The Stagnation Before the Storm
Hey! Long time no see (again)
I've been meaning to write here more, but you know how it is. I am still a very lazy individual.
I'm also not great with introductions as I'm sure you know, so let's just get to the main stuff.
Regress to Progress
I've mentioned all the progress I've made in life in general in the last post, so how well is that holding up? Well... kinda.
Unfortunately the past 3 months or so I somewhat returned to a state of stagnation, but not for no reason or with no further plans. My dad needed space, as he wanted to focus on improving his slowly declining health, and I couldn't exactly find myself a job or anything of the sort in the meantime. As a result, I was, with some hesitation, sent back to the flea pit that I had escaped from. My dad knew that after everything I've been through and my general progress in being more autonomous I would manage to find my way out again by myself. And... he's definitely right!
I made a few medium-to-long term goals a while back, and my continued stay here is definitely fucking up my mood and motivations though, so I believe the time has come for these goals to come into fruition.
I'm going to be moving in with my girl @rari_teh! It'll, uh... be more of a test run initially to see how things will go. But honestly I am quite optimistic about what the future holds!
There were other contributing factors to this stagnation too, which I'll get to soon enough.
Media I've Been Consuming
I know some people are put off by wording this like that for dumb reasons, but... I don't have anything better (and don't care lol)
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream
Can you name 'em all?
The funny game! I haven't personally played any game in this series myself, but I'm definitely more than familiar with the dozens of Vinny Vinesauce streams of the previous game.
I've been playing it mostly casually and stupidly, as one should, probably. I do miss some aspects of the previous game, and I'd say some parts of the game feel a tad weak and/or unfinished, which is something a good update could rectify.
Also... Nintendo, why no pt-BR localization? Right when you've been getting good at that lately... don't stop the streak now, especially when you already have the TTS stuff figured out, you can't pretend Miitomo never happened!
JOT
Ah... so what the hell is this now? Of course, this does not come off as a surprise to most who know me, if there are two things I enjoy a possibly unhealthy amount it's obscure media and cute things.
I was just on YouTube watching an upload of some interesting/funny CG from the 80s that was algorithmically recommended, when I came across this very interesting looking cartoon from the same uploader. It was JOT (also known as Jot the Dot), a short cartoon series from the 60s, produced by... the Southern Baptists
It was honestly quite surprising at first to know this cartoon was of religious nature, because, visually, it looks so ahead of its time! If not for all the film artifacts and painted backgrounds, one could easily guess this was some flash animation from the 2000s. Well, the same could be said about Peep and the Big Wide World... also (technically) from the 60s in case you didn't know.
JOT is quite trippy, abstract and psychedelic at times too, which is definitely a decision. But it can feel pretty cozy too. All in all, it's great to look at (not so much a few episodes handled by a different animation team than the usual, but there's not many of them), in terms of writing, however... you can probably imagine. It's bad. Just very preachy and stuffed with moralism and good ol' American Christian Values™, which is to be expected, really (but once again, VeggieTales still ages gracefully by focusing on being entertaining first and foremost)
There are a few recurring characters like Tat (Not the similarly named floating video game cat whom I also love, nor the company with the infamous no-longer-lost logo), and other characters with similarly simple names with 3 to 4 letters max, which I find a cute touch. Interestingly one of the show creators has stated Jot as a character was made to be as much of a blank slate as possible, as to not distract from the "messages", and that perhaps almost included his gender, as he stated his wife could easily see Jot as a girl too, which puts Jot in a funny position as a possible first non-binary Christian character. It's my headcanon now. Totally not biased.
Jot's dynamic with Tat (who sometimes seems to be portrayed as a bit of an infidel, the "questioning atheist" type...?) is also pretty cute at times, hard not to ship.
I'd definitely categorize this cartoon as very moe, if not for the lame, cult-ish propaganda vibes.
Another unexpected surprise was to see it parodied on Animaniacs (2020), which is very fun. If you're interested in somewhat exotic/unique looking animation and can look past the baptist writing, I'd recommend checking it out. We should reclaim him.
Sushi Pack
Deek!
I was aware of this cartoon's existence for a while, but never got around to really look into it beyond a surface level.
The very existence of this show is interesting as it was the very last cartoon produced by DiC Entertainment under that name, before they were acquired by Cookie Jar. It's also not very well preserved.
As for the cartoon itself... it sure is a cartoon that exists...!
It is quite unremarkable, has some very odd/cursed music (especially its ending theme, which, to be as polite as I can, gives The Nutshack a run for its money), and it's what one could describe as "aesop-slop", but the character designs go hard and are adorable. Go, my tiny makis.
The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act
Isn't she lovely?
So I actually went to the movie theater to watch this. Twice!
The second time with my lovely friend @bernacha, who hung out with me for the first time. It was very brief but cool.
Once the credits started rolling, this kid shouted "absolute cinema" and well, I can't disagree. It's a satisfying finale. Not absolutely flawless, but I definitely see and respect the vision, and I'm sure Gooseworx did everything she could in her power to bring it to life.
I've said this before, but she really doesn't deserve the fans she got. Parasocial, toxic, illiterate. It seems like it can't be helped these days, but damn it if I don't at least try to foster a positive community...
Anyways I wish infinite money and eternal vacation for the rest of Goose's life.
(And good luck to all the "Jaxes of real life" out there...)
Deltarune (Chapter 5)
Glue!
Tricky Tony does it again! Go Aqua and Seth!
I'll be winging my ding until we meet again at the Meat Factory in Chapter 6...
Kill Me Baby
nice desu ne...
That's right! I thought I'd give the unhinged lil' 4koma-based anime that YTPMVers love to use a fair shot, since I enjoyed Lucky Star enough.
...I kinda love this. Watching it felt... healing. To the soul.
It's stupid to unimaginable degrees, but that is very much a compliment from me.
Haven't finished all of it though - when I do, I might have more to say.
Also I don't even have to look at what fans generally have to say to figure there is a consensus on Agiri absolutely being a stoner, right?
A Story About Linux and Frying SSDs
It's been quite a while since I've actually touched my Windows installation as I have been doing mostly fine on Linux (Kubuntu to be exact) - it's been getting pretty good! Well. Not so much now that I've had to resort to running it off a live USB with persistent storage instead. Why and how'd that happen? It's... a long story. But let's say it doesn't help much that my daily driver is a particular Acer laptop with pretty good specs overall, but also lot of OEM crapware to control it. Windows only, of course. There are unofficial implementations for Linux that are not perfect but are better than nothing... but that possibly led to side effects.
Linux can still be pretty weird and unpredictable even for intermediate users that are already somewhat used to it, and one thing that it kept doing seemingly randomly with no rhyme or reason is, sometimes resetting the CPU/GPU clock + fans profile to a default of "0" which is "Quiet" rather than "1" which should be the "Default", all while also setting it up so that the battery profile would be set to a "high performance" one whenever connected to power.
So what did that result in after some months? A mess. I still don't think I fully comprehend it. But the short of it is that it led to the system being very trigger happy in locking my SSD into read-only mode at random moments, leading the whole system to crash. Had it not been for me noticing some extremely high temperatures in a SMART log once, I likely wouldn't have known of anything and perhaps it would've led to much worse results. Still, I do have plenty of reason to believe this has permanently damaged my SSD (which is an NVMe, in case you're wondering) - even Windows just fails to boot now, sometimes I will turn the laptop on and I'll get a "no bootable device" message, but even with all that there seems to be no major data corruption... for now.
So this is also, at least partially, why my general output lately has been somewhat lackluster. After I'm finished moving I'll properly look into what steps to take, but for now the live USB is doing the trick. Kinda. I'll live.
New Webstuffs
I've added a couple of fun things to my webs site the past month or so!
An improved page for my favorite characters that I've cringely named blorbopage. It replaces what was previously a shitty Notion page. Still missing a lot of images (though soon enough, you'll be able to help with that...)
Another addition is the Scratch Archive.
...well, that was already there, but it's much more interactive now, and has basically everything I wanted to add previously, it's much easier to manage now as it's just embeds that read straight from the original files. A much better approach than having an entire instance of Scratch/TurboWarp for every file... was all of that worth it? I dunno. But I do like looking back at these endearingly bad projects.
On a related note, I finally managed to access my Scratch account (my first online presence!) again after not being able to for years, so that's nice. Don't expect much activity there, though.
Other Stuff
Addressing Commissions
For a good few years now I set up a form for my music commissions, and I haven't gotten in touch with some of the people that submitted their requests, mostly because I had to deal with several... garbage submissions that I could do nothing with, because I guess some submitters are too dumb to even live. Seriously, even with every possible disclaimer, they manage to do things like "write simply 'Discord' in the contact field and nothing else" or even not type a request at all...
I then remade the form outside of Google Docs, but kept it accessible from the same link, and this time I even included some form of illustration commission options, I just didn't particularly promote it much. Well, now I still see a couple of weird submissions I can't do anything with, and some that chose the "video editing" option that kinda did nothing and was there for me to expand later at some point (likely after I finish my reel). I guess that's kinda on me. Oh well. I'll try to make it up for y'all soon once I'm settled in my new home and take a good look at each submission (with usable info) and give responses.
SAGE 2026
I'll be (attempting to) join this year's SAGE expo with... yet another demo of my silly fangame that's 12 years old and counting - Luigi and the Quest for Nothing 2.
I'll be real, I don't know how much new stuff will be on it, but I'll try my best in the coming months. At least I can say the game is finally on the path to introduce more story elements, cutscenes and such. After that and finishing some more levels, bosses and such, the game will be finished... that's still easier said than done. This sorta became my own Mushroom Kingdom Fusion to deal with, except I'm the only dev... oh, speaking of that, I hope to see it on the expo as well!
CyKuro Fangame Sprites
I mentioned in the last post something vague hinting towards a possible Cyborg Kuro-chan fangame that I wanted to make. While that is still very far from happening as I already have so much to do, I did want to somewhat visualize it a bit and made a few silly sprites a while back. Look at 'em!
...yeah that's it. I imagine the gameplay being somewhat like Mega Man but "less bullshit" in a way.
Shoutouts
I want to give a couple special shoutouts to whitney, Ryu N. and MrGochevMan - no real reason other than just, they're cool. Get shouted out, iddyots!!!
Final Words
This is it, Luigi.
It's time to do like our good friend Nubert and move up in the world.
It might look a little scary, but I think the outcome of not trying at all is scarier.
I've also come across some very encouraging words from one Temmie Chang from when she was attempting livestreaming:
Source: temstuff
Her mentioning being someone who doesn't speak very often was probably the most relatable thing I've read in a long time. Maybe I'll follow in her steps... will I become the next hit funny streamer™? only time will tell.
I do want to do more with my YouTube channel as I'm sure I've said before... and I think that's all.
I'll see you soon!
