#I may have experience but I'm still a bit of an amateur

[tribow]

Buncha things implemented recently. Finally started working on the part that starts generating the actual game. Right now, only the asteroids get spawned in.

I plan to have...well way too many objects existing at once, so I really need to cut down on what is or isn't active. For this, I implemented a quick check for what objects are within a certain radius from the center of the camera. The game periodically checks that radius and activates everything within it while deactivating everything outside of it. All active objects are put into an array so the game knows what to deactivate when performing the check.

This may not be the best method for achieving better performance. I didn't use the VisibleOnScreenNotifier node for the check (I wasn't aware of it when scripting oops lol). Each object could individually signal when they are and aren't on screen instead of having the game do a huge query on the world space. The game could instead have a dictionary of active objects so each object could look up if they need to be added or removed from the dictionary.

In the future, I plan to implement a radar camera. The radar's range would have roughly the same size as what I'm already checking, so I could utilize VisibleOnScreenNotifier the same way as my query check and it might be better for performance. It's hard to say unless I compare it though.

Well in other progress news I implemented audio for the ship whenever it moves. I originally tied its volume and pitch to its speed, but I realized that the speed can change without the player's input. Wouldn't make sense to have an engine sound just because something bumped into you.

So instead, the sound only comes on when the player is actually inputting something to move. The pitch still gets changed based on speed though.

I spent way too much time was spent adjusting values. I forgot decibels aren't exactly the same thing as "volume". A value of 0 doesn't mean muted lmao. Felt like an idiot for not understanding why I was blasting out my eardrums whenever I moved the ship around.

[myimaginedcorner]

A THANK YOU

Hello my dear readers,

We have now hit two weeks since the official launch of Scales of Justice: Book One. So far, it has received quite a bit of feedback from the community, both good and critical, and is currently still holding top of the page in Hosted Games. I am incredibly grateful for all your comments, ratings, and engagement with his game. You have made this journey magical, and I am beyond happy with its outcome.

I am, perhaps, one of the main critics of my own work. I began this game as my first ever project in English, still green as a writer, an amateur with nothing but a silly dream of telling stories. This game has been my debut in many ways; it pushed me to publish, it pushed me to practice and improve my skills, and it pushed me to engage with a fabulous community that has helped me direct my work so others could enjoy my tales through my writing. During the hard times of Covid, it brought me to finally start working towards my aspirations, and I cannot be more grateful for it. I am grateful for everything this game brought me as a writer.

Now, I am someone with more than 3 years of experience in multiple accounts of writing. I am a graduated historian, a graduated writer, and a programmer working on my last master's degree in STEM. I have written and coded so many new things, tried new genres and styles, experimented with ideas. I have heard your feedback throughout this WIP, and I am listening to everything people have to say now that it's published. I am planning to continue with my work - I am planning to make the next book better, taking into account all the knowledge you've all taught me throughout this journey.

I've been listening to everything that people have suggested as improvements and criticism, but I'm also curious what parts of the book people truly enjoyed and would like to see more. Forgive me if this sounds a little selfish, but I do wish to hear more from everyone, and of course, there's nothing more pleasant for a writer than to see their story being loved (that is, of course, not to discourage anyone from critical feedback; it helps greatly with improving my faults). Please, continue sending your feedback. Tell me what parts have been the most compelling, alongside any other feedback you may have. I am still here to listen, still here to learn. The only way is up.

With all my love,

Julia xx

[yzy-dragon]

I absolutely ADORED S2E9 "Three Stories" of Link Click and was a bit surprised to see the discontent here on Tumblr, and I totally understand the reasons why people didn't like it, especially in the context of the pacing of the rest of S2 (which I also have some opinions on but I won't talk about that here), but I also felt the need to just get my heart out why I love it so much. A bit of background, I'm Chinese American but have lived in and visited China numerous times.

Music and theater. As a western classical musician and an amateur Chinese opera singer enthusiast (I saw someone else post about the possible inspo this episode got from Chinese opera), I VIBED with the artistic direction of this episode SO much. The three-part structure was almost like a sonata/symphony (and remember that one scene where Qian Jin was air-conducting in a previous episode!!) or scene changes in a Chinese opera. Nothing needs to be said about the animation style that hasn't been said already, but I like how scenes from the three individual "stories" were interwoven and reused like leitmotifs. Especially that crazy, tortured laughter. Idk if any of the parallels were intentional on the part of the director, but it's what I got from it due to my personal experiences. I know that's a highly subjective takeaway though, which brings me to my next point....

Qian Jin's "tragic" backstory. I know a lot of people were upset that the extent of Qian Jin's tragic backstory was "oh his wife cheated on him", but I think the "basicness" of his struggles was the whole point (by the way, this segment displayed various attitudes towards work, family, marriage, individual pride, and life in mainland China so subtly but so well!). I also don't think sympathy was the main thing we were supposed to feel for him, although of course there is some. The whole "tragicomedy" aspect of Qian Jin's story is that it's not some horrible, terrible, rare thing that happened to him, but a common problem faced by so many hardworking but busy married men trying to provide for their families: infidelity. But Qian Jin sees himself as the main character of an elaborate play that rivals the great dramatic classics (which, funnily enough, often depicted very DRAMATIZED versions of a rather basic series of events). And his viewpoint is validated when....

Qian Jin meets the twins. That segment is still largely from Qian Jin's perspective, because we still don't really know how LTC and LTX even feel about him. But for Qian Jin, it's a stroke of fate and fortune that could only possibly happen in theater. He's very far removed from reality at this point. Reality is that a cop whose job it is to investigate violent crime comes across two kids who are the victims of a violent crime. Again, nothing particularly special or even coincidential. It's comical like that.

The fairy tale section.  Unlike the first two, I think this segment is from Xixi’s perspective, which not only justifies the cartoony artstyle but also makes it heartbreaking, due to her childlike innocence.  Like Qian Jin, she also perceives her reality as something it’s not, but unlike him, she doesn’t have delusions of grandeur of being a tragic protagonist.  It’s just a little fox trying to survive in a forest full of predators and hunters.  

All that tortured laughter. I’ve actually noticed in a lot of Chinese media that they like to use laughter as a way of signifying a person’s complete mental breakdown due to the tragedies they’ve suffered.  It’s a very internal thing that has people on the outside going, “WTF?”  In this episode we have a lot of characters crazily laughing together at the same time and it seems like they’re relating to each other, but in reality they’re all trapped in their own nightmarish hells and motivated by selfish purposes. 

Back to the topic of Qian Jin, even though he (innaccurately) may see himself as the hero of his own story, it's not enough for him. He wants to use Cheng Xiaoshi to change the past. He wants to become the director of the play.

I know a lot of people were disappointed this episode didn't advance the plot, especially in regard to Cheng Xioashi and Lu Guang's storylines, but I was actually prepared for a backstory episode and couldn't have been more satisfied. Again, I have other opinions on the rest of S2 but at least standalone, I think this episode was nearly perfect. And I really wasn't expecting this, but it's really elevated Qian Jin to one of my top characters.

[wingsdippedingold]

Ch 1: "Please String your Bow"

New Series: Read ACOTAR with me!

Hello! I’ve decided to start a new series of me going back and rereading the ACOTAR series, as it's been years since I last actively did so, and posting it here on tumblr!

I plan to do my best to observe the story as though I’m reading it for the first time and don’t have prior knowledge, trying to build my opinions back up from a blank slate. Some of my annotations will try to reflect that, asking questions that I or you may already know the answer to. However, I’m including many of my old comments as well.

I may start a tag list if people are interested, but with that: Chapter 1!

wc : 859 - Index

This is the line that pulled me into the chapter.

So she's shooting a recurve, which in this case, is basically the standard medieval bow you'd imagine. Unstringing is done to keep the wooden limbs from straining and getting bent out of shape from the tension.

Alright, so this is our first bit of human lore regarding faeries beyond just the "they're dangerous". Humans believe that faeries eat people.

Okay, okay, very Cinderella-esque. Now, is the expression she's thinking of sad, disappointed, or angry- at this point it seems more pitiable.

I am familiar with this pose.

Seemingly, both her family and her town rely on Feyre. I know it's to emphasize her role as the only one working, but it's weird imagining an entire town asking a single 17 year old girl to provide for them. They're asking her to be the main character at this point. The world is cruel to Feyre.

The artist in her 😭

I think its interesting that she includes bother her father and her current cottage (quote below) in this dream.

On another note, I know some people interpret the last bit to be "oh she hates her sisters and wants them gone", but I think she knows they'd be unsatisfied with the simple life that she would be, wanting to go back to their prior life of luxury. (But, she basically becomes her sisters in this dream later in the series anyway)

Feyre and painting on fucking walls

Pretty words

Feyre, baby… you gotta string your bow again…

I think I know why y'all are starving.

Our first outright characterization of Nesta from Feyre:

I mean a regular arrow would still do more damage than a bee sting. Regardless, her weapons are important for later.

👍

This confused me. Because, either way, unless you kill the wolf, you starve, unless the wolf flat out leaves, but considering it's going for the deer, it won't. If he eats the doe or scares it, you have to kill him. SJM didn't give Feyre the mindset of a poor woman in dire need of food. Is eating the wolf not even an option?

I would imagine hunting the bigger game, even if less tasty and more dry, during a time of animal scarcity when she regularly comes back empty handed, would be a starving woman's first choice. Your shot would have to be a good one regardless of whichever you choose, and if its because of disease, eating any wild animal carries risks.

Maybe I'm just being stupid, but like... if they really were that poor and in need of food, how is the wolf not even an option?

8 years of experience, assuming she had consistent practice between hunts

Wrong, this happens even after death. How much research did SJM do before making an entire chapter around hunting and a character who's been doing it for 8 years?

Personally, I would try putting the poor thing out of its misery if I was unsure about pain, instead of sitting and waiting. Feyre has a hunting knife which she uses to skin the wolf later. Even with her appropriate level of caution, this animal couldn't jump up and kill you. I don't know, reading this made Feyre feel like a relatively amateur hunter, rather than the experienced one she's meant to be.

I imagine she waited for it to die in case it had faerie magic or something, but she decides that it's not one after its death, which doesn't make sense to me, because I imagine she had never seen a faerie die (or shapeshift)? How would its death have any different markers- beyond the ones Feyre couldn't previously identify- than a normal wolf?

Well no. It didn't. Earlier she said animal wouldn't live with the ash arrow in it's side, but it was her normal arrow in the eye that proved lethal (see below)

Mr. Wolf was still standing after the ash arrow, he only collapsed after the normal one in the eye.

Realistically, the better option would be to dress both animals, get rid of organs (especially the wolf's), guts, heads, genitals, and any other dead weight; this'll reduce the load by at least a third, if not a half, considering that she's only hunting for sustenance and not keeping any parts for trophies. Drag the wolf and carry the deer.

The wolf's size could be an issue- but she considers a small deer to be a struggle, so I'm not sure what's up with that. I imagine she isn't an experienced hunter and/or doesn't field dress, despite her 8 years, considering that she usually comes back empty-handed.

Alright, so dressing both animals would take upwards of an hour for someone with the amount of experience I would assume Feyre has. Regardless, for a wolf of that size and weight, with half of it against the ground, it'll take way longer than minutes to skin. You're gonna spend a while there, even if you don't dress the animal.

Back on track with Feyre being the cool protagonist that she's set up as.

Thank you for reading these! Overall, this was more nitpicky than any serious notetaking as its just the opening chapter- there's a lot more substance in the coming ones!

[antialiart]

Hi, your art is stunning. May I ask what program you use to draw digitally, and if you have any tips on how to get the forms and colors as incredibly accurate as you do?

Aw, thank you! I still feel like very much an amateur at this; my first digital painting of this type was this one, a month ago, and I don't really know what I'm doing, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

I use Clip Studio Paint currently, though an older version from when it was a one-time purchase instead of a subscription. (Why is everything subscriptions these days.) In the past, I've used Krita, which was free, but I haven't used it for this kind of painting per se.

For these paintings I've been using the default "Dense watercolor" brush for laying out blobs of color and the "Transparent watercolor" brush for subtler shading and smoothing. I expect these are not the ideal tools for this or anything, just sort of the brushes I've gotten most used to working with in coloring in CSP, which I stumbled into kind of randomly while messing around.

To get the forms right: something I started doing for my Good, the Bad and the Ugly kick early when I'd started on that in September was to do a rough sketch with the screenshot on the canvas at the same size and every now and then drag the sketch layer over the screenshot to check myself off - see if I'd made some feature too small or positioned it weirdly, etc. This felt a little like cheating but it did also just kind of help give me a better sense for it and for the ways in which my initial eyeballing tends to be off so I can adjust for it, and then once I had the very rough sketch of where everything is, I could detail freehand on a second sketch layer from there which feels a lot less like cheating.

However, for the last three paintings I did, instead of doing that I have been using a trick I saw my dad using when doing traditional oil painting, namely using a grid: enable the grid option in the CSP view settings, line the reference up with the grid, and then focus on each individual 'tile' of the grid. While working on this latest one, my canvas looked like this, for example:

So when sketching and while working on it from there, I could look at the individual square on the grid that I was working on and try to match it to that individual bit of the reference, which is a lot easier than trying to eyeball the whole thing at once.

As you may be able to tell, the colors don't feel super accurate to me when I'm working on it and actually looking at the screenshot beside it; it's all a little off and less detailed, but then it looks a lot nicer once you crop the reference out of the canvas. For this one I actually experimented with using the color picker tool to pick out some of the extremes of the colors I worked with for each given area - some of the brightest highlights on the face, a nice midtone, some of the deepest shadow - but this isn't all that helpful because film grain means the overall impression of the color is different, and there are a lot of nuances. Something I did do, also for some of the previous paintings where I specifically didn't use the color picker as a challenge to myself, is try painting a brush stroke on top of the area in the screenshot whose color I'm trying to replicate and keep adjusting until it feels like it just about blends in. But even then color is very hard. There are so many subtle nuances and shades and it's hard to adjust the exact shade of some color I've already put down other than by just painting over it again and then redoing the details - unless, of course, I just put another layer on top and set it to Hue or something. I did that a little with the barbed wire around his neck on this one, to make it less blue after I'd first put it down.

Buuuut mainly I think the key to making these sorts of things look good, as far as I've felt, is just to be willing to spend a whole lot of time noodling on them. There's always more you can do with it to make it better.

I found the checking myself off by dragging the sketch on top of the screenshot trick very helpful, even if it does feel like cheating, just by virtue of the fact it makes the outcome look better, which makes me less likely to ultimately go "ugh, this isn't right" and just want to stop working on it and move on. And that's very helpful, at least to me.

Finally there's the general just draw a lot, etc. I have been posting art daily on this blog since the beginning of 2016, and it's been a slow journey of my very intermittent efforts at human portraits getting slightly, slightly, slightly better each time. Just these feel like a pretty massive level up in the space of a couple of months, though, and I think that's largely just because I got obsessed enough with a movie to want to spend the time to draw one million cowboys instead of doodling Pokémon, and also allowed myself to use whatever neat tricks would help me make them come out well enough to stay motivated on it.

[tamelee]

I love your artwork, it's so cool! I'm an amateur in art, do you have any tips? Thank you!

Thank you so much! 💕 And sure! (Have you seen my other posts as well?) It’s a bit easier when it’s more specific >< But I’ll try my best; 

- Keep notes about the things you want to learn as you draw! Someone gave me a tip to have an art-goal so you know what to work on and then improve these particular things as you go, but for some reason I found it really hard to set these goals? (Am I the only one?) I kept thinking I just wanted to ‘improve’ everything, but that’s not very tangible and I can’t effectively measure whether I’ve succeeded… (it’s also not always easy to see your own improvements… at least I rarely can ><) 

But when you draw and you come across these little things that make you go “hm, I wish this was easier” or “I really love this sketch I made, but I’m not sure how to go about coloring it”, anything like that— then your desires regarding your art or your process become a lot more specific, right? Write these down! What specifically would you like to improve on?

I’ve noticed for myself and many others talked about it as well that once a piece is done, it’s like you forget a lot about the process and your mind is set on a new project. (Also, yay! You were in the zone~) You can either use your current project as practice (all of them are in a sense, really) or start a new one later, research what you need (on YouTube, books, or perhaps a course from an artist you really like if you can afford it) and work on your goal! 

- Also keep notes for any ideas you may have. We always think we’ll remember something and then we don’t. These sudden, often spontaneous glimpses you receive seemingly out of nowhere can be some of your best and it’s a shame if they fade back into the void. This also applies to anything that inspires you.. it can really be anything. I think I’ve said this before, but if you do this, try and organize a bit. Otherwise you’ll end up with a bunch of notes that’s more overwhelming than anything else. 

You can use folders to keep images, notes, a dedicated Notion page perhaps or if you can afford it, keep an extra external SSD for this. 

- Well, this also applies to research or video’s you’d like to watch. If you end up with too many tutorials or books, or they aren’t goal-oriented specific to your art desire, it may get really hard to get you started on something. If you’re like me and it’s hard to focus, I’d highly recommend taking some time to sit back, think about the thing you really want, organize and structure a way towards it and go. That way you don’t have to make all these decisions along the way— you know what to do already, it’s written right there!

- And that also applies to tools and brushes xD I know it’s really fun to download all of it because many are free and what if there’s ever a time you may need this specific texture on a brush? What if you can’t get this style that inspired you with the brushes you already have? But truth is, you don’t need them all and if you do, you’ll notice there are many you won’t even touch. And well… as you can see in my art as well, apart from the pencil ones, it doesn’t necessarily encourage consistency if that’s what you strive for. If you want to practice, most often the basic round brush will do, the less opacity or blend, the more you can practice shapes and clarity. In that case I’d stay away from the airbrush whenever possible. 

- Depending on the program you use (CSP has their own), you can use these to help you with facial angles, or this if you rather prefer a basic skull. You can use the site if you can’t get the angles quite right for many things. 

- For coloring I highly recommend James Gurney’s articles or book ‘color and light a guide for the realistic painter’, even if you’re not a realistic painter, it still contains most (all?) of what you need to know about color.

- A great way to experiment is to just… open a blank document and do whatever. I know it often feels like you have to draw something (preferably something good), but you can actually learn a lot by just scrabbling away. Here’s also often where you find the things you feel like you need to improve. Certain angles are especially hard for me, but I hadn't known that if I didn't try >< Oh, I also found this site by accident and I haven't read it all, but it covers many subjects! Hope these are helpful! 🌷

[shiraki-yurara]

On-Screen Lovers Part 2 Story Event - Hugh - Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Morganatic Idol belongs to Cybird & ABC Frontier.

My Notes: Translation is for entertainment purpose only. Translation may or may not be correct. Please ignore any grammar mistakes.

It's been a while since I heard that Hugh-san was going to star in a movie.

(I don't have anything today; I think I'll go shopping ......)

It was late afternoon on my day off, and I was coming out of my room to go out.

As I check the contents of the pouch I am carrying, I catch a glimpse of chocolate.

Rina: Ah……

(I haven't seen Hugh-san since then, I wonder if he is okay.)

(I carry chocolate with me so that I can give him when I see him but……)

This level of support cannot be called support at all.

However, I still couldn't help but be worried, so I started keeping some chocolate on hand.

Rina: If you're worried about it, you should ask him how it's going…… Huh?

That's when I found a towel on the floor.

(Wasn't this ...... Hugh-san's, I think?)

(Maybe he dropped it on the way here? Let's look for him.)

I went to the dining room, Hugh-san's room, and the gym, but he was nowhere to be found.

I thought I'd give up for now after I checked the lesson room……, but sure enough, there he was.

Hugh: …………

Standing quietly, Hugh-san seems to be concentrating with his eyes closed.

As I hesitated to call out to him, his lips gently opened.

Hugh: ~ ♪

(Waah……)

I couldn't help but listen carefully to the beautiful, melodious singing voice that I heard.

It was a song with a lot of bass voice, which is Hugh-san's forte, but it had a different, more relaxed tone than usual, which was very refreshing.

(Maybe it's a song from the movie?)

(It's like talking to your lover about your love...... A very gentle song.)

Hugh: ~ ♪

The soft and gentle way he sings is breathtakingly captivating.

At that moment, Hugh suddenly stopped singing.

Hugh: …………

(! It was a lovely song, but...... he didn’t look convinced.)

Rina: ……Hugh-san, are you okay?

I was really worried and couldn't help but call out to him.

Hugh: ……Housekeeper-san……?

Rina: Sorry for calling you out suddenly. I was looking for you to deliver this towel.

I held out the towel to Hugh-san, who stared at it for a moment before accepting it.

Rina: Umm, is that the song you're singing in the movie?

Hugh-san nodded in response to my question.

Hugh: …… Tomorrow is the main part, so…… practice

Rina: Ah, filming has already started.

Rina: How is it? The result of your lesson.

Hugh: Hmm_......

Hugh: I don't really understand……, but the director said it looked good……

Hugh: But……

Hugh-san's expression then darkened and he lowered his head.

Rina: What happened?

Hugh: Today…… It was not good.

Hugh: Doing the same as always was not good…… Got a lot NG……

Apparently, at the beginning of filming, there were many scenes where it would be okay to have a blank expression.

For that reason, Hugh-san was taking lessons and gradually improving his acting skills, but---

Rina: Recently, the protagonist has become “more human”, so you were told that you couldn't act the same way you had before.

Hugh: Yes……

Hugh: Like in love scenes……, change facial expressions a bit more……

(It's true that it's better to show more emotions, but that may be difficult for Hugh-san.)

Rina: But that song you just sang was great, wasn't it?

Rina: I could really feel how much you want to convey your feelings to your loved one......

Hugh: Singing…… I've always done it since it’s my job……

Hugh: But…… Dialogue is difficult……

Muttering while looking troubled, Hugh-san let out a long sigh.

Hugh: Even if you tell me to show my feelings on my face…… I don't understand

Hugh: Usually, I…… I don't think about anything in particular……

Hugh: When it comes to love…… I also have no experience……

I'm not sure what to say to Hugh-san, who is troubled by his thoughts.

(This seems pretty serious……)

Rina: Um, can I see the script please?

Hugh: Eh……?

Rina: I'm an amateur when it comes to acting, but I thought I might notice something……

Hugh: …………

After hearing what I said, Hugh-san quietly handed me the script.

Rina: Thank you

Upon receiving it, I immediately took a quick look at the contents.

(……I see, the changes in the main character played by Hugh-san are depicted in great detail.)

As he talks to her, he gradually develops feelings for her and his expression changes.

The film would not be as good as it is without expressing that process.

Rina: In this scene where they meet by chance, he starts to become interested in the girl.

Rina: This is also where he becomes aware of the feelings of impatience and anxiety that are unique to love……

Rina: Certainly, you would be expected to express various emotions clearly here, but……

Hugh: …………

Rina: ? Hugh-san, what’s the matter?

Hugh: Housekeeper-san……, you said the same thing as the director……

Rina: Eh? But, you can kind of understand that just by reading the script……

Hugh: ……I don’t understand……

Hugh-san muttered softly, then looked at me intently.

Hugh: Like just now…… Tell me more……?

Rina: ……!

Hugh-san leans forward and comes right in front of me.

His handsome face, with a hint of seriousness in it, made my heart skip a beat.

Rina: I-I don't mind that, but…… will an explanation be enough to solve the problem?

Rina: I feel like if you don't practice, your acting won’t change.

Hugh: ……Then, what should I do……?

Rina: For example, how about doing some script reading?

It's a cliché method, but I think it's the most effective one this time.

Hugh: I did it in the lesson……, but should I do it again……?

Rina: If you do it in an environment that is closer to the script than at that time, you may discover something new.

Hugh: Hmmm……

Hugh-san seemed to be deep in thought as he was silent and looked down.

His long eyelashes fluttered languidly, and the next moment his lustrous eyes caught my eyes.

Hugh: ……In that case, doing it with Housekeeper-san…… may be good

Rina: Eh?

Hugh: During the lesson……, I practiced with a male teacher……

Hugh: You are…… a girl just like her……, so……

Rina: ! As a girl, I am definitely closer to the script.

(I'm not confident in my acting……, but I want to help somehow.)

Rina: I don't know if it will work, but let's try our best together.

When I smiled back encouragingly, Hugh-san's face relaxed.

Hugh: Yeah…… Then let's go to the sea……

Rina: Eh……, the sea?

[anoellev]

Blog Post #1 - Intro

Hello, my name is Aubrey Vigan and this is my 2nd year as an animation major at Fresno State (I'm a transfer student). I may not be a professional photographer, but I enjoy doing photography as a hobby. A lot of the photos I've taken so far revolve around nature, particularly landscapes. On some occasions, I take photos to document the little things that happen in my life and post it on social media. In short, I pretty much take photos whenever I feel inspired to do so.

In this course, I hope to experiment more with this medium and learn new techniques on how to properly handle the camera and how to take the best photos. Although I have quite a bit of experience with photography, I believe there is still room for me to improve my skills. I would consider myself more of an amateur photographer.

Aside from photography, I like to draw portraits of people from time to time. I also listen to various genres of music (pop, K-pop, indie, r&b, hip-hop) every day because it distracts me from thinking negatively. Currently, my favorite game I love to play is the Sims 4 as I have been playing it nonstop over winter break.

Given that I'm a 3D animation emphasis, I would love to work as a 3D animator for animation companies such as Pixar or Walt Disney Animation Studios and assist with the production of animated films.

[pynkhues]

"Surviving trauma doesn't make you an expert on other people's trauma" is how I'm paraphrasing your tag. But it's such an important point to me. I feel like not just internet spaces but also societal mental health conversation has been ignoring this for decades. I can talk about this extremely broadly because I think it's one of the problems with 12 step type of addiction treatments. But it's also especially popular in the realm of victims of crime and/or abuse of any kind. Surviving trauma only makes you an expert on your own personal trauma and healing. There is no universal cure for any trauma, everyone needs something different. And treating others requires a level of detachment that rarely exists in amateur survivors of similar trauma. Sorry for preaching about this in your inbox but your tags really reminded me how passionate I am about this. I've experienced people scolding me for abandoning support groups and group therapy types of things when they didn't feel helpful to me because they helped them and "I just didn't give them proper chance".

(x)

Don't apologise, anon! I totally agree, and I'm really sorry that you've had that experience with support groups and group therapies.

I've been thinking about this a lot actually since the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial and the horrific treatment of her during all of that, but it's been a pretty big factor in my life these days in general.

Like, look, this is kind of getting a bit in the weeds of my real life right now, but my aunt's very angry at me and my mum at the moment in a way that's been pretty exhausting. (Putting this below a cut because nobody needs to read this, haha)

My aunt is a victim-survivor of some pretty horrific domestic violence. It was many years ago now, and she's done a lot of healing and is in a better place overall, but the situation currently with my sister going through emotional and financial abuse, gaslighting and physical intimidation, with her ex-husband has I think brought up a lot for my aunt, and the result is that she's really trying to dictate the choices that my sister makes as she's going through this.

My aunt has been genuinely so supportive of my sister, but she's also been incredibly judgemental and critical. It's been a really challenging space for their relationship, and, by proxy, my relationship with my aunt, because she calls me (and my mum, who's her sister) up to try and influence my sister's decisions. We're in this current kinda stand-still over it because we're six weeks out from final trial in family court, and my ex-BIL has done something very threatening to my sister, and my aunt wants my sister to get an AVO. We tried to get my sister an AVO last year, and the police told her that until he put her in hospital, they wouldn't give her one. Now my aunt wants my sister to try again, and my sister's lawyers are saying no, because it looks like a play to the judge. They've been in family court for two years, and to try again this close to final trial may be legitimate but to a judge it'll read as a move that could influence her custody of her children.

My sister doesn't want to take that risk, her lawyers don't want to take that risk, and in my opinion, the worst result would be for her to try, have it on the record that she tried, get the same response she did last year that he hasn't put her in the hospital yet, and ergo get no AVO and a bad mark on her heading into court. On top of that - - AVOs don't do shit. They're a piece of paper that maybe bump you up a few spots in the queue when you call the police.

Anyway, my aunt's furious about this and it's become this huge thing where my aunt feels she knows better because she got an AVO, because she's been through this already, because none of us understand what she understands, and I'm like - - it's exhausting, and it's unfair. Their experiences are not the same by any stretch of the imagination, and I hate that a part of me keeps thinking that what happened to my aunt didn't end because of an AVO, it ended because he was a gambling addict and he was killed over an unpaid debt.

My aunt really is trying to do the right thing by my sister, and I love her for that, but there is this disconnect between survivor experiences that can cause an enormous amount of friction and complication, and I think we need to get better in general at acknowledging that.

[justicerikai]

graduation

In Japan, when one decides to move onto greener pastures or simply quit the current job they have been doing for quite a while, that is referred to as graduation.

And thus, I too, will be graduating from translating Charisma House.

Earlier this month (May 2023) I decided to go on a break due some medical and personal issues I had to deal with. No thinking about translating at all, just doing what I want and what I like. It's been roughly two weeks now and for someone who is doing things all the time, it was more than enough to decide where I want to keep going with translating.

Of course, this isn't a spontaneous decision. It's something that weighed in the back of my mind for a bit- can I handle all of this? I love translating, but can I handle all of it? No, I cannot. I need to know my limits.

But most importantly, know what's fun.

Charisma House was very novel for me. I had to learn to understand the humor, grasp what's being implied, the nuances of the jokes that can be easily misunderstood if not read properly. It was a challenge that definitely pushed me beyond anything else ever could. And yet, that honeymoon phase of grasping something so novel, so different, has come to an end.

I still love Charisma House, and always will. I actively keep up and peruse the interwebs for fun theories and content. Yet with the direction of Season 2, I have noticed... translating it no longer sparks joy as it once did. It is still good content, but not the one that made me lose my marbles, or perhaps I have simply gotten used to it?

Or perhaps, I simply just... lost the spark and drive I once had for it. And that is fine. Such is the beauty of what's fleeting, 物の哀れ if you will.

Translating Charisma House was, and will always, be a fun experience for me. I'm happy I took the risk, a mere amateur like I, to still translate it. I learned a lot, I laughed a lot, I shared a lot. I never thought I would translate drama tracks, or even still try with song lyrics (which I did give up on but alas). Besides this, I have also dabbled in subbing anime, I have even attempted manga translating. But at the end of the day I realized that what truly sparks joy, what actually is fun for me, for me is visual novel type content.

Not only that, I also want to translate because... I want to. Not because it is an obligation to give the people content. A few weeks ago, my favourite mobile game released an event with my two fave characters and I had so much fun working on it. I felt so excited with each phrase I translated, I couldn't wait to show this to people.

Even when I am thinking of an other mobile game that's coming out soon, all I can think of is "God, I cannot wait to share this with the masses! I have to! It's my duty as a human being!"

That feeling is, alas, what I have been lacking with Charisma House for a while. And that is when I should know better, and draw the line.

As I said, it is no longer fun.

Is it that serious? That I'm dropping a series that I have translated? No, probably not. Happens all the time, I'm sure there are others waiting in line to continue what I was doing, or maybe not. Who knows.

But to me, it is, and that's why I wanted to convey it in a long hefty post.

As closure, I will share some words of one of my favourite manga. Something I live by, and will for as long as possible.

"The world is filled to the brim with nice things... and all of them are carrying someone's intentions and feelings.

When those feelings get across and manage to make someone happy... I gain little pieces of confidence,

that I'll gather together and carry with me as I move on."

And I believe something like that, is only achievable when you do something that is fun, to you.

Thank you for reading, this post, and my translations. Thank you for being able to find enjoyment in Charisma House through my translations. This blog is not going anywhere and will stay up, of course. You will probably still see me around on my other ventures, just not here.

And never forget,

Rikai-kun is cute and he will always be.

Sayonara

[spissed-off]

Birthday is coming up.... what does this mean?

Well. Let me update you on things, if I may, with Tumblr mobile's fancy new features (that I've known about already for like a couple months)!

So I was able to get a new computer that works really well, and I have a microphone. I want to learn how to better balance audio and all that, this blog just... Makes me feel weird now I guess. It's bittersweet. Someone I had a really terrible experience with pulled me away from this blog and as a result I fell out of wanting to post on it. So I'm a little bit at a loss as to how to use it going forward. There's been some small interaction, but I just don't feel good using this blog anymore, or even the other more general voice acting blog I set up. I still would like to do that as an amateur because it's fun, but probably not for a bit. I might see about revamping my other VA blog but I may very well archive this one and move operations to the other one when I feel ready. I'm mainly trying to learn how to be a person again, mainly my own person and it's been a bit of a struggle. I hope those of you who are around understand.

I'll update this post with anything that seems relevant, but in the meantime I don't think I'll be making any more posts. I might clean up some things when I get the time but that'll be it.

Spinsy

[canmom]

Das Abenteuer der Canmom in Köln (zur Gamescom)

It's time for canmom to have another adventure! What will that wacky lil porygon do next?

[you may be wondering, whatever happened to the plan to transfer l'aventure de canmom à Annecy to the main site for easier reading? that's still planned to happen, hopefully pretty soon! I've just been very busy.]

So: I work for a small VR games company called Holonautic. I've been working for them for around four months now (time flies)! This week some of us were in Cologne, Germany, attending Gamescom. Until this trip I hadn't met any of them in person, and indeed only had a vague idea what they looked like, because the modern world is wacky that way.

What's Gamescom? It's a major industry expo where game devs show off their games to the public and journalists, and otherwise have various industrial sorts of chats. The event fills a massive convention centre (the Kölnmesse), similar to the Excel Centre in London. Thousands and thousands of gamers enter in massive queues, and once inside, they queue up some more to get a chance to play some work in progress games at massive display booths.

Or maybe they go to the indie room, where there are hundreds of tiny desks just wide enough for a dev to set up a computer with a demo... or the retro games area, where various old consoles were set up for people to play... or one of the zones set up for laser tag or something like that. There was a lot going on!

Even Cthulhu came down to check out the games.

My own experience of Gamescom involved very little of that. With my Trade Visitor badge I could skip the queues, but most of my time was spent in a corner of the Business Area demoing our game to influencers, other devs and members of Meta and Unity, and then heading out to restaurants to have dinner with other VR devs in the evening. I had a good time though! It was great to meet the rest of Holonautic in person, and get to see the sights of Köln a tiny bit. And it was a very rewarding feeling to see other people enjoy the game I'd been working so hard on.

So in this post I'm going to talk about my trip, do a bit of amateur sociology, think about the place of videogames in the world and all that - and also talk a little about how the game sausage gets made - at least as far as I can without breaking NDA. Sadly, the game I spent most of the weekend demonstrating remains under wraps, so I'll have to tell you about that another day. I didn't get to see a ton of games but I'll also talk about the handful of indies I did see!

This time I travelled by train (non-transport nerds, feel free to skip this paragraph), taking the Eurostar from St. Pancras to Brussels, and then the ICE 19 to Cologne. Although it was slower and a bit more expensive than flying, once you factor in the time it takes to travel out to the airport, and the security generally being much more straightforward, I think I much prefer the trains. I spent my journeys drawing other passengers (coming soon to @canmom-art) and reading Osamu Tezuka's manga Ayako (which will be its own post). It was all told very straightforward and comfortable.

[minutiae: I thought I was clever by getting an Interrail pass instead of just buying tickets the usual way, but I didn't realise that you also have to pay for seat reservations, so in the end the Interrail probably cost about as much for a 'there and back again' type of trip.]

By far the most expensive part of the trip was the hotel room. We stayed in a hotel pretty close to the centre of Cologne, but it turned out that its proximity to be about 15 minutes walk from public transport, so we didn't end up saving that much travel time. Since I ultimately spent almost no time in my hotel room, I think if I go next year, the call will be to stay at a hostel. But anyway, let's talk games.

How a game gets released on the Quest

So, Holonautic specialises in VR games. I wrote about our previous games in this very nerdy post, but in brief, there are broadly two major types of VR game: PC VR and standalone VR. For PC VR, the game runs on a computer, and the headset just contains a screen and something that can be tracked. For standalone VR, the headset is essentially a powerful Android smartphone with a custom OS; it uses the headset's cameras for tracking and does all the computing on the headset.

With the success of the Oculus/Meta Quest series, standalone VR became really, really popular - much more so than PCVR ever was. It makes sense: for native games you don't need a powerful gaming PC and there are no cables to trip over or expensive base stations, but you can still play PCVR games if you want to. Almost all of Holonautic's games are Quest-native.

For PCVR games, you can use one of various APIs, such as OpenXR, to wire up your game to VR tracking and input. Moreover, Valve built pretty good VR support into Steam, and since Steam is pretty much anything-goes, it's pretty easy to release a PCVR game in a way people can get it - but marketing is all on you, as with any Steam game.

The Quest is a different story. Compared to other consoles, Meta (which absorbed Oculus a few years ago) occupies a bit of a strange position in this industry, simultaneously the hardware manufacturer, the only publisher, and also a developer of first-party titles.

I don't have any good pictures for this part so here's me in a massive cathedral. Metaphors? No no. It's just a holiday photo...

There are two ways that games can get released on the Quest. There's the store, which is heavily curated: here, Meta acts as a publisher, releasing only games they think will sell, but they also put games through months of QA and handle all the marketing for you (i.e. putting it in front of people when they boot up the Quest). To get on the store, you basically need to have an in at Meta - there's a whole process, I'll talk about that in a moment. There's also 'App Lab', which is much less heavily vetted - but also it's a lot harder to get an audience on App Lab. If a game is particularly successful on App Lab, Meta may end up promoting it to the store. But a lot of games just languish there.

Of course, just because you have a liaison at Meta does not mean you have a free pass onto the store. There's a whole series of stages you have to go through: first you write up a detailed pitch, then if approved (based on what else may be in the works, Meta won't approve two overly similar games), you have a few months to make a 'Minimum Viable Product' prototype of your game and show it to Meta. I joined the company about a month before the MVP was due on our game.

Assuming your contact at Meta likes the MVP, you get a few more months to make a 'Vertical Slice', which is essentially a small portion of your game that's more or less complete. (For example, a single level.) Then, you show this to Meta again. If you make a good impression, they'll give you the go-ahead to finish the game and release it on the store.

Here's another random picture of Köln from the famous Hohenzollern Bridge. Are you saying this wall covered in padlocks is symbolic of something? Overactive imagination, I tell you.

So if yo uwere wondering, the last few weeks of intense work were all about making that vertical slice be as good as possible (and it got pretty clutch at the end). Since we were all going to be at Gamescom, we agreed with our guy at Meta that we'd demo the game in person.

The upshot of all this is that selling a VR game is heavily heavily shaped by Meta, and specifically the individual at Meta who makes the call. Holonautic has a longstanding contact with a laid-back American guy I'll call W.; he has in the past championed some of our games like Hand Physics Lab that left other Meta staff unconvinced. (As it turns out, W. was right and Hand Physics Lab was successful.) But he's not shy about saying that a game doesn't make the cut and should go to AppLab instead. Our game would live or die based on W.'s opinion.

But not just W.; Meta itself as an organisation is also looking for certain things, shaped by its internal politics. They have new features they want to tout - so if you can come up with a game that uses mixed reality, hand tracking and shared anchors that's probably going to count in your favour. And they have certain directions they are keen to push: sporty exercise games are in favour at the moment.

What does this mean for the evolution of the medium? Well, of course people will make the games they want to make, and just because Meta likes an idea doesn't mean it will sell. But Meta does have a lot of power to dictate the general direction of VR games - and if the Apple Vision Pro takes off in a few years, Apple will no doubt end up with a similar role.

It's been interesting to see the forces that shape a game up close: our ideological desire to make things that are new and different and meet our personal tastes, balanced against the need to have successful games to keep the company afloat (good old M-C-M'), and the need to satisfy Meta; all of this leaves its fingerprints on the game.

To not keep you in suspense, I think the demo to W. went pretty well; I can't really say more than that. It was also a good chance to tell the Meta guys about the parts of their APIs that are jank and hard to use - and to their credit they were apparently rather desperate to get feedback and I feel hopeful that they'll make it better.

It's hard to talk about Meta, because it's just such a massive organisation. We can talk about massive erosion of privacy, enabling genocide in Myanmar, and so on - but we're dealing with a small sub-corner of this huge beast, which is less a social media company and more of a games publisher and console manufacturer. But I definitely understand why someone wouldn't want to let a Facebook device loaded with cameras into their house! I could go more into privacy and the Quest 2 but it would be way too long a tangent. Ultimately this is probably a 'no ethical consumption'/'we live in a society' type of deal - one day Meta's domination will erode and we'll have to deal with a different superpower.

Whatever happens, we can continue to explore what's possible in this medium! I think of all the ethical bargains that must be made with the tech industry, I have done OK.

What Cologne is like

On Tuesday, I arrived in Cologne Central Station (Köln Hauptbahnhof) and walked over to my hotel, where I met my colleagues. Most of them looked fairly similar to how they'd set up their VR avatars... but none of them had realised I'm super tall. surprise, bitches ;p

We went out to an Indian restaurant where we all ended up ordering biryani. This being Germany, the portions were massive, so I asked for mine to be in a box to finish later, forgetting that my hotel room had no fridge or microwave and I'd have zero time to eat it (rip). Overall I think I hit it off pretty well, and we chatted for a while about games we liked, the mess that happened at Za/um, movies and the like - it was good to get a chance to interact more casually in person instead of only ever talking about work stuff. Everyone was exhausted from travel so we turned in pretty early, though probably not as early as the restaurant would have liked...

The thing that surprised me most about Cologne is how much it didn't feel strange or unfamiliar. If not for all the signs in German and cars driving on the right, you could drop me in an area of Cologne and tell me it's an unfamiliar part of London and I'd easily believe you. The parts of the city that are filled with business parks and glass-fronted chain stores could exist almost anywhere on Earth.

That said, there are some ways the Germans do things differently! One is restaurants. I visited three different restaurants and two of them worked on a 'self-service' model. Essentially, you order your food at the bar, and they give you a little buzzer device. When it buzzes, you go back up to the bar and collect your food. Nobody would wait tables, there would just be one person behind the bar taking orders and such (though someone would still have to clean your table).

Restaurants also close very early in Cologne. I think a couple of times we put staff in an awkward position of wanting to go home but having to sit around until our party was done. That said, at one point I walked through a riverside area with a few dozen steakhouses, and that seemed to stay open a lot later.

Köln has a decent amount of graffiti, a surprisingly large portion of it in English. Under most bridges there's usually a good number of tags. I didn't manage to get any good photos but shout out to the person who wrote something like 'this world is too damn loud', which is a big mood for autistic girl walking away from a convention centre lmao.

Wednesday: in which our heroine finds out what an influencer is

The next morning we all went down to a German bakery (pictured above). According to my colleagues, the thing to get is a Bienenstich, or 'Bee Sting', a kind of cake with crispy honeyed almond flakes on top and cream in the middle. Here's a really bad photo:

It was pretty tasty!

We scooted over to the convention centre on the metro, and made our way in. I started getting used to navigating the Messe. Our company didn't get our own booth this year, but XR game devs are pretty tight-knit, and Niantic, creators of Ingress and Pokémon Go, there to promote their new phone-based AR Monster Hunter game - lent us some space in their booth to do a demo to the popular VR influencers Cas and Chary.

We headed over to Hall 8 and none of us could find the Niantic booth. Eventually we figured out why: the Niantic booth was outdoors. On a very bright summer day.

The Quest 2 has a bit of a finicky relationship to light. If it's too dark, the cameras can't pick up anything and tracking can fail - hand tracking is especially susceptible. But bright sunlight is also a problem. Essentially, the controllers on the Quest 2 contain small infrared LEDs, which are tracked by the headset's cameras. This works very well, in general - but in the sun, the background infrared radiation can completely overwhelm these LEDs and the controllers become essentially unusable. You also have to be very careful never to let the sun shine through the lenses inside the headset when you take it off, or the focused sunlight can destroy the screen.

So, an outdoor demo was a problem. Luckily, Niantic had an air-conditioned tent in their little zone. We all filed into the tent and started testing the headsets. Even inside a tent, it was too bright for the Quest 2 hand tracking... but we managed to figure out the Quest Pro still worked (since it uses cameras in the controllers for tracking), and rushed to test everything would work. Before long, Cas and Chary arrived, and we demoed the game. Look mum, I'm in a tweet:

Before this convention I had very little knowledge of the whole world of VR influencers, and honestly I still don't, but it seems to be a big thing - a good word from an influencer is a massive boost to a game's chances. I'm still not entirely sure what the difference is between an influencer and a journalist; both are in the business of reviewing new tech and games and rely on a reputation of unbiased analysis for credibility, and both are courted by devs hoping to promote their games. I guess an influencer is like a fully independent journalist? In any case, Cas and Chary were really sweet in our extremely brief meeting, and it was amazing to see the first people from outside the company having fun with our game.

We got word that bHaptics, a Korean company which makes haptic suits and gloves for use with VR devices, had some space in their booth and were willing to let us do some demos there. So we set off back down the entire length of the convention centre to go into the secret Business Area.

Wednesday at Gamescom is restricted to trade visitors, meaning it's much less crowded than the later days. On those later days, that restriction only applies to the three halls designated as the Business Area. Like regular Gamescom, these halls are divided into flashy booths trying to sell you stuff, but in this case it's mostly companies trying to sell services and tools to developers: backend services, special 3D pens, anti-cheat... also a bunch of stands selling merch and figurines for some reason (maybe because they want to manufacture tie-in merch for your game), as well a bunch of national organisations promoting the game development scene in xyz country.

The Belgian stand functioned as a meeting spot, and they were also handing out vouchers for free beer. A strategy that seemed to be quite effective, judging by how crowded their booth became that evening.

We tested our headsets in the bHaptics zone, and discovered DOTS Netcode's prediction/rollback is good enough to make the game feel smooth even on public convention centre wifi, which was rather satisfying - so you know, good job Unity! Unfortunately the Shared Anchors continued to be a pain. We briefly ran into the head of DOTS at Unity and arranged a demo, scooted off to meet W. from Meta who bought us drinks, scooted over to Niantic again to meet some members of XR Bootcamp (a training course in XR game dev, whose cofounders Ferhan and Rahel seem to be the glue that holds the whole XR dev scene together), and at last wandered back to the Belgian zone...

...and then I went back to bHaptics to have a go at their gear. I didn't take a photo (rip) so here's a photo by CNet showing the full bHaptics getup, which in combination looks... kind of like you're the member of the SWAT team on washing up detail...

(source: Scott Stein/CNet)

I had never gotten to try any sort of haptic suit before this, so it was quite novel. Essentially the vest contains 40 (or 16) vibration motors; the gloves contain further motors on the tips of each finger, and there's another motorised ring between you and the headset. There are also motorised wrist bands, motorised ankle bands...

The first demo was designed to showcase the features of the suit and wristbands, so you could try out various actions like shooting guns or putting stuff in a backpack with and without haptics. A second demo focused on manipulating objects: no wristbands, just the glove and hand tracking.

Of the various devices, the most convincing was probably shooting with the haptic suit. Vibration motors are well-suited for brief, intense pulses, and firing guns definitely felt more impactful with the suit on - not a perfect simulation of impact, but a strong effect. The backpack demo was especially impressive: it really felt like dropping heavy objects into a backpack. You also got to shoot at your own mirror image and feel the bullet/laser impacts, which felt like a rather roundabout way to give myself a back massage, but I could see it being effective in the right game.

The hand demo convinced me less. The problem is that vibration is a poor simulacrum of pressing against a solid surface, so it just felt distracting to have a vibration pulse when i grabbed an object - and you still had the usual physics jank associated with manipulating objects in VR using hand tracking. The final section of the hand tracking demo was social interaction: you were faced with rotated clone avatar, and you could shake your hand, punch or slap yourself, or give yourself a hug. As someone who lives half a world away from most people I love, I think giving someone a hug in VR would be a fantastic use of the technology, but sadly this hug was... not entirely convincing. It is very hard to simulate a steady touch with vibration motors.

Ultimately I think the best use for this haptic gear may not be simulation fidelity, but more abstract: similar to the haptic suit used in certain public demos of Rez Infinite, pulsing in time to music. Such uses are mentioned on the bHaptics site, and I'd love to have been able to try that kind of demo. (And yeah, I'm sure you could hook it up to the other kind of remote-controlled vibrating devices if you so desired, though you'd probably have to do a bit of work to wire everything up.)

It was really cool to finally get to experience haptics, and I was very grateful to the bHaptics members for taking the time to show me their gear.

After I'd satisfied myself, I caught up with the gang; we went out to dinner with other XR devs at a Turkish restaurant called Bona'me near the river. (The food was tasty and had a decent amount of vege options, once again in huge portions but this time we split them between the table. ...and once again we were the last table to leave by a long way, and I feel bad for the staff who had to sit around waiting for us.)

There, I met a solo dev called Ben Outram, who's spent the last three years working on a game called Squingle, a fascinating psychedelic game about manipulating bubbles in a world of DMT-core abstract visuals. (Honestly, check this game out, it's nuts. Meta are sleeping on it, it should absolutely have a full store release.)

Thursday: chaos reigns

On Thursday it somehow ended up that in the space of an hour, we would be demoing our game to the head of DOTS development at Unity (whose name I somehow never managed to catch), demoing our other game Cybrix to Cas and Chary, and then doing the big important demo for meta. Then it turned out that our metro line was blocked by an accident up ahead. We hurried out to get an Uber, and our driver gave us a rather... exciting ride; he rolled down the window to argue with another driver and dropped us off in the middle of the road while we waited in traffic. Rather harried, we arrived back at the bHaptics corner and set up for the demos in an unused area of floor nearby.

I'm not sure if I can say too much about how our demos went, but unfortunately we ran into some versioning issues and were not able to show Cybrix to Cas and Chary before they had to rush off (we weren't the only one to face transport issues that morning). Lesson learned: test everything, not just the part you're worried about. It's not the end of the world, though, and we all headed over to W.'s hotel, into a swanky suite with a nicely laid table for the most important demo of the week. We had the room for maybe 20 minutes, then we were out the door again to the lobby of another hotel to talk it over.

After that... suddenly the afternoon was free, ish. We went back into Gamescom and ate some very expensive ramen. Then, word came that some more influencers wanted to try out our games, so it was back to bHaptics and well, the story gets a little repetitive at this point :p I can't say much more than that without talking about our game, so I will just have to say that the demos went well.

This was my view for most of Gamescom.

At the end of the day, I had a couple of free hours to scoot over to the indie games area and try out some games before everyone went home. At this point my social batteries had run very dry indeed so I was glad to get some time to just play games.

The indie zone was divided into lots and lots of small booths, typically just wide enough for one computer. And even late in the evening, it was very, very busy...

This is just one small corner of the indie area.

Not really knowing almost any of these games, my 1337 MLG Pro Gamescom strat was to wander around until I spotted an empty chair and then play whatever game was going and chat with the dev if they were around. This worked out pretty well! I'll write up the games I played in a moment, but first I'm overdue to wax philosophical.

What was really striking about walking around the indie area is just how many games there are. Wandering around you can pretty quickly spot patterns and influences just by glimpsing at screens (here's a combat tutorial, there's a crafting/survival game, and yonder a narrative game that's borrowed the entire interface of Disco Elysium).

I've seen, up close and personal now, just how much fiddly effort and dedication it takes to make a game. There's something kind of strange and alienating to me about encountering all this creative output in a massive aggregate, where you can only give it maybe half an hour in a noisy room, surrounded by a dozen more or less similar games, in a way that kind of demands you rapidly assign it into a broad, combinatoric category: x art style, y core mechanic, z emotional register. Presenting this game this way really seems to file them all down to Content, which can be boxed and tagged and matched to a consumer with the appropriate set of subculture flags.

One thing that is distinctive about games as a medium to me is the very strong separation between 'mechanics' and 'presentation'. To produce a game you don't just need a system to manipulate, but also associate it with a narrative to make it comprehensible and lend it some sort of affective impact.

So you could theoretically make a game with the exact same mechanics as, say, Half-Life 2 - the same movement, the same enemy hitboxes, the same collision geometry and shooting mechanics and progression - but a completely different presentation style and telling a completely different story. Indeed, a typical early stage of game development has placeholder 'programmer art' and 'greybox' levels.

Equally, you could lift the iconography of a game and drape it over a completely different mechanical substrate - and indeed, it isn't at all uncommon for major franchises to launch spinoffs in different genres.

So games as a medium consist of all these different pieces which you can attach in various ways to define a game which you can name. And once this is done, that game becomes in a sense 'concrete': we act as if Half-Life 2 is an object with a distinct existence. It's a powerful social construct. Then, a successful game is then one which manages to unify all these disparate elements into some sort of whole that feels coherent. Game development sees all the possible elements of a game gradually collapse into whatever gets released. It's highly stochastic: an arbitrary decision by a tired dev, or even a glitch, might later become fixed as one of the core icons of the great 'Franchise'.

When there were less games around, and it was a lot harder for people to get their hands on dev tools, it made sense to think of games as solid, discrete things. Whatever you got on the cartridge or disc was pretty much immutable. Now, though, most major games operate as a 'service' that is constantly modified, and it is not uncommon either for players to mod a game, on a continuum from small changes like injecting shaders or changing music, to total conversion mods that are a 'whole new game'.

And indie games, then... you've got a subculture which heavily emphasise sharing techniques, and it's just as beholden to genre as AAA games. The existence of all these games side by side, even though each one has its own name and identity, seems to further break up "games" into combinations of pieces. When I encounter a new third-person action game, it's as a variation on a kind of broader, abstracted super-game. My first task is to discover the particular quirks of this manifestation of the third person action game. The days when we had a shared culture of 'games everyone has played' are basically already gone, but we still have a certain degree of shared context, because each game is a probe into that constantly evolving game-space, which someone has gone to the trouble to fish out and decorate...

I suppose this is all coming back around to the otaku database thing, isn't it? Or just semiotics in general...

Anyway, here's what I found on Thursday:

I played an FPS called Serum, in which the core conceit is that you inject big syringes into your arm to give yourself powerups. Otherwise, it seems to be a game about gathering and crafting. Sadly the demo computer didn't have headphones, so I was missing sound, and seemed to be a bit underpowered for the game. Nevertheless, I walked around a bit, manufactured a healing serum, and shot some wolf and rabbit monsters with a bow and arrow.

I feel like I was rather ruder than I intended to be, because in talking to the dev afterwards, the first thing I mentioned was the performance issues and he had to apologise like, yeah, we're running it on a laptop (it sounded like he said with a 3070? but I must have misheard him, unless he has very high standards for underpowered), it does run better on a proper computer. The environment design in this game was definitely really strong. Not quite sure how the serum mechanic would work in practice - it sounds quite like Bioshock's plasmids, but the demo didn't really give the opportunity to try out the different options.

I played Dead Pets Unleashed, an adventure game about a demon girl in a struggling punk band. One of the devs was hanging out with this one and generally had a great vibe, joking about how almost nobody picked a certain option and suggesting the route that would get the most out of the demo.

The game uses a sidescrolling perspective with hand-drawn sprites. The art style is very consciously flat, its population of monster people allowing an impressive variety of colours. It broadly alternates between conversations with choices that adjust stats (e.g. +punk, -social) and a variety of minigames - there was a music minigame of course (the conceit being chasing away intrusive thoughts), but I also washed a dildo, constructed a hot dog, and waited tables. Generally it oozed style, absolutely nailing the punk vibe, and had a bunch of cute features like changing your character's outfit. You can play the same demo on Steam. I think this is one I might well get when the full release comes.

And then I played... a game I can't even find now! I really should have made a note or taken a picture or something. It was a kind of Amanita-like point and click game in which you play a tin can person, manipulating objects as you try to rescue your can dog, descending into a city made of cardboard boxes. The puzzles were occasionally a bit obtuse, but the cute style really carried it. The devs weren't on hand for this one, but they did have a wall where you could leave postit notes with your comments on the game, including one with a fairly essential hint for the first puzzle. It was called something like 'can world' or 'box world', but at this point, I can't find it anywhere. It's a shame because I thought it was neat.

That was all I had time for on Thursday: I zoomed off to another restaurant by the river to eat some more falafels. Someone let off some fireworks for some reason.

We started to make our way back, across the famous Hohenzollern Bridge, which is one of those bridges with a tradition that lovers will attach a padlock to the fence to symbolise how long their relationship will last.

At this point the padlocks have started to resemble kudzu, hanging down in strands of linked padlocks, or even growing up onto the superstructure of the bridge on chains. Questionable symbolism or not, it all makes for a fantastic textural effect, especially since it maintains the sheer density of padlocks for the entire length of the bridge.

While we were crossing, a boat passed under the bridge carrying some kind of a party. From a distance, all you could really see was a mass of glowsticks, and all you could hear was the ghost of the beat. It was a cool sight.

At this point I was pretty much completely exhausted so while there was some kind of industry party I definitely could not handle the crowds and walked home past the cathedral for an early night, eager to head in early to Gamescom tomorrow with a good night's sleep...

Friday: just like in my Bloodbornes, amirite gamers?

Predictably I overslept. Since I'd only get a few hours at Gamescom, I decided to visit the famous cathedral. I took that photo that I posted earlier, where somehow my little phone camera absolutely nailed the lighting, even if the cathedral is severely out of focus...

I headed inside the building too.

Cologne Cathedral (Kölner Dom) is a bit of an oddball, historically. While it wasn't uncommon for cathedral-building projects to last a century, after working on this thing from 1248–1560 they downed tools, leaving the city with a half-finished cathedral for about 300 years.

They had the front and back of a cathedral, with a big crane on the front part.

In the 1800s, the middle ages were in and the state decided it would be a good idea to have a big cathedral - both to make their new Catholic subjects happy and a symbol of THE NATION. After raising a stonking amount of money with one of the world's first NGOs, they built the rest of this thing, which briefly became the tallest building in the world. Hooray, said Emperor Wilhelm I. I love being a big strong nation with a big cathedral dick.

The cathedral survived the first world war, but got hit by a lot of bombs in the second - though the towers remained standing. After the war, they put it back up again. Now, it's a tourist attraction. Transsexual atheists can walk in and turn their phone to funny angles to try and capture the ceiling...

You can call this a Deutsch angle, because... ok whatever guys they can't all be winners.

They've got some old school Christian-style guro in here.

The interior is pretty cool: huge vaulted ceiling, massive stained glass. The stained glass unfortunately photographs really poorly on a phone, the colours washed out pretty much no matter what. They did have this funky ladder contraption, which I assume is probably used for maintaining/washing the windows...

After a little while in there I decided this was pretty neat but I'd go to Gamescom, to say goodbye to everyone and maybe get a glance at some of the mainstream game zones. As it turned out we had another demo lined up, so we went back to The Corner Near BHaptics and did the routine. This time the audience was mostly other VR devs so I got to have some nice technical discussion.

At last, I had about an hour before my train. I thought about exploring the indie game zone some more, but decided I should really at least take a glance through the other halls. What I discovered was... queues! Many many queues. And various elaborate dioramas.

Sometimes they had actors to go with them. I decided to include the people taking the photo because... I don't even know what I was going for with this one to be honest, it seems kind of banal.

Here's a queue of people waiting to play Rogue Trader, which boldly tells you it's the first(!) CRPG in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, hopefully not also the last. 'Warhammer CRPG' is a concept that 16-year-old Bryn would have gone completely insane about. 31-year-old Bryn was still a bit curious, but not enough to wait for a sitting down queue with less than an hour left at the con.

I didn't take a lot of photos of the Extremely Gamer Shit, but for a taster, this lady was DJing a set on something called the 'Leet Desk', which appears to be a desk with built in RGB lighting, billed as 'the desk for gamers', because we can no longer contain the rainbow puke. When I walked past, she was playing an EDM remix of a tune that I vaguely recognised from a movie or a game but couldn't place specifically, which felt about right. Maybe it was Skyrim?

A lot of people walked around with the Hoyoverse bag, Hoyoverse being the collective term for the games of Chinese developer miHoYo such as Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact. Their slogan was 'tech otakus save the world', which thanks to their cunning move of handing out large bags, was soon paraded all over the convention. I feel like the jury is still out on the impact (ha ha) of tech otakus on the world...

In the end, the last hour was spent briefly walking around to see the halls and then I left to say my goodbyes and hop back on the train. The journey back was totally straightforward. I finished reading my manga and drew some more train passengers, who were generally pretty happy to be drawn.

Cosplay

It's a con, there's gotta be cosplayers right? Sure enough, the crowd was peppered with stormtroopers, kitsune, army men, luffies and various spooky skull guys... I didn't get many photos but here's a couple.

Obligatory stormtroopers. Luckily, the inside of the con was airconditioned, those suits look toasty.

These three kindly stopped to pose for me. I don't know what game they're doing, Dead by Daylight maybe? DbD girls, tell me ^^'

This robot-girl cosplayer's costume is neat: when you look close you see it's made of old PC parts. Or at least the casings of them. I spotted a graphics card and an old VR headset. She also has built-in stilts so she towered over everyone, big respect. She was hanging out in the hall on Wednesday, so she might have been there in an official capacity, but I didn't get a chance to talk to her.

Observations of demographics and stuff

It's been a good long while since I've been to any sort of nerd convention. Mostly I've been to scifi/media fandom cons like Nine Worlds and Worldcon, or general nerd-shit cons like MCM Expo, and in the old old days, Warhammer cons like Game Day. But this event being specifically a gaming expo was pretty new to me.

Predictably the demographics skewed male (but not overwhelmingly) and white/East Asian (almost without exception). The various national organisations present were primarily European (which tracks for an event in Germany) but there were large stands e.g. promoting Korean game dev or the Guangzhao region of China. In the indie zone, there were a good handful of Japanese devs, and I spotted one game that was fully in JP. Here and there, you'd spot banners promoted other gaming expos - a lot in Europe, but also there is apparently a Gamescom Asia in Singapore, and a Tokyo Indie Games Summit which sounds pretty fun. By contrast, while I don't have any real stats to substantiate, I would say I saw very few organisations were promoting game devs from South America, Africa or Oceania.

Beyond that... this is very definitely a place for nerds, but there's a lot of different varieties of nerd you can be now. So sure, T-shirts with slogans and cargo shorts for many, but equally you could dress super goth, you could show off all your tattoos, you could go in your colourful coordinated kitsune cosplay or just wear some bright hair die. I'm confident I saw a few other girls from the isle of 🏳️‍⚧️, but 'hello I clocked you let's be friends' is not the best introduction even from another trans girl lmao - in general I didn't really talk to people besides the group I had arrived with. I think if I'd gone alone, it would not be the sort of con where you make a lot of friends, but who knows?

All in all, a solid adventure. I'll probably go again next year, if I can find somewhere cheaper to stay. I never did get to see the chocolate museum.

ok, story over - thanks for reading, nerd ;p

[sleeplittleearth]

appreciate the tag @cranberrymoons :)

current song: "Elegy from Gump Worsley" by the Weakerthans--can recommend if you want to feel extremely wistful about a mid-century NHL goaltender

currently reading: still very slowly working my way through May We Be Spared to Meet on Earth, a collection of letters relating to the lost Franklin Arctic expedition, but I also started Mort by Terry Pratchett recently

currently watching: nothing really atm. I think the last thing I finished was season 2 of good omens, and in theory I'm working my way through M*A*S*H, but in practice I haven't watched an episode in months

current obsession: been dusting off my (admittedly meagre) html skills and learning more about web design and stuff. been thinking a lot about web 1.0 and what kind of spaces can exist on a modern social internet outside of social media, and also just like the aesthetics of amateur web design. I'm just a teensy bit on the young side to have really gotten the full experience of all this the first time around, so it's very cool to see people reviving these practices, particularly against the backdrop of the absolute chaos of social media atm

zero presh, but I'll tag @aquilathefighter @thirrith @ghostboyjules @sarumans @likemmmcookies

[doubleddenden]

Okay so I've been playing Star Rail and I'm gonna do a lil amateur review because I do that sometimes

Here's my take

1. I like it. I got it for pc and it's fun when I can play it.

More under the cut

2. It is free to play with micro transactions, however I've not spent any money on it and I find it quite playable and easy to get into. That being said, I started with a lot of free stuff from starting so early and codes, so my experience may have differed if I started later.

3. It's a turned based RPG akin to JRPGs like Digimon Cyber Sleuth, Persona 5, etc, but a little easier to comprehend combat wise

4. Story and setting so far is something sort of like a mix of Star Ocean- specifically 4 with the planet hopping- or Rogue Galaxy, with... well, a LOT of mystic, techno, scifi, and religious babble. Enjoyable tho. I love space trains so much. It's dumb but classy. There's also a LOT of optional lore you can collect and read to really help you get immersed if that's your thing, and characters will have a lot of dialogue to give you more world building lore too. That being said, they do kinda just toss you into the ocean with really complex shit right out the gate with no vuild up- I've been told that having SOME knowledge of the Honkai Impact series can build upon what's given, but it's not entirely necessary.

5. Graphics are great, I like the art style and how polished everything looks. Art style works for the game and it looks gorgeous. I do think the NPCs kinda look plain, but that's about expected.

6. Music is passable. Not really finding any ear worms just yet, though. The summoning music and the train music are great though.

7. It might be me and my somewhat shit connection, but I experience lag and disconnection sometimes. This can get pretty frustrating

8. Characters are fun and have fun dynamics with each other. I already dig The Trailblazer, Dan Hung, and March 7th's dynamic- I will say, wtf is this name? Like I know why, but still, not just March, March 7th specifically is her name. Is her full name Saturday, March 7th, 5023 AD?

9. Voice acting is... decent enough. I play English dub because I have reading difficulties due to unmedicated ADHD, before anyone starts screaming at me to change languages. There's some strange takes or line reads sometimes, sometimes the voice will read something different from the text, and there's a couple of voices I wish would just sound... different. But the majority is passable to really good. I've also heard some unexpected voices- you could say they are TRASH, but I find them TASTEful.

10. Character design is pretty fun imo- definitely a bit of Genshin style, but it is by the same people so you kind of expect that. But they're fun to look at, have fun weapons and moves, and have great art. My one complaint would be similar builds and designs for some characters, but that's minor and also expected. But I will say, I do prefer a good anime style over indie cartoon or realistic style, so to me I think it's great.

11. The menus are... very complex. Easy to lose track and get lost in. I swear the pause menu rearranges every time I open it.

12. It shouldn't need saying, but: It's not Genshin Impact- that's fine actually. In fact it's great, turn based rpgs are really fun, especially JRPG styled, which i like to play (Dragon Quest 11, Digimon Cyber Sleuth, Persona 5, Pokémon, etc). While I do like exploring open worlds and having a lot of freedom and real time fighting, sometimes it's nice to have a simpler point A to point B system with smaller maps, and especially nice to have auto battle. There's a bit of carry over from Genshin, but i think it works for what's given. I do miss my emergency fo- I mean, my adorable best friend Paimon, but she and all my other Genshins are Impacting in the other game while I Rail some Sta- wait I'm not finishing that sentence.

13. It is gacha. You kind of expect it- some people won't like it, I kinda like it to some degree, but I do got issues. Basically watch your spending- again, I haven't felt the need to, unlike some games that feel like you have to to get anything done. But it definitely would help to speed things along if i were. When you get a good character, it's a nice feeling for me, personally. That being said they do give you 3 pretty good ones right out the gate, and you do gather in game materials to help you summon at a fair pace anyway, so you're rolling decently enough to get something out of it.

Overall an 8/10 so far. I wanna keep playing, but unfortunately this damn meat mech that is my wretched bodily prison of my soul requires sleep, and I have things I have to do.

[covington-shenanigans]

hell yeah! I was an alto before T and now I'm a baritone, trending to bass, and I sing just as well as I ever did! (which is decently well lol like I'm not a professional but I sing in a very good community choir and I can hold my own.) if you want to sing after you start T, you can!

tips from a totally amateur trans male singer, based on my own experience and that of trans male singers I've talked to:

keep singing even when your voice cracks! my voice teacher told me your voice cracking while singing is good because it means you're singing from your diaphragm rather than from your throat

breath support breath support breath support!

don't worry when you have trouble matching pitch for a while -- you're relearning your muscle memory and it's going to be tough for a bit, but if you keep singing through it you'll relearn it faster

parts of your range may be very weak for a while but this is temporary, keep singing and they'll come back

your "break"/passagio is going to shift down and may keep changing for a while

your "head voice" is going to shift to a falsetto after a while, it's pretty cool

you may be able to sing in your chest voice relatively higher than you used to before T

your lowest notes and your highest notes are apparently using the same muscles (according to my voice teacher), so work both ends of your range and be assured you're not harming your ability to sing low when you practice your high notes

there's a lot more overlap between "male" and "female" vocal ranges in terms of notes than a lot of people realize, it's mostly about vocal timbre and tone

your voice is still your voice, whether it's lower or not, and it's beautiful <3

that's all I can think of for now. anyway HRT rules and singing is great and everyone should do it more, especially trans people

i am SO sick of the fearmongering around T and how it will affect your singing voice. i have been singing since i was a kid. i mean i have been singing as long as i could talk, i was once in an all girls choir, i was the youngest person in my churches choir when i was, like, 8. i never had much confidence in my voice because i sounded like a girl, which led me to singing less, which led me to sounding worse. before i started T i was SO worried that it would ruin my beautiful feminine singing voice.

but the difference is like night and day. i sound SO much better than i did pre-T. i can sing without hating myself. i sound like a man and i can sing

and yea maybe i’m no longer and 8 year old soprano. but i can sing and listen to myself and not want to die and isn’t that fucking wonderful?

[ofrionstage]

Irregularly Documenting My Creative Journey, PHASE: Editing PART: 0.5: First Drafts and Rants

4.2.2025

Hi guys!

I want to try out different ideas for the title and see what looks best with the new editing phase, so the titles will be a bit inconsistent for the next few updates. Anyways!

This part is called part 0.5 because I'm not counting it as a part, all I did ever since my last update was take the finale that I wrote on paper (for some reason) and type it all out on my digital document that has the rest of the draft, so technically I didn't make any editing progress yet because I wanted it all organized.

The first draft of the finale has over 3,200 words, and the complete first draft of my project has 20,140 words in total, which is both really cool and a little terrrifying.

As I reached the end, I understood just how much stuff I'm going to have to rework, and I was really nervous. I try to be honest with this documentation series, and I'd be lying if I said the thought of reading some of the parts in this first draft didn't scare me. Weirdly enough, me getting distracted was what helped. When my attention was inevitably on other stuff, I found a lot of supportive posts and videos here and on youtube that can all be narrowed down to one sentence:

"First drafts are SUPPOSED TO suck, they WILL suck, and you WILL be able to fix them eventually." It made me feel a lot better!

If you see this and you're like me, an amateur writer with a scary first draft, I'll save you the panicked research, this is real. The world won't see and mock our first drafts, and we are all going to be just fine! I got this, you got this, let us face the draft folder!! :D

Speaking of the draft folder, as painful as it was to read some of it, I also had some great moments working on it! I came up with this sentence today as a last minute change and I am SO PROUD OF MYSELF for it:

('the same' = doing something foolish out of care for the one you love) YOU FREAKING GO GIRL!!! OBLITIRATE THE VILLAIN EMOTIONALLY!

I honestly love how I'm writing Annalise. She's the main character(the princess who swears the oath to save her brothers), and originally, in my mind, she was a bit one-dimensional and only focused on her goals and ambition for her kingdom. As I actually started writing, however, I think I found some depth in there. Now, she's the type of person that wants to be cheerful and loving and just pick flowers and spend time with loved ones, but she's serious and stern by default because that's how she was taught to face the outside world, even if she really wants to be more caring on the outside. All she was taught since she was born was how to lead, how to be stern, how to remain strong, etc. In the beginning, she is sure 'love' is a formal, professional sort of feeling because that's how she feels towards her father. She only allows herself to be herself with her childhood best friend, which is because they're in love with each other(but they don't know that yet, so shhhh).

And then she meets her brothers- a bunch of lovable idiots who genuinely care about her, even if they mess with her from time to time. After some time with them, her real side slowly comes out. She smiles more, she's cheerful, she breathes easier, all because she experiences and understands genuine love. She feels like herself.

And then it goes downhill, because I may be a coward but I'm still a writer and the plot must plot. Because this is a first draft, I will most likely change some things with Annalise as I edit in the future, which is fine! Changes to a story are always allowed. I think I just wanted to rant a little about my current vision for my MC. Sorry about that!

Anyways, if you're still here, thank you for bearing with my rants! if you're not here anymore, that's obviously fine. Either way, I hope you have a great day, and goodbye! :)