Diorama of Hyrule, used in the instruction manual for The Legend of Zelda. Clean photo comes from the official Nintendo website that was launched in 2021. (Source)

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Diorama of Hyrule, used in the instruction manual for The Legend of Zelda. Clean photo comes from the official Nintendo website that was launched in 2021. (Source)
haven't played gw2 in a decade(!) but i always liked how it let wizards use different weapons in appropriately wizardy ways
The sky above the television tuned to a dead channel was the color of a different, much older television tuned to a dead channel
IG: www.instagram.com/dawning_crow SITE: www.dawningcrow.com
maybe the most confounding graph i have ever seen in any book
(from prophetgoddess@cohost [rip])
i'd had hiroki azuma's otaku: japan's database animals on my to-read list, but tbqh (not remembering where i'd heard about it) i'd assumed it was one of those books that everything it's got to say is right there in the title. and i've got my own ax to grind against the comic book guy, america's database animal.
but it sounds like it's weirder than that! like fukuyama, whose the end of history and the last man seems reasonable until you ask who the last man is supposed to be, azuma got hopped up on hegel-by-way-of-kojeve and started making grand proclamations about humanity's final form.
they're still more characters than not
――How did you first get Yamashita involved in this project? Tsurumaki: When the project was greenlit, I asked him, "If you have any ideas on what you want to do with Gundam or mobile suits, please feel free to pitch them." The first concept he submitted was his Zaku design, which we ultimately used pretty much as-is. Yamashita: Yes. Around that time, I drafted the full-body Zaku design, then just the Gundam. That was the order, I believe. ――Could you share the overarching concept you had for the mecha in this series? Yamashita: First, we wanted the Zaku to remain the standard, definitive mobile suit in that world. Second, we wanted to remove the usual "character" elements from the mobile suits. Whether it's a combat or a civilian model, a mobile suit in space is basically an extension of a vehicle, and that's where we started--thinking of them as advanced heavy machinery, rather than stylized "heroes." ――So you envisioned them as a direct evolution of construction or work vehicles? Yamashita: Exactly. The moment you say Gundam, there's often a built-in expectation that the design will look heroic, you anthropomorphize it. One of the ways we departed from that was by giving the Zaku a smaller foot shape. If you think of it as an actual work machine, you’d want it to walk around efficiently, and a huge foot might be unwieldy. It's like wearing ski boots, everyone knows how awkward that can be.
I thought after the last post I was done with mechs for a while then I ran across this GQuuuuuuX interview with the director Tsurumaki and mech designer Yamashita (and mech animator Kim) that's all "we're trying not to make them characters!"
But they can only do so much:
――In your view, what must a design have to be considered “Gundam?” Yamashita: When you get down to it, I think it’s that dual fin and those eyes. Tsurumaki: One of the first design proposals Yamashita gave us had no visible eyes at all, it looked extremely cool, but it didn’t feel like “Gundam.”
"a weapon bearing the elements of a character"!
(anno, in gundam the origin; more @ source)
for all that i'm "character is real and a thing you should take seriously alongside lore and plot" i hadn't cast my net wide enough.
another one for the fake mech tactics files--since radar doesn't work due to minovsky particles mechs can't be detected until they fire, so they operate in pairs leaving one unit free to cover against the counterattack.
(the heir to virtual on in japanese arcades is a gundam branded 2v2 game; the problem 2v2 solves there is that flying movement in an empty arena collapses 3d space into 1d space if there's only two things that matter.)
i don't know how much that's inspired by irl air war--i know that wingman as a concept exists but no idea what they're for--but nothing comes from nowhere. for my own part i've always liked the version of space war that's like submarine war: you're invisible against the dark of space until you give off radiation, but thermodynamics means anything you do generates heat that has to be radiated.
one down, 49 to go!
ufo 50 is real! here's a little map & notes i made to help get through BARBUTA (game #1 of 50!!!); when they were like 'these are full games, don't take them lightly!' they weren't kidding.
it's a charming but kind of weird package, and putting barbuta's intentionally old-school jankiness first (the buzz as you go between screens!) sets the tone for the whole thing but is also kind of deceptive--underneath the jank barbuta, like the whole collection, is suffused with 21st-century game design fairness.
but that doesn't mean it's easy! the games are short but tough, and you've got to take them seriously if you want to beat them; other devs might have been tempted to undertune them so people who aren't good at one genre or another will still see everything the collection has to offer, but not mossmouth.
there's a little marsh we walk by on the way to lunch where the egrets hang out. usually they're just standing there waiting for their own lunch, but this one started strutting around when i pulled out my camera :D
game, you have successfully shamed me out of putting this thing in my mech and going nothing but missiles :(
it's tempting though! or would be, up to now i was firmly in the 'pile bunker rules, nothing can beat pile bunker!' camp until i unlocked something even better.
but i do love me a theory of mech warfare. it takes a very particular thumb on the scales for it to make sense at all, and even then only barely.
my somewhat lukewarm armored core take
is that jet fighters are profoundly unnatural! the mech of armored core isn't an infantry brigade bundled up with technology until a knight fighting honorable duels against a single foe makes sense again, it's a fighter plane slowed down, given arms and legs so it makes sense again.
i am not as diligent a highlighter as i could be, even though i find myself delighted when i scroll back and find something relevant
There’s this adage in some circles (or the ones I am adjacent to) that mech fiction is, fundamentally, about bodies. I grimace when I hear this, not because there isn’t truth to it, but because I feel it’s a bit myopic and jealous. Mech fiction is about a lot more than just bodies, and to reduce a genre to some core theme is obviously absurd. But as I play Armored Core VI, I cannot stop thinking about bodies. Not because of any bodies in view. Rather, their absence haunts Rubicon.
the whole unity thing
i'd meant to jot down a few thoughts about the whole unity thing, and now that riccitello's apparently stepping down and putting an end to this chapter, at least, i've put it off about as long as i can.
unity's announced pricing changes were stupid: tone deaf, privacy nightmare, potentially unbounded financial obligations; you've heard it all at great length. but as weird and outrageous as it was, the reaction might have seemed a little overblown if you haven't been watching unity get worse and worse over the years; every new version boots up more slowly in service of features that they've slapped in and haven't bothered to finish.
so i'm mostly sad about the whole thing. it was a great engine in 2009! but idk how much riccitello & crew understood that a lot of unity's greatness was their decision to build on c#, and others have done the same--godot & fna/monogame from re-logic's announcement, among others. and the more engines i use (we're on unreal now at work, for art/graphics quality/big team reasons) the clearer it is that they're all doing the same thing. they've each got their own quirks, but there's a consensus around how to edit animations or materials or what have you that nobody strays very far from.
in conclusion: switching will be mildly irritating but extremely possible. i said that i wouldn't use unity again until someone resigns in shame, but i honestly didn't expect it to happen. riccitello by himself is probably not enough, could be a few more that have to go before they can turn it around.