Aion-related.

( I have come for the pineapple's eternal soul )

Hey look, I'm up at Stupid O'Clock due to !Dragon_Age.

Curiosity (and an urge to look at pretty) got me to finally poke at Aion (after verifying that it will run on my new system).

( quick impressions )

The Windows 7 tablet default settings consider "holding down the stylus" to mean "right-click", which explains its completely bizarre behavior in Photoshop. Since you have to hold down the stylus to draw lines, doesn't that sort of defeat the point of a tablet in the first place? Fortunately Google, as always, was of great assistance in turning it off.

Unrelated to the above, our cafeteria has revised its menu to include more health-conscious food, such as fresh fruit, vegetables (yes, including broccoli), and low-fat salad dressing. One thing that almost never seems to come out right, however, are various "healthy" baked goods, which always turn out a little dry. Makes sense, I suppose, since most cakes and pastries are made of sugar and fat.

Work-logged. So happy it's almost Thanksgiving.

Haven't done one in awhile, mostly because there's not a whole lot to write about. Nevertheless:

-New RPG announced by Squeenix, a new game in an old series called Estopolis. I know nothing of the original series, but the splash art contains a beautiful floating continent, and I am always in favor of floating continents.

-XBox OS updated for compatibility with Facebook and Twitter. Um... good for you? (Facebook and Twitter, as I understand, are for people who post one or two lines of text. Aside from spur-of-the-moment NERDRAGE posts, I generally try to have some amount of content when I post to LJ, so I've never really seen the point of using them.)

-XBox version of FF13 announced to contain some bonus in-game item. Irrelevant to me, but somewhat amusing to see that more developers have caught on to the essentially free value and distribution of virtual items in place of physical loot.

-Some sort of mysterious countdown page over at Nippon-Ichi. I can only assume this marks the imminent Zombie Prinny Apocalypse.

-New Samurai Spirits ("Samurai Showdown"?) to be released in December. Man it's been ages since I last tracked one of those.

-Ar-Tonelico 3 has apparently moved to polygons for its combat character representation.

Die in a fire.

I may not play WoW anymore, but sometimes it is good for a laugh. One of the advantages of alt-itis is a decent working knowledge of how other people's classes and specs operate. It avoids making yourself look a bit of a moron.

Acquiring a new computer is much like moving house - there winds up being a lot of junk that you suddenly realize you don't really miss. The major problem with an SSD is that since I didn't blow $500 on a huge one, there are a limited number of large programs I can install on it, though most of those are games.

[insert reminiscing about the days of DOS-based OSes and green-and-black screens with giant floppy drives here]

Next step: set up real sound board and maybe a video switching box for impending game console.

..."clean up desk space" might have to happen first, though.

"According to the laws passed in the Patriot Act after 9/11, all banks are required to verify the identity of their customers, so you have to fax us copies of your social security card and a bill as a proof of address."

"...my social security card is 10+ years old and some of the numbers are illegible. Also, I do not pay utility bills."

"Er... pay stub? Or maybe a bill from another bank?"

"..."

I am so freaking sick of having to prove my identity to various institutions. What, that I have been a customer at your bank for the last 3 years is not proof enough? How about the ID I showed when I signed up, did you lose the copy of that somewhere too?

Question of the day: what does "Newegg" mean? Why do they have eggs as a logo? What do eggs have to do with electronics? According to Wikipedia:

According to Newegg customer service representatives, the name "Newegg" stems from a Taiwanese philosophy meaning "new beginnings".

A brief look at their Chinese website proves that, yes, the Chinese translation of the name is quite literally "new egg". However, I've never heard the term used in anything other than its literal sense, so I'm totally drawing a blank on this one. Maybe someone who is Taiwanese might have a better idea.

Title.

1) Hmm. Many of the original male characters I draw appear to be bishounen. Maybe that's overdoing it a little?

2) Wait a minute. How often do I see a major female character in a game/anime who's not young and pretty?

3) Well then. So as long as the ratio of attractive-to-plain male characters does not approximately exceed the ratio of attractive-to-plain female characters, we're good?

4) Yup.

I played around with the Dragon Age character creator module a bit. It's been my experience that it's virtually impossible to create an attractive character using the standard cRPG type character generators (where "attractive" is subjectively defined as Aion, Musou, or Final Fantasy style CG).

There are a number of reasons for this, probably the least of which is that the jRPG CG style, while technically realistically possible, are quite specifically oriented towards the types of real people you only see in visual-kei bands. In particular, whether it's just something with the structure of how the modeling is done, or the way they set various facial sliders, the polygon mapping on the sides of the face in cRPG character creators seem to be closely fixed to the cheek and jawbones, but leave the middle of the cheek to sink in (even if you adjust gauntness, if such a slider exists, to minimum), resulting in a face that looks "lumpy" because you've got clusters of flesh clinging to the more prominent bones and hollows in between instead of a smooth gradient, made all the more pronounced because it's constructed out of polygons.

Anyway, some amount of wrangling has resulted in not complete fail, though trying to get a male character to look good is going to require more wrangling.

For those on my flist that were interested in this (and haven't instinctively pre-ordered it already), early review. I'm a little mollified to find that the screenshots presented in the review seem a little less coated in blood and grime than any of the promotional material; I maintain that it is quite possible to do a mature and dramatic fantasy story without clinging to the gritty Middle Ages equivalent (particularly for fantasy settings that incorporate real magic).

PS. There is also both heterosexual and homosexual romance of both genders in this game, illustrated in approximately the same detail as Mass Effect, or so I heard. I eagerly await the response from our fine friends over at Fox News.

-A muscle in my knee seems to twitch involuntarily when I'm trying to go to sleep. This does not interfere with sleep, but feels a little odd.

-Reviews for entertainment such as books are very subjective, and the reviewers do not always show their work (a meta-review system is useful, however). I should remember to send Past Me book reviews if ever I discover a time machine.

-There is a point at night when I'm not quite ready to go to bed, awake enough to ingest media such as reading books or playing video games, but not awake enough for any activity that requires a lot of concentration, such as art or miniature painting. This is not always immediately obvious in that state, but often good for a laugh in the morning.

-Halloween season always presents me with the mental image of a giant translucent glass pumpkin and a Cute Witch for some unfathomable reason. Unsurprisingly, this image turned up in last night's dream, though I can't for the life of me remember the context.

-And speaking of context (or lack thereof), I was looking up some stuff on American comics due to recent gaming. Thank you, TV Tropes.

Food for thought from reading too much TVTropes. Or maybe fandom_wank.

If you wrote a book or a series of books for which one of the most notorious notable characteristics was its numerous, obsessive, and batshit insane fanbase, how would you react?

*Napping in the evening causes wakefulness at Stupid O'Clock.

-My new glasses are a little heavier than my old ones, requiring a bit of getting used to. On the bright side, I can read signs further than half a block away now.

-Ordered half of computer parts. Countdown to bank freakout: 3... 2... 1...

-I'm never tempted in the least to get the Updated Rereleases for Squeenix games. Squeenix has the bizarre habit of making these re-releases available only in Japanese versions... that insist on using English voice acting.

-Sleep schedule borked due to a 4-hour nap.

-Cats: 1. Shoelaces: 0.

Today's weird dream sequence: hide-and-seek in an oversized summer condo while being pursued by various thugs wielding rocket launchers.

One of the neatest things they did with the recent WoW updates is create better skins for druid animal forms. Finding out that my (very old) Alliance druid turns into an iridescent silver cat (not panther/tiger/what-have-you-looking thing, but cat with big floofy paws) was pretty cool.

And WoW characters now get mounts at level 20 for 5g? Man. *insert "back in my day, uphill both ways in the snow" speech here*

There are laws in Japan that prohibit speaking on cell phones and use of audible ring tones while on public transportation. Text messaging is fine, however, and people seem to have adjusted by getting really good at speed typing on a cell phone pad. I would like a similar law to be implemented in the US so I don't have to listen to someone's obnoxious ring tone for 5 minutes straight.

Fire!

*ahem*

In other news, Koei is making a Musou game based on Fist of the North Star. *insert lolwut pear here*

(Yours truly is not interested in this because I hate the artstyle, despite being a Musou fanboy.)