Weird 3DS Double Exposures

In my experimentation with the 3DS camera, I discovered 3dswigglegram.com, a website which allows you to convert MPO files (the file type the 3DS uses for its 3D photos) to animated gifs.

This is the resulting wigglegram for this image, correctly aligned and dutifully wiggling.

It does this in a beautifully elegant way in-browser, by showing you each of the two separate images stored in the file, and two sliders you can use to align them. This creates animations which can be adjusted depending on where you want the focal point of your image to be, and in the process you get to see these oddly pretty misaligned negative images.

Sometimes these warped and dreamy overlaid images look cooler than the animation or photo itself, and it's really fun to play around with, to shift those sliders around. I love the extremely saturated colours and the stark black in all of them.

They create this wonderful alien world, and I love how two versions of the same image combined like this conjures a sense of wrongness. It's such good shorthand for unease or altered consciousness. Looking at these, I just think: Yeah. That's what it's like, baby. 

They're perfectly crunchy and unpleasant. I'm vaguely reminded of David Lynch's Dune and its gloopy special effects. 

I love them. 

Me & My Mario

Here he is. My dear Mario. I've had him for about nine months now (he is so young), and I simply adore him. You can probably understand why by looking at him up close. His stitching is divine. His material is soft. He's shaped just right.

I think my favourite element of his construction is the little red loop he has on the back of his head. This means he can attach easily to a bag to become a comically large bag charm (this honestly makes me feel powerful).

You can also simply hang him up anywhere you like. If he's naughty, he'll go up on the wall until he behaves better. Usually though, I don't feel the need to do this. It's much more common that I have Mario sitting (or lying down) next to me. He might rest on a pillow while I write, or nestle with me before bed.

He's just my sweet little guy. 

I Have Become Enlightened

Have you ever perused YouTube late at night, at say, two in the morning, and suddenly located a new favourite YouTuber? Someone who makes some oddly perfect video, brought to you as an angel might in a dream? Well, this happened to me the other night, when I glimpsed this video glistening expectantly in the sidebar:

Hmm. An unassuming bloke playing three hundred dusty PC games from one mega-CD? And it's an hour long? Sign me up. Take me away. I am ready.

This is 'DOS Storm', a channel going over DOS games. You know, like Minesweeper. Classic. 

There's a charm and ease to this guy which is brought out really well in this chunky, 300-game video. But the way he goes over miscellaneous, varied DOS game demos in minute detail really speaks to me. This sort of excavation is thrilling. I love the strange and often dated creative choices so many of these games make.

What is this? It's Penny's Arcade (1996).

I get the sense, watching this video, that I could watch it for hours. That I could sit back and watch this stretching on for eternity, until I'd learned every last tiny detail of every DOS game ever made. And then maybe it'd start over, spool out forever, a personal heaven. 

Many of the games he showcases are simplistic in this very particular way, and there's an immense joy to be had in these, but others strike me as wonderfully designed, eclectic, unique gems. Look at this thing, for example:

I love that.

Really interesting and good video. It's nice to be reminded of the sheer endless expressive possibilities that exist. If there's a way to invent some nonsense, people will do it. 

Reviewing J2ME Games: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a side-scrolling shooter made by Smallfry in 2007. It's a bullet hell situation, where you must take out attackers as the screen relentlessly pushes you rightwards. Simple, beautiful, try not to die.

There are certain stylish elements to this game. The title screen is this hyperlink blue with a simple, beautiful logo, which appears with a pretty acoustic guitar flourish, and as you play you hear frightening, discordant piano, which beautifully escalates when you get a pick-up into a briefly slightly more hopeful tune.

We see a little text introduction to the game, some flavour text about the Nautilus, and then we're thrust into the main screen: a lush underwater world with shadowy sharks lurking in the background.

Many things will shoot balls of energy at you. The ocean is thick with enemies. You simply have to avoid and destroy as many of them as possible until you succumb to the war of the sea, and enter your delicious high score.

It took me three tries to beat the high score. Now it's just a game against myself. Behold, my personal best. I am the 20,000 Leagues champion. And I love it. 

51 Wears

I've been using an app that lets you catalogue your clothes and record outfits and see stats about the composition of your wardrobe, etc, for a while. 

It's called Whering, one of those perfectly confused business names that is just slightly off a relevant normal English word. Tumbler, Flicker, Wearing. Twitter was, in relation to these names, pretty clever. An actual word, a good and whimsical synonym for talking, and really gorgeous when combined with calling posts "tweets". Nothing will ever be quite the same. The linguistic design is insane. It's too good.

Whering has this conspicious feel of plucky startup about it. They seem heavily invested in testing features. One of those features is the brand new UNWRAPPED. That is, a Spotify Wrapped, the ornately animated slideshow that shows you end-of-year stats about who and what you listened to on Spotify, but for the wardrobe organisation app Whering. Although in this case, it's a quarterly review, which seems both appropriate and fashion-y, and deeply insane.

Let's investigate my personal statistics, shall we?

***

The first shocking and tantalising statistic is that I have, apparently, worn 35 items of clothing between January and March. Cool.

Next, we can see my TOP 3 HIGHEST WEARS. At number one are my boots, which I've been wearing the whole time. At number two is a long cardigan, very nice, very comfortable and I wear it a lot in the house. And at number three is my jacket. That's because it's cold sometimes. Very good.

Next, bizarrely, it shows me my TOP 3 LOWEST WEARS, which is really begging for a tie, and yes, we have three perfectly tied items. That's not very satisfying.

My MOST WORN OUTFIT is this combo of grey jogging bottoms, a red t-shirt, and a navy jumper, which is very real. I guess I wore that one a lot. And it was comfy as hell. Outfit construction, though, is a bit on the clunky side, so every time you record an outfit in Whering you have to essentially add a new outfit to your library of outfits, and it's then its own particular outfit that you have to go back to and select on any other day that you wear the same outfit. Except you won't do that, you'll make a new outfit instead, because it's way too much hassle.

This is my most worn outfit only because I went back and added it to later days instead of what I almost always do instead, make a new outfit that's definitely the same as a previous one. It's a structural issue.

These stats and their presentation are a bit awkward, but nevertheless, I do enjoy looking at the info, figuring out how many times I wore my jacket. Don't worry, I say to myself.

It was 41.

Donkey Kong's Frightening Bananza

I've been playing a lot of Donkey Kong Bananza lately. The great feeling of unstoppable power the game gives you by allowing you to transform into a bigger monkey and smash almost everything in sight feels engineered to make a toddler throw up. It's so frenetic that the game's camera can't keep up, desperately trying to follow Kong as he tunnels madly into another mountain, ending up squashed pathetically against the rock face. And the player doesn't care, drunk on rock-pummelling, enjoying it maybe even more because the rock is up against your face and you can't see a thing.

It's a weird game in many respects. The other animals dear Donkey Kong can become are deeply ugly and mostly not that helpful, not as much as Big Monkey who can Smash. The 'Bananza State' is presented as a special form that helps Donkey Kong in times of need, when he needs to access a unique ability, but in reality, you're never really leaving Bananza mode. Why would I be a small monkey when I could be a big monkey with a huge, juicy ass?

Last night as I write this, I obtained Donkey Kong's elephant form, which can suck up vast amounts of rocks, and even dangerous and frightening lava. Elephants can do that sort of thing. There's an exhilaration to be had here, sucking up the walls around you, eating that lava, formerly dangerous, now yummy. The elephant's domain is a rainy one, beset by storms, and the elephants you speak to wear raincoats. They're probably the most appealing NPC animals in the game - and the raincoats are a big part of that. I love the way they speak, in gibberish, but with theatrically lilting voices. They feel very much like talking to the most dramatic freaks of Breath of the Wild.

And there is, overall, an interesting Breath-of-the-Wild quality to this game. Not just in the explicit references, like when Donkey Kong falls into very familiar Tears of the Kingdom style terrain, but in the way the game unfolds. We visit layers that have some kind of disgusting problem going on, they're filled with poison juice or weird mud, and you have to have to solve the area nastiness - just like in Tears. The smashing itself evokes those mounds of explodable or smashable rock Link occasionally has to deal with. I'm feeling like, hmm... what if I opened up Punished Hyrule again? But then again, Link can't smash everything. More's the pity.

In any case, I like being Donkey Kong, fists out and ready to destroy the whole world. There seems to be almost no use for his zebra form, but I don't mind. That thing is hideous.

 

I am Finally Listening

It feels embarrassing to note the gulf between every individual aspect of a language you have to learn. To have to study listening and reading and speaking seperately, as if none of them touch at all. But it feels that way, often. Being able to read just doesn't mean I can hear. It seems like a joke, knowing hundreds of words and missing even the simplest ones when you listen, but this incongruous sense of... the senses is constant in language-learning. It's frightening.

Quistis greets Squall. What is she saying?

So I've decided to finally force myself to do something I've been saying I should do for a really long time: do some dedicated listening in my target language, so that I might maybe understand it on some level. Okay cool, great idea. This is easy enough for French - there are French YouTube channels making hour long videos about the ins and outs of Nintendo history, and stuff like that. Done. Japanese however, has been more challenging for me.

Exactly the kind of video I need.

You'd think maybe I could just watch tons of anime and become a big anime freak, but it's weirdly hard to find Japanese subtitles. A lot of recommended Japanese learner-appropriate podcasts are either pretty boring to me, or have no transcript to follow along with. I realised that I really wanted a visual component. Rather than relying purely on text, seeing images just provides so much context alongside subtitles. But where French YouTube is pretty similar to its anglophone counterpart in terms of general available content style, Japanese YouTube seems very different.

There are plenty of vlogs, people taking trips and showing their day to an audience, but a lot of those are very quiet videos that use subtitles instead of talking. Where, I'm asking, are the quirky videos detailing all the glitches in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in this language? 

I don't know the answer, nor how to locate Japan's prickliest video essayist, but I think I've found what I need: A lengthy let's play series for Final Fantasy VIII. This is an 81-video series made by someone called "GAME COMMENTARY SISS", which will keep me occupied for at least a month. And then I'll just watch that sort of thing until I accumulate a thousand hours or something. And in theory, I'll start to understand better. We'll see. I'm not sure learning a language is a real thing that actually happens to people. I think it's made up.