Category Archives: My Fanwork

Art, Daily, My Fanwork

Now Saving: You will Grad in 5 days.

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Alright, so I kinda fell behind on writing this thing. This is that post that I owed! Which is kinda being written more because I feel that I should than out of a need to record tasks which have been completed recently.

Something something something PIX

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  1. On Friday, I:
    1. Met up with Ben. Recorded video and audio for The Seas Have Eyes postmortem presentation. Did something akin to pair-programming with another unrelated project. We didn’t switch roles though. I was observer and helped troubleshoot some errors with GetComponent<>() and using doubles where floats were needed. That made up a large portion of the day. Also, we talked about MLPFiM.
    2. Washed clothes.
    3. Played a bunch of Brave Frontier in the downtime.
    4. Drew a bunch of Sandy from Fallout Equestria: Better Days. (Those sketches above.)
  2. On Saturday, I:
    1. Tried to work on the LLD for Resonance. Ate incorrectly for breakfast. Spent most of that time lazy and lethargic.
    2. Played a bunch of Awesomenauts.
  3. On Sunday, I:
    1. Tried to auto-generate a documentation for Resonance using Sandcastle. Took me a few hours to figure out I needed to run it on existing XML documentation, then a about another half hour to figure out MonoDevelop can also generate such documention and that I had to enable it via checkbox in the project (not solution) settings menu. Then to build it. Then took another hour to realize I had to explicitly tell Sandbox to include the global namespace in the generated docs. And once I figured all of that out, I got a very thoroughly outlined website with lotsa cool pre-made themes for the website and everything! …Which I couldn’t turn in, as the assignemnt wants a standlone doc file, not a full website.
    2. Wrote up the LLD portion for the status indicators. (Just in case anyone is wondering, the High Level Design and Low Level Design documents are supposed to be written BEFORE coding, not after. So this was backwards and a pain and felt largely redundant.)
    3. Played a freaking ton of Awesomenauts and Brave Frontier
  4. On Monday, I:
    1. Got hype for tacos! Unfortunately, they were fish tacos. On the other hand, they were serving fairly-tasty nachos and really-tasty taco-pizza. But I didn’t want to hurt myself on the pizza part of the taco-pizza, so I didn’t get too much of that. Also, BALLOONS!

      TACOS AND BALLOONS TACOS AND BALLOONS wait what do you mean it's supposed to be bubbles
      TACOS AND BALLOONS TACOS AND BALLOONS wait what do you mean it’s supposed to be bubbles. OH. And. The Mayo thing. This is that Mayo thing.

    2. Asked a friend a bunch of silly questions on Tumblr.
    3. Spent about 4 hours pouding out about a third of the LLD for Resonance.
    4. Picked up my Cap, Gown, and Tassel. Hung it up for the folds to fall out. It looks cool.

      Cap, Gown, and Tassel package.
      Cap, Gown, and Tassel package.

    5. Watched God Burns Down Equestria for Insurance Money. It was weird, but mostly-OK Youtube Poop. Above Average, but not quite there in terms of being a remix-content new story.
  5. On Tuesday, I:
    1. Spent about 6 hours pounding out the remaining third for the LLD for Resonance.
    2. Played a lot of Brave Frontier. Finally figured out that the best time to attain Idol unit is to grind them in the vortex in that map that’s only available on Tuesdays. Also figured out that grinding the same map over and over doesn’t work too well in BF because of the ‘Energy’ mechanic. Successfully evolved Shock Bow Loch to Thor Bow Loch. Got a bunch of idols of different types stored up in prep for evolving my other units.
  6. Today, I:
    1. Looked at pictures on the internet. It was fun.
    2. Had a rant and ramble about why demanding people on the internet to not do something becomes a challenge, whereas sometimes things left well alone might seem offensive but were done out of affection. Yes, fiction authors. When I draw those pics of your characters, it’s because I like those characters. Not because I want to ruin them. And while I know you might say “don’t do that” to me specifically, it doesn’t mean that I won’t. It means that instead of posting it to my usual galleries, I try to keep it to smaller circles of friends… Or sometimes it means I completely lose interest in the thing I was fawning over in the first place and stop following it, but that’s not too common.
    3. I’d kinda like to commission some work from b0rn-t0-die and see their interpretation of Sandy. Probably on an inexplicable balloon-bursting spree. I’m afraid I’ll end up being unable to afford them, though, but the only way to find out is for me to write up some specs and ask. I’ve got time today, so maybe I’ll do that.
    4. Comfirmed plans with family to move out on Sunday and turn in key just before the graduation ceremony and whatnot
    5. I plan to resume work on Super Bunny Bounce to see if I can get the core mechanics working with some placeholder objects. I’ll probably remake it using Unity 3D’s new 2D tools instead of trying to make these objects just kinda work otherwise. I’m also thinking I’ll use Ribbons Bunny as the feature character.  If I do that, I’ll probably change her color scheme to use Carrot-Orange, Glitter Gold, and Taffy Teal instead of Grass Green, Bark Brown and Lemon Yellow. The contrast should make her easier to follow and less likely to be lost in any particular background. (And I kinda favor warm colors when given an option.) You can kinda get a vague idea of that kind of contrast with this image, but it’s not exactly what I meant either.  I’ll probably also get rid of her pants (or make it optional) simply because I think it’s sillier and more entertaining that way. Kinda like how Donald rarely wears lower-body clothes, or how Sonic characters are typically nude except for shoes… Though come to think, the latter case draws attention to the fact that they run a lot. Ribbons will hop,  bounce, and rebound a lot. What clothes are good for that? (The jist of what I’m thinking of for the game is to toy around with the idea of the ‘homing attack self-projectile’. Also, since Ribbons has ribbons, she may grab things with those ribbons and pull herself to them. I’m not sure yet.) I’d also like to add joystick support for that, in addition to touch.
    6. I’d like to write a fic or so about Pokey Pierce / Pinprick. I’ve got a lot of built up headcanon about the guy, and I’ve seen some pics of Scootaloo and her implied family that are just dumping more fuel on the fire. And it especially helps that there’s so many episodes of FiM in which he or his apparent family seems to show up as well. Would be fun. Would be a long term project though, not a single day. And would probably go freaking slow. If I do it, I’ll do it in first person.
Art, Daily, My Fanwork

Daily Doubled – 2 Feb 2014

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Artstuffs: Guess who just figured out how to vector stuff?

sandyvecme_inkscape_prev3_by_retl-d74vyynballoonpacket_inkscape_by_retl-d74r054 pinkiepieballoonrideadjusted_borrowedbackgroun_by_retl-d74r56k 

THIS GUY! Through a bit of bouncing back and forth between GIMP’s path tools and playing around with Inkscape’s Pattern Along Path tools and other node-tweaking whatnot, I now know how to make vectors that look relatively close to the show? But it’s still not spot on. It’s most noticeable if you look at the inner-body tapers. Still. I’m glad to have finally figured out a way to make lineart that doesn’t look super janky and to have an idea of how to make very MLPFiM-esque art. On the other hoof, I do not like how many hours it takes to do. It’s not hard. Just. Time consuming. Someone if I’d make the extra step on to animating this stuff. The answer was: Possibly but it’s really unlikely. Given that this takes me about four times longer than my usual slapping color on a rough sketch on a single image, going from this to animation would be kinda nuts. And I didn’t build these to be flash-animation puppets.  I could probably tweak and force them to be such with a lot more node-tweaking but they’re not designed for animation as is. (And trying too hard to MAKE it be a flash animation build is exactly why I kept struggling with vector art for so long.)

Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Reread Progress

40 – Recovery : Scotch is in a bad way… but P-21 gets a bit more fleshing-out, and it’s fun.  Mainly, Blackjack finally realizing he’s been addicted due to lifelong exposure to Med-X, and Glory having understandable frustration with even his presence.

[Oops!]  I fell asleep for a few chapters. Technically the chapter I mentioned above, I listened to yesterday. But I wasn’t in much of a rambling mood yesterday. And I’m not sure I care enough about this particular arc to go back to review these chapters right NOW.

43 – Lucidity :  It’s the Happyhorn Gardens chapter! Both one of my favorite chapters in that it does the most exploration of the potential benefits of future tech in the  Fallout Equestria Expanded Universe and one of my favorites in that it really lays down heavy what with the mindscrewery weirdness.  I woke up about half-way into this one. Though, as much as I like it, it has a lot of very gruesome and uncomfortable content like rape and child murder. Ultimately though, the good makes the bad worth getting through.

44 – Mares and Stallions : This is another one of those chapters in which we get a glimpse into an alternate universe that could have been in the form of Blackjack’s Littlehorn Massacre Nightmare with her party as young ponies on their way to their new school…

This chapter is also the chapter Stygyus first shows up. And… really this chapter is a great deal about sex and sexuality. It  doesn’t linger on it for the purpose of eroticism or ribaldry, but it’s a major theme in this chapter.

45 – Hightower : “Champion in Bed”.  Also, Mister Shears first appears. B-Team regroups at Meatlocker and then they go into Hightower.

This is also the chapter where it’s revealed that Psalm murdered the now-grown-up Pokey Pierce and Pinkie Pie… a matter of moments before the bombs fell. So I guess either way they were set to die? But it still only cements my dislike of Psalm. I question why didn’t make me dislike [Spoiler].  By matter of course, it also gives a brief glimpse into both the organization of the Ministry of Morale and of the Ministry of Arcane Sciences right in the final minutes of their relevancy. I’d still like to see a fic that explores what those structures were all like before the war started peaking, but I guess it really might just be on me to write such a thing. After chatting with Kkat in the IRC though, seems like the MoM in particularly had a very very loose structure built around a fairly simple and straightforward mission statement. And that as things became more and more about weeding out insurrection and whatnot instead of making more fun, things became worse and more frantic and harmful.

46 – Casper: Man, Blackjack abuses ghoul mental deterioration a lot. And I feel kinda guilty when she does. But it works! Also

“Well, he’s probably not personally running it, and definitely not the whole M.o.M., but he totally has his hooves all over the law enforcement branch.  I don’t think he cares about party reservations, balloon research, or theme parks, after all.  But we totally know who assigns our Hearth’s Warming Eve bonuses, and you just don’t go behind Quartz’s back.”

I would be ALL OVER that balloon research. Also this conveniently gives me an excuse to blame someone other than Pinkie herself for things going sour with her her ministry. Yay. Heck, I could split the blame between Twist for passing on drugs and GB for changing at least one branch’s direction… On the other hoof if Twist didn’t do what she had, then the MoM would have been doomed by bomb attack right at the start…  So… bittersweet? Eh. I blame GB.

–

Breaking down Project Horizons by Volume, Volume 1 seems to be the most about Security as an entity and our initial A-Team. I like that volume. Volume 2 has the whole Blood and Stars / Hoofington Rises thing going on. Seems to be less about individual level things and more about establishing and hinting at grand-scale plots. The dreams get more interesting and mysteries are getting setup, and it’s kinda cool but daunting. This is also were we start getting a bit more ‘gap-filling’ universe expansion with Blackjack getting involved with Watcher. Volume 3 seems to primary revolve around conspiracies and redefining Fallout: Equestria as a universe by making great use of knowledge of when and where the original story by Kkat- Fallout: Equestria- had left time gaps or explanation gaps and un-shown perspectives. Typically when people talk about PH playing too much with canon or why it’s so vital to FoE as a setting, it’s because of exactly this chunk section. The most obvious example: LittlePip’s memory gap is used right at the first chapter of this volume to give Blackjack and her A-Team an adventure with LittlePip and her team. And it fits. There’s nothing in the original story that would imply these events didn’t happen.

I haven’t recently reread Volumes 4 and volume 5 just started, but 4 seems to be mostly about escalation of power and scale, and Blackjack’s painful journey that shapes her into the so-called Maiden of the Stars. Some of the coolest action parts happen in this volume! Heck, even some parts of just plain genuine fun here and there. But by this point, it’s getting really REALLY hard to keep track of all the characters. And then Volume 5 starts off with an immediate and huge shift from everything we’ve seen before implying a breech of a point of no return. What this volume is meant to be is hard to guess from just the one chapter. But this will probably be the end volume.

Rambling and Other Stuffs:

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I played lotsa videogames. Probably about 3 hours of Awesomenauts between today and yesterday. And I keep fitting in a few minutes of the MLP Gameloft game here and there, so I’ve probably played at least an hour of that total. The MLP game is kind of a dirty cash grab, but it’s not as brutal about it as some Piano apps I’ve seen or even compared to the same core team’s LPS game. It’s super cute and has a reasonable atmosphere though, so I keep coming back.

I was gonna ramble more about that, but then I ran out of steam. All you need to know is that Apple Bloom, Cheerilee, and Twilight Sparkle are all working on a carrot farm and Big McIntosh is cranking out lemons every three minutes.

Art, Daily, My Fanwork

Daily 26 Jan 2014

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puppy

Drew a little new stuff. Scanned a few days-old stuff. Uploaded a bunch.

Read a bunch of chapters of Fallout Equestria: Duck and Cover.

Got in contact with the Team Leader for the SSE project and worked on stuff side-by-side for about an hour and a half. Still no team for GP2 project… Submitted Weekly Report 01.

 

Had a bad dream this morning. Had an unstable mood and shed some tears a few hours later in the day. Concluded that I’m a little stressed out, and not particularly used to the experience of being stressed out.

New phone should be arriving tomorrow. Admitted guilty that I pretty much begged $200 to get a device that can finally run Gameloft’s money-grab of a MLPFiM ‘game’. There’s a lot of other reasons I had been wanting to upgrade for a while too, but without the means to reliably pay phone service, the benefits are more akin to upgrading game consoles.

Kinda sorta wanted to do a 20 minute writing exercise. Never got around to it, and want to go to bed soon. Did talk to Kkat briefly about how the MoM became what it did in the FoE Universe. Turns out the primary operating directives are even simpler than the silly ones I had imagined, which makes the whole structure of it sound… chaotic, yet straightforward.

—

Earlier someone asked me ‘how are you doing?’

So-so. I’ve got tears in my eyes, and I’m not sure why. Had a weird kind of not-fun dream this morning. Also just ended up realizing that if my belongings got raided or taken for legal reasons or something, I’m not completely sure what I’d do. Most likely try to get more paper and pencil and draw more smut to make up for smut lost. Which was kind of an alarming/worrying thought.
[2:30:47 PM] Retl: At the same time, kinda happy because episode put lotsa fun thoughts in my head, and one of the fics I read is pretty much adding a new character based on my work, based on another character that I already liked. So it’s like. A cake of excuses for me to really really like this character.
[2:31:42 PM] Retl: Uploading a bunch of scanned pics and whatnot. Gotta hop on a bus in about 75m

[2:40:53 PM] Retl: The dream I had was kinda simple though. In it, my dad moved into a new, smaller place and invited me over. I was trying to play a PnP thing but couldn’t get in because my niece was on the phone? (she wasn’t there, and I don’t know why that stopped the net from working) and I took some kind of small single-use packet thingy which worked like a miniature laundry machine without asking permission. And was upset both about not asking permission, and about missing game.

okay bored now this is the part where I dump images.

anothersandybatch drawthisdrawthat diamonddogpracticecontines  sandypuppysmilesplotandstuff RetlLikesBunniesAndCats quickiegameideabunnycatapultsketches howdodiamonddogswork funkylookingponypose doggiesandybouncyfuns

My Fanwork

Blowups! (1/?)

(Tried to see what would happen if I did a 10m challenge instead of 20m. It doesn’t really give enough time to think. : /  But a half-hour might be a little too long to make it feel like a small investment. Also, I wrote this with my head kinda swimming and on the edge of sleeping, so uh. Stuff/)

“It smells like butts!” The blue colt wriggled his nose and then was promptly plunked down on a wooden stool. An orange filly’s green tail rearranged things at the table with the deftness of any other familiar limb momentarily before she whirled around and filled his vision with her large pink eyes.

“You’re not supposed to smell it!” The filly gingerly tapped the colt’s nose with a forehoof. “Be glad it only smells like butt! I think somepony used to use it as a chair. I’ll sell it to you for five caps if you want it.  don’t need it anymore.”

Art, Daily, My Fanwork

Daily

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Tired. Drew Sandy. Did Classes. Played Skullgirls  for 15m.

—

Jan 21 23:29:03 <Retl> Man I had an interesting time in robotics today. We were blazing through the programming portion until we hit a problem where our robot simply couldn’t turn while everyone else’s robot was working fine
Jan 21 23:29:38 <Retl> Turns out waaaaay early on in the construction of the thing, we used a 7unit axel instead of an 8unit axel. Just enough for everything to FIT but not enough for the entire servo to spin the wheel
Jan 21 23:30:19 <Retl> So we spent half of an hour taking it apart trying to see if we had busted motors, then another 15 once we found out it was actually the axel, not the motor. and by that point we were so far behind everyone else that people now had their robots going around racetracks
Jan 21 23:30:35 <Retl> And I’m like
Jan 21 23:30:45 <Retl> CHEATER UNICORN MAG-no I didn’t actually say that
Jan 21 23:31:36 * NitoKa pats Retl
Jan 21 23:32:01 <Retl> Seriously though, that’s making an extremely minor mistake with all of the parts neatly sorted in a box to pick and choose from
Jan 21 23:32:13 <Retl> Imagine trying to build a robot in the wasteland where nothing is labeled and everything is juryrigging
Jan 21 23:32:16 <Retl> Or whatever the term is
Jan 21 23:32:23 <NitoKa> thats the right term
Jan 21 23:32:55 <Retl> Anyway
Jan 21 23:33:35 <Retl> http://sta.sh/28zp016var8?edit=1 I was trying to draw a Hellhound/DiamondDog pup for an acquaintence/friend/person. I didn’t like how it was going so I GAVE UP ON THAT and then just drew it like I usually draw anthro type characters
Jan 21 23:34:12 <Retl> But I just can’t figure out what’s going on with the diamond dog faces in the show. I see that their lower jaw is far more prominant than the upper portion of their mouth. But when I draw it, it looks freaking janky
Jan 21 23:34:32 <Retl> I point this out to you because hau du eye feex
Jan 21 23:34:44 * InsanebowDash has quit (Quit: Buh bye now.)
Jan 21 23:35:13 <Retl> Uh wait frig did I ever post the link
Jan 21 23:35:19 * Retl goes to- oh yeah I did
Jan 21 23:35:21 * Retl tired

Art, Daily, Music, My Fanwork

Daily

cheerleader_puppysmiles_by_retl-d72z616

 

 

Awesome day. Yet. Boring day.

Briefly toyed around with FLStudio. Drew some Puppysmiles. Washed clothes. Spent most of the day having fun on the #FalloutEquestria IRC channel chat.  Tried a 20 minute fic-writing challenge which can be found here: /?p=46 Finished reading Fallout Equestria: Better Days up to current chapter (So I went from 7-12.) Read Fallout Equestria: The Long Winter chapters 1 and 2.

Confirmed for FoE PnP session this Wednesday afternoon. Hopefully I won’t ruin everything. Also confirmed a meeting this Wednesday night with the RA, which means I have to leave the play session early. And that’s gonna be awkward and not leave a great first impression. I also got to chat lots and lots with one of my favorite FoE  sidestory authors who had a day off today, and ramble a bit with another FoE sidestory author who experiments with lotsa things and is neat. I had fun, but don’t feel like I got much done.

I kinda didn’t feel like doing the daily blogpost today, but I guess I kinda like typing. Or something. And WordPress’s drag and drop upload is very convenient.