A Brief Respite (May 2023 Newsletter) (Patreon)

Just a quick bit of games-related news because most of this month was spent on/recovering from a much needed vacation. I'm hard at work on the Food Chain Magnate script and expect to film it next week, meaning it'll hopefully be ready around June 20-25th. Then once that's done I've got two commissioned videos to work on for July and August. The first is for a game called Galactic Era, which I've heard it said is a contender to be better than TI. Haven't tried it yet, and definitely skeptical about that claim, but I'm still very excited to give it a whirl. And then after that is Deliverance. A tactical combat game about heaven vs. hell. There's a small chance that might be delayed though, so if that happens I'll put up a quick poll and push up the next Patreon-requested tutorial.

The other big thing this month, in a very literal sense, is this giant camera robot. This is something that the Above Board studio got a few weeks ago, and just before my trip I was able to take a three day training course to learn to operate it. It's basically a robotic crane, but the camera moves it's able to pull off are absolutely incredible. I might be helping them out with filming a bit, but there's a decent chance I'll be able to use this for RTFM shoots, which will seriously up my game. I won't be able to make it happen for the Food Chain Magnate shoot, but I might be ready by the next one. I'll keep y'all updated because I am super excited about the potential here.

Anyway, I won't photo-dump my vacation pictures here, but I did have a lovely trip to Japan. We saw beautiful sights like this park or the temple where the lucky cat comes from (picture in the header), we ate amazing food (duck ramen for ¥800!), and we even went to Tokyo Disney Sea, an ocean themed park next to their Tokyo Disney.

(We chose not to go to the regular Tokyo Disney because from what we heard it's very similar to Disneyland, which I live quite close to)

I also got to meet my wife's extended family, though my Japanese is so rudimentary that I couldn't really talk to them that much. Still, it was certainly motivation to work harder on learning the language. They were very nice though. They even took us to a castle!

It was a fantastic trip and we're already planning the next one. Maybe one day I'll even be able to make sense of their subway system, which, despite looking like this...

was actually the best public transportation I've ever experienced (when you let Google Maps do all the work).