Over at Snake's M.U.G.E.N place you can get two graphical update packs for Chun-Li. He touched up her sprites and made a lot of new palettes to go along with the new sprite file, with some impressive results. I might replace Chun-Li's original files with the improvements at a later date, for now you need to separately download Chun-Li and then one of the patches from Snake's site.
It was said by some that the return of Elecbyte's site signaled the coming rebirth of MUGEN, and by others, that the various changes I am guilty of initiating at the Guild forums had been the killing blow and made MUGEN's and its community's death imminent.
Instead, what is now called Windows MUGEN Plus came up: a modification of WinMUGEN allowing to use both normal and double-resolution stages. However, I care little for stages and have never tried it. I could, though—starting a few versions ago, the Omega Drivers I use to power my graphics card began to run MUGEN properly on my notebook. You can find WinMUGEN Plus at RandomSelect.
So MUGEN lives on in its way, but still people died. Among them Reu, who was Reuben Kee, who was many things and a star of MUGEN. As Michael Flynn wrote, "Everyone dies—it is no signal accomplishment—but not everyone lives." Reu, the consensus seemed to be, did. I chatted and exchanged messages with him a few times, but not in months before his death.
Other deaths I feel like mentioning here are those of fictional characters like Gilad Pellaeon, Grand Admiral, supreme commander, and ruler of the Imperial Remnant that had once been the Galactic Empire of Star Wars. He was created in 1990, learned under Thrawn, abolished slavery, […], […], […], ended the two decades-long war with what had once been the Rebellion and even served as their combined Galactic Alliance's supreme commander.
He was shot by an ex-Jedi when he commanded his fleet to bring down a Lord of the Sith, for the honor of the Empire—an ex-Jedi himself: Jacen Solo, the oldest and only remaining son of Han and Leia, main hero of the New Jedi Order series, who had at its climax displayed the highest attunement to the Force on record in galactic history, eclipsing everyone else. A being of light, the living Jedi dream, avatar of the Force. Now Darth Caedus, Dark Lord of the Sith.
During his Knighting ceremony, Luke Skywalker said to Jacen, who had always been questioning everything anyway, "Never stop asking questions." But apparently Jacen did. Recently he made his uncle a widower, killing Mara Jade Skywalker, Hand of the Emperor, assassin, Jedi Master, mother—which concludes this list of fictional deaths.
Daniel Keys Moran, computer programmer and one of my favorite authors, has opened a blog. In the past, he has written the Star Wars short story to rule them all, The Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett. It is not yet freely downloadable from IMMUNITY, but some of his other work is. Among it the completed novels of The Continuing Time, currently Emerald Eyes, The Long Run and The Last Dancer. Attempting a description of those in brief is futile. From the beginning, I had a section of my page set out to be called Read, and the Continuing Time would have had a central place.
The Last Dancer was out of print and I bought it used a few years ago, for the highest price I ever paid for a book of fiction. Afterwards I didn't mind; it is now one of my all-time favorite novels.
I moved and finished university. There is a first time for everything—and also a last. Today, for the last time, I was at the uni. Today, for the last time, I trained at the gym. Most of the things I will do over the next two days I will do for the last time, here. I'm relocating my basis of operations again, and already miss the cats. My dreams get the priorities right, though, and in them I'm back together with my friends strewn across the continent.
What eight months mean depends on how you tell the story.
Guest comments to news entries like this one are now possible without having to register on the board (in a sense another sort of pet for me and irrelevant and uninteresting for the rest of the world; I'm aware… don't worry :p).
My laptop broke in Oktober or November. The new one has a drawback: I cannot really run M.U.G.E.N in resolutions higher than 320 x 240 pixels. It's either in that tiny window, or full-screen, or choppy, or under Ubuntu without sound. None of these options lends itself well to character development, and together with several other factors, this has led me to practically cease working on characters during the last eight months.
As all this and the creation of a page with dedications implies: I might no longer be actively producing playable M.U.G.E.N content for a while, although an inclination towards it yet remains—I just invested an hour or two to update Zangief a tiny bit using notepad: the Aerial Russian Slam special move has been re-enabled and tweaked from its MvC origin to better fit into SFZ style. I don't know whether that really suceeded.
But plans rarely survive the contact with reality. I think that's one of Sun-Tzu's. Moving to a quieter room tomorrow and University starts again the day after. Wheee~!
Ⓚ All rites reversed