August 2025

Mira here!

Bwah, it was a MONTH. One of use needs to talk about Blackheart still, but I'll leave it for now. Suffice it to say we had some periods of stress in August, but all is well at the moment. Viper has made some progress on its visuals and eventually we'll get some distance and be able to write things up. These end-of-month things are mostly light and meant to make sure we keep writing here.

Speaking of which, writing is basically progressing. Streaming means its really slow, but as long as we do something, it's not too bad. Feeding the creative impulse is what matters. We even doodled a little, working out what new characters should look like.

Streamingwise, this was the month of the Sega Saturn above all else. What a great little machine that is! It really has its own flavor, distinct from the Playstation games of the time, and there's so many gems we've discovered in looking through its library. Of course, we've touched on some classics that we already knew, like NiGHTS and the Panzer Dragoon series, but there's a lot of other good Sega arcade games that got ports to it, and Mr. Bones was an absolute treat. Also, we finished off Shinobi on the Master System after spending a number of weeks slowly learning and getting through it on sunday streams, which was a ton of fun too. It's great to have an excuse to actually buckle up and play a game properly when it's normally pretty tempting to save state or just otherwise drop it.

We really began a thing this month, which is the simple belief that all video games need a part that's really messed up and people hate. Things should be a pain in the ass, because that's what we remember. It gives contrast to the things that are easy and provides a point everyone can bond over. Mandara in Shinobi. The Mr Bones Icy Lake. That final boss of Megaman 7... these are the moments that really make the game. At first, we thought it was difficult or impossible to do this on purpose, but after seeing some examples where it really was intentional, I think we believe even more strongly than ever in this. We only get more hardline against the concept of games "respecting the player" over time.

Overall though, things feel pretty normal in life. I can only hope September continues to be peaceful.

Art

I like big bird talons a lot and my Master got me the treat of him having a form with big sharp ones. Roxie really rocked it on this one.