An experimental update about what I’ve doing

I felt like giving y'all something thanks to a new thing I tried out

January 18, 2023

I recently realized how I could potentially allow myself to write more for my Neocities if I used something like the Wordpress or Word that allowed me to embed links and set stuff in bold, italic or whatever the way I’ve been used to with typing and then tweaking whatever I need rather than manually typing and formatting the stuff for it to work.

As I realized how the key was in looking up a Markdown Editor with the capacity of exporting into HTML, for now I’m trying StackEdit.io and this is how what you’re reading right now was formatted- just some hashtags to set headers, asterisks to get my asterisk bold big bang big band text in less than 10 seconds without having to move the mouse.

So…that’s right, I’m here to drop HUMONGOUS ARCADESTRIKER LORE DUMP INTO YA thanks to Markdown rather than WWF Wrestlemania wrestling with HTML as I usually did which definitely slowed down motivation and progress.

ALSO IN AN COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE…I had started listening to Virtuafightaz’s Virtua Rush album and GOODNESS CYBERFUNKING GRACIOUS, Kulaphantasy’s 4 Seasons SLAPS. But make sure to listen to the whole album as well- it is really packed as a whole with bangers.

Don’t stand behind him if you value your life

I SAY PRAYYY FOR YOUUUUUU PRAY FOR YOU

If the few times I had mentioned out there that I was checking out Golgo 13 stuff, such as the manga, the anime, the arcade game, the old movie The Professional, or even having Golgo’s stupid smug panel from early chapters of the manga plastered into the thumbnail for my 2023 game awards, didn’t hint you that I had been a bit laser-sighted over media about the Duke Togo- not Duke Nukem, and not Duke the dog from Johnny Test (w h i p c r a c k - s o u n d - e f f e c t . w a v), but the name Golgo 13 seems to use the most whenever he’s arriving as just a casually innocent cold-faced man that’s around for a trip or pretending to be a professional on another job that isn’t his actual profession: Hitting impossible headshots with whatever it takes, sniper rifles, revolvers, you get the deal.

If you got curious or have been fancying some cool Golgo 13 stuff that isn’t strictly official for your existence, then here’s some stuff that I can give shout-outs to:

An AMV that dubs over the car chase from Golgo 13 The Professional with new music and sound effects that according to the creator on Reddit, were taken all from actual Rally Group B car sounds to fit with the driving. It’s in Vimeo due to copyright concerns, but I can confirm it looks quite well done, the sound effects are spot-on, and the scene itself is still awesome thanks to the way 80s anime animation aged from the movie.
Someone made a beat to The Professional’s opening theme, Pray For You, and at first I thought it was just an AMV to another old OVA until Ithe beat dropedp and the chorus coming back more than before. Not only neat work done with that, but also props for using another old OVA with a ruthlessly effective killer running amok targets in the form of Crying Freeman. No, I haven’t checked it out yet…but you know, this might get me to do it sooner or later. Who knows. And pardon the literal French at the beginning, but it does gets offset with how you can hear the I SAY I SAY I SAY fading in as a killer intro to let the PRAY FOR YOU drop properly. Shoutouts to Nicholas Craven for this- though I wonder if he has or would ever release a version that has the intro clean without the french pleas to live from the anime overlayed.
Speaking of takes on Pray for You, Geek Music also has an English cover that is pretty close to the original, and it is interesting to listen back to back the difference in tones that the already english PRAY FOR YOU has between the original and the fully english take.
And as a segway to the next section…here’s a few Golgo 13 fanarts I stumbled on Deviantart, plus a REALLY well done one that was made as a tribute by mecha artist Hidetaka Tenjin for the late Takao Saito, the author of the Golgo 13 manga (rest in peace).

https://www.deviantart.com/thundertori/art/Golgo-13-191853524
https://www.deviantart.com/thundertori/art/Golgo-with-Kitty-199300149
https://www.deviantart.com/thundertori/art/Golgo-will-have-Kitty-Ears-319805348
https://www.deviantart.com/birdboy100/art/Golgo-13-299197458
duke tougou and saitou takao (golgo 13) drawn by tenjin_hidetaka | Danbooru (donmai.us)

DeviantArt is an interesting sleeper goldmine of stuff that others haven’t somehow found yet. Oh, and I also talk about a bit of my own art journey.

And I don’t simply mean like, searching up super specific obscure characters that you could count the amount of people have done fanart of them with your two hands (if you know me, then technically I would be one of those because of how deep I stuck my nose in 90s or 2000s games for years), but more so art that happens to slide into my feed that I think are pretty nice…and have very few favorites on deck.

At the very minimum, aside from finding them in the first place, I also tend to drop my two cents of encouragement (and “woahhhh” with stuff that is surprisingly cool in spite of the low traction of the art) since as a fellow pen and paper and mouse and mysterious sudden bursts of motivation artist, I know how having someone take a look and acknowledge the little cool thing you put hours of effort at feels quite nice.

And uhh, if you DO want to dive your head into the long-unmantained sea that would be my favs in there, do know that since it had been building up for a while, there’s probably some stuff I liked months ago that I didn’t know that were made with AI- just now I was cleaning away some of those because…bruh, some of the design ideas I’ve seen done with it have been kinda neat, but it feels like a tiny thumbtack to be looking for stuff to highlight on that ocean and then I find out with stuff that wasn’t even drawn by hand, be it with pen or mouse, by someone, when what I wanted to do with this section is to highlight cool creators that are under the radar but are still going strong today or that had put out something cool before.

So anyways uhh, KEEP DOING YOU, KEEP CREATING, KEEP DRAWING WHAT YOU LOVE, AND KNOW THAT WHAT YOU’RE DOING IS COOL. Even if you are starting, if you can keep going and slowly but surely learn, you can definitely improve.

Some impromptu words of experience from the roadbumps

I can tell you that well like the palm of my hand even with blurry eyes from having just woke up, because its really noticeable when I go and, for example, compare some of my oldest art with my newest art that is a new take on an older original design or just new fanart of a character I drew before. [See my 2020’s Komachi and 2021’s Kunimitsu and Komachi (this last one doesn’t look iffy on the pose and proportions because I had traced over a Rev3 screenshot…but is otherwise oof on the lines and total lack of shading) vs the result of drawing both characters in the first month of 2024.

Or if you want to talk about OCs, then see how this one design started (the proportions the clashing colors and dim shading the background EVERYTHING IS KICKING ME IN THE TEETH) then after going through two to three name changes, this is Lilia’s latest digital drawing as of writing this- as I still have to draw her again this year just to update a few tweaks I made from a sketch I did in paper, but had some steps in evolving from the first redesign attempt in 2023 thanks to the awesome, incredible mfs that was D3writo for a take he did on that before I even changed the colors it had, both for inspiring me to try drawing her again and for polishing my design further, and then y4chnny for…well, man also did a sketch of her during his huge OC drawing marathon over Twitter and I was lucky to have got something.

Maybe I’ll expand more on this little, kinda uneventful these past years but still an art journey nonetheless in a different post, and even more so hopefully if I can get to do more stuff…as long as something else does not get in the way such as university.

4 SEASONS REMINDED ME OF ONE CRUCIAL THING I ALMOST MISSED: The profile picture update.

Putting aside the quick explanation of symbolism, such as the 2002 being my birth year (yes, I’m not that old yet) but also a fitting number for the 2000s JSR vibe it has because of course I did it like that, it is the first time since 2022 I think that I got around to cook a new art at all of my persona/avatar. I actually had to make a backup from my photo in SRB2 Message Board and find a bigger but lower-res copy of that at I sent to a friend once in a chat since I somehow had lost track of where I had the original PSD or art even when I had used the render for a PMEX Remix montage last year.

I had one take in 2020- oh golly its worse than I remembered, one take in 2021 and yes, I used Kyosuke’s CVS2 SNK portrait as a reference, two I made and one which used very very briefly in 2022, while the other one I still had in a few sites like the SRB2 Message Board until now, now that I did the new one in the second week of this year.

I do have to mention that the last one I had made before this latest one was based off a friend’s birthday gift from that 2022, which I still think was a really cool detail when I look again at the whole picture- though the tweet he had shared it through originally is gone with his account since a while ago. But I do still keep a copy of it, I'm obviously keeping gifts like that safe and sound

Interesting road the one there, don’t you think?

Whaddup, what else?

Uhh…¿comida de avión?

What do you mean you never had airplane food?

…Okay, I never had it either- I’ve never been on a plane in the first place. Where did that joke even come from anyways? (You can tell I have not googled this yet.)

There’s likely stuff that I would like to update later, such as other stuff that I’ve written about somewhere else, things I’ve tried out, things I have been slowly but surely working on…and once again all of this if university stuff or even occasional tasks that arrive on my mail box like a pipe bomb (except these are worth getting for a reason) don’t get in the way of my creative concentration. I did try setting myself a daily to-do list for goals to do or to progress on for a day, and in that list I also had a little tidbit to keep my head away from the usual Birdxgram and even the Discord scrolling routine (I know this might already sound like a broken record at this point if I had mentioned it before…but you probably know well what I mean about that kind of problem).

So uhh…if you happen to be reading this because I hit send with this on any of those accounts, then consider it a little letter from me from this little “mental vacation” that should also work to focus on productive stuff, be it creative or otherwise, and hopefully come back to y’all with more worthy goodies to talk about- whether its art, finishing that one video, more writing, you get the drill.

Until then, or until I happen to crack my fingers again at simply another writing session for whatever and update my Neocities to reflect that…