📝 Friday Fundays

Hello! This is starting to turn into one of those blogs that are just full of entries going "I'm sorry I didn't update in forever!! I promise to start updating more from now on!!" and then never following through. I am going to copy my friends Ruby and Derek and try to do a weekly check-in blog entry. Let's see how long this lasts!

Weekend in Gunma

Super yummy omuraisu after checking out Michi's gallery!

We drove up to Gunma to see Michi's art exhibition! It was super chill and cool, and their art was, as always, very beautiful. Afterwards we all hung out with Nyacchu and played board and video games, then ate way too much delicious food 😋

Daikon adding the finishing touches to our インディー通信 Indie Tsushin daruma!

The next day, we went to Shourin Daruma-dera, a temple that is just absolutely filled with daruma. We bought a blank purple daruma to paint. The Shourin Daruma style is to draw the eyebrows as cranes, and the beard as a turtle. Both animals represent long life. Then you write your goal or wish on either side of its face, and paint in one of its eyes to set your goal. Once you've reached your goal, you color in the other eye.

I also used the trip as an opportunity to try out PixelFed. It's like Instagram but connected to ActivityPub, so I can share stuff from my Mastodon. I have so much social media now, it's getting to be kind of a lot 😱

Tokyo Game Dungeon later this month

I don't know if I wrote about that here, but Indie Tsushin is on break this month. That doesn't mean we haven't been working on it, though! It's just all behind-the-scenes stuff. See, Tokyo Game Dungeon 3 is later this month, and we're scrambling to get stuff ready in time.

This time, I wanted to have physical copies of Indie Tsushin at our event booth. Ideally, I'd like to send the PDFs off to a printer and get back beautiful professionally-made copies, but the issues are huge (each one is around 80 pages). I also only want one copy of each since we're not planning to sell them, so it would be a relatively huge expense as we wouldn't be bulk-printing them.

My desk is too small to take good pictures, please ignore all the junk and dust ahhh

I solved the first problem by preparing cut-down インタビュー特集 (interview editions) for each issue. And instead of sending them off to a printer for one copy each, we went the Ultimate Zine Route of just printing them out ourselves at the conbini! We stuck them in clear files from the 100 yen shop and slapped some washi tape on the spines. We're planning also to print out some Adele pictures on sticker paper, cut them out, and plaster them all over the covers.

I also made some postcard designs from the monthly issues:

We're planning to print the April and June-July postcards and give them out at Tokyo Game Dungeon! Stop by to get some free postcards and leaf through our print issues!

Stuff we played

Kingdom Eighties: s'good!

It's Kingdom, but with monster trucks!

Played and cleared Kingdom Eighties! It's another Kingdom game but with a neon semi-modern reskin. I personally could have used fewer '80s pop culture gags, I feel like that sort of thing peaked well before Ready Player One. But the pixel art is gorgeous, I ran into the fewest amount of bugs of the entire series, and it was cute seeing how they could repackage elements of Kingdom in a Stranger Things sort of setting.

The Steam reviews ding the campaign for being too short, but I personally think that's a strength. Two Crowns started to drag, especially once winter hit. Eighties stays just long enough to entertain before turning into a grind.

Cassette Beasts: still catchin' 'em all

My current team, they have served me well.

Booted up Cassette Beasts today to finally check out the 1.2 update. I've managed to get all the new beasts... except one. (Possible spoiler, don't click that if you haven't played the update yet and want to encounter everything yourself.)

FINALLY.

I still need to grind more Fusion shards to get some Ritual Candles to spawn Glass and Astral Bootlegs. I do also sort of feel like I am done with the game though, since shard hunting is not all that fun, and much like with Pokemon, I'm not that invested in Shiny hunting. (I do sort of want all the achievements, though. Hence why I'm even bothering to grind...)

Tears of the Kingdom, finally

Yes, we finally got a copy of Tears of the Kingdom. Daikon's been the one in charge of actually playing while I just watch, because I cannot handle those fiddly Ultra Hand controls for long without wanting to scream. Most of our fun so far has come from seeing what kinds of terrible contraptions we can build and getting killed in hilarious and creative new ways. As for the rest, it's Breath of the Wild but with cool underground caves (to make up for its surface world, which is disappointingly empty?) so we of course are having a good time.

Think that's about it for this week. See you again next Friday at the latest! I hope!!