August Update

Hey all! Alex again, it's been a bit of a month so I'm glad to be back and writing updates again. Taking my month off from writing deadlines was definitely good for me, and it allowed me to unwind a lot. I spent a lot of time hanging out with friends, and I still have friends who are moving soon that my girlfriend and I will likely help carry boxes and unpack and such. In my personal time I've been trying to do a balance of different things, and just generally fill my time with a mix of things that I enjoy.

One of these things, and the most surprising of them, was the revival of a childhood homebrew TCG I made with my friends when we were, like, 10. It's called "Battle Cards" and it was inspired by Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh, and whatever else we decided to rip off on that particular day (one of the cards was pretty plainly just Zook from Skylanders) but in terms of mechanics it has more novelty going for it. The game has been remade at least twice, one of which was by me in high school hoping to recapture some of the magic I had as a kid of drawing cards by hand for fun. None of these iterations of the game were, uh, fair or balanced, but they did get better with each one. I've saved as many cards as I could find for several years, and recently I pulled them out of storage in a filing cabinet drawer where they had been tucked into a card binder page for a few years. I decided to show it to some friends and one of them actually played a game with me and had a great time! I was pretty inspired and uplifted by that, and so I decided it would be fun to try and make a fourth generation of Battle Cards, aiming to rebalance the game and tweak the rules to be a proper game that can be played more easily. I'd love to have friends help me design some cards, but even just sitting at home and talking about the game with my girlfriend, I feel like I'm finally getting that magic from my childhood back in a new and special way. The new cards are way more balanced, but I didn't want the style to change, so I'm still making them the way I did more than a decade ago: cards trimmed from sketchbook paper on a paper cutter, drawn in pen with no sketches to guide, minimal color. I'm gonna introduce the game to more friends soon and see how they enjoy playing, and I plan to recruit as many as I can to help me design more cards and expand the 4th Gen of the game. It's really important to me that I get to reclaim a fragment of my childhood, and really healing to get to make new memories with this game that I made as a kid before I really knew who I was. It means a lot. I'm glad I get to do this.

I've been helping my girlfriend download her music so that she can kick Spotify, much like I wrote about back in December. Actually, the process of helping her do that, in addition to having a new iPod that I've been using for most of the year so far, makes me want to write a sequel, or a redux, or whatever of that post to update it a bit. I feel like even though I wrote it a few months ago, I already have a lot more experience writing blog posts and guides, as well as following my own advice from that guide to do offline music. I'd never even used Winamp when I wrote that, now I have like 5 different music managing/playing software, more experience with putting music on modern iPhones, and a new iPod to talk about. So, maybe a remaster of that post coming soon. A second edition, if you will. On the topic of writing for my blogs though, I've had several gaming blog posts that I want to write floating around for a while. I played the romhack Pokémon Emerald Rogue a few months ago and really enjoyed it and wanted to post about it, I've been workshopping a review of the Gen 4 Pokémon games, I intended to write about game preservation back when Myrient shut down (and likely will do a post about game preservation and include a resources list, it just won't be so much of a news post when I get around to it), and several other prompts that I've had sitting in drafts for a long time, like a Dungeon Defenders review, a Rhythm Heaven retrospective (an idea so old now that a new Rhythm Heaven was announced and released), the art of the Gameboy Zelda titles, Animal Crossing retrospective, a DSpico review, and more. I hate sitting on such a backlog of writing ideas, but technically it means that I have a lot to write on whenever I feel like writing one. Just sucks that I can't snap my fingers and have them all be out there for people to read. It's not even that I have to write it myself, it's just that it takes time to do that, so it'll take time before you can read them. Hang in there though, I promise I do intend all of these ideas to be written and posted here eventually!

I won't spoil too much of this month's What I've Been Playing post, but it's gonna be a lot of Pokémon again. Been making good progress in Pokémon Diamond, and my team is largely Pokémon I've never used before, which has been a lot of fun. Eventually it'll lead to me filling in some blanks in my HeartGold Pokédex, but also I just really love Diamond so maybe I'll go for double National Dex and do some primary gameplay in Diamond as well! The Sinnoh games and the Johto games are just different enough, despite being the same generation, that I see value in doing the exact same things in each game, so we'll see how long it takes me to hit 400 hours in Diamond, too. I'm already at 70 and I only have 7 badges, so we'll see! I've also been messing around with the new Minecraft pack "Matcha Flavoured", and doing a lot in the new Better than Adventure! update 8.0 which has been awesome. I really love BTA, and the new update is just an improvement on what was already the best way to play Minecraft imo. Just having some fun with gaming this month.

Tomorrow (or today, since I'm finishing this post on the 2nd) I'm going to see the new Spider-man moving with my girlfriend Jess and my best friend Amber. We're all Spider-man fans, and we're really hoping that this movie does a little something to revive movie Spider-man after the MCU was DOA and the last few Spider-man movies were uh... mid, for lack of a better word in mind. The Amazing Spider-man duology died for this movie and it's predecessors, so I really hope it's good...
(God I miss the TASM movies...)

Those are some of the bigger things that I've done that are coming to mind, I don't want to dip into writing too much and spoil content that I intend for my Patreon (only $5 a month to subscribe and you get exclusive BTS posts and new chapters every month) but I have been working on my new chapters for that, and doing a lot of worldbuilding in particular for "The Gaia Machine". Just last night I was talking about the concept of magic and wishes with my girlfriend to bounce some ideas off of her. I'm really excited for the direction that that story is going in, in addition to my new story that I'm working on and buffing the dents out of before starting publication. Exciting stuff in the world of my writing right now!

I think I'll call it there though, that sort of covers what I've been up to for a good portion of the last month. Despite the ups and downs, July was pretty good, and I'm hoping that August is a good follow-up. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more of the usual coming soon! Have a good month everyone~!

~ Alex Amelia Pine