Blog: Books Read in 2020

Loyalty. Morality. Leadership. Expectations. Strategy.

I'm on Good Reads

Project 1: 10Blog - Update

Well, happy Blog End and Start Day again.

I've returned to my garden (actually I've been doing a thing called "vacation" for a few weeks so I've been here a lot of the time) and it's time for that annual end of the blog post. And as I usually do it's also time to start another year of blogging.

The garden does not look nearly as good as it did last year, but it's a learning activity.

I generally prefer things with a defined start and end date (much as I'm bad at hitting them a lot of the time), so I find breaking the blog up by yearly volumes (sessions, editions?) helps keep it from feeling like it goes on forever. This is also traditionally the time where I reenforce my distinction between the blog as blog and the blog as project tracker. Effectively, I created this to keep track of projects I'm working on, but one of those projects is to practice writing and getting this out.

The last volume(?) of the blog covered an odd period of my life (I mean it included spring of 2020, so it's been an odd period in everyone's lives). I was fairly stressed in the fall and winter semesters with my day job, and trying to figure out how to live life when not doing a PhD. I'm slowly making progress on that front but honestly it's been a rough year in general.

For the most part the blog itself has been ticking quietly along on series of posts about the games I've played and the books I've read. I've been enjoying tracking those, so I'm happy enough with that. Aside for that I've written a few project posts and I feel like for the first time in a while I'm getting much better traction on the projects I'm working on. (Look for a project update shortly).

I am interested that the only thoughts on post I wrote was for Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival.

Overall a quiet year for the blog, but as I wrote in my update last year I wanted to focus my energy elsewhere, so I guess I've done alright.

My total posts per year, highlighted by month. You can see more on my Blorgress Page

Over the last few months I've wanted to improve my writing and I think my project focus for the last half of 2020 will be on writing the novel I've been thinking about and on writing a manual of interesting coding. That could also include more writing here, but that depends a bit on what I want to write about. I definitely have thoughts in mind on Ocotopath Traveller and on Paper Mario: The Origami King.

I'm also considering moving the blog itself off of Blogger/Blogspot. I've been generally unhappy with outsourcing hosting to Google as a provider for a few years now, as we've seen power on the Internet being consolidated and algorithmic filtering affecting how people are able to access information. I'm also exceptionally unhappy with the recent interface update which has really increased the length of time it takes me to make a post. The tag system has always been bad as well and finding a solution that makes me happier is becoming more important.

I haven't made a decision about what I'm exactly I'm going to do yet, but things muttered on the internet sometimes come true. I am planning to look at Hugo for Code Click and if that goes well there might be a change.

In the mean time, generally, you can expect to see a continued series of updates on books and games, with an occasional update on other things or thoughts I feel like I want to share.

With that, I hope you have a good August, a better end of 2020 and a much, much better 2021.

Blog: Books Read in 2020

Politics. Endings. Identity.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: Books Read in 2020

Aliance. Plauges. Nostalgia.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: Books Read in 2020

Avatar. Academy. Skillz. Truth.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: Games of June 2020

June was a bit weird. I spent most of it happily playing Animal Crossing and trying to find cool stuff to fit in my other time. I had some work I needed to get done, so I didn't really sink into any "funemployment".

My top five games (by play time) for June were:

1. Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Generally the games that get at least a little bit of play time each day end up pretty high on my play time list. AC:NH is a good example of that. It's been really nice to play slow and enjoy the daily play. I think the game could use a few more features, to catch up to New Leaf and also just to give you more things to do each day.
   
   

   

   A Beautiful Night on the Island

   
   


2. Europa Universalis IV - I decided to pay for the DLC subscription, so I'm spending my current play time realing from all of the things that don't totally make sense. I'm still not sure how I feel about the newest DLC, but I'm still having fun. Currently France keeps throwing me into wars which eat all my man power as Castile, but I'm learning.
   
   

   

   A New Monarch

   
   


3. Wargroove - I skipped out on Advance Wars despite it being a game I would probably have liked. Wargroove has proved to be a great game to pick up and play even if I'm finding the "normal difficulty" a little punishing. The style is great and it's fun.
   
   

   

   A Good Boy's Victory

   
   


4. Secret of Mana (Collection of Mana) - I assume I explain this every year, but Secret of Mana is a game you should play in summer. So I am.
   
   

   

   A Confident Moment

   
   


5. Xenonauts - I wanted some slow tactical gameplay to enjoy, which Xenonauts does give. I'm finding the whole thing needs a little boost to be interesting but generally it's still fun if you want to very slowly march some soldiers across a bunch of squares. I did spend a bit of time looking at the mods and I'm facinated and frusterated by how many popular mods there are to "remove all women from the game". Definetly feeling like that's not a community I want anything to do with.
   
   

   

   Almost before anything goes wrong.

Here's my total play time chart for MONTH:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Project 12: Chrono Trigger Sprites - Lucca

Not even a year later ... I finished the next sprite in my Chrono Trigger Perler Sprites. Everybody, let me introduce Lucca.

I managed to work on Lucca much more quickly than I did on Marle so I actually managed to build a bit of a process. I'm hoping I'll be able to quickly move through the rest of the cast. I also got to get a little better at using The GIMP and Omnigraffle, so this feels like a productive project.

The Lucca Sprite

I started by determining all of the colours in the sprite and which sprite colour of Perler bead I would use to match them. I did this by taking the original sprite from The Spriter's Resource and then making a new layer for each colour in the sprite and removing all other colours. I also compiled those colours into the grid below. (I gave them names, but they weren't great names, so I think I'd just use the hex codes next time).

There's a few cases where I don't have a bead that's a perfect match. Particularly, the Dark Green should probably be Olive and the Bright Green, Fern. Apparently it's about time I put in a new order of beads. I also beaded a test block in the same pattern so you can see what does or doesn't match.

I've broken out all the details below so you can see which colours are which parts of the sprite and how I matched them.

Sprite Part	Hex Colour	Perler Colour	Notes
	---	---	The Original
	#302838	Purple	Again I'm using purple for the "deep shadow" parts of the outline.
	#281820	Black	The main outline of the sprite.
	#B86817	Butterscotch	The (single pixel) highlight on the blaster barrel.
	#482830	Dark Grey	Most of the shading.
	#F8F867	Yellow	The (again single pixel) bright spot on the blaster barrel.
	#F8800F	Orange	Highlights in Lucca's outfit.
	#F8E0A8	Rust	The leather bits of Lucca's outfit.
	#F89868	Peach	Main skin colour
	#801800	Creme	Skin highlights
	#586029	Dark Green	Hat and sleeve shadows
	#F8C028	Bright Green	Hat and sleeve high lights
	#f8f848	Gold	Leather High lights.
	#ffffff	White	Highlights and her glasses.

You can also download the my .xcf file.

Process

As with the Crono and Marle sprites I decided to do a little addition to make sure that the fused sprite would be sturdy. I also levelled the bottom so that the sprite would stand up right. The only big change that was needed was filling in a couple of sprites on the right side of her face. I wonder if those were a glitch somewhere in my process or even in the sprite.

 

The sprite was pretty easy to build. I did make a good choice in laying out all the necessary beads in the same pattern as the blocks above in a project box.

I found the easiest way was to work from the top down doing a few beads of each colour at a time. 

Success of the Sprite

I'm exceptionally happy with how this sprite came out. Part of that is the improved process I've used, so I managed to go from sprite to fused within a week. That definitely kept my the whole project in brain which made it much, much easier. 

I definitely need to put in an order to get the beads I'm missing. I generally think Lucca looks good, but a little bit off from how she'd normally look. Olive and Fern beads might have helped with that. Overall I don't think she looks completely off from the other two though.

The one thing I'm not sure about is using purple as that "deep shadow" colour. Given that I *have* dark grey beads now, it seems like it might make more sense to use those in the future. I started with the purple for Crono, which I think worked because there were fewer deep shadow pixels. I'm going to keep on with the purple / black arrangement for the rest of this batch and then I'll come back for a second and see what overall changes I made.

The next sprite is Robo and I'd like to wrap it up by July 15, 2020. (I was thinking Frog, but I'm going to wait until I buy a few more green beads.)