Past Updates

12.01.07. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, all. We have four new cards in the Gift Shop, three Birthday Cards and one Thinking Of You Card. Have a good holiday season. ^_^

11.01.07. Wow, it's almost the end of the year. Hope everyone had a Happy Halloween, and that they have a Happy Thanksgiving. :) For the update, thanks to Celestial Tiger and her website, we now have a name for Shuu's ancestor! So his forensic file in the Police Station has been updated. Enjoy. :)

10.03.07. Small update this month, two wallpapers over at the Mall.

09.19.07. Another birthday for us and Rajura! And for the update, we present the sequel to Gangs of Lower Tokyo. Hope you like!

08.01.07. Four new wallpapers in the Home Improvement section of the mall. Summer is winding down. Next update we'll be back to subbing, and putting up a cool fic of ours. Look forward to it! :)

06.02.07. New stories from us, all of which are from Kingdom Hearts. We got both I and II for Christmas and obsessed strongly over them for almost two months. Aaaaaah. The result? Three new stories. :)

05.01.07. New Warlord stories from Isabel Night. Go look!

04.02.07. A new story that was a real change for us. We are proud to present Shaken Up, a Shuu story of a different kind.

03.01.07. Four new wallpapers, and two new non-Ronin fics by us: Mother's Love of a Brother ala Fruits Basket, and Equivalent Endearment from Fullmetal Alchemist. Enjoy!

02.02.07. Three new wallpapers. It would have been five, because it's a series, but I haven't had the time to make the other two. And on a happy note, Mirror passed student teaching! Happy feeling! Life is good! *sigh*

Oh wait. Now she has the graduating portfolio due. In March. Get busy, Nee-san!

01.03.07. Happy New Year! We had a great Christmas and are already having a great start to the new year. For our update, we have some new wallpapers over in the Mall as well as a new author to our site, Eagle Blaze, whom we met at Samurai Fanservice. She has a very nice song fic that we posted in our library. Happy New Year again, everyone!

12.09.06 Ah, Merry Christmas! We finished our last update of the year: four new Christmas cards in the Mall! Go enjoy!

12.06.06 Meri Kurisumasu, minna! Our update isn't quite ready yet (still in the process of scanning...), so there will be another update later this month. But for now, we'd like to give our yearly Christmas present to the fans: go check out our latest fic, Gangs of Lower Tokyo!!

11.01.06 In keeping with the fact that yesterday was Halloween, we present for this update a ghost fic of ours. So check out our Rurouni Kenshin fic, Most Haunted! :)

10.04.06 Update on time. Yay! A total of 6 new wallpapers over in our Home Improvement section. :) That's always good stuff.

09.23.06 Updates late for a few reasons, not the smallest of which is that our laptop needed to be sent in for service; the stupid thing wouldn't turn on. Bad Samurai, bad! We were biting our nails for a while, with the very real danger of his harddrive being wiped and loosing a *bunch* of files. But that atrocity never occured. We're still doing minor checks, but it looks like he's in the clear.

New material is just two little FFVII stories but us. A chibi Cloud-Tifa fic, First Time; and an internal monologue about the Cloud-Tifa-Aeris love triangle. Enjoy.

08.03.06 A little late, but we've had record breaking temperatures with humidity to make twin-puddles on the ground. Okay, we actually have a moderately large update. We have Isabel Nights Fire, a few non-RW fics from us (FFVII and TT), and, the biggest update, a new section of the school. We now have lessons in Web Design. Yay, yay! Does that satisfy all of you?

07.01.06 Two things. First, Isabel Night's Like Toy Soldiers, and over in the school, we have a few extra credit seminars for you. :) Enjoy. And Happy Fourth of July! You can also check out our Boys of Summer Art Challenge that we're doing for July.

06.03.06 Yet another new fic from Isabel Night, When I'm Gone. Hopefully things will pick up over the summer.

05.04.06 A little late for an update, but we have one, nonetheless. :D First up, a new fic from Isabel Night called Reflect and a great new link for an excellent message board called Samurai Fanservice which we HIGHLY recommend. Also if anyone has a g-mail account, could you PLEASE send us an invite? Or sombody recommend a new free email provider with lots of space? Thank you.

04.01.06 It's April Fool's Day, and the twins have started a Fink War at home. :) Meanwhile, here, we have three new wallpapers, and yet another new fic by Isabeal Night: Alive. Go read!

03.01.06 Another ficlet from the wonderful Isabel Night called Sakura, and, for putting up with a few false steps from us, we have three new group wallpapers over in the Mall. Enjoy.

02.01.06 Finally figured out a schedule for the next few months to avoid missing updates again. Allow us to present Isabel Night's poem: Inhale and what was slated to be our Christmas gift to you, a fic from us called Mixed Blood. Inhale tells of trying to get back a lost brother, and Mixed Blood weaves a tale of close friendship.

01.01.06 Er, yeah. We accidently skipped two months of updates. Why? Life. One of us is working full time and the other is student teaching, that's more than enough to keep a pair of twins unbelievably busy. Eh, regardless, we have a combo update to make up. We have more wallpapers, and another story from Isabel Night entitled Suffer. In short: Lots of good stuff.

10.01.05 New story from Isabel Night. We love her stuff.

9.19.05 Wallpapers. Need we say more? ^_^ A series of matching walls to boot.

8.1.05 A few small things. We have a new author over at the librar, Lena17 with her fic "Cherished". Yay! New art in the Mall, under Showcase and Gifts, from Ghost. And it's from our Swords & Sorcery fic! Oh, and speaking of Ghost, her Ronin page now has a separate link over in the Highways! Yatta!

7.1.05 A non-Ronin fic update. We have a new story called "Kasshin no Kokoro" under our Rurouni Kenshin section in the Non-YST Library (see link by our name). Image is out job-hunting while Mirror has one more class to take. Wow. It may not be much, but Graduate School sucks your life away more than regular college does....

6.1.05 We are now finally able to give you something that's been in the works for quiet a while. After reading a lot of fanfiction that tries to set themselves in the past (such as Masho origin stories, etc), and since we're generally obsessed with Japanese history at any rate, we've gone and added a bunch of "Forensic Files" in the Police Station. What to they contain, you ask? Articles we spent a year writing about feudal Japan, history, weapons, mysticism, and biographies of everybody's anscestors. If you have any interest in this kind of thing, then by all means check it out.

5.2.05 For those of you who are getting ready to finish another year in college, we have a little "finished-with-finals-need-a-break" plus. The last part of Swords and Sorcery, the Endgame.

4.9.05 Just went to a job fair this morning for the first time. Hopefully we'll be hired in September. In any case, the next part of Swords and Sorcery is up, Yuuki. That should be enough to placate you until next month. :) Enter Nasutei.

3.5.05 Not a very big update this month, just the next section of Swords and Sorcery: Luga. Of course, if you're obsessed with the fic, then this should be all you need. :)

2.9.05 Well, we got the new battery, but our power jack was still broken, despite being sent in. So we sent it in *again* (that's the fourth time since purchase) to have them fix it.

We just got Samurai back today; so, a little late, we can *hopefully* get back on track. If you're interested, we're student teaching now. It keeps us busy - very busy - but in an exciting kind of way. Each day is a new adventure and the same thing never happens twice. We're fighting to have time for everything, but thankfully we have excellent time management skills. Hopefully with Samurai back, things will go much better.

As for the actual update, we have the next section of S&S, Sthiss. It marks roughly the halfway point. Things only get better from here. We also have a handfull of new wallpapers in the Home Improvement Section. We haven't gotten any new fics for a while... the community seems to be dying. But we're still alive and well and have no intention of going anywhere, even if the ronin net shrinks a little. Be prepared for some interesting articles that will pop up in the summer. Do enjoy.

12.31.04 The update is Swords & Sorcery, sections: Kaosu's Keep and Peace. Kaosu's Keep was supposed to be the December Update, and Peace the January Update. Our Christmas gift was going to be a Rurouni Kenshin fic. Clearly, this hasn't happened.

See, two days after Thanksgiving, our laptop power supply completely died. Kaput. Nada. Nothing. No power. With only 21% battery left, Image and I scrambled to save all of our college stuff so we could finish our massive projects (like the 128 page portfolio) and mission cricticle stuff like that. Then came all of December trying to extract the harddrive before we sent our poor laptop down to Dallas for repair (again...). It didn't work. Nobody could extract the harddrive, so we had to risk sending it down and pray that our laptop wouldn't be reformatted.

We got our lovely laptop back three days ago and we currently are waiting for them to ship us a battery. Our gift-fic isn't finished, and we are clearly behind in updates. So we settled with this.

Oh, and this is the abridge edition of the story.

11.03.04 Swords and Sorcery's next section Daasa Laska is up now. Enter Seiji's family. >:) We also put up three new wallpapers. A powerful Kayura wall, and two new group shots. Yatta! We hope you all had a Happy Halloween and went out to vote yesterday.

10.02.04 Next chunk of Swords and Sorcery, our latest, biggets, nad hopefully greatest baby. Also, got an email from Cypher, he is not dead! Yay! Some updated status on his fics, and of course a few new wallpapers but other than that everything's quiet. It better be, we don't have the time this semester for headaches. :) Enjoy

09.01.04 It's finally here. The first section of Swords & Sorcery. The Outlet. Where do your beliefs lie?

Aside from that, parts 4-7 of Amazon and Riana's Rising Children. We know, we know, we always do our update on our birthday. We just could't keep Swords & Sorcery underwraps any more. :)

08.01.04 Yo! Hope everyone has been enjoying their summer, staying cool, and doing a lot of creative things. We sure did, with a new wallpaper of each of the masho and a masho-centric fic, the Mashokateers. We've also been wprking on a bunch of other things, but they'll be popping up later.

And lo... It's coming next month...

07.01.04 Happy Independence Day to all of you out there. In celebration, we've reworked the Home Improvement section of the Mall and added two wallpapers (a Ryo and a group). We hope you enjoy. We have a long summer ahead of us.

What will you do? Will you pick up your sword?

06.01.04 Slightly altered look. A new CSS which makes life easier, and pics on the side that are bold and more clear than simple text. We like. :)

What do you fight for? One or many?

05.01.04 Two new Touma Wallpapers over in the Home Improvement Section. They're kinda cool.

What is your choice? Which god will you follow?

04.01.04 Happy April Fool's! And while I can't think of an apporiately funny joke, I will say that we have a BUNCH of new wallpapers in the Home Improvement section of the Mall.

It approaches. . . and things will never be th same again.

03.01.04 Ataaaaa. We did have an update planned for this month, but it seems it's aready been done. *blink blink* When did that happen? Did our time management screw up? Ah well, for spring we have a new opening pic. Happy Springtime!

Beware! It's coming. . .

02.02.04 *whew* This was hell getting this update up. Mostly for personal reasons, everything was ready to go almost a month ago, but Real Life just dropped into our laps. We won't bore you with details, just suffice to say that finding time over the past few days (and the next few) is tricky.

So what's actually new around here? First, Isabel Night has a new story I Wish I Could Have Been There. (I may have mis-typed the title. Bear with me, I'm multi-tasking...) Secondly, and mokst importantly wallpapers. 1 new Seiji, 3 new Shin, 5 new Shuu, 1 new Touma. Finally, all the Troopers have evened out. Now if only the Masho had pics as good for wallpapers...

01.01.04 Happy New Year! We hope you all enjoyed your presents. We know that we love our new hard drive! Heheheheheee. Otherwise, with the new year comes a new author: Isabel Night! Short, sensetive works of the sadly neglected Warlords, she adds a lot to our collection here.

In personal projects, we have some doozies coming this year. *Big grin* We like to keep you on your toes. ^______^

12.13.03 To be frank, we're not sure wether to say happy holidays or ba humbug! We've been having a heck of a couple weeks. Our firewall crashed, and because of that we can't put our laptop online without overrunning poor Samurai with viruses and spybots and spyware and everything else the net has to offer. So we try to fix it through our virus scan, and ended up crashing that! To top things off, phone help (we're humbled to say that we went in over our heads so quickly. We're computer scientists, what does that say about us??) costs 3 bucks a minute and, knowing as we do, that this could take several hours to fix, we don't really have the money to spend. So BA HUMBUG!

But there is light on the end of the tunnel. In between pulling hair, screaming, and utilizing profanities in three different languages, we did have time to sit down and do stuff witht he page. For starters, Tiger's Eye has a new holiday flavored fic, cleverly titled "O Bonsai Tree!" Definitely worth checking out. And, in an attempt to get us in the holiday spirit, we have SEVEN (count'm *7*!) new wallpapers that are winter/hoiliday flavored. Plus we've been listening to a Tenchi Christmas CD that is absolutely hilarious, and that's putting us in the right spirits. Happy holidays!

Oh, but wait, we have three finals on one day that might turn out to be a typical New England storm (read: freezing rain). Waaaa! Why does this always happen during the holidays??

12.01.03 Happy Holidays! Wow, we were awfully busy over Thanksgiving break. We have quite a few things in the works, and hopefully we'll be able to give you guys a Christmas present later on this month. For now, satiate yourselve with a new fic by us, written and produced in recod time (under two weeks! We can't believe it). Go to the Library and check out the Shadow Movie!

11.03.03 A little late this month. Sorry about that, we had the weekend from hell. New this month is a new part from Mark of the Magi from Lily of trust. Also fixed a few small glitches on the page. Nothing else overly new. Hopefully we'll scrounge up some time for a nice December update. We hope.

10.02.03 Sorry we're a day late. Mirror's getting over a bad cold that Image is now catching. Ehhhh. In any case, two things. First, new wallpapers that we hope you like. Second is a boo-boo. In our last update, it appears that we put up the entire school rather than just the lessons we've had up before. So as a treat, you don't just get a full lesson, you have a complete School. Well, until we can get the Web Design class up. Stay healthy!

09.19.03 Like the new look?

Well, we have a lot of things to say for this update. For a very long time, we've been trying to get a mirror site. Most of you know some of the story. We had a college friend say he'd host our mirror, blah blah blah, he dropped out of school and contact with us, blah blah blah, and thus the great hunt began. We wanted a host that was different than envy.nu because if envy went down, then both pages would go down. So a new host was needed. It was really hard to find one that was free with the features we wanted and the space. (You've probably noticed how large our page is.) But thankfully, we've been emailing back and forth with Lily of Trust for a while now and she recommended brinkster.com and voila! Our mirror page was finally born!

Secondly, or rather, thridly, we have tossed the subject around between the two of us for some time. We have decided to accept Shounen Ai fanfiction. No, this does not mean fanfiction where the Ronins/Troopers end up sleeping with everyone on the team, but fanfiction that would basically be the same as romance with someone. We don't like slutty portrayals of anyone, so we won't be accepting that kind of fanfiction, be it with a female character or any of the boys.

So, in order to celebrate, we have some new work in the Library with work that either could be interpreted as, or will become, Shonen Ai. Lily of Trust's awesome Mark of the Magi, and a new author Melee with her insightful Monkey See, Monkey Do, and our challenge fic to her, Sapphire Subversion. Do enjoy.

To top it all off, we also have redone the Psyche Ward> with analysises of interactions to replace the ancient ward.

Oh, and did we mention that the Mall now houses the Showcase and Gift Shop? As well as an added bonus you should go and check out? Right now? Go on! Go to Home Improvement.

12.14.02 MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!! As a gift for all of you, our wonderful patrons! So we introduce, the School! Happy Holidays!

12.5.02 Mou! What a semester we've been having! We've been buried and snowed in. Neither of which are related. Next week classes end and the week after that is finals. No wonder this update is a little late. *pant pant* We honoestly have lost track of what we've done. Most of it is in the library. Let's see, we have a new author Wildfire with a cool story set in Fuedal Japan, Cypher's "When the Future Comes" is complete, Neko-chan has a new story and a new part for "Dragon World", Tiger's Eye has a new part in "Destinies Reborn", Riana's "Journey" is also complete... we think that's everything... If not, we're sure you'll find it. Oh yeah! We have a non RW/YST fic up called "Thomas LaRue" in case anyone's interested. *looks out to snow falling in waves* Guess we're shoveling. Again

11.1.02 Happy Halloween! Okay, what a semester we'be been having... *sigh* Ever had a teacher that seems to think that their class is the only class you have? We have one. And boy is it a pain. All we do is work for him, and we're not kidding. We spend every hour at school working on our school work, usually something for another class, come home, open up our laptop and start to work on his work and don't stop until we go to bed. Weekends are devoted to our thesises. Our only measure of sanity has been our enforced breaks for the various episodes of Inu Yasha that we've downloaded. We can now brag about having episodes 1 through 88. Can't find 89 or 90 though.

Anyway, that's enough about our pitiful lives. You want to know what we've been doing.

For this update, we finally got the mural up for this page and have a few new parts for Cypher's "When the Future Comes...". We have a little disclaimer, since we made a boo-boo. Cypher wanted the armors to be the ones from Message, which we didn't know. That was fixed started for part Eight. Unfortunately, we came up with absolutely *NO* picture out there for what the colors of the sub-armor are, so we took some creative liscence based on the one toned picture of what the design is. We also have the next part of Tiger Eye's "Destinies Reborn" up. We are working on everything else that you have sent us.

The only fly in the ointment is that it doesn't look like we'll be able to finish our Christmas present for all for you. It might be late ;.;

10.7.02 A little late, but here's our update. We have pieced together a little bit of the Showcase, and finally Image finally learned enough from her Computer Graphics I course to finish the Ryo-Fuji-san pic in the Gift Shop. Got a few more lost links into the Highways. Little things really. We've been busy refacing our kitchen, installing molding, resealing our driveway, and projects like that along with a full semester. At least the end is in sight. We're working really hard on getting pics and stories done for this page, so we're sorry we're so sluggish in updating.

9.19.02 Happy 21st birthday to us and happy birthday to Rajura/Dais. In other news, we have the lastest part of Tiger Eye's Destinies Reborn and are working on the next part and we have the next part of Poison up. To Riana, we owe you a big apology. It's been well over a year since you've sent us Test of Time and we finished the pics for it. Thankfully, it is now up. We apologize for the unbearable delay.

8.1.02 Well, we FINALLY got all of our fics up. What does this mean? Our page is finaly back up! Yes, you read that correctly: OUR PAGE IS FINALLY UP! This is the second time that it has been fully restored for the SECOND time since the page has crashed.

Our page is now completely back to normal, and now we can finally breathe. Oh, wait, no we can't. We have this HUGE backload of work that we've been letting slip the entire summer because of trying to get our page back, work on our thesis', going on a downloading frenzy on Kazaa lite--including the first seventeen episodes of Inu Yasha subtitled. ^__^ We've been a little distracted. ^^'

But, we have a break coming up, so we sould be spending at least a few weekends to catch up. We've read and html everything (er, almost), it's just a matter of making lists and finding time to doodle. ^__^

So, in the next few months be expcting some updates for other autheros. Hopefully, once we feel settled down, we'll start craning out our new stuff. Ja!

There a bunch of behind the scenes updates. For one thing, we've finally gotten around to converting the entire page to cascading style sheets. You may not see much of a difference, but boy to we! We also have finally set aside time to trying to get back to our lost fics. Just about everything is back in terms of html, and we have pics scanned for the first three books and have plans to work on the rest.

That in and of itself is a huge update. In terms of our mirror, anime-ideas.com, well, that will take some explaining. For those of you who have registered domains, you should be able to understand this. Those of you who don't... well... we'll try to keep it simple.

See, what happened was this. Friend signed up and registered a domain through company A. Friend had problems with company A, so he re-registered with company B (Domain Registry of America). He paid bill, went on his merry way, and during the interum gave us the sub domain that is supposed to be our mirror. Then, one day, he discovers that a company C is parked on his domain name. He is still registered as the owner, but when he emailed company B, they informed him that he was late on a payment that he knows he had paid. More than a little annoyed, Friend goes to Company C, explains his problems, and wonders if he can re-register again under them. (This would be different from when he changed to Company B. Friend wants to register under new name, so that when owner problems arise, the old owner (him) will be asked if it's okay to tansfer the domain to the new owner (still him). Does that make sense?)

That was over two weeks ago. He hasn't gotten any replies.

So, for the now anime-ideas.com mirror is on hold. We don't know if we can slip into monthly updates to too easily. We haven't gotten a paycheck for over a month, our boss is pulling some not-so-nice crap on us, and life is a little busier at our "do-nothing" job then we expected. But our weekends are still free, and that's when we're doing the scanning and work and stuff. It's not like we haven't made any progress either. Once all the dust settles (ie- we're fully up and running for like three months...) we will start putting up the new parts to fics that people have sent us (yes, we did get them and are working on them...), and we have a new section to put up to the page. Keep your eyes out for the School, coming soon.

In a relative sense... ^^'

A brief history. You all remember that the Crosswinds servers crashed after the 9.11. Our computer had crashed over the summer and we had lost all of our back ups. Our page was deleted before we could reget the backups off of crosswinds. Okay, we say. That's okay. That gives us a chance to redo some things that we've been meaning to do and clean up the page a little bit. We do some "shopping" and decide to move our page to envy.nu. Most of you were able to follow us and the transition took round about three months. Christmas came and went and we put up to new fics that most of youprobably haven't read yet.

Why?

Because just we we finally started to breathe easier envy.nu went out of business and didn't tell anyone.

"That's okay," we say. "We remembered our old mistake. We have a .doc that has the essentials of our page. And scanning for the main pages will be okay. Besides, our library was salvaged, cutting 90% of the scanning. We'll be fine."

How wrong we were. Yes, our library was salvaged, but only part of it. Every single one of our fics was deleted. Envy.nu had limited space for the free accounts, so we ended up spreading our page over three accounts. When envy went out of business, a company called 0catch took up the slack and slavaged some of the pages. About a month after envy died, we got an email from them saying that mnilibrary had been saved and to reload it. Well goodie! Now we just have to wait for an email for the other two accounts right? Wrong. While we're making the back ups of the library nothing is happening for our fics or the main page. We go back to 0cath and they say that you have to know ftp in order to salvage the files. Okay, we had downloaded an ftp program a while back when got our subdomain (more on that in a minute) and we were getting pretty good in handling it. So we try to connect our computer to 0catch's. It wouldn't connect. At. All.

More than a little annoyed at this rate, we send an email to 0catch tech support to ask why we can't even get in let alone find our two missing accounts. We got an email this morning saying that neither account was on their servers. Meaning that it's all gone. Still refusing to panic, we loot to our .doc to at least have the main text of the pages. Our back up is corrupted. Everything else on the disk works perfectly fine EXCEPT our backup and nothing, not reformating, not opening in notepad, not even dos manipulation of the disk will fix it.

Meaning?

We're essentially back at square one. The library is safe, that's half our page. Good. But the rest of it that we THOUGHT was safe is not.

BUT! There is light at the end of the tunnel. Enter a RL friend of ours from college. He has had his own share of web server problems--which surpass our piddly little annoyances by a lot--so he and a friend of his share a domain. anime-ideas.com. Sympathizing with us, he actually offered and then created a sub domain for us at his site free of charge. Ain't he a sweety? There's no browser upload there, so as a result we donwloaded this cool ftp program--which we're discovering is much more reliable than browser uploads.

Of course, life is never that simple. Oh, no. See, our friend has had his own share of problems. Part one, he had bought his domain name with one company, but that company cause him... shall we say... problems. So he switched over to another company and renewed his domain name. No problems. But, company number one never deleted his records, so no only to they keep billing him, but he is now in conflict with himself over his domain name! With all of his protests going unheaded and no idea who to contact, he's in a pickle.Problem end to be determined.

Now, our semesters here at college are going to be very busy. But over the summer is a completely different story. We're "lab moniters" for our college which mean we sit in the computer labs by ourselves waiting for someone to come in and work on something. We'll have forty hours a week to work on our page. That is when we're not watching the Samurai Trooper DVDs hooked up to a projector and on the big screen. ^_^

Things are starting to look up. If you got this far in our novel, then congrats. You now have a better understanding of our lives to date, and hopefully can understand why it's taken so blasted long to get everything up and running.