When Condolences Aren't Enough To Fend Off Dreams

I suck at titling posts...this post needs some background before I go into it, so here goes.

I've been a subscriber to a Youtube channel run by a user named brunello1997. Like many of the channels in my subscription list, the user hails from Japan and exclusively posts videos of her(?) cat, Yukke. The cat reminds me dearly of a cat I once owned back in the late 1990's...the videos usually consist of her sitting atop high perches, staring out the window and chattering at any birds that she might see at street level.

The last video Brunello posted to the channel was on February of last year. Activity on her account ceased during about the same time the Fukushima earthquakes hit. I, and a number of other fans, were understandably worried.

Near the end of April, Brunello left an update on the channel.

■　皆さんへ 　■　(2011年4月21日(木)更新)
brunello1997 です。(=^-^=)
たくさんの方々からユッケと私のことを心配してくださっているメッセージやメールをいただきましてありがとうございます。そして

、すぐにお礼ができなくてすみませんでした。
まず、ユッケも私も地震による被害は受けていません。ご心配くださった皆さん、本当にありがとうございました。そして、ユッケは相変わらずお茶目さんで、とっても元気です。（*^^*）
どうかご安心ください。
[ユッケちゃんねる]を更新できなかった理由は、私(brunello1997)の体調不良によるものです。
詳しい検査を受けようとしていた矢先、三月に緊急手術、そして、そのまま入院することになりました。現在も入院して治療を受けています。決して楽観できるような状況ではありませんし、私の命が皆さんよりかなり短いことだけは確かです。でも、私はむしろ幸せだと思っています。私自身の残り時間が短いという事実を知ることができたからです。
それによって、私は時間、そして、色んな事のありがたさを感じながら過ごす事ができるわけですし。
なので、超ポジティブに頑張っています。（*^^*）おかげさまで、現在お薬もよく効いていて、もうすぐ一時帰宅できる予定です。ユッケとの時間もたっぷりと楽しみたいと考えています。
愛猫ユッケの動画や写真は、これからもアップし続けたいと考えています。今後とも、ちょっとお茶目なユッケ(ちけちゃん)のことをどうぞよろしくお願い致します。
(*^^*)
To dear all of you.
Hello. I am brunello1997. ^-^　Thank you very much for your very tender words as always. And, I'm sorry, I was not here, long time.
We do not suffer damage caused by the earthquake. Please don't worry. We are in the safe place.
However, unfortunately I have other problem. It is the reason why I was not able to upload a video of Yukke.　I was not well-conditioned recently. And I underwent every check at a hospital. I was going to undergo a more detailed check(CT, MRI, PET, etc..) in March. However, on March 20, I was hospitalized.(I am in hospital now.)　Unfortunately I have cancer. However, I am not pessimistic about it. Please don't worry.
I want to upload a video of Yukke again soon. (^-^) I wants to say, again. Thank you so much for your very brilliant tenderness. We (I and Yukke) are very happy, because all of you are very kind and tender.
I will come back here. =^-^=
Thank you very much.

brunello 1997 in hospital.

That's the last activity she's had on the account in almost a year. I learned of this several months ago.

Last night, I had a dream, wherein I found myself in the middle of Japan, visiting this person's house - never going inside, because why would I be invited inside by someone that I've never spoken to, especially when I can't speak their language? In the dream, I left a gift package - I don't remember what was inside - on the doorstep, and left afterwards. I could only tell it was the right house because of Yukke appearing in the window as I approached.

It's beyond me why I'm having dreams about people I've never met, and in fact, don't even have a clue what they look or sound like. Although Brunello does speak to Yukke in her videos, it is often whispered, so I don't even have a clear picture of her voice. Perhaps it's my overactive imagination, or maybe some bizarre sort of mental link (perhaps morphogenetic fields?), but I have no idea why I've dreamed of this, of all things...and so clearly, at that.

Bleh...whatever. This post isn't supposed to be about me, anyway.

I suppose I should close here by offering a "get well" to Brunello, best wishes to her and her feline companion, and I hope things go well. I hope the fact that we haven't heard from her in almost a year isn't setting us up for bad news.

*salute*

What Am I Doing For Valentine's Day?

Do you need to ask? Nothing. Pretty much. Still don't have a relationship ongoing (at this point I'm not sure that it's worth worrying about). So my plans are pretty much down to waiting until the day after, visiting the local Bi-Mart, and plundering their stock of candy. Maybe I could get another pack of Hot Shots, the only candy badass enough to be packaged inside a shotgun shell. =P

And Nothing Of Value Was Lost

As some on the Internet might be aware, tomorrow (Wednesday, January 18th) marks the date that many websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Rockpapershotgun, and innumerable others will be "going dark" (becoming completely inaccessible, outside of an informational message) to protest the upcoming United States bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). Blaugh! will be following suit.

...Well, not really. I'd love to participate in this blackout myself, but the thing is, I doubt enough people are aware of Blaugh! in itself, so going dark would serve no purpose whatsoever. Unless Google decides that Blogger as a whole will be blacking out tomorrow, Blaugh! should (theoretically) remain operational. Not that it really matters.

Musings on RPG Battle Systems

[01:20:55] [Ough] i should play more ff6
[01:21:18] [Ough] the battle system still bothers me.  the fucking bars that keep fucking filling when you're selecting from the fucking main menu
[01:25:15] [wildweasel] if i had one wish for a romhack, it would be the complete removal of ATB from any of the FF games that used it
[01:25:32] [wildweasel] make it play like ff1 or something, i dunno, just get rid of the stupid fake realtime
[01:25:39] [Ough] my favorite standard rpg style battle system is final fantasy 10's
[01:25:55] [wildweasel] hm actually yes, that's a good one
[01:26:17] [wildweasel] smt3: nocturne did about the same thing too, but with more emphasis on being able to influence the turn order with certain abilities
[01:26:27] [wildweasel] that'd be a bit ambitious for a rom hack though
[01:27:22] [Ough] that shit was perfect!  speed and attack "times" and turn order were still a huge deal and something you had to pay attention to and strategize with, only instead of being accomplished by fucking bars it it had to do with what you did and, importantly, you had time to think about it
[01:27:36] [Ough] then they went back to atb in the sequel.
[01:28:04] [Ough] i never played much of that anyway

Well, Uh, You Know (A YU-NO Post)

Man. Why do some of the really intensely well-written games have to be so embarrassing to talk about online?

The topic of my (potential) embarrassment this time around is a Japanese visual novel slash point-and-click adventure game by the name of YU-NO. Recently chronicled in a highly enlightening article on Hardcore Gaming 101, and also coming to the forefront of news for people already familiar with it due to the unfortunate passing of the game's music composer, Ryu Umemoto, I became interested in YU-NO after learning that there was a very complete fan translation of the game. Those who know me well enough can probably guess how I got my hands on the game, but that's not the important point here.

YU-NO's story has many twists and turns, not all of which the player can naturally be present to witness at a given time. That's where the beauty of the game's narrative comes in, though - you don't hear of big events "through the grapevine", you aren't always conveniently in the exact place that something is going to happen, and you most definitely don't know exactly when a specific event will occur. But the game's rather unique save-game system is how we get around this. Here is a brief explanation of how it works.

Shortly after the game's prologue, you gain access to a device called a Reflector, two Jewels, and a Divergence Map. The Reflector doesn't really serve an in-game purpose besides the ability to pull up the in-game menu, should you decide you want to quit playing. The Jewels - of which you can carry up to 8 - are how the game's save system works. You can "bookmark" points in time by pressing one, at which point it vanishes and leaves a bookmark icon on the Divergence Map (which is, in reality, a gameplay device to help you discern where the plot branches will occur). If you open the Map and then click on the bookmark icon, you are warped back to the exact point when you used your jewel, but any items or jewels you may have gained or used will retain their current status. In short, if you bookmark a scene in which you need a crucial item but don't have it yet, obtain it much later in the story, and then restore the bookmark, you will still have the item and can use it. The game's own universe has its own explanation for this sort of behavior, in the form of many stacks of scientific documents (I've been told the game even comes with a physical copy of one such document). Parallel world theory plays a huge part in this; this isn't a simple time-travel plot.

Here's the thing, though. This plot device has not, to my knowledge, been used in any other game - in fact, I have almost no idea how anything like this could be applied to any genre other than visual novels or adventure games, without it merely coming off as a highly restricted quick-save system (and the players, understandably, crying bloody foul over it).

This brings to mind the quandary I touched upon in the very first paragraph: why, of all things, did the most interesting plot device I've seen in a game in years...have to be attached to an adults-only visual novel? Granted, the sex scenes do bear the very slightest amounts of character development which would have been awkward in any other context (however, I'm told that the Sega Saturn port, which omits these scenes, was able to get by just fine story-wise, though is otherwise quite an inferior version of the game), but really, all this seems to have done is greatly limit the game's audience after the fact. Sure, the game probably wouldn't have sold anything had the developer not marketed it to "those" sorts of people, and likely would have faded into obscurity...but now that it's available in English (thanks to those kind folks at TLWiki), and English-speaking countries have very different attitudes towards sexual content in media...especially in regards to some of the situations in which it occurs in a game like YU-NO...

...Sigh. Now nobody's going to take this post seriously.