Zines (not mags)

i had the weirdest dream last night of reading this really baller book

and the plot's fuzzy, some kind of 'we need to get to the root of this cosmic horror situation' but there was this human who was talking to his brother(?)/lover about how to solve this shit, and then the instant he mentioned this plan of ingesting this Artifact that merged all human consciousness, the written POV switched from "he" to "you" as in "you the reader" that had been Subsumed By The Artefact just by continuing to read on.

like it sucks ass here in the daylight, but in the dream was done in a technical way that was entirely too convincing

and dude

i literally woke up going holy shiT THAT IS THE BEST PLOT TWIST EVER EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THIS (cue frank e peretti but heretical yaoi yumejoshi cosmic horror comment)

????

(has that kind of thing ever been done?)

this weighted blanket is giving me some weirdass dreams and i kinda love it ngl

i've spent the last day slowly figuring out the scope of what i want in this next project with gamedev....

see, it's always been a dream of mine to recreate tellius as a walkable 3D world. i like that world and characters, and think it'd be Neat. it's safe to say after twenty years i doubt i'll get bored with it anytime soon, so the low-level consistent drive is certinally there. but actually taking a stab at this does several additional things:

* forces me to learn blender beyond 'pick a video to do one small thing, flail a bit with copying it, and giving up out of boredom'.  3D modeling is one of the last frontiers creatively that i had been intimidated by, and this would create a consistent positive cycle with lots of mini-goals to tinker with, while not having to come up with ideas from scratch.

* obviously this wouldn't be sell-able in any way given the IP, but giving the game files to tellius old heads to have fun with would be cute. :)

* lowkey honest to god great reference for future tellius doujinshi/drawings.....

anyway -

finding PoR/RD's high res textures was an incredible boon because the bottleneck of most games is the sheer amount of assets needed, even if you're an artist. i like painting textures, but i was not looking forward to having to recreate .... everything.... this also lets me put in placeholders with fairly little effort as well as seamlessly matching the world i'd want to recreate.

 i'm actually considering using blockbench again for the initial wave of modeling because i had about a month or two genuinely having fun with it creating basic low poly work and painting my own textures to the point i made a walk cycle for one character and a basic environment with fairly little difficulty (this was right before gunter ate my brain in 2023 or so). perhaps working in that program there briefly could stretch those muscles again before attempting blender...

* in terms of NPC and general graphic complexity, i'd be happy with a majora's mask equivalent. this isn't no 'recreate elden ring/skyrim' scope creep. majora's mask felt dense and lived in, but "basic" enough with polygons and gameplay it won't eat my computer alive lol.

of course, since this kind of thing invites dreaming, the pie in the sky ideas my brain was running wild with last night: 

* what if a wyvern delivery service mini game that unlocks fast travel. creating crude weather systems (so a wyvern flight isn't a boring direct line between A and B) where there's a chance of lightning bolts to OHKO a wyvern, or a tornado like gust to likewise OHKO a pegasus (nodding to their weakness of lightning/wind reciprocally.)

* in terms of "filling up" the towns with characters we know, i was wondering if there'd be a cool system where there'd be a % chance makalov could be at any tavern in begnion, volke could have a lower % at any one in the continent in general.

* what if bright eyes gets a whole special combat system where you're encouraged to take damage to regenerate/counterattack. friendly to newcomers but also has a weird skill learning curve. (this is also making me think how cool would it be to incorporate my ashera's tower survival horror game idea.)

thinking a lot about atlantis: the lost empire (animated) movie lately again : 

a) that scene when the gang shows their ""true colors"" to milo (thankfully temporary) and he's going 'wtf are you DOING (ransacking a living city/doing a colonialism' and they're like 'money.' not particularly happy about it, not particularly sad about it, not particularly angsty. (we've spent the past hour getting to know them and their complicated lives before being mercenaries, the context should probably be said they're all quietly minorities who had to figure out how to make ends meet because the world kinda sucks like that.)

like. man. idk if disney could ever get that Real about it again. i feel like modern disney would either straight up not have that scene or go the other direction and do an awful whole guilt-trip-the-audience flashback sequence to pull on the heartstrings for Le Characturrr Engagement points when that lowkey kinda sabotages the point of Not being complicit etc.

b) how almost weird it is that rourke for being such a bad/awesome villain, white colonialist edition, actually treated said team with like. genuine basic respect for their competency. very much a 'nothing personal' guy after money. damn he's refreshingly honest, other than the, you know, sacking the city.

i had/have such a horrible crush on rourke you don't even know. yes i have terrible taste in fictional dudes. :p

it had its issues but man what a kickass movie. i would watch it again if i wasn't specifically trying this year NOT to rewatch everything again (other than this tellius playthrough)

reading up on rap history and i'm really endeared at the connection i'm seeing between rap handles & hacker handles & drag performer names. something about names that reflect one's chosen performance back at society. deftly slipping out of the constricting noose of given names to play tricks on society and bestowin' upon them art with a wink.

* crazy xbone hardening / hacking talk to listen to ... so much of the tech stack went over my head but i had an awesome time listening to this at a work lunch break. i'm a lil' more familiar with the "red team" circles here but the amount of detail it takes to harden a machine in "assumed" malicious hands is awe inspiring.

* persona (former discord ID contractor) surveilance whistleblower has an interesting writeup of the fallout of the leak. also interesting to see how the various players handled said fallout, whether poorly or decently.

* "the biggest difference between a dog and a wolf is the way they look at you." cool af blog post musing.

* technically a gaming issue but a very very thoughtful rundown / experience on what it was like to face a copyright troll (and win)

* ez android adblocker without having to download any extra apps/stuff (been using it for the last few weeks)

* https://delphi.tools/ neat grab bag of common tools every machine/designer should have; says they're privacy focused. file converter software, background remover, vectorizer, gradient generator, etc.