Jolly holidays' music video analysis

I nearly forgot to do this but I hope it still counts! I spend little time looking at music videos in general, and couldn't remember any of thosee that have impacted me somehow in the past so instead I picked something I remember watching somewhat recently.

It opens up with a scene of a harsh winter where a figure wearing a strange suit of armor that covers even their face is walking laboriously. This is enough to signal to the viewer this might not be a very ordinary setting. The music starts with melancholic low guitars and the video sets up more of the story; some alternate history where people are struggling to get through the winter on scraps.

Misery is a common theme in heavy metal videos and this is no stranger to it. Powerful music needs to evoke emotions and that is what the videos usually emphasize. What I like about this one is it has a whole worldbuilding scheme going on for it; I'm not very familiar with the Fallout series games but I know Orden Ogan's video(s) borrow from those games' theme. In this video in particular it's more than obvious when at one point you can see a banner advertising "Nuka-Cola", a brand in the in-game world of Fallout.

So if Fallout is about people surviving in a post-nuclear war world, I believe this is what "The Things We Believe In" also wants to represent. There's a whole storyline in the video that you can follow which is not explicitly following the lyrics. That puts more emphasis on exploring the story: it gets the viewer engaged, what are the fates of these people and what is the world they are living in like. I saw another video from this same band and some of the same characters appear in that one as well, so these guys really want to share their little world.

Of course, the heavy themes ties really well to the heavy music and you've got the usual bravado of metalheads. Strange armor as clothing and long hair to whip around, the appearance is obviously quite masculine, bit of frowning of determined faces to drive in the message, but the music just wants to give you a kick of adrenaline no matter who you are. It's not unusual for metal bands to go over the top with the aggression, that's somewhat of a signature for the genre. Some might find this video ridiculous but I thought it was interesting to see so much effort put into setting the story.

The story however is a little ambiguous. Some Glowy Dude goes around reviving people who had died so far and they start to follow the Red Scarf Man. Possibly these were people who died for "the things they believed in". I think this video and song nicely represent the genre as being strong and determined are very common themes. Just go out there and kick ass.

But don't freeze in the snow.

Course final project: cross-over art pt.9

I'm linking my presentation here because a lot of things that I didn't cover on this blog are in it, and vice versa, so everything will be neatly here on the blog.

Hopefully this link works!

Also here's the final work separately as well, in case you're not interested in the slides :P

Comparison from the original Battleborn model:

Too bad we didn't get to see everybody's presentations, but I thank you folks for a great course, also thanks for taking interest in my project. I have some blog posts to make still about some tasks I've missed but all in all it was a fun run y'all.

Course final project: cross-over art pt.8

As luck would have it, I actually finished the project one day earlier than my estimate! No, I'm not gonna post it here just yet -- I'll save it for the presentation next week! And making that presentation is my next task... Don't know the guidelines for the pres but I'm gonna include most of the same work in progress and research material as I've had on this blog here, and then some fancy words on what I've learned etc. I've heard good feedback on the design from my fellow fans so I hope it'll do for the class as well. 😘

Course final project: cross-over art pt.7

Today I finished painting the main body and moved onto tackling his left arm -- I was well aware it would cover a lot of the detail I had painted on him but for the sake of being thorough I wanted to include all ot if. Besides when the time comes to present the final version I can just include both with and without the arm.

I may have mentioned wanting to use actual shipheads as his shoulder-lion-things but obviously that wouldn't have fit too well, so taking inspiration from an in-game shiphead model, I created a mash-up between it and ISIC's own model.

The arm is not yet finished, by the way. You may also notice I dropped the opulence -- this is an iron lion instead of a flashy golden one to fit the overall theme better.

Mind you, while working on this I thought in this case you could also simply call this creation "a skin". Battleborn also has its fair share of different skins in the game that change the appearance of the character you're playing. Skins don't add anything to the characters' abilities and are just for the looks. This one I'm doing could instead of a cross-over be also called "ISIC's Sea of Thieves skin". Even for a small fandom such as Battleborn there's a number fan-created skins for the characters, and I'm actually happy to include this idea among them.

I didn't actually plan on painting over screenshots for this project, but it seemed to work well for the first image so yesterday I started doing the groundwork for the second image. I needed a good shot that would showcase the right side's fancy cannon arm better, and landed on this one. Working on it should be fast since the rest of him will stay a silhouette more or less, I'm estimating I can finish the project in 2 days.

Course final project: cross-over art pt.6

Whittling away at the draft, turning it more and more into a painting. I noticed I'm putting too much detail into the painting process but I'm just enjoying it too much I suppose...

I dug out some wood texture and surface references from my Sea of Thieves screenshot folder. I always had appreciated the art style of this game but scrutinizing it so closely like this I notice just how excellent it is in its simplicity. Very few elements overall but rendered with high care and attention to the detail.

(Skull reference. These are items you can find in the game and sell for in-game currency.)

Sticking my nose right into a game's pixels is not new to me -- observing a game closely like this and becoming aware of all the detail around lets you have a newfound appreciation for the way the whole package has been constructed. Works for real life too, sometimes it's great just to stop for a second and take in the surroundings.

Also this could turn into a whole monologue of "are games art" but it's much too late for that today.

Shipwreck-ISIC will eventually have arms too, but I was thinking of making another quicker painting of a right side view to better show the plans I have for his cannon arm.

Course final project: cross-over art pt.5

Chipping away at the digital sketch, didn't get all that much done today, but did some problem solving and trying out detailing more towards the Sea of Thieves' visual style.

The style experiment is especially visible on the cannon. Take a reference of this screenshot.

Course final project: cross-over art pt.4

Brainstorming sketches from yesterday and a digital sketch work in progress.

Course final project: cross-over art pt.3

I did what I didn't think I'd have to do. I went into Sea of Thieves to get more accurate references of certain things, but it was good because I got a better direction of what I'm actually after.

On paper I was brainstorming ideas earlier today, settling down some details and figuring out the general form of Sea of Thieves ISIC. I want to keep the silhouette quite similar to the original model, which was an especially important question when in Battleborn he's able to transform and bust out a ton of guns.

I'm not an engineer so I wasn't able to make enough of a functional mechanism with pirate-age tools that would allow this cannon to be pulled out and lifted up without breaking the silhouette too much. I decided to stick more to Sea of Thieves' simplistic style and settled for an in-between solution where the cannon is stationary, simply propped up enough on a small deck on his back.

As for the stuff I researched in-game, I actually came across this ship customization that reminded me the "Sovereign" style would be worth looking into more to put some of that bling on him (maybe*).

The thing with Sea of Thieves' style is that it's treading on a strange line of uncanny stylized realism. The cannon above is still functional but it's not a thing that could really existed. So it's important to break down the elements into the most basic form (understand them) and build from there.

I also went on an excursion on the Ferry of the Damned, the ghost ship sailing the waters of the underworld where dead pirates go (to respawn). This vessel/environment had inspired me a lot with the initial idea, and I still prefer a lot of the aesthetics.

Tentative strict 'no' on adding candles to the design.

* I'm more keen on the idea of a haunted shambling shipwreck than a fancy gold-trimmed war golem-thing -- one, because there's no automatons in Sea of Thieves, and two, because I love the spooky. I'm not yet sure how these two styles would mix.

Course final project: cross-over art pt.2

Today I studied through the Sea of Thieves art book and made some notes of the style's general vibe, and what I'm particularly after for in my design.

The original idea explorations from earlier this year didn't touch upon the feet's design at all, so I made a couple ideas.

Course final project: cross-over art pt.1

Probably should have updated earlier about this, but for our course's final task/project I chose to do a cross-over art piece. My own definition for a cross-over means imagining what person/object/thing X would look/be like if it was in universe/story Y instead of their own. It's a fun little thought exercise that puts the creative muscles to the test when trying to boil down the defining elements of each universe. It makes possible practically an endless amount of scenarios for fan fictions, fan art, et cetera.

So cross-overs could be like "what would happen if the Simpsons were in the Harry Potter universe" (placing the characters in a new universe and imagining how they would behave) or maybe like "what would Marge Simpson look like if she was a wizard in the Harry Potter universe" (imagining how to merge the two visual styles).

For my work, I will try to merge the visual styles of two games by taking a character from Battleborn and putting him into Sea of Thieves, and trying to make it look plausible. The idea came from a friend who earlier this year did this cross-over with her favorite character and it came out great. I meant to do my own and jotted down the basic idea, so now's a good chance to finish what I started.

I used to play a lot of Sea of Thieves when it came out in March 2018 and I love the stylized world it has. Haven't played the game in months now, so my secret weapon is this hefty opus right here:

The perfect style guide! I will need it to study the ship and weaponry details up close because the character I will be re-imagining in Sea of Thieves' world is a big ol' metal boy, quite fancy and deadly looking robot with more than enough guns under his hood.

(Happy looking chap, ain't he?

Source http://battleborn.wikia.com/wiki/ISIC/Strategy?file=ISIC_render_2.png)

The idea I got was to make him look like a haunted shipwreck with cannons and guns attached. The notes I did earlier this year have the basics down, it's just a matter of chipping down an assload of details, and for that I need to bury my nose into the art book.

I read a whole book and I liked it!

[I aimed to keep this review-let spoiler free, but it's up to you how much/little you prefer to know before checking it out yourself]

During my recovery from a surgery I read a book from Becky Chambers, which is maybe a little bit unusual to me. I'm not a very good reader because I can't focus on the text as well I can on pictures; it needs to be a really intriguing piece of text for me to properly read it. It's a shame, really, because I like the idea of books; you're entering some other person's mindspace through them, and they can teach you a lot. That's not what meant to ramble about but anyway.

The book I read is called The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and is the first science fiction novel in the series from this author. I stumbled across this author's works last summer when I by accident bought the second book in a 3-for-2 deal. I didn't read it then, but deemed it was interesting enough so I also got the first book later.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, or "TKWSAP" (?) with its bare-bones settings seemed hilarious to me; judging only the fact that it's a scifi book which implies spacetravel, I was amused by the idea that maybe some alien race is making their way to Earth only to find a species of grumpy little things. While the expression "Angry Planet" still holds true in the book, it was not Earth they journey towards.

The story focuses on a small patchwork crew who work on an equally patchworked spacecraft meant for creating wormhole tunnels for travelling quickly through the cosmos. The crew is a mishmash of various alien species, each with unique traits, racial history and customs, and during their "Long Way" to the place where they need to be to do their job, they also meet other alien life forms, and this was personally the reason why I liked the book so much -- the richness of other sapient species in the story. The sense of adventure and the thrill of the unknown, not knowing just what kind of creatures you will meet next. The book's tone was cheerful and hopeful and majority of the species were friendly, and it was just so enjoyable to indulge in a crazy story of how no matter where you were in the universe, you always had friends around. Especially true for the crew; as the story went on, each of the crew members got to tell their background and why are they like they are as a species and/or as a person, and it was such a curious and intriguing thing to learn about.

Yet, here I think was also the book's weakest link; many of the alien species seemed perhaps too similar to the human psyche and it may have gotten a little numb at some point. Still interesting, but I feel there was potential for wackier and more imaginative alien life forms. Another thing that somewhat hindered my enjoyment of the book was the fact just reading the back cover of the second book ahead of time was enough to spoil me a bit.

I know the plottwist at the end was meant to tug your heartstrings, but personally it hit me pretty hard. The twist put forth a chain of events that I'm curious to see how they have developed in the second book, so hopefully some good came out of it.

I really enjoyed reading this book and not just because I had to lie in bed and had nothing else to do. I was always looking forward to opening the book and I was practically devouring the story. During the big climax scene I was pretty much unable to put the book away, super-glued to the text, and I love when that happens because it's so rare to me.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet gets a solid 4.5 out of 5 from me. I recommend looking this up if you like smart and whimsical scifi! Very fresh stuff!

Socially acceptable stalking

So I chose this one university teacher to be the target that I observe on social media, and when I went to see their latest blog update, I was very confused about the way they greeted their readers this time!

Chairs? Normally this person greets with something like "realists" or "meme-crunchers" which usually refers to the topic they discuss in their post, but in this one they never talk about chairs. It made sense only when I saw the time this was posted at.

4:34 AM is when you should be asleep.

"What's happening?"

The long and the short of using Twitter is knowing what's up in real time from the trending tags.

This is depressing.

Reality TV idea: "My classmate is a robot"

Being as I don't watch a lot of TV anymore, I teamed up with a friend to brainstorm an idea. I did some reading on what is a reality TV, but it seems the subgenres have become really convoluted in the recent years so I'm sticking to just a very basic frame.

In this show we have teams of 4 young adults, fresh from upper secondary. Each team is given a humanoid robot that they will have to learn to program and make it perform the given tasks. We might choose to have a side-plot of interpersonal drama, but there definitely are eliminations, team switches et cetera. At the end of the season we have two teams competing for the final task and the prize of the show, which is a free pass into any technical university that the students of the winning team chooses. Also cash, I suppose.

The best part of this idea is that it is competitive, educational and invests greatly into the future. Everyone benefits!

Students might be asked to create vlogs or something similar that they will share on the internet. Maybe even ads on the street where their individual updates can be accessed through QR codes?

Lands on the Border and some words on game UI

Hello reader! I apologize if you've ever commented on one of my posts and not received a reply, Blogger's and Google's union is just a nightmare and I'm unable to properly log in to respond, but I do appreciate you taking the time to comment!

Earlier I wrote about the perils of adult life in regards of video games and the apparent sense of guilt of spending time playing them. I have now succesfully -- depending on the perspective, I suppose -- managed to relax enough to to lose the track of time while gaming, which was refreshing. Certain things had to move forward before I could start playing Borderlands, but last weekend I started a campaign with a buddy. My friend lives in the Netherlands and games have always been our preferred way of spending time together, yet there hasn't been anything in a while that we have been playing so I'm very happy to jump into Borderlands now.

Gearbox Software's Borderlands, the first installation in the series, just recently celebrated its 9th anniversary on the 20th of October. I remember when it came out I was mildly curious about it but that was when I felt claustrophobia when playing FPS's -- and that feeling persisted for a long time -- so I passed it by. For years my only source of what Borderlands was about has been this comic.

(Source: https://unrealitymag.com/video-games/a-good-borderlands-comic/ )

Can't go wrong though. But for nine years this comic was the only thing what I knew of the game(s), up until playing Battleborn in 2016, also from Gearbox, which was my first proper touch to an FPS as well as a touch to a game made by the studio. Long story short, it became my favorite game, making me forget my dislike for FPS's among several other positive effects. (I'm aware of the unfortunate stigma on Battleborn, but if you know it too, I hope you will not judge it too harshly solely based on that.)

Point is, a lot of people that I played Battleborn with said they had picked it up because it was a Gearbox game. I, not having any prior knowledge of their games, was just enjoying Battleborn for what it was and exploring a new territory. However, I grew fond of Gearbox's style of humor and the way their game was constructed, so I grew curious of Borderlands. Eventually I bought a bundle containing the three games of the main series -- Borderlands, Borderlands 2, and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

With a few hours in the first game under my belt I saw a lot of similarities between Borderlands and Battleborn, two games that were released 7 years apart from each other, similarities that can only be described as Gearbox's particular style. The first thing I noticed was how much the UI elements were alike, right from the start up screen. In gameplay the HUD elements were slightly in different places on the screen but essentially being the same.

So I thought how strange it was to be familiar with everything else except the story only through UI design. It was like meeting a friend whose face you know so well but just can't for some reason remember anything about them.

That being said, the age on the game shows. The menus are clunky and a bit cumbersome to use, and were missing a setting that I personally would have appreciated; the FOV slider, but I suppose it wasn't very trendy in 2009. My favorite thing, however, is the awkward way the quest objectives are displayed on the HUD which I assume was just coding limitations and having to work around that (which makes it doubly hilarious). 

This extends to the quest displays, creating strange but golden examples.

Quest: Meet T.K. Baha

Questlog: T.K. Baha met zero out of one

I can't believe they let this lack of grammar and common sense to pass. Maybe it's safe to assume this was fixed in later Borderlands games, because at least in Battleborn my brain didn't collapse on itself trying to deal with the grammar.

The HUD elements and menus were done very intuitively in Battleborn so I was happy to see the style was consistent across Gearbox's other games. There's few things worse than god awful UI design in games, which is a whole another topic in itself. If the screen is crowded and/or the menus confusing, or maybe even malfunctioning, there's little enjoyment to be had in that game.

While I don't have any examples of particularly horrendous UI designs in games in mind (although I do find myself annoyed by a lot of the design choices in the games I play) there's one that I just can't, even 14 years later, stop laughing about.

The amazing, Windows-esque design of the menu screens in Fable (2004). Granted, the game was published by Microsoft Game Studios but...

(Source: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/216528908 )

C'mon, guys. This isn't the type of familiarity you would want to implement 😂

Futuristic Mental Hike day 2

Yesterday when I arrived for the first time I was really confused why there was so few people around, but assumed it was because most of the presentations were already done for the day, thinking tomorrow will be different.

Turned out there were, at least at the start, just as few people. Then a classmate pointed out the lack of crowd is likely due to the astronomical ticket prices -- 200-400 euros for regular visitors. Even 69 euros for a student's ticket sounded high (regarding how "much" stuff there actually was), but I really appreciate it how our school decided to sponsor this.

One specific happenstance irked me and almost made me lose hope for the event was when I tried to attend an academic research panel in Opus 1 & 2, but besides me there was only one guy... and no presenter. It took 20 minutes for the info desk staff to find out that Opus 1 & 2 were in fact not in use, and the panel I wanted was in Opus 3. Well I got there just on time to hear more about my favorite subject, robots!

I've met the particular Pepper bot a couple times already in Tampere, and I was really happy to witness a research done regarding how people react to a social robot like her. This is an important research subject as robots will continue to fill in more tasks, and this research was just about exploring those possibilities and how people would accept them around. This made me really feel like we're moving forward as a society. Living in the future almost!!

Not even sorry for including so many photos because I find this highly interesting and exciting.

Then I went to hear a presentation about AI, which wasn't completely on the subject, but still glad I went. I did learn about how AI is formed, what it's formed of, and how it can be used to learning. At its simplest, the definition of AI is pattern recognition. Feels like this was one of the most popular presentations as it was (next to lunch) the place where I saw the most people in one spot.

Right after that was a presentation that was glad I stuck around for; the use of video games for teaching and learning. The presenter was genuinely excited about the subject and the possibilities it offers and so it was delightful to follow. Also because I like games, and also because I just earlier made a short research report about other benefits of video games besides entertainment. Video games are a culturally significant and surprisingly underutilized medium!

A slide from the prestenation that made me chuckle

Highlight of the day was during the first presentation of the day with this slide regarding data management.

Welcome to Mindtrek.

Futuristic Mental Hike day 1

Today was the first day of MindTrek but I sadly could only visit it briefly due to errands. As I arrived there I really didn't even know where to go and just went where my nose pointed me, and found two classmates and a panel about open source with this guy

(idk who you are but cool beans)

Most game-related panels were today but I only could make it to the last session, but I'm glad I did. First part was about the UI designs used in game live streams, and another was about online [verbal] abuse in MMO games, Dota 2 in particular. 

The latter is something that I'm happy is being researched and getting attention because toxic atmospheres are a huge problem in games. The presener pointed out that many of the people interviewed for the research chose not to speak on the microphone as not to give other people leverage that they can use to harass them. Myself as more or less the member of the fairer sex am especially wary about these things; although as the research data itself was quite biased as 94% of the 364 responses were male, I find as such it doesn't fully reflect the situation. Women are more likely to get harassed just because of that massive gender bias in player pools.

It's a huge deterrent for me personally to even think about entering online games because of the male-dominant, and often toxic culture in them.

Anyway possibly my highlight of the day was seeing this dapper, quite goth, robot. Sadly I had no time to introduce myself.

(I was there! so formal heck)

Let's play: Adult Life™

Today I was briefly discussing [free] time management with a classmate, especially regarding the amount one might spend playing video games. I told him in the past week or so I have barely put in any time to games and he didn't believe me, arguing "either you play them for hours or not at all". Which is a funny hyperbole about how usually things go, but here's a proof of my meager gametime within the last two weeks as displayed by a counter on my Steam profile:

Yes, I own other gaming platforms, and no, I haven't spent time on those either. My consoles haven't even been plugged in since I moved to Tampere.

Me not spending more time playing games is less about not wanting to and more about not being able to. It's been years since I have properly been able to immerse myself into a game (there are exceptions of course, which I might talk about some time later). "Why not" is a question that I really don't have an answer for, only thing that I can offer as an excuse is the feeling of uneasiness; "I should be doing something else instead".

I suppose in large part that restlessness was because of my previous work. The rhythm of 'commute-work-commute-free time' that I had left me drained most of the time. I also began putting in more time into making fanart of games rather than playing the games because art is a skill I need to keep sharp.

Would I like to play more games? Yes. There are a ton of games I haven't tried, completed or just otherwise would like to revisit. As anyone with a Steam account would know, thanks to those massive sales they have, games just seem to pile up in one's library...

Speaking about revisiting, there is an astonishing amount of game remakes going about. Last year I got the PS4 remake of Shadow of the Colossus, which has always been one of my favorites and so loyal to it I of course wanted the new version. I've still yet to play it though, simply because of the sheer amount of hours I had put into the original PS2 game -- back when I was able to dedicate so much time to a game without feeling guilty -- so that I don't see much point doing all the same stuff again.

We only have so much time to use as we see fit and time management is tough. Yet this new school offers me a lot more free (?) time than what I had before, so maybe I could work on breaking away from this boring adult mindset a bit. 😂