Rundown (2/17-2/23) Tax Time Makes You Go Crazy!
So this past week I began another engagement with a CPA, wherein I aid him in various tax related activities while juggling my office job, grad school, personal time, and time spent making content for this quaint little site. It is a side job that pays well, and is rather pertinent to my interests as an accounting major, but it also represents yet another activity that impedes my ability to go through games or work on my own projects. It’s not ideal, and this week is a particularly hectic, since I am going into my part-time job today, on a Sunday, when the office is closed, because somebody thought it would be a nice treat if I went home early on Monday. I swear, I was mentally referencing last week’s header image for the past 5 days, stewing over how much I wish I had done everything sooner rather than later. Garf!
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Rundown (2/10-2/16) Flowchart Nightmares Ahead 2: You Can (Not) Prepare
Last Friday the Student Transfer development team announced that Version 4 will be coming before the end of February, boasting that this version will contain roughly twice the content as Version 3. A surprising bit of news that I find to be simultaneously exciting and intimidating to me, as I have taken on the duty of creating the flowcharts for sprawling choose-your-own adventure style visual novels about TG, body swapping, and more. I very much want to enjoy the game and take my time with it, but Version 3 took me a good week to get through, so I am a bit concerned about getting a flowchart ready in a timely manner, especially with work and grad school keeping me so busy. As such, I decided to do my homework in advance and download what I can off of the public Student Transfer GitHub in order to get cracking on a rough flowchart for V4 at the risk of spoiling myself. Only to discover that with the way this game is developed, I would basically need to consolidate the builds available myself and… yeah, that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.
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Rundown (1/06-1/12) Destiny is Destiny and Destiny is Free!
While I have admittedly given the western AAA industry the cold shoulder of indifference and apathy this past generation, I have been, obviously, keeping an eye on it and one of the more interesting titles to come out of the industry this generation was Destiny. A highly anticipated title that was met with a middling critical reception before strong arming the idea of live services into the popular consciousness and also popularizing the numbers driven “Looter Shooter” genre. Following that, it’s development and expansion was just plain old bizarre with voice actors being replaced, the story being fragmented as all heck, a bunch of dirtbag monetization tactics that were introduced in its sequel, quality going up and down sporadically, and dozens of millions of units being sold, because of course they were.
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Rundown (12/30-1/05) Editing Woes
As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently editing my latest novel, and with the rate things are going, it is definitely coming out sometime this month. The novel itself is primarily a summary of stories I wrote back when I was a teenager, recontextualized around a greater narrative I had loose plans for… about 5 years ago. I consider the material to be very personal, but also very… messy, as my writing skills have developed a lot over the years, and the imperfections with the narrative construction in these stories are obvious to me. This makes reading these stories difficult for me, let alone retelling them in a clear and concise manner, and ensuing that through editing is a more time consuming process than what I would like. But it is almost over, and within a few weeks I will be able to begin production on the next novel. Because the train of creativity is powered by thousand year atomic batteries and if it stops, it will blow into bits!
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Rundown (6/12) E3 2018: Exhaustion and Exertion
Once more, the bulk of E3 news has been unveiled, and the press conferences have all come to a close. Meaning I am left both exhausted and exerted, while still holding a feeling of immense excitement in my heart of hearts after the blitz of news that occurred over the past few days. I would call it a bittersweet feeling, but after doing this for 6 years now, I know that is not the case. It’s a sweet feeling.
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Rundown (12/17-1/06) I’m Back and I’m Tired!
Hello everybody. While I initially said that I was not going to start up the whole Nigmabox train until mid-January, I have been feeling a lot better post-surgery than I expected, and have been somewhat productive when it comes to playing games, so I figured that I’ll resume my usual review and rundown schedule. I was actually going to start things up sooner, but, well, I could not find enough noteworthy new stories to do a full Rundown, hence why I’m bundling together three weeks of news here.
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