gen's daily life - gensou's boston adventure

hoo boy, saturday was a HUGE day for me. last week, i attended Anime Boston for the first time ever in my life. i registered back in February, but i never actually attended a convention of any sort in my life till now. plus it marked the first time in a while i ever went to Boston. sometimes i forget what the big city looked like.

am i still tired? yes. did i nearly run my wallet broke? yes. did i nearly exhaust myself walking around for around 10 hours? yes. did i have a blast? hell yes.

shot of the full outfit. iiiiii did not have the wig on (yet)

i went as Almaz von Almandine Adamant from Disgaea 3. scarf, jacket, belt, and gloves were done with my dad's help, and i managed to find a use for my leg warmers as well. might not be a 100% accurate cosplay, but it was comfy enough and inexpensive to make. thrift shopping and my dad being a tailor helps wonders for cosplay.

i was the only Disgaea cosplayer at the con that day, aaaaand subsequently that meant that not a lot of people recognized who i was. despite that, i got to see quite a few neato booths, saw some rad cosplayers (and even snapped pictures of them!), played some games in the game hall, and even ended off the con by attending their JoJo panel.

so yeah, as you can imagine, there's quite a bit i can say about my first ever con experience! as much as there were only so much photos i could snap with me in them, aaaaaand the fact that i only attended one panel, quite a bit went on that day!

photos and a brief overlay of what went on under the cut, of course!

vlog - Desert Dream

(warning! flashy effects! don't watch if you're epileptic or easily disorientated by such effects)

another scene demo for everyone. this time it's an Amiga one: Desert Dream by group Kefrens. not as technologically impressive as Second Reality, but still has some pretty cool graphics, music, coding, and pixelart. it was released in April of 1993, and placed first in the demo competition for The Gathering demoparty in that year.

if you got an Amiga (or Amiga emulator) you wanna try it out on, you can download the demo here.

MAKAIPUNK - Manga Senki Disgaea CHAPTER 2

one day i'll learn to start doing MAKAIPUNK installments on a more frequent basis.

er, yeah. anyhow.

last time we left off with the manga readthrough, our princely protagonist Laharl woke up from a two year nap and found out that his father King Krichevskoy died. not really caring about that, Laharl decides to take the title of overlord for himself. and some guy named Vyers showed up, i guess. gen then went on a break from MAKAIPUNK for like three months to do shit involving the Playstation 2, bandicoots, Steam games, cosplay, and JoJo's Bizzare Adventure. alongside other things. ahem.

so yeah, let's get this back on track. will Flonne assassinate the king? will gen remember how to write these kinds of readthroughs after an entire winter? let's find out.

curiousities - Microsoft Comic Chat

back in the halcyon days of the 90s and early 00's, IRC clients were a pretty popular way for people to message each other and host chatrooms where likeminded people could gather around and talk about things. of course, with instant messengers like MSN and Skype and the like becoming more widely used in today's more streamlined era, IRC chat clients saw a significant decline in use (from one million users in 2003 to around 400,000 in 2014, according to Wikipedia).

of course, that doesn't mean IRC chatting as a whole has dropped off the face of the earth. while it has gone scarce, there are quite a few communities around the net who still host IRC servers for people to chat about stuff, and of course IRC clients still exist. one of which we're going to talk about today.

i'll be honest, i know very little about IRC stuff aside from this one client and the Wiki page, but hey, having your chats in comic form is always rad, innit?

Microsoft Chat (sometimes called Microsoft Comic Chat or just Comic Chat) was released in 1996 by... well, Microsoft. it was bundled with the full downloads of Internet Explorer 3, 4, and 5, though distributions of Windows 98 and 2000 included the program as well. for quite some time, it was Microsoft's main chat program until some time around 2001, thanks to MSN discontinuing the official Comic Chat servers.

of course, that didn't spell the complete end of the program; being an IRC-based client, it still works with a lot of IRC servers out there today since it runs on the same standard protocols. course, there's a bit more to Comic Chat than that, obviously.

vlog - Second Reality

(warning! lots of flashy effects! don't watch if you're epileptic or easily disorientated by such effects)

scene demos (or simply 'demos') are one of the more interesting forms of computer art i've come across. for those not in the whole know about the whole demoscene subculture, demos are small audio-visual programs mostly developed as a show of artistic, programming, and musical prowess. while the demoscene was more popular in the 80's and 90's thanks to computer systems such as the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS, it's still active today with groups making demos for a wider array of systems, including some game consoles like the Game Boy Advance and such.

demoscene's kind of a lengthy topic i'm not too savvy with, so i'll just leave it at that. :'D anyhow, this here is Second Reality, a MS-DOS demo done by Finnish demogroup Future Crew in 1993, and was placed first in the demo competition for the Assembly demoparty in that year. for it's time, it's a pretty dang impressive piece of work as far as programming goes.

the demo can be downloaded here if you want to run it in DOS (or DOSbox) yourself. there's also some wikipedia articles on demos, the demoscene culture, and the Second Reality demo if you wanna read up on them. also of interest are Moleman's documentary on the demoscene and a video on the making of Second Reality.

in p'much unrelated news, FCC voted in favor of net neutrality today. hell yeah. B)

gen's daily life - stuffed shiara shenanigans

not a lot happening here aside from a crapload of snow here on the east coast, not to mention i'm in the process of refurbishing my contact hub and working on some WIP articles (including the Disgaea manga readthrough), so have something a bit more mundane.

around the middle of 2014, my good bud Cyber (who you may remember from my Neopets Haunted House playthrough during that year) started working on a plushie of my minotaur bloke Ayiru as a birthday gift. though, the plush didn't get finished until later around Christmas, and just recently this week she managed to ship it out.

and man was the wait worth it. <3

the plush Ayiru (inset) and one of my recent drawings of him.

it might not be professional-grade, but it's still a lovingly-crafted buddy for my desk. he's pretty soft and he's even got strands of yarn for hair! bless you so much, Cyb. you've made me a happy fenn. ;o;

as you can expect, i had a bit of fun with him and my camera. more shots are under the cut!

gen's thoughts (also vlog time) - jack of all trades, master of none

so a while back i was working on an article concerning aesthetic/design trends in video games (as well as their links with particular audiences) after developer Naughty Dog pretty much ruled out ever returning to making any Jak or Crash Bandicoot games and i got pretty sore about it.

well, as far as the whole game design thing goes, George Weidman of Super Bunnyhop worded it a lot better than i could've. while i'm not going to deny that older gaming generations had trends of their own (how many friggin 3d platformers did we get in the late90s-mid00s again?), certain trends seem to be more commonplace in AAA games from the more recent years. hell, even a good fraction of indie games aren't safe from this; just count how zombie/crafting/survival/metroidvania/sandbox games you see on steam's indie section.

a lot of people yell for new IPs all the time, but how do we know said new IP won't just use trends already seen before? new IPs are great, but if you can innovate on new features or streamline existing ones, that's even better. quite a bit of Nintendo series tend to try out new things and improve on existing gameplay stuff: while the Mario and Pokemon series are good example of this, Kirby and Zelda have this as well.

hell, recent Nintendo consoles feature some pretty creative new IPs that put a spin on existing trends and try out new styles of gameplay. the Pikmin games are wonderful, Captain Toad looks pretty fun, and the upcoming Splatoon is a interesting take on the shooter genre with its gameplay and graphical style. a good lot of japanese-developed titles are pretty unique in their gameplay as well, and there's even some pretty creative indie games if you look hard enough. there's also a few western-developed gems that put an interesting spin on usual gameplay conventions: just look at Guild Wars 2.

there's a bit more to fun and memorable game design (and aesthetic, by extension) than just hopping on a trend bandwagon, but not a whole lot of developers are willing to risk innovation over sales. why is there an overabundance of a particular genre/gimmick/graphic style in games? because that's what the vocal audience demands. and they sell. it's a sad truth, but it's a truth.

though even in recent times, there are creative gems that are worth a look at. you just have to look hard enough for them. c: