Very recently, out of a desire to have something to do that didn’t require any input or attention from me (well, and to continue teaching Crunchyroll what kinds of stuff I liked), I started watching Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood. This is easily one of my favorite anime since it is a remake of the Fullmetal Alchemist story that closely adheres to the manga by the same name, which is absolutely my favorite manga series. I am not a fan of the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime since it seems to go in some odd directions pretty much immediately (largely because the anime series was made well before the manga series was finished), but I know plenty of people who watched it and enjoyed it. I’ll admit a level of bias here since I started reading Fullmetal Alchemist as one of my first manga series right as the first two volumes were released in the US and I didn’t miss a new volume until the series concluded. I read through it at a very formative time in my life and the story has stuck with me for years, standing up to scrutiny each time I read through it again and sometimes revealing things I missed the first time. Which is what I’m finding now as I watch the anime and think my way through the bits of the manga that it skips past or trims to fit a different media format. There’s a whole major aspect to this story I never really considered all that deeply despite how integral it is to the setting. Sure, it isn’t something that’s addressed explicitly by the manga or anime, but it’s not only a major aspect of the setting and worldbuilding, but a active backdrop that helps develop every single character in the series. After all, the story wouldn’t be even close to the same if it wasn’t about power struggles and working towards the good of all within a facist, authoritarian state.
Continue readingGetting Attached To A Shiny Pokémon Because Of A Sad Story
As I’ve been slowly working my way through the Pokémon Violet DLC, I’ve been listening to a wide variety of podcasts. I finished working through the entire Patreon catalogue of Friends at the Table and have begun to catch up on my usual collection of podcasts that fell by the wayside while I was incredibly focused on the one thing. I’ve been jumping around, from one thing to another, as my time and attention demand, and having a generally pleasant time half listening to a bunch of podcasts and half playing a game whose structure I’m fairly content to ignore. It makes for pleasant evenings, most of the time, though I’ll admit it gets very difficult to handle plot bits of Pokémon that I run into if I’m also trying to listen to anything. My general answer to that is to spend time wandering the new land and catching Pokémon when I’m more interested in the podcast than in making story progress, so I’ve barely done any of the DLC’s story (or at least what feels like barely any of the story but could easily be half or more of it, depending on how long it runs). What I’ve done plenty of is catch Pokémon and enjoy the scenery of this new area.
Continue readingNational Novel Writing Month 2023
Today is the first day of National Novel Writing Month (Or NaNoWriMo as I’ll be calling it in the rest of the post) and I only just decided I was going to definitely participate yesterday (which, coincidentally, is the day I wrote this post). I’ve been thinking about it for a bit, but not as long as I usually do. Normally, there’s little else on my mind as summer finally begins to fade into fall, but this past year (since it has actually been a year of this life stress and chaos now, despite my desperate attempts to avoid it) has driven most things beyond the immediate day and sometimes week I’m experiencing so far from my mind that I’m beginning to forget what it is like to live any other way. So when my friend asked if I was planning to do NaNoWriMo, it caught me off guard since I did not have an answer prepared and I almost dismissed the question as being hardly relevant right then, despite it being the twenty-first of October, because I’d forgotten how soon the beginning of November was. Still, it’s not like I had to do much to prepare. I’m fairly adept at coming up with writing projects and while I expect to struggle with finding the time I need to do my daily writing since my schedule is already so full, I expect I’ll be able to find enough to write about to fill any words left over should I finish the last twenty-ish chapters of Infrared Isolation before I hit the required fifty thousand words for the month. I mean, the first twenty chapters are over seventy-five thousand words, so I’m really not worried, even if I wind up being a few chapters short of forty-six.
Continue readingVox Machina Season 2 Is As Violently Messy As This Post Is Meandering
After many months of waiting (I promised to watch with a friend and I do my best to keep my word when I’ve got the choice), I finally watched Season 2 of Vox Machina. These twelve episodes, clearly broken into three-episode chunks with particularly hefty cliffhangers meant to hook the viewer at the end of each weekly chunk of episodes (at least, you know, when the episodes where initially released), cover the beginning of the longest arc of the streamed Critical Role Campaing 1 tabletop game, from the arrival of the Chroma Conclave (an alliance of Ancient Dragons) to the climatic battle against the the first of the four Ancient Dragons that has conquered the kingdom the heroes called home. While much of the first season’s changes were made to adapt the show from a streamed tabletop game to a cartoon, much of the second season’s changes were made to make the story as a whole flow better (on top of continuing the changes required to adapt the story). It even mixes up a lot of the individual story beats from the streamed game of Dungeons and Dragons 5e, but it tells a much cleaner story in doing so. Over all, I have to say I like the cartoon more than the streamed show. Sure, watching a bunch of professional actors play dungeons and dragons is fun, but it is also super time-consuming. They really belabor the various plots, big and small, of a tabletop game in a way that is fun to watch as an on-going streamed game, but not really something that would make an interesting or particularly engaging story in any other medium. While I do hold a special place in my heart for the 100 episodes of Critical Roles Campaign 1 that I watched, I think that adapting the story to a cartoon has allowed it to become the interesting and engaging story I remember rather than the somewhat long and belabored story I have been unwilling to watch a second time and unable to push myself to finish.
Continue readingReturning To Nimona With Some Company Along For The Ride
Over the weekend, I visited a friend for her birthday and the two of us caught up on some streaming stuff that she was behind on. I was also behind on some of it, on account of having promised to watch it with her and waiting until we had the chance to even think of watching it, but I’d already seen Nimona. I saw it the week following its release, resubscribing to Netflix for the first time in years to do so. I figured my second time through the movie would be less impactful, mostly because the moment-to-moment tension of the movie would be gone after the first viewing, but I figured I’d be familiar with it enough the second time around that I’d start to look for things I missed the first time. More background details. What the other characters in the movie are doing when the movie is directing my attention to a specific place. Subtle nuance I missed in the course of the raw emotions I experienced the first time through. That sort of stuff. Instead, the only difference was that I knew things were coming and was able to eagerly await them rather then be surprised when they showed up. Sure, it was a bit less tense and a bit less moving, but I still felt the same way as when I watched it the first time. I still experienced the same swells of emotion at the same parts, even if they never quite reached the peak of my first time watching the movie. The only thing that was different was that I was watching it with someone else.
Continue readingDecorating A Haunted Office
He hangs the decoration, a scrap of white with a face facsimile adorning the lumpy top, and then shifts his ladder five feet to hang another. They do not match his vision, but they match his wallet. He pauses, steps away, and returns, shifting the decoration once listed as “hanging ghost” half a foot away. He might not take pride in the look of the thing, but he takes pride in the look of them all. These imperfect pieces must be placed perfectly.
When he is done, the room is dark. Lights turned off to check the effect are now off in earnest. He cannot turn them on again. The building has gone dark while he labored, his coworkers gone and the thermostat set low for the night. There is no one left to see if his vision is visible amongst the clutter and decorations.
He takes one last look round before returning to this office and the one light he could turn back on after time turned them all off. He packs his things, glancing out at the bits of cloth and draped cotton that are visible from his drawing board, all while silently hanging his thoughts on the wall for another day. These mingled doubts, anxieties, and notes of pride will still be there tomorrow, when he can act on them. He does not need them now.
When he is gone, the decorations battle the scant airflow of the greater office, fighting to stay where he placed them. They were not made with pride or care, but they were placed with an abundance of both and what little power they have will be spent to show everyone else the vision he so carefully cultivated: a room haunted in truth by the death of a dream no one supported.
Finding Comfort In The Cool Fall Weather
So far, the cooler seasons are off to a great start for me, personally. I’ve not only learned that my apartment can get a decent enough cross-breeze if the wind is coming from the right direction, but that just closing the windows is enough for the temperature to start rising inside it, even after the sun has shifted from shining through the windows to just reflecting off the roof. Any day where I’ve felt like my apartment got too cold overnight (the lowest I’ve seen it so far was just under sixty degrees and that was a night it was almost freezing outside), all I have to do is close the windows and it will warm right back up again. My old apartment could not be counted on to ever warm back up and then stay warm throughout the day unless I had the heat running. As a result of all that, I actually had my windows open for over two weeks in a row, adjusting how open they were to control the temperature and enjoying every minute of fresh air I was getting. In fact, the only reason they weren’t open longer is because I left for the weekend to visit a friend and wanted to see what would happen during a relatively chilly weekend if I left all the windows shut and the air off. It worked out pretty well, though it never got quite as warm as I’d hoped it would, so I’ll probably need to run a few more tests to dial in my expectations.
Continue readingSo Much For Restraint At Work…
It has been a week and a half since my boss told me I could take my side “research” project and work on it more actively. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to really do that since I’ve gotten sidetracked every single day by something that came up and required my attention. I did get to spend one evening of work earlier this week doing research on some of the tools I’d be using and I got to have a chat with a few people about how to make this useful for them, but I haven’t made much forward progress because the other people I need to talk to are busy during every free moment I’ve got. Between not being able to access people and running into my own time and energy limitations, I’ve actually done less work on this project in the last week and a half than I did in the single week prior. There’s just been so much going on and I’ve been unable to pull myself away from most of it since, after all, this project isn’t really my job. It is now a thing my boss doesn’t mind me working on, but I think we’re both aware that he meant I had to still keep up with the stuff that features more heavily in my job description.
Continue readingThe Return of Pokémon Violet: It’s Shiny Time
After several delays due to life chaos and the general distraction of other video games, I’ve begun playing through the first chunk of Pokémon Scarlet/Violet DLC. It felt a little odd, returning to the game for the first time in several months. I’ve kept the software updated and I’ve gone back into the game once or twice since I finished playing last winter, but never for more than a couple minutes. I don’t think I even saved either time, since I was mostly going in to check something. I’d avoided it for so long because there’d been a lot of reports of save file corruption due to one of the late winter or early spring updates and I didn’t want to risk my complete Pokédex. I figured that, until Pokémon Home was available, it just wasn’t worth the risk. Then Pokémon Home came out and I still didn’t play. Normally, I’d have restarted it and played through the game again that instant, but I have been busy this summer (to put it simply), so it fell to the bottom of my list until I remembered the first of two DLC segments was releasing sometime soon. After that, it was mostly just a timing thing and feeling uncertain about whether or not I was up for more Pokémon. I was in the middle of a wave of depression, so it was difficult to start doing anything new. Once I did, though, I was glad I went back.
It was easy to forget given how much stuff has happened since it came out, but I think this Pokémon game was the most fun I’ve ever had playing an entry in the franchise. I mean, sure, it was incredibly buggy and had enormous performance issues, but it was the first entry in the franchise that I could play with my friends. Some of my best memories from the horrible period that was the start of last winter involve getting together with my friends to play together, do some raids, or even just hang out in voice chat while we all played by ourselves. I think the game would have benefited from a few more months of work of course, but the people making the games have shown that each thing they do is part of a cumulative effort to improve the franchise as a whole, so I remain hopeful that the next game will have everything Scarlet and Violet did, but better. I mean, its not like they’re going to be backsliding or somehow releasing a worse game than the last one. Sure, the games may not have lived up to everyone’s expectations, but they’re still better games than the previous iteration. I mean, hell, people give Sword and Shield a lot of guff, but at least you didn’t have to be taught how to catch Pokémon if you’d already caught one and it was SO much better than the hours-long intro of Sun and Moon.
All the company really needs to do is stop redoing all the Pokémon models every release or two and focus on other work. There’s too many Pokémon for that shit. I know a lot of people didn’t like this game and while I absolutely understand the frustration they’re voicing, I can’t help but think that, laggy moments aside, it runs better than most BioWare games I’ve played right at release. Sure, it would have been better if they’d focused on optimizing the game for the Switch’s admittedly limited hardware, but it’s still not that bad, compared to the general state of the video game industry. It actually delivered on the promises it made, even if did so at a subpar framerate. I’m not saying we shouldn’t voice our opinions or attempt to hold the company to account for what seems like a product they rushed to the market (likely against the wishes of the people actually making the game), I just don’t think it’s worth hating the game over. I mean, it would bug the hell out of me to have worked on a piece of software that was this full of visible issues when it got to customers, but I also know that sometimes your schedule says “release” and you’ve already done everything you could to suggest (or demand) that the product should be delayed for quality reasons, so you can only sit by and watch a minor disaster unfold (save those emails, everyone, because it can be really helpful to show you noted all those issues months ago when someone comes knocking on your door to find out how, as the bastion of quality, test let something this poorly performing get past them).
I haven’t gotten very far into the DLC since, true to form, I stopped following the plot and ran as far as I could in the opposite direction. There’s tons of new Pokémon to catch and I have to catch ’em. Which has worked out pretty well for me, all things considered, since I’ve caught three new shiny Pokémon in the three evenings I’ve spent playing the game [predictably, my rate of catching shinies has dropped off since I wrote this]. I caught two the first night (a shiny Poochyena literally walked up to me within a minute of being able to control my character in the new area we went to) and one on my most recent night. All completely random shiny spawns. Just wandering around the world for me to find. Which is funny, since I’ve tried to go shiny hunting before, when some of my favorite Pokémon were showing up in swarms, but I’ve never managed to get a shiny one during those times, despite how much I’d shifted the odds in my favor. I literally spent four hours shiny farming a Vaporean outbreak and had nothing to show for it, despite encountering enough Vaporean that I should have seen at least four shinies if the statistics I’d looked up held true. It’s been a bit frustrating, to see all my friends have a great deal of success with shiny hunting but be unable to get lucky even once when I’ve gone looking.
Every shiny I’ve ever caught, outside of plot shinies, has been the result of completely random chance. I’ll admit that Violet has been pretty good for shinies, but three of the four I’ve found were found just recently, in the DLC, and this is not exactly representative of my experience as a whole. Outside of Pokémon go and the aforementioned plot shinies, I’ve averaged maybe one per generation, and that’s even counting Pokémon Legends: Arceus (my previous record-holder for most shiny Pokémon caught in a single game). Still, Violet is a lot of fun to play. I miss the days when my friends and I played together, but it has been a long year and a lot has changed since then. Half the people I played with back then are no longer in my life (all thanks to the wizarding world bullshit of February), so it’s not like I could recreate that experience. Now, all I can do is hope that I make new friends who are just as into Pokémon as I am and that the ones I’m still friends with are still up for playing it even though I’m a month late to the party. Time will tell, I’m sure, but I will continue regardless. Pokémon used to be a solo experience for me and it will be fine if it goes back to being that again.
Telling Human Stories In Heart: The City Beneath
I’ve now run two sessions of Heart: The City Beneath and I think I definitely picked the right game for this group. We’re moving at a glacial pace, compared to how the game is built to run, but that’s because we’re doing some pretty heavy roleplaying. We’re also still getting used to the game and I’m still introducing my players to the various systems and rules involved it, along with carefully setting expectations as we go, so I’m really not that worried about our pace. I’m making sure to separate the game’s mechanical concept of “a session” from the actual runtime and pacing of our gaming sessions since it would really undercut the utility of several moves and the pacing of the beat system if we completely abandoned our rate of play and strictly adhered to the period of time on specific days that we gathered to play the game. I mean, I had a powerful figure in the world give my characters “An Answer” as part of their payment for the tutorial mission (meant to help them all solidify their character’s goals and provide them with a bit of information they could use to kick off their character’s journey) and we spent almost half the session roleplaying through everyone’s answers. A quarter of the session went to talking about how the game worked and translating the things we were discussing into more concrete terms for the players and the last quarter was smaller bits of roleplaying and the final stages of the tutorial delve. We filled almost four hours in the blink of an eye and we were even down a player.
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