Game Thoughts: Baldur's Gate 3
I recently spent a few weeks completely enthralled by Baulder's Gate 3 before my annoyances with the game's mechanics finally outweighed my fun and I put it down for good (Around the middle of Act 2.)
The game is unquestionably a masterpiece. We are served a world lush with rich characters, filled with interesting stories, and peppered with discoverable lore. Astounding care was poured into giving players a simulacra of the creative freedoms offered by traditional table-top RPGs through the many available paths, dialogue options, and unexpected interactions. It really feels at times that the developers thought of everything.
However, the adherence to D&D mechanics was a major turn-off for me. A table-top RPG is a structure crafted of many rules that, by design, can be bent or ignored. A living, conscious Game Master is responsible for deciding when the laws that govern the very fabric of their tiny universe need to be re-shaped to ensure that the players in their world are having fun. One could argue that every rule in a tabletop RPG is fundamentally designed to optimize for player enjoyment, and so this flexibility to change any rule to the tastes and personalities of the people around the table is key to the overall enjoyment of these games.
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Project: 0dd.company
A little bit ago, after realizing I needed to do more things with more people, I decided to start a little artist collective, because sometimes that's just what you need to do.
It's one of those things I feel like should have rules or regulations, but it turns out it's just something you can do. You get a couple people you know online into a group chat, pick a name, and declare yourselves an art collective and nobody's really gonna stop you. I recommend it!
For the initial members I reached out to creative people I knew who had been struggling to produce art. Maybe they've been too busy with their career, or life had just become too complicated lately, or perhaps they'd simply been having trouble finishing personal projects.
The last was my own pain point! I would look at things like gamejams and artistic dailies and feel so unworthy as a creator. How could these people in 24 hours build entire games when I can barely publish a blogpost in that time?
And so with these creatives in mind, the concept was to provide inspiration. Every few months, a new inspiration file would be published, and members would be free to take the next couple months, when they could find the time, and make anything they wanted. A poem, a song, a doodle, whatever, just keep the inspiration in mind.
The first piece of inspiration I found for the group was 13 minutes of whale song dedicated to the public domain, and while the group's pretty small I feel like we still got a pretty good variety in the handful of submissions!
Without a bar (low or high) or any real restrictions and a generous timeline, almost everyone got a little something finished. Not all of the original members had time to finish their piece, but there's no stress or judgement. There's always the next piece, and members still get to celebrate the works everyone else produced.
Anyways, I'm happy to announce that the 0dd.company's first gallery: Deepsong is now open for viewing, and I'm really happy with my first piece: Whalefall. I finally found an project to use Orca with, and I learned a lot over the course of the project!
I also broke down my process for making the song on my music page -- though the 0dd Gallery has the way better video version!
Thoughts: LLMs - A Weekend Drive and a Steak Dinner
I was having a chat with a friend recently which kept circling around LLM (or "AI") usage within our respective jobs, how people around us use them, and our own feelings about engaging with LLMs.
We came to a conclusion that actively using LLMs is a lot like eating steak: something many people will openly acknowledge as being "bad" while still willfully (often even eagerly) partaking.
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Story: Blades of Wheel
It was the summer of 2019 when I looked out from the 9th floor window of our condo north of the "Big City" and decided I wanted to buy some rollerblades.
I don't know what drove this -- perhaps I had seen someone in rollerblades in a park or video, perhaps I wanted to extend the range on my daily walk to farther flung reaches of our neighbourhood -- whatever it was, I became fixated and rollerblades became inevitable.
Before continuing, I want to make two facts clear which made this decision a slightly not great idea. First, I don't know how to skate. Despite being Canadian all my life I avoided the siren call of the hockey stick, eschewing both ice and street flavours of the sport as a youth. We frequently had "ice rink" gym days in grade school, but I was one of those kids that just goofed around in boots or ate nachos in the stands.
Secondly, I am large. Not large enough to be featured on degrading reality TV shows, but my height draws the common questions of "how tall are you?" and "do you play basketball?" more frequently than not, and I've got enough meat on these long bones that the last time I saw 200lbs was in grade 9.
In fact, until this event I doubted that they even made rollerblades in my size, as most shoe stores don't even have me covered -- but on that fateful summer day I found myself a specialty rollerblade store, and my fate was sealed.
Said store was a 2 hour walk away. I had much saner means to get there at my disposal, but very reasonably decided that a 2 hour walk there would give me a solid hour of rollerblading on my way back, which would give me plenty of time to learn how to rollerblade.
Did I mention people treat me like a fully functioning adult?
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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!
