WELCOME to the personal home page/blog of Matthew La France. Please enjoy your stay.

10/31/2006

I went to a midnight release of Final Fantasy XII last night. I wasn't actually getting the game but two of my friends were so I decided to tag along. It was pretty fun just hanging out before hand, getting some dinner and drinking coffee. It's a little ironic though when you wait like an hour to pick up a game that you get home too late at night to play. :P

I've stopped getting pissed off at my web page so much. I'm just trying to concentrate on myself as an artist a little more and on the artistic aspects of my web page design, not the technical so much. I'm getting toegther a site that should look pretty cool. Still don't know exactly how it will look or when it will be done but hopfully it will be ready within a few weeks.

Keep an eye on my PSX Anime List for some updates and stuff. Mostly I've compressed it into a single page rather than a page with inline frames. Also going to be adding link backs to the top page from the individual game pages, as well as counters for each of the game pages. Might be adding some cross links to another anime based game site as well. Not 100% sure on that right now. Also put up a little "for sale" section, so please check it out!
5 comments

10/28/2006

Phantasy Star Universe came out yesterday. Aside from taking care of some errands and such this morning, pretty much spent all of my afternoon and evening playing. Probably not something I should do all the time, but I figured I deserved it. Played with friends only. Well, friends, or friends of friends. One of my friends is playing the 360 version on 56K dial up, but it works out ok as long as we do not use voice chat. Ok by me anyways, even when I did use voice chat it didn't seem to work that well. Three people in a party and only one person could hear the other two. I could hear them, and the other person could hear them, but the other person and I could not hear each other at all. :P

My human hunter is up to level 9. I like that this game is not at all like FFXI considering that in order to say what I just said I would have had to be playing for about a week, not half a day. Definitely not the same sort of time sink. This should be much more laid back. I have to work this weekend which kind of sucks, but it's not too bad. I think I just want to play PSu instead. ;) I need to do some ebaying and drawing. I'm piling a lot of stuff on, but I'll just take it slowly and not try to overwhelm myself. I don't want to fall back into that feeling of running myself raggged. It's hard to get out of that mode. I feel guilty if I am not working all the time. I need to just work steadily and play steadily. My well being is as important as my livelihood, I just need to keep up with the livelihood.
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10/22/2006

I'm doing a weird double post around midnight so it's popping into tomorrows posting so be sure to read the post below this one because it's probably new too. ;) Anyway, since I've been working a little on my web site I ended up reading through almost all of my blog posts from 2005-2006. One thing that I realized is that there was a dramatic change after accepting my new position at work to including a line something like "This week has been hell, I am horribly exhausted, been living on 4 hours of sleep for weeks, I hate everything, please god kill me", and then I go on to talk about the movies and video games I normally geek-out about. The point is that I didn't realize how much I complained about my job exhausting me and stressing me out compared to the previous year.

2005 was mostly the occational grumbling post about life and self-loathing, but 2006 has definitely been the "I have not had any free time and I just can't wait for the weekend" sort of year. I have been markedly more healthy, aside from suffering from the same back problems I had the previous year. Regardless, it makes me think that the recent changes I've made in my job schedule can only be a good thing, as long as I keep up my physical activity. I've basically spent an entire year feeling like I didn't have any time and I was on the verge of collapsing from exhaustion, that just doesn't seem like an enjoyable way to live. And it's not like it was for any sort of good pay either. I don't want to have to live like that any more. But maybe that is what it took for me to start to make the changes that I have begun. Hopefully I will continue making the necessary changes so that I can blog much more differently in the future. I'll have to keep an eye on my posts from here on.
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10/21/2006

Well, within a matter of about 48 hours I've gone from thinking that moving to an increased reliance on blogger for publishing my web page would be a good thing, to genuninely regretting it even occured to me in the first place. I don't really know if blogger has just died completely for eneryone or just me, in reality, I don't really care.

I have managed to astound myself with my amazing ability to follow simple directions and install phpBB on my web host giving me (up to 10 of) my very own web forum! Not that I am necessarily planning to use it on my blog/home page, but it's the principal of the thing. I should have tried this sooner. Bolstered by my success I'm thinking of taking the plunge and setting up WordPress on my web host as well. We'll have to see.

Update on the blogger troubles, I've since managed to connect with Firefox and am realizing some of my trouble may stem from thier recent updates and my usage of a version of IE that is becoming outdated for reasons that I do not need to go into. Suffice to say it may be working a little better with Mozilla for now, but I'm still tempted to break away from blogger. Relying overly much on something that is "free" is always a little worrisome, esp. when it's not blatantly obvious to you how and why it is able to be offered for free. When something is done by altruistic individuals, free makes perfect sense, when it's coming from a company that is suposed to be making money, it's hard to not to look at "free" and wonder where the money is in that?
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10/19/2006

Checking out my site stats recently. It never ceases to amaze me some of the stuff that can bring people to my site. A google search for "hentai translation" puts my translation projects page on google's first page. I should figure out a way to use this to my advantage... I think that one is even better than "Haruki Genia" which gave a high relavance to my site for a while. I'll let you google that one if you want, though I warn you it's not work/school safe, definitely adult only. I also found some disturbing trends such as folks entering my site on my nested blog frame and not the main site. I need to figure out how to fix this, I've been woried about stuff like that happening for a while.
12 comments

10/06/2006

Just a small update about WtPC. I finished another few blocks of text yesterday. As far as I can tell, this should put me around the 41% complete mark for the script. I haven't heard any news on the technical end. David is busy working on site upgrades for MagicEngine.com and the forthcoming PC-FX emulator Magic Engine FX, so I don't expect any major news on the hacking side of things for a little while, but you never know.

Also been doing a little more with my onomatopoeia list. I have some ideas about going beyond onomatopoeia and making it a regular all-around supplementary reference for game and manga translators.
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10/02/2006

Lost season 2 finished, PSU forthcoming, be careful what you say online

Been a while since I've posted. Mostly been busy finishing up work in anticipation of starting my new part-time job. I just finished watching the second season of Lost. I don't know what I think of the last episode. In comparison to some of the stuff that happened in the episodes leading up to it, I was a bit disappointed. I won't go into specifics due to spoilers, but I guess I was a little let down that it was so much flash back, especially when stuff I was interested in seeing happen was being postponed.

I'm looking forward to the release of PSU at the end of this month (hopefully). Even though I said I would not get one until the price dropped, I ended up getting an Xbox360 to play it. All of my friends will be playing on 360, and with rumors that it will not be compatible with the other versions, combined with the fact that my PC only just beats minimum specs, I was left with little option. Besides, it's not that bad to have a 360 either, esp. since I worked a bunch of overtime and did some side work recently.

I've been running myself a bit ragged recently, for good reasons, for myself, which is a good feeling, but I still feel like I need to take a break. I can't wait to cut back at work. I hope that works out for me the way I want it to. I think it will be a load off my mind and a strain off my body. I should have time to really do things I want, for some reason I don't want to talk too much about them though.

I've talked about doing something for myself and trying to make some money for myself and be happier and more independent. I'm still very excited about this, but I don't really want to get specific about it. I don't know if I'm just being secretive, or I feel like I can't be candid on my own blog. I hope it's just that I don't want to say anything until I have things a little more concrete, but I fear also that being overly expressive on the web has come back to haunt me in the past, not in large ways, but small ones at least, I've had discussions with other people worried about their employers googling their names and things like that. I think a little discretion is best until you find the right forum for your expressions.
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