Life Rambles – 11/06/2023

Welcome to another life rambles, where I post a few things about my life in short succession.

Vacation Week

I had to work my first-ever Saturday as a teacher. It was weird and messed with my internal schedule for a while after! But thanks to that, Monday was off. And then Friday was Culture Day, a national holiday. Tuesday was Halloween, and Thursday was my birthday. So I took 3 vacation days and had the whole span off, from 10/29 to 11/5. Eight days to do whatever the heck I wanted!

…So probably 3.5 of these days were just me sitting at home watching movies, oops

But I also did other fun things, like go out with a friend way past last train and had to stay at an internet cafe for the night. And I did day trips to Nara and Kobe. It was a really nice relaxing way to usher in what will probably end up being a stressful November.

JLPT’s Coming

The Japanese language test is on December 3rd, just a month away, and I’m nowhere near ready and studied yet. That’ll have to change immediately.

I’m not as fluent at Japanese as I want to be… I’m out of practice for stuff like reading long passages and remembering kanji readings. Obviously I can speak and listen a lot better than 4-5 years ago, but I’m not so sure about everything else.

Time to hunker down and get some major immersion/flashcard study for a few weeks, then take a few practice exams… mendokusai kedo na

Steamboat Willie 2

My original plan months back was to release Steamboat Willie 2 on 1/1/2024 as a spiritual sequel to Gay Gatsby. But for the third year in a row, I see immediately that November will be too packed for me to do Nanowrimo, which means I’m not likely to actually finish the book by then. The gimmick of a 1/1 release probably isn’t that much anyway; not like Gay Gatsby was a smashing success itself. I’ll release it when it’s good and ready.

But, you interject, why didn’t you just focus really hard on this project during your vacation week? Because, I answer, I just watched movies instead.

Old Mario Sprites

I got a wave of nostalgia during my vacation week. looking at some ancient sprite sheets from Spriters Resource and elsewhere, and it got me browsing again. My favorite spriter as a middle schooler was NO Body, who was on MFGG and TSR regularly posting all sorts of awesome custom sprites. This spriter was probably just a kid like me, but got better and better and, I hope, ended up as a thriving artist in the indie game boom of the 10s.

There’s a lot of sprite artists from those days I wish I knew how to follow. They were around in 2006, 2008, and used names too difficult to track across the web. Maybe that’s a good thing in their view, not being associated with their teenage selves and letting it fade away. It’s sad for me because I wanna see what they’re up to today!

Paper Mario Sprite Comic

Thinking more about sprite comics… Back probably 2007, 2008, one of my “dream project” sprite comics was Paper Mario… something. I don’t remember the subtitle anymore. But the idea was, it’d use Paper Mario 64 style sprites and backgrounds, and basically tell an entire RPG storyline as if it was Paper Mario 1.5. Snow played a big part because the snow areas of both Paper Marios were my favorite. It’d be a comic strip comedy like all my other stuff in middle school, but with actual stakes and RPG action occasionally.

But I never did the project due to having so many different sprite comics I started and stopped and the tolls of teenage life. Pretty much exactly what I suffer now from too many projects that never happen, but more tragic because this was when I was young and idealistic.

Maybe I’ll actually end up making it one day, just for fun… Nah lol

Read more of my blog posts, I worked really hard on some of these: