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posted: 2025-06-05

Q2 2025 Media Report

Greetings once again to all you interested investors. I have once again returned from the depths of hell (otherwise known as the modern-day United States of America), to report to you my goings-on. Can you believe it has already been three months since my last media update? I cannot fathom how quickly time has moved between my previous update and today. As it happens, three months have come and gone in the blink of an eye, and in those three months, yes, I did happen to do more things. I did so many more things in fact, that I reckon I cannot share every single one of them with you here today. AS such, I will be sharing the most critical, most pertinent, most central features of my April, May, and June of 2025. And with this blustering introduction now taking up more words than is needed, let me begin with the big one.

I Got Married

Yes indeed, I got married. “But this isn’t a video game!” I hear you protest. You’re right! It’s not a video game! This ain’t Fire Emblem Awakening, buddy.

“Getting married” is easily the most important thing that happened in this Quarter 2, so you’ll have to deal with that. I’m happy tor report that there are a number of pieces of media that I played which now orbit my wedding day in such a way that I will never be able to consider them again without also considering the days before and the day of my legal union to my lovely wife.

We got married on May 25th, 2025. She was gorgeous. She said I looked “so handsome”. We threw a wonderful party for all our friends and family who could attend. There are some matters that I think are worth sharing, and then there are some that are worth keep to ourselves, to sit within the beautiful museums of our minds, to be shared only through a visit with an oral accompaniment. So while I have plenty of notes on my sentiments throughout the process of “getting married” 1, I want to instead report general facts of the actual weekend.

The wedding really began when family started arriving on the Friday before the ceremony. Of course, nothing really interesting happened on Friday. We went to CostCo to pick up stuff. That’s not interesting. We went to lunch and then some of us in the younger generation (i.e. not the parents) went to the University of Michigan’s Computer and Video Game Archive. This journey is interesting enough, but not related to “getting married” in the way I want to generally report, so let’s just leave this one here for now.

The night before our wedding, my wife and I (and our families) put on a catered event for the guests to meet and greet each other. We had Buddy’s Pizza, and boxed wine, and Mom’s homemade royal icing-iced sugar cookies. We bounced around chatting with family members from nearby and with friends who had traveled all the way from the extrema of the country to be there. It was wonderful to get to finally meet some internet friends in-person after nearly half a decade of spending countless Saturday evenings together in a single Discord call fan-dubbing the Ace Attorney franchise. The collision of friends and family all in one place, and with many different collections of friends at that, was something of a beautiful fusion event. “You’ve got a lot of fun characters here!” said my Midwestern American relatives who may have never met a non-binary person in their lives until that night.

Many photos were taken that night, though my favorite has to be the one where, after the internet friend group photos were all taken, a subset of the group remained posed next to me. In observing those who had left the scene, I understood what was happened. Those who remained embracing me had seen the Smosh video and thought to themselves “we should recreate this with voltage” 2. I allowed an embarrassed grin and two thumbs up. It was a lot of fun :]



After this meet-and-greet event kicked off, a wave of calm washed over me. Everything was going to go just fine 3. I was the most relaxed person the entire rest of the weekend. I told my friends that night I felt the gravity of the moment, and was letting myself fall through it, unafraid of the landing. I knew that every single one of the moments would live on in my life’s canon. People will ask me one day what my wedding day was like and I’ll say “it was everything I hoped it would be and more. It was a perfect day.”

Of course, I don’t think that would satisfy many people. They might want to know what I did on the actual day I got married. In truth, the day was so perfect, with so little drama, that it makes for a pretty uninteresting story. A story’s got to have tension and conflict and drama, and the closest thing to that for me was the game of Euchre I played with my groomsmen two hours or so before the ceremony. The day was so perfectly executed, in fact, that the Euchre game wrapped up exactly as it was time for the first look and period of private vows. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

I “took notes” on my Wedding Day, sure. I woke up, I went down to the hotel lobby top eat a cheap continental breakfast 4, then returned to the room I shared with my brother to get ready. Once dressed in roughly 65% of my wedding attire, I retired to the hotel room chair and proceeded to play Metroid on my 3DS (more on this later) while my brother watched Across the Spiderverse. It was a lovely calm, which was never interrupted even as we made our way to the wedding venue around noon. Then the men and I got dressed, had some photos taken, and then we had our aforementioned game of Euchre 5. And after that game, it was time for me to see the lady who was to be my bride, and to whom I was to be be her husband.

I don’t dare spoil the feeling of seeing one’s beloved in their wedding attire for the first time. I describe to you, dear reader, what it feels like to see someone stand before you, their physical beauty matching the beauty of their soul. I hope that everyone gets to experience this feeling in some capacity. It doesn’t have to be identical to mine, frankly it shouldn’t be identical to mine, but I hope they can have the same human feeling I had upon seeing her in her dress there in that stairwell. There are some things we should not share, some things we cannot share, and some things that are best not shared for one reason or another.

We walked down the aisle to a rendition of Tifa’s Theme from Final Fantasy VII. We kissed fourteen times at the clinking sound of our guests’ spoons against their glasses 6. We had our first dance to Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon”. We closed the night to “Runaway With Me” by Carly Rae Jepsen 7.

We made the day ours. We embraced our quirks to create a wedding ceremony, a party, a weekend that was entirely characteristic of us. We rejected the notions of modern marriages that we felt spoke contrary to our relationship. And we did NOT bankrupt ourselves, thank goodness. I couldn’t have asked for anything better than the day we made and were given.

Please understand that my succinctness about my own wedding day is not meant to imply the notion that I had a bad time. Did you not read what I had said a few paragraphs ago? The day was quite certainly perfect. I was living in the moment. I was letting my life take its course. I was reveling in a job well done. I was appreciating the love afforded to me over my first twenty-six years of life. Some might call it “a blur”, but I think that discredits the feeling of actually embracing the moment as a whole. How could I be worried about how I appeared, or what I was doing when I was so focused on the joy I was feeling the whole day? I have to rely on the testimony of others to learn about my wedding day, because I cannot tell you about everything that happened at my wedding. I can only discuss the joy of the day, the peace of being surrounded by people whom I loved and who loved me, and the wholeness I felt in my soul in that moment.


okay, that’s enough of that, let’s talk some video games.


Video Games (for real this time)

In the process of getting married, my wife and I, of course, needed something to do besides prepare all our wedding business. So here, I present to you all two specific games and some elaborate ramblings on the nature of “playing a video game when big other things are happening”. Lord knows I don't do enough already.

Metroid (NES)

As a person who these days takes pride in his willingness to “try video games”, there come points in my hobbyist career where I need to back up my words with action. I never pretend that I am particularly skilled at video games, but I do happen to enjoy games that present themselves as mazes of some capacity. Yes, I happen to like the Metroid franchise quite a dang bit. But I have to declare, I had never played the original Metroid longer than a few minutes because, well, it was intimidating! I didn’t know where to go, and I wanted an immediate form of gratification that the original Metroid just didn’t give me.

When my good pal Game&Burger started their Metroid Map Analysis in their discord server, they opened my eyes to the truth of the original NES game. They showed me that the game is far less about exploring the world for every little secret, and more about finding the appropriate amount of resources to effectively handle the three major bosses in the game. They showed me something completely obvious that I took for granted: the only reason there are doors in Metroid is to change the direction the screen scrolls.



Knowing this truth changed the game for me for the better. this is my biggest takeaway from this playthrough: Metroid teaches the player to “expect secrets” by considering the way rooms scroll. I know that sounds stupid to say, but genuinely, simply understanding that a room being only a screen wide is reason enough to be suspicious made playing this game so much more fun. I will never forget the experience of being in “Wave Beam Grotto” the morning of my wedding, and should I ever replay Metroid, I imagine that when I return to this space, so too will my mind travel to that special day. Thank you GnB, your analysis managed to make the experience of playing Metroid NES far more mentally manageable.

Also, Liam Triforce made a video analyzing the original Metroid during my playthrough- and it’s really bad! It’s a well-made video, but wow, the body of Liam’s analysis is off the mark. Liam, at 12:36 in the video claims that the game encourages the player to fall into lava patches because of the fake lava in Kraid. Liam completely misses the fact that this room is vertical, and that this fake lava only appears in these vertical rooms, which the player should generally be suspicious of should they be paying attention to the game. Because Liam fails to even acknowledge the way the rooms scroll, I have to assume that this is not something he noticed during his playthrough, which kneecaps most of his analysis. Let’s not dwell on negativity for much longer, but also, can we acknowledge taht he pronounces “Sakamoto” as “suh-kah-muh-toe”? Get it together Lye-am trih-for-che 8.

Having met Metroid at its offerings, I can say with confidence that Metroid NES is an excellently designed video game. Its rules are consistent and it plays fair as it slowly increases the difficulty. I don’t mean to bemoan the modern Metroidvania meathead, but like, do yourself a favor and struggle with the lack of quality of life features. Metroid NES is a fantastic video game once you accept that the world does not need a map in the top right corner. So long as you can draw out a general structural layout of Zebes, the space is much more navigable than you might expect. Let yourself learn the rules of the game, and struggle in the process of meeting them! You might be surprised at how straightforward games like Metroid are to play And also, like, it’s okay to not clear this game within three hours on your first playthrough. Kill the demon in your brain that needs to see 8-bit Samus naked.

I’ve now beaten Super Mario Bros. 3 and Metroid in a single year…. maybe I ought to play the original Legend of Zelda next? Also, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a Metroid (NES) game. The elaboration of this point is left as an exercise to the reader.


The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy




And now we must discuss the game that I expect to define the Summer of 2025: Kazutaka Kodaka’s maniacal, epic The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. We are eleven endings deep with 101 hours committed play time, and I still wonder if I can even talk about this game in a coherent way. Maybe I’ll write something more once I finally make my way through this labyrinth and come out on the other side.

First and foremost, this game is a miracle. How is this a real game? How is this a game that exists at the scale that it does? How did they do it? I mean, I know they took out loans, I know that Tookyo Games was liable to bankrupt if this game flopped. I know the “lore” as we’ll call it once people start making those 80-hour “video essay” retrospectives of this video game equivalent of an epic. Yet still, what the actual hell? supposedly there are one-hundred endings in this game, and also Kodaka wants to add more as DLC? Look, if adding even more endings to this game saves scenarios from the gacha game mines, I’m all for it. I would love an entire story route where “Takumi get iPad”, and I’m NOT joking.

My lovely partner, now wife, and I play this game every other night for like 2.5 hours at a time on average. We’ll come home, go to the gym, come home again, eat dinner, and then play Hundred Line until it’s after 10:30 and then we’ll look for a good place to stop and get ready for bed. Playing Hundred Line has become part of our routine. It was how we spent our weeknights resting before weekends full of wedding planning. It is how we spend time with each other as we work around my regular travel responsibilities. It is our new futon game in the same way 1000xRESIST was earlier this year. In that sense,1000xRESIST was an excellent proof-of-concept; yes, we are happy to replace our previous habit of watching two episodes of a television show with playing a visual novel. Of course, this means that some nights we are watching a thrilling story about the nature of war and what it does to a person, while other nights we are watching a very strange porno 9. Usually we end up following a path with a variety of choices, and we will just ride it out until we get to an ending. Sometimes that means we have to deal with the route taking a sharp left turn from the main plot to instead turn into a story about how three different characters had a sexy dream and now all want to romance our protagonist. The magic of Hundred Line is that if we get tired of the fluff or side stories, we can just jump back to what is obviously the “main” route and keep playing until we once again fall off the primary path. We’ll get to the “golden route” eventually, maybe by the end of summer? Maybe not. But why rush it? We’re having a great time.

I won’t elaborate too much more on this game right now, I expect to have plenty to talk about when we return for our Q3 meeting here in October. Let the record show that I have more than 5,000 words in notes about Hundred Line, and expect that figure to double well before I finish the game.


Three cheers for Day 69.


Other Assorted Gaming Experiences


Books!

As I promised myself at the start of this year, I have been reading books in earnest. I am making time to sit down and spend time reading. Whenever I feel like I’d like to scroll on my phone to read whatever half-baked considerations are posted upon our shared collective unconscious, I instead open my Boox Page eReader. In my time with books so far this year, I have slowly but surely found myself enjoying the act of engaging with words on the page. My relationship with reading is changing from what it was in my teenage years. I hope to spend my time here tilling my garden so that I might be able to sustain a bountiful garden. I want to read some great literary classics in my lifetime. Before I can do that, I must build the mental muscle to do so. With that in mind, allow me to share a few books I’ve read so far.

On The Beach

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach by Hideo Koji-

No, no, no! The video games section was one-hundred sixty words ago! Let’s try this again.

On the Beach by Neville Chute is a 1957 apocalyptic novel written by Neville Chute about people living in Australia in a post-nuclear warfare world. Because of the reckless actions of the warring nations involved in World War III, the entire northern hemisphere is blanketed in a kind of radioactive fallout that is slowly diffusing southward. As such, “the radiation”, as the characters like to refer to it, is likely to kill every last human before long. It thus falls to the characters in the novel to live their lives as regularly or irregularly as they so choose. Some characters are in denial of their fate, refusing to deviate from their cultural norms and behaviors. Others understand that their death is inevitable and subject themselves to excesses and reckless behaviors. Some still carry on with their tasks and duties, well-aware of the fact that the people and governments who imparted these duties are either dying or dead.

I read this book as a part of the lowercase jai jaicord’s readalong leading up to the release of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach. Let the record show that I have not played Death Stranding 2, nor have I played Death Stranding 10.

Let’s not kid ourselves, On the Beach is a bleak story. It’s a story about people contending with their notion of not only their own mortality, but society’s mortality. It indirectly presents the reader with a icepick-sharp question: “If everyone in the world was going to die in six months, how would you spend those days?”. The primary mystery of the story comes in the form of a strange Morse code signal coming from Seattle, despite the high levels of radiation supposedly killing off all forms of life. It’s revealed about halfway through the book that the signal is being generated from gusts of wind blowing a window sash against the signal transmitter; there was never anyone sending the signal. In spite of this, the crew of the USS Scorpion carries out the mission faithfully and in earnest, despite the mission lasting longer than two months. Imagine that feeling: spending two entire months of your final days dedicated to a mission that ends up yielding nothing immediately hopeful. That’s a demoralizing realization. The story only gets darker from there.

Now’s the part of this report where I put on my radiation Ph.D. Candidate hat to say that even if the world is subjected to the effects of nuclear warfare, On the Beach cannot and should not be a predictive text. We do not need to commit a mass suicide in light of diffusing radioactive materials that come from atomic detonations. Ionizing Radiation has only become more and more understood since the late 1950s when Chute first wrote On the Beach. We have found ways to shield ourselves from the primary biological effects of radiation using various new materials. We have found ways to harness ionizing radiation to our advantage for power and medical applications. Should we have to contend with the effects of a nuclear winter, we have scientists who are studying radiation uptake in plants, for example 11. We have the capabilities of keeping ourselves alive, if nothing else.

We, as humans, are alive, and to be alive can sometimes mean to fight against death. I’ve been able to live through parallel illness-based circumstances so I know that what I’m saying is the truth. It is critical to remember that making the choice to live and flourish despite seemingly impossible circumstances is a beautiful thing. We have to live our lives to the fullest. We have to embrace every day knowing that eventually, that “one day” will be our last. And when that eventually happens, we can look back upon every day prior and feel confident and satisfied in our time. We live in a world where we do not have to embrace the inevitable death; to claim there is nothing else to do but die is wrong. Until we die, we can always do something.

By the way, play Linda Cube Again.


16bit Sensation

Every so often, you just gotta read a manga on your phone. I don’t make the rules here, I just follow them. And hey, a cute little doujin is a great palette cleanser after Chute’s dread omelet. 16bit Sensation is a doujinshi written by Tamiki Wakaki, based on the initial concepts, stories, and experiences of Visual Novel (VN) and eroge illustrators Tatsuki Amazuyu and Misato Mitsumi from their times working at Aquaplus. It focuses on a team of game developers at Alcohol Soft as they go about making visual novels for home PCs and later video game consoles. And its art is pretty darn cute.


It has a Zenny’s!


I think its concept is really fun: its a manga that also acts as a kind of memoir for what it was like to work in the eroge and PC game industry at the turn of the millenium. It’s fun to read about how Tokimeki Memorial so radically impacted the industry with its emphasis on each girl having a different dynamic affection level depending on the player’s responses. The section where the narrator discusses how Saki Nijino was more popular than the “box girl” Shiori Fujisaki stands out to me in particular, if only because I have actually played enough Tokimeki Memorial to have met both of these girls 12. The drawing of Saki is amusingly accurate- it definitely caught my eye the first time I saw it on the page.



I’m through the first volume and onto the second one, I usually read this before bed and don’t really take extensive notes. I think that reading this more casually is totally alright. I don’t need to take rigorous notes on everything I do, that’s exhausting. Sometimes it’s nice to read something before bed, as a treat! And since I’m reading things on my phone, if there is something that catches my eye, I just switch to my Obsidian app, type a few words, and then get back to reading.

Still, I find this doujin quite nice to read as a way to obtain some historical context of an industry I’ll never be able to experience due to the advancements of technology. Drawing a circle on a PC with a mouse is something I would never consider doing, rather I’d attempt to use a modern circle tool. It fascinates me to read about how illustrators had to practice drawing circles by hand with a mouse. I felt a similar sense of awe learning that artists used to do pixel dithering manually to apply shading before the full spectrum of colors was implemented. These are feelings one can only begin to think about by taking the time to peer behind the industrial curtain, and are only possible thanks to those who have lived through such revolutionary changes in such short periods of time. I fully expect that in thirty years my industry will look radically different compared to how it is today, likely from the advancements in machine learning. Yes, I figure one day I’ll be saying “back in my day, I had to learn C++ before vibe coding was possible. I really spent hours digging through spaghetti code looking for that segmentation fault, and it took me two whole days to find and correct it!”. I suppose we can dream.


Just a Bunch of David Foster Wallace Essays Via Audiobooks

Oopsie doopsie I’ve been listening to people read David Foster Wallace’s essays. It all started because I craved the the flavors of a well written line of essay prose read by its author. I figured that it was probably best to stop trying to tickle my brain by listening to Mr. Action Button’s ACTION BUTTON PRESENTS LOS ANGELES NOIRE 13, and listen to something else for a change. I think he would appreciate that, not that this was the reason I decided to listen to David Foster Wallace 14.

Admittedly I don’t really care for listening to anyone read Wallace if they aren’t Wallace himself. Of course, because Mr. Wallace hasn’t had a voice to use for almost 20 years, I have to settle for others. But let me tell you, listening to Wallace himself read aloud his own sardonic prose as he discusses the filthy eating conditions of the Maine Lobster Festival is otherworldly. The images are vivid and make me want to wretch. Consider yourself in my conditions while listening: running up a hill in the false summer heat wave in early April, and ask yourself: “Is the image of the a persons own flesh boiling off of their bodies really the sense I want to have floating around in the cavernous space between my ears right now?”. And yet, I come to you today and share, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Consider the Lobster (2003). I’ve always been an auditorily-inclined reader. When I write, I hear the words in my head as my fingers clack away on the junk keyboard that sits before me. I know that I probably wouldn’t say that previous sentence exactly as I wrote it, but I can hear what it would sound like if I were to say it, and that is a lot of fun to me. No, this means that my grammar and vocabulary are not nearly as refined as the late Mr. Wallace’s, but of course that seems to be an unreasonable expectation. This also means that when I read prose, I tend to hear a kind of internal monologue that is shaped by my understanding of the speaker. It’s why I love hearing Mr. Wallace read his own work aloud, I get to hear what he intends to say in its fullest form.

I must also admit that Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley may have become a canon piece of writing for me. Wallace’s ways of writing about tennis captivates me as a former competitive tennis player myself. When he describes the unfairness of the incongruity of the teenage male form, I think back to how when I was an early-pubescent fourteen year old boy, I had to play a behemoth of a fifteen year-old. The man had no doubt gone through puberty at age nine, and had already found plenty of time to take additional testosterone supplements beyond the steroids his body naturally produced. Wallace’s description of his own defensive playing habits also drew back memories of obnoxious pushers. No matter what you did, you couldn’t get the ball past the guy, and he’s always find a way to wimp the ball back over the net, always landing right in that rear third of the service box. You could try an approach shot, but he’d just throw you a lob and send you running right back to the baseline, back and forth, in and out. Your knees would grind away as you loaded your own body weight from one side to the other, desperately trying to demonstrate your own male bravado and hit that fucking winner already. And then you’d hit your shot into the net and it would be 0-30 and you’d have to do it all over again for the goddamn next hour and a half. Wallace’s writing about tennis supercharges my synapses. I know what I need to do with this energy.

Maybe some day soon I’ll take on Infinite Jest. Though in my current reading mentality I suppose that’s like someone who has just run a 5K race saying “next, I’ll run an ultra-marathon”. I want to read it some day. I think I probably should read it some day. But not yet. I know my current capabilities. I want the book in paperback, not on my eReader. I want to carry that brick with me until I either finish it or die.


and now for something else that's its own thing.

Goblin Bunker TV and English Dubbing some Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou



Alright, so this is technically a July project, but whatever, I’m including it because I worked on this enough to delay the posting of this article. If you tuned into Golbin Bunker TV, a 24-hour charity stream designed to raise funds for the lovely maria ilmutus, you may have seen a promo trailer and a meme with an English Dub of the Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou (YKK) OVA. In the span of approximately 5 days and maybe 18 total hours of work, I managed to conceptualize, manage and execute this vision. This is how I did it.

When the advertisement for GBTV was posted in the bunker on Saturday, July 5, I reached out to harmful park, the organizer of the event to see if there was any way I could contribute. She mentioned that making some kind of bumper for YKK in the Toonami style could work. I knew then what I had to do. While the rest of the guys at the cabin were playing the Lord of the Rings Extended Cut drinking game 15, I was also dumping every idea I had into a document, and DMing relevant parties to see who all might be interested. I happen to be friends with some pretty experienced Voice Actors and Audio engineers. The best Among Us player I know, Anthony, also happens to be an ADR engineer who has localized various movies for Netflix, and half-decade friend a this point, so naturally I reached out to him. He had been wanting to do dubs of old anime OVAs, so he was immediately on board and told me what I should send to him to set everything up. I then reached out to my friend Ari, the VA whom I thought would make for a great Alpha. She and I are very good friends too, and she was also on board with the idea. From there, I had to find a Kokone, source the materials and transcribe the script. These were things I was unable to do while watching as the guys was calling it “The Lord of the Rings: The Twin Towers”, so I found the OVA on Youtube, downloaded it, and saved it for the plane trip home. Alas, I would have to save more Ritalin-powered Balatro for another trip.

Once home on Sunday, July 6, with an active re-watch under my belt (complete with various notes on potential scenes to dub and what they might sound like), I sourced the relevant material, transcribed the fansubs to a script and put out a call to my ADR practice group to see if anyone wanted to be involved with a short-turnaround project over the course of the week. Luckily for me, Brooke was the perfect fit for Kokone and after picking out what profile from her demo I felt would be best, we set up an ADR session for the following night. I ten sent my admittedly poorly formatted script to Anthony along with the video and audio files.

Monday, July 7 we had the first ADR session with Brooke, which went swimmingly. I proceeded to reformat things in the script based on Anthony’s notes, and canonized some ADR scripting standards into my database. That was a tedious process, but it made for the session with Ari the next day even smoother. Tuesday July 8, the session with Ari took place, and like the one with Brooke, went excessively smoothly. I was a little picky about what we wanted in each scene, and we had to rewrite the script here and there to make sure that the syllables in the line matched with the lip-flaps while still maintaining the character of the scene. If you can believe it, this process is really hard, and I’m thankful that I had Anthony to help with figuring out just how many syllables we ought to add. With all of these scenes squared away, and with the relevant files, Anthony sent me everything to do mixing.

I started mixing the audio on Wednesday, July 9. I had never mixed audio like this in my life, but I knew some basic standards. When I did freelance eLearning voice over work for a hospital, I figured out how to read the spectral side of the the waveforms pretty effectively. I suppose it also helps that I do a lot of research involving signal processing and understand Fourier Transforms, so I know what filtering actually does from a mathematical perspective. Anthony mentioned that his tool to isolate the background noises from the vocal didn’t work as intended and that there were a number of “buzzing” audio artifacts that didn’t go away with an automated process. So I went in, saw that the whole audio file was roughly 5 minutes long and just decided to clean it up manually. In my eLearning days, I was reading the spectral map for mouth clicks and buzzes for files that were more than an hour long - five minutes is nothing to me. After doing the best I could for more than a half hour but less than an hour, I managed to have a mostly clean audio file. I am certain someone could have done a better job, but I can live with the results. As I understand it, this process was effectively a “jam-like” project, you take what you can get, and also I’m doing this for the love of the game, not for the money. There is no money here for me.


This is what those artifacts looked like. Observe the "spine-like" response across various frequencies. This will create an unnatural "buzzing" sound in the range of human speech.

They all had to be destroyed.


The English dubbed scene was finished that night, and I shared it with the cast and crew as well as with HP. In talking with HP, I realized it might be very difficult for me to make the bumper exactly in the way I wanted. Luckily HP was very willing to put it all together, provided I provided her with all the relevant materials. that was easy enough, all we needed was the ad copy.

So then Thursday, July 10, I asked my wife to write a couple sentences of copy I could use to riff out a promo-like read. HP had sent me a sample fanmade toonami promo maria had made that gave me an idea of the energy and sound that the group was going for, so I had a place to start. The day prior, as I was running my laps, I was also listening to various toonami bumpers in compilations and some “bumper like songs” that would fit the texture of the project. Then, after I got some of the copy, I took to my own booth and vamped for about ten minutes. Some reads were reading the lines verbatim, some were goofing around- I had fun with it. You gotta have fun with it. Then it as just a matter of cleaning up the raw audio file to get the takes I wanted to send to HP.

And then I sent it all off to HP and the ball was in her court. And she made a masterpiece all her own. It was finished by Friday, July 11.

So that’s how I did it. I managed to leverage my friendships and work partnerships to assemble a group that I knew I could rely on. I came home after work, and put the time in where I could I took the path of least resistance and made decisions based on my gut. I didn’t overthink my choices and just sort of rolled with whatever felt best for the situation. I trusted in my teammates to do their side of the job and let them make choices in ways I couldn’t have made myself.

And man, I gotta say, this shit turned out pretty darn good! I don’t want to gas myself up too much, but I’m proud of this project. I am a project maniac. I need at least three different projects cycling through the cavernous hole in the space between my ears to mute the otherwise deafening acoustics of a single reverberating sound. Or, if I’m going to take on one project, I need to do it fast and hard and be done with it within a week. This one was the latter, and man, I loved it. It’s nice to sometimes just make something that takes a few days and then you’re generally done with it for a short bit of time. I hope everyone enjoys watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.


Enjoy.


Conclusion

“I hope everyone enjoys watching it as much as I enjoyed making it” seems to be my mantra these days. I’m enjoying my time as a person doing, being, living, and I hope that the things that I can do with those experiences mean something to others. This was the mindset my wife and I had during our wedding. it’s the mindset I carry when I’m working on a fundraising anime “bumper jam”. It’s what I do when I enter hour 106 of Hundred Line, scribbling down notes about how much I love to hate certain characters. I hope that the things that I find natural joy in doing might be meaningful to others.

We’ll see each other in the Quarter 3 Report. Perhaps I’ll have some real comments about Hundred Line. Perhaps YOU’LL have some real comments about Hundred Line.

Those Footnotes, You Know the ones:

  1. All twenty-odd months of preparation and work,↩︎

  2. This I learned from them a few days after the fact when reflecting on how much fun we had that weekend.↩︎

  3. With much love towards myself and my wife, we are what outsiders might call “control-freaks” to some degree. WE like to think of ourselves as “project-managers” and we are very good at making sure that we cover contingencies as they arise. This is, of course, because we are both very anxious people. We work well together though. As we planned our wedding, we did a LOT of safety net-laying, making sure that everything would be where it needed to be. The only time we hired someone else to do anything was on the day of, as we hired a day-of coordinator. That was where we drew our line. To see everything at the catered event go as smoothly as it did proved to me that we had done a good job planning this whole thing.↩︎

  4. I happened to enjoy the way that machine made pancakes and how these pancakes fell onto my Styrofoam plate with a pathetic little “flop”.↩︎

  5. Those fuckers beat me at Euchre on my own wedding day, can you believe that? Who does that? Jackasses, that’s who.↩︎

  6. The more weddings I attend as an adult, the more I realize that this is a very location and culture specific tradition, so let me explain for those who don’t understand: As a wedding guest, you can make the bride and groom smooch during the meal by clicking your silverware against any goblet of water (or other liquid) you may have. You may continue clinking against this goblet until either A. the happily newlywed couple kiss, or B. your goblet breaks (this has never happened before).↩︎

  7. That horn is my Black Parade “G”↩︎

  8. In the description of this video he has a link to Nebula where he goes over how he makes his video scripts. I have not watched it, but maybe I should. Maybe I’ll be able to get to the source of how Liam consistently manages to make videos that are more than an hour long and are entirely devoid of any kind of novel perspective to them.↩︎

  9. Yes, we found the gay sex CG. No, we are not telling you where it is. also wow, how lucky I am that my wife is just as big of a Kodaka fan as I am. How lucky I am that she was on Something Awful at age 14 just like me! Wow!↩︎

  10. Actually I haven’t played any Kojima games aside from the first twenty minutes of the first Metal Gear Solid. No, not even Boktai. I’m sorry. This will change in time, I promise. But like, also, I’m going to use this footnote to ask you a question: if YOU worked on topics related to nuclear nonproliferation and radiation detection and weapons policy in your day job, would YOU want to come home and do experience media about the same thing? I like what I do a lot, but damn if I don’t need to make every waking moment about it, especially when it’s related to something as taxing as nuclear nonproliferation. You read and play games about this stuff? Well buddy, I live it. In that same vein I don’t really watch Kyle Hill’s nuclear science and nuclear accident videos because I already know this stuff. I don’t need to watch stuff about the atomic bomb, I already know and I don’t need more of this (Oppenheimer, 2023 being the lone exception because I enjoy Nolan films). tl;dr I’ll play the Metal Gear franchise by the end of 2026. I think that sounds like a great franchise to play once I have my Ph.D.↩︎

  11. shoutouts to my good pal soon to be dr. jillian↩︎

  12. Though I have only played this game in a hazel-esque style where I simply pick the Japanese language dialogue option that looks the best becuase I cannot actually read what it says. Maybe some day I’ll learn to read Japanese and come back to it and try again.↩︎

  13. Which is a tremendous Let’s Play, by the way. Go give it a watch.↩︎

  14. In previous days I have made the claim that Tim Rogers is the David Foster Wallace of Video Game Reviewers. Since making this claim, and listening to DFW’s essays and touching upon his fiction, I must be honest with myself that I am once again falling victim to the boss Baby Tweet gambit. Such is life, I suppose.↩︎

  15. Rules are to drink when one of the following occurs: Sam says “Mr. Frodo”, a meme quote is said (:O points at screen), Gollum says “precious” for the first time in a new scene after a cutaway.↩︎