phantasy Star" +wallpaper gives more results). Replaying PSII made me want to do something PS-related, and... uh. Yeah. This is it.
    First of all, I must confess: I was inspired by a wallpaper on this site - the one on the lower right. That's the reason I used purple (I wouldn't have otherwise, but I thought that looked good, so...), and also the reason I included the Orakio/Laya pic.
    As for the technical stuff, I started with the PSIII pic. I liked the "old" look of it (the muted colours), so I converted some other images to the same colour scheme. The "movie" edges were done in MS Paint, oddly enough, because of the way it handles simple shapes and text (it doesn't anti-alias without asking). The rest, though, was put together in the same ol' Picture Publisher. Again, I didn't have to spend that much time on the graphics - it was just copy, paste and paste again; the only thing that gave me trouble was the logo, which tended to show blue edges no matter how I handled it, but even that didn't take that long. Once I succeeded there, I just copied it in "lines" (because it stood out too much when it was "solid") and pasted it in as usual. The background is a tint fill (black and dark purple), and the "film strips" are pasted in and rotated slightly; the Orakio/Laya one is cut off with an uneven line to emulate a "broken" film. I haxx0red the PSIV title (an "o" and an "n" contributed to the "a"), and transparent-ed it somewhat. That's really all there's to it, and I'm now one of the most active PS wallpaper-makers on the web. ;P Congratulate me, or something.

Suikoden III Wallpaper - "The Masked Man"
800*600   (188kB)
Nooo! Not another one!
    All right, first things first:

[SPOILER WARNING!]
This wallpaper reveals, without any doubt, the identity of "The Masked Man"(™). Do not view if this bothers you.

Right, now that that's out of the way, it's time for my Rambling®.
      This project has been sitting on my HD for quite some time. I knew I wanted to make a wallpaper with Luc, but I haven't been able to find any good pics of him. (A big fuck you goes out to all the people I've asked for help who knew where to find them and just didn't bother to answer. When I see a request for help, I help the person in question if I'm able.) Anyway, I stumbled on a scan from the Suikoden card game, and that took care of that. It's not in the best of quality, but I took what I could get, and this is the result.
      I started off with a really freaking big True Wind Rune pic (actually, it was a wallpaper on its own; an official Konami release, apparently), copied the Standard Character Portrait™ of Luc from S3, and pasted it in, then repeated with transparency and altered size. The logo in the top-left corner is just the S3 logo with transparency, the quote is plain text with - you guessed it - transparency, and the un-masked Luc on the bottom left side is the one from the card, enlarged and smoothed as much as possible without totally ruining it. Since it's a scan of a rather small pic, its quality leaves a few things to be desired, but as I said, it's been hard to find pics, and that was the best I could come up with. Well, that's all, really. In spite of the troubles, I'm rather pleased with this one, and now that I have a monitor that doesn't choke the light, it might actually look decent on other people's computers as well... ;P

Suikoden Wallpaper - McDohl family
800*600   (194kB)
Alright, yet another Suikoden-themed wallpaper. This one depicts the entire McDohl family (well, almost - Sonya is missing), including Tir, Gremio, Cleo, Pahn, Teo and Ted. The characters are all from the official artwork, and it's the same old cut/paste routine. Teo and Ted are very transparent, and everybody else is darkened slightly with a darken (duh) tool. The background is a photo of an angry-looking stormcloud, although blurred quite a lot. Soul Eater, as well, is copy/pasted in, enlarged a lot, blurred, and turned transparent. The famous but oh-so-cliché-looking (don't tell me you've never seen that kind of effect before...) text from the Suikoden intro is simply typed in about five of six different fonts, most of them turned 50% transparent, and the one in the middle coloured blue. And as for the title in the NW corner, care to guess? Yup, copy/paste, transparency, and a lighten tool. Quite simple. All in all, I quite like this picture, but it's too chaotic for me to use it as a wallpaper... wah. Well, it's the best I could do. Hope you like it.

Suikoden 2 Wallpaper, "Nanami - Through a Glass Darkly"
Version I (facing left) 800*600   (265kB)
Version II (facing right) 800*600   (220kB)
I seem to be one of very few to actually like Nanami. I fell in love with this picture from the intro of Suikogaiden the moment I saw it (the picture, the picture! Not Nanami, the picture!), and decided to do something with it... probably didn't turn out as good as it deserves, but I think the end results are kinda pleasing... pleasing, but depressing. (It's such a sad pic... ;_;)
          The process of making this was very simple. Pressing PrintScreen at the right moment while watching the SuikoGaiden intro is so easy that even G. Bush could do it. As for the editing, well, Picture Publisher comes with a prerecorded macro called "brush strokes", which I've never found much use for. This time, however, it looked good, so I used it. Then I typed up the lyrics in a nice font, pasted them in with a bit of transparency, and added the larger words with an "invert background" command, and, well, that's it.
          Song lyrics are taken from In the Arms of Silence, © Bay Laurel 1994.

Suikoden Wallpaper, Crowley - "I have no regrets"
800*600   (230kB)
This is - duh! Surprise! - another wallpaper... something quite unique... namely a Suikoden wallpaper featuring everybody's favourite mage, Crowley! (Everybody's. I shall hunt down the nonbelievers later with my Spork of Smiting™.) Thanks goes out to Vivi-chan for letting me use her Rune pics. ^^
          In case anyone is wondering, the "I have no... regrets" quote is his "death quote" - what he says if his unit gets defeated in a major battle. I think it suits him. ;P
          I didn't spend a lot of time working on this. The reason for that is that almost everything is made from an original image - Crowley and the Runes are simply copy/pasted in. Crowley's portrait needed a little bit of smoothing, but otherwise it was fine; the Runes, I simply pasted in twice, once at normal size and once at about 2x size. The only thing that provided troublesome was the wedge-shaped thing under the quote, but with a little work, it wasn't that difficult. The text and the wedge are coloured with a gradient fill tool, one white-black and the other black-white, in that order. The faint quote on top is simply very, very transparent and written in something that PP calls "glass text".

Phantasy Star Wallpaper
800*600   (320kB)
Well, what it says (duh). A wallpaper featuring Alis, Noah, Myau and Odin with the Algo solar system in the background, as it may have looked around the time Alis lived (that is, Palma is still in one piece). It has "simplicity and elegance", according to RPGamer's Theme Central. Hehehe. ^_^;
          I got the star-sprangled background to this from *PSII SPOILER - highlight the text if you want to see it* Nei's death scene in PSII. I darkened it towards the edges with the good 'ol gradient fill (not too pleased with this... looks too "flat"), used a lighting tool to create the "star", and pasted in the planets from Sega's official artwork. Alis and friends are also from Sega's art; I simply turned them black and white and tinted them blue, then pasted them in with a bit of transparency. The barely-visible PS logo in the corner is just the same; pasted in with a good deal of transparency on it. Quite simple, in fact. Well, fairly simple, at any rate. :P

My career as a journalist
Just a place to put the articles I've had published. Funnie. Yes. Definitely funnie.

The Midi Massacre
This is a little project I've been working on for some time. The Midi Massacre is a bunch of remixed tracks, in midi format (that's where the name comes from, duh)... I had to put it on another page to save space. If you're interested, click on the link above to read more.

Neon Genesis Evangelion "chibi" active windows characters
This, too, I've had to put on a separate page... If you're interesting in having a small NGE character on your window (Windows window, not the glass kind...), you should have a look. I think they work with any version of Windows after 95, but I'm not entirely sure. No idea what happens if you run Linux, though...

"A Book of Five Rings", by Miyamoto Musashi

This is a must-read. I don't know if this is the complete book, as it was some time since I read it... but there's some interesting stuff in here.
          Oh yeah, and I don't know the person who translated this, nor do I have his/her permission to post it here. I don't have Miyamoto-san's permission either, obviously. So I may have to take it down if someone complains. That means, if you wanna dl it, do so now, before it's too late...

The Suikoden Fan Fiction Drinking Game (v.0.3)
Something I fixed up when I was bored... A drinking game for use with fan fiction based on Suikoden, either the first or the second game. When the third comes out, maybe I'll add that as well... ^_ ^

The Final Fantasy Fan Fiction Drinking Game (v.0.9)
A Drinking Game for use with Final Fantasy fanfics. It contains characters and situations from Final Fantasies "1" to 9, so you should be able to find SOMETHING to drink about...

Selfinsertion
A... silly pic. :P It depicts a selfinserted... me. O_o Oh, whatever.

Final Fantasy VII Encounter Generator (v. 1.0)
Manual
Program
This is a very simple program that generates "random encounters" for characters in Final Fantasy VII. You feel like writing a fanfic but don't know who you want in it? Just use this program to generate the characters, and you're halfway there! ;P Or maybe you want a character to team up with someone else, but don't know who? Same thing there! The FFVIIEG - it doesn't slice, it doesn't dice, it definitely doesn't make french fries, but it does create random encounters! Get yours today! Oh yeah, and read the manual first, 'kay?