*endless coughing*
Took a sick day today after feeling ill all weak. Pretty sure it's just a cold but it's still nasty. A lot of chest congestion and tiredness mainly.
Kind of a bummer to be sick on my birthday (Thursday) but eh, 'tis the season I suppose. I was so tired I just made a box cake to bring in to the office (but with homemade frosting! I got some raspberry extract with my groceries last week to try out a raspberry-flavored buttercream, which turned out pretty nice). People liked it though, all was devoured. My project team got me a card too, which was nice (and my mother decided to have some flowers sent to my office...lol. They're pretty though! Currently sitting on my dining room table).
Due to being sick, I'm not up to much this week...still coding videos at work. I'm kind of lolling actually; we're at the training stage of coding (where you code separately and then discuss as a group in order to refine the coding manual and get reliability), and from the start I had suggested to the project co-manager (she's in charge of all the coding and data analysis) that the current rules for one of the codes might end up being way too broad (essentially we would code ALL instances of a higher-level code as this, so it's like, what new information does this code give us at that point?). She was like, that could be an issue but let's leave it for now. So the actual project manager and also someone from another project were called in to help out with some of the more challenging segments that we were unsure on, and...they made the EXACT SAME COMMENT. So now the coding manual has been updated. I feel somewhat vidicated, haha. It's kind of confidence-boosting though, because I'm often the odd one out when coding (and the other two coding team members tend not to want to actually discuss the codes much but rather just go with whatever most of us think, which I find a little counterproductive tbh), so it's nice to know I'm not just crazy here lol. Although, in fairness, I also am the only person on the coding team with prior coding experience and/or knowledge of the subject matter.
I'm a little disappointed/frustrated by one member of the coding team; she joined a couple months ago and we worked together on the previous round of coding. (for reference, this type of coding tends to have a 'funnel' approach where you code increasingly detailed things in layers. So first we coded general coach behaviors, now we're specifically coding certain types of verbalizations, etc.) At that time, she seemed really unsure and her coding wasn't great, but I figured that was because she had never done coding before (which kind of raises the question of why the project manager hired someone with no experience to the role, but idek...I recall at the time that she kept complaining that it was too hard to hire anyone because she had no time for interviews. I'm pretty sure the actual person she hired is a cousin of hers who had been looking for a full-time job). But she just didn't seem to improve that much as we went on (making the same errors over and over again, for example), and she just seemed very hesitant. That was kind of frustrating when we were training, because the idea is that everyone codes the video and then you discuss spots where you disagreed as a group. So it's most effective if everyone has some specific reasoning for their codes, can explain it, and then the group can discuss what makes sense. That way the group can refine the codes and increase their knowledge. But she would be like, 'I don't know, it just kind of seemed like that' or say she didn't feel strongly about it. So then it's like, well, if you can't explain WHY you coded it that way, it's hard for me to really be persuaded that my own code is wrong, you know? Without some kind of reasoning, how can I understand how you're thinking about the code? You need to be able to ultimately agree on the codes (otherwise you will never achieve reliability), but if you're not willing to debate it a bit first, then you don't really improve the coding scheme.
So now it's the second round of coding, and I feel like she's just still so vague about it all. And she's said a few times to the co-manager that it's hard because none of the coders know about baseball so there's so much we can't necessarily grasp. Which, first of all, speak for yourself. I have minimal knowledge of baseball, but just from watching enough of these games and also basic logic, I feel most of the baseball-specific terms coaches use can be understand well enough to code them. The stuff we're coding is not sport-specific. Only a handful of times has there been any problem, imo, with coding a segment due to technical terms being unclear. Plus I'm like, if the coach uses a term you don't understand why not try googling it? We watch these videos on computer, the internet browser is right there. I just get the impression that she's in over her head a bit with the coding and isn't sure why, and maybe she feels a little intimidated because she feels like she doesn't know anything about sports. But we aren't coding technical things, we're coding stuff related to general psychology concepts (which is why I know about them even though I have no sports knowledge).
I was also kind of surprised to hear the other coder say she'll end up listening to segments over and over while reviewing the codebook. I pretty much read the codebook beforehand, then listened to each segment and just coded it. Sometimes with more ambiguous segments I'll listen to it a few times, but I really think that the more you agonize over each one the more you end up confusing yourself and talking yourself into unfitting codes. Once you've understood the coding scheme and the concepts being coded, your initial impressions will usually be pretty accurate (observe that, for example, my codes generally agreed with our two 'expert raters', the project manager and the person from the other project). This is particularly true here because we're meant to be coding only clear examples, and leaving anything that's too ambiguous as other. If you have to argue yourself into using the code, it is probably too ambiguous.
Of course I also think the existing coding scheme is not that great (I coded more based off my background knowledge of the concepts/constructs we're coding for), so that could be part of the issue. Neither of the other coders has done any work in this subject area before so they may not be familiar with what these constructs are. It's still kind of frustrating though. At some point, having a coder who has no confidence in their own codes is just not helpful.
Other than that, I'm still working on That One Analysis, and planning for the final report for the other project. I'm thinking at this point that we'll have to just not use the cases with multiple timepoints within year, because there aren't very many of them and no matter what we do with the valid missing data, the problems we would cause for the analysis would not be worth it when there's so few cases that it lets us keep. It would just overcomplicate the model so much. It's going to depend on which specific cases are in the final analytic sample, though...and how many we lose to data cleaning...given the high levels of insufficient effort responding (basically, people filling in the questions without really reading them/paying attention just because they want the gift card reward) I think we really need to just kick out all the cases with zero variance on the relevant measures. We may lose some legitimate cases (a person could plausibly have the same response to each item for some of the scales), but keeping them in will just add so much noise to the data and destroy the variance. But, that will hurt our sample size too...it's going to be a tricky analysis. It should be pretty fun to play around with once the data is all entered, though. I love stuff like this, haha.
No word back from the clients for the project we're hoping to start yet...their organization seems to have a ton of red tape and beauracracy though, so it's not too surprising. Sigh, I need to take another look at the poster draft soon, and see if project manager bothered editing it at all. I'm not willing to make a fuss over this, because it would cause more trouble than it's worth, but it's super bullshit if she's the first author on this while doing no work. I think I would be marginally less enraged over it if she had just ignored it rather than have me do all the work and then ask me to make additional changes. She's been too busy job-hunting to do much with it though; she's done a few informational interviews this week. I know this because we share an office and she does them during work. Which is just like...waste your work hours if you want, but you could at least not disturb my work as well by having a loud phonecall in my office. I understand when it's work-related--it's a small office--but repeated personal phonecalls are just rude. Particularly since the office conference room is usually empty during the day and is a perfectly good place to make a phonecall (but, I suppose then there'd be the risk that the lab director or someone else would be annoyed she's doing this during work hours).
Aside from work, I finally finished all three routes in Fire Emblem Fates! So I shall post a review of it soon. I'm still playing the DLC, it's mostly pretty difficult. Overall I really loved this game, but I'm a bit baffled by some of the writing choices. My main complaint with Awakening was that the characters and overal plot concepts were awesome, but the actual execution had a lot of dumb elements, but here I'm more like...the story is fine, it's just weirdly under-explained. Like key events will be briefly glossed over, and I'm like, wow, that seems like it would be really interesting if only the game would actually tell me about it. The gameplay is amazing though and the music is a particular highlight. As expected of FE!
I'm getting psyched for Pokemon Sun/Moon...I'm torn about which to get, normally I would go for Moon because I love moon imagery but the legendary for Sun is cuter (it's like...a metal lion-dog thing? With psychic powers? It's so dumb, I love it). The Moon legendary is like...a bat? Or something? It's kind of weird-looking. Probably I'll get Sun just for the lion-dog.
I'm also bewildered by the announcement for the Nintendo Switch...like, it seems super cool and innovative, but it's SO innovative that I'm also like, ??? It seems kind of big to carry around as a handheld. I hope this doesn't mean they're giving up on actual handheld games, I love handheld gaming and no other gaming company really focuses on it at all. Sony tried it with the Playstation Vita and all, but it never got that popular iirc. Handheld gaming is really more my thing than console gaming (indeed, I've had the current generation of handhelds ever since the Gameboy Pocket, yet I haven't had a current-generation console since the N64 when I was a kid). And I really think that even if this console has a portable element, there's a big difference with games designed specific for portable devices! Console gaming lends itself to a different style of gameplay, different controls, etc. But handheld gaming has been such a major source of Nintendo's profits iirc that I can't see them dropping it...
BUT it also turns out the Switch will NOT be backwards compatible! So now I'm like, ahhhh, what doooo. The Wii U honestly looks really cool, but I never got one because they were so expensive, and there weren't a ton of games I wanted to play (a limited library was one of the Wii U's big problems). And now that a new system is coming out, it's not like there will be more Wii U games made. If the new system was backwards compatible that would be fine, but...who the heck makes their new console NOT backwards compatible? I mean I do realize that the Wii U had the gamepad and stuff that probably just wouldn't work with the Switch or something, but still, a bummer. And they seem to have gone back to cartridges rather than disks, which is a surprising move! So overall this looks like a really different system, which is exciting, but I dunno how well it will all work. Nintendo has always been really innovative imo though, so it's exciting to see. It looks like they're aiming to fix the problem with the game library from the Wii U as well and have some solid titles lined up already.
I may actually buy a Switch once enough games are out...this would be my first purchase of a new (rather than used and last-gen) console in...well, ever, since my parents bought us the N64 when we were kids. It'll depend on what games come out for it though. In general there tend to be a lot more handheld games that I like than console games, which is why I'm more into handhelds.
That reminds me of a game I'd love to see made...a Pokemon version of Mario Party. I always liked the minigames in Pokemon Stadium as a kid, and there's hundreds of Pokemon so you'd think they could make plenty of minigames for a party game. It would be sooooo cute. I'd also be in favor of a modern version of Pokemon Snap (not a remake, just a game with a similar concept), because that was such a cool game. Although, it seems that Sun/Moon will have some kind of picture-taking minigame, so maybe that's a bit of a Pokemon Snap throwback.
As a side note, I was just thinking recently that Nintendo still makes pretty durable hardware...I've had my 3DS for like, nine years at least I think, and it still works great. I did have to get the charging port repaired at one point, but that was due to me accidentally bending the connector inside, not a fault in the system itself. And I carry my 3DS with me everywhere. I'm amazed it's stood up to wear and tear so well.
I'm still trying to decide what to write for NaNo...last year I wrote Pokemon Conquest fanfic for every NaNo event lol (I have over 200k words of it now...a valuable use of my time, to be sure...). I'm considering maybe doing something with my vague 'non-fanfic version of ReEragon' idea. It occurred to me ages ago that at this point, ReEragon is so AU that most of it has nothing to do with the actual Inheritance Cycle and is sliding toward original fic anyway. Not sure how well a lot of it would translate though. My original thought was, what about a fantasy novel with female characters and stereotypically 'girly' monsters like unicorns instead of dragons? But I love dragons so much that not using dragons would be kind of disappointing lol.
The vague overall concept is that the setting is postapoc, but in a distant enough future that it's basically a fantasy setting with implications of post-apoc rather than an actual post-apoc (so like, a thousand years ago the world ended, but that was ages ago and nobody has much knowledge about it nowadays). Long ago (hundred years? or something like that), the evil king character stole the sun, and the rebel forces want to retrieve it, because the sun is kind of important. My idea was to have a more 'mythical' or fantastic setting, because the Inheritance Cycle is so weirdly un-fantastic at times. So something more mythical and not really bothering with 'rational' explanations of magic etc. to keep a more mystical, magical feel. The evil king stealing the sun has perhaps a Last Unicorn sort of feel, with the king not being overtly malicious or evil but more distant and obliviously self-absorbed. Like he is a guy who has lost his mind and stole the sun. Literally just stole it. It's been gone for a hundred years. The world is lit only as much as the king allows, and is largely dim and shadowy. And there's an older, long-destroyed kingdom (that was probably destroyed in the postapoc past) where the land is now completely blighted (like nuclear winter-ish I guess?). The main character is a girl whose family are metalworkers who make things out of scrap metal retrieved from the wasteland of the destroyed kingdom (since metal recovered from the distant past, before the world ended, is better than what anyone can currently make. They've lost the knowledge of how to create it, but they can reforge it into new stuff). I'm thinking maybe it would have a more Final Fantasy-style magical steampunk feel, with cities and industry run via magic (lol it's FF7 mako I guess?), but I dunno whether I'd prefer that or a more classic style high fantasy. I'm thinking no traditional fantasy races (elves, dwarves, etc.) though. Particularly if I go with the more steampunk-ish setting, since elves have a more high fantasy feel to me (I realize people have used them in all sorts of settings/genres, but for me personally I don't feel like they'd fit).
I started thinking about it in part because I've always loved fantasy as a genre, but as a kid almost all the fantasy books I read focused on dudes. The female characters generally were supporting cast and were kind of the stereotypical 'spunky female warrior' kind of thing. This is changing nowadays but when I was a kid it was so common that if a book had mostly female characters it was likely to focus on romance and other stereotypical 'girls' books' themes, which I wasn't interested in. I always wanted a book that had the same kinds of tropes and plots as a typical fantasy book, but just with women. Like a genderflipped Lord of the Rings or whatever. So I was like, you know, that kind of book could be cool to write. Sadly I tend to write mostly male characters because I write mostly fanfictions, and a lot of the games I play and stuff I read has a lot of male characters (well, I do read a lot of shounen manga and play mostly mainstream RPGs...). So I was like, well, if I wanted to convert ReEragon to original fiction, why not just gender flip it at the same time? The characters' genders weren't that important to the story to begin with. Although, the concept has slid somewhat far from the original 'convert ReEragon to original fic'. But in fairness, ReEragon still has enough stuff from the Inheritance Cycle that just taking it all out doesn't really make sense anyway.
It's not really developed enough to write it yet, though...I suspect it would turn into another unfinished NaNo novel where I had a broad plot concept and no details outlined, so the draft ended up as rambling internal monologues with no real content. This is a problem with much of my writing! Lol.
But yeah, some kind of weird steampunk fantasy postapoc fairtytale-ish mashup could be cool. I'm thinking that instead of elves, there's like, fairy-like beings that live in flying castles. They turn out to be kind of evil? The king is still kind of a dick though, stealing the sun is a classic dick move. Anyway instead of spirits there would be like, living shadows. So instead of spirits summoned by sorcerers, these can LITERALLY become someone's shadow. Hm, the more I think about it, the more this seems like just a weird mashup of several vague ideas for novels I had, plus Final Fantasy, plus Fire Emblem, plus Inheritance Cycle. Which...is very characteristic of me, actually.
But it's still undecided! I might just write more odds and ends of things...mainly Pokemon Conquest fanfics, due to my inexplicable obsession with it. I have actually gone and got myself ANOTHER two books on the Sengoku era out of the library. Sadly my university's library doesn't have that many relevant books; it's not a super large library or anything and they've got like, one section of shelves for books related to Japan, so of course there aren't many for a small, specific period of Japanese history. Most of the books are on more modern history anyway. There's like, four or five relevant to the Sengoku era. I guess it's not as popular among researchers? We really only have academic books. I could maybe get some on interlibrary loan though. Unfortunately academic libraries tend to be oddly poor if you want books that are more general intros to a topic, and instead overflow with books on very, very specific niches. Like one of the books I have is on the role of gift-giving and acquiring art objects in the culture of the Sengoku era. Which is certainly interesting, but is also VERY specific. Luckily they had a single, solitary book on the Japanese middle ages and how they developed into the eras leading up to the Sengoku era (so like, the Muromachi period and stuff). Unsurprisingly, it was a somewhat older book. The more recent a book is, the more specific it's likely to be in a university library...well, if you want to publish and get ahead in your career, you need to produce new/novel work. General overviews are more what you'll find in textbooks and/or books aimed at a general, not academic, audience. And there's not a huge amount of English-language work on the Japanese middle ages as far as I could tell (when I was searching for books on the Sengoku era, I found a lot of results for Japanese books, which I can't actually read). But for now I have two new books to read which will be fun!
Aside from that...there's not too much to say! I think maybe this year I'll try to actually post on the NaNo forums periodically. I was active on the forums my first few years, but I've become more of a lurker in general over time. Keeping up with forums just takes so much time lol, and also as I get older, I become more aware that my random thoughts on video games and stuff are not REALLY something the world urgently needs to know. Also social anxiety so yeah. But it might be good to try to be a bit more active! The NaNo forums are usually really friendly too. Haha, well, I guess first I need to decide what I'm writing...
And that's the story! Wow this post got hella long. Even though not that much really happened this week!
Kind of a bummer to be sick on my birthday (Thursday) but eh, 'tis the season I suppose. I was so tired I just made a box cake to bring in to the office (but with homemade frosting! I got some raspberry extract with my groceries last week to try out a raspberry-flavored buttercream, which turned out pretty nice). People liked it though, all was devoured. My project team got me a card too, which was nice (and my mother decided to have some flowers sent to my office...lol. They're pretty though! Currently sitting on my dining room table).
Due to being sick, I'm not up to much this week...still coding videos at work. I'm kind of lolling actually; we're at the training stage of coding (where you code separately and then discuss as a group in order to refine the coding manual and get reliability), and from the start I had suggested to the project co-manager (she's in charge of all the coding and data analysis) that the current rules for one of the codes might end up being way too broad (essentially we would code ALL instances of a higher-level code as this, so it's like, what new information does this code give us at that point?). She was like, that could be an issue but let's leave it for now. So the actual project manager and also someone from another project were called in to help out with some of the more challenging segments that we were unsure on, and...they made the EXACT SAME COMMENT. So now the coding manual has been updated. I feel somewhat vidicated, haha. It's kind of confidence-boosting though, because I'm often the odd one out when coding (and the other two coding team members tend not to want to actually discuss the codes much but rather just go with whatever most of us think, which I find a little counterproductive tbh), so it's nice to know I'm not just crazy here lol. Although, in fairness, I also am the only person on the coding team with prior coding experience and/or knowledge of the subject matter.
I'm a little disappointed/frustrated by one member of the coding team; she joined a couple months ago and we worked together on the previous round of coding. (for reference, this type of coding tends to have a 'funnel' approach where you code increasingly detailed things in layers. So first we coded general coach behaviors, now we're specifically coding certain types of verbalizations, etc.) At that time, she seemed really unsure and her coding wasn't great, but I figured that was because she had never done coding before (which kind of raises the question of why the project manager hired someone with no experience to the role, but idek...I recall at the time that she kept complaining that it was too hard to hire anyone because she had no time for interviews. I'm pretty sure the actual person she hired is a cousin of hers who had been looking for a full-time job). But she just didn't seem to improve that much as we went on (making the same errors over and over again, for example), and she just seemed very hesitant. That was kind of frustrating when we were training, because the idea is that everyone codes the video and then you discuss spots where you disagreed as a group. So it's most effective if everyone has some specific reasoning for their codes, can explain it, and then the group can discuss what makes sense. That way the group can refine the codes and increase their knowledge. But she would be like, 'I don't know, it just kind of seemed like that' or say she didn't feel strongly about it. So then it's like, well, if you can't explain WHY you coded it that way, it's hard for me to really be persuaded that my own code is wrong, you know? Without some kind of reasoning, how can I understand how you're thinking about the code? You need to be able to ultimately agree on the codes (otherwise you will never achieve reliability), but if you're not willing to debate it a bit first, then you don't really improve the coding scheme.
So now it's the second round of coding, and I feel like she's just still so vague about it all. And she's said a few times to the co-manager that it's hard because none of the coders know about baseball so there's so much we can't necessarily grasp. Which, first of all, speak for yourself. I have minimal knowledge of baseball, but just from watching enough of these games and also basic logic, I feel most of the baseball-specific terms coaches use can be understand well enough to code them. The stuff we're coding is not sport-specific. Only a handful of times has there been any problem, imo, with coding a segment due to technical terms being unclear. Plus I'm like, if the coach uses a term you don't understand why not try googling it? We watch these videos on computer, the internet browser is right there. I just get the impression that she's in over her head a bit with the coding and isn't sure why, and maybe she feels a little intimidated because she feels like she doesn't know anything about sports. But we aren't coding technical things, we're coding stuff related to general psychology concepts (which is why I know about them even though I have no sports knowledge).
I was also kind of surprised to hear the other coder say she'll end up listening to segments over and over while reviewing the codebook. I pretty much read the codebook beforehand, then listened to each segment and just coded it. Sometimes with more ambiguous segments I'll listen to it a few times, but I really think that the more you agonize over each one the more you end up confusing yourself and talking yourself into unfitting codes. Once you've understood the coding scheme and the concepts being coded, your initial impressions will usually be pretty accurate (observe that, for example, my codes generally agreed with our two 'expert raters', the project manager and the person from the other project). This is particularly true here because we're meant to be coding only clear examples, and leaving anything that's too ambiguous as other. If you have to argue yourself into using the code, it is probably too ambiguous.
Of course I also think the existing coding scheme is not that great (I coded more based off my background knowledge of the concepts/constructs we're coding for), so that could be part of the issue. Neither of the other coders has done any work in this subject area before so they may not be familiar with what these constructs are. It's still kind of frustrating though. At some point, having a coder who has no confidence in their own codes is just not helpful.
Other than that, I'm still working on That One Analysis, and planning for the final report for the other project. I'm thinking at this point that we'll have to just not use the cases with multiple timepoints within year, because there aren't very many of them and no matter what we do with the valid missing data, the problems we would cause for the analysis would not be worth it when there's so few cases that it lets us keep. It would just overcomplicate the model so much. It's going to depend on which specific cases are in the final analytic sample, though...and how many we lose to data cleaning...given the high levels of insufficient effort responding (basically, people filling in the questions without really reading them/paying attention just because they want the gift card reward) I think we really need to just kick out all the cases with zero variance on the relevant measures. We may lose some legitimate cases (a person could plausibly have the same response to each item for some of the scales), but keeping them in will just add so much noise to the data and destroy the variance. But, that will hurt our sample size too...it's going to be a tricky analysis. It should be pretty fun to play around with once the data is all entered, though. I love stuff like this, haha.
No word back from the clients for the project we're hoping to start yet...their organization seems to have a ton of red tape and beauracracy though, so it's not too surprising. Sigh, I need to take another look at the poster draft soon, and see if project manager bothered editing it at all. I'm not willing to make a fuss over this, because it would cause more trouble than it's worth, but it's super bullshit if she's the first author on this while doing no work. I think I would be marginally less enraged over it if she had just ignored it rather than have me do all the work and then ask me to make additional changes. She's been too busy job-hunting to do much with it though; she's done a few informational interviews this week. I know this because we share an office and she does them during work. Which is just like...waste your work hours if you want, but you could at least not disturb my work as well by having a loud phonecall in my office. I understand when it's work-related--it's a small office--but repeated personal phonecalls are just rude. Particularly since the office conference room is usually empty during the day and is a perfectly good place to make a phonecall (but, I suppose then there'd be the risk that the lab director or someone else would be annoyed she's doing this during work hours).
Aside from work, I finally finished all three routes in Fire Emblem Fates! So I shall post a review of it soon. I'm still playing the DLC, it's mostly pretty difficult. Overall I really loved this game, but I'm a bit baffled by some of the writing choices. My main complaint with Awakening was that the characters and overal plot concepts were awesome, but the actual execution had a lot of dumb elements, but here I'm more like...the story is fine, it's just weirdly under-explained. Like key events will be briefly glossed over, and I'm like, wow, that seems like it would be really interesting if only the game would actually tell me about it. The gameplay is amazing though and the music is a particular highlight. As expected of FE!
I'm getting psyched for Pokemon Sun/Moon...I'm torn about which to get, normally I would go for Moon because I love moon imagery but the legendary for Sun is cuter (it's like...a metal lion-dog thing? With psychic powers? It's so dumb, I love it). The Moon legendary is like...a bat? Or something? It's kind of weird-looking. Probably I'll get Sun just for the lion-dog.
I'm also bewildered by the announcement for the Nintendo Switch...like, it seems super cool and innovative, but it's SO innovative that I'm also like, ??? It seems kind of big to carry around as a handheld. I hope this doesn't mean they're giving up on actual handheld games, I love handheld gaming and no other gaming company really focuses on it at all. Sony tried it with the Playstation Vita and all, but it never got that popular iirc. Handheld gaming is really more my thing than console gaming (indeed, I've had the current generation of handhelds ever since the Gameboy Pocket, yet I haven't had a current-generation console since the N64 when I was a kid). And I really think that even if this console has a portable element, there's a big difference with games designed specific for portable devices! Console gaming lends itself to a different style of gameplay, different controls, etc. But handheld gaming has been such a major source of Nintendo's profits iirc that I can't see them dropping it...
BUT it also turns out the Switch will NOT be backwards compatible! So now I'm like, ahhhh, what doooo. The Wii U honestly looks really cool, but I never got one because they were so expensive, and there weren't a ton of games I wanted to play (a limited library was one of the Wii U's big problems). And now that a new system is coming out, it's not like there will be more Wii U games made. If the new system was backwards compatible that would be fine, but...who the heck makes their new console NOT backwards compatible? I mean I do realize that the Wii U had the gamepad and stuff that probably just wouldn't work with the Switch or something, but still, a bummer. And they seem to have gone back to cartridges rather than disks, which is a surprising move! So overall this looks like a really different system, which is exciting, but I dunno how well it will all work. Nintendo has always been really innovative imo though, so it's exciting to see. It looks like they're aiming to fix the problem with the game library from the Wii U as well and have some solid titles lined up already.
I may actually buy a Switch once enough games are out...this would be my first purchase of a new (rather than used and last-gen) console in...well, ever, since my parents bought us the N64 when we were kids. It'll depend on what games come out for it though. In general there tend to be a lot more handheld games that I like than console games, which is why I'm more into handhelds.
That reminds me of a game I'd love to see made...a Pokemon version of Mario Party. I always liked the minigames in Pokemon Stadium as a kid, and there's hundreds of Pokemon so you'd think they could make plenty of minigames for a party game. It would be sooooo cute. I'd also be in favor of a modern version of Pokemon Snap (not a remake, just a game with a similar concept), because that was such a cool game. Although, it seems that Sun/Moon will have some kind of picture-taking minigame, so maybe that's a bit of a Pokemon Snap throwback.
As a side note, I was just thinking recently that Nintendo still makes pretty durable hardware...I've had my 3DS for like, nine years at least I think, and it still works great. I did have to get the charging port repaired at one point, but that was due to me accidentally bending the connector inside, not a fault in the system itself. And I carry my 3DS with me everywhere. I'm amazed it's stood up to wear and tear so well.
I'm still trying to decide what to write for NaNo...last year I wrote Pokemon Conquest fanfic for every NaNo event lol (I have over 200k words of it now...a valuable use of my time, to be sure...). I'm considering maybe doing something with my vague 'non-fanfic version of ReEragon' idea. It occurred to me ages ago that at this point, ReEragon is so AU that most of it has nothing to do with the actual Inheritance Cycle and is sliding toward original fic anyway. Not sure how well a lot of it would translate though. My original thought was, what about a fantasy novel with female characters and stereotypically 'girly' monsters like unicorns instead of dragons? But I love dragons so much that not using dragons would be kind of disappointing lol.
The vague overall concept is that the setting is postapoc, but in a distant enough future that it's basically a fantasy setting with implications of post-apoc rather than an actual post-apoc (so like, a thousand years ago the world ended, but that was ages ago and nobody has much knowledge about it nowadays). Long ago (hundred years? or something like that), the evil king character stole the sun, and the rebel forces want to retrieve it, because the sun is kind of important. My idea was to have a more 'mythical' or fantastic setting, because the Inheritance Cycle is so weirdly un-fantastic at times. So something more mythical and not really bothering with 'rational' explanations of magic etc. to keep a more mystical, magical feel. The evil king stealing the sun has perhaps a Last Unicorn sort of feel, with the king not being overtly malicious or evil but more distant and obliviously self-absorbed. Like he is a guy who has lost his mind and stole the sun. Literally just stole it. It's been gone for a hundred years. The world is lit only as much as the king allows, and is largely dim and shadowy. And there's an older, long-destroyed kingdom (that was probably destroyed in the postapoc past) where the land is now completely blighted (like nuclear winter-ish I guess?). The main character is a girl whose family are metalworkers who make things out of scrap metal retrieved from the wasteland of the destroyed kingdom (since metal recovered from the distant past, before the world ended, is better than what anyone can currently make. They've lost the knowledge of how to create it, but they can reforge it into new stuff). I'm thinking maybe it would have a more Final Fantasy-style magical steampunk feel, with cities and industry run via magic (lol it's FF7 mako I guess?), but I dunno whether I'd prefer that or a more classic style high fantasy. I'm thinking no traditional fantasy races (elves, dwarves, etc.) though. Particularly if I go with the more steampunk-ish setting, since elves have a more high fantasy feel to me (I realize people have used them in all sorts of settings/genres, but for me personally I don't feel like they'd fit).
I started thinking about it in part because I've always loved fantasy as a genre, but as a kid almost all the fantasy books I read focused on dudes. The female characters generally were supporting cast and were kind of the stereotypical 'spunky female warrior' kind of thing. This is changing nowadays but when I was a kid it was so common that if a book had mostly female characters it was likely to focus on romance and other stereotypical 'girls' books' themes, which I wasn't interested in. I always wanted a book that had the same kinds of tropes and plots as a typical fantasy book, but just with women. Like a genderflipped Lord of the Rings or whatever. So I was like, you know, that kind of book could be cool to write. Sadly I tend to write mostly male characters because I write mostly fanfictions, and a lot of the games I play and stuff I read has a lot of male characters (well, I do read a lot of shounen manga and play mostly mainstream RPGs...). So I was like, well, if I wanted to convert ReEragon to original fiction, why not just gender flip it at the same time? The characters' genders weren't that important to the story to begin with. Although, the concept has slid somewhat far from the original 'convert ReEragon to original fic'. But in fairness, ReEragon still has enough stuff from the Inheritance Cycle that just taking it all out doesn't really make sense anyway.
It's not really developed enough to write it yet, though...I suspect it would turn into another unfinished NaNo novel where I had a broad plot concept and no details outlined, so the draft ended up as rambling internal monologues with no real content. This is a problem with much of my writing! Lol.
But yeah, some kind of weird steampunk fantasy postapoc fairtytale-ish mashup could be cool. I'm thinking that instead of elves, there's like, fairy-like beings that live in flying castles. They turn out to be kind of evil? The king is still kind of a dick though, stealing the sun is a classic dick move. Anyway instead of spirits there would be like, living shadows. So instead of spirits summoned by sorcerers, these can LITERALLY become someone's shadow. Hm, the more I think about it, the more this seems like just a weird mashup of several vague ideas for novels I had, plus Final Fantasy, plus Fire Emblem, plus Inheritance Cycle. Which...is very characteristic of me, actually.
But it's still undecided! I might just write more odds and ends of things...mainly Pokemon Conquest fanfics, due to my inexplicable obsession with it. I have actually gone and got myself ANOTHER two books on the Sengoku era out of the library. Sadly my university's library doesn't have that many relevant books; it's not a super large library or anything and they've got like, one section of shelves for books related to Japan, so of course there aren't many for a small, specific period of Japanese history. Most of the books are on more modern history anyway. There's like, four or five relevant to the Sengoku era. I guess it's not as popular among researchers? We really only have academic books. I could maybe get some on interlibrary loan though. Unfortunately academic libraries tend to be oddly poor if you want books that are more general intros to a topic, and instead overflow with books on very, very specific niches. Like one of the books I have is on the role of gift-giving and acquiring art objects in the culture of the Sengoku era. Which is certainly interesting, but is also VERY specific. Luckily they had a single, solitary book on the Japanese middle ages and how they developed into the eras leading up to the Sengoku era (so like, the Muromachi period and stuff). Unsurprisingly, it was a somewhat older book. The more recent a book is, the more specific it's likely to be in a university library...well, if you want to publish and get ahead in your career, you need to produce new/novel work. General overviews are more what you'll find in textbooks and/or books aimed at a general, not academic, audience. And there's not a huge amount of English-language work on the Japanese middle ages as far as I could tell (when I was searching for books on the Sengoku era, I found a lot of results for Japanese books, which I can't actually read). But for now I have two new books to read which will be fun!
Aside from that...there's not too much to say! I think maybe this year I'll try to actually post on the NaNo forums periodically. I was active on the forums my first few years, but I've become more of a lurker in general over time. Keeping up with forums just takes so much time lol, and also as I get older, I become more aware that my random thoughts on video games and stuff are not REALLY something the world urgently needs to know. Also social anxiety so yeah. But it might be good to try to be a bit more active! The NaNo forums are usually really friendly too. Haha, well, I guess first I need to decide what I'm writing...
And that's the story! Wow this post got hella long. Even though not that much really happened this week!