Silbird.fla has corrupted. I've tried everything. It was around 95% done. It is now impossible to open it. I was going to finish it today, but I guess not. I've tried decompilers, my friend tried opening it on his computer, I tried opening it in different ways... it's hopeless. I was working on it 7 or so hours straight the past couple of days... I made such good progress, it was looking good... now it's gone due to an unpredictable crash that destroyed the file.

I'm pretty upset about it. I don't think I've got it in me to work on it that obsessively again after losing all that progress. I was able to salvage a little bit by taking screenshots of the latest .swf file, but it's not much... I'll have to redraw/trace a ton of stuff. I'm not only bad at tracing, but I also dislike it. 2010 is off to a good start.

I've always got so much stuff to do... I'll write some stuff here so you guys know what's going on, and it doubles as a reminder to myself! Well, first off, I did a couple of insignificant things. In the Miscellaneous section, I added two new pictures to my "Colors! gallery" page and I added some of my daily drawings (the better ones) to my "openCanvas gallery" page. I made another daily picture on January 31st in the form of a wallpaper... it's just some sort of forest. The bark on the trees doesn't really make sense, or at least I don't think I've seen trees like that before. I should've shaded the trees a bit better to show some depth... Anyhow, I stuck that in the Downloads section. I might edit it someday. Looking back on my old wallpapers, they're kinda embarrassing (aside from the Cloud City Ransom one, and the Blind Swordsman one is almost decent). I'll probably take them out of the Downloads section eventually, but still have links to them in Cloudflash's History section.

Some of you may have noticed the new Scream face emoticons on the forum... I intend to replace all of the emoticons with Scream versions. I don't really like the original Scream faces I made (an edit of a phpBB3 emoticon), but the new ones don't really have the same charm.

-What I've been doing-
1. If you didn't already know, I've been improving my art, and I think it's working.
2. Coming up with new Cloudflash Mix ideas! From sometime in December to now, I've come up with around 20 ideas.
3. Coming up with and developing some new stories... I've got over 10 story ideas written down. Unfortunately, they aren't short ones, and they're still trickling in. I won't be touching these until I can draw professional looking manga (anime style), though.

-Other things I've been doing-
1. Watching anime and reading manga...
2. Translating manga from Japanese to English.
3. Making pixel art for something (not Cloudflash-related).

-To do-
1. Make good Scream emoticons.
2. Take care of some of those yogurt requests.
3. Create graphics for the "previous" and "next" buttons on the comic pages... Y'know, like every other webcomic site does.
4. Fix up the mistakes in El Cacto like I said on December 30th's announcement in 2009... and remove the "score" part of the game/movie pages as mentioned there, too.
5. Create border graphics so I can put text on the site in its own little "box", if you will, rather than just having white text on the background.
6. This one's a very large project, but I want to create an entire city for the modern day world of Cloudflash. A city with multiple elementary schools and high schools, stores, malls, playgrounds, streets, thousands of houses... Really, an entire city. And I want every street and building to be named. I've got some stories involving magic, some set in the past, or whatever other things like that... Those stories won't use this city, but I intend to use this city for like... General Cloudflash Mix purposes or as the setting for my more realistic stories.
7. Perhaps create a specific section for my art and have the images neatly displayed as thumbnails.
8. Make a new set of update avatars (always with the update avatars)...
9. Organize my art tips better and go into better detail with the explanations, including example images. There's gotta be thousands of free art tutorials out there, but the ones I see seem to be pretty much useless (unless you just want to learn how to draw something in one specific pose without really being able to apply it to anything else).
10. Bring C-Mix out of hiatus...
11. Make new wallpapers.
12. Sleep.
13. Maybe make the Characters section more like Newgrounds' cool "The Staff" page.
14. Maybe just some general layout improvements to make the site sexier...
15. Update the logo to at least say 2010.
16. Make Final World Quest better as mentioned on November 30, 2009.

And I'm gonna go put the unfinished "Silbird" movie on YouTube, explaining the situation and linking to Cloudflash in the comments. You're all thinking "Who cares about that cheaply animated thing? I bet no one's ever heard of this 'Hyadain' or 'Silbird' thing...", but you'll see! I bet 20 yogurt tokens it'll have at least 10 comments and a couple hundred views within the next three months! ... What? I don't sound too confident about it? Well, at least Cloudflash would reach people that little bit.

In other news, I might heavily cut my Flash game projects. I'm not a good programmer... I should tell my stories through comics or animations instead. There are a couple of Flash games I really want to make, though, so I will eventually.

Well, it's been over a month and I pretty much haven't touched that "to do" list from February at all. So far, I've fixed up El Cacto a little like I said I would and I just brought Cloudflash Mix out of hiatus (updates every Thursday now).

As I mentioned once or twice in my Twitter, I was working on Copy Ninja vs. Copyright 2 for some time. Seems I didn't really give it a formal announcement, though I made some mention of it on the forum... Anyhow, I was working on it like mad, but then I suddenly lost interest and haven't touched it for weeks. I am going to finish it. It's a lot better than the first one... well, maybe not as clever, but I don't think people entirely appreciated the subtle jokes of the "forbidden jutsu" being those which are protected by copyright laws or that Kakashi was punished for such theft. Anyhow, much better art, better writing, better voice acting, more action planned, etc. I'll give my usual 90% value promise that I'll have it done before summer ends.

Bringing up Silbird again, so far it has over 150 views on YouTube, 2 ratings, and no comments. I'm guessing it'll get enough views for my statement before, but probably only one or two comments max, so maybe I'll just drop that project unless I REALLY feel like remaking/fixing it sometime.

I sometimes think about redesigning some stuff on Cloudflash, but those thoughts don't go too far... Adding/making new graphics, maybe killing the background image on the main site and going with a solid colour... I think about how swell it would be if Cloudflash had a good MySQL database; then there'd really be some opportunities to organize things better and such, and then the forum wouldn't have to be on a different host... By the way, Hostbidder, the site I used to get free domains from, seems to have merged with some other site and it seems like they don't offer the free domains anymore. It looks like I'll have to get a credit card, find a domain registrar with decent pricing, and start paying; cloudflash.net will last until July. And then I wonder if I should pay for hosting so Cloudflash could be better, but am I willing to shell out, like, $50 to $100 per year for little ol' Cloudflash?

Actually, the forum's current host seems pretty decent. Distracted in the middle of writing this post, I was looking at some various hosting sites for about an hour. Most of them were vague on things I wanted to know and it was hard to find information on them, but the forum's current host was more clear... No file size limit, seems to include the features I want, around $60 per year, domain name included... I think I'll transfer all of Cloudflash to this host right now, actually. Maybe I can even still get away with free hosting for now, but I'll have to do something about that domain name.

As some of you may have noticed, today's comic was blurred for a while. I also deleted the "Downloads" and "Forum" navigation buttons so that they wouldn't load at all (unless perhaps cached), I deleted half of the El Cacto screenshot that's been sitting under the main site's navigation for a while, and I deleted one of those Cloudflash character bubbles in the top-right of the main site... Inconsistent measures, indeed, in hopes that one might lead the user to believe something is not right with Cloudflash. Anyhow, the actual comic does have to do with April Fools' Day, which you can now see for yourself.

Now for some news regarding my projects and such... I haven't really been touching them and I thought about starting a few new ones - the usual. You can expect Cloudflash Mix to continue updating every Thursday (or at very near dates) unless I decide to unexpectly stop on a whim. I'll probably keep it alive and well for at least a few months before considering doing that. I haven't touched the second chapter of El Cacto yet (aside from writing it), but you can expect that anytime between now and mid-June. I intend to start/finish another project within the same timeframe, and perhaps I'll convince myself to get Copy Ninja 2 over with...

I also want to redesign Cloudflash, which I drew some concepts for. Or at least I have a good idea of how I want the front page to look... If I get around to that, everything will probably be prettier and more efficient (for me), and I'd hope to also add a feature to log onto the site (with your forum account) and be able to comment on stuff... And I'm thinking of changing some of the forum profile information since some of the current stuff is sorta risky... I thought about this at least a month ago, so I don't entirely remember what I had in store, but I wanted to add a profile field for "YouTube account" and "Newgrounds account" so people could conveniently link to their creative works without having a website or incorrectly using the "website" profile field.

Well, that's about it.

Great news, everyone! Rather than working on Cloudflash's redesign, a 30 page comic I want to have finished within the next two and a half weeks, or any of the things on my "to do" list from February, I've started a new Flash project! It'll be a parody of generic/stereotypical battle anime with some similarities to "Girlchan in Paradise" (if you've ever seen that on Newgrounds). I intend to make an "original Japanese" version with Japanese voice acting and all, then I'll dub/butcher/censor it later and make both versions available for viewing.

-You can watch the opening theme by clicking here.- I intend to re-record or have someone else do the singing part since it sounds a bit off, and I might add a bit more actual animation. Like "Girlchan", I plan to make the animation pretty cheap, though, like little movement and lots of recycling. The song from the opening theme was made by Direlire of Newgrounds, audio portal ID 311954. The original song is 127 seconds long, but I'm just using the last 49 seconds.

I have most of the story written already, but I still have to translate it to Japanese, have it reviewed/corrected, and find people who can voice act in Japanese. Hopefully I can get the first episode released within a month. The cheap animation for each character's dialogue is pretty much covered already, along with some other stuff... Anyhow, I guess that's about it for now.

As I vaguely mentioned a couple of times in April and mentioned this morning in the Polls section of the forum, I have a 30 page comic I want to get done soon. I'll give a little more info about it now... It's a one shot, so there won't be any sequel for it - just those 30 pages as is. Unlike everything I've finished so far, this story's based on romance. The project ended up being a bit bigger than I originally anticipated since an important part of the story has to do with an anime series... I decided the "anime series" in this comic would be based on our old supernatural fighting friend, Taun Bu... But I wanted something completely different from the story I've planned for Taun Bu, so I had to write more about his story and then write the setting and start of a sequel story. I also had to design new characters for the sequel story, give them background stories, all that jazz... I also had to write some song lyrics for this one shot since a certain song will have importance, but I'm thinking of changing it since I can't think up a decent tune to go with the lyrics I wrote. So, I made further attempts at learning how to make music in order to make a song first and then write lyrics for it after... And I ended up with "Drifting Cloud", which I submitted to the Newgrounds Audio Portal. But if I was gonna have music, I'd need album art, right? I decided to call myself "Cloudy Danno" for whatever music I end up making, and here's the non-album specific art I made for my stuff (for now, anyways):

Newgrounds' Audio Portal removes the album art and some other information, though... Anyhow, the song didn't turn out right for my original intentions... Back to this one shot, I was sketching it on paper, but I was being way too slow and detailed, so it was taking me a few hours just to sketch one page when I know I'm capable of sketching a decently detailed full body person in, like, 5 minutes. I have 20 pages sketched and I got a small start on tracing them with my tablet (just 1 and a half pages traced so far). Around when I was starting, I set a deadline for myself - May 13th. I probably should've set a sooner deadline 'cause with this I'm only leaving myself around a month to get El Cacto's 2nd chapter done. My estimates state that it's almost impossible for me to meet this May 13th deadline like I want to, but I'll do my best. Incidentally, I got a blister on my right thumb. Blisters! My one and only weakness! Hopefully this won't hinder my ability to draw. I don't really have much to show at this point, but here's a small, vague preview of things to come!

I really can't afford to piss around now if I wanna get this done in time and looking good... and yet here I am pissing around... If I show no signs of life for the next 10 days, this is why.

A couple days late, but whatever...

That's right... The polls said a whopping 66% of Cloudflash believed I'd be a week or two late, but who's laughing now? Well, I don't have the cover page done yet, but I hope to finish that before the day's over. I have most of the hard part done already, but I figured I'd post the one shot now rather than delay it a few hours just for the cover page. So, that's that... Our Precious Song, a 30 page manga/comic that you can find in the Comics section. And I've mentioned that I was making an actual song for the song in the story... I did make it and write lyrics for it (as seen in the story). You can listen to the song without the lyrics at the Newgrounds Audio Portal if you want, though it's nothing amazing since I still have much to learn about making music; I might remix it or something someday. I just had to get the tune made so I could write lyrics to go with it... Why, you ask? Well, who knows? Maybe one day I'd animate "Cloud Blader's ending theme"... I figured I should plan ahead in case I do so I don't set some messed up stuff in stone.

Forum regulars may have noticed that I replaced the Final World Quest link with the Our Precious Song link. The reason is simple enough - Final World Quest's hiatus has gone on quite a lot longer than I thought it would, so I guess there's no sense in keeping a convenient link to its latest page like that when I could stick something else there.

I hope to have today's Cloudflash Mix done within the next 5 hours, but that might not happen. You can expect it tomorrow for sure if not today.

For Cloudflash's billions of visitors that don't go to the forum, Skutieos has a new comic series starting, titled "the story of WOMAN". It's in the Comics section, of course. Note that I'm just making this announcement now to get it out of the way, so it might not actually be there when you read this... if it isn't, it will be very soon. Skutieos has also announced that Super Asshole will not be continuing.

Despite nobody believing I'd started yet another Flash project, it was true! I just didn't wanna waste time with an announcement since I planned to have it done so quickly. Quickly, indeed - I made it in 3 days. The new movie is Link Misses His Target, a parody of something I saw on Newgrounds. You can read more about that in my comments on the movie page. I wanna give a shoutout to the Voice Acting Club since three voice actors there sent me auditions for Navi's lines very soon after I requested them.

Oh, regarding El Cacto chapter 2, it's seeming sorta grim that I'll have it done by June 21st (I've barely started the first page). Well, there's still a month, and I have quite a bit of vacation time booked between now and then, so ya never know. I'll make a new 90% promise if I don't think I'll have it done on time. I guess there's not much else to say right now. It's sorta past 1 in the morning and I sorta have to wake up in 4 hours for work.

I've been meaning to do so for quite a while, and I finally did it just now. I switched the copyrighted music in Escape and Supernatural Fighters to stuff from the Newgrounds Audio Portal. I also updated Escape a small bit to make it slightly more playable. There's now one checkpoint and a level skip cheat. More details in the game's description.

Moving along, I'm trying to pick up Copy Ninja vs. Copyright 2 again. A project started May 2007, dropped and picked up various times until I finally stopped working on it in March 2008. I didn't work on it again until February 2010 when I updated the entire movie's artwork to match my more modern skill (though I left some things as they were in the original and just added shading or fixed them up a little). Anyhow, I wanna get this damn thing done. I'm gonna try to find something to motivate me or try to just force myself to do it. I'm trying to skip the boring parts and get straight to animating the fight scene... which is also the hardest part to animate. But if I get that out of the way, the boring parts wouldn't need that much attention, so then I could get it done...

Also, I quickly drew a couple of temporary update avatars for myself... I've been going on about the stupid things for months and wanted to put them off until I made a new layout for the site, but whatever... they just took a few minutes to make. I've also been doing some pixel art for the new and improved Characters section I've mentioned before. Here are two characters I've done so far...

edit: Made a bonus Cloudflash Mix comic for Escape. You've gotta wonder about how practical such a prison system is... The guards have a bit of a different design in the comic. Well, the only real difference is that I forgot to draw their backpack things. Otherwise, I guess they're just more detailed. Now then, back to more pressing matters...

I was working on Copy Ninja 2 last week until I flew to Toronto (with my superpowers) for Anime North. I hope to put my pictures and videos of the event in one SWF file later and then post it... I'll probably do that way later than I thought I would. Since returning, I've been very unproductive and time's been flying. My vacation time has met its end and I'll be back to my sleep deprived self come Monday.

I'm fairly certain I won't have El Cacto done by June 21st (again with El Cacto). I'd have to do, like, 2 pages per day...! Madness! That's actually very realistic, but I don't have the motivation for it. Copy Ninja 2 is interesting me more right now, plus it's practically half done (maybe?)... I was gonna work on it now, but I got sidetracked making homemade sound effects. You're thinking "they're probably as cheesy and obvious as your glass smashing sound effect in Link Misses His Target"... and maybe you're right. I think I'm pretty good at making punching and slashing sounds, though. I just spent half an hour or so right now putting together a little soundboard so you can hear the sounds for yourself. -Click here to check it out...- I have more sound effects and I plan to make more... I'll release all of them in the Downloads section as one zipped file when I feel I've made enough, and I'll make a full soundboard to go with it so people can try the sounds before downloading. Using those same old few good punches from FlashKit gets pretty old, especially when you've been hearing the same ones in the work of others for the past 5 years.

Anyhow... I'm gonna change El Cacto's 2nd chapter release to... July 15th. No more changed deadlines for it after this! And I'll get Copy Ninja 2 done sometime this month. Checkmate, future Danno.

On a very long side note, two of my old game projects have started to interest me again. Supernatural Fighters 2 and Cloudflash Dream Battle. I may be horrible at coding, but these are two things I can and want to do. The original Supernatural Fighters/StickFighter was really only a test, as were all my games before Blind Swordsman. I was just a total newb who was eager to make games and try different stuff, see what I was capable of. It took me a couple years to gain a mind to create a real fighting game without really learning any new actionscript, only to set it aside like I frequently do. A couple more years later, I'm certain I could do even better. I originally planned to have 20 characters (most of them silly filler characters and token minorities), but maybe I could cut that down to 10 or something... I was also considering not making them stick men. I originally just gave them different head colours to tell them apart, but I started coming up with actual designs for Supernatural Fighters 2. It seems I created Taun Bu's current design in September or October 2007 while working on the game, which is pretty much the point he became recognized as one of Cloudflash's characters. Anyhow, I thought it might be cool to actually draw the characters in full, though it's obviously harder to do that than draw stick people. The good part is that you only have to draw a single side view for everything with fighting games (no back views or front views)... Well, I hope I get around to making it someday. It'd be a bit of a waste to make a test fighting game and come up with the coding theory, designs, and storyline for a decent fighting game and then not do it.

As for Cloudflash Dream Battle, I don't think I've ever formally announced it before. The original plan was to make it a battle game between various anime characters, such as Ichigo, Kenshiro, Luffy, Orphen, Edward Elric, and Alucard. The characters each have their own stats and abilities and the battlefield is a grid divided in half. Each character has to stay on their half, pick 3 actions per turn (moving up/down/left/right, defending, or using an attack), then the two characters alternate between their 3 actions until the turn ends. The goal is to defeat the other guy, of course. I eventually decided that I was more interested in using Cloudflash's original characters instead of the anime characters. It would surely get way less recognition for that, but whatever. The original anime character version is around 2 years old, and the Cloudflash version is just a little over a year old/untouched... I started it 2 years ago? Geez... time really is flying... How am I ever gonna get the first episode of "Kunio's GUTS" done with this massive project buildup? It's nearly 2 AM, but I better get crackin' on Copy Ninja 2 right now.

edit: Oh, and I moved "Danno's Endless Adventures" from Miscellaneous to Movies. It's been done for quite a while. I never thought it really deserved to be among the other movies, but whatever.

Not much meaning to it now, but oh well...

I haven't been working on it as much as I should, but Copy Ninja 2 is coming along nicely. I estimate it should take me 10-15 productive days to get it finished. Huh... reality checks suck... I'd say the voice acting for it is half done. I could fill some of the remaining roles myself if necessary... I dunno how long it'd take to get some suitable voice actors. It would be wise to start looking for people now, but I'd rather work on the fight scene for now... if I got voices, I'd want to add them right away, then I'd have to do more boring lip syncing and stuff... though two main characters wear masks for the entire thing... Anyhow, I'll do it later! It is possible that the movie would be a bit late if I take too long to find voice actors.

Moving along, I've taken interest in some more projects. I worked on Hero's Revenge a little (I think I started making that in 2005...). Unfortunately, I noticed a gap in skill level from the time I made the most modern sprites (this happens too often). I'll probably change all the male sprites a bit (their faces have been bothering me from the start, but I didn't want to admit it) and redo the colouring and shading on a lot of things. I'm still developing the game's storyline and thinking of ways to make the game unique, not just a Final Fantasy clone. I ran out of rough drafts for the story, though some ideas have been stored in my head for a while... I sort of have to think of where the game will go from the latest chapter I've written and how long I want the game to be.

I also started a new project just now... I had the idea somewhat recently. I want to make a game sorta like Pokemon Red/Blue. It'll be black and white pixel work sort of resembling the original games... I'm not looking back on the things for reference since I don't want my style to be influenced, so my battle characters will probably look quite a bit different. The traveling part will likely look very similar to the games, though. Anyhow, it'll be like Pokemon, but the enemies will (mostly) be well known Flash artists, their original characters, and people associated with them. I haven't entirely thought of the story yet, but I was vaguely thinking I'd go challenge Newgrounds. You'd start off fighting generic spam crews and work your way up to Tom Fulp himself!

I haven't entirely decided on a system for acquiring new party members ("catching Pokemon"). There are two main things about the game I've decided on:

1. You will play as Danno. He'll be just like any other fighting character in the game, but you automatically lose if he dies (even if you have others able to fight). The same will go for the enemies; if you kill their leader (the person who challenged you), they lose.

2. I want to add Cloudflash's regulars to the game as allies/people you can get on your team. Perhaps you'll have to beat them to get them to join you. I might ask you guys individually or just go ahead and add you without taking "no" for an answer, but feel free to post saying what you want to look like or whatever. Anything I could use for reference would probably help. I'll limit this offer to people who have over 100 posts.

I figured it wouldn't be TOO much of a problem to start this project since the art is fairly straightforward. One front view and one back view for each battle character... like Pokemon, there'll just be cheap stuff shown on the screen to indicate attacks rather than actually having the characters move/attack. Walking around the world probably only needs 2 small, simple sprites for each direction - easy enough. I also think this is within my coding capabilities. I was thinking of keeping the game sorta small (maybe only lasting an hour or two tops). I vaguely considered evolution (Skutties evolved to Skutieos!), but I think I'll leave that out. And I MIGHT add backgrounds in battles.

First, sorry about today's C-Mix being pretty late. My sleep pattern's been rather messed up this week, but I managed to prevent myself from falling asleep after coming home from work this time. I got to work on it a little bit later than I should've, then there was a power out just as I started colouring. Crazy Saskatchewan weather... Dry, sunny morning... hail and heavy rain in the afternoon. Sunny again the next morning... Hail, heavy rain, thunder, and lightning in the afternoon today! Anyhow, I managed to get the comic done sometime near the time I made this post. The irritated eyes, weak body, and pounding head made it sorta hard to be motivated enough to do it sooner... and I've also been spending little time on Copy Ninja 2 despite my previous estimates. Will it be done on time or not? It's always unpredictable with Danno!

Moving on to important matters, there's a very good chance that cloudflash.net will be no more. HostBidder.com, the site I used to get the free domain at, merged with some other forum and dropped the free domain offer thing, meaning I'd have to actually start paying. I wasn't too serious about Cloudflash back then, but now I am quite willing to pay for a domain name. I filled out an application for a credit card later than I should've, so I've yet to receive it. I had a couple of backup plans that would maintain cloudflash.net for another year, but there was a little something I overlooked - the HostBidder domain registrar doesn't allow any payment methods. They just say to "contact their billing department" and they link to the non-existant HostBidder site.

The other option would be to transfer the domain to a functional registrar, but there's no telling how long that could take, especially since HostBidder's admin likes to keep quiet for long periods of time. He's always stayed true to his word with his offers, just sometimes it would take months to get a response from him. It seemed like it would be more risky to try transfering the domain with only 12 days till expiry, so I decided to wait for HostBidder's response (I asked the "billing department" if I could renew the domain via Paypal). Unless I get really lucky, cloudflash.net will no longer be the cloudflash.net you all know and love come July 3rd. However, Cloudflash won't end just like that. I've already done a full backup of the site/forum/database, and I'll be sure to keep the database (that's stuff like posts and topics) up-to-date. We've been kicking since 2004 despite circumstances and me being a cheapskate.

And you can always do a Google search for Cloudflash to find out where the hell it is. If I can't get cloudflash.net back, I'll get us a different domain name. Hopefully we can remain as cloudflash.net, but there's no telling what could happen. If any domain parkers out there are reading this and planning to buy cloudflash.net after it gets deleted in hopes that I'll pay triple the price for it, I won't. I'll also remove every link I've posted on the internet to cloudflash.net, so its page rank will drop to the dirt, making it a worthless purchase.

Anyhow, that's that. Make sure you know how to find Cloudflash in case it disappears in July.

Well, I spent a lot of my free time yesterday asleep, so I didn't get around to Copy Ninja 2. Today's Canada Day (a day off), so I have all day to work on it now (after I make today's C-Mix), plus I'm well rested. I hope to get most of the remaining animation done within the next few days. Also, part of the delay is because the voice actor I contacted for Kakashi 10 days ago didn't send any lines back. I've now posted a request at the Voice Acting Club.

I haven't heard any word from HostBidder, so Cloudflash is definitely moving. I've started to upload updates to http://cloudflash.site11.com. It seems 110mb is as unreliable as ever; I tried uploading something there and the FTP was still nearly unusable. I'm gonna lock cloudflash.net's forum on July 2nd.

If this thing didn't have so much work done on it, I'd just scrap the stupid thing... It's hard to stay motivated/focused on Copy Ninja 2, which can partially be credited to our recent expiry and that no voice actors seemed to be interested in the remaining roles. Hopefully the fact that I'm doing so many of the voices won't be TOO noticeable... I'm doing the intro narration, Kakashi, Shikamaru, and Iruka... and I might do the ANBU ninja. I think I'll just make his voice a joke and impersonate a "Girlchan in Paradise" character's voice. I'm starting to get a bit lazy, recycling stuff wherever I can.

I still need to find/make some more sound effects, edit music and voice volumes, and probably spend another 10 hours or so animating. There are also a couple of minor role female voices still needed... It might take me a couple more days to get all this crap done, but I dunno how long it'll take to get those voices. El Cacto's release will likely be affected by the slowness of Copy Ninja 2... I'd get going on El Cacto, but then Copy Ninja 2 would only be even later than it already is. I'll never draw a Naruto character again after this is all said and done. Time to clank some spoons together in front of my mic.

edit: I got distracted by Azpire, who wanted to know how long it took for me to get decent at pixel art. The answer is -here.-

After cloudflash.net expired, I decided to go about things a slightly less polite way (taking HostBidder stuff outside of HostBidder). The former HostBidder admin, Fergal, also runs a site called Business Advice Forum, which he used to have daily $7 contests on to promote it. Now he seems to have some contest for big money... Crazy stuff. Anyhow, being quite certain he checks in there on a regular basis, I sent him a PM regarding our situation. He was quick to respond and, after a couple messages back and forth, he allowed me to send him a payment to extend cloudflash.net's life another year. We just had to wait a little for it to take effect. So, we're back. My thanks to Fergal for being so cooperative. I'll do my best to ensure this doesn't happen again.

As for Copy Ninja 2, I'd say it's maybe around 80% done... I still haven't been working on it nearly as much as I should, but it WILL get done.

It's July 15th and El Cacto still hasn't been touched. I was hoping I'd at least have a few pages and then I could release one page every few days or something like a lot of other jerk webcomics do (the suspense!). I'm disappointed in myself. Copy Ninja 2 is getting really close to done, but it's still not done. Sorry, everyone. I guess I won't bother with another deadline since I'm just not motivated enough right now to meet a deadline, so I'd probably fail to meet it again. I guess they'll just get done when they get done.

Edit: Ogg, and C-Mix isn't getting done right now... I just have to colour it, but it's already past midnight and I'm drifting out. I'll have it up within the next 24 hours...

A little update on The Copy Ninja's Return... It's so close to done you wouldn't believe that I'm informing you about its status now. Since the third, I've been making an effort to extend the animation by at least 2 seconds every day. One day I came 0.5 seconds short and another I only barely started drawing one character, but other than that I've been going a little above 2 seconds. I'm cutting back on recycling a bit and trying to make it look pretty decent... I'm sure the remaining animation is no more than a few hours work tops. Then there's some sound editing and such, which I could certainly do in one sitting. The wait will mostly be due to that I'm waiting for a few redos from voice actors.

I know I've said this thing was near done a few times in the past, but this time I mean it! Really, it's right at the end of the movie.

Regarding my other projects, they're untouched.

I can mostly keep up with this 2 second thing on Copy Ninja and making a new C-Mix every Thursday, so I suppose I should be setting smaller, achievable goals for myself. After this is done, maybe I'll set a half page per day minimum for El Cacto... surely I could handle that much. I plan to work on it furiously a couple days before Cloudflash's anniversary (the 18th), though it probably wouldn't be in time.

It's that time of year again. One day of the year where I seriously do try to get things done. I've got no particularly special events planned for this year's anniversary. However, I do bring the completed Copy Ninja's Return. I started a Cloudflash Mix comic for the occasion yesterday, but didn't quite finish it... I'll get that done within an hour or so. I'll try to make two more C-Mix comics after that, but I only feel confident about getting one done. Well, I'll try.

I really wasn't expecting Copy Ninja's Return to be this late, but I guess it sorta worked out how it happened to be done today. I was hoping I'd have El Cacto for today instead, though... But alas, it is still untouched. I could've rushed Copy Ninja to being finished earlier so I could've worked on El Cacto, but I wanted to make Copy Ninja look good, so I put a little more time into it. Hopefully it will meet your expectations, Cloudflashians. I feel I've become faster and more accurate at drawing people and some other stuff, so I hope that El Cacto's second chapter will look better than the first and take me less time to draw.

I guess I'll submit The Copy Ninja's Return to Newgrounds on... Monday after work. Let's predict the score we think it'll get (from 0.00 to 5.00)! Guesses must be made before it passes judgement and we'll count its score at midnight (my time, GMT-6) as the final score. The closest guess wins; if I lose, then I'm not allowed to play any games/MMOs, sign on MSN, or visit any sites other than Cloudflash and Gmail for 3 days. So, I'll basically be cornered into working on stuff.

Yesterday's comic ended up a bit bigger than I expected, plus I was busy being a DFO addict, so it didn't get done on time. I figured this was a good enough place to leave it at, but I had more in mind. That said (and since I took so long), I'll make a continuation tomorrow. And, unfortunately, my DFO character does not look like the version of myself in the comic.

Yesterday's C-Mix got corrupted. I was just colouring it now, saving about as often as I do... Flash crashes, no biggie? Can't open the file anymore. I thought this would only happen with bigger projects... To have to make backups for a single frame on the timeline is absurd. I'm not enjoying this much, so I dunno how late the comic will be. Luckily, I saved the comic in PNG format while I was working on it juuuuust in case something stupid like this happened. My saved image has no colour and has some stuff overlapping where it shouldn't. I guess I can't quite use it as is, so I have to go through the tedious process of tracing it... Goddamn.

Perhaps a tiny bit over one month ago from today, I was somewhat determined to get El Cacto chapter 2 done. I was working on it at least a little bit everyday and progress was pretty good. This stopped at August 29th and I haven't touched the thing since August 31st; I've been too busy playing Dungeon Fighter Online everyday with 90% of my spare time, the rest of the time mostly going to daily necessities. I've been managing to keep C-Mix fairly on time at least... but I just feel little to no obligation with El Cacto for some reason despite saying that the new chapter would be done in spring and then continuing to break other deadlines for it.

I tell myself, "Okay, just work on it a little bit like before... Just for an hour before playing DFO." ... But that doesn't happen. I don't really want to uninstall and quit DFO like I did last year. I'd certainly get things done if I did, but I'm quite enjoying the game, especially since they reduced the grind GREATLY compared to the original North America release and since there's new/more stuff and more updates to come in the near future. I'm also trying out some different character types; it's interesting playing through the game again with a completely different style of gameplay.

In a month or two, I might reflect on my achievements for the year and decide whether I should get serious or not. If I decide I really want to bring about more new, shiny things, then I'll probably just have to uninstall DFO again... Or I might be content with my accomplishments and leave it at that like a lazy bastard. Anyhow, there is one way we might not have to wait that long to find out. I just might be willing to show more determination if we have some sort of bet. The bet from last month pretty much caused all my progress on El Cacto chapter 2. If someone wants to challenge me to a bet, then challenge away. But try not to bring on stupid/blatant things like "I bet you can't go a month without playing DFO, you addict!" or "I bet you can't get 2 pages of El Cacto done within a week!" I was in good spirits with Copy Ninja 2's completion last month, but it would be too hard for me to walk into a lose-lose bet like that at this point.

Have a very bad, very sad, disgusting Halloween.

Moving along, some may have noticed Thursday's comic was not done on Thursday, Friday, or even Saturday. I started on Thursday, but then I got far too lazy/sleepy to continue. I need to find/develop a style that's easier/faster for me to draw without making the comics look like utter crap... Anyhow, I'll try to get that done sometime today. Hopefully within the next few hours so I can return to my constant Dungeon Fighting Online in time for an event.

Seeing as this is the first and last update post for October, I'll sum up the other things that happened... I played DFO, I played DFO, I played DFO, and I played DFO. I lost a bet involving eggnog, so I had to work on El Cacto some. I made a few pages worth of progress, but flaked out of some of the scheduled days to work on it. I bumped that time to other days and added some more time to it, but still didn't get that all done. As of current, I have eight and a half hours of obligatory progress to go... which I suppose would need to be done before the end of the year. I'll give a quarter-assed vow that I'll do it by mid-November...

Other than that, there were a few C-Mix comics as usual. I don't think anything else regarding Cloudflash really happened this month... I guess I'll reflect on my productivity this year sometime this week.

Alright then... Time to look back on what I've done this year. There are lots of projects I started and never finished. There isn't even two full months left in this year. I could surely finish a thing or two with this much time... if I felt the need to. Anyhow, time for the reflection, which may make or break my motivation.

Things I did:
1. Brought C-Mix out of hiatus and kept up with the updates fairly consistently until recently, but I'm still making them, even if late.
2. Made "Our Precious Song", a short manga story rather unlike my previous works.
3. Link Misses His Target, a sorta spiteful parody of something on Newgrounds.
4. The Copy Ninja's Return, a thoroughly neglected project.

The main unfinished/unstarted projects I wanted to do this year are as follows:
1. Silbird (Hyadain music video) - Scrapped due to file corruption.
2. El Cacto chapter 2 - I really didn't think I'd put it off this long, but I have...
3. El Cacto chapter 3 - Can't exist without chapter 2, of course. Pretty much no chance of it being done this year.
4. Sex up the Characters section. Only pixelated two characters... which happens to not be enough.
5. Kunio no GUTS episode 1 - Made the opening theme, wrote lyrics for it, and wrote lyrics for the ending theme. I need to redo the singing on both... I wanted to release at least one episode.
6. I wanted to continue Final World Quest... but it's nearly been a year since it went into superhiatus.
7. Anime North 2010 video/picture compilation/commentary - It's too bad 70% of my photos and recordings are crap due to my poor camera skills. I probably should've tested my iPod's recording feature a little before relying on it to capture so many great cosplayers. I've probably forgotten half the stuff I wanted to add/say about the event by now...
8. Redesign Cloudflash.
9. Dannomon.

Comparing to last year, I did...:
1. 3 C-Mix comics per week.
2. Started Final World Quest and changed it to 2 C-Mix and 1 Final World Quest per week until C-Mix's hiatus in September 2009 and Final World Quest's hiatus in November 2009.
3. El Cacto chapter 1.
4. Dungeon in the Clouds.

Hmm... It's hard to say if I've amounted to what I did last year. This year has one Flash project up on last year, but only a third of the C-Mix. At the very least, I do intend to get El Cacto chapter 2 done this year, so perhaps that would put me ahead... It's hard to say if anything else is within realistic range of being completed. I guess the next most likely project would be Kunio no GUTS episode 1, but I dunno how much time I'd be left with after finally doing El Cacto... Maybe I need to uninstall DFO again, at least for a little while.
Let's see... I suppose there are 3 more items in the game I particularly want to own. Preferably before uninstalling the game since the supply is limited, meaning their price has nowhere to go but up... making it inconvenient for me if I play in the future. I guess I'll uninstall DFO when I acquire these items. There's no guarantee I'd be able to find them for sale, though.

Cloudflash sure has been down a lot lately, and not just the forum. I found a way to make online purchases without a real credit card or whatever; I bought myself a $200 Visa giftcard. With it, I bought 3 years of hosting and domain name life at GoDaddy. We'll probably have to wait around a week for the domain transfer to go through. So, we'll probably never have downtime again, and now I'm free to piss around with stuff like MySQL since we'll have reliable databases. Of course, I should be working on El Cacto instead since I only managed to do a quarter of that quarter-assed vow from last month.

It's been a little over a week since I quit my job. I've been staying up till sunrise just about everyday and even pulling some allnighters without good reason. I've been playing Space Station 13 and Haven & Hearth quite a bit, not so much Dungeon Fighter Online anymore. I still haven't found that one item I want on DFO, so I can't uninstall it just yet! My interest in Haven & Hearth is slightly dwindling. Space Station 13 can be played anytime for a good laugh since you don't have a permanent character to think about working on and buying items for. I'm thinking of buying Minecraft, which is a horrible idea with my projects in mind.

In other news, I purchased a good ol' 2 litre of eggnog today! Yep, it's that time again already. I'll have to go get some more when I have the chance. Now then, I better get to work on tomorrow's comic...

It's a bit later than it should've been since I was slow to notice a problem at a certain step, but Cloudflash's domain transfer has now been completed. This only means that the name cloudflash.net is registered with GoDaddy now. I still have to setup Cloudflash's new hosting, something I couldn't do until the name transferred.

I've backed up the forum and it will be closed until I'm done with all this. Cloudflash itself may also see some downtime while I'm mucking around with all this, but I assume there won't be much of that. I think everything will pretty much stay as is for a day or two since I think that's how long it takes to change where the name servers are pointing at. Right now cloudflash.net is registered with GoDaddy, but Cloudflash itself is at 000webhost.com. What I need to do is make it so Cloudflash itself is also at GoDaddy. So yeah, you probably won't notice anything different other than the forum being down for a day or two. I'll keep this post updated if anything in particular occurs.

Around 14 hours after this post was made, Cloudflash is all done moving. The name server stuff was a bit faster than I expected. I hope I uploaded everything properly; let me know if you find any broken links, missing images, or anything like that. Everything appears to be in order, though.

Oh, and I guess this is a good time to mention a raffle I'll be holding. I've got $17 Canadian sitting here leftover from my purchases regarding Cloudflash. The winner will take it all and decide how they want it to be spent/sent/whatever. I can send it via Paypal or buy some junk on eBay and send it to your home address if you don't have a Paypal account, whatever works. The price of Minecraft will be going up as it enters BETA soon if anyone's into that game and hasn't bought it yet, and this amount happens to cover it. Some transactions may involve a currency conversion tax, so it might be a buck or two less than $17 Canadian.

Anyhow, the winner can decide that when the time comes. To enter, simply have 50 posts and post a number between 1 and 100 in this topic. I'll use a random number generator and the person with the closest guess will win. The winner will be announced sometime on December 20th, 2010 (GMT-6), and the prize will be sent whenever it's convenient and arranged after that.

So, now you get to stare at this post and think long and hard about what number you'll choose while the forum is down. Don't forget to mash F5 on a frequent basis to ensure someone doesn't post that special number before you! Have fun!

Disclaimer: this isn't a legal agreement/promise, you'll get what you get if you get it and that's that; I reserve the right to cancel this at any time, including after the raffle has occurred.

El Cacto chapter 2 is, at long last, done. I really didn't think it would take me over a year to focus on it, but, evidently, that's how it turned out. Perhaps this is disappointing to hear, but this was as far as the story was really planned. There are some ideas for future chapters, but there's a lack of direction. I'm gonna take some time to think about how to give future chapters some meaning and make them interesting. Right now it just seems a little typical to me that El Cacto is getting himself into trouble and that someone will obviously come after him after seeing that thing on page 49. The predictable thing to do would be have someone stronger come after him next, then someone stronger again, etc., but I want to avoid that direction if I can. Of course, I still plan to make El Cacto as badass as ever, doing whatever the hell he wants without budging for anyone else's concerns. I also do have some plot twists lined up that should even make the "predictable" storyline hold some surprises and suspense if I can't come up with anything better. I made a guess that I'll have chapter 3 done in spring 2011. It really is just a guess.

Now some comments on my efforts... Throughout this past week, I was generally just making sure to work on it some almost everyday since the new year was getting pretty close. When I got to the backgrounds, half the time I was trying to figure out what building went where. Consistency is pretty annoying and I even had to redo a couple backgrounds due to miscalculations. The grocery store was totally dry as far as eggnog went for the past couple of weeks, but I managed to bring home 4 litres a few days ago. Naturally, I pulled an allnigher to finish this stuff up by 3 PM my time with the power of eggnog! I generally tried to draw it near the best of my abilities, unlike with chapter 1, which I did fairly sloppily. Oh, and I guess I'm sticking to this way of drawing the sky/clouds like I did in Our Precious Song. I was pretty excessive with tiling images in chapter 1... I thought I'd have to do that sort of thing to make it look like "real manga". I learned when making Our Precious Song that I'm better off doing that very seldomly since I don't have proper screentones, plus I learned from a manga series called "Bakuman" that screentones are in no way necessary to create manga.

Months ago, I tried to do some research to make the setting look kinda convincing since I sure as hell have never been to Mexico. I Google Image'd, I Wikipedia'd, I watched a movie set in Mexico, and did other Google searches to find information. I didn't do any research on chapter 1, which is why it's full of sand dunes instead of dried up wastelands... I might redo the backgrounds in chapter 1 someday since Mexico is kinda, like, not Egypt. I have no clue if they even have sandy deserts like that in Mexico.

Anyhow, with El Cacto chapter 2 done, I feel I've done enough this year... except I skipped yesterday's C-Mix to work on El Cacto, so I still have to do that. I can't guarantee it'll be done before the new year since I'm pretty sleepy. I might try, though. There goes another year of incomplete projects, things to do that were never done, and a few new additions to Cloudflash's content. Have yourself a happy new year and whatnot.

Oh, and Atanamir won that raffle (for anyone reading announcements without bothering to read the replies in the topics). He should probably be banned from contests here since he always wins. Like with that "get drawn into C-Mix" thing or the bet on Copy Ninja 2's score. He seems to have no use for $17 Canadian, so I guess it's up for grabs again. I guess uh... I'll just re-roll sometime tonight until I get a number that makes Atanamir lose.