Interipelli's Journal

2024-11-22

Stuck in the middle of things are happening, outcomes are uncertain, and I can't talk about it. Not the worst place to be in, but then, well, that's not exactly easy to write a compelling journal around, is it?

I've heard that "infrastructure teams run on hope." That goes for people who make tools for a living and as a hobby. I suspect this goes for all creators on some level, with substantial variation in what that hope is.

This website appears to have become Write in Blood, inconsistently veering between fiction and reams of pagination documenting influences from a specific generation of video games. There are worse things to be.

2024-08-13

The presentation I gave in the Bay Area was better received than I expected. Truth be told, I constantly fumbled every practice run I had leading up to it until I decided, forget everything else, get some damn sleep and make sure I'm well rested for the event.

Well, that worked. I had four minutes removed from what I was told would be a ten minute presentation, but I had the practice runs timed by stopwatch so I could figure out when to expand, when to condense, and what were the necessary bits. Ended up sharing all I needed while keeping my composure without resorting to stupid tricks like talking too damn fast.

I can't share much more than that, besides one tiny anecdote. Sleeping in a parking garage by a NASA research center is quite tolerable with earplugs.

Site navigation got a bit of a reshuffle when I came back to better reflect current interests and what's active. Don't worry, nothing's truly lost. All past URLs remain functional. The major shift is that some inactive content that was two clicks from home now requires looking for something else that's related.

2024-07-31

Six days ago I saw my landlord off as he was moving out of our shared building. A work accident left him in a brief coma, rather poorly timed between having a child and needing a new place to stay in.

All told he's in good spirits. We talked a bit about the state of the region, how he'll adjust to renting a house, and what he was hoping to do with his community before life circumstances got more complicated. He's walking, we're all grateful for that. I'm less certain about the state of this apartment complex for the foreseeable future, but then, nothing's certain really.

Four days ago I met with the lady and her husband behind the Princess Maker discord group. I wonder if bringing my Marathon shirt was a mistake, as I ended up talking a lot less about Black/Matrix, Devil Children and Princess Maker and a lot more about Bungie games and LucasArts titles that I have not played in ages. At the very least it gave me an excuse to dig up The Story of LucasFilm Games from PayPal's then-regular TechXploration talks. Small wonder so many haven't seen this retrospective of a once beloved adventure game developer.

Four days from now, I'll be on a train to the Bay Area heading to another work gathering. Not sure what to expect again. So far, putting in the effort to show up has been more than enough.

2024-05-24

The second cancer scare has come and gone, with great relief that it hasn't amounted to anything worse. This particular episode did uncover a few relevant misunderstandings with regards to family history. Out of an abundance of caution and perhaps some cost savings, I am unlikely to travel much besides one west coast train trip later this summer.

Lately I've been catching up on Comic BomBom, a defunct presumably kid-oriented phone book sized monthly of manga that has a fairly rich history of promoting Bandai and Nintendo products alongside its own originals. There's a good framing there to be had as far as really contextualizing the full two years, one month of the Devil Children project during a time when BomBom somehow got passed over as the home of Pokemon and Digimon for surviving rival CoroCoro Comic. If anything comes of this, it will be a fairly long term project, especially if I somehow get ahold of Atlus obscura like the manga for GuruGuru Galactors.

I have nudged Raindare on a few occasions about proceeding with the KMT 2 screenshot LP, but she has been more engrossed with replaying Diablo+Hellfire via Devilution X, making progress on existing stories, and finishing up a Fire Emblem GBA rom hack yet to be released called "Sacred Stones Plus". We still have time.

2024-02-18

Raindare and I spent the weekend visiting an old friend who helped us out during pandemic times, lending a hand and serving good Taiwanese style vegan food. As with many post-pandemic reunions, I find that the occasion is not really marked by much more than showing up, saying hello, and trying to piece together just what exactly were we doing before then. At any rate, their business seems to have picked up, and I am no longer their most regular customer. All good things.

After another experiment with an e-ink display proved disappointing with assisting Raindare's blindness, we made an appointment to the Apple Store to try out their latest flashy bauble. The Vision Pro has a remarkable number of hand gestures to allow for blind navigation, but limited capability to interpret those gestures from slightly unconventional-looking hands. A fascinating case study in accessibility designs that don't always work.

Despite a rough showing at times, it has occurred to me that Raindare does look at objects in the distance by positioning her cell phone directly at the view, and looking at the screen up close, acting as a magnifying glass for life. It would seem that the Vision Pro would be perfectly serviceable at replicating the same, as the device itself is indeed a set of smartphones jammed directly up against your eyeballs. We'll see if the fruit company can accommodate her prescription lenses. It does seem to be a matter of trying to make the purchase, and then finding out from The Company if they can make those particular lenses on demand.

Thanks to an overwhelmingly friendly community, I seem to be spending more time at a Princess Maker Discord. Despite our collective experience being largely with the very good second game and its unreleased English translation for DOS, the community there has been welcoming on a scale that I don't usually see. If you do happen to see more Princess Maker content on the website in the coming months, that is certainly to blame.

2024-01-14

Raindare and I just finished Black/Matrix 00, one that we've been juggling for nine months between BUSIN 0. Great game. "God"(ly) game! Sometime we'll get to moving on to translating the stories and extended fiction from that game's official webpage with some of the concept art that's been harder to find.

I'll update the reviews page once I've figured out how to collect my feelings. It's a bit dominated by Wizardry games as BUSIN 0 made me want to jot down my feelings on the more interesting entries in the series to me.

We're starting to write Devil Children post-...armageddon? manga? reset?... fan fiction and I'm pretty proud with how it's coming along. Someone who's only familiar with the manga should be able to follow along. Heir to the Empire is first, Grocery Run is still in progress.

Quite a few stories are still in progress, come to think of it! The Stray Vampire recently wrapped up. Within a Tempest is still coming together, slowly. Vivian remains popular with Japanese artists, as a character design.

Not a comprehensive list of changes of course, but who wants to write that?