All right, let's try this again.

A while back, I drew a Pokémon webcomic where I played through two Pokémon games (Blue Version and Silver Version) and riffed on lines of dialogue that caught my eye. (Which is basically what I do when I play video games anyway.) The result was an unhinged, tongue-in-cheek journey through an odd world of insane professors, utterly incompetent criminal organizations, unnecessarily detailed environments, and the side effects of using too many Repels. I'd previously hosted it on a webcomic hosting site, but that site went belly-up some years ago, so I thought I'd bring the comic back online here so more people can enjoy it. I think it's hilarious.

I'll be putting the comics up on the blog sequentially, so first up, here's the title page! It's called "Trainer Wants to Battle" because so much of the dialogue in Pokémon games comes from the things Trainers say to you before and after you battle them.

 Also, the past few weeks have been a learning experience for me. I was experiencing severe social media burnout, feeling like all my attempts to post and network and build friendships on social media were somehow making me feel even less connected, more isolated, and like I just couldn't get people adequately interested in my work (or indeed me) no matter how hard I tried. 

(Read on for self-reflection that has absolutely nothing to do with Pokémon webcomics.)

Literary thoughts

 You'll have to pardon the lack of new (old?) content. I've been dealing with a lot, my creative well seems to have run dry in this summer heat, and I've been taking some time off to take care of myself because I am very bad at resting. As much as I'd love to just be able to go nonstop and be ultra-productive all the time and write fifty novels a year... humans don't work like that.

One of the things I've been doing while resting is reading (not research papers, surprisingly). There's something emotionally, mentally, and spiritually healing about the power of a story to temporarily take you to a different world, to dredge up fond feelings and nostalgic memories, to allow you to be right there looking over the characters' shoulders, sympathizing with their struggles and celebrating their successes. I've been reading a series of books set in the 1940's that I remember from when I was a kid, and it's been giving me those warm cozy nostalgia vibes. Okay, I'm not quite that old, but it reminds me of my grandparents' neighborhood, of simpler and quieter times, much like the effect of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Anyhow, I guess the whole business has got me thinking about some questionable literary advice I've heard over the years, which then of course makes me want to vent about it on my blog where I'm not actually directly debating with anyone. (I hate arguing. It's so pointless and never gets either party what they want and all you end up with is hurt feelings. I think it's much more sensible to just present your opinion and leave it for people to think about.)

The Zelda timeline explained (possibly)

I've been sitting around, clearly with too much time on my hands and reading too much Legend of Zelda info, and it suddenly occurred to me how the Zelda timeline might possibly make sense in-universe. I sent a big long text-message essay to my sister about it, and she thought it made sense too, so I thought I might as well write it up.

Now, this isn't really anything mind-blowing. I'm not going to speculate on the meaning of some obscure half-hidden graphic asset, or invoke the hypothetical missing fourth piece of the Triforce, or put together a Tolkien-esque three-volume history of Hyrule that I'll insist is way better than anything Eiji Aonuma can come up with. I'm just going to apply some real-world historical analysis principles and invite the reader to reexamine the entire idea of the timeline from a different angle. If you disagree with my stance, that's totally okay. I'm just putting some thoughts out there.

Read on after the jump (spoilers ahead)!

Video game ramblings: prices, princesses, and the casual/hardcore divide

 No, there's no typo in the title. Today I want to discuss a sustainable video game industry, appeasing two very different subtypes of gamer, and my thoughts on Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom.

Read on after the jump!

Video game ramblings: cancellations, consoles, and how to make a bad mobile RPG

 Is this blog turning into less of an original artistic content blog and more of a ranty gaming blog? Perhaps the question I should really be asking myself is, does anybody actually care either way?

With some recent occurrences in video gamery, and just overall thinking about things in my spare time, I've come up with another batch of items to discuss and no better place to put them. Read on if you're bored enough.

Video game ramblings: the unecessary sequel

 Again, it's time for more random rants about stuff that's been on my mind and I can't find a real excuse to write it up, so I'm just going to collect it all into this blog post and hope no one notices.

Below the jump you'll find more stuff about Pokémon (although surprisingly not about Scarlet and Violet this time), Digimon, Zelda, Super Mario Bros., filmmaking, and web design just because.

Video game ramblings

 I'm not even gonna make up an excuse for this; I just wanted to blog out stuff about video games. (Spoiler alert for Zelda and Pokémon games!)

What I'd like to see more of from Pokémon

With it now being more than a year since the release of The Indigo Disk, and still absolutely no new information on Pokémon Legends: Z-A since the very vague teaser trailer back in March, as well as my recent various rantings on what Scarlet and Violet could have done better, I figure now is an opportune time to reflect on what I like about Pokémon as a franchise and a game series, and what I hope to see from it moving forward. (Also, happy new year and such.) (This post is rife with spoilers. You have been warned.)

 More old art!

Neopets had several paint brush colours in the early days (before even I started playing) that were rather swiftly retired and converted into a completely different aesthetic (such as Glass becoming Tyrannian) as the art style of the site became more polished. Unicorn (down at the bottom of the page) was a colour with some cool potential, but in reality it was just... a white Neopet with a doofy horn sticking out of its head.

So, I thought it would be fun to play around with ideas for a "revamped" Unicorn style that actually altered a pet's appearance more and... looked better. Man, I'd love a qilin Moehog!

Also featuring my redesign for Grarrl physiology, because as a paleoartist, the canon designs for Grarrls and Chombies are a huge pet peeve of mine (or were when I still played the website, I guess). I hate that they have all the paleontological accuracy of a 1960's Saturday morning cartoon, and I'm a huge advocate for taking the time and effort to make sure current representations of dinosaurs in the media are scientifically-informed. 

Dinosaurs are not fantasy creatures that exist only in popular imagination--they are as real as living animals, just a few million years removed from us. I'm not saying everyone's got to stay on the cutting edge of the latest scientific literature, but would it kill filmmakers and toy designers to, say, put feathers on theropods, make sure their sauropods aren't dragging their tails, and just stop pronating those hands pleaseandthanks?

I'm barely letting the Jurassic Park/World franchise slide with this, simply because the original novel, and several parts in the films, state that the creatures in the movies aren't "real" dinosaurs, but genetic chimeras created for entertainment purposes, and the scientists are aware that their clones sometimes take some serious creative license. But everybody else needs a better excuse than "well, this is what dinosaurs looked like when I was a kid".

It's probably something silly to expect from a cartoony virtual pet website, but considering how gorgeous the rest of the Neopets artwork is, and the incredible amount of depth and lore the site contains that really make Neopia come alive, it's just too weird to me to have blobby kid-drawing-style dinosaurs waddling around an otherwise really sophisticated and well-designed world.

I mean no offense to Donna Williams and all the work she put in as the original (and at first only) Neopets artist, but as the franchise's aesthetic evolved and became more polished, Grarrls and Chombies should have gotten a glow-up as well. Many (actually most) Neopets species underwent redesigns before the advent of pet customisation, and to me it just feels like those two Tyrannian species are painfully still stuck in the site's Stone Age (pun intended).

/nerdy rant

 Couple old Pokémon illustrations.

Having just finished Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and started Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (the Switch remaster, which makes me feel really really old because I played the original when it first came out), I've had game design on the brain. It got me to pondering what Pokémon can do better moving forward, so we don't get another title with the weaknesses of Scarlet and Violet.

Thought I'd change it up a bit from the string of Zelda comics with more old art. Back in the day, someone created a "PokéFusion" web page that combined two different random sprites of Gen I Pokémon, and it became a thing in the Pokémon art community to draw these amusing hybrid creatures. I tried my hand at a few myself. 

After I posted my feelings about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, and as I've been playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom with their impeccable game design, I got to thinking about what exactly goes into a great Pokémon game, and what I'd like to see in future installments of the main series.

Koraidon from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. 

I didn't dislike Scarlet and Violet, but I also didn't think they were the strongest entries in the core series. I feel like they had some good ideas and timely innovations, but didn't implement them to their utmost effectiveness. 

My main issue with SV is that in a nonlinear massive open-world RPG format, there really needs to be more for the player to do, and more ways to flesh out the game world, than the main plotline. Scarlet and Violet gave no compelling incentive to stray outside the path from one plot goal to the next, except for (extremely repetitive) Tera Raid Battles and the (occasional, very sparse) NPC trainer battle. A generous amount of sidequests would have really helped pad out the main plotline content in a meaningful way, like in Legends: Arceus (which I greatly enjoyed). 

I know Scarlet and Violet were trying to do the whole Zelda: Breath of the Wild thing, but I think maybe the developers should have more carefully scrutinized the really smart design choices that make BotW such a fantastic game, including the fact that BotW uses copious amounts of side quests to encourage you to explore off the beaten path, making full use of its enormous world map. When I played Pokémon Violet, I felt like I was constantly having to invent excuses to not have to zoom straight to the next plot destination and finish the game too quickly, and a tightly-designed game should create those excuses for you.

In addition, I feel like Paldea was extremely lacking in lore and development past, basically, the personalities of the named NPCs and the main (a.k.a. only) plotline. It's a big place with really not a whole lot going on outside of its towns--or even in its towns, which are mostly just buildings you can't enter and soulless menu-based shops. This is a shame and a real downgrade after every other previous core series game was crammed full of helpful and entertaining NPCs, usually some sort of addictive side activity or two (I loved Black 2 and White 2's Join Avenue and Pokéstar Studios), and busy environments that really helped bring the world to life. Scarlet and Violet, for all their fancy graphics and massive overworld roaming, ultimately aren't a whole lot but landscape, and landscape alone does not make an immersive RPG experience. 

Another, more minor quibble is that I feel like the player character customization took maybe one step forward and one step back in Scarlet and Violet. I loved the ability to customize your character's facial features in a more involved way than just changing the eye color and makeup, but I hated that you were stuck wearing variations of your school uniform the whole time, and most of the accessories were just not appealing (neither were most of the hairstyles, to be frank). The Hidden Treasure of Area Zero introduced a paltry handful of new outfits and accessories, but not even being able to individually choose what top and bottom you're wearing just feels extremely restrictive after the customization systems in previous Pokémon games. Hopefully they won't do that again, because it's not the 2000s anymore; games nowadays certainly have the memory capacity to let your characters wear whatever you want.

In summary, Scarlet and Violet sort of have the vibe of being cautiously noncommittal, like the developers wanted to make a mechanically innovative Pokémon game but didn't dare to inject a significant amount of personality into it, maybe in an attempt to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. The problem is that when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one and making a really vanilla game that lacks a solid creative direction. I think I can speak for a lot of Pokémon fans when I say that what got me hooked on the franchise, and has kept me playing all these years, is the experience of exploring and being immersed in vibrant, lively worlds with plenty of quirky charm around every corner. Scarlet and Violet just don't give that same type of satisfaction; it's more an exercise in speaking to the like five NPC's in a city with unique dialogue, and then wandering off into vast empty spaces to train your Pokémon before heading for the next plot point. That's the sort of RPG gameplay model we outgrew in the 90's. In 2022, and from Pokémon, I expect more.

Honestly I want to see another Pokémon Gold/Silver(/Crystal) remake. Generation II was my favorite and I want more reasons to doink around in Johto. (I actually started playing Crystal again recently and fell in love with it all over again. Gen II was brilliant. We need more like it.)

Social media stinks.

I'm stepping away from social media until humanity can get its act together, and I'm writing this post to encourage you, dear reader, to critically examine how you use social media, how it is affecting you, and if there is anything you feel you should change about it. I don't enjoy being a Negative Nellie, but with the prevalence of social media in everyone's lives nowadays, I think it's a topic that requires serious consideration, and more people need to speak out about how much harm it can cause.

I don't think I would label myself a social media addict by any means. I could barely handle Facebook once a day. I really only signed up for Twitter/X because I was hoping more people on there would be interested in my work than on Facebook. I even had an Instagram account for a period of time, but deleted it because the spambot comments on my posts were super obnoxious--and I got more of those than comments from real people. Suffice to say I already had a pretty low opinion of social media in general, but lately my opinion has just gone through the floor, and I've finally realized that the handful of ways I benefit from social media are not worth the heinous drawbacks.

I'm posting this not to expect you to sympathize with my problems, but because recently I have been made increasingly aware of just how toxic and detrimental social media can be, and I want to spread awareness in my admittedly small sphere of influence, because one never really knows who one is reaching and how it is affecting them. I'm writing this because I care about you, reader, and your mental well-being. I'm giving you permission to take care of yourself.

Social media is an open forum, and humanity can't handle those right now. In an ideal world, everything people say would have value and meaning. In reality, mental illness makes a lot of absolute rubbish come out of some people's minds. And one of the really unfortunate things about social media is how it gives the illusion that said senseless rubbish is on equal standing with actual intelligent reason. 

Just as bad, it gives mentally ill people the opportunity to connect with other mentally ill people, giving them a community where their insanity is validated, enabled, and normalized, which is probably the worst possible thing one could do for them. Mentally ill people often use social media to say and do things they could never get away with in real life, and even if you're not actively engaging with these people, it's still harmful to constantly be exposed to their insanity on a daily basis. And it's so pervasive and insidious that no matter how much blocking and filtering you apply, junk still gets through appallingly frequently. 

I'm all for freedom of speech to the widest reasonable extent, and I'm not saying we should (nor is it really possible to) turn the Internet into a dictatorship, but I'm really uncomfortable sharing the same website with the likes of conspiracy theorists and political radicals. If sane people usually try to stay as far away as possible from mentally ill people in real life, why are we being forced to come in constant contact with them on social media? 

No matter how many times I try to tell the social media recommendation algorithms that I'm not interested, crazy people's posts keep showing up in my news feed as "recommended", I have to read their comments every time I go to write a sane comment, and whenever I post something, I kind of cringe a little inside not knowing what kind of weird comments it's going to get. Social media platforms have a long way to go in the realm of actually caring enough about their users' safety to crack down on nonsense.

Social media ironically decreases the quality of people's social lives. (More like antisocial media.) Clinical studies have shown that social media usage contributes to increased feelings of depression, social anxiety, and low self-esteem in teens, but those issues definitely don't stop on your 18th birthday. Even though social media promises to connect you with millions of other human beings around the world, it actually enhances feelings of loneliness and isolation as your connections with people are limited to shallow "likes" and "lols". The Internet creates a horrifying virtual (un)reality that psychologically manipulates you into thinking your interactions and relationships with other users are meaningful, when in actuality they see you as nothing more than a name on a screen and some entertaining words.

Social media does not guarantee increased success in your career. I have written many, many, many posts about my failed attempts to find an audience for my work online. I tried for ten years. I'm exhausted and I have yet to regain all the money I poured into promotional and advertising efforts. When I wrote my first novel, I was given the impression that the Internet would make it easy for an indie author to find an audience--all I had to do was post on social media and the readers would flock to my work. Well, that couldn't have been further from the truth. 

What social media actually does is establish a system wherein users are attracted to accounts that post aggressively, competitively, and on-trend--regardless of what those accounts are actually peddling. Fast food corporations with savvy (and well-paid) social marketing teams have gobs of followers liking their entertaining daily memes, while nobody cares when an author posts saying they published a novel. The priorities of the social media collective simply do not align with the priorities of anybody who values quality over quantity, and if you're not willing to attempt to run that insane rat race of social media content creation, you're going to get mowed over.

So yes, there are some serious flaws with social media--flaws which I could no longer ignore because they were causing me massive amounts of unnecessary stress. I may post on Facebook and X now and again, but they are definitely no longer part of my daily routine. Or even my weekly routine. And again, I strongly urge you, whoever you are, to consider stepping away from social media and finding some better uses of your time. Go outside and touch grass, people. Hug your family. Bake a cake. Visit a museum. Rediscover the wonderfully superior offline world around you.

Truth, context, perception, and planets

Rather differently from my usual fantasy doodles and occasional opinionated rants, today I've got a bit of an art history essay to share.

I recently watched a very intriguing and thought-provoking lecture by Randall Rosenfeld, archivist for the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, where he discussed the late 19th-century astronomical illustrations of Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. (You can view a gallery of Trouvelot's lovely renderings here: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/the-trouvelot-astronomical-drawings-atlas)

At the crux of Rosenfeld's presentation was a question he had no satisfactory answer for: why are some of Trouvelot's illustrations almost photographic in their accuracy (such as the Orion Nebula), while others appear highly foreign and almost caricatures of their subjects' true appearance (such as Jupiter)? Trouvelot was a trained and very skilled artist, using the best telescopes of his time. When his lithographs were published, they were widely praised by professional astronomers who saw nothing wrong with the way he had depicted anything. Other artists before him actually rendered these subjects with more accuracy (you can see a good selection of early Jupiter artwork here), so what was going on?

Rosenfeld ended the lecture with the question remaining open. But as I was absorbing the information he presented, a hypothesis sprung into my mind and I wondered if it might not be along the right track. I emailed Rosenfeld but never heard back from him, so I'm posting the contents of that email here (slightly edited to read less like an email and more like a formal essay), in the hopes that maybe it will help someone along in figuring out the answer to this interesting historical conundrum.

Here are some old sketches of anthro Neopets wearing customization items from the website.

I will be completely honest, I feel like the idea of allowing you to dress up your Neopets sounded fun on paper, and the old site artists came up with some really lovely clothing items (as evidenced here), but I think a lot of the clothes just didn't translate well into the fact that on the website, owned Neopets have much more animal-like physiologies than many canon characters. As a result, wardrobe pieces that would look really good on something shaped more like a human just come across as a bit doofy on, say, a stubby-legged quadruped or a cartoony-proportioned dinosaur.

For example, back when I still played the website, it annoyed me that the real(?) Blynn's pose had her sitting on her haunches, so any tops, pants, or skirts I put on her made her look squat and fat, when Zafaras are actually quite svelte. Clothes looked just as bad on Hyren, and it didn't help that the new Grundo artwork gives them even shorter torsos than before, when I consistently imagine Grundos looking like Gorix from the Return of Dr. Sloth plot. There's a huge discrepancy between how Neopets are portrayed in canon material and the graphics used for user-generated Neopets, and you can't just slap clothes on the latter and assume it'll come across the same as the former. 

I just feel like overhauling the pet graphics and introducing a dress-up system was unnecessary, somewhat devalued painted pets who used to have unique (i.e. non-palette-swap) artwork, and in many cases actually made the species designs less appealing (cough Zafaras and Grundos cough). Unfortunately, it was a decision probably made by the fact that offering wardrobe items for real money would likely be a great source of revenue, because plenty of site players aren't as pedantic about design as I am and just want to stick some shiny clothes on their virtual pet.

I mean, it worked, and that's where most of Neopets's revenue has likely been coming from since they introduced pet customization, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

At least it's better than (shudder) NFTs.

/opinionated rant

Hollyweird must go

Much of this blog post is based on an op-ed letter I sent to a newspaper, which didn't get published, and I'm not really surprised because I'm kind of a maverick. But it's mavericks who get stuff done. And I felt that the message was important enough that I can at least share it on my blog.

I write this with the full knowledge that it will shock and offend people. And I don't mean the kind of offensive that's morally repugnant. I mean offending people who have gone along with society's status quo and lulled themselves into believing they don't have to make an effort. Who prioritize money and comfort over integrity. They won't like what I'm about to say, because as a Christian, I follow a divine Master who is inviting humanity to rise from the slums of mediocrity and minimal effort and discover the joy, fulfilment, and potential of walking a higher path and not settling for the devil's destructive lies.

Christian leader Jeffrey R. Holland put it masterfully in this talk about what it means to truly be a disciple of Christ. It's not the easy or popular thing to do, but history has shown that what is easy and popular is never what is truly worthwhile. 

To accomplish anything with real meaning and impact, people have to stretch themselves, think for themselves, and stand their moral ground, and a prime example of where this isn't happening is the entertainment and media industry. And not just the creators and executives--I'm also calling out audiences for letting things slide.

Real talk: Hollywood is crumbling, and it's time for a revolution on both fronts.

The tired myth of the "Mary Sue"

Today, I'd like to discuss a notion that's been on my mind for a while now: the concept of the "Mary Sue" and why writers need to just let it go. I'd been trying to wait for a good opportunity to appropriately soapbox, but then I figured, there's no better place to soapbox than one's own blog. And yes, I look at the visitor statistics, so I know people are seeing this. Time for another essayrant (new portmanteau I just invented).

As someone who regrettably grew up doing a lot of writing networking over the Internet (I feel like no one should ever spend their youth doing any sort of networking over the Internet), I was quickly exposed to the world of fanfiction, and the world of people who read and discuss fanfiction. Both are equally terrifying in their own ways.

Fanfiction is exactly what it claims to be: original fiction pieces written by fans of a fictional work, purely for fun (or sometimes more for social clout in the fan community). There is no quality control much like independent publishing. I have read some very, very good fanfiction by talented writers that could easily be turned into licensed novels. I have also read some fanfiction that would only make the publishing cut with a lot of editing and much more skill development on the part of the writer.

But you know what? In fanfiction, an amateur labor of love for something you're emotionally invested in, writing skill doesn't actually matter all that much, in my opinion. What I really think is a bigger problem is when other fans read said fanfiction and proceed to critically tear it apart unsolicited--or worse, publicly denounce it and make fun of it. And nowhere have I seen more of this than attacks on what are perceived as "Mary Sues"--or, to put the issue in its real light, character shaming.

Why I'm not going back to Neopets

It's time for another highly opinionated rant, and with a provocative title like that, you know you want to read more. Actually probably nobody cares, but sometimes it just feels good to blog out my feelings, especially when it's a subject that I feel passionately about and has been a big part of my creative life. Besides, on the off chance that people actually pay attention to my Neopets work and are wondering why I no longer submit to the Neopian Times, am not participating in the fan community, etc., this post will explain it.

Spoilers: If you actually like the direction Neopets has been going lately, you will not agree with this post. You have been warned. I'm not trying to start an argument, I'm just feeling some feelings right now and want to air them for anybody curious, since at one point I was a mildly prolific Neopian Times writer.

Also, this is a long read, so buckle up. I've got several bones to pick.

Six Things Indie Authors Should Actually (Probably) Never Do

This post is going to be a bit rantier than usual, but as I've reflected on my best and my most stressful times as an independent author, I've realized that there were some key activities that stressed me out tremendously--but that I was told were absolutely necessary to "make it big" in what is, let's face it, a completely insane and unpredictable market where success is never guaranteed.

So I've composed this list as an attempt to help my fellow indie authors who may be feeling as stressed and confused as I once was. If anything on this list sticks out to you as something that's causing you a lot of grief, you may want to seriously reexamine how much good it's actually doing you. 

And if you skim this list and just think "What a load of rubbish! All of these things work great for me!", read number six and all will be made clear. (Hence the "probably" part of the post title.)

Author Thoughts: Marketing (or lack thereof)

As I'm between projects right now, I thought maybe I would take some time to discuss authorly topics that have been on my mind lately, in the hopes that what I have to say might help my fellow authors and aspiring authors. I'm sure my opinions won't be for everyone, but maybe they'll mean something to someone who really needs it. I've had some unusual experiences as a professional author, and maybe there are a few other folks like me out there who need to feel validated.

Today I want to talk about marketing, and why I don't do it. I used to try. Check the "opinions" tag for my series of blog posts about why it didn't work well for me. My miserable experiences with marketing also helped launch me on the path to discovering that not only was marketing not one of my strong suits, but I also just plain do not want to market my work. Some of what I have to say here may be repetitive of some of what I've said in those previous posts, but I feel that it's well worth reiterating.

(Please note that if you are an author who is finding fulfillment in marketing, this post is not meant to criticize how you run your career. This post is for those of us who do not have your skillset, find marketing a horrible experience, and wonder if there's any alternative for the modern independent author. So if you're sitting there reading this like "but marketing has done wonders for my books!" then probably this post isn't for you.)

(This post is also expressly not for people who concern themselves with making a living off of their books. I'm grateful to be in a position where I do not need to write for a living, so I don't have to pay attention to how much money my books are making. This post is for people who have the means to write for the sake of writing, but I'll talk a little bit more about that later.)