The best kind of ramen is the kind that’s made fresh, just for you! Instant Ramen LIVE!
For those who were unable to make tonight’s yet-again-impromptu livestream, the time-lapsed YouTube edition:

By gosh, I think I’ve found the magic combination for converting from Justin.tv autoarchive into a format that won’t get artifacted too badly on YouTube. H.264, WHY haven’t I used you sooner? XD It exports hella fast into a nice, small little thing that uploads to YouTube in about 10 minutes.

What do you doods think, anyway? Is time-compressing the streams into 10-minute fun-size versions awesomesauce, or do you prefer watching at the original speed? (Because I can easily toss the stitched-but-otherwise-unaltered versions on my server if you wanted to loot those.)

Also had quite a few doods in the audience/chat room this time, just some passers-by who were curious about the software and thought this was fan art. XD

In any case, I’ma try to assemble the actual wallpapers before raid time. As for what’s next… uh… oh yeah, something for NSFW since the next episode is TRIPLE COMPLETE BIRTHDAY (one of the hosts, a frequent guest and one of the TWiT tech director doods).

What? Another time-lapse release of the last Instant Ramen LIVE broadcast? Okay!

We’re… getting there as far as video quality goes. But I get the feeling that it’s not going to change much if I go past 1mb/s, since it appears the other half of the problem is something that can’t be fixed (video compression hates line art… which is what this IS, and is less glaring when I add moar color). But now I’ve gotten a means of speedily extracting, polishing and punting to YouTube. :D

Now it’s just a matter of getting more doods to show up and watch, so I can open up Skype for what would ideally be a 3-way+ sass commentary. Yeah, I should be doing these streams much earlier in the evening.

The next part (Blastoise dual-wielding the giant Hydro Pump cannons) will be tomorrow tonight.

I didn’t know whether to flag it as a WIP or completion, but the video below documents more or less what goes on from ink to color and… oh, just watch the damn thing already.

Low bitrate is looooow. Sure, it’ll load pretty fast, but holy crap all the jitter and artifacts and ew. You can be sure I’ll crank up the capture bitrate for future streams and captures. :P
But yes, if you have ever wanted to see how Instant Ramen gets drawn and polished, look no further! This particular piece probably won’t be exported as a standalone piece, but will be included in the immediately-following wallpapers I’m drawing up for Blastoise (crouching with his spear, summoning the pressure cannons for Hydro Pump, and a third one I’ve not yet wireframed).

I would like to livestream as much Instant Ramen as possible, though in reality, odds are I’ll probably stream just the major pieces and commissions.

Semi-related: drawing this kinda makes me miss Blastoise’s PSU/PSPortable2 form. I may go pick up the latter again…

The following YouTube is the closest approximation to what just went down in my office…

It’s a chilly 34F in Fontana, and it took me much longer than I should have, but Blastoise lives once more. >:D
Holy crap, this dude is FAST. And quiet, too! Maximum No-Noise from this dood! Ahh, the power of solid state drives. ♥
A couple of minor snags, though: I cannot for the life of me get his front-side USB 3.0 ports (or rather, ANY of his frontside USB ports) to work. The front-side USB 3.0 plug just will not go into the port on the motherboard, and either I put the USB 2.0 header on the wrong port or… I dunno. But the rear ones work just fine and that’s more than enough for what I need right now. :P
Also, there’s no way I can mount this card reader from Blastoise’s old body. Boo! I liked this thing, it saved me from having to plug in my PSP and going into USB mode to swap out/back up save files. So, I’ll have to loot an external card reader, but those are dirt cheap anyhow. Maybe I can toss this internal card reader into Yggdrasil.

As awesome as SSDs are, they do force you to acquire some degree of willpower in terms of what you install. As far as games go, the SSD I have will, uh… WoW and one other game comfortably. (City of Heroes or Skyrim?) Of course, the idea is that you pair ‘em off with a large-capacity normal drive, but with normal drive prices still TOO DAMN HIGH, that’s not happening anytime soon. As mentioned in previous entries, Blastoise will just have to rely on Yggdrasil to stream any media I need until normal drive prices return to sane levels.

I blinked into WoW to reconfigure add-ons and make sure the thing runs, and I’m getting no graphical lag. I think I was pulling… 43FPS? Don’t have time to try out 5 mans or anything, but I’m sure Blastoise will be just fine.

One small thing I did lose to the bytes of eternity, however, was my wallpaper (Hikaru and Numair in final equipment), but I like to think that it’s all the more motivation to draw up something fitting of Blastoise’s new body… and quickly. Mmm, Painter… so good to have it usable again. :D

Blastoise’s case paint is not helping much. It’s this matte black, so it’s not reflective (except, of course, for lulz flash photography and then it’s OMG LENS FLARE), and the overhead lighting isn’t enough. I ran out of batteries for my headlight, so that’s out… which is why I need to do this stuff during the day since the side window and the sun that unloads through it PLUS overhead lighting would be just enough so I can see.

Also: is there really a point to the I/O gate anymore, aside from keeping marginal amounts of dust from seeping through between the ports and plugs? All it’s doing is posing unnecessary frustration while I’m trying to bolt this motherboard in place; falling off, pushing back, etc. Once I took it off, it was soooo much easier to bolt things into place.

Nice to see that the PSU goes below the motherboard this time, though… I always hated that it was above, on the off-chance that it could fall off from where it’s at and break stuff on the way down.

SO. The optical drive and SSD are in (but not connected). Once more, I ran out of daylight, because I just happened to have a broken smoke alarm that decided to trigger a house-wide smoke alarm tantrum. It started beeping to indicate battery fail (even though said battery had just been replaced), then all the other alarms started beeping too. It’s this ear-piercing cacophony… though… I will say that the Cacophony of WOOF is still worse because that has a certain bass in addition to being loud, and smoke alarms are just high-pitched. In any case, I have a broken smoke alarm, so mother had to haul a ladder into my office to disconnect my smoke alarm to try and find a replacement, but forgot to move the ladder (it was blocking the doorway, preventing me from going in and work on Blastoise) until the sun was starting to set. Buh… I could have been booting if I’d been able to get in earlier. All that’s left is to seat the video card, connect the SATA cables, the front panel wiring and the power cables and I can finally boot this dood.

TL;DR Edition: Slow Yoshi is slow and should not be building in cold weather and poor lighting. :P