The Archives
1/12/09: First of all, happy new year to everyone. December ended up being a really full month, hence the lack of updates for it. Now that things have settled down, there are 262 new pics (topping 8,000) in Costa Del Sol Memories. I've also been doing a lot of work on my blog, so be sure to check it every so often.
11/21/09: I've been out of work for a while so I've been focused on looking for a new job over the past two months, hence the lack of updates for October. But rather than let the backlog accumulate, I figured it'd be smarter to add the 387 new pics to Costa Del Sol Memories and a new list in the AVALANCHE Top 10.
9/6/09: Once again life has dealt me a bad hand and the past month ended up not so good in terms of having time to get all I wanted to done. However for today I was able to scrounge up 213 new pics for Costa Del Sol Memories.
8/8/09: Hard to believe this place is 11 years old (and I actually remembered to do an anniversary update). I've got the usual new pics (394 total) for Costa Del Sol Memories and I'll try to add more as the month progresses.
7/31/09: Full update next week. July was NOT a good month and I'll be busy this weekend too.
6/21/09: High speed internet is finally part of my home life and that has saved incredible amounts of time in less than a week already. A few things I do daily now take less than 5 minutes rather than upwards of 2 hours, so I now have a LOT more free time; thus I'll be able to put more focus on other sections of the site again. For now, enjoy 378 new pics in Costa Del Sol Memories.
6/13/09: Full update next week... when I'll have high speed!
5/3/09: Judging for the fanart contest is complete and the winners have been announced! I really don't have a lot of stuff for any other part of the site for now so this is the "full" update. With any luck I'll finally have high-speed internet at home within a week or so and will be able to spend a lot more time working on more of this place.
On another note, a while back I mentioned that I would start writing VG/Anime reviews. Rather than put them up on the site, I decided to place them in a separate blog. Check it out now!
And one more thing, I recently read the news about how Yahoo is shutting down Geocities, so I'll do my best to salvage the files from the "mirror site" and hopefully find a new free host to place them in case this one dies again.
5/2/09: Entries for the Fanart Contest are closed. Judging begins today and the winners will hopefully be accounced along with tomorrow's full update.
4/25/09: Two new contest entries with a full update coming next weekend.
4/4/09: No new contest entries today, sadly, but I am expecting more before the new deadline. Until then, enjoy another 176 new pics (with the Blue gallery breaking 2000) in Costa Del Sol Memories.
3/31/09: Better make this announcement today so people don't think it's an April Fool's Joke (personally I hate it when websites waste the whole day with a silly fake shutdown, the concept got old after one year). Anyway, there are a whopping four new Contest Entries since the last update and the deadline has been extended until May 1st, thus giving one more full month. Full update this weekend!
3/28/09: Should've waited until this morning to update as I woke up to find another Contest Entry. I'll know for sure if I have to extend the deadline on Monday.
3/27/09: Quick update for two more Contest Entries. I will most likely have to extend the deadline by 2-4 weeks due to a slight financial pinch.
3/21/09: Got another Contest Entry Update for today. Hopefully there'll be a few more.
3/7/09: Quick update to show off a new Contest Entry. The rest is a nice 178 new pics in Costa Del Sol Memories.
2/1/09: Well, happy late new year. Enjoy a new Contest Entry and 247 new pics in Costa Del Sol Memories. I'm going to go crash now.
12/16/08: Busy, busy, busy! I say I'll try to update every two weeks, but every time I do I end up taking longer between each one. Thankfully there is an update for this month and it's more than just the usual group of new pics for Costa Del Sol Memories (of which there are some, of course). I moved the entries from the last fanart contest into Red's Collection and actually updated one of the galleries in Tifa's Eye Candy since I finally found official art of every character from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. Speaking of fanart contests, there's New One under way! Even though it doesn't officially open until the 1st, my fiance is coming down for Christmas tonight and I don't expect to have a lot of free time between now and then, so I went ahead and put it up (it's even got an entry, but any more that may come in before January won't be added until then). See you all next year!
11/1/08: Sorry for the lack of updates over October, I was occupied with taking care of my parents' house for most of the month, I've been hooked on a big list of games/anime, and my plan to update with each new fanart contest entry sort of backfired as I didn't get the final entries until yesterday. If you check out the Contest Page you'll notice that I've decided to skip the voting and declare a tie due to the low number of entries. Aside from that, enjoy the 228 new pics in Costa Del Sol Memories and a pair of Halloween fanarts in Red's Collection. I'm doing my best to get to work on some other projects, however it won't be easy as my To Do Lists are already quite long.
9/21/08: So much for my goal of trying to update at least every two weeks and also meet other goals for certain sections of the site, but hey at least it's still here. Anyway, the meat up the update is 126 new pics in Costa Del Sol Memories and a quick announcement regarding the Fanart Contest: I've extended the deadline through the end of October thanks to a financial pinch I just hit. My parents were planning to take a month-long trip to Australia after the original deadline but their plans got changed for the better (in terms of ticket prices) and they ended up leaving this past Friday without a lot of prep time. Thus I'm having to use the extra money saved up for the contest prize money to cover basic necessities for the next few weeks, thus the contest extension. I'll also attempt to keep the two-week update schedule but since my birthday was this week, I picked up several more anime series and 7 new games coming out this month, it may be a miracle that I'll be online at all. As always, enjoy the update!
8/30/08: As I mentioned in the quick update the other day, the Fanart Contest has received its first entry. Along with that today I entreat you all with 190 new pics in Costa Del Sol Memories and 6 new fanarts in Red's Collection. I've been collecting new Midis over the past few weeks and hope to get them organized and up for the next update. The hard part will be making sure there are no duplicates.
8/28/08: Quick update to mention that the Fanart Contest has received its first entry and I've gotten word there are more to come. Full update this weekend (if I can break away from Rune Factory for that long).
8/8/08: Phew... 10 years... 10 years! I've been maintaining this site for 10 years! Back when I first started this place, I signed up for a free Geocities account and had to update from my friend's computer or from school because I didn't have Net access at home at the time. Since that began, I've met my fiancee, graduated from high school, began and finished college, and have been working at my current job for over a year. This place has been hosted on Geocities, Xoom, Crosswinds, Geocities again (the outdated mirror is still there), Versehost, and now Lunarpages (and it's only had its own domain name for the past two). It original started out as just a Final Fantasy VII shrine, then slowly expanded to include all RPGs and then anime while original characters have always been a welcome addition. Even though some portions of this site may be considered outdated (who gives awards anymore?) and while some sections never grew as large as I'd hoped, I feel that this place has become a unique experience on the web and hope to continue to maintain it for a long time to come. Sadly I was unable to collect any new MIDIs for this current update, but there are 94 new pictures in Costa Del Sol Memories. The major meat of this update is to announce the new Fanart Contest that begins today and will run for the rest of the summer. Check it out and let your friends know because I'm hoping this will be the best one we've ever had!
7/26/08: Most of the time spent between the last update and this one can be seen in the form of the Castle of Shikigami III Game Script Guide that I recently submitted to gamefaqs but can also be found in AVALANCHE Fake IDs. Not only that, there are 170 more pics in most of the galleries in Costa Del Sol Memories. The next planned update will be mostly midis and I'll be on the hunt for them between now and then. Enjoy!
7/9/08: I'm considering this the grand re-opening update because I doubt I'll ever have to cram nearly 2 years' worth of pic additions into a single update ever again. I doubt even the 10th anniversary update a month from yesterday will be nearly this big, either. The basic run-down with the site's last disappearance was the host I was on, versehost.com, tanked from under the ground of its customers. I attempted to renew the avalanchehq.com domain name, but when the time came for renewal, it wasn't actually renewed even though I paid the bill on time. Thus the site's IP address still worked, but not the domain. When I attempted to contact versehost's customer service about this, all emails bounced and all phone lines had been disconnected, despite still being charged the monthly rate. Thus I stopped paying the bills, let the account be removed because of that, then paid what I owed and the site was thrown into limbo. A lot happened over the past two years, too: I graduated from Brigham Young University in April of 2007 with a BS in Computer Science, have been working at my job for nearly a year now, and am finally officially engaged to my girlfriend. We met in October of 2000, started dating in February of 2001, knew we wanted to get married by 2002, and I was finally able to buy and give her a ring in May 8th of this year. And once I could afford it, I bought this new domain name and an account at lunarpages.net. Had to pay for the whole 2 years at once rather than a month-by-month basis.
That said, feel free to re-acquaint yourselves with this good ol' place. You may want to start with some fanart in Red's Collection, check out the new poll, or dive right into the major meat of this update and try to keep track of all 1,101 new pics added between every gallery in Costa Del Sol Memories. That was the one section I kept maintained the most over the long hiatus, but the others haven't been forgotten. Most of my personal focus will be going towards that and adding a couple of new sections that deal with game reviews and some other fun stuff. My next big project is a Game Script FAQ for Castle of Shikigami III for Wii and that will be hosted here as well. I'm also using the webspace here for a couple of sub-sites based on various other projects I do online, but since they don't have much to do with the main site, I will likely not link to 'em at all from here.
Start looking through the older updates (may contain broken links to sections that no longer exist)