It's been hell here at college for the past week and a half. All kinds of personal stuff going on, mid-terms, and what-have-you have conspired to keep me from doing my God-given duty to this site. I know you guys have heard that before from countless webmasters, and believe me, I hate saying it as much as you hate hearing it. I hope this week's update will satisfy you guys, though. It's fairly massive, I should think. Got some new pics, three new fanfics, and a brand-new section. Enjoy.

You may also have noticed the new title pic on the front page. That came to me courtesy of my boys Bueno and Samanosuke, from the Moralos Interface. It's no secret that I suck at Photoshop, and I'm just good enough at HTML to run this site, so I was quite grateful for the contribution. You two rock! See, that's fan participation! Everyone's got a skill. Use it! Make something Strider-oriented, and send it here. Animated gifs, sprite edits, ROM hacks (er...maybe. Jury's still out on that one.), Flash animations, drawings, fanfics, whatever...send it to me, and I'll put it up!

Now, on to less joyful matters. Most of you have probably heard by now that Bueno's in hot water over his "theft" of the pictures from Burning Hiryu CG. Some of you may even be wondering if my archive is next on their hit list. Well, fear not, you avid Mainframe readers! They may kick me off Gizba (and I would thank them if they did), but I have a complete backup of my site on my hard drive, along with several friends who own their own servers and would have no problem in donating the bandwidth and webspace.

Ahem. Anyway, this is actually a serious issue. The question is, do websurfers have the rights to take artwork that someone else created and post it on their personal websites? Put in that form, the answer would be an undeniable "no," but the question actually runs deeper than that. See, neither Bueno nor I have ever claimed ownership of any of the artwork we've posted on our sites. That's why we have the little disclaimers at the bottom of our front pages, actually, to avoid situations like these. But illiterate imbeciles don't check those, so we end up having to do a bit of explaining.

It would be one thing if we took the artwork from Burning Hiryu CG or Takoken or Striderbadguy and actually claimed to have drawn it ourselves. In fact, we would deserve to be beaten within an inch of our lives if we did that. But we didn't do that. In my own case, I divided each person's artwork into a separate section in my color archive, linked to their home sites (when I could remember them) on my link page, and expressly denied *any* rights over the material. All I was doing was redacting (or gathering) everything I'd found during my years on the net into one spot. That's all I wanted, was one spot where I and other Strider fans could go to get everything we wanted, and not have to hunt for hours on end to come up with one good picture.

Believe you me, there's a lot of crap Strider art out there...mainly drawn by Strider Trav and Miho-Chan, but there's also some by other people, like Carlman. It falls into three categories: blatant ripoff, doodles, and just pure, utter crap.

Pure, utter crap is the Crayola drawings you get by 9-year-olds who played Strider 2 or Marvel vs. Capcom 2 last week for the first time. They're usually quite excited by this awesome "blue ninja" and they attempt to draw him. Yes, I did say attempt to draw him. They often fail miserably in this endeavor.

Doodles aren't so bad. They're usually made by someone who knows what they're doing, but is unsure of how to portray the character. I have quite a few of these on my hard drive. These would probably piss more than a few of you off, merely because they portray Hiryu in several...nontraditional lights. He doesn't look like himself. A few of these are abstract. They're not bad, they're just not what the majority of Strider fans are looking for, myself included.

In the "blatant ripoff" category, you get art that people made by either tracing or emulating someone else's drawing. Sometimes these are quite good; in fact, I'd venture to say that most of the time they're quite good. There's a couple of those in my black and white gallery, actually. The problem is not so much the quality of the artwork, in that case, as it is the fact that the artist doesn't give due credit to the original author. He just says, "This is a drawing of Strider Hiryu I did..." and that's that.

Which brings me back to my original point. I wouldn't have a problem with these people who draw blatant ripoffs, if they would just say that they had emulated a different picture and used it as their base. I mean, you gotta learn how to draw somehow. Conversely, those guys from the Strider Web Ring should just go take a flying f**k on a rolling donut, because Bueno and I gave credit where credit was due. We didn't claim ownership of any of these images. We just put 'em up and gave the original authors greater exposure. Half the sites we got the images from were in Japanese anyway, and we had to wade through links of gibberish for hours on end before we found the treasure trove.

Let this be a lesson to you. Always download the Japanese font package for IE before you go wading around in Japanese sites. It makes things so much easier.

Anyway, go ahead and snatch all the images off my site before the Strider Web Ring throws a hissy fit and I go down for a couple of days. It probably won't happen, because Lord knows it took them over six months to find Bueno's gallery, and he's part of their webring. I'm not. Still, if you want the goods, grab them now. That's what they're there for, is for people to look at, admire, and save onto their hard drives.

This is all so inane and surreal. People, please read the disclaimers before launching a jihad! It saves so very many headaches.

P.S. I just thought of something. Do you think they could be referring to the use of Burning Hiryu CG's artwork in the Moralos Interface banner? I could see how that would piss them off. Hmm...

P.P.S. Oh yeah, and since no one emailed me about the Strider movie, I'm not going to tell you my personal picks. Someone, anyone, please reply!