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Must be just Darth.  Everything was pretty much instantaneous for me as well.

As far as fonts go, you'll need a couple of fonts.  First, there is Kanji which are the pictoral representations of numbers, colors, objects, etc.  You'll need a font w/ Hirigana also.  Hirigana is similar to English in that it uses vowels.  Each symbol is not a representation of a symbol, though.  Instead, each represents a phonetic.  Finally, there's Katakana which is used for spelling foreign words.  Katakana is difficult because it is based upon how the Japanese would interpret the pronunciation of a foreign word.  If I haven't scared you off yet, you can probably find the appropriate fonts by googling for their various names.  

With NeroVision Express you can choose to use a lower resolution and bitrate to fit more minutes of video onto the disc, but the conversion still takes ages. It was estimating about 48 hours when I tried it, so I've never actually bothered to make a proper DVD.

What the hell, man?  Are you programming AGS on a 486 to ensure proper backwards-compatibility?  That estimate is only 44 hours longer than mine've ever taken.  Hell, I'll send ya an Athlon 1700+ XP CPU if it'll help.  :

Very amusing thread.  I think if there was any oversight or crossing of boundries, it has its root in the fact that not everybody celebrates Christmas.  A better method may've been to give the notice with a subclause stating that if you didn't celebrate Christmas or if you were anti-social, you could change your system clock or hit Alt-I-H-A-V-E-N-O-L-I-F-E to continue.  Either way, I think it's a damned good joke and am sorry that people anal-retentive enough not to find it amusing feel the need to gripe and moan about it.  

Marcus, you twit, haven't you learned that there are no magic words in a proper debate?  Resorting to informing people that they are brainwashed/immature/stupid/unwilling to listen to your point-of-view, doesn't mean that you've validated your opinion.  You've merely managed to deflect proper questions and answers.  If you'd posted to let the community (and CJ) know that you didn't appreciate the joke and wanted to know if anyone shared your opinion then it would've been accepted differently.  If you'd politely asked CJ not to include this bug/feature in future versions then at least you would be considered.  I certainly hope that this doesn't dissuade CJ from throwing other easter-eggs into future versions (easter-eggs being one of the best parts of adventure games).  

I remain on the fence.  That whole creationist-education exhibit thing isn't really that out of the ordinary (and not too different from stuff we did in my Christian school).  Either way, debating this is pointless as there doesn't seem to be definative proof one way or the other.  I suggest we put it to a practical exam.  This community can e-mail various members of the website and post (summarizing, if necessary) the replies.  I'll send one off when I get a minute.

[edit: by the way, if I've managed to get anyone else to try it, I'd suggest using different tactics and writing from different viewpoints]

edit again: I'll still e-mail but the satire-side wins, I guess.  Either that or this is the goofiest bunch o'misfits I've seen.  I just saw a "Christian-Klingon" banner/website.  The only alternate theory I have is that one or more creators of the site is bright enough to pull the wool over their eyes in some areas.

Alright but you saw my mention of Testamints..  In addition, I was raised in a slightly-kooky fashion.  I went to church 6 hours on Sundays, 2 hours on Wednesdays for 18 years.  Any music other than gospel/hymnal/choir Christian music wasn't allowed.  Dances were seen as evil as well as various odd things.  I had neighbors at one point who stored canned goods and weapons for armageddon and went around the neighborhood preaching to kids about the evils of Pokemon & Disney.  These same neighbors would purchase every Disney cartoon just so they could watch 'em with their kids & have the kids point out all the sins & lies in the movies.  There are some truly nutty people out there who believe in the strangest things.  I definately can't assume a site like this is parody just because it defies logic.

It's got to be a parody -- no one could be that fucking dumb!

You obviously haven't met many fundamental/radical Christians.

First off, the imagery & presentation is astounding.  Excellent!  I only have 3 tiny difficulties with it:
1) The darkest greys (like on the pants) are a bit too light, giving the drawing an odd look and making it slightly unnatural.  However, the problem's probably that my monitor's too bright.  

2) The rope hanging from the moon (I interpret the scene to have something to do with roping the moon?) ends in a thicker, spiraled portion.  This makes me thing of a hangman's noose (where the noose part is hidden).  

3) The focus of the drawing is a bit hidden.  I'm not sure whether to take more note of the moon, the rope or the figure.  Currently, the rope draws my attention the most.  With a little contrast-experimentation or additional background for framing it might clear things up.    

Aside from personal preferences, I think it's absolutely amazing.  I'm saying that partly because I just started messing with digital-only artwork and am having a rough time of it.

Oh yeah? Well speaking of parody and falsehood, I bet your real last name isn't Colossal.  Your avatar's probably not even your real picture.   :

Anyway.. you're slowly convincing me but I really don't think the Trinity long distance thing is that out of the ordinary.  After all, these are real products: Testamints (Like velamints, only holy).

As kid-art its sillyness is acceptable.  I have known many Christian-types that believe in many of the things this site claims to.  So far, I haven't seen anything there that far out of the ordinary.  I'm open to the fact that it could be fake but the paranoid part of me keeps screaming that these goofballs actually believe this tripe.

I was iffy, until I found this part: http://objective.jesussave.us/creationsciencefair.html

I remain dubious.  The Creation Science Fair is in keeping with the beliefs/attitudes of some people I've known.  The entire site is actually fairly mild compared to some of what I've seen & heard.  The nagging thing that makes me skeptical of this as a genuine site is the story of Kyle.  Kyle supposedly worked on the Landover Baptist Site but left the dark-side when he became a Christian.  Now, he helps with the subject's site.  He's also a jewish guy named Kyle (reminiscent of South Park).  

The argument about nostalgia makes perfect sense.  I wasn't saying that we think all old shows are wonderful merely because of nostalgia but that we tend to see older items we enjoyed with a bit of favoritism.  We tend to see things that we watched and enjoyed in our teens (or younger) through rose-colored glasses.  I did not say, however, that nobody had a right to enjoy these things.  One show you mentioned, "Bewitched," quite a few people enjoyed.  As far as that goes, take the plot synopsis, editing capability, the "effects" used for "magic", the characters and summarize their worth without any bonus points given for the fact that you once enjoyed it.  It's utter tripe.  I am fully willing to admit that one of my favorite older shows, Get Smart, was patently ridiculous.  It did, at least, have the redeeming value of having a particularly poignant point of view in the beginning years of the Cold War.  It encouraged its viewers not to take stuff too seriously (our enemies & ourselves).  I could name a dozen or so shows that I watched quite a bit of while growing up and I realize now how cheesy they were.  It doesn't stop me from enjoying them still, mainly for nostalgia's sake.  

I'm only intended to express my point that complaints about current television programming is similar to the way that everybody gripes about anything new.  We often claim that some of the best stuff happened years ago.  Hell, that's part of what the AGS group is about.  We recognize the average banality evidenced in today's game offerings and strive to re-live and re-make the gaming experiences that we felt were the best.  If you take this post as condemnation, you've got it all wrong.  It's merely honesty.

Well, the MPEG-2 format is meant for hi-quality.  Even if you use a low-quality AVI, it's still only got the compression rate of a higher-quality movie (At least when using most user-friendly programs).  So, you get to see blocky crap as crisply as possible.  What program are you using?  If your drive came with MyDVD, I suggest you ditch that program as soon as possible.  I've tried several programs for DVD-creation in the past month or so and MyDVD is one of the worst.  It's easy to use (which is nice) but at the cost of any real sort of features or customizations.

That much was amusing.  I have great respect for a good many Christians that I know (my parents among them) but sites like this one do a better job of making a mockery of Christianity than Landover Baptist.  Incidentally, they quote the constitution and claim that , this being the US's internet and the US being a Christian nation, the government should enforce its authority and remove this website.  Lesson #1, if you browse the Landover Baptist site and come away from it with either Pro-Christian or Anti-Christian sentiments, you're an idiot.  Sorry.  Their anti-Triclavian campaign is laughable as well.  

I found the coloring book additionally enjoyable because the page states that, "People enjoy having the Bible shared with them!" What a wonderful thing to send your kids out into the neighborhood thinking.  Sorry, but I'm gonna treat someone like that exactly like I treat telemarketers and door-to-door salesmen.  They'll find me polite for about 5 seconds and if they don't get the hint, they'll probably walk away offended or pissed off.  

Okay, I was going to post a caution about religion-bashing but that Atheist cartoon thing was funny as hell.  Maybe you'd have to have grown up Christian to find it amusing, I dunno.  Back to my caution: If you want to bash people/sites/whatever that are bashing other religions and promoting their own, that's cool but let's not make this a general anti- Christian/Muslim/Atheist/Apathist(my own religion) thread.  Well, alright, if you want to bash the Church of Apathy, go ahead.  We don't give a sh*t.

[edit: Actually, the most amusing bit was the note about the coloring book: ". . . all while imparting the valuable moral lesson that we should not color outside of God's lines."]  

Agreed.. I like 6.  I like the idea of having a "prissy" hairstyle on someone who considers himself to be a badass.  Perhaps a happy medium would work as well, having overly-curled/styled hair in a more traditional color.  The best argument for #6, IMO, is that it is memorable.  After reading a couple lines (or hearing them) from a character w/ that body/hairstyle, I wouldn't soon forget them.  

People occasionally mention older shows as being the now-expired holy grail of television.  "If only we could have a show like ____ again, it was absolute genius."  Bullshit.  TV's always sucked and there have usually been a couple of exceptions.  Star Trek (Original)? It had one of the largest followings for a series for quite some time.  It was absolute crap.  Some of the writing, situations and characters were impressive but the show itself was laughable.  What about older Sit-Coms like ____?  Very few Sit-Coms have ever been worth a damn.  Honestly, I have a lot more respect for Everybody Loves Raymond than I do for Cheers.  I don't mean to put down everyone's TV preferences but if you take away the nostalgia factor, how much TV has ever been *good*?

You might consider using a different program as well.  When converting a Div-X, X-Vid or standard Non-compressed AVI file to Mpeg-2 via Nero 6, it takes a maximum of 3.75 hours for me.  Still a lengthy process, I often set up a burn and go to sleep.  

There are other programs out there that will convert various files to the proper format.  The problem is that various burning programs will try to re-convert the file when burning.  If you learn about the structure of a DVD-movie (audio/video_ts folders and filenames) you can burn it as an ISO and have it work in many standard players.  

One format conversion program I like is TMPGencoder (Web-search TMPGenc).  It will convert among many file-types and usually doesn't take much longer to encode movies in MPEG-2 than the time period the movie lasts.  The problem is that it has a 30-day limited functionality for MPEG-2 conversion and requires you to register the program after that.  

For DVD-Copying (which you didn't ask about but I thought I'd mention for interested parties) many people swear by DVDXCopy.  I don't particularly enjoy paying 80-150 dollars for a simplistic program so I found others at www.afterdawn.com.  They've got lots of programs/tutorials on various video-manipulations.  From there, I found DVDDecrypt (free) which gets rid of Region-markers and other protection devices and DVDShrink (Also free) which lets you choose which DVD features to cut or compress (and how much compression) so you can fit an 8-gig (DVD-9) disc onto a 4.7G DVD-writable.

I gave up on TV in 1995.  Of course, there are a few shows which pique my interest.  They are mostly the shows that Trap mentioned.  I really don't think it's worth it to pay X amount per month in order to watch the 2 hours of TV I might find worthwhile each week.  I've been doing movies, for the most part, and downloading episodes of shows I wanted to catch (MST3k, Invader Zim, blah, blah).  Currently, I do watch about 3-4 hours of TV per month, mainly in the interest of spending time with friends & family that are still into the non-interactive glowbox.  

I go for dubbed/remastered nearly every time.  How could bad lip-synching be more irritating than the words not matching the speech in the slightest and having to read a lengthy speech while missing a nice animation sequence?  Just personal preference, I guess.  Though it is annoying when they dub using horrid actors or use American phrases in place of the originals.  I guess I'm slightly less geeky than BOYD.