The Quest Blog
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06/19/09: Happy Birthday, Quest for the Legends
On June 19th, 2002, my parents got married after having been engaged for, oh, fifteen years or so. They took us the kids with them on their honeymoon (which consisted of a trip to the bakery). Later that day, it seems my twelve-year-old self was inspired to start writing a new Pokémon story after the one about Molzapart and Rainteicune stopped being as interesting and I had found the first other Pokémon fanfiction I had seen on the Internet. So I made a Word document called "pokémonsaga.doc" (pokémonstory.doc) and wrote into it the sentence, "Mark lived in a very small village." And my life would never be the same again.Now, seven years and oodles of revisions later, I have just started chapter forty-nine of this same story that the Internet miraculously has not yet become tired of. In the meanwhile, I have actually figured out what the plot is about (a comparitively recent development), written two longer spin-off stories and a one-shot, rewritten the same chapters about two hundred times, created a complex system of acronyms to describe all these versions, and spent my clearly far too abundant free time making various versions of minipages for it on my website and in the more recent past blabbing on about it in a blog.
On to more important business, because I do this for my website and my fic deserves to be subjected to the same horror just this once:
Happy birthday to you,
Mark, May, Chaletwo,
and all the other characters,
and the storyline too!
No, don't even ask how this is supposed to make any sense. Shush, you! Bad poetry isn't meant to make any sense!
In other news, my dad was messing with some settings on the server (this messing around will eventually lead to my being able to update my site easily from anywhere that has Internet access, so it will be worth it in the end!), and I just realized now that this prevents me from actually updating the live copy of the site (including things like this minipage). I can still post this entry, since I do that through the forum interface, but I can't upload any actual pages, so I won't be able to actually make the birthday updates I meant to make on the minipage.
(And I just might have spent today watching Gurren Lagann and the first Pokémon movie and reading and fangirling with elyvorg instead of working on the birthday preparations, and I just might be going to a summerhouse tomorrow (which is technically today, hence my posting the birthday entry now, but it's half past two AM and I have not yet gone to bed) where I won't be able to continue to work on them either, but that is totally not the reason the things I promised won't actually be going up on the birthday itself but a few days later. It's really all because of that server-messing-around and all my dad's fault. Totally.)
Anyway, I hope this attempt at an apology in the form of a long rambly snarky Quest Blog entry makes up for it, and note that I will make all that stuff over the next days and put it up.
Happy birthday, dear fic. I will eternally love you to subatomic bits despite all your cute little flaws, occasional lack of making any sense, overcomplicated plot, characters with far too many issues, legendaries, poor descriptions, two extra legs on Ariados and worst title ever. Just like Chaletwo loves the hell out of those iddle widdle dragons he created no matter how much of a danger they might pose to the continued existence of the world (pssh, who cares about the world anyway?)! May you live long and prosper, but not so long that I won't finish you sometime within this century, at which point I will dig your rotting corpse out of the grave and rewrite you all over again.
:3
(Yes, I seem to be high on something. It must be that blasted air I keep inhaling.)
06/17/09: Another New Volcaryu Sprite
So, well, since I pretty much finished what will probably be Thunderyu style on the minipage, it was time to move on to Volcaryu. And since Thunderyu style has a sprite trace (where I take a sprite, magnify it a lot, trace the outline in Illustrator and then color it in) of Thunderyu, it seems sensible for the other styles to have sprite traces of their respective dragons, too.The problem is that I've never really liked the new Volcaryu sprite much, so I figured I'd fix a thing or two first. Primarily, it bothered me that its body was kind of triangular - the belly was widest at the very bottom rather than being properly rounded - and that the tail seemed too narrow and flimsy compared to the bulk of the body. I also thought the wings looked a little pasted on and a bit too small even for Volcaryu. So I tried to fix all that, creating this:
Basically, I moved its right leg (our left) and the nearest portion of its belly a couple of pixels to the right (with appropriate tweaks to get the belly to look smooth again, of course), thickened the base of the tail and lengthened it slightly, and moved the wing a couple of pixels to the right to make it appear a little bigger.
I ran this by a couple of people who said, and I agreed, that the wing looked like it was attached too low on the back. And since I'd never been that fond of that wing shape anyway, I figured, hey, what if I just draw a completely new wing - like if I make it folded or something? So I did that. And then I thought that the head had really always kind of bugged me too, or rather the neck: it seemed to bend too much. So I decided to move the head a little. But then surskitty said she thought it would look better if I actually made it face the other way. I tried that and saw it actually would look pretty good that way, so I flipped the head and reshaded it accordingly. And then she said it would look better with its mouth closed, so I did that too. And then I thought the near horn looked shorter than the other horn, so I lengthened it a bit.
So the result is really more of a "new Volcaryu sprite" than an "update of the old Volcaryu sprite", and looks like this (shiny included for the hell of it, just to show I made it):
Any last-minute comments before I go and trace it?
(Also, don't miss the previous Quest Blog entries: chapter 48 is up, and there is a discussion of birthday celebrations for the fic, since it will be seven years old this Friday.)
06/15/09: Chapter 48 up
The Ouen League - Chapter 48: The Second Preliminary is now up on the minipage. Thanks to to surskitty, Midnight, elyvorg and opaltiger for reading over it and providing some comments (or rather, opaltiger has technically not finished reading over it yet, but once he does, I might make modifications according to his comments).Also be sure to check out the previous Quest Blog entry concerning possible updates to the minipage in celebration of The Quest for the Legends' seventh birthday.
06/15/09: Birthday Approaching
So, as you may or may not know, The Quest for the Legends' seventh birthday is coming up next Friday. I meant to make chapter 48 the big birthday update, but now I think I may finish it before the nineteenth, and keeping it back just to put it up the right day would be kind of annoying, both for you and for me. So I was considering my options for stuff to do for the fic's birthday if I put up chapter 48 sometime before that.EDIT: Chapter 48 is done and will be up tomorrow.
Idea #1: Redo Chalenor Style
I don't really like the Chalenor style here at the minipage much. I could use this opportunity to remake it entirely; probably just about the same colors, but a different layout and general design. In which case it would be nice to hear from you about what kinds of changes you would like to see. I could also tweak Chaletwo style somewhat while I'm at it.
Idea #2: Add New Style
I could also add a new style - probably based on Mew, since Mew, Chalenor and Chaletwo are pretty much the main legendaries of the fic (let's just say Molzapart doesn't count because he's not a Creator or Preserver). This would allow me to make a medium-colored style to go with the light Chaletwo style and dark Chalenor style.
Idea #3: New Styles Altogether
By which I mean redoing the minipage layout completely and creating completely new styles. For instance, I am toying with the idea of Thunderyu, Volcaryu and Polaryu styles - Volcaryu's would be black and red and thus the dark layout, Thunderyu's mostly yellow with some blue and on the light side but still intermediate, and Polaryu's white and blue as the light layout. I'm starting to lean towards this. Any objections, suggestions, etc.?
Idea #4: ILCOE Character Bios
The character bios currently on the minipage are... well, the only section on the site that applies to the IALCOTN rather than the ILCOE. That's pretty much because at the time I couldn't be bothered to make bios for everybody somewhat important who has been introduced in the ILCOE, and the IALCOTN was really being written. Now that I'm obsessively writing the ILCOE and the IALCOTN is pretty much on an acknowledged hiatus until I get serious writer's block on the ILCOE, maybe it's time I finally made the ILCOE bios. (I am thinking about including a section called "Character Rambles" in each bio where I would, well, ramble about the character, which I'm sure I would have a lot of fun with, but I don't know about anybody else.)
Note that nothing says I can't do many of these things except the time constraints - it's only a few days, after all, and I don't think I'd have the time to do all of this for the birthday (though I might just do much of the rest later).
Any thoughts about these ideas, which you'd most like to see, other ideas, etc.? I'm particularly interested in whether you think I should keep the Chalenor/Chaletwo(/Mew) layouts or switch to Thunderyu/Volcaryu/Polaryu - I'd rather not have both at the same time since I don't really want to bog this minipage down with random gimmicks like styles and it's neater when the styles are more nicely parallel - and whether you would have any interest in reading character rambles about everybody important in the ILCOE.
06/13/09: Huh.
It seems that Megan Hayfield has decided to be badass no matter how much I didn't intend to make her so. Or at least her Pokémon have decided to be.EDIT: ...Okay, okay, I'll talk a bit more. I'm on page thirteen of chapter 48 right now and the battle is progressing nicely; I'd estimate it'll get to the end by maybe page sixteen or seventeen, although knowing my estimates, I'm probably grossly underestimating it. The problem I mentioned in the 'American Ramble', by the way, has been solved.