Willy

used to be if you had the right kind of laptop you could use it in the dark, up to and including reading vital documents. not anymore. all we've got is backlit 6-row keyboards.

since i bundled all three of these EPs together, i wanted to write a bit about what these three EPs mean to me! each one represents an important facet of my life, and i want to elaborate a bit on their meanings in this post. starting with...

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

24 - the future

this EP is dedicated to my baby boy! when he was born, he was 5 weeks premature. this meant that for one thing, we had to wake him up every few hours so he could feed, he would not wake up by himself.

aivi and i both had alarms on our phones set up to facilitate this--but we got sick of our alarms very quickly LOL.

i decided i would write an alarm/ringtone, and asked aivi what mood i should go for. they said "11pm", and so that was the first one i wrote! after that, i wrote 11am (for me!) and by then i was so into it, i decided i wanted to keep going and write one for every hour, 24 in total!

it's been such a joy to watch him grow (he's 1.5 years old now! already!!) and i cannot wait what lies ahead for us and him.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

1 - the present

all of these songs were written during the 2020 quarantine period. in that time, the music irc channel #mod_shrine held regular "one hour compo" events, about one a week.

these compo events were great escapism and camaraderie in a time when everybody was isolated. because the songs were written in one hour, they have a bit of a stream-of-consciousness vibe, and i think it really reflects the stress and darkness of the time.

even though the times of social distancing and isolation are (mostly?) behind us, we still feel the consequences of that time to this day, with outbreaks of RSV and influenza much worse than usual, as well as a general sense of isolation.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

5 - the past

this is the most personal release i've ever made: it's about my mom's illness and eventual death to breast cancer, around 12 years ago.

i go into more detail on the ubiktune release website, so if you want to learn more, i urge you to read that, but to summarize i never dealt with her death properly from an emotional standpoint. the tracks of this EP represent the 4 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression). the 5th and final stage, acceptance, would then be reached by completing this EP.

in writing this EP, i treated it as a musical form of therapy (in addition to actual, literal therapy). i feel like i was able to face and work through my feelings regarding her death, and have truly reached that stage of acceptance in doing so.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

thank you for reading all this! all three of the EPs are available on bandcamp, and of course there's the pre-order campaign for the minidisc (which i'm hoping to post on bandcamp soon as well, as soon as i receive a preview unit). i'll also be printing CDs soon as well, so if you wanted to buy a physical but don't want minidisc, keep an eye out for that!

The new stickers I had made are here. I'm hoping to have them in my store this weekend!

It’s the part where they introduce a new named, voiced, modelled and animated character, and he gets this gif’s worth of screen time and is never seen or heard from again. Mirror's Edge is full of these parts where you can see the stubs where big slabs of game must have had to be cut for whatever reason, which feels like a rare bit of almost-insight into AAA game dev, plus it makes the world feel bigger - the opposite of the hannah-barbera-effect of knowing what's about to be important from which assets look expensive.

I don’t have any scoops, but it feels like the devs had to hurriedly figure out how to make a decent smaller game out of bits of a planned larger one, in which case they did an incredible job. Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which I also think is great, feels like it might be a second better-resourced run at the same concept ME started out with.

The PC version of ME shipped, maybe accidentally, with its Unreal Editor, and I went through that and some decompiled source code a while back, and found some cut multiplayer modes where you’d play as various classes of runners and cops: cops and robbers, package delivery, stuff like that. Hot scoops.