The Story of the Beast With Those Four Dirty Paws

The FFX Let's Play is moving to Blogspot!

It looks a lot more user-friendly now and it can handle all the images! Hooray!

I also revised some of the entries with a few new insights and to include some commentary that came up in the comments (including Doge Waffles).  I'll continue to use my DW journal for DW purposes, though.

And we’re back! (Sorry for the delay; I’ve been stupidly busy recently.)

Also I hit my photobucket bandwidth limit again. Since I don’t think anyone is reading this on lj, I’m going to try not crossposting it there anymore and see if that helps. If not I may have to find another file hosting site but I haven’t found one yet that allows multiple uploads as easily as photobucket does.

Last time we got pummeled by everything with a pulse along the Mi’ihen Highroad (and by some things without one) but managed to make it to the Travel Agency in one piece. There’s no rest for the weary, though, since a giant . . . something . . . has just landed on the roof.

( Here we go again )


Next time: This will not end well.

I stayed up until four in the morning working on this because I wanted to get it done last night.  (Knowing I'd have to get back to work on Guardian today and I wouldn't have time.)  Surely this was the responsible thing to do, haha.  I actually prefer working on art late at night though.  It was really peaceful sitting at my computer in the dark, nobody else awake, painting in all those blues.

But ughhhh it wasn't worth it.  I had someone ask me yesterday how to get her work more attention and my first inclination was to be like "Haha sorry you have come to the WRONG PERSON for advice on that."  *facedesk*  Keep trying, I suppose.

Last night I went into my yearly 10:00 on October 31st pre-NaNo panic, outlined a fic I've been planning for a few weeks . . . and then decided in the end not to write it. I have a lifelong bad habit of pitching story ideas to someone and then getting discouraged by their lack of interest/understanding. I know I shouldn't measure the entire worth of an unstarted project by an early lackluster response, but I do and I have abandoned so many of them because of it. It isn't the other person's fault. I just have very little confidence in my own work.

I think part of the reason I've managed to stick with Guardian for so long, despite it being a completely unreasonable thing unmarketable even to its home fandom, was that I didn't tell anyone about it or try to get anyone's opinion before I started it. There was no starry-eyed planning period of announcing "I'm going to do a thing!" I just did the thing, plunked it down in my deviantart gallery, and never looked back to see if anyone cared about the thing. It was the least discouraged I've ever been by a lackluster response, which there certainly was for the first few pages. (I was still disappointed, but I had gone in accepting that that might be the case, since I had just turned up one day like, hello, deviantwatchers! Here's a story for a fandom I've only barely alluded to in my past artwork so all of you are almost certainly watching me because of something else. Oh but it won't be returning to the plot hook introduced on the first page until the last chapter. First it's going to cover the life story of a generally-overlooked character beginning with her childhood. Some of this will be unfamiliar unless you have played the game very thoroughly. None of the really popular characters will be introduced for several weeks. Oh and it's in graphic novel format. I have never written one before and I am also fairly new to digital art.)

And then Auronlu found it, and suddenly I had an audience who was actually paying attention. I probably would have continued trudging stoically along with it otherwise, but knowing that someone is reading it who likes it and is invested in the story really gave me a renewed sense of purpose. There are now a handful of someones following it, but she's still my most diligent reader. :)

So this month my NaNo goal is to finish the first chapter, which has a few more pages to go. (I think this is the point I was trying to make when I started this entry.) There really isn't a NaNo for sequential art, probably because it's hard to quantify and also not something you can go back and easily edit if you've rushed through it. I can't really keep a word count or anything because the pagely process goes like script - panels - sketch - lines - text - color - post - repeat!

I haven't written prose in a really long time and I miss it, and I love/hate the joyous/hair-pulling frenzy of NaNo, I love the camaraderie of writing alongside everyone else, and I wanted to write a fic because I have this increasingly crowded hutch of plotbunnies for them, but I don't want to stop working on Guardian especially since I've finally managed to drag it onto a regular update schedule. And I really don't think I'll be able to keep up with both.

Sooo yes. I don't know if I can still count it as a NaNo project, since I'm still going to be boxed off in panels while everyone else is working with words, but that's my goal for the end of the month.

On the way back to the docks I had Tidus attempt to take down a killer bee that had only 1 hp left and be nagged by Lulu when he missed. Then I pressed the wrong key and had her attack it with her mog rather than casting a spell and she missed it too. And nagged herself.

( On we go. )

Next time: Sketchy guys! Horrifying monsters! Prodigious badassery! And blitzball.

Hello again! When we last left Waffles he had just charged into the cryptic recesses of the Cloister of Trials with all the reserve of a feral chocobo. And this is why we love him.

( One brief sphere puzzle later )

Next time: I will try to pick up the pace, haha. We just met a bunch of my favorite characters so I got a little starry-eyed there.

Okay so! I got a message from Livvy on tumblr explaining how to increase the resolution and get better screencaps. Unfortunately, I had already taken about a billion screencaps of Besaid before then. I was able to revert to an earlier save with the new settings, but not all the way to end of the last recap. So for this installment, these are going to be in the native PS2 resolution. I’m sorry!

( We're here! )

Next time: Waffles opens the Chamber of Secrets.

I’ve been wanting to replay FFX again, and considered waiting for the HD rerelease, but 1. Nobody knows the release date for that yet and 2. I don’t have a PS3 or much hope for obtaining one in the future so I decided to go ahead. Many thanks to maclaniaspring, Livvy, and Auronlu for helping me get set up!

This is my most favorite game of all time, so I have a lot to say about it. If you’re reading this, I’m going to assume you’ve played it, but I'm doing a fairly detailed recap in case it's been awhile. Also, there WILL be spoilers. One of this game's favorite storytelling devices is foreshadowing future bombshells way in advance, and I'll be discussing major plot elements when they're hinted at early, before they're actually revealed, so we can see how long and intricately woven the threads of the plot are. I’ll be providing my own observations, insights, and analysis with a focus on some characters and relationships that I feel are often overlooked. (Specifically Lulu, Lulu and Yuna, Seymour and Yuna, and Kimahri because I don’t know how everyone manages to ignore the big blue lion in the room, but even the game does this most of the time.) That doesn’t mean I’ll be leaving everybody else out though.

I will also be attempting something I’ve been wanting to do for a while but I’m not sure how feasible it is: a sphere grid swap! This basically entails doing a no sphere grid run until I have a bunch of level 1 key spheres. Then everyone breaks into Kimahri’s sphere grid and out into each other’s, resulting in Auron becoming a deft and nimble thief, Tidus wielding black magic, Lulu commanding an army of unstoppable samurai plush, etc. It’s gonna be awesome.

I’m going to be posting to Dreamwidth to allow for any discussion, but that gets crossposted to LJ, and I will be linking to tumblr. I’ll keep comments open so you can reply even if you don’t have an account. And of course feel free to message me in any of these places if you have something to say. :)

( Onward to Zanarkand! )

Next time: Waffles makes a bad impression on everyone he meets at Baaj Temple (including a passing seagull).

Well, Quiltpocalypse Weekend is upon us! Things actually went a lot more smoothly than expected, but then again, I was expecting chaos. I got six blocks done today, which leaves me only three more to go. (And then I have to do the backing, and binding, and then the actual quilting itself.)



My sisters actually finished the fronts of their quilts today:



(Seen here with miscellaneous pets.)

At some point we ended up in a conversation about "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and about how it is basically about him being mopey because he is getting old and disillusioned and women don't pay him much attention anymore. (Probably, one of my sisters posited, because he is no longer a hot young stud and, being English, has bad teeth. This on top of the early twentieth-century casual misogyny and racism, it's no wonder the ladies in the room prefer to come and go, talking of Michelangelo.) But it has some nice imagery.

So, I'm making a quilt. This is a thing that I am really doing.

A few weeks ago while my grandparents were visiting, one of my sisters asked my grandmother, who is an experienced quilter, for help making a duvet cover for her bed in her new apartment. I offered to contribute my sewing machine in case they needed an extra one, but suddenly my mother jumped all over this and thought wouldn't it be great if me and my sisters all made a quilt together with Mom-mom. Not working together on one quilt, as I was hoping she was getting at, but ALL THREE OF US each making a separate quilt. Three projects, in one house, on one weekend.

Now, I've always wanted to make a quilt, and I think this is a lovely idea in theory, but in practice I think it's going to be a huge stressful mess. I offered to help either of my sisters with their projects, since I have both a sewing machine and experience with it, but my mom got angry and accused me of not wanting to build my own memories with my grandmother. Then she started guilting me about it, stressing how much of a "memory-building experience" this would be and also how my grandmother is not going to be around forever, because the women of my family have raised passive-aggression and guilt tripping to an art form.

Unable to convince her that I do want to make a quilt and some memories with my grandmother, just not at the same time and with the same sewing machine as everyone else, I picked out some fabric and now I am making a quilt. I did get permission to get a head start, so I am trying to get as much done as I can before the Great Quilting Weekend (this weekend) arrives so I at least have the hang of it by then.

I got all the pieces cut out a few weeks ago but put it on hold to finish this and this, in an effort to cut down my number of ongoing major projects. Today I laid out and planned all the squares, a process my grandmother calls "auditioning".



You can get a vague idea of what it's going to look like in the end. The pattern is called "Lucky Stars," which you probably can't tell right now, but the small triangle pieces are going to be the star points. Getting all the blocks organized - making sure that I didn't repeat a pattern in each square, trying not to have too many solid pieces or pieces with distinctive patterns or polka dots or what have you close together, getting the right colour balance - was very puzzly.

And then I had to pick them all up because I can't keep them laid out on my bed, haha. I took several pictures so hopefully I will be able to put them back together as perfectly as I had them laid out.