What, two posts in quick succession?! Don’t get used to it.

In order to try to keep my posts a bit more focused, I’m splitting things up in a sensible way, or at least trying to.

First of all, my wrist is currently damaged (cartalige damage) so I’m not able to hold a game controller, let alone a crochet hook or knitting needle.

This has given me a bit of extra time to work on other things, though.

The Timeline

As I mentioned in my latest post, “The Dead Shall Rise” has been released digitally. This includes a couple of noteworthy events that definitely should be listed, and at least one additional character. Arguably I should also be including Turel’s journey, though we have very little to go on for that (at least for now)

On the timeline there is currenty a toggle called “gameplay only” - this was poorly named in the first place, but now that the official media I’m taking into account includes things that aren’t games, it’s an even worse name now.

I am therefore trying to alter the code to instead list the different sources for an event, but even that might not be sufficient.

We can definitely try to categorise events in the following way:

• An event directly witnessed by us, the player/reader.
• An event inferred by the characters. For example, backstory told through murals that they find in the games.
• An event inferred by us. Events that are required for the story to make sense. For example, the sequence of events that are the case before a change in the flow of time (e.g. Raziel getting sucked into the Reaver at the end of Soul Reaver 2).

So it seems that for each source there are “explicit” and “implicit” events, at the very least.

Accessible Colour Picker

I’m passionate about trying to make this site as accessible as possible, and part of that includes picking the correct colours. They need to both be pleasurable for me to look at, but also contrast with each other enough to be distinguishable for those with visual impairments.

There are a lot of tools for this already, but they generally seem to only compare two colours at once. Due to the timeline, how this site can assign colours to categories, and how there are multiple differnet background colours (due to dark mode) my needs are much more complex.

I am working on a tool to help me with this, which will obviously be publically available afterwards.

Amigurumi Moebius

I don’t like to mention craft projects I’m working on until they are complete, but I’m making some exceptions here.

I’ve been working on an amigurumi Mobeius doll. I was doing a size comparison with the 4 different Allison Hoffman patterns I have - adult and child from the book, teen and adult from “Last Travelers of Us Joel and Ellie Patterns”. Effectively it’s 8 patterns, as I normally use 4mm hooks but the pattern calls for 3.5.

I was doing this because in my imagination Mobeius was shorter than Raziel, and I wanted to find a good size for that where the proportions would be accurate.

One of the items that came with The Dead Shall Rise was a 3D model file of Moebius. I decided to use this to get a good idea of the size difference. To do this I used Soul Spiral to extract the models from the remastered games from last year (interestingly, Soul Spiral would accurately detect the Soul Reaver remaster, but not Soul Reaver 2, hence my fork with fixes for that) then import them into Blender.

The Dead Shal Rise’s model was much bigger, as in, it was if a Kaiju version of Moebius was attacking a city populated by the Soul Reaver 2 cast. So instead I just used the remaster models. I placed each one at the same co-ordinates, then shifted them along the x axis so they were next to each other, and I could get an accurate height comparison.

Damnit. It turns out that Janos & Kain are taller than the humans, who are about the same height, but that Wraith Raziel is a short-arse.

Well, I can correct that when I get around to the second iterations of the dolls.

Amigurumi Elder God

This is anther one I’ve been working on, and I’ve occasionally posted pictures on Facebook when asking for advice.

In the summer I bought a resin kit. My main use for it was to create a keepsake for my wife, which I did. A seondary use for it is to create my own safety eyes - it’s difficult, but I’m creating glow in the dark safety eyes for the Elder God. My proof of concepts worked, but there are two issues:

1. For the resin to cure, it needs to be warm, which is difficult coming into winter.
2. The fumes are highly poisonous. I would be alright doing it outside to keep everyone safe, but it’s even colder outside than inside.

This one will take a long while, but is also being delayed because of everything else.

Remaking Amigurumi

Whenever I’ve seen amigurumi posted on social media, especially through ads, I’ve been deeply suspicious. They often have square looking stitches, and they look super neat. That’s just not possible… or is it?

It turns out that depsite doing yarn craft for almost 15 years now, I’m still essentially a beginner. I’ve been doing some reading up on techniques that will make the dolls look so much better. So of course I’m going to do it.

Plus, if I redo the accessories and integrate magnets, that’ll be cool.

Blogging Mobile App

I’m still occasionally dipping my toes into learning React Native, with the ultimate aim being to create an app so I can write and submit blog posts from within it.