You're attacked by a Repair Nektann

It's back.

Source: Bfa Plays

Ten years ago today, at least according to Wikipedia, the first episode of Ōban Star-Racers aired. To this day it has its place alongside Avatar and Code Lyoko as some of my favorite animated TV. Unlike those, however, the story only spanned one season and it seems like not as many people remember it.

Having bought and read "The Art of Oban Star-Racers" gave me a new appreciation of the effort put into this show. And before that, I'd managed to snag a couple of t-shirts from the Oban Fan Shop, which unfortunately seems to be down indefinitely.

I'm not the only one celebrating, either: this page went up to celebrate its original April debut in France, and has a bunch of behind-the-scenes art and stuff. Seriously, this show looked fantastic.

(Also, the avatar I had before Sabine was Molly/Eva. Guess I missed that mark by a year or so, oh well.)

I had entered a board game design into Hasbro's recent game contest, and this is what it'd look like and how it'd move. Didn't make it past submission phase (though they were nice enough to send an email to those not selected so we wouldn't be left in suspense) so I'm sharing it.

Basically the game is based on a planetary gear system where the outer annular gear is the board's base and the sun and planet gears make up most of the playing area, with the connections filled in on the rotating carrier.

Didn't have much of a plot worked out (probably the reason it wasn't chosen) because the contest deadline was the day after graduation (oh btw I graduated from college) and this wasn't a high priority, but basically you're in some kind of magic shifting dungeon and you need to get out by finding the four keys and getting to the exit. The four keys would be on spots in the middle of the planet gears, and the exit would be the center of the board.

The gimmick is that in some circumstances (around 1/10 of the die rolls) players would have the option to rotate the board, the motion of which you can see in the video. This would move the position of the planet gears and cause them to rotate, scrambling the paths. Players would stay on their spots, meaning they'd be moved too. There are four possible board orientations. Also the global orientation of the center technically never changes but it looks cool when it's turning so shut up.

Player motion would be two spaces per turn maximum (chances are about 50/50 one space or two) so there should be plenty of opportunity for "revolution".

As for the video, it's just a SolidWorks motion study of the basic gearing system, so it doesn't stop at any of the playable positions. Basically whenever the arrow on the middle circle is pointing "up" the board is in a playable position. The triangle cutouts were there initially to demonstrate how the system turns, and then the board decals I added later for the contest submission.

Maybe something will come of it some day. But I doubt it!

(gonna have a GOOD TIME)

So I started watching Star vs. the Forces of Evil, since it was on after Gravity Falls.

It's like if you took My Life as a Teenage Robot and replaced the robot theme with magic. Doesn't disappoint.

(The characters are so adorable. Especially Marco.)

Not really.

Well, sorta.

Recorded a whole series of videos back when I did this (2013!) explaining much of the process and idea behind what I did. I doubt I'll ever put them out there, it's lots of dead air and ums and ahs and redundant or unimportant information. This is probably the one big thing worth sharing, which is the Arduino sketch I wrote to accompany the song "Disco Lights" by Alex S. and PinkiePieSwear from the big Balloon Party collaboration album. I liked it, but after running through it an uncountable number of times to correctly program the Arduino sequencing I got a bit sick of it.

But anyway, here's that sketch played out in as good a way as I could.

An attempt at using the Knight's Kingdom crown piece for teeth.

Went to a party hosted by a member of the local Mandalorian Mercs clan and got some armor work done.




It was a fun day.

After working on this all year, I've reached the primer application stage, which is often the point where it starts to look like the finished product. This is exciting.