Well, been a while since I've been in this neck of the woods. What has been going on? A couple of things, really.

Of course, there are games, I've been spending countless hours doing some Uncharted 2, and to a lesser extent, Critter Crunch. If you still don't have Critter Crunch, get it and jump online, I need more people to beat with my puzzlan skills.

I've also been doing some brainstorming, a few of you may remember my ten things you don't know about me blog that was posted many moons ago, where I bring up my interest in comic/manga stuff. I bring this up because after doing some doodles for a while, I feel like trying out something a bit more professional. Plus, over the last few months, I've been having these crazy stories floating around in my head, and they're stories that I think would be interesting to share with the community. What I'm really saying is, I've got a few big and slightly different things planned for the future, so be on the lookout for that.

And Topher's superior taste in music has been kinda getting to me. It's all I've thought about for the last week now. So much so, it's been affecting my dreams. One of those in particular was that Miku girl who did nothing but walk around, carrying around this paper, constantly scratching it and giggling to herself. It...went something like this.



wut indeed. There's not much I can say about this without exaggerating how eerie this is, especially since it was the last thing I saw before I had to wake up and do a quick morning class, making that entire day awkward. So yeah, Topher is the devil. Watch yourselves.

asdfgjdsfgjdaf Seriously? Davis' birthday was last week and I didn't even notice? I feel terrible right now. Like really terrible. Like going to a party only to find out that you were the only person that the cool kids didn't invite. And on top of that, you brought a quiche, which you damn well know no one likes. And you still brought it. What's wrong with you?

It's an awkward feeling that won't go away, shame that I'll have to live with for the rest of my days. Maybe someday, I'll have a chance to make up for this error. Someday...

Anyway, doodle. :D

I've been reading a lot of discussions over BlazBlue: Continuum Shift over the past week. A lot of them were about the new characters, the small aesthetic changes in the playing field, and most importantly, the edits in the moves of various fighters. I'm not a big fighting fan, so knowing how some moves will not be able to be jump cancelled doesn't really affect me, but reading people talking about how most of the changes are being seen as nerfs for their respective characters just by reading it and not actually playing it boggles my mind.

Noel was probably the most commonly seen name I've run across when it came to the nerfs, next to Rachel and I think Carl as well. Far too often have I read comments which had "Noel" and "nerf" in the same sentence. Then I had a thought, when was the last time something good actually happened to Noel?

A large portion of her roles in the story were either doing something because a higher command told her to do so, or accidentally getting into a fight due to miscommunication. The other fighters had their roles, granted they weren't very strong, as they were trying to find information about key characters, or trying to find answers to their questions. But this kind of thing rarely occurs for Noel, she only gets into fights mainly due to miscommunication or higher authority. It's disheartening.

Aside from the alternate story when Noel is being chased by Litchi to try on clothes (which I think is more weird than anything else), there is no happiness to be seen anywhere with her. Jin and Ragna act like pricks around her, Carl had his mind warped and sees Noel as more of a foe than a friend, Tager pretty much dislikes anything involved with the NOL so he doesn't care, etc. So it's like Noel is really on her own without having a purpose.

And this is made worse when she interacts with Nu, which makes her feel more like a thing than an actual human being. So depressing.

And with this nerf thing, it's no wonder she has such a sad face most of the time. She's like the Trix Rabbit, constantly suffering, never being able to get what she truly wants. And the cereal is, like, happiness or something, I dunno.

Just look at how sad this girl is.



She doesn't look like someone who should be beaten up, much less someone who should wield guns more than half the size of her body. She doesn't deserve the poor treatment after all that she's already been through. Next time you run across a Noel, look in your hearts, and think twice about what you are doing. :(

...OMG

Yeah, kind of a big deal for me. I've been wanting to post this earlier this week, but schoolwork and family stuff got in the way, so I didn't have as much time as I could to work on it. And the time I did work on it, I spent more time constantly making very small edits to it rather than actually making progress on it. I go insane whenever I have days like that. And a lot of days spent on this were like that. They sucked. But I persevered and finally got this thing done, I'm happy.

Life story out of the way, back to Jimbo.

Facial hair was fun to do, trying to get any resemblance of a sword was not, that's something I need to learn how to do in the days to come. The eyes took a while to do, as I had about four different takes on how to do them, trying to choose the best pair took a day in itself. And trying to do a robe at first feels like a chore, but gradually became a bit more enjoyable as I neared the end for that part.

Also, Jimbo constantly coaxed me to do this thing, true story.

It's been a while since I actually played anything with the Rock Band for more than three hours in one sitting, or really, any music game that recently came out, and in the span of about half a day, I had a few thoughts during my playthrough, which I felt like sharing mostly because of boredom. But yeah, the thoughts:

-I was pretty underwhelmed by the background of "I Am The Walrus" of all songs. Maybe because I was expecting something more hallucinogenic ala "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," but what I got instead was a costume party. Not my thing, yo.

-Have there been some modifications to the game engine? I'm actually having an easier time hitting ho/po chords than I did when I played RB2.

-I'm undecided whether "Dear Prudence" or "Octopus's Garden" is the most fun song to play on guitar.

-I'm a bit more fond of the aesthetic change that went down on the drum highway. The gems seem a bit smaller or at least less of a giant block, which feels a bit DrumMania-esque and that was a layout I always kinda dug.

-Gold star cutoffs are so ridiculous. The first time I played a song, I 100% a song, no gold stars, so I replay it, change my Beatlemania path, get 300 more points from my last run, then gold star it. So ridiculous.

-My respect for Ringo Starr has gone up pretty highly since he really is a pretty good drummer when I played some of his songs. But it's really because I just found out he was the guy who wrote "Octopus's Garden," mad props to him.

-Trying to sing a song while in harmonizing mode is the most frustrating thing to do. If there's only one pitch on the screen, it's not a problem, but when you eventually have to deal with three, the game can't decide which one you want to choose, so it goes all over the place. I don't know if it's different if you have an extra mic or two of them hooked up, but I'm sure it just adds more frustration into the mix.

-I still don't know what the hell I'm singing when I play "Come Together."

-You have no idea how useful that pause timer thing is when you need it, it really helps when you ready yourself into playing again, which would have helped me wonders if it was in RB2.

-Hearing Ringo Starr yelling about how he's got blisters on his fingers is easily the highlight of "Helter Skelter."

-I really should have seen the encore song title coming a mile away. I didn't. I felt dumb.

Minor gripes aside, this was a fun outworldly experience to go through, it was fun to see Harmonix put a lot of effort into making the universe of the Beatles as screwed up as possible, and they did wonders into pulling that off. Definitely worth a look just for the visuals alone.

I got bored, so I took the opportunity to try a more realistic/mature style. Tried getting an idea, didn't get one for a few days, played some Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, got owned by Drac (I never saw his running animation coming, I didn't know what to do :[), and decided to do something Castlevania-related.

Let me tell you, I'm pretty bad when it comes to long hair, and I completely forgot how long Shanoa's hair was. How does she fight with all that around her anyway? So I limited it to a few strands, because I know that there's no way that I can do fifty strands of hair. Not at the stage I'm at right now. But I love how everything came out shading-wise. Also felt like giving Shanoa some soulless eyes since I think it would have fit her better than anything else I could have done.

This was a fun two-day project, even though it took me an entire day to get the hair down alone, holy crap. But yeah, hope you dig it.