The ongoing Character Battle on the Lifestream forums has reached the knock-out stage, which kicks off with four exciting quarter-finals. They will run until the weekend, so it’s not too late to sign up and have your say!

The results of the group stage determined the quarter-final match-ups, which look like this:

1 – Cloud vs Celes
2 – Kain vs Vivi
3 – Aerith vs Lightning
4 – Tifa vs Fang

The winners of quarter-finals 1 and 2 will meet in a semi-final, as will their counterparts from quarter-finals 3 and 4. There will then be a final and a third/fourth place play-off. The competition runs until the end of May. Who are you supporting?

Continuing our theme of making Final Fantasy VII a more multi-player experience here on The Lifestream, we’ve just re-started a Community Playthrough of the game, in which our forum members play along at the same time and all discuss it together. If that sounds like your kind of thing, read on…

(more…)

The first ever Final Fantasy race on The Lifestream took place over the weekend, with Prince Lex comfortably beating Flintlock to the end of the game.

Here we take a look back at how it all unfolded and get the thoughts of the players.

(more…)

Update: the race finished on day two! That means there will be no broadcasts on the third day, Sunday. Look out for a report on how it all unfolded on TLS in the next few days.

If you thought Final Fantasy VII was only a single-player game, think again. This weekend on The Lifestream, two of our members will play the game head to head as they race from “New Game” to “The End”.

There is a dedicated page for this race, which contains both players’ streams, so you can watch their progress, and a chat room for discussion. Both players will be in the chat room and will be able to field questions during their breaks.

The playing sessions will take place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from 14:00 to 21:00 UTC each day. You can check what that is in your timezone here. Those seven hours include five and a half hours of playing, a few breaks, and around half an hour at the end to discuss it and answer any questions you might have.

Read on for the rules and the players.

(more…)

A Final Fantasy character battle has just got under way on our forum, where the most popular characters from across the series will compete for the honour of being our community’s number one. Who will emerge victorious from the very strong line-up?

Across the first three months of 2012, The Lifestream ran a series of polls, one for every game in the main Final Fantasy series (XI and XIV excluded), to determine the most popular character from each one. The 12 victors, alongside 12 of the best runners-up, have now been drawn into four groups of six, where they will once again compete in polls of their popularity among our members. A live draw on the #TLS IRC channel last night determined the groups, which look like this:

1 – Auron, Cloud, Ingus, Cecil, Squall and Lightning.
2 – Kain, Sazh, Garland, Lulu, Fang and Kefka.
3 – Vivi, Laguna, Firion, Yuna, Zidane and Aerith.
4 – Balthier, Faris, Celes, Tifa, Rikku and Freya.

We need your participation to make this battle as exciting as possible. Who would you like to win in each of those groups? Cast your votes on the forum throughout April in group 1, group 2, group 3 and group 4.

The second part of this article contains a preview of the favourite for each group.

(more…)

I told you we were going to do it. I told you we were going to do commentary for Final Fantasy Unlimited.
And so we are.
But what is Final Fantasy Unlimited?
(more…)

The sector seven plate was dropped as a desperate act to crush a dissenting voice ShinRa could not control. While it was an act of retribution, it was also an act of censorship and of control by intimidation- it was to serve as a warning so that no one else would attempt the act again.

SOPA and PIPA, the proposed Internet Security acts currently in the US congress, also seek the ability to control the flow of information, to be able to control and censor the information online, and this could be extremely problematic for website reliant on information that originates from other sources, including and especially this one.

Even in the reduced forms, these bills are dangerous and set a terrible precedent as far as free speech rights are concerned.

There is, however, a shiny golden wire of hope. Many sites, including Wikipedia, Google, Boingboing, and countless blogs, are going dark today as a form of protest against these bills, to demonstrate the terrible repercussions the ability to censor the internet would have. Many sites are urging their readers to contact their own congress members and urge them to vote against the bill.

We urge you to do the same. This bill would not just affect this site, it would affect us all, both here in the US and with possible aftereffects abroad as well.

So, The Lifestream stands with the Blackout and Against SOPA and PIPA, for a free and uncensored internet.

We just hope you stand with us all too.

UPDATE: All done, we’re now on a 1 GHz virtual PC with a fat internet pipe. Will do some more tweaks and optimizations to increase speed and decrease server load even more; keep an eye out on this thread.

We have experienced some downtime on the forums some time ago, in part due to peaked activity, in part due to shitty vB plugins, in part due to a restrictive webhost that blocks databases at times of peak activity. With that in mind, we decided to go forth and move to a new, better host – again.

This time around, we will be moving from a shared hosting account on Hostgator to a ‘virtual private server’ hosted by Leaseweb. The benefits of the latter are pretty big: A ‘dedicated’ machine, so no database blocks anymore, full control over the system (SSH / commandline control, w00t), and a lot more flexibility in what kind of software we can use.

The plan is:

* Close the forums for new replies at 3 PM my time – that’s 2 PM GMT and about… 9 AM eastern time? Something like that.
* Request a full backup from the host. This may take a few hours, depending on Hostgator support.
* Move the backup to the new server. This’ll take about as long as it takes to transfer a ~5 GB backup file – probably about an hour and a half to two hours, but it depends.
* Unpack and setup the backup. This should only take a few minutes
* Change some settings
* Test stuff
* Switch the domain name over to the new server. I set it so it should only take a few minutes for the DNS change to take effect, but results may vary.
* With luck, the whole move will take about three hours. But that’s with luck, so no guarantees, might take longer.

While we’re moving, feel free to head over to awesome sites like FFOF, SO, or goatse.cx.

Alternatively, join the TLS IRC at irc.ipocalypse.net, channel #tls.

As many of you may have noticed, TLS’s main site and forums have been going up and down a lot over the last several days. We’ve contacted our host and made some optimizations to the server, which should hopefully keep things up and running properly. We’re also looking into the possibility of dedicated hosting options to ensure that any future site outages are as brief as possible (pronounced: hopefully won’t happen at all).

Overall, thanks for bearing with us during the downtime, and we’re working hard to keep things running smoothly for all of our loyal fans.

HypochondriacPiano has put together a fan tribute album, “Final Fantasy VII: Pulse of Life.” This music has been featured on the TheLifestream’s On the Way to a Smile Audiobooks, and if you’ve wanted to get your hands on it, and listen to it on your portable mp3 player of choice, now’s your chance! Click Here to Download the Album in .RAR and here as a .ZIP and be sure to let us know what you think in the comments!

Hello all,

It seems that our domain name expired and was replaced with a generic advertising site for a while today. As it turned out, our domain name had expired, and due to administrative fail we were not notified of our impending doom.

I was able to contact the host and fix things before it became unrecoverable – I believe there’s a grace period after it expires to fix things. Here’s to hoping this doesn’t happen again. We apologise for the inconvenience.

On the upside, this reminded me that we registered the thelifestream.net domain three years ago, September 25th, 2008. We celebrated our three years anniversary with a few hours downtime. Woo!

TLS was mentioned in the new digital magazine put out by Square Enix.

One of their favorite fansites? D’awwww, tanks Square. :3

Thanks to Arianna for the heads up.