Coatleque

More practice with hair and clothes.

I spent an hour trying to do hands and could not get them right. So here she is, handless, until I practice them more.

I use backstory as a general guide to give reason for why a character acts the way they do. My character will not discuss their past unless someone else asks. It's just a way for me to pre-generate answers in my head for those inevitable questions. "Where are you from?" "What was childhood like?" "Why did you leave?" "Why haven't you gone back?" etc. . .

Finally got Crofte's hair to look right.

Practicing hair styles and profiles.

More random sketches here: http://socrofty.tumblr.com/ So I've been practicing my sketches. Thought I'd share. Maybe some day I'll be good enough to do scenes.

I will accept them as canon of course. I'll probably get one(1) so I can continue leveling and reach new content. I will most likely NOT use them myself in-character. Crofte has no reason to go anywhere that requires flight (yet). She doesn't even have her own chocobo, she just rides a borrowed Flames mount if necessary.

"Do you really have five?"

Incoming wall of text. I can echo what's already been said here. The Hard Disk (unless you get a Solid State Device) is the only physically moving part in the computer. With any mechanical device, the longer it moves the greater the chance of failure. If you've never seen the inside of a hard disk drive, here you go: Those large metal disks are usually made of ceramic and covered in a magnetically sensitive film. The little armature over top of it is not actually resting on the disk, but hovers at a fraction of a millimeter above it. This particular drive has "three platters". There is an armature between each of the platters as well. When a drive reads or writes data, that armature swipes in and out across the disk. That is the grinding sound you hear when loading software. The platters themselves are spinning at typically 7800 RPMs. How do these things typically fail? 1.) Physical Shock (dropping, or vibration) - If enough shock is sustained, the armature may skip or touch the platter. At the speed it is moving, this will actually carve a groove in the disk which will destroy the head making it unreadable. Another aspect is dust. Drives are typically sealed except for a small port which has a dust filter over it. If anything should get on the platter and collide with the head, again it will scratch the surface and destroy the film. 2.) Faulty Circuitry - On the bottom of each drive is the controller board which interfaces with your computer. Sometimes bad solder connections may cause chips to malfunction and render the drive useless. 3.) Bad Blocks - Sometimes the magnetic film simply fails on the platter. This causes the area to be unreadable and a CHKDSK will flag this as "Bad Blocks" or "Sectors". This is a good indication your drive may die at any moment. 4.) Motor Failure - I have rarely ever seen this become an issue, but the DC motor could fail if the bearings go bad or the coils burn out. Chances of this are extremely low for the life of the drive. If this was to happen it would be as the drives spins up or down since it draws much greater electrical current at that time. You can avoid it from even spinning down by going into your power management software and telling it to keep your drives on 100% of the time.

{edit} If only this game had cloaks. Yes, I'd wear one.

An unfortunate side-effect of active cooling. Older nVidia cards were much more noticeable. As a rule of thumb, the bigger the fan the quieter it will be. For example, this card is very quiet (I speak from experience): This card is very noisy: Those sideways blowing gear-looking fans are horrible in my experience, both for cooling and from a dB (noise, decibels) perspective Depending on your brand of video card, you may have access to 3rd party software which MAY help the noise issue. Note, you need to be very careful doing this! MSI Afterburner, for example, should work with any nVidia cards, and if I recall it has the ability to limit the fan speeds to the % of maximum that you specify. You could cap it at 80% if that is a more pleasing experience. Just keep in mind that if your card starts to overheat, games will start having graphical glitches, followed by crashing (The machine will probably crash before you actually damage the card, but there is always a risk)

It's okay. I do this for 40+ hours every week. I hate computers.

Per Dell's own error-code reference, this issue may be a bad SATA connection. Did you open it up and make sure all the cables are plugged in? Or try replacing them if you have spares? Another thing to do is try booting to the Windows recovery disk and running a system repair. Or trying to boot to the command line and manually run a chkdsk. Running diskpart then using the command "list disk" will show all attached and detected drives.

Are you running in exclusive full-screen or Windowed mode? FFXIV has an error when tabbing out in full-screen mode. For that reason I run in borderless-windowed now. Haven't had an issue since.

I had posted a similar thread a while back with some basic troubleshooting steps. The first one being the Windows Event Viewer. If you don't know where that is, just click "start" and start typing "event". It should pop up in the list. The Application and System logs are the two main ones to check for critical errors or application warnings (In Vista and later, expand "Windows Logs"). Application log will show program specific errors or failed services. System log will show faulty hardware, network, and driver errors. Logs are displayed automatically by timestamp, most recent first. Most of the informational stuff you can ignore. Right-click the log (application/system) in the nav menu and chose "Filter log". From there you can just check Critical, Error, and Warning then Ok. That should clean things up considerably. Another thing is the Task Manager which you can reach by Ctrl+Alt+Del, or by right-clicking the task bar and choosing it from the menu. The "Performance" tab will show how many system resources are in use. If your CPU is constantly pegged at 100% or you have 75% of your RAM in use, that signals a problem. Either an application is hung, a virus maybe slowing you down, or you have too much stuff open at one time for the limitations of your hardware. Worst case scenario to recover a frozen Windows desktop if you can get into task manager, find the "explorer.exe" task and end it. This will close out the Windows GUI. Then you go to File->Run new Task and type explorer.exe in the box to restart it. You may actually be able to avoid a hard reboot doing this in some scenarios. Hope this helps.

No more than three days after the final events of What You Are In The Dark Silence. If nothing else she could always count on her captain's office to be quiet. Long red curtains swayed in the breeze from the window behind his chair. The corners of a few stray papers curled upwards but refused to lift past the weight of a leather folio resting upon the pile. Coatleque's eyes slowly trailed to a few tendrils of down swaying at the base of a quill pen that had rolled to the side of the inkwell. Her attention was barely drawn by the clearing of his throat. "I must say your reports are never bereft of detail, Ser Crofte." The man's eyes could be seen over the final page by the woman sitting on the other side of the desk. Her hair was uncharacteristically pulled to one side of her head and held in place by a bandage which wrapped around to the other side. One arm rested in a sling upon her lap. Despite these injuries, which were rather minor compared to some others, she chose to appear in uniform sans one gauntlet. She managed to look him in the eyes for the barest of moments. A courtesy of habit if nothing more. "Thank you Sir." she replied dryly. His brow quirked as the page lowered to meet its brethren. Whether the statement was intended as a compliment or not had seemingly gone over his subordinate's head. The slow sigh of resignation which followed had even less impact. "It is over then. The man has fled Eorzea and escaped justice." She did not look back to him, merely swallowing. "Ser Crofte?" "I did what I was necessary to protect our people." Her voice did not change. There was no lift of defiance nor waver of emotion. Just a dry acknowledgement of her part played before the end of of a very long and wearying trial. "I was not judging your decision." he replied while staring her down. Eventually the man reclined and looked away. Fingers gripping the arms of his chair. "Where is Deneith now?" "Unknown, Sir." He glanced back to her with a careful eye as if gauging the truth of her words before chewing the inside of his cheek. The man stood and turned his back to her to look down on the city from the window. "What happened to our eager, young squire Crofte? Usually you have so much more to say during our little chats." "I do learn, Sir." "Clearly so." He turned back to the desk and flipped the leather cover back over the pile of papers. "You cannot return to La Noscea." he stated with some authority. Now she looked at him through something of a daze. "That was the deal to keep the status quo. Your exile being a small price for peace, don't you think?" Coatleque closed her eyes and nodded quietly. "If the Maelstrom catches you there, they are authorized to shoot on sight. You do understand, yes?" Another silent nod. He retook his seat and leaned forward over the desk. Another awkward silence fell over the room as she awaited some form of judgement that neglected to arrive. Coatleque looked up to the man across the desk from her with a puzzled expression. Her mouth opened to speak but she hesitated, the request which came forth was not at all what she intended. "With your permission, Sir, I would like leave to visit the Black Shroud." "Can you avoid causing another diplomatic incident?" he asked. "Aye, Sir." There was another sigh of consideration before a relenting nod. "After all this, I believe you could do with the time away. No more than a sevenday, understood? We need you here, Ser Crofte." "Thank you, Sir." She found herself standing then, as if she had some pressing business which took priority. Her reflexes stopped her though. Turning back to the desk she saluted with her uninjured hand. "If there was nothing further, Sir..." The captain returned her salute before taking up the mass of papers she had left for him once more. "If there is, you will be summoned. Dismissed." Turning slowly, she limped for the door.

gdi, you guys are fast/clever. I yield.

He was just staying true to his class/role, unlike some supposed do-gooders.

*ahem* At least Crofte knows how to make her man behave and, you know, not go on a murderous rampage.

*jingles cuffs at Roen* Ready for round 3?

I don't know. Has Chachanji given up his dreams of being a semi-paladin yet?

/golfclap Osric, well done. Really well done. Let me shake your hand. No, the other one.

Delial is attracted to bullets. And obvious setups.