2025-05-19

My temporary job as a TA ended. Not so much with a celebratory gesture, a plaque, an e-mail, or an announcement. Simply ended. Whether to ask follow up questions or move on, I chose to move on.

I'd been hoping to have another big milestone to share that would be more interesting to visitors of the website, but all work is settling out over time and The Boxes from the move still tower over us.

I will highlight a few games that I think are worth having a look at:

Myth II: Twice Born Edition is alleged to be the remains of a Nightdive Studios update of Myth II and Myth TFL with contributions from the original artist. It's another laborious project led by Jon God, a little known emissary of Mac gaming. If you have a Myth II CD lying around, please give it a try.

Shin Megami Tensei: 20XX somehow feels better than the Super Famicom Megaten games it's based on and happens to be a more focused package by miles, despite being a port of a cell phone game from 2004. To date, the cell phone editions G-MODE has put out have felt like remixed, cut down Game Boy conversions of better known games, but this one's special. Give it a try if you know Japanese, or wait for a translation patch if you don't.

Next time I might feel a little more confident about sharing what's in progress, rather than throw links to elsewhere. I'm sure it's crippling for our SEO.

2025-03-30

Raindare has begun documenting her favourite drinks and writing new fictional things. In the meantime, I've been unpacking boxes and slowly adding new content and scans I'd had saved from a backlog assembled just before the physical move.

I thought I hated the cold. It was a constant nuisance in graduate studies within upstate New York, the way that snow would get into boots and freezing rain would stick into the wrinkles of my face. The way that aluminum laptops would bend and latches stick if left to the elements for too long. However, nearly four weeks in Ontario alternating between snow storms, ice storms, and short periods of sun has made me feel somehow nostalgic for a time that wasn't quite as I remember it.

We've started Dragon Shadow Spell, the Black/Matrix OO follow up that's like a gorgeous, high resolution (by PS2 standards) Final Fantasy Tactics with a setting closer to Phantasy Star Online. An unexpected combination. If Japanese wikis are to be believed, there's an alleged focus on gay male couples. Not too far off from Black/Matrix by any means, though it's still unusual to have more than one. Raindare remains interested. We'll see what lies ahead.

2025-03-10

Moving to Ontario has gone well; I'm looking forward immensely to our new life here.

2025-02-11

For the last three weeks and up through May, I've been acting as a teacher's assistant for a course introducing computer science and project planning fundamentals. This has been a highlight in between the more pertinent work of moving forward immigration affairs. It is fascinating to see how younger people relate to computers now, and to some degree I'm not sure that teaching has changed all that much. Yes, students can "cheat" with generative AI, but it wasn't all that long ago when the most visible solution online was Experts Exchange, a popular means to give folks (bad) advice absent useful reasoning, for a fee.

Events of the last month have reminded me that even family members I often look up to tend not to recognize trouble is brewing until it affects them. I am doing my best to be patient, as I try to move quickly when I can, when there is news to act upon.

2025-01-01

All of the Shin Devil Children fan fiction I had planned for 2024 is finished, leaving only Raindare's chapters (Grocery Run and Through the Circle) as remaining works in progress. She's still tied up by other fiction projects that she can't talk about right now. We're both quite proud of how this little exercise turned out.

Wrapping up 2024, we've got one final retrospective following up where the mid-year retro left off. These will be the last of the behind the scenes website meta articles. I think our work speaks for itself.

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 centre 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

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?

2023-11-18

Last week, I took a cross country ride by train to see America through the Empire Builder and Lake Shore Limited trains. I recommend it. It's a very good opportunity to see the cities, resort towns, company villages and meadows of the USA in the Fall and Spring months.

Future updates to this journal will likely be less centred on website content. There have been some bits that I've been particularly proud of lately. The Devil Children Red and Black Book Planner Q&A article went in some interesting directions as I've gotten into a habit of bidding on auctions for printed works and less online content.

To be honest, I'm not fond of "feeds" or update aggregators. I'd rather let people stumble upon these bits in their own time. Have faith in the lazyweb, get lost in a website.

At least, that's how I remember the web.

I patched together a quick wrap-up of 2023, though I don't believe there will be too many more of these.

2023-07-01

I finally cleared out the boxes in my apartment! Wild that it took over five, maybe six years and a pandemic, but I've managed to eke out room for a spare bed and a separate room for Raindare, which she's been enjoying immensely. Farah the cat has been a bit fussy about the loss of boxes though she seems happier to be by her favourite human during most hours of the day.

The website has undergone a few changes, which I won't highlight this time, only because very few bits are "finished" and there's now a bit more of a push to show off works that are still in progress. I've not been as able to find the time personally contribute stories and content as work has been taking up more headspace and gym has been taking up more energy.

Black/Matrix 00 is amazing, but hard to relay in website form. The trouble is it's a 50+ hour strategy RPG structured as a visual novel, (very) loosely based on an 8 to 10 hour Game Boy Advance game. It is on the level of a Trails game to translate and effectively localize before even considering the alternate routes, the good endings and bad endings, and the mass of optional dialogue in town segments. I'm not sure how to make content for this game! A screenshot playthrough of Devil Children Red Book seems more feasible in the not-too-distant future. Maybe Black/Matrix 00 will get some pages recovered from the archived web, we'll see.

Raindare's KMT2 screenshot playthrough has mostly stalled on account of us playing Black/Matrix 00. We are about a third of the way through a Persona 3 in terms of running time and still on disk 1 of 2, for perspective. We're still working on website bits! It just happens that video games that clock in at above ten hours of running time are tricky to fit into adult lives.

2023-05-15

Life remains a bit busy, hoping to get onto a better project sooner than later. First there are some people issues to sort out and tempers to allay. Once that's resolved, I'd like to get back to writing.

In the meantime, Raindare made enough progress on her Kyuuyaku Megami Tensei II romhack that she's willing to show off more of her work. To that end, she's cleaned up her notes on findings in the ROM itself and started pulling together a screenshot playthrough of what the game is like.

After taking a small break from Skeb requests, Otugei found the time to do a really amazing picture of Raindare's Vivian from the Witches and Artifice stories. We got a few appeals from other artists to do more art of Vivian since, which surprised both of us. I suppose we'll have to figure out a way to showcase that sometime!

2023-04-16

On account of a depression that's led to fewer website updates, I've been making a point of eating healthier (vegan) and doing a moderately aggressive workout three times a week. This has helped, though I understand it's not widely applicable advice.

Raindare and myself finished a play through of Devil Children Red Book. That inspired her and my own self to do short form reviews of games we had something interesting to write about. It's all Megaten at the moment as that's what we've been playing just before and since marriage.

Keeping with a theme of angel people and devil people in 90s/2000s era anime games, I expect we'll move on to Black/Matrix 00 (pronounced "Double Oh") next. It's a bit more Tactics Ogre inspired, which might be more to Raindare's liking, and it still fits the post-Evangelion fascination of Judeo-Christian matter.

Raindare and myself have been mid way through bigger stories. To get out of a sort of writer's block, Raindare started a series of drabbles in Moss Bay, and I did a bit in Hokkaido introducing two new characters, Offspring of the Cosmos.

Two more translations of Ma's speculation about the world of Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei II have been rendered; on the west side of Tokyo in 2036 and Tokyo Tower Witch mysteries. Ma (aka もこもこ) is a wonderful friend whom I shared old guide books and enthusiasm for the game with on a strange, ailing website called Twitter once upon a time, I hope she continues to do well as far as sharing her own fiction and rambles.

2023-01-23

It's been awhile!

Though I've been hoping to give an update on new fiction, I've been a bit more focused on transcription and preservation over the past few weeks.

There's a new section dedicated to the vintage Westwood game Circuit's Edge, itself an interactive novel based on the North African cyberpunk universe of When Gravity Fails that just happens to take place in a dungeon RPG engine. Though that old DOS game has shown up in a few places, I haven't seen any references to the original manual or the author's setting background materials. To fill that void, I've made a point of reprinting all of that here, starting with an introduction to the game.

Alongside that is a section dedicated to D2 Megaten, which wife and I spent much of our COVID times playing before I got a game console more recent than a PlayStation Vita. The main push behind that has been to catalog as much of the (easily missed) story behind the main Wizardry-like mode, also known as Hollow World or Aura Gate 2. With ten floors left and a story mode epilogue, I'm pretty close to wrapping that up.

The last ten floors of Aura Gate 2 that I've recorded dialog for (31F to 40F) happen to be pretty closely associated with office humour of a sort. This past week has made that feel somewhat timely.

Left drifting out in space is You Learn Noise, from an impromptu monologue by ARavingLoon where he espoused one way to square the past with the present.

Finally, thanks to m15o for welcoming the website this journal is hosted on to Nightfall City proper. It's a warm, fuzzy place that I hope our writings are helping to add to. Go check out everybody else's websites!

2022-12-23

A Devil Children section has been added. Kicking off with a summary translation of the twentieth anniversary Q&A with the lead writer of the original setting, or the (scenario) "planner" as it's often phrased in the credits of Japanese games.

I am hopeful that this site will continue to pick up obscura from lesser visited parts of the web of interest. Perhaps something like Chris' Majin's Mansion dedicated to the many ports and direct sequels to Shin Megami Tensei for the Super Famicom, BLUE MATRIX with its hierarchy of knowledge around Black/Matrix and Kogado Studio games, Write in Blood, or the classy Boltac's Trading Post, to name a few.

2022-12-18

In light of troubled times behind us, and the holiday season right here, it's good to have A Chance to Relax. Featuring the gloom-sensitive witch Vivian and the highly abrasive Matsumi.

Within the last month, a full archive of Raindare's fan fiction has been assembled from the depths of ao3, including more recent bits involving underrated Tactics Ogre characters.

2022-11-28

Raindare has a soft spot for writing stories about Sapporo, Hokkaido. It just so happens to be the focus of Mem's observations on Sapporo, New and Old.

2022-11-18

Opened up a new section for stories centred primarily around Mem, The Mechanical Lady of Abriel, as she goes on an adventure in post-disaster Hokkaido.

2022-11-14

Raindaire just finished a new story with the Burning Angels, The Garage.

Taking place before the three arrived in Moss Bay, the trio meets a character who has been doing quite well in the present circumstances...

2022-11-11

Added a new section on Megami Tensei II with a translation of Ma's (まー) Megami Tensei II official setting summary, provided by Raindare.

This game means quite a bit to us both. I hope others are able to discover and appreciate this largely ignored gem from when Final Fantasy III was the standard bearer for JRPGs.

2022-11-05

First step towards making a tiny journal, with the intent of tracking contributions to this site.