#Mostly because of being busy IRL but also because I decided on a new rendering method

[northstarscowboyhat]

Peepaw Starlo struggles. Autism 2 autism communication struggles.

[dlamp-dictator]

Quick Ramblings (Anime Edition)

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of older stuff along with some of my backlog from the last two-ish seasons. Nothing this season really clicked with me save for In/Spectre, and I’m waiting for more episodes of the dub to come out before watching it. 

All in all this has been a rather quiet season in terms of anime, at least for me. I’ve been a lot more focused on updating fanfics and my original stories for the past two-ish months to really watch any anime that I couldn’t just binge. A few things in Spring has my interest, but that’s Spring...

Anyway... onto the anime Allen’s been watching these past few months.

I’m about half way through Cross Ange and I’m having a blast with it. It’s trashy, it’s riddled with fanservice, it’s premise is honestly stupid, and even the mech battles are a little lacking, but this is an show that knows it’s trashy and over the top, so I don’t have an issue with it. 

For a quick summary, Cross Ange is about an Angelise Ikaruga Misurugi, a princess living in a peaceful kingdom of magic-users, at least until its revealed that she had no magical talent and was immediately shunned and exiled from the kingdom as a member of the magic-less Norma caste. Taken from her home and forced to train and work as a mech pilot to kill dragons, she grows into a cold killing machine, with only anger and revenge keeping her going. The story goes into depth about a conspiracy regarding the Dragons, Ange’s origins, and a few other things, but again, I’m at episode 13 at this point. 

This is actually my second time watching this show, but stopped after episode 12 last time, mostly because something came up for me IRL and by the time I got back to Cross Ange I realized the dub was out and I was just waiting for that to wrap up. Speaking of, the Dub is pretty good, Ange sounds great, the voice actress being able to do spoiled princess and cold-hearted badass parts of her very well. And the rest of the cast sound good too with Hilda being my favorite, my favorite moments being the ‘on-the-next-episode’ segments, which are hilarious. To paraphrase one of them:

Ange: Hey, it’s been like 10 episodes since someone died, and we just became friends soooo...

Hilda: I don’t want to be friends with you anymore.

That aside, this show it just a fun romp. It’s trashy, it’s over the top, it takes itself almost too serious but not in a way that feels like they’re reaching. Like the seriousness only adds to the cheese of it all. I haven’t finished it yet, but if you want something fun and trashy to watch with your friends, this is definitely the perfect show for it.

Against my better judgement, I decided to look back at the original Fate/Stay Night anime. It’s been years since I’ve watched it and all I remember is a 3D-rendered dragon in a mid-2000s anime. And while that is bad, it shouldn’t be all there is to that anime. As of 10 episodes I can confidently say it’s... not... terrible. A lot of the complaints I remember hearing about this anime seem to be blown out of proportion, at least given the point of the anime I’m at. It’s got plenty of time to make me cringe even more than it has now, but that cringe mostly comes from me being a 26-year-old man watching anime that was probably a lot cooler to 13-year-old Allen that the 26-year-old Allen currently watching this now. For a mid-2000s shounen series, it’s okay. Not great, but okay.

This anime might get a Rambling in itself drafted up when I finish the Gacha Rambling, but for now I’ll just say I have two main issues with this anime: Shirou Emiya, and the World-building of the Fate universe. Shirou feels incompetent not due to how he behaves, but how the writers make him behave. The second issue... requires me to talk about Fate and its writers as a whole, but the short version is I wish Fate/Stay Night wasn’t originally a porn game. It’d make things a lot easier to explain and maneuver around if it wasn’t.

Also, I do prefer this English voice cast to Unlimited Blade Works. The UBW cast if fine, even great, but Sam Riegel as Shirou and Liam O’Brien as Archer is just too perfect a combination to beat.

Finally started watching Ascendance of a Bookworm, an isekai anime about a librarian being reincarnated as a frail, sickly girl. Her one goal being to write and curate books. The only issue being the world she reincarnated into has little in the way of mass-producing books, as neither the printing press or typewriting has been invented year, and paper is rather expensive. So she uses all sorts of schemes, ideas, and plots to try and get books made on some reasonable level, each time a failure, but each failure doing more good in the long term than she thinks. 

This anime has a very mellow feel to it. Not something I watch for the plot, but just to see this cute anime girl finally make handmade paper and read a book. The stakes are really that high, the premise is rather simple, but... it’s comfy watch for me. I’m about 4 episodes in and I’m glad to hear we’re getting a second season of this show by the time I finish this first season. Can’t wait to watch more of it. 

So Granblue Fantasy got an anime. Two seasons actually, but I only finished up the first one since that was the one that’s fully dubbed. The story revolves around Gran, a young skyfarer wanting to travel the world to see his father. Through this endeavor he gathers many allies and friends, along with a girl named Lyria who saves his life after they first meet. The story takes off from there in a sort of island-of-the-week format. There’s a few other girls like Lyria wanting to meet the other girl that might be tied to her past, or Gran and crew constantly running into the Evil Empire(tm) of this world, but it’s more episodic affair than anything else, each three-ish episodes covering a new island.

I like the anime for its action, but that’s really it. I feel like this was at a time before Gacha games got the more dark and surprisingly in-depth lore and story-writing that games like Girls Frontline and Arknights has, but that makes it more of a comfortable watch than anything. A feel-good anime, but nothing wrong with that.

Also, I can only imagine the amount of hype that happened in episode 12 where all the characters teamed up to take down Leviathan. I don’t even play Granblue Fantasy and I was getting hype when I saw Boxing Grandpa punching debris as projectiles to take out monster fish. This was a fun anime to watch, and I say that as someone who doesn’t play Granblue.

Last up, I’ve been watching BOFURI: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense. It’s a fun anime about a young girl named Maple taking a tank build to it’s logical extremely. I won’t lie, I’m watching this because it’s not an isekai and has a pretty simple plot to follow. My favorite part of the anime is when the admins and game devs try to patch the game so Maple’s Tank meta won’t break the game in half... only for her to come up with some new nuttiness that makes her even scarier. 

Imagine walking around a field, minding your own business, then you see this tiny shield girl riding a flying turtle while summoning acid rain to kill a mob of monsters without even moving. This woman is unstoppable and I love it.

But yeah, that’s it for anime. Next up, I’ll hopefully have the Gacha Rambling wrapped up by Monday. In the mean time, I’ve got work to prepare for.

[eshu-chan]

A few updates and how I handle things nowadays. 

Been thinking about making this post for awhile now, and if to make it here or on Twitter, but seeing how the later has a really small word limit per post, I guess here is the best place to do it since it is kinda long.

The last two months I’ve barely released anything, reason for that has been IRL stuff, but most importantly, commissions. Now, before I go on, this is not me complaining about being busy or complaining about commissions, all the other way around, I’m extremely grateful that I’ve had this many commissions, it’s thanks to them that I’ve been able to fix and upgrade my PC after months of having issues and no money to fix it. So, truly, from the bottom of my heart, thank you to each and every person who has commissioned me for the last few months and I hope I can continue to make works and bring everyone’s ideas to life.  

Having set that, I’m gonna have to explain how I used to do things before and how I’ve been doing them for the last 2 months now. When I began to do this (About June-July 2018), I would work on something all day and even night if I was free after IRL responsibilities, it could be a render, an animation, check out models and see how they worked, get used to PS, AF, and so on. I would be on SFM pretty much every second of whatever free time I had. I enjoy learning new things, so this was pretty fun. Once I started to take on commissions I would, more often than not, end up working on them until late night hours, 3-5am. Like I said, it was fun for me at the time. But then December came, that’s a month that for me, and I am sure, many other people is the month where everyone has the most amount of free time and is used to basically chill ad enjoy, but for me, this time around, it was the complete opposite of that, mostly because of my own fault. I decided to work on many animations with a Christmas theme and may commissions too, doing all of these ended up taking every single second of free time I had on December. Close to New year and after talking with some friends, I realized that I had been neglecting them for quite awhile. I still talked with them, but we wouldn’t really do anything together like before, as I was always busy on SFM. That and also the realization that working on something until 4am wasn’t healthy at all for me, is what pushed me to make some changes. Changes that I’ve been sticking to since January. I decided to set a limit on the amount of hours that I would work on SFM per day, be it in a commission or a personal work and then spend the rest of the day on myself, playing something, watch a movie, do stuff with friends, and so on and finally that I wouldn’t work on commissions past a certain hour (8pm) nor on the weekends. Past 8pm, even if I hadn’t been able to meet the hour per day quota because of IRL stuff, so to speak, and the weekends would be 100% for myself. This, personally, has been great. I’m not neglecting myself nor my friends anymore, I’ve been able to play and even read some books I’ve wanted to for months, basically, it’s been way more healthy for me. But all of that also meant less time to work on animations, which ultimately led to not as many releases since some commissions have been, sadly, private. 

I hope I explained things well. I really enjoy making animations, renders and other perverted stuff (been thinking about learning to draw) but the rhythm that I was going at last year wasn’t healthy and something had to change. 

With all of that said, I am working on a few commissions right now, two of them above one minute and other smaller but kinda tricky ones, so I’ll be releasing stuff soon. 

If you managed to read all that wall of text, thank you and I hope you have a nice day!  (´・ω・`)/

Note: That render is from an unfinished work.

Note 2: I’m going to make a commissions specific post sometime next week. 

[pokeallthelawyers]

Outlines for the olwy spinoffs

Lydia and Sarah present: What Could Have Been

[or: our more or less verbatim notes on the stories for olwyverse we were planning, listed more or less in the order we were going to write them]

Our doubts are traitors - Peter’s tumblr

Chapter 5: 9 - 14

Balth and peter ignoring ea/o, repairing relationship, all those cute moments where peter is freaking out internally but just Really Really cares about balth

Co Drunk AMA with Jaquie

Missing moment = Jaquie and Peter getting drunk together

Post movie night -- talk about how ridiculous flatmates are--Talk about magic?

“Denying something isn’t going to magically make the problem go away” - “stfu i don’t want to talk about this” - change of subject but elephant in room, setting up for faustus character development

Chapter 6: Faustus

Talking about play, hyping up play

Missing moment = after party with Jaquie and Costa

Chapter 7: Faustus - 15 (clusterfuck around magic thing)

Missing moment = conversation with Rosa

Trying to get him to understand balth’s situation

Coming to terms with the whole magic thing

Chapter 8: 15 - end of the fic

Peter missing balth

Missing moment = when Balthazar gets back from Auckland, conversation, fluff

Can’t be sure it’s going to work out but it’s worth trying anyway

Talking about rosa leaving: “i’m sorry you had to leave her but i’m glad you could stay”, dealing with the grief of losing his entire people

Talk about the whole elf thing, peter’s opinions about magic (has a lot of work to do, needs to come to terms with accidentally hurting balth/dealing with that)

Relationship, if they want to try a long term relationship, not sure if it’s the best/smartest thing but they want to try anyway (addressing insecurities?)

Not with the eyes but with the mind - Chelsaige

Both povs

When they met + the beginnings of their relationship

Lock eyes across the crowd at one of the gatherings

C: “can i buy you a drink?” P: “i don’t drink” C: “great, me neither!”

Chelsey shows paige her tree, first time paige shows chelsey her music

Melancholy convo about lifespans, “i want a future with you, no matter how long that’s going to be”

Talking about having their own place and starting a garden together one day

Flower imagery

Sweet are the uses of adversity - Manderking

Text fic! + six irl scenes where they meet (Jaquie POV)

Jaquie slips number into freddie’s purse at faustus, freddie almost doesn’t text her but then decides to on a whim (like how often is she spontaneous and just does things because they fall into her lap?? Like why the fuck not, let’s do something for HER for a change)

Neither of them really expect it to go anywhere except when it does start jaquie is charmed by how easily flustered Freddie gets [honestly how can she not, it’s kind of adorable] and Freddie thinks jaquie is… one of the funniest people she’s ever talked to?

Plus their differing views on magic result in some interesting debates. Mostly it ends up in jaquie gently pushing her toward her side though because jaquie is very persuasive when she wants to be

Both of them find this new acquaintanceship… refreshing

They start texting hardcore, as in, like, every single day

Jaquie flirts bc jaquie has no chill; Freddie tries to be chill that cute girl is flirting with her but very clearly isn’t

1st IRL scene - Jaquie hangs with peter at the flat, freddie runs into them by accident

Freddie lowkey pretends she hasn’t been texting her nonstop for a week but jaquie ruins that by making eyes at her

Afterward Peter is like “doth mine eyes deceive me?? Does Jaquie have a crush on one of my flatmates????”

“Oh my fucking god shut up”

Pete is just delighted that he finally has ammunition against Jaquie for teasing him about Balth

2nd IRL scene - study date

Set up - j texting about being bored, f is studying, jaquie’s like “ooh that’s better than nothing i can totally help you study” and fred’s like “I really doubt you’d be of much help” but she also tells her she’s at the library so jaquie just takes it as confirmation that she can come

Freddie’s freaking out over an exam or essay or something and jaquie actually does help her calm down

Maybe there’s some very platonic and soothing hand holding i dunno. At some point jaquie says, quietly, “you’ve got this,” and Freddie nods and steels herself and crushes this thing she has to work on

Jaquie is absolutely not a proud girlfriend. She is a proud platonic friend at best

3rd IRL scene - Jaquie complains about work, freddie decides to surprise visit her at the bar to cheer her up

“How do you know where I work???” “Um you work with Peter right? I just asked him”

Jaquie is, like, knocked on her ass

Cute girl asked about her workplace and came all this way just to cheer her up? Fuuuuuuuck

The moment where Jaquie is like “holy shit i like her”

4th IRL scene - watching/shit-talking shitty movies together

Basically their first hang out that is planned and not spontaneous

Their one scene in the show is watching a movie; freddie’s thing is shitty movies; jaquie’s thing is shit-talking; could we make it more obvious

It’s in Freddie’s room and it’s TOTALLY NOT A DATE

But it’s dark and jaquie is sitting really close to Freddie and at some point she puts her arm around Freddie and Freddie doesn’t push it off and then they’re kind of cuddling and jaquie is slowly dying a little

Probably at some point the movie ends and they lock eyes and just kind of stare at each other for a while in the dark silence and they can kind of tell that there’s something there but neither of them are brave enough to make that next step so jaquie’s like “... i should go home” and Freddie just says “okay” and… that’s that

Freddie fucks up [chapter 15], doesn’t text jaquie for like a day after which really worries Jaquie because they’ve been texting constantly every day for the last like month

Finally Freddie texts her like “I fucked up”

5th IRL scene - jaquie comes over and comforts her

Afterward, texting w increasing romantic tension that both of them can feel but neither of them really call out [especially since neither of them are really talking about the Clusterfuck] so they’re both just like Hardcore Suffering

Finally freddie is about leave for her parents house, doesn’t know if she’ll return to Wellington, texts jaquie her good byes but jaquie doesn’t reply bc she is hauling ass to freddie’s house

Fred is all busy being sad that jaquie won’t answer and then she opens the door and is totally rendered speechless because cute girl on doorstep?

Breathlessly, jaquie says “i think we should date!”

Freddie: “?!?!?!?!?!?!” Still incapable of human speech

Jaquie says in a rush something to the effect of “listen like i know i’m sort of an asshole sometimes and i know you get easily freaked out but you’re really sweet and funny and beautiful and we work really well together and i wasn’t going to say anything because i want to respect your boundaries but you’re going and i don’t know when the next time i’ll get to see you is and i don’t want you to leave without knowing that I - “

Freddie still can’t speak lol she just repeats kind of dumbly “knowing that you what?” Her heart is beating so fucking fast

Jaquie’s like “can i - can i kiss you?”

Commence literally the gayest kiss the world has ever seen

And jaquie whispers, “Will you be my girlfriend?” And Freddie just smiles and says, “I thought you’d never ask” or something equally sappy and terrible and it’s super gay and then they ride off into a gay sunset

What fools these mortals be - Kit (aka the loss highlights reel)

Significant years in his life

Bad experience with a family--warded against fae w/o knowing he was one

Confirmation of being aroace

Exploration of beginnings and being banished from the fae

Background to kit’s motivation in ch15

“Oh brother” background

Background to convo with balth in ch14

“In my vast experience,” Kit adds, “it doesn’t always matter when you leave. Sometimes, it feels like seeing them die kills you, too. Sometimes every last moment you have with them is worth all the ones you don’t. Sometimes it takes a year to smile again. Sometimes it takes three hundred. But if you leave now, or if you stay watch them fade over the course of the century, it doesn’t matter. It hurts, you cry, you mend, you smile. That’s just the way it is, man.”

All of our secrets are out now oops. If there’s anything about this verse that you’re curious about, feel free to send us an ask. -L+S