Tag: Aesthetic

Deltarune is delightful

I’m a few weeks late to this particular craze, but after staying up until 2:00 a.m. finally finishing the first chapter of Deltarune I have an unbridled desire to gush about everything.

That’s probably going to involve a number of spoilers for an experience that I truly believe everyone should have for themselves. Because of that I’ll aim to be as vague as possible, but even so you might not want to read this quite yet if you haven’t played the game yourself.

Here’s what I can offer as a general teaser introduction.

Deltarune is the follow-up to indie game developer and chip tune musical genius Tobyfox‘s now-famed 2015 RPG Undertale — That one where nobody has to die. It’s available on just about every gaming platform imaginable, so if you haven’t dived into this universe at all you should.

The newest game, released just a few weeks ago, takes a somewhat different spin on the kill-or-spare game mecahnic from Undertale. It allows you to follow Kris, a human living in a world of monsters, as he deals with the day-to-day trials and tribulations of school.

Until certain events leave him and the local bully, Susie, taking on an adventure to save the world.

I know that’s pretty vague and somewhat derivative, but it’s nowhere near as dull as I made it sound.

Please just play the game if you haven’t.

Trust me when I say it’s all worth experiencing as blindly as possible. As a result, the rest of my discussion is going to go on under the spoiler-laden read more line here.

Hope you’ve enjoyed me rambling in vague generalities if this is as far as you’ll go. Just come back and let me know when you’ve gone through the experience for yourself!

Continue reading “Deltarune is delightful” →

Spotted around Venice

I spent some time over in Venice, California today to meet with Michelle about some Gladeo updates.

It was mostly simple stuff. Talking about how to register the nonprofit with Cal State Fullerton’s internship center so I can use it for my class next semester, going over future recruitment, discussing more stuff I can do with the organization going forward, all that good stuff.

Speaking of, I might get to try assisting with video production down the line — Stay tuned for that if so.

However, outside of that there wasn’t really anything noteworthy enough for blog post purposes. Most of my night from here on out is just going to be homework and work-work now that I’m home, and I wouldn’t consider any of that interesting blog topic fodder either.

So I decided I would write something about a few interesting things I ran into while wandering the area of Venice I was in while waiting for our meeting time.

Just feels like something fun I wanted to throw together as a post for the day that has some fun photos.

That said, here are some fun photos.

Just across the street from the restaurant where we met, I found this bike holster. This metallic… Pair of pants, for lack of a better descriptive term for its shape, is made out of old pipes and handheld tools.

Recycling. Good for the environment and apparently good at inspiring random 20-somethings with blogs to write about interesting little things around Venice.

I mostly took this picture because it has become an in-joke within my family to count the number of bird scooters we see lying around different parts of the street as we go on travels around places like Santa Monica.

Between the signage and the cute cotton candy-colored house that it is displayed for, I grew a very quick respect for whoever lives here.

I posted this picture on Twitter because I thought it was pretty hilarious. Over there I said ‘I can appreciate the honesty’ of the statement, though I actually spent a good few minutes trying to figure out exactly how to explain what this is.

Have you ever had those moments when a word is on the tip of your tongue that potentially describes a situation perfectly, but you can’t get that word out of your memory? That was me pacing back-and-forth along a sidewalk trying to write that dumb tweet.

A dumb tweet that nobody looked at.

I blame the lack of a proper word choice.

That said, if you have a good term for proving a point by doing something physical along the lines of what you’re describing, please let me know.

Who is Boobie Ralph?

Why is the “70” in quotation marks? Is Boobie Ralph 70 years old? Or is he from the 1970s?

Is the squiggly line underneath the numbers meant to emphasize them? Or is it a question mark?

I don’t know. I’m not a psychic.

But boy do I want to know.

I don’t have a lot to say about this one, I just liked the pattern on top of this building. Not sure it’s very visible in this picture, but there’s a cool spiderweb of mosaic glass from the looks of things.

Pretty neat.

There’s a few different things to take out of this one stop sign.

Stop “gentrifying venice” is a good starting place. I don’t think I can add too much more, the statement being plastered at random points throughout the city this way kind of speaks for itself.

Then there are the photo stickers. An anime girl and the Umbrella logo from Resident Evil on the stop sign itself, as well as the bear-shaped honey container on the sign below it.

Plus I would kill to know who ‘blake’ and ‘sarah’ are so I could ask why they seem to be competing for namespace on the off-kilter signage.

What can I say, this particular sign brings up a lot of questions. While I don’t have too many answers, I at least have a pretty picture of it — in my opinion anyway.

I thought the painting on this house’s gate was absolutely wonderful.

While Venice has its own specific beach culture, the composition of this painting in particularly reminded me so much of the Redondo shoreline that it just really hit home. The twin lifeguard stations and palm trees, the lovely sunset above the sands…

I actually wanted to go to the beach after seeing it.

That’s a pretty powerful image, if you ask me.

I think I’ll have to blame my Visual Comm class for making me just a little too attuned to stand-out things in my environment. Whether it be something unusual or something aesthetically pleasing, I’ve been taking a lot more time to mull over these ideas.

Arguably that isn’t a bad thing by any means. On top of the benefits of being more attentive to one’s environment in a digital age, these sort of days where I’m taking a bunch of pretty things out of my environment also make for great blog fodder!

So, if you like this kind of thing, let me know. I wouldn’t be opposed to traveling around California a bit more often to do these sort of observation-driven posts.

Bangers and Monster Mash

Welcome to another blog post focused on aesthetic things.

Don’t know why I’ve been doing so many of these recently, but I’ll hedge my bets and blame the new Instagram account and my Visual Comm class for both making me focus on the appearance of things in the world around me.

Today that happened to come into play when I went out for pseudo-lunch/dinner with some members of the Boom crew as a mini-gathering before we host something larger later on in the semester.

Dr. Sexton brought us to a place down by Fullerton College called The Olde Ship.

If this picture alone doesn’t suggest it, The Olde Ship is essentially a British pub smack dab in the middle of Old West Yankee country. It’s apparently a small chain in Orange County, if you can count two locations as a chain restaurant, but I probably wouldn’t.

Because the place definitely feels like a pub you’d find in some small village in England somewhere.

Not that I’d know what that feels like to be fair, as I’ve never been to England before. But it seems like exactly what I’d expect based on popular media. Like the Kingsman movies.

We all know that popular media is a good barometer of what things are like in real life, right?

I suppose that’s as much of an interesting observation as any, the fact that I implicitly gauged a location’s authenticity by the aesthetic I’ve noticed in pop culture. But to be frank that’s not what I wanted to touch on with this place.

Nor did I want to touch on the corned beef sandwich I had. Except I will briefly just to say that they made a pretty darn good corned beef sandwich. Not quite as good as my parent’s corned beef and cabbage, but I didn’t want to go down this route in the first place because I’m not fully prepared to tackle the ‘home cooked meal vs. restaurant quality’ debate at 8:45 p.m. on a Monday night. School has me too wiped for that.

Instead I wanted to talk about how bizarre it was seeing that traditionally British-style aesthetic intermingling with, of course, Halloween decorations.

Yeah the whole place was covered in fake skulls and cobwebs and fancy little pipe cleaner spiders. All of those kitchy Halloween decorations that suburbanites love to coat their houses with as October 31st approaches.

I can’t say it wasn’t cute to see that kind of decor in such an unexpected place. But I do feel like I have to say that it was unexpected to see those two aesthetics clashing together.

Now granted that may, once again, be a problem of my own sheltered sense of scale. Maybe there are tons of pubs over in ye olde England that love to decorate their things with cliché, kitchy Halloween stuff. It’s just not the kind of thing I’ve ever personally heard of in my limited, media-driven understanding of the world.

In a way it’s kind of cool that I got to take that interesting observation out of lunch/dinner. On top of the wonderful company, of course.

But maybe there is some bigger, underlying point about media representation and worldview. I’m just frankly too tired to know whether I should dive into it any further or if I’m just crazy and rambling about nothing.

Which, to be fair, is a very strong possibility.

Before I signed this one-off, I did want to mention that my focus on aesthetics in these last two post was actually for a more substantial purpose than just corruption by my liberal college education or whatever.

While taking pictures for my Visual Comm aesthetics assignment, it really got hammered into my head that iPhone photos are way huger than I thought they were. Which, in turn, led me to realize that the reason why I’m filling up all of my media space here on the blog so quickly is because I almost exclusively use iPhone photos.

So taking pictures of buildings at Pasadena City College yesterday and of this pub today were somewhat underhanded attempts to practice a new form of throwing pictures up on my posts without having them be humongous messes I have to deal with down the line.

If all the pictures I’ve taken seem smaller than usual, that’s why. It’s probably going to be the norm from now on.

Campus Architecture

If there was anything I learned while touring college campuses about three years ago, it was to appreciate the architecture that each campus offered.

For me aesthetics were a fairly big driving factor in deciding where I wanted to go to school. It sounds somewhat petty and shallow I know, but I enjoy wandering and taking in sights. So it mattered.

Honestly the look of Cal State Fullerton as a whole was a strong component in why I decided to go there. I love being on campus, and that’s important for someone who’s commuting every day and wouldn’t have a reason to necessarily stay otherwise.

But I’ve come to appreciate campus architecture overall during trips to a number of California universities because of the kind of insight I’ve gathered at CSUF. Namely the idea that the kind of architecture you see is a signifier for what era the buildings were constructed, and as a result you can essentially walk through time and see what became more important for students over the decades or even eons that the campus existed.

Cal State LA and El Camino College were pretty strong examples of the vastly different building styles on different parts of campus from what I recall.

As was UCLA when I went and wandered that campus after a Boom event some years back. But that school is also massive and ancient so it’s a whole other beast in terms of things like structural construction.

Today I found myself at Pasadena City College, where Alyson was auditioning to be a part of the Tournament of Roses Honor Band. If she gets in she’ll be performing at the next Rose Bowl Parade, so… That’s pretty fricken cool if I do say so myself.

However parents and family were not allowed to sit in on the auditions. So my parents and I were sitting out on the campus proper enjoying a slightly overcast afternoon, some clashing musical performances from practicing students all around and absorbing the nervous energy of basically everyone taking their shot.

Delicious, pure nervous energy. It’s kind of nice when you’re not the nervous one.

As my set-up suggests, I decided not to just sit around the entire time perusing Twitter or whatever. Instead I wandered the campus to get a feel for the different pieces of architecture built over time.

Because, as previously suggested, I’m the kind of weirdo that enjoys that sort of thing.

Now I’m certainly not an expert in era-specific architecture by any means, so I can’t personally tell you which buildings are from which time period just by looking at them. I’m more of a fan from an aesthetic perspective, so that’s my main purpose here.

I’ve always liked buildings where the top portion hangs beyond where the bottom portion ends.

For some reason there were no sculptures in the sculpture garden…

I like how the front of the library looks like numerous faces depending on how you look at it. It’s a goof.

The avian-looking light above the door to E Building gets a thumbs up from me.

This kind of tree plaza in front of a building seems like something I might build in Minecraft… I’ll have to save that idea for later.

More trees, this time in pink! With clock towers. And cops.

This building felt vastly different from the others because it was red, and I have no idea why it was red if nothing else is.

It’s nice that even the parking structure gets to look cute.

Obviously the newest-looking building I could find, the performing arts center looks modern as hell. Aly probably hates it from all that associative stress.

But of course, no architectural tour would be complete without also including at least one piece of bizarre modern art.

At PCC, I think this one took the cake.

It’s just a horse. Made of wood.

The plaque included with the sculpture doesn’t explain anything except who donated the piece and what it’s called. So I have no idea why some artist decided to make a horse out of wood.

I’ll admit it’s impressive and well-constructed.

But just baffling to me.

So yeah. Pasadena City College. Pretty place, bizarre wooden horse. If you’re all curious about how Aly did in her audition, we won’t know until later, this isn’t really the post for that discussion.

Though I guess if you see me talking about the Rose Bowl Parade later, now you’ll know why.

Ultimately Pointless Thoughts on Industrial Aesthetics

I was going to write something tonight about Wizard of Legend, an indie game developed by the two-person team at Contingent99 that’s all about being a dope mage who is basically the Avatar in a rogue-like dungeon crawler. It’s super fun and my current gaming venture with Alyson on the Switch, since she’s about to finish her school year and we wanted something to play together.

Unfortunately I still haven’t figured out a good way to pull pictures off of the damn console because it needs a Micro SD card and we only have a Mini SD card.

So a discussion on the merits of that amazing little couch co-op action game will have to wait for another day.

Instead I figured I would just ramble a bit about something that got me thinking during my travels today.

While driving to Hof’s Hut in Torrance this morning, where we had breakfast with my grandparents as an early Father’s Day celebration, we passed through a part of the city that could best be described as an industrial park.

Lumber yards and other mills interspersed with office complexes in a compact grid. That kind of a region.

What struck me in particular was the foliage in the part of the city we drove through, as odd as that sounds.

There’s a clear divide between the two residential areas and the industrial park between them along the path that we took to the restaurant. Especially crossing Hawthorne Boulevard, where one side of a train track-covered bridge is as classic a suburban area as it gets — tightly packed houses dotting hills and strip malls all around — while the other side is office complexes, empty lots, electrical towers and lines of hedges across entire sides of some streets.

Everything on the industrial side is much more spaced out and very clearly grossed out as if purposefully designed by someone playing Sim City.

The hedges are what intrigue me the most, as they seem like the outer walls of large mazes, complete with a singular entryway that has a sign indicating what’s on the other side. A lumber yard, like I mentioned, happens to be the one kind of facility I recall specifically.

Thinking it over I can’t help but wonder… For what reason have these facilities decided to cover themselves up?

Is there a law leading to that kind of exterior decorating? Or simply a way of building a better public image by preventing citizens on the outside from seeing any sort of “eyesore?”

Who decided to use hedges in particular? Why is that a common practice?

Also, in a more wide-ranging aspect of the question, is that practice common around the country? The world?

I’m not sure any of this brief flirting with the ideas of how industrial parks work from an aesthetic level amount to anything more than a dumb blog post. It could possibly be a future research opportunity for a story of some kind…

But for right now I’m a little too tired to dig through the history of industrial parks in any sort of hard research excursion. Especially considering my main computer seems to be having problems and I had to copy the entire post here off on my phone a second time.

If nothing else, I suppose being thoughtful about the nature of some foliage surrounding a lumber yard has inspired at least a little bit more than just an ultimately pointless blog post.

I’m thinking about potentially building something with a hedge maze in Minecraft on my friend’s world. Perhaps a revival of a project I tried to construct years ago.

Or at least I’ll think about building that more when I’m not running around zapping fools as an incredible wizard.