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underpuffau · 6 years

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Underpuff 200 Follower Retrospective

Well, we’ve done it Underpuff now has 200 followers. How many of them actively follow the AU is impossible to know, but one thing is for sure. That 200 people saw my AU, and enjoyed it enough to hit follow. This means so much you can’t even imagine. No matter how you look at it, 200 people is a fuckton of people, and I couldn’t be more happy you all decided to follow this little ol’ Kirby AU. Sadly though, unlike last time, I really don’t have a way to celebrate this via a sneak peak of the next part. There also isn’t anything I particularly wanna show off either as far as roles or plot goes. So clearly the most logical thing to do is talk about my old work and laugh at it. That’s right, to celebrate this step forward, let’s take some steps backwards, and look at the hilarious atrocity that was the Underpuff Preboot.

Let’s start from the beginning. Starting from the middle was considered but I thought it was too post modern. Back in ye olden days of Sprite AUs, crossovers were just becoming a thing, the leaders of this format being Undertoad, and the now dead Smashtale.I oved the idea of crossing over Undertale with other series, and the number one AU I wanted to see happen, was of course, a Kirby AU. Every day I prayed for some kind of music track or comic part to be made for one, rather than all the vague concepts I saw thrown around from time to time. I waited an waited, but a Kirby AU never came. One day, on a Meta Knight as Mettaton shitpost on r/Undertale, I talked about this want for a Kirby AU in the comments, and some vague ideas I had for one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Undertale/comments/4h335y/metta_knight/d2nb7p7/

As you can see things, really didn’t pan out like this, but one step at a time. After posting this comment, and reading responses to it, I came up with more and more ideas, and I even drew concept art of all the roles!

Adecryforhelp

Keel me

Kirb stomp me into the ground

LololOH GOD

JOLY SHIT

eta knig.

eta knig period.

Whispy (why) Wood(you do this to me)s

Here take this for your eyes, I bet you need it right now

But yeah, my art and design skills weren’t up to snuff at the time. I’ve obviously gotten much better, but at the time I was a full blown amateur and was blissfully unaware. Gotta love that Dunning Kruger effect huh?

But all these “ideas” and art were for nothing, as I had a shit laptop at home that couldn’t do jack shit without coming close to fucking combustion. Like, it was so bad, I used my Wii U for everything Internet related. The Internet Browser on the Wii U was a better alternative than my actual computer. Let that sink in. However, spending so much time on the Wii U would lead you to discover new games and apps when they popped up, and for me, one of those was the software called Pixel Maker. And this is where Underpuff would get it’s start.

Pixel Maker was a pretty good software. I did exactly as was advertised, allow you to make pixel art on your Wii U. I saw this as my opportunity to finally make my ideas a reality, and when I had enough money, I bought it without delay. I got started making the first stages of Underpuff. I had no way to pull straight from Undertale. I had to eyball the maps and recreate them to the best of my ability, with the Great Cave reskin aesthetic of course. When I went to make text, I tried to recreate the UT font myself, but was unable to do it. With all the pre made fonts in PM not being to my liking, and the software lacking text sizes at the time, I decided to make my own font.

This was a mistake.

It was poorly made and ugly to look at, but I used it throughout all 7 preboot parts. And since this was my own font made in PM, I couldn’t use the text tool to apply it. I had to meticulously copy paste EVERY SINGLE LETTER. It was annoying, and resulted in me despising text. But hey, it’s just the font, so long as the spritework looks good, who cares?

Anymore of that bleach leftover? It’s for me.

But yes, Underpuff, in all awfully sprited and JPGed goodness, was murder on your eyes. (And probably soul too)

Why is the file type blurry ass JPG o all things you ask? Well my fan, allow me to tell you about my process for getting Underpuff to imgur.

Step 1: Create Panel

Step 2: Go to miiverse

Step 3: Save screenshot of the panel into screenshot album

Repeat till part is complete

Step 4: Access album from browser

Step 5: Copy image url

Step 6: Paste this url into imgurs uploader

Repeat until part is uploaded

But what does this have to do with JPG? Well, the answer is that Miiverse’s screenshots save in, you guessed it, JPG! So my images were blurry not of my own volition!

But, even if the visuals are completely, 100% awful, the dialogue must at least make uop for it. Surely I didn’t stoop so low as to just slightly modify Undertale dialogue right? RIGHT?

...

God dammit.

Underpuff was a reskin to the highest degree. Character relationships, dialogue, areas, all just Undertale with a Kirby paint. That’s all it was. And I was sitting here, wondering why the hell I couldn’t break 10 upvotes on reddit. This was why, cause I was a terrible writer, artist, and typographist. But it added up to something in the end, because one day I realized this, and rebooted Underpuff into it’s current state right now. A fully fleshed out, new story, with logical relationships, and a huge focus on lore and characterization. You know why I put those on such high pedestals, because of this. Because of preboot. I don’t want anything like Preboot to ever exist again, and it’s why I want to make Underpuff as sound in the Kirby universe as I can, while still having plenty of characters to work with..

And now, I have an actual computer, that I can actually make panels with. I still go back to PM from time to time, usually for battlesprites, since I like doing those by hand, but most of my work is done on here now. The parts may come out slower these days, but that’s because actual effort is being put forth now. Everyday I think of how to improve Underpuff’s story, fix plot holes or mistakes, all so I can make what I’ve been told is the only good Kirby AU the best it can possibly be.I take my time and not try to rush parts out per month like I did, all so I can achieve the quality I want. (The Reboot battle system wouldn’t exist if I didn’t take so long on Part 2.)

While I may not get the amount of asks, fanart, or music as I would like, one thing remains true. 200 of you appreciate the new Underpuff, and the work I put in. You appreciate the fact it’s not a shitty JPG reskin. You appreciate the fact I try to be lore and characterization friendly. And I appreciate all of you, my friends and fans who support me and what I do. If it weren’t for all of you, I may have given up, but all eyes are on me, and I’m not gonna disappoint. I may be a little sappy right now, but hey, I’m a Kirby AU, gotta be somewhat wholesome right? But to all of you, whether you have been here since the preboot, or jumped on for the reboot, I just gotta say...

-Thank you, Pika

#undertale #kirby #undertale au #undertaleau #undertale_au #nintendo #hal

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dystopialiving · 5 years

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Case Study #11: Meta Media

Some background:

Meta-media is, as near as I can tell from a very cursory Google search, a term that I’m coining for the sake of this blog.

Seems fair.

The same concept has been touched on by some writers under the terminology of recaps and recap culture, but that analysis in my opinion doesn’t capture the complete nature of the issue. Probably because most other pop culture outlets don’t operate from the premise that we’re living in an inescapable hellscape of our own making.

I’m not sure why, because I’m having a blast here.

Anyhow! Meta-media is media whose sole purpose is to revisit other (most often contemporary) previously-consumed pieces of media, typically in the form of podcasts, television, or streaming video.

You’re likely already familiar with at least one piece of meta-media. Examples include Talking Dead, The West Wing Weekly, Watch the Thrones, and Here to Make Friends.

Media about media is nothing new, as the long history of film and literary criticism, digests and the like attests. However, meta-media is distinct from these other historical forms in that it expects the viewer or listener to have already consumed the primary piece of media in order to engage in the meta-level consumption.

In other words, you’ll read a film review to help you decide if you want to spend your time watching the film in question, and you’ll read Soap Opera Digest to catch up on the episodes you missed, but Talking Dead is not a show you watch if you missed The Walking Dead. It’s a show you spend your time watching if and only if you just spent the last hour of your life watching The Walking Dead. And you don’t listen to The West Wing Weekly to decide whether or not you want to start watching The West Wing. It’s only coherent if you’ve already watched the show.

Whereas historical media about media was created to save you time, meta-media is created to compound the amount of time you spend consuming. So not only do you have to contend with a truly overwhelming amount of primary media, you’ve now got to make sure you’re up on all your hippest recaps as well.

Meta-media is coming for every goddamn minute we have.

The Dystopia:

There’s nothing inherently bad about media consumption, and there’s no shortage of media that provides opportunities for personal enrichment—It’s when we reach overconsumption, and in particular overconsumption of the types of media that don’t provide personal enrichment, that problems begin to arise. Speaking of a rise:

Source

That’s right—Americans now spend more than 11 hours each day consuming media of one form or another, and that number is rising. That’s nearly ⅔ of all waking hours (factoring in the less-than recommended 6.8 hours of sleep per night the average American gets).

Frustratingly, the meta-media problem is further compounded by how serialization of media has changed with the advent of streaming video. It is only very recently that media creators expect viewers to consume, for example, every episode of a television series. Even up until the early 2000s, series-long story arcs didn’t require the viewer to consume even the majority of a series’ episodes to be comprehensible, and important plot points were often recapped with the expectation that not all viewers were able to keep up with essential episodes (see, for example, The X-Files). Now, when entire seasons of television are dumped in a single day and viewers can binge watch over the course of a weekend, every episode is designed to be essential viewing.

Whereas the historical digest format would be even more helpful now, in what can only be called a content glut, we’ve instead moved in the opposite direction. Meta-media not only compels us to watch every episode of a television show, it also compels us to watch or listen to every episode about every episode.

In pulling this post together, I spent several hours listening to and watching meta-media, and I came away with one predominant thought: I’m never getting those hours of my life back. But it was certainly a learning experience.

I dove into The West Wing Weekly and Here to Make Friends (each hour-long podcasts recapping single episodes of The West Wing and The Bachelor, respectively), Beyond Stranger Things, Talk the Thrones (an hour-plus long live webcast recapping single Game of Thrones Episodes), and Talking Dead.

In terms of the content that most meta-media explores, it tends to live in the world of commentary, but rarely approaches criticism—it’s all far more expository than analytical. Hosts will give surface-level opinions about the primary media’s narrative, and make predictions for future episodes or installments, but rarely do they delve deeper into themes or questions like what a piece of media says about the culture at large. Controversial opinions are almost nonexistent, as if the meta-media exists primarily to validate positive feelings that consumers have about the original piece of media. This characteristic is particularly egregious for meta-media that’s produced by the very same entity that created the primary media.

In a best-case scenario, meta-media will include in its discussion someone who was involved in the production of the primary media to give behind-the-scenes insight into the making of the original product. In other words, you’re basically watching this:

So, yeah, I’m using “best-case scenario” pretty generously here. It’s derivative, it’s uncreative. It adds very little to the conversation started by the primary media, and it’s really only a simulacrum of a conversation.

Meta-media also pays a very real part in our deepening entrenchment in our own particular content bubbles, in that it does little to open us up to new perspectives or ways of thinking. There are only so many hours in the day, and filling those hours with meta-media leaves less and less room for experiencing novel primary media. In a time when we could stand to learn about as many new things and ways of thinking as possible, it seems borderline irresponsible to consume something that, instead of being about love or acceptance or trauma or family or friggin’ dragons, is just about another show.

But Why?

A defense of meta-media I’ve heard from friends and acquaintances is that consuming it feels a lot like hanging out and chatting with friends. But if that’s the case—why aren’t we just hanging out and chatting with friends? Do they not like the same shows that we do? Are we disappointed that they’re not as witty as our favorite podcast hosts? Or do we just not have the time, what with all the meta-media we’re consuming?

At what point does media consumption become another obligation rather than a real pleasure?

Critically, meta-media lacks the most crucial element that hanging out and chatting with friends grants us: actually voicing our own opinions. Sure, we might have thoughts and feelings upon consuming a particular episode, but if we then immediately follow that with simply dumping professional content creators’ positive opinions in on top, do we even have space to fully form and flesh out our own ideas about media?

It’s like a reverse Two Minutes Hate. Let’s call it 60 Minutes Love.

Assuming we don’t receive a cease-and-desist from the Leslie Stahl fan club:

And there, I think is the real answer to why meta-media has grown so enormously in recent years: More consumption means more advertising dollars, and in terms of effort to both create and consume, meta-media expertly scrapes the bottom of the barrel. It’s a low-budget media format that, at its least complicated, reliably gives its consumers warm and fuzzy feelings. More insidiously, meta media also spurs ironic consumption. Sure, you wouldn’t normally be caught dead watching The Bachelor, but Here to Make Friends is funny, so you’ll watch it on a lark. Congratulations—advertisers don’t care why you’re watching the Bachelor. They got your eyeballs anyway.

Redeeming Qualities:

Particularly given the aforementioned opinions about what it feels like to consume meta-media, I’m not going to deny that plenty of meta-media is entertaining. Most meta-media hosts are deliberately chosen to be funny and engaging, so from a strictly hedonic perspective, meta-media has a role to play on the mindless end of the entertainment spectrum. I certainly understand wanting a break from dense, emotionally or intellectually heavy media.

That’s not to say that meta media is dumb, per se. At its best, it can be witty and occasionally insightful, but what it’s not is intellectually original. It is, by its very nature, derivative. And while I understand the impulse to sometimes just kick back and enjoy something untaxing, there’s so much primary media that could fill that void! Or even non-media choices altogether.

I suppose at best that meta-media can be seen as a manifestation of the completionist impulse that lies at the heart of certain fandoms. If we love something enough, we’re happy to sacrifice novelty for depth, and that’s okay as long as we fully grasp the consequences of that choice. Still, I can’t help but feel that there’s a fundamental difference between A World Of Ice And Fire and Watch The Thrones.

Can we fix it?

The first step to fixing this is to just be honest about what we get out of our favorite piece of meta-media and decide whether or not it’s enriching in a way that’s deserving of our increasingly scarce time. More broadly, though, we also need to work towards dealing with a larger cultural problem in content creation: Talk Show Disorder.

Talk Show Disorder is a problem that manifests itself time after time in the behavior of otherwise extremely talented comedians and performers. When presented with a crossroads in their career, they overwhelmingly make an extremely boring and predictable choice: hosting a talk show (see: Conan O’Brien, Stephen Colbert, Ellen DeGeneres, etc. etc.).

These are extremely capable people who could otherwise do just about anything with their time and be successful. Why is their impulse to choose to spend five days a week sitting behind a desk, talking about the things that other people are doing? Is it just good, easy money? Is it the cultural weight we’ve assigned to talk show hosts as authority figures? Why are so many creators compelled to do something so thoroughly unoriginal? To put it another way:

Meta-media, I think, is a symptom of this larger disorder. The notion that this media format is something to aspire to is embedded deeply enough in the zeitgeist that people are going to continue creating and consuming meta-media until it changes.

Just as every hour we spend consuming meta-media is an hour not consuming better media, every hour spent creating meta-media is an hour not spent creating primary media. Hopefully, if enough people stopped consuming meta-media, market forces would push content creators away from this form and towards using their intellectual capital on more worthwhile pursuits.

Look—at the end of the day, it’s your life. You can spend it doing whatever you want. But know that just as you vote with your dollar, you also vote with your time. So if, for example, you’re a young white dude who took three weeks of improv classes and is convinced that the best thing you can do with your time is record a combination Ballers/60 Minutes recap podcast called Ballers & Stahlers, maybe do your old pal Kevin a favor and try directing your creative energies elsewhere.

Up next: I may well go a few years without posting again, but hey—America has concentration camps again, so the basic premise of this blog is kind of shot. Maybe we should talk about that soon.

#recaps #DystopiaLiving #dystopias #podcasts #meta-media #the bachelor #commentary

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ansu-gurleht · 5 years

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So, what is the technological advancement in your world? Is magic common or rather somewhat rare? Are some species more likely to be magical than others? Classical distinction between good and evil or more complicated than that? How about healthcare? And what do the people believe in, many Gods, Religions, maybe Major Religions? What about love? Special Cuisine? (Sorry, many questions)

okay let’s get CRACKIN! gonna put in a read more here for people who don’t care, b/c this is about to get LENGTHY

technologically we’re not too far ahead! maybe think early renaissance europe? no gunpowder, tho’ we have magic gun staves. we got crossbows, siege weaponry, and also magical prosthetic limbs! a lot of “technological” advances here are b/c of magic, but i don’t think that makes them any less valid.

magic is common enough that everyone knows it exists, but not everyone knows its scope. somebody (esp. like, a human in a rural village) might be surprised to meet somebody who can use magic, but they wouldn’t really doubt that it’s real magic. and also, there’s a bit of mystery in exactly what magic can do, how much there is in the world. think lotr, although in practice, my magic is much more of a hard magic system. (see sandersons laws of magic for what i mean by that!)

the three sentient races in my world (orcs, humans, and elves) can all practice magic to varying degrees. orcs tend to be born with an innate gift, and if you aren’t, then you either can’t do magic, or you can barely do magic with great effort. humans don’t tend to have innate ability, unless they have an innate gift for studying. b/c studying magic is the only way for humans to be able to learn and practice it. you might consider orcs to be d&d sorcerers, whereas humans are wizards.

elves….are a different story. they’re ALL inherently magical. their entire BEING is magic. that’s not to say they’re not flesh and blood, real people - they just treat magic like breathing. that doesn’t mean they’re all wizards or sorcerers or shaman, but they have the best “starting point,” so to speak. orcs have the worst “starting point” in that some of them can’t practice it at all, but orcs ALSO have they highest potential of power.

good vs. evil is absolutely not a thing - this setting really focuses on the grey aspects. it’s important to note - my original premise for this setting was, “what if a huge good vs evil battle like in lotr happened, except the ‘evil’ won?” naturally, orcs aren’t inherently “evil,” they were just slaves to a relatively “evil” force, the trolls. i won’t elaborate on the trolls too much, since even in my head i’m purposefully keeping them somewhat vague, but they were a powerful race who created the orcs as slave-warriors to try to destroy and conquer the world. but then the orcs won and realized being slaves wasn’t great, and that they didn’t like what they’d been made to do, and so they killed their gods, their makers.

there’s another force in the world, one which you MIGHT could consider a “truer” evil than even the trolls, but i won’t elaborate on them. spoilers ;P

(as a small note on my races: i’m using rather familiar names for them, like “orcs” and “elves” and “trolls,” but they’re really very different from what you’d expect. i shan’t elaborate on how, esp. wrt elves, b/c, again, spoilers.)

orcs are a very communal race, and always seek to protect and take care of their sick, weak, and disabled. i’ve already mentioned magical prostheses (orcs, esp. those who regularly fight, tend to lose limbs a lot :P), but magic and traditional medicinal cures are also used to tend for the sickly. the elderly and infirm are cared for and protected as well.

humans are a bit less caring, and esp. in communities w/o orc rule or influence, sometimes even discard the sick, elderly, and disabled. they tend to excuse it as being barely a dent in their population, b/c, well…..humans fuck like rabbits. that’s the primary reason that the orcs and trolls couldn’t completely destroy them. they destroyed their cities and homes, slaughtered them by the millions, but there were always those hiding in the forests and jungles, who just refused to die.

b/c of their magicalness, elves rarely NEED to worry about healthcare. magical healing and remedies are either something anybody can do, or something somebody down the street can do. it’s a non-issue to them.

ooh, boy, religion. humans believe in either a vague almighty God, or a vague almighty Pantheon of gods (possibly derived from old elvish religion), but it’s really not very well established. it really depends on the place, b/c a lot of places developed different religions due to their isolation after the war.

orcs, and a lot of the humans under their rule/influence, have a very flexible system. they are ancestor-worshipers with some animist aspects. they also worship certain primordial elemental spirits (who they also consider ancestors) of the four elemental planes (earth, air, water, fire). it’s a bit odd to call them “planes”. they’re really like four pieces to the puzzle that is the world; they overlap with one another and their interactions create the world as we know it.

anyways, some orcs tend to have cults devoted to specific proposed ancestors, certain sacred sites, as well as some of the elemental spirits. it depends really on the specific culture - there’s a lot of variety.

elves worship “star gods” who speak to them (and only them) from the heavens, and also send their “emissaries” in the form of “dragon gods” to rule over/protect/guide the elven people. it’s quite a bit more complicated than that, but a lot of stuff about elves is spoilery, so that’s all you get.

ah, love. i’ll give you this: love for humans isn’t exciting. it’s about par for the course either in the real world, or in other fantasy worlds.

orcs, though? it’s very different. there’s not really “soulmates” in the sense of exclusive partners throughout your life. sure, some might be pretty attached and stick together, but it’s not exclusive, and not an end-all-be-all. gender/sex is irrelevant when it comes to orc love/mating. if they like somebody, and that somebody loves them back, they’re gonna fuck. sometimes publicly, but they try to keep it somewhat private, if not always quiet.

it works mostly off of hormones/pheromones. it’s worth noting that orcs age very differently from humans: orcs reach the size of an adult human by age 3 or 4. they reach full orc adulthood by age 8 or so. most orcs live until about age 40, rarely longer.

anyways, once an orc reaches adult age, their reproductive glands responsible for producing and receiving sexy-times pheromones are fully developed. (it makes it a bit difficult to determine exactly what “adult age” is for orcs, since some orcs finish developing by age 6, while others don’t finish until they’re 12, or at all. northern, “civilized” orcs tend to assume an age of 8.)

for orcs, “rape” is basically an incomprehensible concept. orcs can literally only fuck if they are receiving the same pheromones they’re putting out for somebody. (this is why human-orc relationships are very, very rare, even not considering stigma; a human is just not equipped, from an orc’s point of view, to have sex.)

way back when, during the big ol’ war, humans and elves spread rumors about the orcs “raping” and pillaging, but what they were really talking about was post-battle orc orgies. these were (and still are, occasionally) very real things. the adrenaline and excitement of battle, as well as the closeness with your comrades that results, tends to result in a lot of orcs getting really horny for each other. this was also effective, especially from the trolls’ point of view, in replenishing losses from the battle by reproducing. so after battles, humans within earshot miles around could hear, uh. a lot of orcs getting it on.

elves are different. obviously. when are they not? they DEFINITELY have life-partners, although sometimes multiple at a time. elvish culture is highly female-driven, and as a result, the most common er, “configuration” for an elvish couple is a lesbian couple. men are also usually expected to be together, b/c a lot of them have a hard time getting with women, due to their lower status. women will have multiple female life-partners, and typically only one male life-partner, which is how they reproduce. (elves are also very romantic, except not so much usually in “hetero” relationships. those guys are just there for babies, more or less.) it’s typically sort of a “competition” among elvish females to see who can pick the least deplorable man to mate with, just as it is for men to try to elevate their status by mating with powerful women.

one quick note on “gender.” humans, culturally, tend to be pretty cisnormative, i guess? there are men, and women, and transgender people are generally considered, er, not good. except in certain northern, orc-dominated territories, where nonbinary people are often considered to be almost as great and important as their genderless orc superiors.

orcs, as i’ve said, just don’t have a concept of gender, nor do their “sexes” look different from one another. there are no secondary sexual characteristics, and their primary sexual characteristics aren’t immediately obvious.

elves consider there to be three genders : women, men, and “something in between”, as they refer to it. that third gender is sort of a catch-all for noncomformative elves, and have a sort of middle-of-the-road social status: not as high as women, but not as low as men.

okay, last question! special cuisine…..i haven’t actually thought much of this! which is good, b/c i need to. orcs like to use a lot of spices and herbs, either that they gather in the wilds themselves, or grow in small gardens. they also have a special fermented alcoholic drink which only orcs enjoy, that gives a sort of energy boost, kinda like caffeine. humans tend to eat what they get, and tend to shy away from too many flavors. elves eat…uh….magical food i guess. fish? lots of fish probably.

#worldbuilding #ask #anon

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