Month: December 2023

An Important Announcement and a Desired Topics Any% Speedrun

Tiberius4 Comments

Nearing the corner on a new year

Since I started writing this blog in January, I expected and prepared for real life to momentarily take me away from the blog for a time. We’re approaching that milestone. Originally, I had attempted to sign up for a volunteer program with AmeriCorps in the Southwest. Moments before clearing the hurdle, however, technical issues held me back and I’d missed the June deadline. This wouldn’t be the first time real life interfered with this weekly blog and I doubt it’ll be the last. Life is like that sometimes; you can lead a horse to water.

This time around, I’d pursued a different endeavor, one that lasted from the latter half of the summer until now. I’d mentioned in blogs before that I had little experience in the Army. To elaborate on that journey, it had been a long time coming. I wanted to join ever since I graduated high school in 2016, even in a reserve capacity which my mom would’ve expected me to do at the time. I was 17 when I graduated and if I wanted to move forward I’d need parental approval. We were also still seeing deployments to Afghanistan at the time and the potential of me going on such a deployment mostly torpedoed any argument I had at joining before I was 18. Not even a list of non-combat deployments would be able to sway her. Like most people, they hear “Army” and immediately think “infantry, cannons, tanks, helicopters.”

Don’t get me wrong, that’s all cool. But from what I’ve seen and read about from films to movies to video games like Call of Duty, the cool guy stuff tends to be limited to combat branches like Infantry, Artillery, Cavalry, etc. For specific missions like those of modern Call of Duty and Battlefield games, if you pay close attention you’ll notice that the units mentioned are Special Forces groups. Delta Force, SEAL Teams, Marine Spec Ops, Air Force Pararescue; units whose training alone demands extra mental fortitude and fitness that I’ve known all my life was impossible for me to achieve. Which was why when I looked for specialties on the goarmy.com website, I looked at support specialties.

Specifically, the Signal Corps where soldiers in this field potentially work on or with networking, telecommunications, satellites, computers, and anything else that kept technical and electrical systems up and running. Nevertheless, my mom thought I should try college first, but I never stopped eyeing the Army. In case you’re curious why the Army specifically, the Marines took everything a bit too seriously, my family in general has an influx of ex-sailors, and the Air Force practices camouflage a little too well. Not to mention the Army recruiting office was right down the street from my home. It was easier to find the Army guys than anyone else.

My first attempt was in 2020, deep into the pandemic. My original goal was to serve close to home (National Guard), and make use of VA home loans to nab a house and a car. That’s still part of my goals, though I’ve had more time to do research on what that looks like. I don’t crap cash so something new is off the table for me. I’d been looking at cars known for their reliability and durability than their ability to show me what I look like in the light.

Never mind the fact that the pandemic made everything difficult, I was determined and sure enough I’d gotten to the recruiter. After a few snags, we were getting to what I’d discover would be the first round of paperwork. The recruiter and I discussed my health in private. Growing up, I had asthma trouble and it would’ve kept me indoors. Conversely, I liked going out and running around as a kid, so asthma attacks were so rare, I can only ever point to one in my life and it’s far before the U.S. military’s cut off of age seven. Didn’t stop doctors from prescribing medicines unnecessarily as a safety precaution. By the time I was turning 22, the asthma was so diminished I didn’t really need anything.

I took a pulmonary function test soon after and I was certain I had failed it, but the doctor who referred me told me I’d pass and if I still wanted to, I could go forward with the National Guard. After all, the most I’d done with them was take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery or ASVAB, a series of tests that determine your strengths and weaknesses. No disrespect to the National Guard, but COVID slowed a lot of things to a crawl, recruitment being one of them. It worked out for me though, I’d waited long enough to get vaccinated in Spring 2021 and by then I was talking to an active duty recruiter.

We talked about my health again, but surprisingly, the asthma wasn’t as strong a focus this time around. I wear glasses and the recruiters saw fit to put in a vision waiver because of a lazy eye. This pushed my ship out date to two months that year and I was gone by the evening of August 9. My preparation for basic training was subpar as seen by my amazing ability to run at the speed of a continental drift. I was also nursing a leg injury and going back and forth to the docs there to get told to do some stupid band exercises wasn’t helping. They did give me pills to eat after each meal, but I don’t like the idea of popping to keep up the pace, not to mention one of them came with a blood thinning side effect.

So in my infinite wisdom, I thought it’d be easier to leave and come back. Well, that would be all wrong. I spent all of 2022 and the first half of 2023 trying to get back into the Army. And the real kicker was that the last IRL recruiter I talked to was the one to get me in the first time two years ago. Fortunately, there’s r/Army on reddit, not administered by the Army themselves, but administered by individuals who are or did serve in the Army. I’m not sure if the Army themselves approved it’s creation, but I’m not discounting it since every business has a social media page of some kind these days.

One of the soldiers I’d been messaging is an active duty recruiter who has a record of helping people enlist even from out of their home state. Now this isn’t exactly a one-off. It’s 100% possible to get aid from a recruiter in, say, Tennessee, even though you live in Wisconsin. On the Army’s side, every recruiter can go through an applicant’s paperwork and help push it forward, especially if the entrant suspects that a recruiter isn’t following through on their duties.

Like last time, it was a series of electronically signing papers and using the power of lucky charms, crossed fingers, and the hands of time to get my waiver approved. By October of this year, I was given the greenlight from my recruiter and the sun started shining brighter that day.

The next hard part was getting a recruiter in my immediate area to taxi me to the processing station to choose my military occupational specialty or MOS. Three games of musical phones later, we get a date for the second week of November and I sign for an MOS that would potentially see me working on telecommunications with a secret security clearance. The important thing to know about secret and top secret security clearances is that they allow those with access to sensitive information. It can’t be shared, reproduced, or tampered with without appropriate authorization. Doing so brings forth dire consequences. If you don’t f[horse noises]k around, you won’t find out. No one wants to share the same fate as Airman 1st Class Jack Teixeira.

No one can stress hard enough how crucial it is that you follow this like a mantra. No one would dare show the likeness of the prophet Muhammad, and no one should do anything with sensitive information that they’re not supposed to.

As of writing this, my ship out date is January 2. I’ll swear in and ship out that day. Last time I was at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I might go there again to train, but other entrants in a similar MOS as me are slated to train at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. It might be related to the weather since I was at Jackson in the summer and it’s currently winter, but I’ll know for certain on the day of.

Doing the math, the timeline should have me in training from January 2 to around the second or third week of March, then to train specifically for my MOS, it’s 19 weeks so I should be done with that by July. This means that this blog will be dark until I can find a way to access it in the summer and depending on my first duty station, I’ll either have the free time to continue this though with less frequency, or not at all.

I have a lot of stuff I’d still like to talk about and I want to try to speed through them here before it goes dark proper. I plan on fully elaborating on these at some point, but I can’t say when or if I’ll get that chance. So here’s a brief on three projected topics I won’t get to discuss further.

My First Blog Should Be Forgotten

This blog is actually my second. The first I launched on blogger in February 2021 and ran until my ship out date in August that year, plus another two or so posts in October and December. It was originally supposed to be animanga focused and serve as a launch pad for a side gig on Fiverr.

I wasn’t all that lucky however and it became more of a hobby where I can improve my writing without feeling locked to the commitment of a novel. As time went on, I involved several of my political views which don’t have a place in an entertainment-focused blog and looking back I don’t like how I worded a lot of things. I’d like for it to fade into obscurity but bringing it here will yield the curious. For those of you who’d like to skim through the muck, I’ll leave a link below so you can see what 22-year-old me thought was a stellar blog. Please be nice.

https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/4013701638792928337?bpli=1&pli=1

Stumbling Blind into Btooom!

As a viewer of the Trash Taste podcast, I’m aware of how clear the hosts are on certain genres. Joey Bizinger can’t stand most isekai anime while Gigguk wolves them down like Mars bars. If I could use them as a scale, I’d be a couple notches Gigguk-ward. I’ll watch a few isekai, but it’s not a genre I’ll make a beeline for. Sometimes I investigate things on a whim and that’s how I managed to find all 12 episodes of the Btooom! anime on YouTube, concealed and unlisted so the algorithm has to work hard to find and delete it.

It might not call itself isekai, but to me it fits the criteria, though I’m using The Rising of the Shield Hero, KonoSuba, and Re:Zero as my measuring sticks. The protagonist is a NEET named Ryota Sakamoto who excels in an online video game where instead of guns, players fight each other with different types of explosives.

As of writing, I’m only two episodes deep into this 1-cour anime, so my assessment of it as an isekai anime may not be completely accurate. It has one hallmark of an isekai that of seen so far, though instead of the lone NEET heading to a fantasy world, multiple people are present from the real world. Then again, Sword Art Online did something similar and both received their anime adaptations in 2012. The Btooom! anime only ran for 12 episodes while SAO became a franchise in and of itself.

In only two episodes of Btoom!, it appears to be a darker series. My memories of SAO are hazy as I haven’t seen it in years, but I remember the golden rule being that death in-game means actual death for the player. In the first two episodes that I saw of Btooom!, Sakamoto lived up to the reputation of most incels while in the next episode, the girl, Himiko, was sexually assaulted by fat nerd. Junya Inoue wasn’t pulling any punches with the writing it seems. As much as I want to write about this anime, I haven’t seen enough of it to throw my hat into the ring, nor have I any memories of SAO to make a good enough comparison.

However much free time I’ll get in Advanced Individual Training will determine if I can use what’s left to play catch-ups with either series, but at least there’ll be enough time for me to absorb what I’m gonna see soon.

That Manga about Robert Johnson

Of the YouTubers I’ve discovered, one called NFKRZ — real name Roman — released a video sometime last month or so about how he took Chinese and practiced enough of it to become fluent. Under the comments of that video, some made a joke about globalization. As hilarious as the next YouTube comment, but a more serious and more interesting case of globalization to me is less on someone learning a notoriously difficult language and more on the manga artist who decided to illustrate the life of early 20th century blues musician Robert Johnson.

There’s a manga for everyone.

I stumbled upon the manga whilst reading a Looper article on unsung and underrated manga and the manga in question takes the name of one of the musician’s posthumous albums: Me and the Devil Blues. Like Btooom!, I’m also early in this series, but from what I’ve read so far it appears to be an apocryphal retelling of how a black man from Mississippi became a legendary blues musician and pioneer. I say apocryphal because the focal point seems to be a legend.

When Johnson was growing up (mid 1910s to late 1920s), adherence to religion, especially in Mississippi — a Bible belt state — was societally enforced as opposed to legislatively enforced. No matter your color or creed, you were assumed or expected to be a churchgoer, even if you didn’t give a damn about what the preacher had to say. Somehow, someway, the Bible made its way into ordinary people’s lives and in the case of the manga, it’s marketed as a devil’s contract/monkey’s paw sort of deal. You get talent in exchange for your mortal soul [evil laughter].

I hesitate to call the rest of it a spoiler. You can’t really spoil history, but I want to implore readers to check out the manga. It’s only five volumes, so you can knock it out in a few days or a week at most. It’s available for reading on MangaDex. I have no idea where to find physical copies, but if you do and you want to read more about one of the 20th century’s earliest blues pioneers and 27 club inductees, I can’t recommend it enough. I’d certainly love to read more of it myself and give a more expansive opinion. Akira Hiramoto’s manga deserves it, so does this sadly forgotten musician.

Those are three of the topics I had lined up for 2024. They all will soon get their own more in depth blog posts in the future, ideally in the summer, but this is subject to change. My job in the Army will take precedence over this blog for 2024, but I’m glad I could get something off the ground this year and with a small but growing following of readers. Glad to have had some people checking out this… admittedly poorly named blog site. Fingers crossed 2024 doesn’t keep me too far away from this.

What Was Lost from L.A. Noire

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It was underbaked all along

I’ve brought up L.A. Noire before as an example of what went wrong with it on the developer’s side. To not repeat myself a third time, here’s the short version: Australian developer and programmer Brendan McNamara used his experiences working on the 2002 video game The Getaway to open his own studio in Sydney called Team Bondi with the goal of developing their only game L.A. Noire, based on old noir films from the 1940s and 50s. The problems that arose came from McNamara’s corrosive personality, crunch, and, according to ex-developers under his wing, explicit approval of sweatshop hours. Numerous people quit or got sick either physically or mentally of his open berating of “slackers” and loads of people who contributed to the project were omitted from the credits, especially if they didn’t see it to its May 2011 release. Keep in mind, Team Bondi started working on the game in 2004.

Over the course of nearly eight years, Team Bondi lost a lot of people and with a high turnover rate and new people not knowing what their predecessor was specifically working on, lots of stuff was scrapped. It wasn’t until Rockstar themselves made a personal investment in the game’s release, but by the time it released, it never broke even and Team Bondi’s assets were sold off in October 2011. The studio was said to have spent over $50 million on the game, making it one of the most expensive video games at the time, but it only made back less than half, even with all the marketing in the years prior to release.

After 12 years and a series of remasters and graphical upgrades especially on newer consoles, Rockstar clearly has a place in its heart for the game. As for what would’ve been different if more level heads were allowed to direct or manage the project, it’s difficult to say. Maybe someone could’ve reined in McNamara or fired him from his own studio for the toxic sludge he spewed from his mouth. Maybe the game would still be in development with graphics and physics engines changing over time. Maybe it’ll get cancelled and all we’ll have are numb, carpal tunnel afflicted hands to show for it. No one can say for certain at least not until we master interdimensional travel.

As for what should’ve made it into the game, it’s clear to see that some content was missing. Select characters seem to know the protagonist Cole Phelps without a proper introduction for the audience, especially on the game’s ad vice desk which handles drug crimes. Spoilers incoming, there’s also a subplot in the latter quarter of the game tying together (though haphazardly) the fate’s of the characters Cole Phelps, an ex-Marine who fought with him in the Pacific Jack Kelso, and a German immigrant jazz singer Elsa Lichtmann. Part of the subplot is meant to hint at Cole becoming smitten with Elsa and beginning a love affair with her despite him being married with children.

Following this revelation, his partner on the vice desk rats him out due to personal reasons (he lost out on a boxing match and Cole pretty much ruined the fun for him by promising one of the potential victims a ticket to catch a ferry from New York), and he’s demoted for adultery. The scandal makes the headlines and left with no one but Elsa, after a few cases on the arson desk, Cole looks into a personal conflict Elsa’s been looking into for a while: the most likely (read: confirmed) fraudulent death of her friend. This is where Kelso comes in as an investigator for the California Fire and Life insurance company. Elsa’s friend was a construction worker who was contracted in the development of new homes for returning G.I.’s but the house he was working on collapsed and killed him. It’s revealed from Kelso’s investigation that most of the houses were build with subpar wood and brickwork, some of it from shut down silent-era film sets.

I bring all this up because the adultery subplot comes in quite apropos of nothing. Call it subtlety or a hint at the rushed development cycle, but the closest we get to a build up of Cole’s and Elsa’s relationship is him visiting the club that she sings at most nights. The scenes where they get even somewhat intimate are rare and in the last few cases in the game. It also seems that much of Cole’s character development is absent. Throughout the patrolman cases and going to the traffic and homicide desks, he’s portrayed as levelheaded and quite straightlaced, even chiding fellow officers for not sticking to his personal definition of justice no matter how slight, though keeping to himself for some other officers’ personalities.

By the time he’s on the arson desk, he’s back to his old professional ways and he’s still the type to chase a victory, even with the power of slippery slopes, but I personally never saw him as the type of guy to think himself as a hypocrite, nor did I think that his preaching morality was in some way a shield for his own personal conduct. Some moments do stand out, but don’t have that much of an effect on the story, such as his pride in his own job as a cop while his first partner, Stefan Bekowsky, complains about aspects of his tenure on the traffic desk; or his taking the homicides more seriously on that desk while his partner there, Rusty, is busy drinking half the time, and several others.

Still, if the devs weren’t dodging an interpretive clock or a nasty boss, it could’ve seen a lower turnover rate and some of the original ideas that were cut could’ve been added back, if not in the game itself than as an expansion pack or DLC. The finer points of this implementation can be better explored elsewhere if they haven’t been already, but of the ideas that were scrapped, there were two crime desks that were abandoned: the fraud desk and the burglary desk.

According to McNamara himself, the desks were exactly as described: burglary dealing in thefts and robberies, stuff going missing, and all that entails; fraud would’ve dealt with scams, conmen, forgeries and everything in between. We don’t know who would’ve been the officer in charge of dispatching detectives to investigate these cases, but we have one clue as to who would’ve been partnered with Cole at least on the burglary department: a minor character named Harold Caldwell.

Caldwell was seen getting along famously with Cole. During the final case on the vice desk, he lends a hand to Cole and his vice desk partner, the sleazeball Roy Earle. Caldwell was suggested to have been Cole’s partner on the burglary desk which would’ve had around 11 cases to play, which is the closest explanation for how he has such a good chemistry with Cole at this point in the game. Because the game skips forward six months between the traffic and homicide desks, it’s suggested that the timeskip was supposed to be the burglary desk, but the reason for its omission comes down to formatting and storage.

The PS3 version has the benefit of a large capacity Blu-Ray disc, but there’s no equivalent feature for the Xbox 360 version. Having played it myself after getting it loaned to me by a friend, I remember the game case having a total of three discs. Leaving extra content in the game would’ve necessitated a fourth disc and to my knowledge, few, if any, games would’ve come with so many discs. Without the cut content, L.A. Noire clocked in at a 20 hour campaign depending on your playstyle, but with 11 more cases focused on burglary, who knows how many more hours and gigs would’ve been dedicated to the game?

As for the fraud desk, we know even less. All we have is speculation based on what probably would’ve counted as fraud in the late 1940s since this game was also released in a time before the Miranda rights afforded criminal suspects protection while in police custody along with a defense attorney. It might not be obvious playing it, but if you ever look at gameplay of L.A. Noire or play it yourself, you’ll notice that Cole never reads the suspects their rights. The landmark Miranda rights case was argued in Arizona in 1966, less than 20 years after the events of L.A. Noire, so a lot of what the LAPD could’ve been implied to play fast and loose with in 1947 would’ve largely ceased by then.

Regarding people involved in the fraud desk, that’s also not well known. Who would’ve been the dispatcher? Cole’s partner? Is there a desk that challenges Cole’s lawman philosophy and awaken him to the shades of gray in law enforcement? All of this is up for interpretation. McNamara claimed to have had some levels and concept art for the burglary at least, but I couldn’t find any screenshots of these to verify. Not that I’m calling McNamara a liar, but he was the only public face during the development of the game.

The attitudes and accounts of the disgraced ex-employees of Team Bondi (especially those who left before the game released) may suggest that McNamara had all the cards, so unless an artist or designer snuck away a copy of a potential level, this cut content exists as lost media. Instances of both still exist in the game, but you would only be able to see it in the game’s free roam mode, looking at fliers and ledgers and whatnot.

Would the cut content have made the game any better than what we got? Well, I doubt it would make as big an impact as expected, though it could still change a lot of things. Like what? Probably an in-depth look at how theft was prosecuted post-war or what defined fraud. The examples I listed above are clearly not exhaustive and people smarter and more experienced than me in those fields may have more to add to those, but those would be the more obvious ones to me as I’d never investigated a missing object in any capacity, nor have I investigated fraud. Certainly, Caldwell would join the list of partners Cole has had over the course of the game and likely one of the more respectable ones compared to Roy Earle who takes home loads of allegations of racism and misconduct, even for an America pre-integration.

For formatting and storage, if Team Bondi was able to commit as much as possible to leaving everything in undisturbed, then the game case may look more like a binder or folder with well over four discs dedicated to each case on the Xbox 360 and probably two or three Blu-Rays for the PS3. Subsequent re-releases for PCs would occupy more storage than can possibly fit on an unmodified computer. If I was a part of that alternate reality, I could easily see myself budgeting for more than one high capacity hard drive for just one game or even a series.

On that note, there’s also a part of me that sees this as being a series given the same treatment as the multiple expansions for The Sims franchise or Battlefield and Medal of Honor, which probably says a lot about how EA’s design philosophy compared to what was inherited from Team Bondi into the Rockstar family.

The only notable changes for later releases of L.A. Noire is the interrogation going from Truth, Doubt, and Lie to Good Cop, Bad Cop, and Accuse. All things considered, what counts as speculation for a different game solely exists in criticisms for what didn’t work or go far enough in the version we got. Then again, it takes a game with enough hard work going into it to spark debates and discussion years after the original developer went under and the closest thing we had to DLC or a sequel was seemingly shelved forever. This video by Real Pixels explains all the faults in L.A. Noire. Based on what I wrote, there’s a lot so take this as a brass tacks examination of L.A. Noire.

Channel: Real Pixels

Finally, is L.A. Noire even good? It clearly doesn’t live up to its purported expectations and as I’ve explained there’s a lot under the hood that’s missing or what’s left over isn’t perfectly aligned, but considering I’ve dedicated one post to the game and sections within two separate blog posts to the game, I have a relatively high opinion of the game, and so do others given how many people dream about there being a better version of L.A. Noire or even a Whore of the Orient.

We end 2023 with a YouTube recommendation for the channels Business Basics and Geopolitics Daily.

https://www.youtube.com/@BusinessBasicsYT

https://www.youtube.com/@GeopoliticsDaily247

The twin channels cover news coverage and geopolitics across the world keeping viewers up to date on major issues that affect us directly or indirectly, typically from a consequences of conflict standpoint especially in the case of territorial disputes like those of Russia, Israel, and China among other places across the world. Both channels began as business and investment guides before the shift to global events, but do still offer tips and guides for business and investing.

My Brief Experience with Stop-Motion

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One of the tougher things I’ve tried

We’re down to the wire with a new year on the horizon and I’ve kept this blog strictly professional with personal information kept to a minimum. But for today, we’re venturing back into the vault to show another side to myself, one that I wouldn’t mind revisiting with new information and knowledge. There used to be a time in my childhood when I consumed a giant swathe of brickfilms.

I’ve explained this before, but for a quick refresher, a brickfilm is a stop-motion animation where the primary pieces to be animated are Lego bricks, the animator moving the pieces individually between each picture taken to give the illusion of motion. It’s like traditional hand-drawn animation but typically uses less writing or drawing utensils, though depending on the props used in the animation, can drill holes into your wallet.

Many of the brickfilms I’d watched at the time came from numerous channels, some of which are now practically defunct, and many of them venture on the slapstick side of things. Others involve action set pieces similar to what could be found in The Lego Movie series. It’s been dog’s years since I’ve seen some of them, but I’d like to share one of my all time favorites from this era.

Channel: Keshen8

Stop-motion itself has a storied history. If you’ve ever seen some of the old 1950s or 60s swords and sandals epics, you probably saw how janky and wild the mythical creatures may have looked. The process involved an interlacing of two different styles of film to make into one, something we did even when 3D movies were all the rage; put the live-action footage with the 3D animation and keep animating in a way that objects looked like they’d fly at the audience.

On YouTube specifically, it’s hard to trace when it started to gain popularity on the platform, but as I’ve stated in another post it began with Lego themselves in the 1960s as part of a TV advert, but later gained fame online when Keshen8 uploaded Lindsay Fleay’s The Magic Portal to YouTube in 2008. Filmed over the course of four years when Fleay was in college between 1985 and 1989, the project incorporated Lego bricks but didn’t necessarily limit itself to just that. The video can also be found on Keshen8’s channel.

Channel: Keshen8

Interestingly, the film was showed by Fleay himself to the leadership at Lego. Personally, they were delighted, but the tried to monopolize it by issuing a cease and desist. Thankfully they have since softened their stance on the matter and it has inspired burgeoning and amateur animators, myself included, to try their hand at a craft that isn’t as devil may care as it looks.

Yahtzee Croshaw said it best in his review of Saint’s Row 4: it takes a lot of care to make [something] look completely care-free. I don’t know about you but the processing that comes with animation in general was mostly lost on me as a viewer because when a cartoon goes to air, it’s the fruits of the combined efforts of a studio’s labor that I’m seeing. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network do take their viewers under the hood to see how the sausage is made, but not always. When you begin to animate yourself, you start to realize how involved the process is.

For the sake of just this topic, I’ll go into what made me think I too can do this. Some of the channels I’d been watching were making back-to-back stop-motion videos, again of a comedic, slapstick style. Other times of an action set piece or even of a dramatic reenactment of a film or even a love letter to popular film genres. In some cases, channels like LCM Brick Show used the building toys to make historical documentaries covering war and geopolitical topics (revolutions, world wars, empires rising and falling, etc.).

Some of the channels I’d watched were various different love letters to established film and TV genres or tropes, and my earliest stop-motion was cut from a similar stock. I began filming it on a stick camera I got as a gift for my birthday as I recall. Playing around with that plus another camera I had was pretty cool, but they weren’t practical for what I planned on using them for. Then again, this was my first time using a camera and while digital cameras were available and smartphone cameras were getting near-professional, what we had in 2011 wasn’t up to snuff compared to what’s in your pocket right now.

By the way, this model of Droid was one of my first ever phones in 2013.

Someone with more experience than me can probably explain that it was possible to do it at the time, but keep in my mind, my knowledge of filming techniques was limited and it would be a while before I learned that just because a thing is done a certain way doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do it: a mantra repeated by any speedrunner.

Fortunately, part of the filming equipment I got included a tripod for me to set up with extendable legs. As for educating myself on brickfilming, there were video tutorials breaking them down from frame rate to filming technique to snafus that could trip up amateur animators. Either way, it wasn’t as easy as it looked or sounded. One of the hurdles I faced was the camera quality. Not the picture, but the camera itself. The pictures were taken over the course of just a night, but stretched out over at least five or six hours as I recall and that was because it conked out and needed to recharge for three hours.

I probably could’ve planned it out a bit better, but it was the equivalent of a rough draft for me that night. Experiment with some ideas before getting down to business. Once the camera was done charging and the animating continued, another hurdle I realized quite late was editing, specifically sound effects. Loads of stock sounds exist on the internet but aren’t exactly cheap. As for producing the sounds yourself, I admire that approach as a cost-effective measure, but some tools necessary to make these sounds weren’t always available, especially to a 13-year-old back then.

Voices and dialogue on the other hand was easier to come by and still is. At the time, and to this day, the free program Audacity has been many creators’ go-to method for voice recording and sound design due to its ease of access. With some time spent learning to script and write dialogue, anyone can do it, but only a few turn it into a profession.

Funny enough, the editing software I had, Adobe Premiere Elements 11, wasn’t all that hard to learn. If I had a budget of some kind, and could afford to license the sound effects I could see how it could be done: let the footage run, install the downloaded sound effects into the editor, input some special effects where applicable, and voila! A brickfilm is ready to be published.

That said, this much involvement necessitated tips and tricks that I wouldn’t have been able to find through means at my own disposal. So by the time I got to brickfilming as a hobby on YouTube, I was making do with the first few videos being filmed on a camera that evidently couldn’t be trusted to stay still.

I launched my channel in June 2012 under the name “legoworksstudios1.” The vision I had was to make many brickfilms for years to come, improve, and join the ranks of some of the channels I looked up to at the time. About a month or two later into the existence of the channel, I had switched from using a push-button stick camera to using a stationary webcam. A Logitech C310.

Personally, this is better used for making Skype calls to relatives or have a long-distance relationship. If you ever choose to do this yourself, I highly recommend getting a camera that allows you to control the focus feature. Auto-focus is not the way to go, especially for filming something as small as Lego bricks or even action figures. I did have the C525 which was remarkably better and in just about no time flat, my shaky animations became more stable and fluidic.

I filmed off and on until my last video around Christmas Eve 2012. I tried to think of something silly for New Year 2013, but nothing manifested and I had put the hobby to rest until recently. I still viewed brickfilms and whatnot over the years, but my taste in YouTube content shifted largely to video game Let’s Plays, live-action content, documentaries, clips taken from anime, and curiously enough full anime shows. I have no idea about the science behind it, but I know that some people have uploaded anime to YouTube by way of keeping them unlisted. They can’t be found through conventional means. If they’re still around past the New Year, then there may be a form of piracy that’s hiding in plain sight.

As for stop-motion animation, the film technique is still available and readily used. Sometime last year, one of the channels I follow up on periodically, Emirichu, had a recommendation for a video from the channel MOONSHINE ANIMATIONS. The video in question took audio files from a game played between its creator and real life friends, Emirichu, Daidus, and Moonshine’s girlfriend during gameplay of the horror video game Phasmophobia. It made use of Japanese-made action figures under the brands of Figma and S.H. Figuarts, though custom made to resemble the channels’ avatars/profile pictures.

Channel: MOONSHINE ANIMATIONS

This one video introduced or reintroduced me to several things. As a viewer of the show Robot Chicken, I already knew that stop-motion props weren’t limited to just Lego, but because of the reputation and budget behind an Adult Swim production, it didn’t dawn on me until I got this recommendation that any old schmoe can pick a camera and start animating. Seth Green did it with Cyborg Poultry, Trey Parker and Matt Stone did it with North Playground, and I did it when I was 13-turning-14 with my building block toys.

With the knowledge I have now about how involved and time consuming animations can get (recall that The Magic Portal took 4 years to produce on 16mm film), I want to say that I could pick up a camera and get back to animating again. How I’ll be able to achieve this, I can’t say yet, but it would be awesome to get back into the fold, be it with my Legos or some Figma figures. Shouldn’t be too hard since my channel is still up.

This week’s channel recommendation is the channel William Spaniel.

https://www.youtube.com/@Gametheory101/videos

An associate political science professor, Spaniel’s main specialty is game theory and geopolitical issues and conflicts. His videos as of recent have focused on modern conflicts and potential flashpoints, including but not limited to the international relations of China, the Russo-Ukrainian War post-escalation, the Israel-Hamas War and several others. And when I say he’s a professor, I’m being serious. He has a textbook available for purchase and teaches political science at the University of Pittsburgh, and is a University of Rochester alumni.

Even if political science or, as Prof. Spaniel would put it, “lines on maps” isn’t your forte, Spaniel’s content offers a lot of insight for many modern conflicts largely from the political side than the military side, so you can get a better grasp of what everyone wants when it comes to conflict. If this sounds interesting to you or you see yourself practicing political science in the future, you can’t go wrong with William Spaniel.

Update: (December 23, 2023)

It’s come to my attention that for the section mentioning brickfilming, I’d stumbled upon a series of videos documenting the animation style in a fittingly familiar manner, but hadn’t placed a link for those who’re interested. The playlist consists of videos published by the YouTube channels sillypenta and Bricks in Motion. They’ve both done hard work researching some of the earliest brickfilms in history, the evolution of the practice over the years and many other aspects of the style. Here’s the link to the playlist:

Channels: sillypenta, Bricks in Motion

Boruto: TBV Chapter 5

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Extra details about the divine tree

Part of what the Boruto fandom has been asking for for a few months now has been a flashback of sorts to some training between Boruto and Sasuke during the timeskip. If it’s an arc they’re looking for, it remains to be seen if that’ll be honored, but the closest we’ve got is the opening pages of chapter 5, released a few hours ago. Last time on Two Blue Vortex, Boruto displayed his prowess as the third ever shinobi in history to learn and use the Flying Raijin Technique.

Using the technique, he traveled to the Ten Tails’ dimension, but discovered that it was gone from its restraints and he and Code were surrounded by four intelligent claw grime humanoids. Boruto expected to twist Code’s arm into a truce, but the deceitful Ohtsutsuki hopeful nearly left him to die. Guided by a mechanical summoning toad, Boruto escaped to safety and towards a few familiar faces: one long thought defeated and one in a coma.

This month’s chapter began with a quick flashback. Sasuke initially doubted his memory, repeating that he was doing this for Sarada, not for Boruto, but by the time Boruto had finished his training, he was beginning to imitate the Uchiha patriarch in attire and even hair.

He always did say he wanted to be like Sasuke, even if these straits were forced upon him.

Since debuting in August of 2023, Boruto’s timeskip seems to have delivered on its new threats. The Chekhov’s gun is getting used so often, it might be time to clean the barrel. In this instance, Code’s claw grimes have another sequence to them. The previous four chapters show that whenever they bite someone, the victim of the bite turns into a tree. In chronological order, we’ve had four victims of a claw grime’s bite:

  1. Bug
  2. Sasuke
  3. Unnamed Leaf Shinobi
  4. Moegi

Not only that, a claw grime replica is created in their stead. They inherit the appearance of the host, but maintain the original desires of the Ohtsutsuki, which is to consume enough chakra to bear a fruit-bearing tree, just as it was revealed in the Fourth Shinobi War all those years ago. Good grief, Madara’s influence and meddling still scar the shinobi world after all this time. In this case, the sentient trees have expressed desirable targets of their own:

  1. The unnamed Leaf Jounin clone wants to devour Naruto.
  2. Moegi’s clone wants to hunt Konohamaru.
  3. Sasuke’s clone wants to make a beeline for Sarada.
  4. and the clone of Bug wants to target Eida herself.

Meanwhile, Sumire and Amado discuss Boruto’s return and response to Code’s attack on the Leaf. Amado explains that the Karma acts as a storehouse for one’s DNA and since he’s trying to revive his daughter, Akebi, he needs a Karma seal with her memories to revive her as he remembers. Prior to the Shinjutsu event pre-timeskip, Kawaki would’ve been the only person of interest since Amado remembers implanting that DNA in his Karma.

If it was Kawaki who fled the village after scarring Boruto, and practically orphaning him and Himawari, I could imagine Shikamaru as Hokage dispatching ANBU shinobi teams to track him down if not designating a special unit of the ANBU to handle that, similar to the Hidden Mist’s Tracker Ninja. But post-Shinjutsu event, this doesn’t happen. False memories or not, Amado can tell that he was the one who modified Kawaki’s body as shown in the flashbacks across Boruto Part I, but has no definitive way to prove it. And let’s be real, this is the same universe where the whole village conflated their annoyance with Naruto with their hatred at the Nine Tailed Fox, almost no one being able to tell that he looked just like the Fourth Hokage. I made the connection when he was featured in Ultimate Ninja 3, and that game came out when I was 9 years old. Back then, it was a theory not yet proved fact in the manga.

Thankfully for Amado’s endeavors, Kawaki doesn’t pose any flight risk, so he’s got his target right where he wants him. But as a “son” of a former Hokage, the Leaf government won’t make it easy. Kawaki’s and Boruto’s roles are switched, but Amado’s prior employment in Kara makes him far from trustworthy, especially in Shikamaru’s eyes. And Kawaki’s attitude and history with the scientist pretty much leave that move off the table for Amado. He’ll probably have to get to him when he’s incapacitated. How he’ll get to that point also remains to be seen, but as a scientist, he’s patient enough to observe the results with all the data on hand. Amado’s patience is matched with a Bodhisattva — you think another minute will faze him?

The chapter closes off with Sumire and Sarada discussing what Sumire learned from Amado and a heartfelt reunion between the young Uchiha and the exile.

From what I’ve gathered this chapter, the claw grimes are more dangerous than Code himself. Forgive me for power-scaling, but the grimes are a cut above Code, and the divine trees created from their victims might turn out worse when they get their chance to shine. I do have a flowchart of sorts to showcase the direction of the claw grimes: Claw grime bites human -> human turns into tree -> divine tree clone emerges -> divine tree clone hungers for chakra… and I have to leave it as such until the next chapter launches in January, though for reasons I’ll explain on New Year’s Eve, that may not be feasible for me.

Until then I leave you with some questions for thought: What happens if a divine tree bites a specific person? A Jinchuriki? Someone with vast chakra reserves like Kisame? What else do they inherit from their hosts? And since the divine tree clones aren’t loyal to Code, what happens if they get to him or someone like Eida, who has a Senrigan and access to Shinjutsu? Time will tell, but I hope I’ll be able take notes and write about it all by then.

Before I close off, here’s some wholesome from the latest Two Blue Vortex chapter for the holidays.

My Opinions on Visual Novels

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Lots of engagement? Or hardly any?

I chose the topics for the year many months ago. In the case of visual novels, I didn’t think I’d have a lot to say about them, but when I got one for free this summer on Steam, it initially got me thinking about how I feel about them… for a bit. Then I stopped largely due to my play style. I do get absorbed in video game narratives — I felt compelled by MK: Shaolin Monks enough to try to fix the narrative like a weekly anime a la Dragon Ball — but my play style successfully blends dialogue with button pressing. Mortal Kombat, God of War, Call of Duty, the Naruto games, Midnight Club, Need for Speed; indicting myself here, the action is the selling point.

But I still decided to give that free VN a chance, specifically this one:

The goal of Find Love or Die Trying is to romance one of the five girls on a televised game show not dissimilar from The Bachelor/ette. If you fail to get even one of them to fall for you, you die. So specifically it’s a dating sim game. I recall tuning into DashieGames in the latter part of high school when he was playing that one dating sim puzzle match game HuniePop, where that game’s goal is to score with all the girls.

I know what visual novels are, and there’s a chance you’ve come across some yourself or even their most famous anime adaptations (Fate, Clannad, Danganronpa, etc.), and I was about to say that they’re not for me, but that’s just not true. I just forgot because I have way more memories of being very involved in other video games not limited to the ones listed above. The truth is more that I’m a bit torn on VNs somewhat. I’ve run into several in my childhood, especially on the practically defunct Stickpage, and while not VNs themselves, the Choose Your Own Adventure template of Telltale Games’ video game adaptations of popular properties as well as Don’t Nod Entertainment’s Life is Strange series served as something of an introduction to VNs or something close to a VN.

I still have my copies of Minecraft: Story Mode Seasons 1 and 2, I’ve watched gameplay of Life is Strange 1, Before the Storm, and 2, along with criticisms of each (for more information on LiS, see GCN, Dumbsville, or uricksaladbar on YouTube for more details), and if you’re familiar with games like these you might see the path I’m walking down here. Diet VNs or not, these tended to have more player involvement than something like Doki Doki Literature Club or literally Highschool Romance. Clearly, I’ve got a preference for one type of game over the other, but it’s not like I won’t give a VN the time of day. I did stick around Find Love long enough to reach at least one ending, and a few years ago I watched an old playthrough of The Anime Man playing Highschool Romance; I watched all the endings on his channel. This is what it looks like.

So why are VNs toward the middle of my tier list? Is the limited involvement that it comes with, prioritizing the reading and storytelling over the action? I doubt it… if that were the case I probably wouldn’t have seen the Telltale Games through to the end or bothered watching that Anime Man gameplay of it. I think it’s effort necessary to get through a VN. Don’t get me wrong, I think VNs can tell great stories with the right kind of writing, setup, and characters. The 4chan sponsored VN Katawa Shoujo about romancing girls with disabilities is said to be one such example of amazing storytelling, but I think part of what keeps me from exploring more further has to do with length.

This may sound weird for me since I’ve stuck around some long running anime and have several novels in my possession right now as well as a published novel out available for purchase, but part of the difference between a physical book or a graphic novel or even a webcomic would probably be the visible page count. With the exception of Choose Your Own Adventure, few books or other such media have branching paths. Sometimes what I do when looking at a book in Barnes and Noble or any other bookstore or even with books I own, I count the pages of the chapters. I don’t always have the time to just read for fun and in those instances I count how many pages a chapter has and whether there’s page breaks for me to stop on just in case I need to put it down and divert my attention elsewhere. They’ve become to me what most mobile games are for someone on public transit.

Visual novels on the other hand feel more deceptive. Because so many have branching paths and multiple choices affecting the narrative, a single run could theoretically take moments of your life away, especially if you plan on going back to unlock different endings. This might come from the side of me that wants to experience a lot of things at different moments or it might be something else, but seeing how long some VNs can be can get pretty daunting. I could do it, but seeing the progress bar move at the speed of sleep might motivate me to try another look for speedrun to watch on YouTube or try one myself to juxtapose.

More popular VNs like Fate also notoriously ridiculous launching points. Gigguk took the piss out of this a few years ago with his video on getting into Fate, but it touches on another problem with some VNs: starting point.

Channel: Gigguk

To be fair, I’ve heard from Fate fans that the memes of where to start getting into Fate take it overboard at times, and I like to believe there’s some truth to that, but other times VNs can run on for very long and seemingly have no clear path to walk on. From the outside looking in, they can look like they’re all over the place narratively. I don’t always like taking notes when I’m reading, but a labyrinthine writing style can make that look like a National Guard deployment to an approaching disaster.

I’ve called my own levels of patience into question before, but it looks like I draw the line at really long VNs, though more of a dotted line than a solid one. I could see myself getting into more VNs if I knew where to look for more, and ideally none that are years long or seconds short. The Highschool Romance dating sim gives me an idea and I may go back to Find Love in the future (especially since I started a second run and didn’t finish), but until then I’m probably gonna keep VNs towards the middle of my personal list. I recognize the appeal and I could see myself getting absorbed in them one day, but it’ll take a while for that to happen. For an in-depth look at what a visual novel is and what most of them consist of, see this video from Get in the Robot for more details:

Channel: Get in the Robot

This week’s channel recommendation is Company Man.

https://www.youtube.com/@companyman114

Company Man is a channel dedicated to exploring the businesses and markets that have since become household names in the U.S. and abroad. Restaurant chains, pizzerias, candy companies, grocers, and numerous others. Often in my writing, I’ll make obscure references to famous products or companies and whatnot and I like that Company Man offers a lot of insight on the history and success or sometimes failures of many of the brands we grew up with or heard about. It may not sound as ecstatic or exciting, but I think it’s interesting to explore these different brands.

What I Like About History

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History – it’s the story of us. – The Cynical Historian

Fitting that I started this with a quote from a YouTube recommendation I gave out last week. So I did have this planned for yesterday, but postponed it due to dental work, and as of writing this post-oral surgical care by way of a saltwater rinse and ice.

Feeling better now than I did last night, I’d like to get to a topic I’ve come to love: history. I didn’t really come to appreciate the subject until high school and most of it came down to a succession of teachers who otherwise did their jobs well, but failed to make it appealing to me. I liken it to one of the many memes to have come from the Megamind movie: the difference between a villain and a supervillain is in the presentation.

Credit: LindeRock, DeviantArt

You know the saying a great salesman can sell ice to a snowman? Or any of the other ones along those lines? I like to think that’s applicable to teaching. A good teacher can make the worst student give a damn about math and science and watch them pass with flying colors. And as previously stated, a conga line of boring and ineffective teachers failed to get me to care. Then when I was in the 10th grade, I had a teacher who was beloved by everyone in his class. He counted as one of the few who could bring entertainment to an otherwise dull subject.

This was about 9 to 10 years ago during the 2013-14 school year, so my memory of everything I learned in school from that time is naturally hazy. But there were a few standout lessons from that class. Being a global history class, the world wars did show up, but like in real life, the Second World War in history class kicked it up a notch. Stop me if this sounds familiar, but when it came to the D-Day and Normandy landings, did your teacher ever show you this scene from Saving Private Ryan?

Channel: MovieClip

One of the most iconic and effective scenes in cinematic history, if it’s realistic enough to trigger PTSD in even the youngest veterans in 1998, it’s realistic enough for a high school history lesson. Funny enough, I believe high school was the second time in all my schooling that I’d seen that scene; the first time being in middle school in the 7th grade.

Another lesson I recall from 10th grade was the life of Nelson Mandela. A South African lawyer and politician, standing against apartheid, getting jailed for life only to be released by President F. W. de Klerk in 1990 and becoming the first black president of South Africa after successful implementation of free and fair elections in 1994, dying at the age of 95.

He also has his name on a widespread false memory phenomenon. Doing some quick research on the Mandela effect by the way, it might have been a crossing of the wires between the numerous “Free Mandela” campaign slogans and his hospitalization while incarcerated, but I don’t think there’s a definitive answer for why it was so widespread until his death.

Still, I and others from that class remember him doing an excellent job and while not straight A’s, I remember doing well enough to advance to the next class. Slightly curious now what was given out in the AP classes. Since leaving high school though, I’ve gradually been getting more and more of my history lessons from YouTube of all places, most notably, Extra Credits and their series, Extra History.

https://www.youtube.com/@extrahistory

I know there’s probably a handful of reasons for why many U.S. history lessons gloss over or outright omit select historical eras like timing or the credits of the teacher/professor, but the deficit of some meaningful history lessons is definitely felt when there’s an entire smorgasbord of history and history adjacent channels on YouTube alone and it’s not even the History Channel anymore.

In the case of Extra History, I remember first watching their debut history topic on the Punic Wars and when I was in college for the Spring 2017 semester, the Seminal Tragedy series helped me write up a report on World War I. My choice for that topic was because of the 100th anniversary of U.S. entry into World War I coming up that year. Interestingly, I did this for an English course, not a History one. It was an exercise in reading and writing comprehension, and I believe I got a decent grade for that.

As for my history journey, again as a subscriber to Extra Credits, now Extra History which was split off from the latter, there was a time in YouTube history where different creators would collaborate on different projects, often two different versions of the same subject on their respective channels. These days, especially in the HistoryTube sphere, they’ve expanded to include multiple history YouTubers covering aspects of the same or similar topics, like Revolutions, the YouTuber’s home state or country, or for special occasions, Holocaust Remembrance.

In one such collaboration, the E.C. crew collaborated with Cody Franklin of AlternateHistoryHub. Right as they wrapped up their series on the Articles of Confederation, Cody barged in at the end to propose a scenario where the U.S. kept the Articles of Confederation on the books.

Channel: AlternateHistoryHub

Following that, this branched out into the discovery of multiple different YouTubers who cover history occasionally or make it their specialty. M. Laser, Oversimplified, The Cynical Historian, Knowing Better, Overly Sarcastic Productions and others. I know that earlier I made it sound like an indictment on the school system that numerous topics in history aren’t covered very well, if at all, but I’ve done the research on why this would be the case and I can see the other side of this debate.

In the U.S., I’ve heard that most schooling is meant to be generalized in the hope that the student will eventually find something that’ll click with them in the formative years. Then again, when I was in school, college and university was looked on and admired with the same praise saved for a famous statue. On the one hand, it may increase the chances of someone becoming passionate enough to make a subject their entire life (or in the worst case scenario, their personality), but it’s not a 100% guarantee. People don’t work that way.

But whatever, these things do happen sooner or later, and as I’ve written about in October, one of my passions became writing and literature, such was the case of both this blog and another one from two years ago. Getting back to history, I do owe gratitude to my high school history teachers for inspiring my deep dive into history as well as the several dozen or so history YouTubers picking up the slack, even when the YouTube algorithm refuses to acknowledge their contributions to the subject. Some of these channels, I’ve recommended before but I do so again for some subjects in which I can say the channel in question is a specialist.

For my take, I often use history in the plots of my novels, whether as a centerpiece for a character or an event that would be in the back of a character’s mind. Other times, I come across a reference to an event in other media or look up the event that inspired X to read up on whether the reference is true for the former or if creative liberties are being taken for the latter, such as the case with the manga, The Elusive Samurai.

Having said that though, I seriously doubt I could ever become a seasoned historian. The research and groundwork of it all doesn’t seem all that appealing or even particularly challenging. Maybe this is me writing from the mindset of a student and there’s a historian reading this who’ll shed some light on the process of writing a dissertation or getting certified to teach history especially on a given subject, but I think I’m satisfied with just tracing the sources back on Wikipedia or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

For this week, I’m recommending the channel TLDR News and its subsidiaries.

https://www.youtube.com/@TLDRnews

TLDR News is described as a network of short form news content channels with the intended aim of taking the world’s headlines and boiling them down into a digestible, easy to understand, video format. Each of the channels is specialized to a region. Since their British, TLDR News is centered on British news cycles concerning politics, economics, and society. The EU variant covers issues facing Europe, the US for the United States, Global for the rest of the world, Daily runs down the top headlines of the day with a segment saved at the end for good news and uplifting stories and finally, this year, they’ve done a relaunch of their business channel covering corporate and business news. The link to their main UK channel is above and from there you can find their other channels as well as their social media links in the about sections of their YouTube channels.

Also, if you’re already subscribed to it, you can find them on the streaming service Nebula.

GTA VI Launch Trailer Arrives Early

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A really long time coming

Citizens of the internet will know that fake trailers make the rounds several years or so after a popular franchise entry is on the market. I recall looking at fake videos of what GTA V would look like shortly after announcement in the middle of 2012. Me and my friends were hyped for the latter half of that year and 2013 waiting for the game to come out and when it did, in a nutshell it broke records back to back.

A few weeks after initial release, GTA Online debuted and despite an initial hiccup for those who were there (I was one of them), Online alone probably counted for lifetime revenue for the game. The most expensive piece of media in history made back all of its money and then some. If Rockstar was feeling philanthropic, every employee could probably retire and have enough savings for their descendants.

Over the years, critics have popped up questioning Rockstar’s design philosophy and direction. GTA V was said to have a DLC that was functionally stolen by GTA Online, which has enough DLC on its own to be released as a standalone semi-RPG (an idea that Rockstar could capitalize on if done more honestly), and even after the release of the phenomenally made, if overdone Red Dead Redemption 2, players often defaulted to GTA. Answering to the money (read: gold) found in the criminal funhouse that GTA Online was and still is, Red Dead Online suffered as a result and some haven’t forgiven Rockstar for it.

Nevertheless, Rockstar’s reputation as a more patient company has paid off. Gone are the days where they were a small team of British programmers asset flipping successful titles with only a year in difference. Projects have gotten bigger and bigger since at least 2007 coming to fruition with the following year’s GTA IV.

I think I have a theory on why the games have taken a more contemporary approach as opposed to the older unnumbered titles like Vice City or Liberty City Stories, and that theory starts with “it’s easier to capture what is than thumb through records looking at what was.” Maybe there’ll come a day when I elaborate further, but today we’re talking about a very long, very awaited installment in the GTA franchise.

On December 1, Rockstar announced the trailer would release on December 5, at 9:00 AM but the full trailer was leaked 15 hours ahead of schedule, racking up a record breaking view-count in minutes.

Channel: Rockstar Games

The internet has been demanding a follow-up to GTA V for a number of reasons, the most popular of them being criticism over the gluttonous mass that is GTA Online. I can’t say with certainty if these are the same people who default to GTA Online, but if there is some of that overlap, then it’s true what they say about a view from a glasshouse.

So following up on GTAs IV and V, GTA VI is yet another entry into the contemporary setting of modern-day Miami/South Florida. After looking myself, commenters who are from or have been to Florida have applauded the downright authentic portrayal of life as a Florida man or woman. Exploration of the Everglades and Keys, run ins with alligators, regular folks putting bizarre twists on normal activities and other easter eggs to the unpredictable nature of Florida man. Here’s a fun game you can play: google your birthday and put Florida man in and see what comes up.

Unlike the portrayal of South Florida from Vice City, where it takes home the allegations of a copy of 1983’s Scarface with a few references to Miami Vice, this time the game incorporates pretty much any given report on life in Florida. Much of the in-game footage captured seems to be recorded on Rockstar’s as of yet released parody of TikTok. Allow me to repeat a similar soundbite when I say that the graphics have never looked so amazing. YongYea recorded a video on this the previous night speaking similarly about the graphics and there’s no hyperbole when I say that minor things like hair and clothing affected by the wind, or facial rendering right down to the muscles, or even the local wildlife all come alive in just the trailer.

As for the plot, I’m personally saving my viewing eyes for later trailers to follow in 2024 and ’25, but from what we’ve heard and seen, it’s heavily inspired by the 1930s outlaw pairing of Bonnie and Clyde.

Also a first for GTA is a female protagonist. Rather than make your own in Online (as I have), the female lead is named Lucia and the male lead is named Jason. Plot details are obviously scarce and I intend to keep myself surprised until release even though select details have leaked yonks ago. From what I can gather from the trailer, it begins not dissimilar from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean.

Think about it: young Florida woman begins in the prison system; Lucia herself most likely dodging worse versions of what Jolyne was forced to share a detention complex with during her own incarceration; a boyfriend with an equally sketchy history… and again without anymore information from that, I can’t say where else the story goes, but it clearly doesn’t take place in a prison, though the prison is likely to play a role in the story in some capacity. By the way, the initial comparisons weren’t lost on the JoJo community.

Credit: u/klydex210, r/ShitPostCrusaders

I honestly thought, as did others, that the release window would be, say, Q4 2024, but the trailer ends with a vague 2025 release window. As of writing this, in-depth analyses of the trailer are releasing on YouTube and more will follow with more trailers in 2024. All that time cooking up a five-course meal, so many people have been waiting for the main dish and it looks like whatever trailers are releasing next year and after until release will hold us all over as appetizers. I’m excited, but all throughout this post, I’ve been keeping a level and realistic outlook on this. As exciting as this reveal trailer was, I’ve learned from past mistakes and disappointments to wait for as much information to be made available. Remember Kratos’s words:

Credit: u/Shaho99, r/GodofWar

Open your mind to the possibilities and all that. Now have some analysis videos to hold you over until the next trailer.

Channel: WatchMojo.com

You’ll have to watch this one on YouTube itself.

Channel: TheProfessional
Channel: YongYea

The Wonders of Golden Kamuy

Tiberius1 Comment

A near-perfectly balanced dramady

As both a history buff and a weeb, I like to think that history can work well even in graphic novel form. I’d bring proof, but so many political cartoons and, as mentioned before, graphic novels, have come out that the proof is everywhere you look. Here’s one of my favorite examples:

For the topic of this post (and something more lighthearted), I bring to you the manga series Golden Kamuy.

Created by Satoru Noda, Golden Kamuy is about a former Imperial Japanese soldier and Russo-Japanese war veteran named Saichi Sugimoto. After his military contract expires, Sugimoto hears from an ex-convict about a complicated story involving a legendary convict who hid a large stash of gold from the Ainu people of northern Japan, Hokkaido, and the Kuril Islands. When he was caught, he tattooed a map onto nearly 40 other convicts, each of whom is a specialist in his own right. After this, the prisoners were set to be relocated to another prison in the north of Japan, but the guards were ambushed and the convicts went into hiding. Sugimoto doesn’t buy into the story at first, but when the ex-con reveals that he’s one of the dozens tattooed by the legendary convict, he reveals the tattooist as “Noppera-bo.”

So far, we’ve got some interesting and familiar hooks, don’t we? A retired soldier searching for treasure, interactions with indigenous people groups, a changing political landscape, and slight spoilers for later, competing groups with similar interests. Almost sounds like a western… A story that fantastical would normally disappear into legend until you meet undeniable proof of its existence, but before we delve deeper into that, I want to discuss the historical background on which the manga is based.

Very briefly oversimplifying, Russo-Japanese relations in the early 20th century, the Russian and Japanese empires, both had conflicting interests in East Asia: for Russia, they wanted warm water ports and more land for the Trans-Siberian railway, and for Japan, they wanted to maintain political influence over East Asia, particularly Korea–but so did Russia. War broke out due to these conflicts and Russia maintaining a military presence in Manchuria when the original promise was for them to demobilize.

By 1905, the Theodore Roosevelt administration brokered a peace between the two powers that saw Japan as the victor, gaining the southern half of Sakhalin Island, political influence on the Korean peninsula, while Russia had to abandon its railway plans and its warm water port in Asia, the former of these later becoming Japan’s Southern Manchuria Railway which connected to that warm water port of Port Arthur.

Golden Kamuy is set in the aftermath of this. The fighting is long done away with, but the outside influences do have an impact on the characters. Keep in mind that decades before Japan went to blows with Russia, it was busy organizing itself into a modern country, and its first step was the reorganization of domestic territory into the modern day prefectures, all the while convincing the last of the samurai and feudal lords to surrender their holdings. Many did, but there were still a few holdouts, the most famous of them was the Vice Commander of the Shinsengumi, a hastily organized group of swordsmen with samurai sponsorship: Hijikata Toshizo.

This was all done during the Meiji Restoration of the 1860s. Although Golden Kamuy is decades after that, select characters with strong memories of the pre-Meiji days do still hang around. It’s also worth keeping in mind that the manga takes several liberties with history and some characters’ roles in specific events. Since I bring him up, Hijikata does appear in the manga, and is a part of a few flashback panels, but in the manga he appears as an old man and political prisoner since the Shinsengumi opposed the Meiji government. In real life, Hijikata Toshizo was shot dead on horseback while commanding troops in a major theatre of the Boshin War.

For the rest of the population of Japan, the Japanese government and media these days tend to promote an image of a homogenous populace, but reality is far different than what you’d believe. I briefly brought them up earlier, but the Ainu people are another central piece to the manga. The prisoner called “Noppera-bo” or “No Face” was the one who buried their gold in a hidden location and it takes the help of numerous Ainu peoples to help locate it. The Ainu people typically includes the indigenous groups found often in northern Japan and Hokkaido as mentioned before, but there are similar related groups elsewhere, on Sakhalin and in Russian Manchuria. These include but are not limited to the Uilta/Oroks, the Nivkh, the Nanai, and many more. One of these characters whom Sugimoto meets in Golden Kamuy is a little girl named Asirpa.

Asirpa serves as the audience’s window to an ethnic group that Japan has at best ignored and at worst disrespected. In history, the Yamato people of Japan gradually fought with them even into the Tokugawa Shogunate where they were forcefully relocated to Tohoku and Hokkaido. During the Meiji government in 1899, non-Japanese who were subjects of Japan (including the then-recently added Taiwan and soon to be added Korea) were forced to adopt Japanese names and use those publicly. True to this, even Asirpa has a Japanese name that would have to be used on official documents, as explained in her associated wiki page.

Nevertheless, love and appreciation for Ainu culture is evident and expressed in the Ainu characters, especially Asirpa when she explains language, naming customs, rituals, folk beliefs and several others. The name given to that convict who tattooed the map onto his fellow prisoners, Noppera-bo, is a reference to a Japanese spirit or “yokai.” The yokai come in a wide range of forms and depending on the legend, some are harmless or vicious. The Noppera-bo is described as a harmless yokai that takes the form of a human, only they have no face. Sorta like this:

Though as explained before, it normally takes the shape of a faceless human.

Regarding Ainu customs, the most famous aspect of the series among fans is the cuisine. It’s a common joke to refer to the series as a cooking show, which isn’t exactly inaccurate. Playing dodge bullet with loads of contentious groups is a key point of the series, but when there’s enough Arisaka rifle rounds flying for one scene, the next one transitions to Noda’s briefest possible tutorial on Ainu cooking, like so.

Channel: Crunchyroll Collection

It may seem insignificant plot-wise considering where the story takes our main leads, but funny enough, there’s a healthy hosting of food scenes throughout the series. Noda explained that much of his experience comes from growing up in Hokkaido as an ethnic Japanese. The conceptualization and characterization of the Ainu in particular comes both from his own experiences, which he admitted were limited and from research, which there’s a lot of.

The characters as a whole are all varied more so in personality than in ethnic group, though there’s a couple of the latter such as the Matagi, or traditional winter hunters also in Tohoku, or even people with varied accents and dialects, notably Satsuma dialect.

Although Japan also promotes a singular dialect of Standard Japanese, there’s a variety of accents in the archipelago. Like the U.S. or U.K., there’s often different words for many of the same thing like soda, pop, or coke in many U.S. regions or what lunch in dinner are called in different parts of the U.K.

Personality wise, the characters all differ in what they want the Ainu gold for. Sugimoto made a promise with a wartime and childhood friend that he’d look after his wife who moved to the United States who was at risk of going blind. A mutinous faction of soldiers, led by 1st Lieutenant Tokushiro Tsurumi, a vengeful intelligence officer, wants the gold to fund a separatist state in Hokkaido to spite the Meiji government. Asirpa was influenced by her father and another Ainu character to also use the gold to separate the Ainu from Japan but for different reasons, and some characters never reveal the truth of their intentions with the gold.

For the most part, the characters are in some way based on real life characters from history. Some are obvious like Hijikata Toshizo living for another 40 years in this universe, and others require some more research to determine their inspirations. My favorite has to be the character Yoshitake Shiraishi who was based on the similarly named prisoner and escape artist, Yoshie Shiratori. Like his inspiration, Shiraishi is described as a master escape artist, finding creative and innovative ways to get out of a jam from contorting his joints to making false keys and using lockpicks. You’d probably need a rotating body of prison guards to keep him in place.

Between Shiraishi and Tsurumi, these characters are both unique and not unique. Their quirks make them stand out from regular background characters, but there’s a bunch of characters who match that description anyone. Sugimoto, for example, gained fame during the war as the Immortal Sugimoto and has thus carried this nomme de guerre in the civilian world. Tsurumi and select soldiers within his unit — 27th Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division — are all quirky as well. One might describe it as a circus of sorts. And this is a similar case concerning the prisoners who carry the map on their bodies.

Just about everyone is a specialist in some singular skill or trade. This may make them one-trick ponies by themselves, but there’s a lot of moments where they get to shine independently or in mixed company. Asirpa, for one, may initially seem like a monolithic standard-bearer for the Ainu, especially since she’s introduced with an old and negative stereotype of indigenous people groups from westerns, but both her and the rest of the Ainu presented don’t seem to adhere fully to these misconceptions.

Similar to the Amerindians in the Americas, the Ainu and other people groups in North Asia would’ve spent their lives directly or indirectly interacting with non-indigenous folks, fighting, trading, working, befriending them among other things. They would’ve been exposed to foreign customs and technology sooner or later, hence why during the Manifest Destiny era of the U.S., bands and tribes of American Indians would have fought back with the same rifles that were being used on them. Off the battlefield, cooking and craftsmanship have also caught up with the times, so old depictions of indigenous folk as backwards and removed are just that: they’re old and quite inaccurate.

My introduction to the series came from some old Funimation ads in 2018. At the same time as my anime speedrun during college, bouncing between Crunchyroll, Funimation, and the now defunct VRV, the ads for then-recently adapted Golden Kamuy were showing and initially, I wasn’t that interested. Most people weren’t either. No matter how high the marks, the average viewer would’ve been looking for “time well spent.” This conflicts with the overall negative opinion of CG in anime and with most of the ads depicting Sugimoto’s battle with a CGI bear, prospective audiences were initially turned off.

Then I started watching in 2019 and continued to do so during the pandemic. My opinions on CG have been somewhat influenced by those expressed online, but in all honesty, if it looks good and it means the animators don’t have to crunch to get an episode out, then it can work well for an anime production, and I feel it does here. I honestly didn’t realize the bear was CG until a few frames in. Just goes to show how rare and at times apprehensive studios can be about integrating this technology into a production.

The manga concluded in April 2022, but the anime recently wrapped up it’s fourth season in June after taking a hiatus out of respect for a treasured cast member’s passing in November 2022. A fifth season is currently in development, though as of writing there’s no release date. This is ample time to go through the anime and then continue in the manga or start the manga and compare/contrast the anime. Whatever works best for you.

It’s a month divisible by 2, and the last of the year so as a final sendoff, December’s first YouTube recommendation gets to the heart of a topic I have in store for next week: Cynical Historian.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN5mhhJYPcNUKBMZkR5Nfzg

The Cynical Historian is a YouTube channel that covers the history of the American Southwest primarily, and other topics in history secondarily. Started in March 2013, by former Army cavalry scout and noted historian Joseph Hall-Patton, the Cynical Historian has himself produced lessons and dissertations on his specialty in the American Southwest, namely violence and conflict, sometimes touching on the historicity of the local American Indian groups and figures active during the era. He runs a tight ship on his YouTube channel and has little tolerance for bigotry, hatred, or conspiracy theories of any kind.

One series he does that I recommend above all else is his Based on a True Story series that compares and contrasts historical moments and their silver screen depictions. Since the most recent video he did was in the lead up to the theatrical release of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon film, I suspect that a Based on a True Story video on the little corporal is somewhere in the pipeline, but without clairvoyance, I can’t say more. Be sure to check him out when you find the time.

Before I sign off proper, I had another video lined up emphasizing the surprising significance of food in Golden Kamuy, but couldn’t put it anywhere above, so I’ll link it down here.

Channel: BOOFIRE191