PA! Eight Point Five Updated

By Nick15 [Friday, November 21st 2003]

A Quick Diversion: I need to make more movies.

But anyways.... given the fact that we haven't updated, etc, I decided to make it up to you by giving you a new version of PA!... Eight Point Five. Woot! Here's what it's all about...

• Updated Look: Nothing jaw dropping, but I changed the fonts a bit. For Mac users, you get a more Mac friendly font. For Windows users, you get a font that doesn't look like crap.
• Built for Safari: Or any new generation browser (Mozilla, Opera, etc). IE = crap. And as a Mac user, it's manditory that I produce websites that look the best on Apple's own browser, Safari. All other Mac users who's websites aren't built to look good on Safari... well... aren't true Mac users! >:D
• Missing Sections Added: A long time ago in previous versions of PA!, there were sections on this site that I had, but never added to the latest version of the site. Well, I fixed it. Look at the retro goodies all over the site! (^_^)
• TCG Section Update: I fixed the TCG section so that the main sets have links to the next and previous sets, as well as added a small little set-based image gallery of random images based on the set. Yup.
• San Francisco Area Organized Play Page: OK, so it's not up right now, but I do plan on adding it and updating it with information on where to play the Pokémon TCG, as well as League info and tournament dates. Good times? Indeed!
• New Blanks!: The big reason for the update.... Both the Fangking and DW19 (aka PinoyPower) worked hard over the past few months to give you some new blanks.... new Custom blanks, some Neo Gym blanks, and all the new EX blanks as well! Check them out!
• General Site Tweeking: Eh, a few fixed links and cleaned up info here and there... you may not notice it... but then again, you may.

Yup... that's what I've updated about this site. Give it a look. In the works though is getting some high quality scans of every card on the site... I seriously plan on doing that. :D

But just for your information, this is going to be the last major PA! update ever in the history of PA!. I mean it this time. Why? Well, PA! is not gonna die, but.... you never know what might happen in the future. :D

Enjoy!

PA!8.5 Update Deal

By Nick15 [Saturday, November 18th 2003]

A Quick Diversion: Read below.

OK, as you can tell the site is sort of in shambles right now. I'm currently working on uploading what's missing, but it's been a slow process, mostly due to something important that happened in my personal life (which I don't care to get into right now).

When the site is uploaded, there's still a few tweeked I need to make, like I neglected the San Francisco Organized Play page... not to mention get NewsPro and the forums working (this post was done by hand).

I'm sure there's plenty of missing sections 'round here... just bear with me just for a moment folks. I also need to upload the new EX blanks >:D which were just sent to me while the site was uploading to the new server.

But year... that's where things stand at the moment. More news in an hour.

Collector's Tin Du Jour

A Quick Diversion: The Matrix Revelutions is out today. Have YOU seen it yet? .... Now here's a funny thing about the San Francisco Chronicle's movie review section. (The Chronicle is my local news paper.) See, the Chronicle, like all other newspapers, reviews movies. But unlike all other newspapers, the Chronicle has a weird habit of reviewing movies. I can't put my finger on it, but the theory my dad and I have is thus:

How good a movie is is inversely equal to what the Chronicle rates it.

For example, if the Chronicle rates a movie to be very BAD, then I know it's gonna be good! Likewise, if the Chronicle rates a movie to be very GOOD, then I know it's gonna be bad. Of course there's always acceptions to the fact; sometimes a good movie is rated good, but I guess it was a fluke when they reviewed it.

Annnnnyways, this gets to my point. The Chronicle rated both The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions to be bad movies, but because of which, I'm absolutly sure they're gonna be GOOD (At least Reloaded was!). Take THAT you stupid newspaper! :D

Getting back to REAL news... Nintendo releases their Pokémon TCG Collector's Tin, in an effort to capitalize on the success of the Yu-gi-oh Collector's Tin. All is far in love and war, you know. ;)

Some Info on the tin...

Nothing big though... one of the the "all new" promos is the 7-Eleven Pikachu promo. Heh. It also comes with 3 EX:R/S packs and 2 EX:Sandstorm packs and a poster. Meh.

Live In The San Francisco Bay Area? Good

A Quick Diversion: I spilt jewlery cleaner all over my pants. How they sparkle like the dew. :D

Are you currently living SOMEWHERE in the San Francisco Bay Area and are looking for the next hot spot to play Pokémon at... but can't find any? LOOK NO FURTHER! I'm gonna host the first of many Pokémon TCG tournaments in the Bay Area! FINALLY you have a place to play!! :D

Click here for more info!

C'mon it's worth the trip across the bay to get to a regular Pokémon tournament! It's worht the $3 back! You know you want to!!

Pokémon Batte-e out.

A Quick Diversion: I would've posted this yesterday, but I was too busy with the three games I bought yesterday: Kirby Air Ride (GameCube), Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (Game Boy Advance), and Megaman's Soccer (Super Nintendo). Huzzah!

So, yeah. Like the subject says, the new Battle-e Cards are out. There are three packs (Freezing Ray, Hidden Ruins, and Iron Defense). Each pack contains:
-16 Trainer cards (in two themes)
-2 Battle Record cards (to keep track of which Trainers you've beaten in each theme)
-2 Enigma Berry cards (first one scanned enables Enigma Berry in your game. Whatever one is scanned after that, ALL Enigma Berries in your game turn into that one)

Gotta love the e-Reader. I know I do. Especially with the SMB3-e cards. I got the Cape Feather! Holy Mario World, Batman!

APB UPDATE

A Quick Diversion: I hate snow.

Yes, the forums I linked to below are broken (sort of?). Not even 24 hours after I put them up, with absolutely no modifications whatsoever after it was set up. No, I am not going to fix them. Guess it's good to not wait, eh?

Okay, we've decided that dispite the problems, we're going to go with GISOL. We have gotten the forums on HostOnce (if you wish to see them IN ACTION, head over to http://www.forums.fakecard.com), but both Nick and I know it would just be a temporary solution, and that we'd eventually want to move to a non-windows server (which allows us to be more secure, better handling, etc.). At that time, we'd have to make sure we could move the forum information succesfully. We aren't sure we can do that. We already have to start from scratch as it is. With this move we will never have the forums go down on us again, which means we'd never lose user info. If we stik with HostOnce for now and go later, well... You get the idea.

So Nick will be buying a new account late this week, we will be moving the site sometime next weekend or next week, and the forums should be up shortly after. Even once the site moves, the forums will not have public access for a while, as I have about 60 hacks (most one or two minute jobs) that I want to get up and running on the forums, including everyone's favorite: Quick Reply!

In short, it will be a happy Christmas. :D

ADV4/EX1 Team Aqua/Magma Theme Deck Scans Du Jour

A Quick Diversion: Merry Hallowe'en!! Or Malloween or whatever that Homestar Runner thing says. (He's getting annoying now.) [Nick gets socked by a HSR fan... which is like all of you]

BTW, once we get this whole server deal worked out (we may not even need to move, let's hope to GOD we don't need to), I'll upload PA!8.5. It's been all... uhm... Pantherized. ;) :D

Some... pretty much ALL the other sites have card scans of the main ADV4/EX1 set, but no one seems to have [thunder clash] the scans for the theme decks. But guess who does? >:D

RainbowRichards does! Every single ADV4/EX1 card is scanned and ready for YOU to look at (exciting, in'it?).

I'll try to get the spoiler finished soon so you can know what each card does. ;)

ALL POINTS BULLITEN

A Quick Diversion: Here's the deal.

Alright, so you've heard time and again, "We're getting a new host, PA! will be down for a few days for this week or the next or sometime in May blah blah blah." Well, apparetnyly, we were speaking prematurely.

Let's recap, huh?

A little over a year ago, when PA!'s free host decided to just go under without warning anyone, I talked ol' Nicky into buying some webspace, going 'legit', as it were. With a payed host, we wouldn't have to worry at all about the host suddenly dissapearing on us, and there would be good days for all!

Well, it appeared that way, anyway. We shopped around, and both Nick and I found hosts we each wanted for various reasons. I chose GISOL (www.gisol.com), and Nick chose HostOnce (www.hostonce.com). Now, GISOL charged more, but it had quite the nice package ($8/month with 1GB of space and 60GBs of transfer and more), while HostOnce was cheaper and offered unlimited space and bandwidth (this has since changed). Since it was Nick's money (and his site), we went with his choice of HostOnce.

One big thing we failed to note when we signed up: HostOnce uses WINDOWS SERVER. The evil, evil Windows Server. This has given us no small portion of heck. Because of the way it's set up, I can't CHMOD, vBulliten won't run on it, all .cgi files have to be .pl (this can affect some scripts). The Control Panel is also lacking in all sorts of stuff you would think would be in a CP. They've eventually added MySQL and PHP support, but it still doesn't seem to be enough.

Now, because of the lack of SQL and PHP support, we had to find another host for the forums. After some searching, we found another free host. As many of you know, that bombed some time after. Crap, huh?

Now, present day. I bully Nick into getting an entirely new pay host. Who would that be? GISOL. (GISOL is RedHat) A week ago, we signed up for a GISOL account. My idea (that I bullyed him into as well) was that we would use the free domain name thing to set up the site and forums, then transfer domains when we were ready to open to the public. We checked after signing up to see if it was possible... and it wasn't. So we decided to cancel the account and resign up with fakecard.com so there would be no domain worries (pa.net would be a forward). However, we requested a cancellation 8 days ago. Has it happened? No.

So what do we do now? Well, over the next few days I will be making my best efforts to make vBulliten work here on HostOnce. If we can do that, then there will be absolutely no problems (aside from the fact that we'd still be on a Windows server, but we can work around that).

If that fails, we need YOUR help. Both Nick and I have done investigative research for possible pay-for hosts. But, we haven't been able to find ANYTHING that compares to GISOL. Places either have the stuff but a super-high price, or they have a low price and not nearly what we require. So, here's how you can help out. If you know of a host that has at least 700MBs of space and 45GBs of transfer, plus the regulars (PHP, MySQL, etc.), PLEASE, PLEASE E-mail me at ryoshin@gamebox.net. This is a most important way that you can help us, with no cost to yourself!

Until either thing happens... well, we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Update on Bundle pricing

A Quick Diversion: I am employed!

I got an e-mail from Didier, and he helps to shed some light on the pricing:

hi i have seen your comments on the pokemon R/S bundle on fakecard.com and i would like to ad a comment to that. i live in Europe so i can tell you the price of a GBA/SP in my country (Switzerland) it usually sells for CHF199.00 but you can find it also for CHF179.00 which is the lowest price here.
CHF199.00 = around 130 Euros
CHF179.00 = around 120 Euros
the exchange rate from CHF to Euros is nearly the same as from CHF to $, so i guess that 1 Euro equals 1$, or close to.

This bundle deal is pretty good for Europe where the GBA/SP sells for such a high price, and it's an opportunity as well to own a special edition GBA/SP. i might get a few for myself and try to sell them to the americans :-) for once we have something that they don't have yet...

So there you have it. Perhaps the exchange sites I visited were wrong?

This looks cool...

A Quick Diversion: Hmm. We've hit even more snags with making a server switch. Expect Fakecard to be down sometime this week. Can't we ever get a break?

IGNPocket has a story about a new Pokemon bundle for our European friends. The bundle comes with your choice of Sapphire or Ruby, a GBA SP colored/branded as such, as well as a GBA SP case along the same lines. It sells for 170 Euros, which the article reports as being $170 American, but something seems very wrong with that to me. [pulls out Calculator] I dunno about the prices in Europe, but in America:

1 GBA SP: $100
1 R/S Game: $30
1 SP Case: $10
-----------------
Total: $140

Don't bundles usually cost less than what the content sell for seperatly?

Oh well. No word on an American release, but if there is one, sounds like a good time for me to invest in an SP and R/S.

Showing your love for Pokemon: priceless

There are some things importing can't get, for everything else, we have cash.

[UPDATE]: I did some googling for money converters, and they all tell me that 170 Euro is equal to $200 US. IGNPocket botches again, eh? Perhaps I should look for other news sources...

Duel Masters Comic And Card Info

A Quick Diversion: Once day PA! will die. And a new site will rise from its ashes....

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/3698.html

The Duel Masters invasion will begin in November with the release of the first issue of the comic series. In the first issue, you'll find the first English Duel Master card. Though it won't be until 2004 when the Duel Masters TCG will finally be released. Still, a nice way to get in on the deal before it explodes state-wise. :)

Oh.... you can BET I'll be getting myself a copy of it. :) ... Now to work on my Duel Masters website...

EX Blanks

A Quick Diversion: Did you know my birthday was on October 20th? Hehe, silly me for not mentioning it. ;)

Howdy. Seeing that I'm a combination of both busy and lazy, I'm looking for someone I can kinda hire to make me a set of really NICE EX Blanks for me to add to the site (better if you already have a set). Though, I'd prefer if your blanks were 100% your own and not hacked together by someone else's EX Blanks (like I think there's a set of EX Blanks that were made from Pokémon Zeo's own EX blanks somewhere).

Why do I ask? Like I said, I'm too busy and too lazy to do it on my own. :)

For anyone who wishes to donate me a set of EX Blanks, please email me with your name/screenname and an example of your work for me to judge your l33t Photoshop skillz. 100% full credit will go to you, and it'll be uploaded onto PA!8.5 when it's done (sometime within a week or two).

Good times. :)