Messages posted by: Dragoniade

I'm back from vacation. Already all gone and back to work.

I left Friday in the early morning to take the plane that would fly my north for hunting. I meet my mom and we drop to the work camp when we packed the boat.
The next day, I met my hunting partner and headed to the reservoir to head to our mirador, 20 km by boat, while my father and mother were hunting in their mirador.
We were supposed to stay there until Wednesday, as both my mother and partner were heading back to work on Thursday, but due to the bad weather, we decided to head back Tuesday. For the 3 days we stayed, it was all wind and rains.
There were quite a few wind waves on the reservoir, but the boat was sure able to take it.

I took Wednesday easy, as my father needed to catch up at work. I took the day to work a bit on the site, working on the future search engine and adding another import feature to help me with the updates.

On Thursday morning, my father and I headed back to his mirador that he lefts the day earlier. The silence was great, disturbed only by the sound of Canadian gooses honking while flying south, beaver swimming and duck running on the water.
However, it was sometime disturbed by the sound of machinery, loaders and dumping truck, working a few kilometers away on the road leading to the work camp. With the mountain and flat valley, the sounds were really amplified and it was like they were working right next to us.

On Friday, my father when down to the ground to call, while I hold guard upstairs. At 10h00, he climbed back and we were sort of loosing hope, as the working sound was really loud and were really disturbing the peace. My father decided to take a nap, while I pulled my laptop to resume my work on the search engine, raising my head every minute or so to keep watch.
It's at 12h30 that I raised my head to look outside I saw it. A small buck walking along the other side of the stream. With all the noise, one came out. I notified my father, who got up as I was grabbing my riffle and my clips. We both got outside and as my father was aiming the moose and I was readying myself to assist him, I saw it... Another moose left the branches to follow the first one. And it was another male. I look at my father, saying there was another one and acknowledging with him about getting both. We nodded at each other and while he was aiming the first one, I aimed at the second one.
We both shot at the same time. His fell at the first shot, mine didn't move an inch. I shot 2 other time before he finally decided to walk away back into the bush. I was shocked. 3 bullets and it did nothing. But knew I hit him.

We waited an hour, watching in case the first one would get up and in case we would spot the second one, before crossing the stream. The first one was down, not having moved an inch, so we proceeded to find mine. There was blood, so I did hit him. We first went into the high folliage and saw nothing. While my father decided to walk further, I went back to where I last saw the moose, then started to track the blood on the ground and foliage. Red on green is not easy to spot, but after about 30 feet through the foliage, I saw it. I did get it, and quite good. All shot went in, where they should, but he was one of those that wouldn't fell no matter what. We started to prepare the nooses for transportation, which means eviscerate them then cut them in quarters. During the process, my partner arrived, having been notified we hit, and two hours later, our expedition's partners. We loaded the ATV and headed back to the main camp to hangs the quarters. All done, we headed back to the work camp for the night.

On Saturday, we started washing the stuff and packing, planning to head south on Sunday.

On Sunday, we got up at 5 AM, ate breakfast and started the drive back to our maple grove, a nice 1400 Km trip .

http://maps.google.ca/maps?f=d&source=embed&saddr=Unknown+road&daddr=45.621722,-72.108765+to:Rang+St+-+Thomas&hl=en&geocode=FWIAIgMdMD9t-w%3B%3BFfXrvgIdjGHH-w&mra=dme&mrcr=0&mrsp=1&sz=8&via=1&sll=44.762337,-71.987915&sspn=2.683424,8.453979&ie=UTF8&ll=44.762337,-71.982422&spn=7.488536,14.0625&z=6

We stopped at Amos to register the kills. About halfway through the regional park, we were flagged by the forest patrol to stop. Seem they were waiting for us and we figured out it was because we registered 2 kills at the same spot, same time, same day, which is rather suspicious in other circumstance. After checking all the papers and asking a few questions, they asked my to come inside for questioning, same for my father. They questioned me further, asking more details about how the hunt occurred. After a 15 minutes interrogation, one of the ranger left and I waited with the other one. They came back, saying all was OK, and we left a few minutes later. What they were after was if my father was the one who shot both moose, which is illegal. But since we both fired at our target, we were all ok. We resumed the road trip and arrived at Longueuil close to 20h30 or so. My parents drop me home, since I needed to pick my car, while they continued toward my sister's home, to stop for the night.

On Monday, I resumed my trip, heading to Sherbrooke needing to buy some food for processing during the second week of 'vacation'. However, my father called, saying he lefts my mother at the hospital, a puncture she did during the road trip got infected. My father continued to stop to the butcher to drop the moose while I was heading to the hospital and waited for my mother. She got her leave late the day, after which we headed to the maple grove.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, Friday were mostly spent cooking the food I brought back and use some of last year moose to make room for this year meat. So we made Moose spaghetti sauce, Moose Shepard pie, Moose Meat Balls, Moose Stew. We also unpacked. Sadly, it rained most of the week, so we didn't managed to get too much done on the land as we would have hoped. I took the opportunity to work on the updates I brought with me during that week.

My parent left on Sunday, while I took the day to work on another project of mine. You see, I have more than 14000 favorites on Deviant Art, most having never been saved, having been more of an online collection... which I hate. I never been a fan of WEB 2.0, where everything is online and should something happen to the online site, you lose everything. So I finally managed to figured out how DA worked their AJAX, through searching left and right, and got started in coding a crawler. This small program query Deviant Art for a user's favorites, mine in that case, recovering the data in XML with all the information for the picture. All that is left to do is download the URL supplied and voila. A structured local archive of my favorite, sorted by artist and title, which I can use for wallpaper, or view OFFLINE without having to be connected to DA.

I spend the remaining days working on this, my updated and getting some wood in for the winter, before heading back to Longueuil and getting ready for Fur Fright. I took the opportunity to get an extra sketchbook, and a 5x8 labels set, which I used to add a cover to my sketchbook. Sadly, I'll have to figure a way to make the laser toner stick on that paper much longer. I think I'll have to use that spray I saw some artist use on their paper, if I can manage find what it is.

On Thursday, I left to Fur Fright after picking Chasseur d'étoile for co-riding there. We got to the overflow hotel by 22h30, then headed to the convention hotel to see if we could register. Since everything was closed, we headed back to the hotel and went to sleep.

On Friday, we registered and we went our separate way for the con. I wandered into the dealer's dungeons for a while, leaving my sketchbooks at a few tables, before heading to the werewolf panel. I think this was the only interesting panel this year and I sure wish I had brought my laptop, since there as been a long transformation talk

I also meet Comus and we talked. He's quite a friendly guy to met and I was sure surprised, in a good way, when I first saw him. I also meet Sorethumb and ICheetah at the con. I was supposed to pick a box at the con from someone who owed me some stuff, one of which was a 160$ charity commission. Of course, the box never got there, the person never having sent it thinking I wouldn't be at the con, while at the same time, being unable to spend 4 dollars for an envelope with a 200$ insurance to send me my commission, which I sure now regret taking, charity or not.

I spent the rest of Friday and most of Saturday wandering between commissioning in the dealer's dungeon, meeting with Comus or Sorethumb groups and the charity event, which I got the DVD of the Howling

I went with Comus to the Gun Fur panel, thinking, by the description, it would be a informative panel about weapon, like C-Ace used to have. Sadly, it was another propaganda, brain dead gathering of weapon crazy United Statians who saw conspiracies in every corner and would be ready to go Rambo should someone ask them to drop their weapon. Like you need to carry a gun to go to the grocery or walk in the street. Some people are just so paranoia. While I understand and enjoy shooting at range, like they do, I cannot understand the religion about keeping a gun on yourself 24/24 and feeling threatened every second. Go figure.

On Sunday, we gave our goodbye and we parted, until another year. I got home at 02h30, having stopped to Cabela's to grab an order for our hunting gear and reload.

While this Fur Fright was interesting in term of meeting people, I must say I was a bit disappointing by the organization. First, when you have to rely that much on overflow hotel that are more than a street corner, it's a sign you've outgrown yourself. Sure, that hotel is quite nice, with the indoor atrium, but when you have to commute between both hotel, it's a realy fun killer, especially when you're tired and need to rest a bit. Second, the programming was to be improved. Last year panels were fun. This years, it could have been better. Too much fur suiting panels or USA propaganda panels (gun, military, dog soldiers, etc) and not enough general panels. Hopefully, next years will have better panel.

Another sore moment was when I showed my sketchbooks to a friend. His first reaction was to ask me that question: "How many gifts do you have in there?". Which, of course, was a big ZERO. All were commission, none were gifts. Which he replied "This really suck. You deserve more." Yes. I think so too. I spent the week before updating daily, pushing a big update. What feedback do I get? None, Niet, Aucun. I see people pushing quarterly updates getting much more feedback, more support, more gifts arts, but when I do one over time, nothing. Why do people writing crappy TF story manage to get requests done by the dozen, and I have to work in the shadow? Why do people say I deserve more and still get nothing. That sure is depressing when it come to updating the site and give back to the community. Especially when I'm told I should be happy I make people 'happy', but the other way around sure isn't important. And it's not to help when you hit the 10th anniversary mark, only to be cast aside by another 10th anniversary, which seem was more worth of mention in a TF blog.

At least, with commission, I can expect to get something back to myself.

I've come to a dilemma.

Until now, all clips uploaded on the site were in AVI format, using a common MPEG4-2 video codec, akaa (DivX 3.11, DivX 5.11 or xVid) and an Mp3 audio codec.

During my vacation, I've been tweaking with DVD and re-encoding older clip with the true aspect ratio and resolution. Watching some of the encoding results, I've been doubting using the same old codec. However, migrating isn't an easy step. Most clips now are using MPEG4-10, also better known as H264. FanSubber should be familiar with it.

The problem is, hold AVI don't like that new format when it's used to it's full potential and ask for another container. Those are the famous MP4 and MKV files. There's also a AVI codec for h264, but less powerful as the native h264.

I've encoded 3 clips and here a screen shot from for each of them.

Xvid in Avi codec, encoded with VirtualDub. The current codec used for my clips.

h264 in Avi codec, encoded with VirtualDub. A potential new candidate

h264 in MP4 codec, encoded with ffmpeg. A potential new candidate

h264 in AVI is the easiest to migrate to. Virtualdub support it, there's no extra step to take. All my scripting factories can easily support it.
h264 in MP4 is the worst. An intermediate file must be created in Virtualdub (for logo and all pre-processing), then encoded in MP4 by ffmpeg. More trouble and current my scripting doesn't allow multi programs.

So, which one seem more suitable? Personally, I would say h264 in AVI, even though it's considered legacy. But considering the lack of good encoding / editing software supporting mp4 / mkv, I prefer support a legacy format with tools than a "your on your own sucker" format. And I don't know how many people can play H264.

The screenshots are a Dragon Transformation from the Mummy :Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. The resolution is 864x368, to support true 2.4 anamorphism while optimizing the resolution.

I don't have a wii so I can't really help you there.

But from what I read with a quick google, you need to convert the file to a format compatible with the wii and load it through the SD port. Not really worthwhile.

Personally, I got myself this: http://www.wdc.com/fr/products/products.asp?driveid=572

Pretty neat and has been able to play my clips, along with some downloaded episode, even those at 1280p.

Ok everyone,

I have asked that the video posted here not be reposted on other video site, like You Tube. For that reason, I watermarked my clips.

I guess the message wasn't clear enough. I just noticed that account: http://www.youtube.com/user/kike640jr

That person has been posting the latest update in his section. Of course, leechers are defending that person http://www.metamorphose.org/thread/show.htp?threadid=10638&se0=thread&se1=show

Is it too much to ask to have a bit of respect to those who contribute content? Why do people have to steal all the work of others and try to cash on it. That person sure didn't go through the work of recording the TV broadcast, capturing it to his PC, trimming the video down, encoding it then put it on a website of his own.

He just took the clip away and lazily uploaded it on You Tube. No mention to the original contributor, no link the site. And while I do all the work, leech like him simply get all the positive feedback.

If you notice any transformation video having my watermark, PLEASE, remind the person that this clip was not made by him and he should, at least credit the source and link back to it or otherwise, delete it.
If that person is stubborn, then be stubborn back too. It's people like him that bring back the "Is TF dead" once in a while. It's people like him that make people quit. And it's leech like those who defend him that make everyone keep their work for themselves.

It's going to be a 3 days week-end. I was planning to do extra work on the site, but I think I'll just take those day off instead. I'm getting feed up to having constantly defend my work and getting nothing back in return.

Well, I did it... FINALLY.

I got banned from the process. Something I've been trying for some time now. Well, not really banned, but to have my account removed.
I wanted that when, some time ago, Lorekeep messaged me when I reinstalled Trillian asking if I was his friend and why I wasn't talking to him if I had him on his list. The usual pathetic sad kid who want friends and want to be sure his "friends" are watching him.

Well, he didn't like his respond when I said I wasn't and the way he was running his site was partially responsible for it. After leaving the conversation with an angry note, he said he would never remove my account. Strange, since he did when he tried to screw up an artist and she stood against him.

To return to the current story. Well, the process is, as we know, a female TF site that slowly turned into a fanservice fetishist female only site. A site where anyone who even mention the words "male tf" automatically get labeled as gay, stupid, freak and like they're having leprosy. A site where the quality of the content is measured by the breast size of the person transformed, or how few cloth she wears. A few days ago, someone posted, in the "Anything else" section of the site, the only place where mentionning male is permitted, that male TF should be also have a separated section. While maybe 3 persons offered sane response, most of the process good replied with stupid comment as "This is a female only site, buzz of", "Male tf are for gay", "if you want gay TF, go to Dragonaide (sic) site", and stupidity like this.

I guess what finally deserved the ban was when someone, known as TF-Viewer, started to post a bunch of libel and lies regarding me and my site. When I posted my defense, he was in denial of ever contacting me, talking to me, donating or ever having anything to do with the site.

Of course, I knew always has been a lie, since about 4 years ago, he contacted me about a donation. Something he more likely had forgotten, but which I didn't. But since he denied ever contacted me, well, what I was about to post must have been fake. So I posted the info, the name and email associated to the donation.

Strangely, the tune changed right after that. He said he had apologized in the past, than he retracted himself from ever saying I was taking drugs, etc and that he wanted to make peace. Strange for someone who denied everything a post before.

Well, Lorekeep didn't like to have one of his puppet being reprimanded and banned me. He banned me before I could post my reply to TF-Viewier.

Right now, I wonder what lies are being posted again. But one thing for sure, GOOD RIDDANCE. I won.

As for Tf-Viewier, I have no idea if he come here, but here's the reply I was going to post:

Wait? I thought you *said* you never contacted me, never donated, never apologized to me in this, and other, threads. I really must have missed something.

From being attacked left and right by a lot of people, I grew up a though skin. And from hearing apologizes over and over from people who would simply "forget" the week after, I've learn not to take apologizes for granted. So if you're REALLY truthful, it will take more than a plain post in a forum to do that and you know where to contact me. Otherwise, this is just another empty "request for truce" that I get so often.

As for the info, what tell you I didn't "invented" the whole thing? Unless it's real and I hit a cord. As for why I did it, take the example of a big surface store. They're not supposed to disclose the information they have about their customer (right). But if one customer start denying ever going to the same store after he's suspected to have broken something, the store can use the receipt as a proof. If you really mean what you say, I'll remove it. Otherwise, they're just a random generated email and a name taken from the internet. Just as you said.

For the record, one of the person I was mentioning about wanting to make a truce was Soty. Heard he wanted to make peace, never heard a word from him ever.

Simply contact me on any instant message.
I'm on Yahoo, MSN, AIM and ICQ (through AIM). My screename is Dragoniade for all of them, adding the @hotmail.com address for the MSN one.

I'm slowly, but surely, coming to them. I've practically moved all of Stonegate clips has been up, so those must be one I captured.

Got any name that I may decide to skip toward to?

Only a small update this week with 4 shows from the 'R' section: Ratchet & Clank, Rupert, Rosewell Conspiracies and Repligator.

However, there's something new. People who have followed the site know that this is the 3rd formats we went through since the site started.

The first one was a plain HTML where everything was static and had to manually be updated in notepad or any basic HTML editor.
The second one was made in PHP with a database backend in order to simplify the update, sorting and categorization.
The third, and current one, now use Java on Tomcat with a database backend for a more persisted format and a more interactive service.

Some of the features were removed or added from one version to another. And the nostalgic were wondering what happened to those feature and the other site.
Well, after getting a few demands about the old site and the old gallery, and since everything back then was all static, I decided to code a small servlet that would feed a website from a big ZIP archive. And thus, Shadowlord 1.0, which I branded "Legacy", with its 62709 files, fita in a 800Mb zip file.

The nostalgic and those wanting to see what the site looked back between 1999 and 2003 can now access it at http://legacy.shadowlordinc.com/
It contain some old stuff that is now long gone and were first hosted on Shadowlord back then.

Enjoy and feedback is appreciated.

This latest update mark a big progress in the upload.
With this update, I have officially started uploading my contents and new contents. In this case, the new content was Soul Eater and Batman the Brave and the Bold.

What is different? Up until now, all the clips I had uploaded were the one Stonegate contributed. Since the site started, both of us were putting our clips together, one have having access to clips the other didn't and vice versa. As of now, all the *shows* that Stonegate was the only contributor has been upload.
All the future update will be of either new shows not yet displayed on the site, or my own clips from show we both contributed to or where I had the exclusivity.

How much has been uploaded so far? About 26 GB and 4673 videos, excluding the preview files. And there's still about 65 GB to go through. That's a lot, but as they saying gows, slow and steady win the race.

So, bare with me as I keep updating and put new content online. Support is appreciated too.

How can you support? There's many way. First, you can donate by following the link in the footer. Second, you can donate arts. I'm a sucker for self transformation, as my previous transformation commissions and contest demonstrated. So any TF of me http://www.shadowlordinc.com/character.view?Character.Id=409 would also be welcomed.

What are the plan for the future? Other than uploading new contents, I'm working in my hiatus period on the search engine for the site. On a more longer term, I plan to redo the layout, ditching the black and grey 'Stonegate' style for a more light theme. I may also start a livejournal page for the site, to announce downtime and such.

Also, Kyreeth has fixed a big problem that was causing a lot fo slowdown on both this site and others Furvect site. Thanks a lot Kyreeth. All is much faster. Keep up the good work.

Discussion and feedback can be posted here

Mostly fixed. I moved everything to dragon except those that were explicitly identified as 'Chinese dragon'. So there may be a few chinese dragons left as 'dragon', more likely those without pictures.

I still got to create a 'Speudo dragon' specie to put all those mammalian oddity wrongfully called 'dragon'

If the guy had offered his service on his site, it would have been fine.
But going after Furvect site specifically and posting left and right libel about the service is another whole story.

But seeing he's part of the Process retards, I'm not surprised to see that behaviour.

Vultures, -noun
a person or thing that preys, esp. greedily or unscrupulously.

Why the definition? Because some have shown their true color. Let me tell you this little similar story.

A man has been offering car polling to some of his coworkers. One day, on the way to work, he unluckly gets 2 flats tires. Of course, there's only 1 spare tire, but luckily, there's garage 2 corners away.
So he asks his co-worker to wait just a little and watch the car while he go grab the spare tire.

The come another co-worker, driving nearby. He stop and tell the other passenger how the other guy is using them to get gas subvention, how he's deliberately not taking care of his car. Of course, he offers them to take the people home, leaving the guy alone to deal with the flats tires.
One person who was too busy listening to his music when the misfortune happened accepted, along with one too lazy to help change the tire. The 'good samaritan' left with the 2 peoples, leaving the car poller to wonder, where did his friends go.

Back at work, the savior bragged how he's offering better car polling to his co-worker.

I dunno about you, but to me, this 'helper' is a vulture. Rather than offer his help, he tooks the opportunity of a mishaps done by someone else to take credit on his behalf.

This little story is close than you imagine.

After years of offering web hosting, Furvect is now the car poller and the vulture is TF-Media.net

For weeks, Furvect staff has been trying to contacts the previous account owners. Some, like the music guys, was not available to listen to the warning or other, didn't wanted to do the effort to send an email.

In the end, the vulture started to look at those being hosted at Furvect, offering them an alternative... of course, taking away the years of visibility those site had thanks to Furvect.

Furvect is not dead of course. All it need is a small move to the new Furvect. Kuma moved fine, we moved fine, Kyouryuu, atolla and a few others moved fine too. So why vulture the other, only to insult afterward Furvect's staff? I'm sorry, but if some of the site haven't been moved, it isn't because Furvect decided that the content wasn't good enough, it's because the people weren't responding or disappeared (doc lab).

I guess it was time for another TF-Central: a site owner claiming to be the 'savior' of Transformation

Here's some details about the recent downtime.

When the old site was getting to big for the old server, namely Furvect, its owner bought another machine as a replacement. I sort of discussed with him what we would be needed for the site, and that new machine was sort of the answer. A few weeks before the site was ready, he setup the new servers to which the site is currently running on.

So yes, Process retards, we did move to another server. Just because I'm still working with the Furvect ADMIN doesn't mean I'm on the old Furvect server, bunch of retards.

Which doesn't mean Furvect was out of the loop. The machine was aging BADLY. Even before we moved we could experience various downtime, which were affecting all of Furvect hosted sites (Foxx, Doc, etc). Soon after that we moved, the old Furvect was shut down and the content put into a virtual machine. The reason was to give the current site owners, some of which haven't been heard of in ages, the time to contact the Furvect's administrator in order to give the go to the move and give the new access information.

However, the setup of all those virtual machines left some bugs. One of those bug hit 2 weeks ago and in order to fix thing, require the manual intervention of the server administrator. However, 2 days before, he had to leave out of the country for his work. That left a bunch of people out of the loop has what had happening. No feedback, no on-line presence in over a week (my Trillian is running 24/24 for a reason)... some people started to worries and think of the worse.

But early last week, he got back. We talked about the issue and put the server back on-line. I've been helping him locate the problem with his setup. Hopefully, what was causing the machines not to reboot successfully is now fixed rather than patched.

As for the rest of Furvect, after discussing the issue with him, we may try to migrate all the sites at once and await the feedback from theirs owners, rather than the opposite. This should help put the last nail in the coffin of the old Furvect server, which is sort of nothing more than a zombie right now. And it's sort of difficult to get a sign when there's no response from the site itself, which contains possible contact information.

I shall post an announcement tonight about it.
I'm moving next Saturday, so I'm a little caught up.

It's in the B section, which is mostly done.

It hasn't been uploaded during the B updates because I'm holding the clips I made for my run of update.
In that case, I redid it at full screen resolution of 640x480, which beat the one from You tube.