What did you do this time @wegra?

I've seen on and off the amazing digital circus, and I can say that jax is hands down the best character. And funny about jax, is that he's the most divided character in the entire show. For those out of the loop, jax is what is called an antagonistic individual. For the more spergish types, they react way over the top with characters like that. Nobody has outright said this, but I've seen some call him an evil sociopath, they might as well say he's as bad as ted bundy. No, he's not that bad. He's trapped in a prison he can never leave from. So he tries to make the best of it by doing what we all do in a video game: find funny ways to inflict as much collateral damage as possible.

I say give it a watch at least once. Yes, jax is a cunt, but he's incredibly entertaining in a way.

Also, just look at that face, he knows it's funny. Basically saying "Hey you, yeah you, fuck you."

You could read any strip at random and still get entertained by calvin being a smartass brat.

What's even better, the creator knew when to quit. When he was done with it. It wasn't hyper-commercialized like other comic strips. It had true integrity.

A game that isn't that well known, but technologically impressive called MDK was released in 1997. It was a nonsensical third person shooter for DOS and Microsoft Windows allowing polygon graphics without a GPU. It ran entirely on the CPU if you had a pentium (1995ish) processor or later.

[Look at those polygons. Goddamn]

It may not seem technologically impressive and given how software rendering games were still a thing in the late 90s, why is it even worth the time of day? It did stuff that was never done on a game. Everyone was trying to make the next big FPS game, they went with a third person shooter instead with the camera facing behind the player. I don't think this was the first third person shooter to exist, but it combined a unique sense of gameplay involving puzzles using your sniper scope as well as shooting with your chain gun.

What made it special was not just the fact is ran without requiring a dedicated GPU (or any GPU for that matter), but it had rather vast levels that didn't have to be split across map loading screens like half life. To put things in perspective, half life every 10 minutes had to load a new map for a few seconds to change levels. MDK was seamless.

Nothing in this game is taken seriously. You get mini nukes as a usable item, you're a janitor being tasked with saving the world, the list goes on and on. So I guess you could say it stood out from all the gritty serious shooter games that were aping doom and quake. And by 1997, MS DOS had faded out with windows replacing it entirely. The fact alone this was on DOS is impressive itself.

I grew up personally on the sequel for the PC as well as the sega dreamcast. You got to play not just kurt (The main protagonist) but also the mad scientist you're employed by as well as the four armed dog called max that has a large array of firearms. The sequel had voice acting and it was honestly fun and charming in its own right. These days I would avoid the PC version because save scumming makes it far too easy to beat the game. In the dreamcast version, you have checkpoints for saving. If you have 1 HP, tough fucking nubs. Git gud. I guess that's why console games potentially can be better than PC games because the issue of save scumming is not as much of a thing.

[Ah nostalgia. I just love that era of 3D modeling].

You didn't just play again as kurt in the sequel. You were this time joined by max and doctor hawkins to finish the job. Docs levels were more reliant on puzzle solving and you can't use brute force to finish the level. As for max, it's more about going in guns blazing, but you have some parts you need to think before you act, though the max levels can sometimes go into guns blazing too much at times. But I digress.

Overall, the first one may not seem appealing after playing today's games and you might be tempted to play the 2nd one instead. I say give both a shot if you like third person shooters, might be right up your ally.

The OpenToonz/Tahoma2D animation program lets you make brand new visual effects using GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language). Luckily for me, it's a 2D program and not 3D, so less math I have to relearn. Gonna be diving into a bit of linear algebra, trigonometry, and some geometry to learn how to manipulate vectors and matricies. This ought to be fun. And even if I don't really use Tahoma2D in the end, it would still be beneficial for me to know.

Earthbound was the 2nd game in the mother trilogy. Almost got ported to the west, mother 1 was to be called earth bound, but instead earthbound was mother 2. Reason being is that it was near the end of the NES's lifecycle and they scrapped the idea. Thankfully, a very accurate translation exists online, I say grab a ROM sometime soon.

[Graphics are nothing to sneeze at, but it's charming in its 8 bit ways]

Now, if you love earthbound, you absolutely have to play mother. Why? It gives you a completely different light of the game. While earthbound was whimsical and silly, mother was more tragic that actually gave character to giygas. He appeared at the very very end of earthbound, was hyped up as the ultimate evil, but he wasn't always like that.

[Looks like a pokemon doesn't he?]

If you hadn't played earthbound, you would think he's more like a silver age (50s/60s) comic book, where the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. But he had a reason why he did everything. I'm just going by memory right now.

In the early 1900s, a couple mysteriously disappeared and the man returned years later. The woman never returned. The alien specie was what was responsible for PSI (Psychic abilities, the equiv to magic from say final fantasy), the man stole it returning to earth. He grew colder and colder as time went on, and wanted revenge so it couldn't be used against them.

You travel around what's supposed to be america setting, like earthbound, but animals are going incredibly aggressive and gigyas's army is running rampant. Ensuring the only ones who know the secret to PSI are killed, even if it means destruction of the entire planet.

You like earthbound again, collect parts of a melody from various points in the game. For reasons unknown, partially because of memories of maria (or mary depending on the translation) caused him to break down with more violent reactions as the song went on. You can't kill him directly, but finishing the entire song makes him flee the planet driven to the point of grief and madness.

This is where earthbound comes in, he found out a prediction ness would be his downfall and decided to invade again to do something about it. Like darth vader, in his own quest of anger, he destroyed himself. And that makes porky (Depending on the translation it could be pokey), your neighbor, the villain of mother 3. Giygas was more than willing to recruit a member of the species he loathed in his quest to ensure ness can never bring his downfall.

I'm going to give you a warning, mother 1 is brutal on difficulty like many famicom games. You could take a single pixel to the right and get a new random battle. So again, why play it? Because the story changes the entire tone and context of earthbound and in turn, mother 3. It's rather tragic and depressing what happened to him.

[In fairness, he was already mad with grief and vengeance even before becoming an almighty idiot]

I would go as far to say mother is better than earthbound. Earthbound is still a good game, but everyone who thinks it's the greatest game of all time, might have never played let alone heard about mother 1. If you like earthbound, I strongly encourage giving it a try.

Also, I really ought to post game or movie reviews more often, this is fun.

I'm going dark for the weekend. As in, I won't be interacting with the internet much (if at all) to eliminate most (if not all) my personal dependencies on people as well as general neediness that's a bit of an issue. I'll be back monday. Until then, stay gold.

This is just some thoughts I want to share. I got a huge problem with impulsively announce decisions and finding out how much time it consumes doing the task, and it all comes falling flat on my face.

I need to stop doing this, I can do any project I desire, I just cannot from here on out announce anything until I'm done or close to done. It's the only way to keep enjoying what I do and not end up incredibly miserable.

I'm being serious, I can't get anything done with how impulsively I decide on and then announce my projects.

You might be wondering, didn't I say I was done with programming? Well, LaTeX is not a programming language, it's a markup language for creation of documents formatted very verbosely as the creator wanted it to be. It's very different from using a graphical word processor like word. Take this for example:

\documentclass{article} % Starts an article
\usepackage{amsmath} % Imports amsmath
\title{\LaTeX} % Title

\begin{document} % Begins a document
  \maketitle
  \LaTeX{} is a document preparation system for
  the \TeX{} typesetting program. It offers
  programmable desktop publishing features and
  extensive facilities for automating most
  aspects of typesetting and desktop publishing,
  including numbering and cross-referencing,
  tables and figures, page layout,
  bibliographies, and much more. \LaTeX{} was
  originally written in 1984 by Leslie Lamport
  and has become the dominant method for using
  \TeX; few people write in plain \TeX{} anymore.
  The current version is \LaTeXe.

  % This is a comment, not shown in final output.
  % The following shows typesetting power of LaTeX:
  \begin{align}
    E_0 &= mc^2 \\
    E &= \frac{mc^2}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
  \end{align} 
\end{document}

It creates:

Anyways, I'm doing this because natron, a free libre (open source) compositor that's just like nuke, could use a nice e-book about how to effectively use it. It's going to take a while, but I know I can do it.

I feel this needs to exist, because the docs aren't very verbose and the YouTube videos available I don't think is enough.

Yesterday, you may have heard I wanted to or rather was thinking of, making an arcade game in flash 8.

Well, doing it by myself isn't going to work out. I rather be good at a single thing than try (and fail) balancing out both the computer programming and the art direction together.

I'm completely open to the flash 8 idea, but I simply won't do the programming. I'll leave that to someone else. I'm happy because I can focus exclusively on the art and be good at one thing than terrible at two.

Some might be able to somehow dish out doing multiple things at once, I sure can't, and I've pretended for too long that I can.