mvu.one

Comic Thoughts: Solanin

A while back I read "Goodnight Punpun" which was a horrifically depressing manga I could't put down. Solanin is a short work by the same author, and while it doesn't come near the depths of awfulness that Punpun reached, it still manages to hurt in a way that keeps you reading.

Solanin follows a group of post-graduate young adults finding their way in life, with the focus on Meiko, a woman who hates her job as an "office lady" and abruptly quits without any real direction or goals in life. She struggles with finding meaning, pushing up against her group of friends and boyfriend who all suffer from varying degrees of listless lack of direction.

It's a story about growing up and facing reality -- it manages to be depressing and uplifting at the same time somehow. There's a lot of reality in between the ennui-drenched pages, and a lot of hurt, but still there's hope.

I think reading this as an adult past my "figuring it out" phase (though my own phase was much less dramatic) is a very different experience than it would have been if I had picked it up while in university or earlier. I'm glad I picked it up now when the angst has subsided. In a weird way this read ended up very much in-phase with my reading of Keep the Aspidistra Flying on that front.

It's a short and bittersweet read that was worth the time.

Game Thoughts: Sable [DNF]

On a lazy weekend evening I booted up Sable on a whim and set out into the desert on my pod racer to find myself.

It's a strangely muted game of small quests, serendipity, and climbing things. If Breath of the Wild were a font, this is the monospace variant. There's less to do, less excitement, no enemies, and not a particularly large story -- but what the game lacks it makes up for in vibes.

Zooming around the various desert regions and discovering interesting locations is as engaging as it is relaxing and the world is scattered with mysteries both subtle and not. The sparse population of masked strangers are both creepy and endearing, and the slow accumulation of lore was satisfying -- though not quite compelling enough to beat the game.

One thing that stood out in my time with Sable was how well the developers captured feelings through sparse dialog, a touch of music, and visuals. They captured the bittersweetness of leaving home, of the excitement of a journey, and even of the dizzying confusion of the first time in a big city. It was all masterfully done, and I'm sure they nailed the landing with however they wrapped up the game.

It was a wonderful experience overall, but vibes alone aren't enough to keep me coming back beyond the 10-hour mark. Perhaps I'll revisit the game on another chill weekend, but for now I've packed it away in the pod racer satchel.

Book Thoughts: Keep the Aspidistra Flying

I recently wrote a complaint-post about my inability to read books lately. My curse has been broken at last!

I was in a local bookshop when my eyes fell on a reduced-price copy of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and my highschool memories of 1984 and Animal farm compelled me to pick it up for $5 without much research. I had some time to burn over the long weekend and read the damn thing cover-to-cover laying on my porch furniture in the almost-comfortable-but-still-chilly spring sun.

As previously mentioned it's been a hot minute since I've picked up a work by Orwell, and I really need to emphasize how much I appreciate his writing style. It's to-the-point, clean, and doesn't go heavy on prose while still feeling extremely well-written. Just a solid writer all 'round.

The book itself was thoroughly interesting -- it follows Gordon Comstock, an almost-30 poet in 1930's London who has sworn off bowing before the "money god", and insists on living a life on minimal wages, dashing his family's hopes, squandering his education, and defying his own ability to hold down a "good job". Despite his resolve, he rails against how his own lack of money destroys his life -- in fact it consumes him entirely as he bemoans his miserable life page after page.

A shocking amount of Gordon's pains echo through to modern times -- how easily could this book have been written about a modern day "incel" and their views on life and women!

Interestingly, I believe if I had picked this book up in my youth, I would have been squarely on the side of Gordon. Not his terrible views on women, but his attempt at self sabotaging for his principals. Fuck the money-god and all that.

Reading it as a working adult, his follies are as obvious as they are painful, and his eventual "growing up" felt inevitable. I still joke about dying poor and principled instead of selling my soul, yet I've managed to sell enough of it to afford patio furniture to read books on in the sun.

I know this book is a satirical critique of the middle class, but much of it rings true. Gordon ultimately fails in his rebellion and falls into the inevitability of the middle class life, "making good" and ultimately becoming somewhat boring and mundane -- but happy, perhaps, at least, in the middle.

The most poignant line in the book to me comes from Gordon's well-off publishing friend Ravelston -- a character I somewhat ashamedly can related to much closer than Gordon despite being firmly in the middle-class myself. It was to the tune of "You cannot expect to live in a corrupt society without becoming at least a little corrupt yourself," one must either leave society all together or sell some part of themselves. If not dignity, then time.

In the middle class, one must ironically find the balance that they can live with. Figure out how much of their soul they're willing to sell that they're left with a satisfactory share and enough capital to live a good life. 90 years later, every word of Orwell's view of capitalism and the middle class ring true.

Keep that aspidistra flying. All hail the money-god.

Game Thoughts: Pokemon Evolved

I've been a big Pokemon fan since I was probably 8, and it's followed me into adulthood as a fun occasional hobby to engage in with my partner.

I don't usually go in for the non-mainline games, and despite being briefly enamored by Pokemon Unbound I usually don't bother with romhacks.

A friend from work, however, showed me a short video of a new romhack that caught my interest: Pokemon Evolved. It offers a very simple premise: they didn't rework the story or do anything particularly fancy with this, they just gave the original 151 Pokemon more evolutions.

That's it -- original Pokemon Leaf Green game, but more evolutions and they beefed up some battles to have higher level 'mons to show them off.

My god I had fun with this.

Some of the evolutions were absolutely amazing and felt natural, some were horrible messes, some were eldritch horrors. My childhood favourite starter got three new evolutions, snorlax evolves, and I was surprised to find myself using cubone and doduo's evolutions right through the Elite Four (which was a very close fight). I think there's something like 350 Pokemon in the final Pokedex, and while I didn't catch all of them (fuck you, chansey) I did manage to see all the new designs in the game.

I've barely been able to keep myself engaged with multi-million dollar AAA games lately for more than 4-5 hours, but this 20-year-old gameboy advanced title that fans modded and unceremoniously dropped on github kept me glued for 15+ hours. (30+ in-game, but I played the whole thing on 2X speed).

The original game holds up, (though I wouldn't have been able to stomach it on 1x speed) and the modding the team managed to mix back in the mystery and excitement of pre-internet pokemon gaming. It wasn't something I expected to finish, but I had a great time comparing new evolutions with my friend and reliving a playthrough of the Kanto region.

(For the record, I do own a physical copy of Leaf Green)

Thoughts: Music as a Hobby

I've been dabbling with music stuff for almost a year now and honestly I still suck at it. I've rented guitars and drums, I've played with VSTs and DAWs -- I even bought myself a hardware synth since my last post on the topic!

However I can still only play a handful of songs, my grasp on theory is tenuous at best, and I've failed every listening test I've tried (even ones just listening for a single note). Despite this I can sincerely say that I love this hobby.

My hobbies have always been goal oriented. Writing a piece of software, drawing a specific picture, playing single-player narrative games -- these are all things that have a roughly concrete end state. With my attention span and wide interest pool I frequently fail to get to that state, leaving me often feeling like I've failed.

I have discovered that music, on the other hand, can be an ephemeral act of creativity for me. Of course you can always produce a song or compose a finished piece -- those things of course exist within music -- but since I've started spending a lot of time watching people online with their instruments and gear and software I've come to realize that many musicians (and amateur music people like me) simply enjoy the act of making organized noises.

After work I'll sometimes sit at my little station and plug in some wires and throw on some pre-made drum loop, then I'll tweak some knobs and put a weird lead sound together and flip on and off different recorded loops and just jam. It's garbage, but it does something to the soul to be actively making something, even temporarily, that is some semblance of music.

I saw a post mastodon recently that I can't find now which philosophizes that music (or art, in general) is a human behavior -- innate to us like making a nest is to birds.

I have no innate talent in music. Starting as late as I have (and at the rate that I'm going) I don't believe I'll ever be a particularly good musician, but this discovery of the joy of making music (or sounds, at least) has been a revelation that I'm grateful to have had.

Game Thoughts: Stories of Sol: The Gun-Dog

I'm a fan of old mech anime and I'm a fan visual novels -- so when I saw the Steam storefront page for Stories of Sol: The Gun-Dog I bought it immediately without any prior knowledge.

It's a great little visual novel! They absolutely nailed the look and mood -- and while the story and characters aren't terribly deep, they were certainly colourful enough that I got attached to or hated hated (in a good way) most of the cast to one degree or another.

I wish it was longer for the price. I'm not one to complain about short games, but this was too short. The game ends on a cliffhanger that comes too soon right after a pretty great story sequence that had me really wanting more.

More as in closure -- I think there's other paths I could go back and take for a different experience, but I want to know what happens next now that there's momentum, not what alternative events could have been!

The game was made with Ren'py, and is good reminder that I should try that out sometime. I'm more into playing VNs than writing them, but I've got good python chops and could probably do some interesting things!

Game Thoughts: Grim Fandango

I grew up playing classic point-and-click adventure games like King's Quest, Monkey Island, and Sam & Max Hit the Road -- however somehow Grim Fandango never made it onto the family PC.

I've rectified that now with the Remaster, and it was definitely a nostalgia trip. It had the same overall vibes and sense-of humor as the aforementioned games, chock full of the cheeky sarcasm that was a hallmark of the genre.

I think there's a lot of things Grim Fandango did right compared to all those other games. It was designed in such a way that you can't get completely stuck -- there's no winding up on an island missing some random item you were supposed to find 4 chapters ago here, and I greatly appreciate that. To pull this off, each chapter of the game has a fairly limited number of screens and a reset of items which definitely made it a smoother ride than some of its peers.

That doesn't mean the game is above the borderline-impossible-to-solve puzzles that plague the genre. More than once I had to pull up a guide after spending 20 minutes visiting every available screen and talking to every NPC -- only to find the solution was some completely arbitrary connection I'd never have thought of. When I pick up a guide for a puzzle game I like my reaction to be "ahhhh I should have thought of that", not "who the fuck thought of this?". Combined with the excruciatingly slow transition animations in some locations (almost every ladder), I felt like I spent too much time traveling between locations instead of solving puzzles in some chapters.

Visually it holds up great! The remaster did very little graphically outside of a bit of shading and smoothing of the characters. The pre-rendered backgrounds and janky 3D models feel intentional rather than dated, and though much of the game is in somewhat washed-out colours this felt right considering the game essentially takes place in limbo.

The story was definitely unique, fun, and filled wacky characters -- but I wish there has been a bit more depth to it. It felt like the world presented has so much unique storytelling to offer, and there would have been ample room for a story that was funny and thought-provoking rather than just funny.

(Don't get me wrong, there's plenty here to provoke thought, just not much of that comes from the story or character interactions)

Still, for a game from the 90's this does hold up well, and I had a good time getting through it. I'm kind of craving a Sam & Max remaster playthough now, or maybe I'll finally play Day of the Tentacle.

Tech Thoughts: I like Bun

I've been doing this web-dev thing for about 12 years now. I'm primarily self-taught, so I wouldn't classify myself as any degree of "good programmer", but after 12 years that amounts to enough burned fingers that I know how to operate the oven pretty well.

It's always felt kinda illegal to run Javascript server-side. I know Node's been around for a thousand years at this point, but when I began writing websites in the jQuery days Javascript was dirty.

It still is, but I feel like after ES2015 things got a lot better. Also, since the declarative UI revolution I write wat more Javascript than I do other languages -- so much so that at some point it became my native tongue over the Python I was raised on.

And why not? Javascript is everywhere. No other language is so readily at your fingertips -- just open the web inspector of any browser and you're ready to sling code, transform some data, or test a Regex. Nowadays JS ships with a ludicrous amount of built-in functionality as well -- everything from MIDI to WebGPU to USB interactions. Look at all this stuff!

I've always been a Python-backend kinda person. Flask, FastAPI, Django with it's various fixings -- I've been using Python server-side my whole career. But for small stuff, the microservices and simple SPAs I frequently need to assemble for work, the static-site builder for my blog, for all the little scrapers and scripts that I write on a daily basis, I'm switching to Bun .

Book Thoughts: A Half-Built Garden

I had a minor crisis because of this book. Not because it was good, but because I felt it wasn't.

Spoilers ahead, but mostly about stuff that happens in the first couple chapters.

Game Thoughts: Tactics Ogre Reborn [DNF]

I've had a complicated relationship with Tactics Ogre.

My love of the Final Fantasy Tactics subseries drove me to buy the PSP version of this game over 10 years ago, and yet I never managed to get into it. I don't think I even managed to finish chapter 1 before now, pinning the game near the top of my backlog for over a decade.

It took so long that they remastered the remaster onto the Switch (which I promptly purchased a physical copy of).

I absolutely adore the visual style of these games. Something about the isometric sprites and serious character portraits scratches some kind of itch deep in my brain that nothing else comes close to. The character art for Reborn is absurdly good and blows its Final Fantasy cousins out of the water -- so much so that I purchased an artbook just to ogle the illustrations despite never having finished the game.

On Paper, Tactics Ogre is everything I want. Final Fantasy Tactics-style gameplay with a richer and more adult story -- in practice, however, it's something entirely different.