hugthebed2

It's that time of year again, again. No worries whether they came out in 2022, although some very nice titles came out this year. I like making these posts! So here we go. Oh, also I set up one of these and I seem to stick to updating it better than MAL or Kitsu so it helps with writing this up.
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Honorable Mentions:
 
Top 10:
 
The Rest:
 
Also might be a nice place to post the Steam Replay things

People comment on screenshots because private profiles don't automatically make your screenshots private, and you can just go steamcommunity.com/id/#idhere#/screenshots and view em all. Some default to that route cuz it'll work for both private and nonprivate accounts.

Short chapter this time.
 

 
The text in the third speech bubble is smaller in the originally so it's okay that I had to shrink it to fit it in.
 

 
I've been blasé about translating onomatopoeia, but this time it was primarily due to the difficulty of covering and replacing the original sound effects.  On panel 2 I would definitely have put "HOWWWL" since it's the sound of the wind blowing.  But with something going across that many differently colored areas it'd be a mess to try to replace while looking at all nice.  The one in the third panel is trickier.  I could have replaced it more easily, but I'm not sure what to replace it with.  ペラッ is the sound of something flipping, in this case Kotoha's shirt flipping up and revealing her tail, and I'm not sure what would be the English equivalent other than to use the "unsound effect" of "flip."
 
Shihiro's statement in the last panel literally means "your tail came out!" but that sounds awkward in English (even though this type of statement is common in Japanese.)
 

 
The shortest translation possible.  There is literally one syllable here, "so" (そっ) with a glottal stop to indicate that it wasn't even fully said.  I'm assuming that this is the beginning of the word そっち which means something like "over there."  I think in this situation it can be used in the same way as it is in English here, i.e. to indicate that something was done "there" (i.e. fixing the shirt around Kotoha's waist.)
 
Incidentally, I love how you can see hints of Kotoha's tail pushing up against the shirt, as well as a sliver of it visible between her legs.  It shows that it's still there, just hidden.  The art style is simple but there is still attention paid to details.
 
Anyway, that's all for this chapter.  Next one is longer and finally introduces characters beyond Kotoha and Shihiro.

And this is where we get the headphone story:
 



 
A couple of comments. From this set of pages and the last one, I think that Kotoha is meant to have a rustic or old-fashioned way of speaking, but I wasn't sure and when I tried to render that it just looked ridiculous, so I went with more straightforward translations.
 
In the last panel of the second page the strip does something that manga do where they have two things said simultaneously.  The Kanji expression is 獣耳かー！ meaning "the beast ears?!" or "the kemonomimi?!" (if you want to be especially weebish.)  But these are given furigana そっちかー！ meaning "there?!" Usually furigana is used for explainig how the Kanji is read (it is used for that purpose in this manga to introduce character names and for the unfamiliar verb 憑かれた.) But here that's clearly not what's going on, instead we have two expressions happening simultaneously with one being what is "said" and one what is "meant."  I tried to get as close as I could by putting one in parentheses (and said "fox ears" instead of "beast ears" because "beast ears" sounds dumb in English when you're not at furcon.)
 
EDIT: That's all for now, but next time you get to see the eternal struggle of tail vs. pants.

Had a really bizarre dream today. I had to write it down because it was surreal. 
 
It starts with me watching an Ashens video (dude that reviews a lot of dollar store tat and other junk, I enjoy it, although its been some months since I last watched one).
On this video, he is reviewing frying pans. That makes funny sounds when you swing them or hit something.
The videos starts with him being roped down a cave, rope tied to his stomach, one frying pan in each hand.
He starts to swing one around and it makes this weird wobble effect. He starts to talk with a British/Australian accent, "Oh ye, this one is all woobly aint it m8?"
He walks around and notice parts of the cave are made out of Minecraft blocks. But as the cave goes, some of the blocks start to get lopsided and eventually get placed diagonally.
He complains that with these blocks he can't do a nice roof, and that even Age of Empires had good straight roofs.
Then he starts to test the second frying pan, that has an auto tune installed. It does silly singing voices with auto tune effects as he hits the blocks with it.

Strange creature sheet

It's over.

Not exactly sure what is being calculated on the board.  On the third line I definitely see a calculation for Chistoffel symbols of the first kind, so this is some sort of differential geometry and/or physics tensor analysis problem.  The fact that this is all done in terms of local coordinates and the capital gamma symbols for the Christoffel symbols do not appear makes me suspect some sort of physics calculation.  The books on the table would probably enlighten the situation, but I can't see the kanji clearly. It's too bad, because it means that I can't sneak this into differential geometry lectures.
 

On the other hand this is very clearly the Urysohn metrization theorem and could be slipped into a topology class quite easily.
 

 
I think this a proof that the angle bisector of the top angle of an isosceles triangle will be perpendicular to the opposite side.
 

 
Ran's blocking too much to really know, but something about angle sums.  I suspect from the third line that this has something to do with cyclic quadrilaterals, perhaps the result that opposite angles of a cyclic quadrilateral are supplementary.

The reason that I take my position is the method used.  If something is not in the training set it can't be replicated by a machine learning AI, period.
 
There's a famous anecdote of a program that sorted pictures of dogs.  Given the initial pictures it was pretty accurate, but people noticed that every picture of a dog in the snow was classified as a husky, even if it was a poodle or a chihuahua or whatever.  The problem was that in the training set the only pictures of dogs in the snow were huskies.  Machine learning AI just looks for similarities to known categories.  It has no concept of, well anything really, but in particular nothing outside of the categories given to it.  In the example of the pictures with dogs it has no concept of "dog" vs. "snow" and so can't be told directly to just ignore the snow because it doesn't matter.  (This is also called the "frame problem" in AI.)
 
Now if we just want to classify pictures of dogs and nothing else we can fix the problem by including more pictures in the training set, making sure to include both huskies not in the snow and non-huskies in the snow.  The AI will never really have a concept of a breed of dog, but if we included a ginormous amount of data and make sure it is properly varied, then it can create an algorithm which is good enough for our purposes.  (But there will always be corner cases where it gets things spectacularly wrong in ways that no human ever would.)  We can't really manually update the algorithm to fix the issue because they are so complicated and bizarre, and it's not like there's a part of the code where the AI says "this is what I think a husky is."
 
Now let's apply these ideas to fanart.  The AI can only make variations of things which have appeared frequently in the fanart.  To give another example of how this can go wrong, there was a point in her stream where Pippa was trying to make art of Omaru Polka.  But every image came back as a loli, while Polka has adult proportions.  I can't be sure what is going on, but my very strong suspicion is that the "fennec fox" tag in the training data was dominated by Fennec Fox from Kemono Friends, and thus when the AI was told to make a Fennec Fox character it pushed it specifically to looking like the Kemono Friends Fennec Fox.  It doesn't have a concept of "give the character big ol' fennec ears and a tan colored fox tail."  The problem could be fixed by stuffing tons of varied fennec fox artwork into the algorithm, but there should be at least a little variation because of characters like Fenneko, Perfumer, Polka herself and some OCs (though I suspect that they might have removed furry characters like Fenneko to improve the output.)  But the Kemono Friends version so dominates the tag that you'd need a lot of extra fanart. Similarly "shark tail" is going to get you a character that looks like Gura Gawr, and if you try to make it different the shark tail is going to look all fucked up, because so much of the art with a shark tail is just art of Gura.
 
Don't get me wrong.  I'm not in the "AI art is crap and will never do anything."  It's already to the point where if I just want generic art of a character who isn't too unusual that it can easily fill my demands.  And it will get better from here.  But there are certain roadblocks in the way that the AI works that will prevent it from doing everything, no matter how much they refine it.  And that's without getting into really impossible feats, like having an AI that automatically generates a manga complete with panels, captions/speech bubbles and a coherent plot.  (On the other hand, AI probably will get to the point where you could use an AI to automatically create all the character and background art and then rearrange them into your own manga.  The most significant problem at the moment would be maintaining a consistent look across your OCs but that is a problem that I do think will be solved in a few years.)

Evolution of a trend.
 
Got sent this video, which got me thinking about its antecedents.
 
 
I'm fairly certain that the immediate reference is to a series of Kizuna AI videos, since these are vtubers.  The earliest I could find was this one (going back three years):
 
 
But this came from a trend of MMD videos, particularly involving Touhou characters, for example this one (four years further in the past):
 
 
The earliest variation of this I could find was this one (two years earlier, though it could have been before that on NND):
 
 
This in turn was a reference to the following video (from two years earlier):
 
 
But that's still 11 years after the release of the original Backstreet Boys song so it's very possible that this video was a riff on something else.  Unfortunately at this point we get into the pre-video streaming days so any viral videos that might be being referenced likely only exist on various personal hard drives or in a low quality format on some forgotten personal homepage.

I got to make the first use of my Steam Deck this last week after I went with my sister and her BF to a water park in Wisconsin for a few days. Knocked out 12 or so hours on Valkyria Chronicles - a game I bought like 8 years ago but never played since it couldn't run on Wine back then. Cool device.

I come bearing sketches.
 
Some doodles/practice of various heads and head shapes

 
Sketch of a zombie girl:

I imagine her name is Saturday. She couldn't remember her old name so she just named herself after the day she woke up: Saturday the 14th.

I got to make the first use of my Steam Deck this last week after I went with my sister and her BF to a water park in Wisconsin for a few days. Knocked out 12 or so hours on Valkyria Chronicles - a game I bought like 8 years ago but never played since it couldn't run on Wine back then. Cool device.

I have done what many have spoken of doing, but only a chosen few have actually accomplished:
 
I have played Monopoly with the rules as printed.
 
Some thoughts:
 
-I thought that auctions would be the huge deciding factor, but in practice most properties actually sold without them and in most auctions the price ended up higher than the right of first refusal cost.  If someone goes bankrupt and the player who bankrupted him can't pay mortgage interest then those properties are all sold on auction simultaneously, but in practice most of the time when this happens the player who bankrupted the other one will have enough cash on hand to pay the interest or at least be willing to sell houses/mortgage property to raise the cash.  That being said, it seems like there are always a few huge auction plays that enhance the game.
 
-Free parking is an even bigger offender than I thought.  If you play with Free Parking just being a blank space, the total amount of cash available goes way, way, down.  The only reliable way to add cash to the pool is by passing go, but people go to jail more often than you'd think.  And buying property, mortgaging, paying fines, buying houses, etc. all effectively remove cash from the pool.  This makes the game much more tense and makes it so that it's pretty much impossible to last longer than two hours.  I think most games would last an hour tops if you have people playing to win and people willing to concede when it is obvious who is going to win.
 
-That being said, free parking is still a great space.  In the end game people will build up the second and third sides of the board, since they are the ones that you are most likely to get to after going to jail (which, as I said, happens more frequently than you'd think.)  With the smaller total pool of cash this often creates a terrifying situation where a wrong roll out of jail could either bankrupt you or else handicap you so much that you will have a very hard time coming back.  Landing on free parking is always a relief at that point.
 
-The most important rule is the ability to trade, build houses, sell houses, and mortgage/demortgage at any time.  This both basically removes downtime and adds a lot of strategy.  You will effectively never build on your turn since you want to have cash to pay people off, and so there ends up being a lot of "I will build here to specifically try to screw the player who is rolling."  This is great.  It's also fun if you have players who are flexible in their trades.  Protip: if someone refuses to let you complete a monopoly no matter what you offer, offer that player the other two parts of the monopoly in exchange for a lot of other stuff.  You can also do fun deals where you get something from player A simply to sweeten the deal for what you really want from player B.
 
Having played by the rules I can safely say it is a much better game than how most people play it.  Not my favorite by any means, but still enjoyable.  Maybe a 7 or 8 out of 10.  I really only have two complaints:
 
1.) There's a lot of dumb math for no real good reason.  You have to pay a 10% interest to demortgage a property and there are a few fines of the form of "10% of your cash on hand."  So you'll be splitting things up into 1's quite a lot and if you have a lot of cash or a lot of properties to deal with there can be some real downtime calculating things out.  You might want to have a calculator on hand, or at the very least have a banker who you trust and who can do figures quickly.
 
2.) There is usually a point where it is really obvious who is going to win but the game doesn't end for a bit.  Ex. someone controls half the board and the other players have mortgaged everything to stay alive.  At that point the only way anyone but the leader can win is to pass go or get money from cards enough to demortgage their stuff, then have the leader land on their spaces, all before they land on half the board (which will probably be an instant bankruptcy.)  It's possible, but exceptionally unlikely.  However since there are so many mortgaged properties you can go several turns where you neither pay money nor gain money.  I would advise playing with people willing to concede in this situation, or just setting a time limit after which you total up all assets to determine a winner.

In case you were doubting me when I said I could ramble on about this game for several more pages, let me talk about one small aspect of the game which shows both how much I've played it and gives you a good sense of how the story changes.
 
Like I said, you pick three party members.  In most playthroughs things go pretty simply in terms of how they join.  You start controlling your main party member and go through the corresponding prologue, at which point the plotlines join because every prologue ends with the character needing to get to the Holy City of Wendel.  Shortly after your prologue ends you will have your second party member join and travel with you to the city.  You then go through a dungeon with that party member and afterwards end up thrown in jail, where your third party member also is and who will bust you out. Simple enough.
 
You do meet the other party members because their stories still happen even if they aren't in your party (they just don't get all the cool chosen one aspects of the plot and miss out on most of the dungeons.)  In fact you can find them all in Jad, the city where you end up after your prologue, including the ones who aren't going to end up in your party.  You then will meet each again as you travel to their respective homelands or related areas, where they will give you some insight in their stories but not join you.
 
Only there's one exception to all of this: Charlotte.  She's from Wendel and so doesn't end up in Jad.  (In her prologue she ends up shortly outside of it and tries to immediately return home.)  Because of this you will encounter her just after you recruit your second party member rather than in Jad (just before you get to Wendel.)  But if Charlotte is your second party member, then you don't encounter her at the usual spot for a second party member but the slightly later location where you meet her in all playthroughs (except if you, i.e. your main character, are Charlotte.)  The only difference is that she joins you there rather than running off to Wendel without you.
 
Things get more interesting if Charlotte is your third party member.  Then you will encounter your second party member at the usual spot, Charlotte at her usual spot, but she will join you.  This means that you have three party members in the first major dungeon and before the first boss, whereas in all other situations you will only have two party members.  This also means when you get to the jail after the dungeon you don't meet Charlotte there, since she's already in your party.
 
But you still need someone to bust you out.  So the game will have Hawkeye appear to help you out, except that he will not join you since he'll miss the ship you take out of town (and will mention this on your next meeting.)  This is the only way that you can have Hawkeye help you escape from prison but not join you.
 
But what if Hawkeye is one of your first two party members and Charlotte is the third?  Then the game has Duran show up instead to help you out.  And if your first two party members are Hawkeye and Duran with Charlotte as the third, the game uses Kevin instead.  In both cases the fourth character in the jail will miss the boat.  Since there are only three party members one of Hawkeye, Duran or Kevin is always available as an extra character to save you, so Angela and Riesz will only show up in the jail if they are your third party member.
 
I have no idea why they didn't just have Charlotte put into a separate cell and bust you out or something, but it was fun figuring out all the contingencies.

EDIT: Found a big blind spot
 

Sonic 1: Mindblowing at the time.  Even though Super Mario World had been released shortly before it, that game didn't have the ability to go through levels as fast or smoothly.  And if you compare it to anything but Super Mario World that was out at the time and it's insane how much better it feels while platforming.  But looking back most of the worlds are pretty poorly designed, with only Green Hill Zone being the standout.
 
Sonic 2: Much better level design and more variety than Sonic 1, and adds several nice tweaks to the engine (particularly the ability to spin dash on command.)  Cute two player features.  All around solid.
 
Sonic 3: Has one of the nicest artstyles of the 16 bit era, and adds a lot of interactivity when compared to Sonic 2.  Playing as Tails is a nice perk.  However it has that bullshit barrel in Carnival Night and is somewhat short (since they split off many of the planned levels.)  Even with the shorter length, it still gives you a better bang for your buck than most platformers in the 16 bit era.
 
Sonic and Knuckles/Sonic 3 and Knuckles: Lock on Technology dude!  Okay, it's a pretty dumb gimmick, but the game by itself is as solid as Sonic 2 and becomes something exceptional when properly combined with Sonic 3 (the only issue being some pacing problems due to level shuffling.)  This is the truly great Sonic game.
 
Sonic Adventure: Kind of a Sonic 1 situation for the 3D era.  Yeah, Mario 64 had been out for a while and that was a great platformer.  But it wasn't really a fast platformer, and not really a classic platformer in the "go through a large level just to get to the end" sort of thing.  Sonic Adventure was the first 3D game to do that well at all, even if it did have camera issues.  (A side note here: many of the collision detection problems were introduced in the Gamecube port and do not exist on the original Dreamcast version.)  But just like Sonic 1, when looking back some of the level design issues become more apparent.  There are also major ups and downs in having 6 different playmodes between the various characters; obviously not all are going to be as good.
 
Sonic Adventure 2: Basically restricted itself to what worked in Sonic Adventure 1 and polished that.  The level design is better and you don't really run into the "I have to playthrough this dumb part to get to what I'm actually interested" experience you get in Adventure 1.  This is probably the last mainline Sonic game which could be defended as "great."  The biggest mistake was probably dividing into two teams of Hero and Dark.  That didn't go so bad in this game, but led to problems such as having too many unnecessary characters or having the plot be too serious which would become bigger issues later on.
 
Sonic Heroes: There are way too many damn characters and the three character per team gimmick, while initially interesting, just bogs the game down and leads to glitches.  Way too many long multi-hit fights which should never happen in a Sonic game.  It isn't a terrible game, but it isn't very good.  People only convince themselves it is because of what is to come.
 
Sonic 06: We all know this game sucks, what is there to say about it that hasn't been said a million times?
 
Sonic Unleashed: The "day" sections are pretty good and have a lot of nice innovation to make Sonic play better in 3D.  But they took too long to make.  Rather than committing to a shorter game experience (which would actually have been comparable to how long it takes to beat something like Sonic 2) they padded it out with dumb night "werehog" sections and made you grind for emblems to unlock levels.  This is something I really hate in modern game design: intentionally padding out the game just because people think that more hours = better game.
 
Sonic Colors:  They did learn their lesson and stick to the "day" platforming model.  Unfortunately the level design is just so-so and the wisps are more gimmicky than anything.  It's okay, I guess.
 
Sonic Generations: The design is much better than colors and the only padding is done through pure 2D platforming levels, which is something that I don't mind seeing.  Pretty fun the whole way through, but it also feels like an admission that the series is long past any chance of being good since the only way that they can get something of any quality is by repeatedly reminding you of better games.
 
Sonic Lost World: Honestly I forget this game exists most of the time.
 
Sonic Forces: It's like they forgot all the lessons that they had to work so hard to learn.  The plot is dumb as hell and tonally all over the place.  You have the edgiest of edgelord villains, but at the same time the goofy classic sonic returns.  Are we meant to take him seriously in a war scenario?  The levels are short, and poorly designed for the various player tools.  I think that a lot of this could have worked if they had just committed to it; for example a game where you made your own character and the levels were set up with many paths which would be easier or harder for various builds would have been neat.  But they should have committed entirely to having your new character do everything then, which of course they were too chicken to do.

Wow, its been only 7 years since I put something here?
Well, anyway, I got back to sketching and recently I had this dream about this insect humanoid character I apparently created. So in some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, here it is.
 
I call her Beatrix.
 
 
Notes: drawing sure got harder. I used to draw more detailed stuff as a kid but now I cant even get proportions and perspective right without help.

yesterday I learned that Lady Bernkastel is in fact NOT a Touhou character

In general, people who often have unnecessary uses of adverbs have a probable chance of being trustworthy.

It's been awhile! I haven't drawn in quite some time, but lately I've found new inspiration! A lot has happened as well, and I feel so much more capable when it comes to drawing now. I've started using Krita; here's my first little batch of doodles:

 
There are a number of developments here. First off, you may notice...that I'm sketching! Yes, this is my big breakthrough! I've been drawn for years and never did I ever sketch, ever! I'd draw a stick figure frame and some rough environment and basically just build the final product directly on top of that. I've basically been drawing backwards this entire time. Why? Well, when it came to pencil-and-paper, I always held my pencil far, far too hard to sketch. So I was just sort of predisposed to this idea that I just couldn't sketch. I partly also figured that sketching was just something I'd do once I got better, because all the good artists, they always sketch. But then I realized: artists do not sketch because they are good, they are good because they sketch. And boy, sketching is just so, so freeing! Like, a way to draw where you don't have to worry about being perfect because what you are drawing is not representative of the final product? Insane! It's so much fun! And it makes drawing everything so much easier because you can actually set everything up before you draw the final! Gosh, what the hell was I doing!?
 
Secondly...I've started using Krita, as I mentioned. Up until now, I've been using Adobe Animate. Then I thought...why am I still using Adobe Animate? I originally started using it because I wanted to animate and make that cartoon, which I did. But for now, I just want to draw. And Animate is just balls for drawing. Even Paint.NET is better for full 2D art than Animate. Every simple thing in Animate takes like 10 steps compared to PDN or Krita, it's insane. I'm very much enjoying Krita and look forward to being able to expand my game now that I'm not restrained by Animate's shitty technical limitations.
 
And finally...I want to evolve my artstyle! As I've drawn I've gotten a lot better, but my artstyle has stayed the same. Which may sort of sound like the point of having an artstyle, but my artstyle was always very geometric, and as I got better, I developed the ability to draw less and less geometric characters. Basically, my skill had surpassed my artstyle. So I feel like it's time that I evolve my artstyle, into something that allows me to make full use of my ability. I'm still experimenting around, still playing with everything, but I'm excited to really develop my art. It's nice to draw again!

I played through all the Shantae games so now I'm gonna review them.

 
 

I've definitely been on the "really should just run linux" thought train as a lot of things that were barriers have been eroded away over time. I keep thinking "I really need to just rip off the bandaid and go for it" but it's hard to get off my lazy ass and do it.
 
Maybe when this version I'm running is officially dropped from support

Since Corv complained about the background, it got me thinking: how hard would it be to import modern art into Windows 3.1 and actually have a decent looking background?
 
Answer: not very: