So the last couple of years I have not done much more than lurk around. I have let a few good projects stagnate, and a bunch of bad ones rot. This is mostly in part to me having a lot on my plate at work and doing what I do best, spending all my time fixing the world around me. Things seem to be slowing down now so I am planning on getting back into the swing of things. I will most likely not be following up on any artwork, not that I ever posted much of it in the first place, but I will be resurrecting the stories I was working on, to include "Forgotten Past". This will include a massive rewrite of the beginning as there are inconsistencies that I cannot in good conscience allow to remain. I also hope to include other works I have had sitting on the back burner. Time will tell.
In short, if any of the old timers are still around, yes...I have returned.

So for well over a year my computer, the one I built in a fish tank full of oil, ran perfectly. No stalls in loading, no slow start ups....nothing that would indicate that anything what so ever was wrong. The PC had become a point of interest in my somewhat cluttered work area I call my den. And all the way to current I would have to explain that it was not in water, fish would not look cool in there nor would they live, and that they were not looking at some weird illusion with mirrors and prisms.
The PC had become my primary link to the land of the internet as it was a much more current system than my old tower. I used the Oil PC as it came to be called for gaming too.
Any way, while I was working my way through Echo Ops on Modern Warfare 2 (getting my head stomped in by a juggernaut repeatedly actually), the oil transfer pump decided it wanted to take a break. Here is where the entire system breaks down...the internal temperature of the tank shot up through the roof as the video card was cranked by the game, the board RAM and CPU were overclocked, and the oil was no longer being pumped through the fan blown radiator. In short, the Mobo and CPU took the damage...I think. I won't be able to see if the video card cooked too until a replacement board comes in.
Now under normal use, I could leave it turned on for extremely long periods of time without worry. The issue comes in when you start running more through the board and CPU. It gets hotter faster than normal, very fast actually and this is especially true when playing games with a large amount of detail. This can be easily managed with a cooling system for the oil. The easiest way is to pump out the hot oil into a fan blown radiator. The triple 120mm style radiator for water cooling rigs is quite sufficient for this. A decent pump is a bit hard though. Water cooling pumps do not like the viscosity of mineral oil and will over time die as I have recently found out. And most dedicated oil transfer pumps are huge, loud, messy, expensive, etc...
So now we get to the part where I tell you the worst part of "Oil Cooling" a PC...changing any part in the tank. I had built the PC in place, so to get into it, I had to take it apart in place. That included draining all the oil out which took forever and made a huge mess no matter how careful I was. Thank God I kept all the gallon jugs the oil came in or I would have been screwed on that part. As I type this, the mobo tray that holds everything that is suspended in the tank is sitting in an old beer cooler I don't use much anymore. I will rebuild the PC once I get the parts in, but it will be in a regular tower. I haven't abandoned the idea, but I am going to take what I have learned, and apply it to a bigger and better one. Maybe this year, maybe next.

So the story line has been an ongoing work in form or another for some time now. Recently I got the idea to start over, scrapping well over 90 percent of what I had. What you see in the first submission is what I am happy with so far. I have been working on it regularly with no case of writer's block in sight...WOOT!

Any who, the second installment will be a bit bigger,and have a bit more going on it. I hope to include a lot more in it as I go along, but right now I am sitting on several pages of scraps that need to be written in all directions to fit right. I would eventually like to add pics of the characters and possibly action sequences to go along with the tale...any takers?
For now things seem to working out pretty good for this story. I look to carrying it on for quite some time. To tide over any interested readers, here is an excerpt from part 2:


A few moments later Alex got the desired effect. The remaining soldiers curled up and covered their heads, unable to see anything that was about to happen. Alex reached up to the headset and turned off the mini-cam, cutting off Laura’s visual feed of what was happening. He usually did this before things were going to get messy. She knew that what came next would be brutal. She quickly transferred over to the satellite feed, viewing the ordeal from above. In a flash of movement, Alex hit the top of the still burning APC causing it to rock violently. He was still just long enough for the heavy machine guns in the windows to take note of his presence. The brief pause in fire told him that they were either reloading, or they had seen him. As the barrels turned on him, he guessed the latter. With blinding speed, he went from the APC to the ground, to the top of the security wall, ending with a suicide leap through the gunfire. The Lycan disappeared into the window, taking parts of the window frame and the gun crew with him.