Busy, busy, busy week! I'm attending a large symposium tomorrow, which will keep me occupied all day... and all evening, so I won't have time to update the website. So I'm updating it today instead. I know you guys love those early updates, after all.

On a different note, my brother found another stray cat, which was apparently randomly crossing a busy street close to our home. Over and over again. He's a neutered striped tom and he looks quite a lot like our old cat, except slimmer and younger (under 1 year old, and quite large for his age), and he's very friendly. He's microchipped, but unfortunately no address has been registered in the national database, so it really doesn't tell us anything other than at one point he was microchipped. He apparently also broke one of his upper canines, and the root might still be in there, because the gums look enflamed.

Poor kitty. Who keeps losing all these pets anyway? We already got two budgies and another cat this way (we rehomed the cat after it tried to eat our budgies, though).

Anyway, on to different news. I made it to the third round of the PSC, and this week I found out who my new opponent will be. This means I'll start working on my new entry soon, and in turn this means I'll be cutting back on SoL updates again. So starting next week, we'll go back to single-page updates until my entry is done. Oh, and did I mention it's my birthday on November 5th? ^^

Hey guys! As promised, I got two new pages for you today. I also have two new additions to the fan art page.

But what I really wanted to share with you is the fact that I finally installed my new computer last week, and it's running oh so smoothly.



This is my old computer. It's about 8 or 9 years old, and it was a hand-me-down which used to belong to me younger brother, who used it as a gaming pc (back in the days when Age of Empires II was sill new and exciting). When I got it in 2006, it had an 80 GB hard drive, an Asus A7V8X-X motherboard, about 265 MB RAM memory and a processor I don't recall the name of.
This is the machine I've been using almost from the moment I started working on SoL. This is the machine I've made most of my art with since then. Even when I upgraded its RAM memory to 1 GB, it still didn't like running Photoshop too much. Nor did it like FireFox. It was slow, and it's hard dive space was insufficient, and of course it had the heat strokes during the summer months. And then there was that time my brother needed to install a new feed, because the old one apparently... exploded or something... Oh, and let's not forget that crazy virus infestation we had in 2007, which, I'll admit, was mostly my fault and not the computer's, but it made the already sluggish machine go even slower. I mean like, seriously slow. I spent three full days trying to manually clear out the viruses by hand, because Norton couldn't handle it. And in the end, I still had to format it.

But despite all the hardships, I think it was a good computer and the good times outnumber the bad times. I'll be sad to see it go, as I tend to get a bit nostalgic about the machines I work with a lot. (I know it's weird, but then again, weirdness is common in us artists.) But alas! It's time for a change. Meet the new beast:





This baby leaves the old one in the dust. It has a 1 TB harddrive, 4 GB RAM memory, a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard and an Intel Core i7 processor. And if you stare directly into that little blue LED when its processing, you'll seriously go blind. It's quite a nice little number cruncher.

And before you go thinking: "wow, that girl really knows her hardware!!", my brother is the one who picked the parts and put the whole thing together. I know it's a good pc, because he was practically drooling over it when he finally closed the lid. Okay, maybe not really, but he seemed very enthusiastic!

Now I just need to figure out what to do with this much power, since Photoshop CS2 is barely a challenge for it. Maybe I should pick up WoW or something? XD

Granted, they're not SoL pages. You're only getting one of those. But for those of you who haven't already read them, I do have 18 PSC pages! Round 2 is over, and I get a breath of air again. FREEDOM! WOOHOO!!

I also got a whopping four new additions to the fan art gallery. Interestingly, they're all of Ethara characters. I think someone is secretly trying to tell me something.

Still working hard on my PSC entry, which will hopefully be completely done by this time next week. After that we should be able to move back to regular SoL updates again (you know, with two pages instead of just one). If you already want to read the first half of my PSC entry, you can go check it out right here. The complete entry will be 18 pages long. Whether or not I'll make this round's deadline is still debatable, though I'm carefully optimistic. ^^

- Neko

I'm going to do a super-rushed update, because I don't know how much internet time I'm going to get today. We're going to seriously clean up the house today, and after that I need to install my new pc. I forgot to mention that before, but I got a new computer. My old one is... well, old. And it had those lovely heat strokes I was complaining about during the summer. So, new computer: jay!

Too bad installing it will probably take quite some time. Time I had actually intended to spend differently today, but I guess I shouldn't complain. Anyway, sorry for the minimal content this week. Blame it all on the PSC or something!