some illustrations from falcom calendar 2014 i found on web. Still couldnt find the higher resoultion than this…..hope someone gladly would to share with me

titsay

Kiana Khansmith
d e v o n
todays bird
almost home
Peter Solarz
i don't do bad sauce passes

★

pixel skylines
noise dept.
hello vonnie
Xuebing Du
Three Goblin Art
NASA
Monterey Bay Aquarium

izzy's playlists!

Origami Around
sheepfilms
No title available
dirt enthusiast
seen from United Kingdom

seen from United Kingdom
seen from France

seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Poland

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Chile

seen from Germany
seen from Uzbekistan

seen from United States

seen from Poland

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
@bangbetter
some illustrations from falcom calendar 2014 i found on web. Still couldnt find the higher resoultion than this…..hope someone gladly would to share with me
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel - Localization Blog #1
Salutations, true believers!
It’s been quite some time since I last bestowed upon you one of my verbose blog posts – almost a year, in fact! Since finishing up work on Story of Seasons, I’ve spent this year working on the sprawling, expansive project that is The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel. It’s been a busy time all the way: this project has taken the full attention of two editors (myself and Young Kris, my star pupil), Brittany the Lord of Kiseki, and assistance from almost everyone else in the office. If it can be said that “it takes a village to raise a child,” then this game is certainly a child that all of XSEED Village pitched in to bring to fruition.
I’d like to take this space to sort of ruminate on some personal thoughts about the game, the experience of working on it, and how I’ve tried to bring you a good localization. Hopefully, in doing so, I’ll enlighten you about some things it took me a while to understand about the game, and offer some insights into the process.
Keep reading
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Second Chapter - Localization Blog #2
The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Back in March 2015, Ryan put together a master Google Doc of all the text in Trails in the Sky Second Chapter for the start of internal QA on the project. As I watched cells being added in real time my first thought was one of pity for the other testers who would soon have to comb through these lines. While everyone knows about SC’s near-legendary size, it’s another thing to actually have to work on it. The Kiseki series is not for the faint of heart, and as the document passed 89,000 rows (nearly three times the number of rows for Story of Seasons) my computer blue-screened trying to load it. This was to set the tone of the QA cycle for the next four months.
The Bad
Things started off well enough. Working from Australia I was unable to see the text as it might appear in game, but combing through the files allowed me to sweep for issues quickly and double-check notes I’d made during the editing phase. When the first English PSP build became available at XSEED, however, things were looking a bit…off.
Text-wise, a lot of issues that came up were of the garden variety ‘lost in display translation.’ Ellipses would revert to zenkaku ellipses (a single full-width character) instead of their intended three single dots, heart marks and music notes showed up as blocks, tildes would float like tiny seagulls, and unable to use quotation marks in the game (as it was an unsupported character), single quotes were instead eaten in almost every cell where they began a sentence. What seemed fine in file did not necessarily transfer cleanly to either PSP or Steam windows. Grimly, QA poured through file after file to yank things into line with how they actually displayed on screen. One even decided to wipe any and all instances of extra spacing off the map. “Pretty or Death,” was their rallying cry against these aesthetic annoyances.
Another dreary, unexpected chore included realigning text when it turned out that some of the limits we were working with were not quite right. For example, since a number of items, monsters, and system text messages were used in both FC and SC, their descriptions had been duplicated for consistency in SC. Unfortunately, SC’s limits proved to be slightly more conservative than FC’s, and a frustratingly large number of these lines had to be reworked.
[Three character spaces less = a lot of rewriting or adjusting]
Spacing issues aside, text would also randomly inflate, windows refused to share space with each other, and for reasons no one was ever able to understand, a single letter was shaved in half on an innocuous quest.
[In a just world, ‘weirdo’ would be blown up here as it refers to Olivier]
[Capel window fail]
[WHY???]
Such a large game also made for a devil of a time when it came to consistency. Naturally, terms that crossed over from FC had to be matched, and terminology had to be internally consistent as well, but even the most casual-seeming words/stylistic choices had to be checked to make sure they lined up. Was it “O-okay” or “O-Okay” for stuttering? *Pant Pant* or *pant pant* for SFX? Did Private Brahm give Faye gloves or mittens in that entirely optional and forgettable NPC quest in FC?! A great deal of effort was put into confirming that these lined up across the board.
The sheer weight of all that text also had a telling effect on the QA testers. It wasn’t unusual to find tiny pleas for help worked into the margins of the Google Doc, blunt exchanges on name choices regarding fish, or jokes so bad that you could be 100% certain the bug had been logged well after work hours.
[This wasn’t even the worst one]
[We are professionals]
Stability-wise, the PSP version also wasn’t without a few hiccups. Our trusty outsourced QA team vetted the game for the usual compliance, graphical, crash, and collision issues, but one glitch refused to go away. While it took some effort, an external QA member found that if he tried hard enough, he could wedge Estelle into a narrow space in the Central Factory Archives. When he asked whether or not it was possible to not be eaten by bookshelves in this section of the game, we checked with the dev team. After much deliberation, their consensus was that it seemed best to leave this one be rather than mess with the code. Belatedly, I waived the bug on the master list, noting, “It’s a feature.”
[Friday challenge? Friday Challenge!]
The Ugly
While the PSP team was drowning in text checking and carnivorous shelves, the PC team was embarking on their own adventures. Sara, our PC wizard, has been waging something of a rolling battle against random menu crashes, warp zones, and mysterious enemy behavior. She’s had to adapt the code in a number of places to fix control issues, and even Frankenstein FC code onto SC to make things function properly. In Chapter 1, one of the Beta testers found out that when quartz was equipped in the seventh slot of any character’s orbment it would fall out of the inventory once you entered battle. This resulted in a crippled playthrough of the chapter that affected all party members. An entirely new setting of difficulty was spawned from this bug before Sara was able to fix it. The Beta testers slogged their way through in the meantime, but they soon encountered amazing new graphical anomalies and deadly purple mists to hinder their progress.
For the PC QA team during this stage, checking text or actually playing the game as intended and not some kind of RPG version of Dante’s Divine Comedy wasn’t possible a lot of the time. Bosses would appear mid-conversation and refuse to move, black voids would swallow whole parties, and unseen enemies would attack you in the unlikeliest of places.
“I was amazed at how many invisible monsters tried to kill me in the Central Factory.” – Beta Tester
[Seems like it’s a deathtrap for everyone, really…]
[The Bracer Guild in Bose became a gravitational singularity]
For Kelly, one of the in-house QA testers, just progressing through a single chapter became an exercise in futility as she found herself imprisoned in buildings populated by glowing purple doorways to nowhere. In particular, she found that EVERY door in the foreign embassies had the strange purple mist effects.
“After playing, I realized the truth,” she related somberly. “The embassies in Grancel were actually portals to hell, and I was stuck there for all eternity.”
[There is no escape]
Other glitches were harmless, but defied logic, and have been frustratingly difficult to root out for our long-suffering programmer.
[When glowing balls of light start coming out of the backsides of NPCs, you know you have problems]
[Everyone on this project went loco]
[I couldn’t even begin to tell you what happened here]
The Good
Random wormholes and glowing balls of light aside, it’s not all bad. We’ve had two dedicated teams consisting of a mash of internal XSEED QA, an external QA house, and series experts throwing themselves at the tide of text that have contributed endless hours to making sure that when you guys get SC it’ll be a memorable experience for the right reasons. Of particular note is the extra effort that’s gone into updating and connecting the games (FC, SC, and Cold Steel). As work was drawing to a close on the editing side of SC, a lot of discussion was also being had on the direction of the series as a whole. This was always in the back of our minds, but it became especially important as work on Cold Steel began. After all, with the Trails series, even the most innocent of terms can become incredibly significant in later games.
To nail down the most important of these (some 2000+ key terms, items, people, etc. at a rough count), the team consulted with Falcom and a number of series experts. The outcome of this was that some things from FC proved to have greater meaning than previously known, and some current SC terminology would have to be updated. It was also decided that, moving forward, the original Germanic naming conventions would be used. Such was our in-house Kiseki nut’s determination to normalize all conventions that even locations names barely mentioned in passing like “Hamel” from FC would be updated to “Hemel.” These changes were applied both retroactively to FC’s Steam version, and incorporated into SC before and during the QA period, and we hope that fans will nerd out as much as we have over the rich lore that has been lovingly poured into this game*.
*We also overhauled the military structure of the entire Liberl Royal Army to make it functionally correct. Just because. Dedication or madness, you decide.
“Do ducks exist in Trails?” – QA Notes Attached to Bug #309
In addition to the overarching series updates, the removal of typos was also a priority. A sincere thanks must be given here to Danielle and the external QA team for their dedication to adding missing punctuation, fixing bad cut and paste jobs, and doggedly running an endless regression cycle to check everyone else’s changes. Some typos found during the QA were truly inspired, though, and it was almost a shame to fix them:
Queen Alicia: “I am counting on you…to balance hose scales.”
Zane: “Yes…the end of the unavoidable path, if you use any marital art purely for combat.”
Overall, it was a grueling few months, and in just a couple more we’ll be at the finish line. Please, please let us be at the finish line…
- Jess (XSEED Foreign Correspondent, @HProtagonista)
The Future
And…that’s pretty much it. You’d be shocked to realize that a pretty big part of the wait now involves us waiting around for things ourselves. For those not in the know, XSEED as a publisher is purely in charge of the text and reporting bugs we find—creating graphics, inserting the English text, and fixing the bugs we report during QA are all on the developer’s side. That’s not something exclusive to us, but fairly normal for the game publishing industry as a whole. The developers know their own source code best, after all! We do program the PC version on our end, however, and it’s worth noting that our programmer loves to add things like HD graphics, widescreen, content previously unavailable for the PC version, and other such quality of life improvements. Trust me, the magic she works up on our PC titles is always worth it.
And finally, an actual glimpse of the future. Please look forward to it. -Jess
Steam Achievements (Tentative List)
Breakfast Safari
Odyssey of Anton
Baby, Come Back
Master Fisher
Master Chef
League of Extraordinary Bracers
Penguin de Samba
Doom Baker
Ramblin’ Gambler
Blue Knight
That Damn Recipe
“Blorf”
Bounty Hunter
<Fin~>
If our Steam icon artist gets too busy to continue her role, Kelly has offered to assume the duties. Pray to Aidios, people. Pray like you’ve never prayed before.
I sit here in my desk staring at another unfinished paper that’s due tomorrow. It’s one of the last papers I have to do as a student at San Jose State. So nostalgia has become my muse to procrastination. As I continue to sift through what I should write about I can’t help but think of how Killer...
I don't even use Tumblr anymore, but I will reblog good blogs. Like this one.
Akbayan Pilipino-American Organization of San Jose State University Presents Its 25th Annual Pilipino Cultural Night, "KILLER QUEEN"
SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY’S PREMIER PILIPINO-AMERICAN ORGANIZATION CELEBRATES 25 YEARS OF CULTURAL AWARENESS THROUGH THEATRICAL PRESENTATION
>>Click HERE to purchase tickets!<<
San Jose, CA, April 4, 2013 – The Akbayan Pilipino-American Organization of San Jose State University has unveiled information on its much anticipated Pilipino Cultural Night (PCN).
PCN 2013 celebrates 25 years of Akbayan SJSU’s never-ending effort to enrich the campus and surrounding communities with the melting pot that is the Philippine culture. The student-run production blends a theatrical play with Philippine folk arts and music, as well as other student performances.
“Pilipino Cultural Night is an opportunity for many Pilipino-American Organizations, like Akbayan, to pay homage to our culture’s history and those who came before us,” said Akbayan SJSU president Arlo Trinidad. “It is an avenue of keeping the culture alive by educating those who are hungry for knowledge about the Pilipino culture and history and to give nostalgia to our elders who may have performed these same dances in their younger years.”
This year’s story, entitled “Killer Queen,” puts a fairytale twist in arguably the Philippines’ most infamous couple.
A young, innocent girl named Gabriella is trapped by her older stepsister, Imelda, who uses Gabriella as a personal servant that does nothing but Imelda’s chores. Like “Cinderella,” Gabriella dreams of living a life free of Imelda’s power.
Meanwhile, an exuberant Prince Ferdinand Marcos invites all the women in the province to a grand ball in an attempt to find his princess. Both Imelda and Gabriella have hopes of winning the prince’s hand, but out of fear that the prince may court Gabriella, Imelda locks Gabriella in her room before the ball.
With the help of her fairy godfather, Jose Rizal, Gabriella turns into the Maria Clara she has always wanted to become. However, like her real-life counterpart, Imelda has other plans…
To give further meaning to Killer Queen’s title, a majority of the music performed in PCN 2013 are actually covers of the hit rock and roll band, Queen.
“I chose Queen for a couple reasons,” said Jonathan Juntado, writer of Killer Queen and former PCN executive director. “First, Queen’s popularity seemed to coincide with the height of the Marcos regime. Second, Freddy Mercury broke the mold as to what defined a rockstar. He’s a major influence on the diversity of music today. Much like how the main character in this story tries to redefine the Maria Clara-like image Imelda upholds.”
In addition to the theatrical presentation, “Killer Queen” will feature a wide variety of performing arts with emphasis on displaying the Philippine culture. There will be a choir singing songs in English and Tagalog, modern and hip hop dance pieces, and a live rondallaand student music ensemble to play the background music throughout the progress of the show.
“I’ve found it to be an experience like no other that combines the essentials of Pilipino culture with creative expression,” said Christian Borromeo, executive director of PCN 2013. “It’s been an enriching experience, and every year, I learn something new.”
Being tied in with these entirely student-run performance aspects are the dances of the Philippine islands taught by current and former Akbayan SJSU members that have more than 20 years of combined experience with other PCN productions and cultural dance groups.
“Through these Filipino folk dances that we’ve taught, we hope that people will walk away with inspiration to learn more about themselves,” said Jeffrey Monje, one of the cultural dance choreographers and former PCN executive director. “Filipino folk dance is important because it’s our history through art.”
Akbayan SJSU’s 25th Annual Pilipino Cultural Night will have its opening night on Friday, April 26 and will have its gala showing onSaturday, April 27.
Presale tickets are $16 for students with a valid school I.D., $20 general admission, and $25 for preferred seating will be available until April 4. At the door, tickets are $18 for studentswith a valid school I.D. and $25 for general admission. Tickets can be purchased at the Akbayan recruitment table at San Jose State University, and can also be bought on their website at akbayansjsu.org/tickets.
For both nights, the doors open at 5:00 PM and the show will begin at 6:00 PM.
See attached flyer(s) for additional information.
About Pilipino Cultural Night For 25 years, Pilipino Cultural Night, or PCN, has been Akbayan’s biggest event of the spring semester. The event is a student-run theatrical presentation that centralizes an important theme in Pilipino-American society. Tied together by a theatrical play, music, dance, and other folk arts, members participating in the production earn on-stage performing experience while also broadening their knowledge of the Pilipino culture.
About Akbayan Pilipino-American Organization Akbayan, meaning “Embracing in Friendship,” is San Jose State’s premier Pilipino-American organization. Originally a social outlet founded in 1976, Akbayan has since adopted the aspects of cultural awareness and community activism to become one of the most active and respected organizations on the San Jose State campus with highly regarded events such as its annual Pilipino Cultural Night (PCN), Raising Awareness Amongst Pilipinos (RAAP) Conference, and its increasingly competitive social presence in Cal-State Fullerton’s Friendship Games. For more information on the Akbayan Pilipino American Organization of San Jose State University, visit the website at http://www.akbayansjsu.org/.
###
Contact: Christian Borromeo PCN Coordinator, Akbayan SJSU (415) 948-4985 pcn[AT]akbayansjsu.org
Arlo Trinidad President, Akbayan SJSU (408) 636-6693 president[AT]akbayansjsu.org Aaron Asilo / D.J. Ramirez Public Relations Officers, Akbayan SJSU pr[AT]akbayansjsu.org
Packers-49ers Playoffs Drinking Game
Drink when...
The score changes.
A turnover occurs.
A sack is made.
The Packers hand the ball off from the shotgun formation.
Jermichael Finley drops a pass. (Misfires don't count.)
The ball is batted down at/near the line of scrimmage.
Any Packers or 49ers are featured in a commercial (aka State Farm).
"Steve Young", "Joe Montana", or "Jerry Rice" get mentioned.
The "Fail Mary" or "Inaccurate Reception" is mentioned.
Take two drinks when...
David Akers or Mason Crosby misses a field goal.
Either team scores off a "free play."
A special teams TD is scored.
A "pick 6" is made.
Aaron Rodgers does the "Discount Double Check" (NOT IN THE COMMERCIAL)
Aldon Smith gets a sack.
Clay Matthews does the "Claymaker" pose. (NOT IN THE COMMERCIAL)
An "old-school rivalry" clip is shown.
Take three drinks when...
Brett Favre's name is mentioned.
A picture of Aaron Rodgers wearing 49ers apparel is shown.
Colin Kaepernick's "Letter to himself" is shown.
A clip of Randy Moss mooning the Packers as a Viking is shown, or it actually happens.
#forsale Size 10.5 #Nike #RosheRun Woven in Atomic Teal, Atomic Teal, Fiberglass, and Volt insole. $120 Deadstock OBO. #teamroshe #igsneakercommunity #todayskicks
My friend recently received this hateful letter in the mail. I’m not Filipino myself, but 95% of my friends are. This kind of thing makes me sick, I don’t care if it’s trolling or whatever the hell it is. Please reblog this and make it known that the Filipino people of the Bay Area won’t stand for this garbage.
Uh. WTF
Skip Bayless: The Troll of Trolls
Okay, Skip. That's agreeable.
And then he says something stupid like this:
Are you serious?
Christian Ponder | 16/28, 234 yards, 3 TD Aaron Rodgers | 28/40, 365 yards, 4 TD
Not to mention Ponder has the best running back in the NFL to hand the ball off to.
Bayless is the perfect example of a person who should think about what he's saying before he says something.
Then again, the only thing I agree with him about is Manny Pacquiao.
I'm fine with this loss.
Like any other loss, it sucks, but this was a special game.
Both teams needed the win in different ways. For the Green Bay Packers, it was to maintain the #2 seed and get next week off--a well-needed week off to rest key players like WR Randall Cobb and CB Charles Woodson.
For the Minnesota Vikings, it was simply to punch their ticket into the playoffs.
While I didn't get a chance to watch the game in full, I saw two players in their prime playing their best football and are probably the best to CURRENTLY play in their positions.
QB Aaron Rodgers and RB Adrian Peterson.
The MVP race might as well have been here.
Rodgers' 4 TDs today allowed him to finish second in the league with 39 touchdown passes to only 8 interceptions, a year after his MVP campaign which saw him throw 45 touchdowns to only 6 interceptions. And he was a fantasy disappointment?
Peterson, on the other hand, started the season coming off a torn ACL and MCL, and he just happened to have his best season, rushing for 2,097 yards--nine yards shy of the all-time record held by former Rams great Eric Dickerson.
Without a shadow of a doubt, if I had to pick an MVP, I'd pick these two. Both.
Peyton Manning and Tom Brady have both had incredible seasons in their own right, but their paths were nowhere close to the journeys that Green Bay and Minnesota had to go through.
Green Bay came off a rough start that included losing their home opener, as well as a game that many believe to be what triggered the NFL to bring back the regular officials. On top of that, they spent most of the season without Rodgers' favorite target Greg Jennings and DB Charles Woodson, who's just a few years removed from his Defensive Player of the Year campaign. Along with an inconsistent running game, Rodgers has simply put the Packers on his back.
Minnesota also has had to deal with tough injuries, namely to WR Percy Harvin, who was simply lighting up opposing defenses whenever he took the field. Inconsistent play on defense and the loss of CB Antoine Winfield didn't leave the Vikings with much fortune at all.
These two teams will face each other for the third and final time this season at Lambeau Field, and this is the game that matters the most. The victor continues their journey to the Lombardi Trophy, while the loser goes home.
Are you ready?
The Packers just lost to the Vikings, and all of a sudden they're 8 point favorites against the Vikings next Saturday? What?
Leonardo DiCaprio cut his hand while the cameras were rolling on the set of Django Unchained and kept moving through the scene, never breaking character, and his real-life bloodied hand made it into the final version of the film. During one take of that scene, DiCaprio unintentionally slammed his hand into glass, creating a gash that later required stitches. But that didn’t stop him from doing his job. As his hand bled quite visibly, DiCaprio kept going, even using the hand as a new dramatic prop. At one point he smears his bloodied hand over Broomhilda’s face in an act of evil dominance. And Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) looks horrified as he does it. (Perhaps Washington wasn’t acting!) And that was the take that director Quentin Tarantino kept in the film. (Source)
People be posting dollar signs with their championship fantasy teams. Most they win is like $200. Homie I make that every week picking winners.
#partjealousy #PartTruth
Was playing New Super Mario Bros. U on the toilet. Wii U purchase justified.