Leon's Microblog – October 2021

Deltarune Chapter 2 (2021)

Touhou translations I insisted on double-checking, part 1

C programmers: is an "#​if 0" and "#​endif" pair a block comment?

I feel like a lot of my sense of humour and standards of fantasy derive from this one character in Narbonic (2000s webcomic) who's a Hunter S Thompson-parody gonzo journalist who discovers, at the end of her journey, that her body is 100% gerbil DNA despite appearing fully human.

"This function can return one of the values True, False, or 𝕊pecial 𝔽alse

Me after getting 4 hours less sleep than I was supposed to and just pretending everything's fine

The first recorded case of "he protecc / but also / he attacc" was Fox McCloud's Reflector or "Shine" move in Super Smash Bros. Melee in 2001

Here's some reviews of a few comics on publisher Shortbox's Gumroad (https://shortbox.gumroad.com/):

"It's the Draw Your Corporeal Human Body From Memory Challenge! It's been awhile, but I can still recall the old clunker like it's yestercentury." *inscribes a perfect flawless glass sphere* "There we… wait, something's missing…" *adds the genitals* "Haha, almost got me there."

"I REPEAT, place ONLY your most repulsive and unwanted memories in the FRONT of your mind, for the machine will ONLY wipe that part, and leave the precious rest cleanly untouched. Reminder that the FRONT of your mind is just above your forehead. Move those memories to THAT part."

I forgot that this exceedingly canon room just has these ripped sprites in it??

TURING TEST PART 7 How do Santa's reindeer fly?

*talking into my own empty palm held up to my ear* Look, if they put Pearl the Gem in that fighting game, she could have Blue Pearl, Yellow Pearl AND Volleyball as alt skins! *pauses serenely as I imagine "who the HELL is Volleyball" being shouting out of my palm*

"Worst part of telepathy? Oh baby… when you have to explain to your boyf that his /dreams/ are too loud… that's as awkward as the Snoring Talk times 1000."

Kind of messed up that all the search engines are so bad now that punching my queries into Twitter search gets me closer to the websites I'm looking for, via tweets referencing them in casual conversation, than what actual web search would get me.

I want to put it out there that my 2021 game "You are SpamZapper 3.1" (https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529) does NOT have continuity with my 2013 game "App Escape" (https://fairysvoice.net/games/App_Escape/), but if it DID, that would actually be pretty hilarious.

Been playing the latest in the "Of The Killer" series of games (https://gamejolt.com/@garmentdistrict/games)

Just discovered that The Unofficial Homestuck Collection modifies the default Chromium/Electron file drag-and-drop icons into something in-universe appropriate. Yeesh. These people really love this comic.

Dark Souls is a game from that meme where you rate every aspect of it 0 stars except for "Overall" which gets 5 stars.

You're playing an RPG, and you're at the genre-standard office cubicle maze interning quest. Your boss asks you for a cup of coffee. The coffee machine asks you for its limbs back so it can become human again and resign after it makes your cup.

"My future's looking so bright, I'm gonna need the eye equivalent of earplugs!"

Is Dr. P.P.Pooman the Apple Girlington of Deltarune Who is this tweet even FOR

Imprisoned in a circle of rotating lasers for 99 seconds for calling the Deltarune darkners "tsukumogami"

Due to a multi-step currency conversion arbitrage accidentally invoked by your payment processor 16,384 times, your $2.50 purchase has charged your account 50 million dollars.

Just reopened old favourite Qualia The Purple (great comic, ten stars, etc) and this main character's name, appearance, and general otherworldly air suddenly reminds me of something…………………………

I like the songs in Steven Universe, but I understand that they are a bit… how do I put this… like, you don't need to have seen the development blog to notice that they have "ukulele energy".

I learned about the "Yukino Watari remix album": https://pxtunes.bandcamp.com/album/variations-on-yukino-watari "Yukino Watari", by the way, is an 8-second-long, 1-instrument victory jingle from Pixel's extremely short-lived MMO, "Soaprun". It appears at the very end of this archival footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPCKIo5QXuI

NAME: SpamZapper 3.1 LIKE: Job security HATE: Hidden messages Their job is clear: zap spam and approve good emails. But why is such an easy job so stressful? And why was an email client plugin made to feel stress at all? Play YOU ARE SPAMZAPPER 3.1 here: https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529

Dismayed to report that I now understand why winpty exists!!!! Be glad that I'm saving you from this harsh fate.

*hears about the legendary Chinese soldier Chunyu Fen being spirited away to the vast utopian kingdom of Hui An, only to discover, after finally being sent home after 100 years, that it was all just a tiny anthill all along* Hmm, this reminds me of Deltarune, the new RPG by

I'm having an extremely emotional time because I'm going through the Zophar dot net soundtrack lists for various Game Boy games I've played, and each of them has 1-3 tracks labeled "Unknown Jingle", and I always know what they are in-game

"Bein' a writer means always havin' an opinion or two in your saddlebag… even if you took out common sense to fit it in." – Brubage Inkstone, "Memoirs of a Wordwrangler" (unpublished ninth draft manuscript)

Reading a 300-chapter "vintage webtoon" (vintage meaning 2014) called New Normal, about students with cartoonish physical abnormalities… the protagonist has a giant head + tiny face, others have stretchy limbs, etc. It's basically just another high-school slice-of-life, though…

Say what you will about this character, but the boss fight itself is legitimately entertaining.

If you really want to come to grips with dodging this danmaku stuff, playing this card a lot is one way to do it. There's no big tricks, just the classics: tiny bullets at reasonably high speeds in well-defined lines that you're forced to cross at a variety of angles.

Saw a thread about unnecessarily detailed toggleable anime subtitles (usually created with Aegisub), and instantly remembered this one from Hidamari Sketch. This frame only shows for like 1.5 seconds, split over two jump-cuts.

I have a confession to make. This extremely good minimalist trailer I made for my text adventure was animated entirely in Game Maker. Not even the new Game Maker, either. No! Game Maker 7, from 2009! https://twitter.com/webbedspace/status/1444317618312126469

TURING TEST, PART 5 A human friend interrupts you and asks to be excused because "they need to poop". In what situation(s) is this request inappropriate and should be refused? (Check all that apply.)

https://vgperson.com/posts.php?p=rpgmakerguide – After almost a literal decade, I finally discover how to open Yume Nikki in Windowed mode /without/ having to press F4 every time. I'm free now.

What game's rules are written on Rouxls Kaard (Deltarune character)

Quality writing doesn't so much come down to "how good is your brain at cooking up beautifully intricate plots" as "how much tedium and irritation are you willing to inflict on yourself until you cook up a plot that meets your adorably narrow standards for beauty and intricacy"

Wearing a golden ring on a string around your neck, and also stickytaping an entire necklace to your finger

The "Chess Declined" is one of the most powerful and time-tested tactical responses to being asked to play a game of Chess.

Deltarune theorycrafting: Alphys says in chapter 2 that there's no school tomorrow (referring to chapter 3), therefore chapter 4 takes place on Energy Sword Sunday. #theorycrafting

I'll admit, I didn't really see the appeal of a spell card with gravity effects, but after the fact I get the charm of it essentially being an "endless scroll".

This is what Touhou has made of me: I am now someone who is convinced that this is how you're supposed to dodge this spell.

I read someone noting that the human characters in my new Twine game "You are SpamZapper 3.1" (https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529) kind of suck compared to the non-human characters. This reflects my very Millennial belief that in the year 2000, everyone on the Internet kind of sucked.

Pleased to report that after not touching it for over a month, I've just picked up and beaten Undefined Fantastic Object on Easy with no deaths! I used 12 bombs but it wasn't relaxing by any means.

https://www.pixiv.net/artworks/89706216 – High-tier videogame fanart

Chaos erupts as FIDE declares that Scholar's Mate is actually the canon ending of Chess. "Rooks are non-canon!" cries the anti-rook faction with tears of joy.

I'm a little mad this was released now and not April 1 https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/1449618799569752064

Suddenly wondering what it must be like to have been a small child who just finished Undertale, leaned back, very quietly cracked their knuckles, and downloaded EarthBound

You eat the Dubious Pill. The pill's ghost drifts out of your mouth and rises up to Heaven… Then, its halo suddenly splits into devil horns! The pill's ghost vanishes in a burst of sulfur, cackling hideously. …This seems like a bad sign.

"Being a Millennial isn't cool and marketable anymore. I'm jumping ship to Gen X. Gonna start calling videogame levels "boards" and quoting David Bowie songs that aren't about dying in space."

Paper brain: Downloading the Umineko official voice-acting mod to bring the characters to life Super Paper brain: Downloading the Umineko official voice-acting mod to finally learn what all the manga laughs like "kukukuku" and "hihihihihi" are supposed to sound like in real life

I just want you to know that if you ever become mind-controlled by a powerful wizard, and act uncharacteristically mean and horny until the spell is broken, I WILL assume that it was all just from the mind-control, even if it secretly wasn't. This is my guarantee, as a true pal.

My greatest fear is waking up to find that not only have I been burgled, but then an entire college marching band was redirected through my opened front door by a chain of "detour" signs placed by a rascally child, and start blaring a peppy Sousa tune directly at my nude body.

"Look at me, I'm a North American, I think "ass-backwards" is a normal turn-of-phrase" – tweet that Satan wants me to unleash to sow discord, but which I am Christily refusing to

"Strength potions do NOT increase strength of will, despite what ALL the reviews said, so now I'm still too scared to ask them out AND my sleeves are ripping open!"

"Humans love pictures of rainforests and dark woods with dappled light because it reminds them of their natural habitat, poorly lit offices. The knowledge that gloomy and humid places also exist in nature is soothing to their spirit."

I like that the Shoot The Bullet games are just about Aya trying to do ambush interviews of various other characters, and all the soundtrack songs have names like "Nemesis's Stronghold" and "Infinite Nightmare".

If you haven't played my new game "You are SpamZapper 3.1" (WHICH IS ONLY 1 CLICK AWAY PLUS A FEW OTHER CLICKS https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529) then, good news! The game has a number of much better inspirations. Once you play those, you can interpolate the story from those datapoints.

ZUN composing the best song you've heard in your entire life (it only plays when fighting a secret boss named Suwako Moriya)

My latest Homestuck opinion is that Crystalanthemums is still one of the absolute best melodies in its soundtrack, even though its remixes mostly didn't accentuate its good qualities and just did their own things.

What if this is actually the maximum amount of intelligence any complex organism can ever have. What if this is it. What if we're all brushing the ceiling. What if we're all nearly cognitively perfect. What then. What would society even do about that.

"Videogames are no longer a fresh medium. All the genres are solved. The ideal HP for a level 1 JRPG character has been found (120) as have the number of bosses before gaining double-jumps in a Metroidvania (5). Pipe Dream will never be AAA. The President will never stream Qix."

You might think most of your time as a mid-00s webcomic author was taken up drawing the little whispering angels and devils on your character's shoulders. That's just one part of it. You also had to write "KA-PLOTTWIST!" in big onomatopoeia text whenever a plot twist happened.

Every so often I think about the Umineko fighting game, and every time I become enraged that a fighting game is actually completely, unnervingly plausible within Umineko's canon

There's so much Dark Souls series backstory out there that's so tonally varied and difficult to find. You could tell me Lord Gywn lost millions on a horserace because he thought "20-to-1" was the horse's win-loss ratio, and I'd A) believe you, and B) be annoyed you spoiled it.

Here's the Twine editor storymap for my game "You are SpamZapper 3.1" (WHICH YOU CAN PLAY IN THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN BROWSER IN EXCHANGE FOR NIL DOLLARS https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529). Yellow tags are emails. Plain passages are fraternising with your co-workers. There's a lot to see!

Everyone keeps mentioning the Deltarune Berdly/Halberd pun, but barely anyone ever brings up the original, the classic, the Meta Knight Halberd/HAL Laboratory pun (a style of joke that Kumazaki would later reprise in Planet Robobot).

"Look, you can't deny that it's canon that Flandre is a nerd. That's–" *dialogue swiftly fades as plummeting cellphone falls past the camera into cavernous pitch-black abyss*

Writing prose fiction isn't just about the joys of bringing characters to life and having them grapple with their challenges. It's also about repeating the same odd turns-of-phrase later in the story for ironic purposes. Homestuck embodied this principle in a grand scale.

"Bury me with my cherryblossoms" – Yuyuko, Perfect Cherry Blossom, quoting the poet Saigyō Hōshi (西行法師, 1118–1190), famous for meditations on the tension between Buddhist selflessness and the stirring beauty of nature

Been going through my folder of old IF parser games from the 00's, and thinking about how my new game "You are SpamZapper 3.1" (PLAYABLE NOW AT https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529) indirectly ended up mirroring a lot of common tropes from that era.

You can't step outside your body while it's alive. Sorry. You'll have to figure out from the cockpit what's wrong with it and why it's making those sobbing noises.

On the counter is a phial of something called "Devil's Blood", which, you've been assured, is indeed the Devil's blood. Rare as it is, the substance is less interesting than the unknown act by which it was extracted.

Need to do something but I'm too preoccupied sitting here thinking about plot twists and how much I love them

I think I'm entitled to be a little upset that I've gone through many ideas for new Twine games over the past several years, attempting many times to make something of them, and freaking "You are SpamZapper 3.1" is the one that lived.

Learn to love yourself like ZUN loves the lunar/lunatic pun

Once again thinking about this part of a summary of a Famitsu interview about 13 Sentinels's development

………………………

Imagine I did a "a trace of the true self exists in the false self" meme with Devil's Galop (orchestral stock music)→Monty On The Run (C64 chiptune)→Pumpkin Cravings (chiptune, Homestuck vol 5)→THIS Pumpkin (orchestral remix, Homestuck vol 10). What? …You refuse? Oh well, nvm

Me when I'm trying to find where the spare linen is

I did it, everyone!! I became immortal.

Suddenly wondering if I might have subliminally based the central trio of my game You are SpamZapper 3.1 (AVAILABLE NOW FOR FREE AT https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529) off of the 17776 trio, who also oversee the affairs of humans from a distance…

Look, you fools, if they'd put Reimu in Super Smash Bros., they'd definitely localise all the names and attacks differently to the mess of legacy decisions in the English fan patches. Do you really want "Gensokyo" to be romanised correctly?

I'll say that both the When They Cry games gave me a renewed faith in the written word, a faith I haven't had in a long time, and my new game "You are SpamZapper 3.1" (FREE AT https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529) probably wouldn't exist without them…

"Look, characters in Shakespeare plays don't make a huge fuss to their actors about endlessly recreating their pain and suffering for petty afternoon amusement, but /videogame/ characters think they're entitled to get up in your grill for as little as not logging in for a week."

"I don't respect players who beat Dark Souls by credit-feeding instead of using the intended amount of extra lives."

Making fun of the Nintendo Switch logo animation is going to become the new putting different animals in place of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion. You heard it here first.

My new game "You are SpamZapper 3.1" (FREE AT https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529) was originally started as a potential example project for the storylets system I'd added to Harlowe 3.2. Each inbound email, plus some other passages, is a storylet with a declarative rule for being shown.

https://ifcomp.org/ballot#entry-2529 – Here's an all-new Twine game by me, Leon, "You are SpamZapper 3.1". Play as a mail client's spam blocker plugin in the year 2000. But enough from me: here's the trailer. That's right! Free Twine games have trailers now!!

Putting 26 elevator cars in the same 26-floor shaft so that the average boarding time is zero seconds for all floors