Paraemon's Comprehensive Ripping Project Thread [Expansion Station]

[Paraemon]

Announcement regarding the Status of this Project

This was going to happen sooner or later, and after a bit of soul-searching in recent weeks, there's no better or worse time than to say what I need to.

I am retiring from ripping content.

There are a number of factors involved in this decision:

1. I am currently in (admittedly quite stressful) full-time employment, in which I am sat at a desk, working at a computer, 8 hours a day. It is, and has become, simply non-viable to go from that to proceeding to extract missing and/or incomplete graphics up until bedtime, or similarly try to fit in any such extraction work in the morning and then go to work.

2. Without getting into specifics (a handful of people I trust know), I am currently pursuing other and more engaging activities which involve a form of social networking and wish to pursue these, if just to escape from the work hell above. While this could eventually give leeway towards having the necessary time to work on extraction later, I simply don't want to give false hope in this regard, and want to make it clear that should my pursuits work out as I am hoping, I will not spare time solely so I can focus on these other activities.

3. I personally feel I have reached a limit with the work. I'm not saying I'm overwhelmed, the literal and sheer number of sheets I've churned out, by myself or with the assistance of others, is testament enough to quite the opposite of overwhelming. It is more that I came into a project truly blind to what to the scope of it initially, arbitrarily expanded it without having cleared the whole of the first hurdle, and dug myself more and more into a hole, as circumstances in real life shifted as they did.

4. I can't babysit other users or chase non-contactable individuals any further. It's too exhausting trying to keep up with comments among 97 sheets, never mind 970, and where mistakes/unfortunate omissions are remarked upon in which I cannot clarify with the private message sender due to their settings, it ultimately becomes a waste of my time - and to make it clear, I detest saying that. That's before addressing the "naysayers", but I'm not giving them time of day anymore than already has been these past few years.

5. I believe that other people can and are competent enough to pick up this torch. Obviously my method has evolved since I first started posting here and there's a lot of criteria to match to, such as extent of the ripped content and palettes, but there is more than enough from the past seven years of work with which to learn and adapt from. Show me with your own power what you can do with the light I have left behind to guide.

There are still some incomplete pieces here and there, and I will be working with Ton in the coming weeks to get these out into the open in whatever form they have been left in. Anything after that, as in Point 5, is no longer in my hands or my concern, and to this end, my private messaging on this website is henceforth disabled as of this post. I will try to answer any questions in this thread regarding this notice or content compilation until the end of this month.

Otherwise, I kindly thank you for allowing me to proceed with these for the better part of a decade and a little under a fifth of my life. It has been quite an experience, sometimes great, sometimes frustrating, but it's time for me to move on to other things.