Not dirt.
I think I’ll set myself a goal for this weekend. I need to try and finish Kingdom Hearts 2 before Super Smash Bros Brawl comes out (9th March), and before my Xbox 360 arrives (probably 5th or 6th March, depending on how generous Australia Post are feeling).
I have a feeling that could be a little tricky considering how I’m only at Mulan’s world as it is.
So as it turns out, the anime community is full of freeloaders who think bandwidth grows on trees. Here’s an interesting fact you may not know: it doesn’t. The server is in Australia, where bandwidth is actually rather expensive. The site used 3.72Gb of bandwidth in September, and I can tell you from looking through the Apache stats that a fair chunk of hits were not from actual page views on this site or hotlinked through my own use. I estimate around 20% of the hits this month have been hotlinks not of my own. I know this is very rough, but if you take 20% of 3.72Gb, that’s a whopping 700Mb of bandwidth.
So I’ve decided to put a stop to that before it grows out of control. From today, hotlinking from sites other than what I’ve allowed will not work. You’ll instead get a pleasant picture of a LOLcat with cheese on its face. You may also get this if you’ve got the HTTP referrer header turned off in your browser, and if you do, stop being a paranoid bastard.
On to the second and more obvious change. Because of the sheer amount of data this site uses, I’ve thrown up some small Google ads to offset running costs a little. I don’t expect to actually make any profit from the ads, since they seem to think this site is about pudding. Wonder what gives it that crazy idea.
Here’s a new wallpaper that has, quite frankly, taken way too long. I nearly lost the will to live a few times along the way, but you know what? It was worth it.
This was originally a high-res scan of some sort. But the more I tried to Photoshop the text off the original image, the more it was becoming aware that the quality was pretty ordinary. So I did what I always do:
One of the reasons it took so long is I changed my method a bit for this one. I used Illustrator for the lineart, then Photoshop for the colouring. Very time-consuming, but the result speaks for itself. The other thing about this image made me glad I got 2gb of RAM with my Core 2 Duo. It’s a 170Mb PSD file, and Photoshop started to get a little sluggish near the end of the trace. I remembered that Photoshop defaults to limiting itself to half the physical memory before it dives into swap files, so I went and bumped that option up a notch. Needless to say, Photoshop was happy with that:
“Om nom nom nom”
