Moretto, James Moretto. *cue James Bond theme*

So many things have changed in the time that the old L-Factor got taken down (I'm a little curious as to why it was taken down, so would anyone mind please giving me the lowdown on why it got taken down?) At first I thought it was something screwy with my computer, but I tried it with other computers AND other IP addresses in different locations and found that they didn't work either. I was sad because of this

BUT NOW I HAVE RETURNED!!! I have hunted this forum down, and finally I located it today! Now that little hole I had in my heart is filled back up, and I'm A-O-K!

Let's see...I suppose I'll have a recap of what's happened since the site went down:

1. I got a girlfriend. Yeah, seriously, I didn't think I'd even have a chance with anyone for a long, long time from now. Nor was I really interested in getting into a romantic relationship with anyone until I found Jillian (my girlfriend). I asked her out on June 16th of this year, and we've been together ever since.

2. I discovered the wide, wide world of MMORPGs. My favorite that I've played so far is Perfect World, mainly because of the huge customization options, fine tuning and all of that. If anyone else plays that, my cleric's name is Panaceia.

3. I became a full-fledged Sophomore. It's not really all that different from Freshman year, to be honest, just less memorable teachers and more complex formulas.

4. My favorite cat, Mr. Tibbs, died of an inner infection. It was really sad for me at first, but I got over it. We have a small box of his ashes set aside on the top of a bookshelf, and it makes it so that he's still with us in a way.

5. We got two new cats, Uma and Leon. Uma has light brown fur with black spots, and is about 1 year old. Leon had full black fur, and he's a kitten who's about four and a half months old. Leon is always getting into trouble; many is the time that he's pulled down an entire roll of toilet paper and played with it while we were sleeping.

6. I revisited all of my old elementary schools for some reason. I suppose it was for nostalgia effect, but it brought back memories I'd thought that I'd forgotten, and sharpened memories I already had.

7. I've been working with Photoshop a lot more than I did before, and photo editing has become a regular hobby of mine. I've been taking a Photoshop class at my school, and that's helped a lot too.

There's probably other things that I'm forgetting, but that's the big stuff that I can remember off the top of my head.

EDIT: 8. I've officially emitted my first posting frenzy here!

I'm a complete emotional wreck today. I feel like crying when clearly there's nothing to cry about, everything that's said about me is sharpened tenfold at the least to me, and the fucked up part is that I have no idea why. Every emotion I've had today has been taken to extremes. When I'd felt happy today, I'd felt happier than I'd ever felt before in my entire life. I'd laugh like there's no tomorrow. When I was depressed today, I was about ready to cry in front of everyone. I almost did too. I don't know why, there wasn't really anything to be sad about, and there still really isn't, but I still felt like there was.

EDIT: After writing that last poem I just put up "Nevermind", I feel a little more stable now.

I can't remember for the life of me why I'm on the internet in the first place, but since I set this as one of my three pages that pops up when I open Google Chrome, I'd better do SOMETHING here!

The new expansion set for Perfect World came out. I'm downloading it right now, and I can't wait to try it!

I'm creating MP4 tutorials from previously made MIDIs so that I can learn a few more songs I've been wanting to learn on the piano for a while now. See, I grab the midi from wherever I get it, put it into Synthesia (a piano program), film it with Fraps (a recording program), compress it with Windows Movie Maker (so it isn't a gig and a half big), and convert it into an MP4 (so I can put it into my PSP and practice wherever there's a piano). I've already got a few songs lined up, and who knows, maybe I'll end up making a thread on my music or something. I don't plan on that quite yet though.

Apparently, for winning the Canned Food Drive at our school, we get some kind of party tomorrow that I didn't know about until yesterday, but apparently has been huge talk around the school. The scores for the Canned Food Drive were as follows:

Freshmen: 500 something
Sophomores: 3000 something (no, that's not a typo)
Juniors: 20 something
Seniors: 200 something

Hopefully the Juniors aren't saving a huge truckload for the very end. I've heard about that happening before, and apparently it worked one time. I don't see them making a comeback even if they do, though, I mean we have 3000-something cans!

I'd better run off to school now. Bye for now!

My stepdad Matt's favorite channel is probably TCM - Turner Classic Movies. Recently he's been indulging in the black-and-white era and watching old Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart films. Apparently 1939 was the year of movies, becasue there are so many well-made movies that came out at that time.

He also listens to old time radio shows like Suspense, Box 13, Quiet Please, and a lot of others. Apparently a lot of really great stories came in the 1930s.

The thing I can't stand about my stepdad is how he's always so stoic about everything. He's seldom happy, and he's seldom sad, and he's seldom angry. He's like a lifeless robot sometimes, and it drives me insane. He's so goddamn emotionless, and the horrible thing about it is I can see he's holding it all back. It always seems like he's holding it back by a mere thread, and yet he keeps hiding and hiding. I'm tired of it. He's passionate about one thing and one thing only: his writing. That's it. Everything else he's completely emotionless about, as if it's just another piece of crap that he has to deal with in life. That's how he treats me, that's how he treats my sister, that's how he treats everything I try to do or say to him that could help.

But I guess it's true...all I am is another burden on him...

My stepdad moved all the way from New York state to Idaho for one reason: Mom. That's it. He left EVERYTHING just to be with Mom. She couldn't move out there because of my sister, who was in partial custody of my FIRST stepdad, Jason. Let's just leave the subject of Jason at this: he's a horrible, horrible person who doesn't know shit and never deserved Mom in the first place. Thankfully, that's something everyone in this household - excluding my sister, Megan - can agree on.

Matt left everything behind for Mom. Friends, family, career, a job, many of his possessions and then some. So I suppose he is passionate about Mom too. Whenever Mom's gone though, for the most part Matt wants nothing to do with me. I can tell that he wishes Megan and I didn't exist sometimes, simply so that we wouldn't get in the way of him and Mom. I can't really blame him for feeling like that, but it's annoying nevertheless.

Another thing. He acts like he's the center of the world sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes. He can be so damn selfish sometimes, and he can be so closed-minded. If I ever get into a conversation with him where I disagree with him on something, he'll pull something on me like, "Well studies have been done that says otherwise, James."

First off, what studies? From the Internet? Riiiight, those are hella reliable. The thing is, these "experts" that make these studies are all out to get each other. You can find a study that proves that chocolate is bad for you, and another study won't be far behind that says it's actually good for you. Over time, the popular belief changes so frequently from one thing to the complete opposite, so who knows what's right and what's wrong anymore!? What do studies prove anymore, really?

Now if he said that he has had a few experiences of his own that refute what I'm saying, then I can completely understand. He's done that too. But I get tired of him of throwing around statistics that he doesn't even know where they came from.

Finally. I kick back, take a swig of my 2 liter bottle of sugar water, and enjoy the fact that Christmas Break has finally arrived. I've been needing this break for who knows how long; quite a few times I thought that I would completely snap before now. But I never did...I never do, even though I think I always will.

For the first half of Christmas Break, I'm pretty much doing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Y'know, living like a Hobbit. Eating, drinking, doing chores, enjoying the lack-of-responsibility I now have from school. I can do what I want, on my own time.

Nana and Grandpa are coming down from Cambridge to spend Christmas with us. Cambridge is a small, 200-something population city that Nana and Grandpa always lived in for as long as I can remember. Once they come down and have a good time with us, they're going to whisk me to Cambridge so I can visit them up their for a week or so, then I'll come back and everything'll be same-old again.

I'm not expecting many presents this year at all - actually, I don't expect any - mainly because we aren't exactly the richest people in town. That's fine by me though, Nana and Grandpa'll be down here, and they always are a great crowd to be with. That's present enough for me.

We got a new PS3 a couple days ago. Our old one was used so much that its innards melted. The new PS3 is a lot smaller than the old one, and overall it's much better except for one thing:

It can't play PS2 games.

Which I find very odd, because it can play PS1 games just fine, which is even earlier than PS2, but yet it can't play PS2. We invested a LOT into our PS2 game collection, at least forty games for PS2 alone. We're planning on buying a PS2 as well this upcoming month so we can play things like Star Wars Battlefront or Final Fantasy X/XII, Kingdom Hearts games and Valkyrie Profiles, Silent Hill games and Resident Evil 4, and a WHOLE lot more.

But hey, we can live for a while without PS2. We have a nice collection of PS3 games started up, including Valkyria Chronicles (probably my most favorite game ever to date), Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Civilizations Revolution, Resident Evil 5, and our newest addition Mortal Kombat vs. DC.

So yeah, we'll live.

Hinatalover17 wrote:

We got a new PS3 a couple days ago. Our old one was used so much that its innards melted. The new PS3 is a lot smaller than the old one, and overall it's much better except for one thing:

It can't play PS2 games.

Which I find very odd, because it can play PS1 games just fine, which is even earlier than PS2, but yet it can't play PS2. We invested a LOT into our PS2 game collection, at least forty games for PS2 alone. We're planning on buying a PS2 as well this upcoming month so we can play things like Star Wars Battlefront or Final Fantasy X/XII, Kingdom Hearts games and Valkyrie Profiles, Silent Hill games and Resident Evil 4, and a WHOLE lot more.

But hey, we can live for a while without PS2. We have a nice collection of PS3 games started up, including Valkyria Chronicles (probably my most favorite game ever to date), Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Civilizations Revolution, Resident Evil 5, and our newest addition Mortal Kombat vs. DC.

So yeah, we'll live.

Research before you buy ! I knew of this for a while now (The largest playstation tragedy since they lost some of their single ownership titles like Final Fantasy)

But yeah , go for a PS2

Shadowed Luminous wrote:

Research before you buy ! I knew of this for a while now (The largest playstation tragedy since they lost some of their single ownership titles like Final Fantasy)

But yeah , go for a PS2

We actually did, but the thing was, the only ones they had in the stores were the 250g ones, which don't have backwards compatibility. Also, we suspected that the reason the old PS3 broke down so fast (less than two years!) was because we were running so many PS2 games on it. It seemed like the fan in the PS3 was working triple overtime when we played PS2 games on it, but it was fine with PS3 games. I think that might be the reason why they stopped supporting the backwards compatibility for PS2 in the first place; too many people were having them break down really fast because of playing PS2 games on it.

That's my theory anyways. I could be wrong.

And besides, the old one was a 60g I think, so we - what - more than quadrupled the memory storage on that thing? So it's not all bad!

I've had my PS3 for a hell of a long time now, and I play shitloads of PS2 games on it, and have never had any problems with it... Hell, I own only one PS3 game, the rest of my collection being PS1 and PS2.

I think it's more likely that you kept it in a place where it couldn't get as much hot air out as it should have... I've had my PS3 playing PS2 games for a solid two days without a break, yet have never encountered any such issue... I did have it in a good position for cooling, though...

Ryojin wrote:

I've had my PS3 for a hell of a long time now, and I play shitloads of PS2 games on it, and have never had any problems with it... Hell, I own only one PS3 game, the rest of my collection being PS1 and PS2.

I think it's more likely that you kept it in a place where it couldn't get as much hot air out as it should have... I've had my PS3 playing PS2 games for a solid two days without a break, yet have never encountered any such issue... I did have it in a good position for cooling, though...

We were also thinking that was the case too. We have this...shelf, I guess, that we kept the PS3 in, and it wasn't exactly the best place for cooling. Thing is, there really isn't much room in this place we're living in, so we didn't really have many choices. We had stuck a couple of small standpoints under it, thinking that leaving most of the bottom exposed would be enough, but I guess it wasn't.

We tried to stick it sideways at one point, so the bottom would be completely exposed, but one of our cats almost got to it and knocked it over. All in all, you're probably right.

New ideas have been popping in my head like popcorn. Each little kernel pops to form a completely new idea I hadn't thought of before, and I don't have time to get them all down, even paraphrased. I may have found a way to synchronize the ideas with each other in order to remember them easier. The horrible thing is that most of the brilliant ideas I get are at night, when I'm lying in my bed trying to fall asleep, and by the time I wake up the next morning I have no idea what the idea was. I remembered that I had an idea, and I remember that it was a really good idea, but I can never remember what it was. It keeps me up at night, keeps me frustrated during the day, but I've learned to try and not really care anymore. If I get a stray idea that I so happen to remember at one point, I exploit it, but most of my ideas are crappy during the daytime and my creative skills/mindset go down the toilet when the sun is up.

I don't know what it is about the beautiful night, but somehow it enables me to let go easier.

Hinatalover17 wrote:

New ideas have been popping in my head like popcorn. Each little kernel pops to form a completely new idea I hadn't thought of before, and I don't have time to get them all down, even paraphrased. I may have found a way to synchronize the ideas with each other in order to remember them easier. The horrible thing is that most of the brilliant ideas I get are at night, when I'm lying in my bed trying to fall asleep, and by the time I wake up the next morning I have no idea what the idea was. I remembered that I had an idea, and I remember that it was a really good idea, but I can never remember what it was. It keeps me up at night, keeps me frustrated during the day, but I've learned to try and not really care anymore. If I get a stray idea that I so happen to remember at one point, I exploit it, but most of my ideas are crappy during the daytime and my creative skills/mindset go down the toilet when the sun is up.

I don't know what it is about the beautiful night, but somehow it enables me to let go easier.

When you are heading to bed , have some writing material close at hand. If you get an idea, you can just write it down and look at it in the morning. Perhaps even a tape recorder would do well

Don't give up on any of your good ideas

Shadowed Luminous wrote:

When you are heading to bed , have some writing material close at hand. If you get an idea, you can just write it down and look at it in the morning. Perhaps even a tape recorder would do well

Don't give up on any of your good ideas

^^ Thanks for that, will do!

Today is Christmas, and me being on this forum during Christmas screams that I'm bored and probably don't have much of a life!

But it really sucks, because my stomach's feeling a bit funny, and I haven't had anything to eat because I'm simply not hungry. I think I might be getting sick, but I'm not certain. I got a horrible night's sleep last night, so maybe my body just needs some catch-up time or something.

Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays/Have a nice day all!

I never knew just how difficult making a YouTube video could be until now.

So I love looking around YouTube and finding these parodies called "Abridged Series". I've seen a couple good ones, mainly stuff from MasakoX/Vegeta3986 and SonsofSatire.

A few days ago I snooped around for a Kingdom Hearts abridged series. I looked, and looked and looked, but nothing seemed to be all that good. So I came up with the (not so) brilliant idea of making my own Kingdom Hearts abridged because (personally) I didn't think anyone had done one right yet. All of them seemed to be unshortened parodies, and not really abridged series. Most weren't all that funny either. And there were a HELL of a LOT of them too.

Now mind you, this is the first thing that's anything like this that I'd ever done. I figured I'd need a little something more than the standard Windows Movie Maker for what I was planning, so I went to get a couple other video editing programs. I went and picked up the trial versions of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and Sony Vegas 9.0. I thought I'd be able to figure them out, no sweat!

As I was downloading both at the same time, I went to tell a couple friends of mine (Alex and Luna (yes, Alex17, the one on this site) were glad to help out), typed up a script, recorded my parts on Audacity, grabbed any SFX that I would need, and went to kh-vids.net to grab a few clips to start out with. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 took a hell of a lot longer to download and install than Vegas did, and so I ended up trying to tinker around with Vegas for a bit.

Wow. I couldn't figure it out at ALL. So I figured that I'd just wait for Adobe Premiere download and hope that it was a little more...uhh...simplified? Well, as it turns out, I couldn't figure out Premiere any better than I could Vegas. I chalked it up to me being way too used to Windows Movie Maker.

So there was setback #1. I couldn't use Premiere or Vegas very well.

(Oh, and note that Riku was going to be voiced by me, Sora would be voiced by Alex (he has a higher pitched voice than I do), and Kairi would be voiced by Luna, of course.)

Then Alex sent me his audio parts, which were great. I mixed his audio parts in with mine via Audacity (amazing free audio program), and now all we needed to do was to wait for Luna's audio to come in.

Well, Luna's audio didn't come in for a couple of days, and when it did, it was kinda blurry. She said that it was her microphone, and that she's try it a few more times. She tried it a few more times, like she said she would, and sent me what she thought was the best one that she did. Still a little fuzzy and "Wahwah-y" sounding, but I could discern it with moderate ease. I mixed her parts in with mine and Alex's, and I finally had all the audio mixed into one file. BAD IDEA ON MY PART, especially with the way I was seperating each line that each person had with a short beeeep. Thankfully, I also saved each person's separate part as well, unmixed, so if need be I can go back and redo that easily without re-recording anything.

The problem with Windows Movie Maker, and why I couldn't use it for this particular project, is that it can only use one audio file at a time. For what I wanted to do, I wanted overlapping audio layers; one for SFX (such as a sudden record scratch for comedic purposes, a rimshot, 5-second clips of music, short applause, a typewriter in the background, and so on), one for the actual talking, and one for the background music if I had any.

I'm going to try and look for Sony Vegas tutorials online on YouTube or something later today; maybe I can find the answer to my dilemma there. It would really suck if we'd have to re-record everything because we screwed up from the beginning. I'm completely new to this, and I want to try and make this one good, and not fail royally.

Hinatalover17 wrote:

I never knew just how difficult making a YouTube video could be until now.

So I love looking around YouTube and finding these parodies called "Abridged Series". I've seen a couple good ones, mainly stuff from MasakoX/Vegeta3986 and SonsofSatire.

A few days ago I snooped around for a Kingdom Hearts abridged series. I looked, and looked and looked, but nothing seemed to be all that good. So I came up with the (not so) brilliant idea of making my own Kingdom Hearts abridged because (personally) I didn't think anyone had done one right yet. All of them seemed to be unshortened parodies, and not really abridged series. Most weren't all that funny either. And there were a HELL of a LOT of them too.

Now mind you, this is the first thing that's anything like this that I'd ever done. I figured I'd need a little something more than the standard Windows Movie Maker for what I was planning, so I went to get a couple other video editing programs. I went and picked up the trial versions of Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and Sony Vegas 9.0. I thought I'd be able to figure them out, no sweat!

As I was downloading both at the same time, I went to tell a couple friends of mine (Alex and Luna (yes, Alex17, the one on this site) were glad to help out), typed up a script, recorded my parts on Audacity, grabbed any SFX that I would need, and went to kh-vids.net to grab a few clips to start out with. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 took a hell of a lot longer to download and install than Vegas did, and so I ended up trying to tinker around with Vegas for a bit.

Wow. I couldn't figure it out at ALL. So I figured that I'd just wait for Adobe Premiere download and hope that it was a little more...uhh...simplified? Well, as it turns out, I couldn't figure out Premiere any better than I could Vegas. I chalked it up to me being way too used to Windows Movie Maker.

So there was setback #1. I couldn't use Premiere or Vegas very well.

(Oh, and note that Riku was going to be voiced by me, Sora would be voiced by Alex (he has a higher pitched voice than I do), and Kairi would be voiced by Luna, of course.)

Then Alex sent me his audio parts, which were great. I mixed his audio parts in with mine via Audacity (amazing free audio program), and now all we needed to do was to wait for Luna's audio to come in.

Well, Luna's audio didn't come in for a couple of days, and when it did, it was kinda blurry. She said that it was her microphone, and that she's try it a few more times. She tried it a few more times, like she said she would, and sent me what she thought was the best one that she did. Still a little fuzzy and "Wahwah-y" sounding, but I could discern it with moderate ease. I mixed her parts in with mine and Alex's, and I finally had all the audio mixed into one file. BAD IDEA ON MY PART, especially with the way I was seperating each line that each person had with a short beeeep. Thankfully, I also saved each person's separate part as well, unmixed, so if need be I can go back and redo that easily without re-recording anything.

The problem with Windows Movie Maker, and why I couldn't use it for this particular project, is that it can only use one audio file at a time. For what I wanted to do, I wanted overlapping audio layers; one for SFX (such as a sudden record scratch for comedic purposes, a rimshot, 5-second clips of music, short applause, a typewriter in the background, and so on), one for the actual talking, and one for the background music if I had any.

I'm going to try and look for Sony Vegas tutorials online on YouTube or something later today; maybe I can find the answer to my dilemma there. It would really suck if we'd have to re-record everything because we screwed up from the beginning. I'm completely new to this, and I want to try and make this one good, and not fail royally.

Abridged series huh ?

My advice is to look up two specific ones (As they were the best ones that I am aware of) Cardgamesftw and TeamFourStar

It is said that the best abridged series are made out of horrible shows (The three most popular ones on youtube are Yu-gi-oh, Naruto, and DBZ) You also have to have a very in-depth knowledge of the chosen series to have the best comedic flare to it. I am reminded of the entry point to one of CardGamesFTW 's famous lines in his Yu-gi-oh series