MOAR SPAM
Character notes uwaaaaaaah. Interesting that he takes some notes on his character's relationships with countries he hasn't made into chracters. I have to wonder, just how many little notes does he have laying around? Unlike alot of the fandom, I don't think he should make a personification for EVERY COUNTRY EVAH - he's wearing himself thin trying already. Some of the characters aren't as fleshed out as the others, and some he hasn't gotten a chance to put in the comic at all... You know, when you go back and read main storyline, the art is really different - it's definately not moe at that point. Also main storyline has alot of disturbing subtext - I keep getting the feeling that oh god something horrible is going to happen ajdjfsjfs even WITHOUT thinking about the historical context. It's like the comic is going KOLKOLKOLKOLKOL sometimes. It's almost the total oposite of the anime, which is rather obnoxiously bleached. The anime is random, but it doesn't really have that brand of strangeness that the manga has where the characters are dysfuctional and horribly encentric yet somehow far more like everyday human beings than normal animanga characters. I want to read his other stuff but I get the feeling that it will never get scanlated because it doesn't have a catchy gimmick like hetalia does. Sigh.
You know there was once this company called pfmagic, and they made this game series called petz. There was Dogz, Catz, Oddballz, and Babyz. It was a really cute little game series- not cute in an OMG KAWAII sugary sense, but in a "d'aww isn't that quant and grandmotherly for a 90's computer game" sense. But the most interesting thing about it was how the characters were programed. Rather than using flat sprites or angular polygons, they used this little system known as "lnz" they made themselves. Lnz stands for "lines", and all the animals were made out of perfect spheres called ballz conected by thick tube-ish lines. The spheres and lines were then given color and texture, distorted to give the apearance of fur, enlarged or shunken, moved about on an xyz- grid, etc. to give the animals their distinctive apearances. An expressive, cartoony eyeball was specially made with two ballz - one which was the eyeball and had an eyelid, the other was the pupil that moved within the confines of the whites and had a thick colored outline representing the iris. The style everything was rended in via its unique rendering system made it easy to give the animals cartoony squash-and-stretch movements. It could have been used for a lot of things.
But then pfmagic got bought by a company that didn't care too much about it, and made a sequel that was buggy and little more than an expansion pack slapped together from things the original petz team had been working on. Then pfmagic got disolved, then the company that bought pfmagic got bought by ANOTHER company that gave even less of a rat's ass about the games. They made another crappy sequel that replaced all the cozy little backgrounds with crappy-looking 3d-rendered ones that didn't jive with the style the animals were rendered in, took away the toys and made it so that you had to win them back in poorly-programed minigames that went against the petz' AI, intruduced a few "new breeds" that managed to look less official than most 3rd-party hacked breeds and acted exactly the same as the old breeds, and... yea, it just sucked. And then said company used their shiny new brandname on a bunch of completely unrelated games for consoles, Nintendo DS, and PC, and the PF Magic games were never mentioned again. Siiiiigh. There goes my dream of a MMORPG rendered in lnz or anything.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/michaelm/www/nidocs/Stern.html
Speaking of videogames, I never understood why Microsoft never made an aviary expansion pack to the original Zoo Tycoon. Really, all they'd need to do to have an aviary would be to slightly tweak the programing of the tanks in Marine Mania so that you could put terain in the enclosure and whatnot, give it different sprites, and get the game to recognize it as seperate from the tanks, and you'd have an aviary. Then they could have sereral species of eagle, swan, crane, and other large flighted birds. Also I kind of really don't like Zoo Tycoon two. It's a little too goofy and obviously trying to pander to children,wheras Zoo Tycoon always had this kind of weird objective disinterestedness to it. It never said that the animals fought each other bloodily and had sex, nor did it deny it. And the graphics are both poorly rendered and way too glowy in ZT2, and in ZT1 they're very crisp and remind me of little models - you know, where you have these tiny little figures and you place them around the model train and you get the fake trees and the fake grass that is really more like moss and the fake water that's solid and only slighly translucent... Yea, it reminded me of that. But MAGICALLY ALIVE. It was like a magical living model. In your computer.
You know there was once this company called pfmagic, and they made this game series called petz. There was Dogz, Catz, Oddballz, and Babyz. It was a really cute little game series- not cute in an OMG KAWAII sugary sense, but in a "d'aww isn't that quant and grandmotherly for a 90's computer game" sense. But the most interesting thing about it was how the characters were programed. Rather than using flat sprites or angular polygons, they used this little system known as "lnz" they made themselves. Lnz stands for "lines", and all the animals were made out of perfect spheres called ballz conected by thick tube-ish lines. The spheres and lines were then given color and texture, distorted to give the apearance of fur, enlarged or shunken, moved about on an xyz- grid, etc. to give the animals their distinctive apearances. An expressive, cartoony eyeball was specially made with two ballz - one which was the eyeball and had an eyelid, the other was the pupil that moved within the confines of the whites and had a thick colored outline representing the iris. The style everything was rended in via its unique rendering system made it easy to give the animals cartoony squash-and-stretch movements. It could have been used for a lot of things.
But then pfmagic got bought by a company that didn't care too much about it, and made a sequel that was buggy and little more than an expansion pack slapped together from things the original petz team had been working on. Then pfmagic got disolved, then the company that bought pfmagic got bought by ANOTHER company that gave even less of a rat's ass about the games. They made another crappy sequel that replaced all the cozy little backgrounds with crappy-looking 3d-rendered ones that didn't jive with the style the animals were rendered in, took away the toys and made it so that you had to win them back in poorly-programed minigames that went against the petz' AI, intruduced a few "new breeds" that managed to look less official than most 3rd-party hacked breeds and acted exactly the same as the old breeds, and... yea, it just sucked. And then said company used their shiny new brandname on a bunch of completely unrelated games for consoles, Nintendo DS, and PC, and the PF Magic games were never mentioned again. Siiiiigh. There goes my dream of a MMORPG rendered in lnz or anything.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/michaelm/www/nidocs/Stern.html
Speaking of videogames, I never understood why Microsoft never made an aviary expansion pack to the original Zoo Tycoon. Really, all they'd need to do to have an aviary would be to slightly tweak the programing of the tanks in Marine Mania so that you could put terain in the enclosure and whatnot, give it different sprites, and get the game to recognize it as seperate from the tanks, and you'd have an aviary. Then they could have sereral species of eagle, swan, crane, and other large flighted birds. Also I kind of really don't like Zoo Tycoon two. It's a little too goofy and obviously trying to pander to children,wheras Zoo Tycoon always had this kind of weird objective disinterestedness to it. It never said that the animals fought each other bloodily and had sex, nor did it deny it. And the graphics are both poorly rendered and way too glowy in ZT2, and in ZT1 they're very crisp and remind me of little models - you know, where you have these tiny little figures and you place them around the model train and you get the fake trees and the fake grass that is really more like moss and the fake water that's solid and only slighly translucent... Yea, it reminded me of that. But MAGICALLY ALIVE. It was like a magical living model. In your computer.