A Bunch of Stuff

As I've been lazy about writing over the past few months or so I'm going to start out what might be a posting bonanza (might not actually be a bonanza) with a summary post.  I've made some convenient bolded headings that are mostly indicitive of the sections so that those reading this can skip stuff they're not interested, which might be the entire post for all I know, but oh well?

New Car Smell

Starting with a follow-up from my previous post, I submitted my order for a Model 3, two years and a day after having made the reservation in the first place.  Delivery is supposed to be in 4-8 weeks, so we'll see what happens!  I got the long-range battery (499km range) and the premium interior, because those are mandatory at the moment, and decided to get the midnight silver paint which was the only optional upgrade I went with.

Nice and NEET

I spent the first couple months of this year, more or less, as a "NEET" which stands for "Not in Employment, Education or Training".  To my knowledge, the acronym is primarily used in Japan, despite being made up of English words, and is used to refer to people who have essentially dropped out of productive society.  Not entirely applicable in my case since I was actually looking for (and eventually found) full time work - I consider those two months to have been a much needed vacation as much as anything else.

So why use the acronym if I don't think it really applied to me?  Partly because I think it makes for a clever section heading, but mostly because it ties into an anime I watched back in the fall as I was facing the prospect of, lets say, a "NEET"-like few months.  The anime was "net-juu no susume" or "Recovery of an MMO Junkie" to use the crunchyroll title.  The series is about a 30 year old woman who decided to quit a highly stressful office job and became an "elite NEET" (in her words) and play MMOs all day - and then stuff happened.  I'm not going to get into any other details here (I may write another post about it) other than to say I absolutely adored the series (one of the highlights of my week while it was airing) and it really resonated with me, and not just because it had some similarity to the situation I found myself in for a couple of months.

Project Progress

One of the main things that I occupied myself with during my NEET-like period was my FR project that I've mentioned in some previous posts.  As I had a lot of time on my hands I pushed forward with it and tried to make as much progress as I could.  And I was at least somewhat successful!  As I was musing in my final post of last year, I decided to start working towards a "demo" of the game's first area.  The first part of this was to work out the plot details of the area.  I started out working on an actual detailed script and got a decent amount written but eventually decided that I would be better served by doing something on the level of a flow chart to get the major points worked out before getting too lost in the fine details (I do that sometimes).  This met with success and I currently have a mostly finished flow chart detailing the first area - there is one small branch that still needs to be finshed but it's not high priority for now because...

Unity

...I have started learning the Unity game engine for the purposes of putting together the eventual demo.  I am currently working on creating a framework that I can use to test out ideas for the combat system.  It's going along fairly well so far though now that I'm working full time again, the majority of the work is getting done on the weekends with a bit of poking at things in the evening.  I may write some more posts about my experience with Unity in the future.

Anywho, that is the summary of things that might be coming to this space in the future.  Please look forward to it!

Freak Out,
-TFitC 

 

Jupiter Power

I was going to write up the episode 7 unfaq today, but I was skimming my sketchbook this morning and realized that there were some design sketches that would be good to incorporate into the unfaq.  Unfortunately, I didn't have time to scan them in this morning so instead I'll post the unfaq tomorrow or maybe later tonight (probably tomorrow.)  Instead, today I'm posting an interlude.  Here is the sketchbook version:

Whilst it is a bit late for Hallowe'en, here we have The Pen cosplaying as Sailor Jupiter.  You can tell it's Sailor Jupiter because of her choice of footwear, or by looking at the colour version.  I suspect that The Pen would be more likely to cosplay as Malie C, if she were to dress up as one of the Senshi, it would be Sailor Jupiter because she is clearly the most awesome one.

Anyway, that is all until tomorrow's unfaq.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Flashback

The second page of episode 7 of The Word Smith has taken a bit longer to finish up than expected, but it is now online.  This page is a flashback to episode 1, so maybe go reread that, or not, whichever works best for you.

In other non-Word Smith news, it has recently come to my attention that the new Sailor Moon series (called Sailor Moon Crystal) has started airing (to speak of flashbacks.)  The series is a reboot (but not a ReBoot) and hews closer to the original manga in terms of overall story/pacing and art style.  Only the first episode has aired thus far (it's airing the first and second Saturday of each month with the second episode going up tomorrow) but I enjoyed it.  The nostalgia is strong with this one.

Anywho, that's all for now.  Next episode of The Word Smith will be up whenever.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Starlights

I have recently started (re)watching the fifth season of Sailor Moon, as I am planning on making an AMV (anime music video) using footage from it to the Arrogant Worms song "Boy Band". Those of you familiar with the season can probably guess what I'm going to be focusing on. Links will be posted here whenever I get it complete (hopefully sometime this month).

Anyway, as I was watching the season, it occurred to me that most of the senshi get a bit shafted in the transformation sequence department - most of them appear to get stuck with essentially the same transformation throughout all five seasons, whereas Sailor Moon more-or-less gets an upgraded transformation periodically (I want to say each season, but I'm actually not sure on that).

Oh well, I suppose that's one of the perks of being the star of the show.

Freak Out,
-TFitC