Castle Magus

Like, at all. (Dreamwidth posts don't count, not really.)

I've left MLP/Star Trek crossover fanfiction behind. (Like, duh, since I haven't written any of that since before moving back to NC from WA). Or, perhaps more appropriately, it left me behind, given I kinda stopped watching MLP:FiM after the start of season 5 or so, even though I always keep meaning to go back and watch the rest of it "someday." (Sure, I'll get right on that after I finish Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon and/or Sailor Moon Crystal which I've also been meaning to get around to watching "someday." In any case, the likelihood of doing that getting me to write another Sailor Moon/Castlevania fic or whatever is about the same as [re]watching MLP is to getting me to finish those MLP/Trek things. I.e. not too awfully high at all.)

But there's always that novel that I've been "working on" for the past... *counts on fingers* ...eight... no, more like almost nine by this point... ...years... ....goddamn..... now... and on which I've made next to no progress for about half that time.

Or the other novel that I've been working on occasionally thinking about for even longer than that, by like at least a whole decade (talking even pre-DigiPen here), and even wrote a shitty prologue for at one point.

Hell, I barely even write in my damn pencil-and-paper journal anymore. Maybe once or twice a month at most, these days.

Thought I'd cheer myself up a bit by listening to some music... but then that just got me thinking about Alec Holowka again... which probably isn't the best thing for my frame of mind right now. And yet, I'm still listening to it even as I type this thing here, whatever this is. Oh well, at least I haven't reached Shivers 2: Harvest of Souls levels of funk, yet... oh... wait... (Seriously, I love that song, and it's my favorite of that soundtrack, but it [and some of the others] can be pretty damn depressing, if I'm in just the wrong sort of mood, which appears to be the case tonight.)

Blargh. Should probably just go to bed already. Enough 報復性熬夜 (and self-referential links) for one night, I guess.

</whiny, effete rant mode>

Link to Equestria Daily.

Man, Google/Youtube is lazy sometimes. Indiscriminate algorithms are not the solution to every problem under the sun. *facepalm*

(EDIT) Also this. Gotta perteck thuh chilluns 'n'all. (/EDIT)

Copy/pasted from Facebook (with tweaked formatting and additional hyperlinks not in the original FB post).

Just a bit of useless trivia: today is the first day I've turned on my actual desktop PC since Friday night. All my Internet stuff between then and now has been via bedside smartphone.

Whenever I haven't been dealing with dog crap (both metaphorically and literally) or reading Iron Druid novels or otherwise just sleeping and generally "being sick," I've been playing quite a bit of the MLP:FiM game, Wordscapes, and Deiland on the phone. I also quickly got fed up with The Sims: Freeplay (due to an increasing [i.e. non-zero] amount of annoying, unsolicited, autoplaying ads [as opposed to the "you have to actively click on them to view them and get free shit" ads, with which I was perfectly okay]) and completely uninstalled it.

I was kind of starting to miss real video games, though. Deiland (made by Chibig, the same company that made Ankora, a game I mentioned in a previous post) is one of the few mobile phone games I've played that feels like an actual, proper game, as opposed to the collection of advertisements and microtransactions loosely draped with a thin veneer of "game" that just about everything else on Google Play that claims to be a game appears to be, at least in my experience.

Speaking of Deiland, there is a version of that on Steam, too, so I think I will plug that, even though I have not yet personally played that version myself. The Steam version has a price tag attached to it (as opposed to the mobile version, which is free), but based on the Steam videos and screenshots, it looks to be much more graphically advanced than the phone version, and appears to have more gameplay as well (and maybe even a bit of an actual story, too, unlike the phone version, where the only story bit I've seen is the pre-menu intro). And it looks like Mûn, the main character from Ankora, plays a bigger role in the Steam version of Deiland, too. In the phone version, she's just a shopkeeper who shows up every once in a while.

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Oh, and while Ankora is not on Steam, Chibig does have another as-of-yet-unreleased game on Steam called Summer in Mara, which also looks like it could be pretty interesting.

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Hmm, Summer in Mara is actually a Kickstarter project, currently with 53 hours left to go. I won't be backing it myself, because I'm kind of over the whole KS thing, but here is the link, if anyone else wants to do so.

First one in a while. While I have been writing in my normal pencil and paper journal quite a bit lately about dreams I've had, I haven't written anything in my bona fide dream journal in several months. Until this morning, anyway. Also, in this here online journal, I have apparently only written one entry about the actual dream journal, even though I've written several entries pertaining to the dreams I recorded in the pencil and paper journal (though I'm hugely behind on that, and probably unlikely at this point to ever get caught up).

This entry, here, is about the actual dream journal. Basically, I'm going to transcribe all of the dreams I've written in that thing since that previous post. So, I left off in... 2009 holy shit really? That's the year I started the damn thing. Yeah, this might take a while. >_>; I'll try to keep the same format from the previous post here as well. Note, again, that these are from the actual dream journal, written immediately after waking up, so unlike (most of) the ones I wrote in my normal journal, these will be more steam-of-conscious, with associated bad grammar (and no paragraph breaks) and shit like that. I'll fix the misspellings, at least, though. I think I'm going to refrain from making (editorial comments) the way I did in the previous entry, though.

( Behind cut because fuck what a lot of text. I'm actually surprised it all made it into a single post. )

Note to self for future reference.

From what little I've messed with it so far, it seems like Fallout (Equestria) meets Metroidvania meets MLP:FiM. It'd be very difficult to go wrong with that combination.

Here is a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanmade game that just got greenlit on Steam. And here is someone bringing up the very valid point that this game is going to get killed so hard once Hasbro finds out about it, a thread in which the game creator (and a whole lot of other people) exhibits an extreme lack of understanding about how this sort of thing always ends up (and that, of course, answers the question I posed in the title of this post). This game will be Cease and Desisted into oblivion, no matter what Mr. Alex_Orangel says, just like so many other MLP fan projects have been in the past, and those weren't even trying to get onto an incredibly high profile distribution service like Steam, as this one is. Also, all the people saying that this somehow doesn't infringe on Hasbro's copyright of My Little Pony are either blind or stupid or both, because it obviously does.

As such, despite how good it may look, I'm pretty much just going to forget that this thing even exists, until the inevitable news that it has been buried by Hasbro comes along.

(EDIT) Just to be clear, I'm not saying I want the game to be killed, because I don't. I'd love to play this game if it ever saw the light of day. I'm just saying that it is almost assuredly going to be killed, and, as such, I don't want to invest any interest or hype into it. I hope I'm 100% wrong and it does make it, without getting C&D'd into oblivion. (/EDIT)

Looks like this game has been available for a while, but I wasn't aware of it until now. It's the follow up to the first two Canterlot Siege games, and is more of the same tower defense sort of thing, except even more complicated. And you're playing as the villains this time.

Haven't played much of it yet, and certainly haven't beaten it yet, so I don't have any l33t strategies or anything, except that a few fully upgraded Gildas are god, at least in the early game, especially when paired with a Changeling or two. But then, pairing the short-ranged power hitters with the non-damaging slow-down characters was a good strategy in the previous two games as well, so that's nothing new, really.

Okay, I am not a lawyer, but this right here seems like some supreme bullshit to me. Fan videos and games that use characters and/or clips from the actual show are one thing, whether they are monetized or not, but I don't see how Hasbro can have any claim whatsoever on original music that is merely inspired by the show. If actual sound clips from the show are being used in the songs, or if the music in question is a remix of one of the songs from the show, then yeah, maybe then they have a case, but in some of the ones being hit by this, that's not the case at all. And if, as EQD surmises, it's actually because of the pony images in the videos associated with the music, rather than the music itself, then why does the claim mention "audio content" to which Hasbro should have zero right to claim (in my non-lawyer-ish opinion, at least), given that they had zero creative input into it?

Again, I am not a lawyer, so if someone wants to explain how I'm talking out of my ass here, then feel free. I won't be mad (assuming, of course, that I am actually, demonstratively talking out of my ass here).

(EDIT)

Then again, if Hasbro is trying to copyright the term "brony" (the news for which somehow completely eluded me until now) or whatever the hell is happening there, then they'll fucking try anything, I guess. *facepalm*

(/EDIT)

So I was watching that and thinking, yeah, that's a pretty cool pony-fied take on the Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia intro, and I thought that was all it was going to be. Then it got to the end and I was like, wait, there's an actual game associated with this? As it turns out, there is. (EDIT) And, apparently, it's almost a year old. How have I not heard of this before now, I wonder. (/EDIT)

Remember this? That MLP:FiM tower defense game? Yeah, well, here is the sequel.

Here's my way for getting past Nightmare Moon, at least on the first spiral looking map. First, put a Lyra just below the first turn (coming down from the top) and a bit to the left. Boost her attack and speed to 4 each. Then put a second Lyra in that little groove just at the final turn going into Canterlot. Again, boost her attack and speed to 4 each. Then put a Dr. Whooves between the two Lyras and boost his range to 5. Then go back to the Lyras and get their attack and speed up to 5. Lastly, try to get the range on the two Lyras as high as you can (I can usually get them to 3 each). That should be enough to beat Nightmare Moon at wave 10.

After that, though, you're on your own. Finish upgrading the ponies you have out there, then start putting some of the others. I was able to get up to around wave 42 or so before losing, so far. Don't neglect the ponies' super abilities (e.g. Octavia's constant stream or Bon Bon's explosive attack) or the support ponies (Zecora, Wild Fire, etc.) or the super abilities from the Princesses. Each have their own tab at the bottom.