Were it an earlier gaming era, then I would shout righteous indignation at Obscure-Japanese-Game-V getting denied or butchered because it's setting a bad precedent and could bode poorly for the future of games like Game-V.  But we're beyond that now.  The market is wide open and still growing.  I feel that we don't have to worry about such things as much because for every Omega Z that gets shafted, dozens more just like it (or even more "extreme" for lack of a better word) still get in/get made, have gotten in/gotten made, and will get in/get made.  So the consumer is never without options because creators are freer to give us more options.   

What you perceive as "who cares apathy" I see more like this analogy: I'm crushing on a girl.  I go to the school dance.  I ask her to dance.  She turns me down.  I'm not feeling so great.  What do I do?  Do I sorrowfully obsess over her turning me down? Or do I go wash my face, dust myself off and ask another girl to dance?   I choose the latter.  Yeah, it hurts that I was turned down, but I'm not worried because there are plenty of pretty girls out there for Dincrest. 

"Who cares apathy" would be me not even going to the school dance and sitting on the couch watching reruns because I convinced myself that school dances were pointless and girls were waste of time. 

I think now it's just going into circular arguments.  I'm laughing at myself because I went off the rails in a thread about a silly JRPG themed around big boobs. 

Is it safe to say "we slugged it out, now let's hug it out"?

But all the fan badgering doesn't do much good if we don't speak with our wallets at the end of the day.  Yeah, we could raise a big stink online about wanting certain kinds of games, but unless we buy them and show the companies there is money to be made then we won't see any more.  The gaming business is just that- a business. 

And I never said I'm happy in a box with only 3 channels to choose from.  I'm just saying that if the 3 channel box isn't giving me what I want, I'll look for my satisfaction somewhere else.  When I was a kid and they were showing reruns of cartoons we already saw, my friends and I would gather up our action figures and other toys and just let our imaginations run wild creating our own adventures, like some random object teleports Optimus Prime to Jabba the Hutt's palace in Tatooine and he fights the Star Wars Rancor.  (Hey, we were around 7 at the time!)

I'm also saying that the gaming biz is at a point where we're no longer in that 3 channel box.  The box has been blown to smithereens and we're now living free in a plentiful land of feast instead of a box of famine.  If one game doesn't make it, there are still dozens like it that will.  I don't have to put all my eggs in one basket.  This even goes for genres that are niche, because the industry knows that the niche markets are loyal buyers.  Plus, thanks to the evolution of the Internet, those niche markets are easier to get to and many smaller devs can bypass the middlemen and just sell direct to consumers.  That's wonderful, because then I can give more of my money to the creators.  I love that there are so many smaller developers out there creating neat stuff.  I've played and reviewed a ton of stuff that flies under the radar. 

With music, I think what mainstream radio and big record labels put out is drivel.  So, I would go to all kinds of local shows and trawl sites like Bandcamp to see what's out there.  I've discovered (and even befriended) some really killer bands by exploring the paths less traveled.  I also played in local bands and we created music we believed in; seeing our musical voice (including songs I had written) resonate with people was profound.  Competition was fierce, though.  We often competed with bands like ours to get gigs.  Sometimes we'd get them, sometimes we wouldn't, but we still kept making our music because we liked doing it.  And the gigs we did get, we played like our asses were on fire.  It's easy for someone to say all punk bands sound the same, but every punk fan has those that they resonate with more than others. 

I feel like there's a LOT being lost in translation in this conversation and everything's getting cloudy with tons of points and arguments that tangent off from the main point.  I kinda forgot what the main point was.  Are we talking about censorship?  Hentai games?  Creating games?  Niche game marketing?  The state of the industry? My overuse and/or inappropriate use of analogies and idioms to the point where they sometimes become malapropisms? 

I feel like I'm being made to sound like I'm anti-creativity or anti-competition or something.  I've said repeatedly that competition is healthy, because it makes developers strive to create quality products to gain market share.  I've also been saying that I value the mentality of "If I can't get what I want, I'll create it."  If the creator wants it, chances are someone else does too.  As a musician, I gladly encourage people to pick up a bass, form a band and write songs/create music.  I say do it, but do it with heart, passion, and sincerity.  I can't ignore the creator-driven trends that have shaped gaming.  Back in the day, companies were content to do bare-bones translations, but Working Designs carved out a niche for themselves by painstakingly crafting high quality localizations (including good voice acting) and players responded to WD's gambit by speaking with their wallets like crazy.  Lunar: SSSC for Playstation (an otherwise standard fare JRPG) made a huge enough splash with its Western release that other companies realized they had to step up their localization game to be relevant in the evolving JRPG consumer market (a very loyal consumer market of consistent buyers.)   And now even the worst localizations today are gold compared to what they were generations ago.  And even little indie games seek out legit voiceover talent rather than just having their drinking buddies read lines.  (I'm an aspiring voiceover artist myself, and the amount of unknown talent out there is staggering.)         


Buuuuuut...
I think my main point, relevant to the thread, is that I don't think Omega Z being denied by the censors (or whatever) is going to hurt the gaming industry or that style of gaming it represents.  Anime porn dungeon crawling JRPGs are a very marketable thing, sites like MangaGamer and JastUSA have several English-language offerings (unadulterated to boot), and they will continue to hawk more of those kinds of games in the future, because there is a lucrative market out there.  I foresee more doujin (fan-made) games being hawked in the future.   

But for every door that closes, a new one opens.  So the girl I was crushing on turned me down when I asked her out because she's into someone else.  Yeah, I'll be heartbroken for a little bit, but I'll buck up and find new love.  There's a good chance the new love I find will be way better than the one I was crushing on. 

If some game I really really want doesn't get localized (and it has happened, particularly during the 1990s and 2000s), I cryass about it for a day or two, then shrug it off, move on, and seek out other games to tickle my fancy.  I pick and choose my battles.  I could bitch about the game I didn't get or enjoy the games I CAN get, especially if the stuff available to me is likely better.  The fool concerns himself with the 99 who say no.  The wise man had a great time with the one who says yes.  I'm blessed that I can do that with reckless abandon nowadays because we're living in an era of feast rather than famine; wholly unlike the 16-bit era when we were lucky to get a scant handful of JRPGs a year from, like, 1 or 2 developers.  Competition among games in most any genre is pretty ferocious so they all have to do something to garner someone's attention.  The gaming scene being so resplendent that there are MANY offerings from all kinds of developers big and small to cater to my desires.  So I don't need to put all my hopes on one pony.

And I'm also of the mentality that if I want my fix and my usual place to get that fix is unavailable, I sure as hell will find a way to get a fix because there are always several ways to get a fix that be better than what was.  I still think that one fanservicey JRPG not getting localized isn't going to hurt fanservicey JRPGs as a whole.  There are/were/and will be plenty out there because there is a market for it.  Omega Z may have been halted by the Decency Police, but the Criminal Girls games snuck by them (and the Criminal Girls are arguably even MORE offensive.)  With so many games out there plying that particular cringe-fanservice trade (and doing cringe-fanservice much better than Omega Z), the decency police can't keep up.     

No one likes being told "you can't have it."  Mom says, "you can't have X."  So instead of me trying to get X (because that's what Mom's so hyperfocused on me not getting and she's resolute about me not having it), I'll look for something like X that Mom doesn't know about.  That way, I win and get my "not X but just as good if not better," and Mom thinks she won because I succumbed to her demand and did not get X.  I guess I'm just a subversive snake.  Hey, The Great Wall of China did not keep out the Mongolians. 

At this point, though, I feel like I'm saturating any semblance of a decent point with gobbledygook and am willing to just "agree to disagree" and call it a night. 

My mom used to be a probate/estates & trusts paralegal, so she's seen her fair share of this stuff.  One thing she observed is that no matter how much the children may have hated their deceased parent, they all had no qualms about cashing in and things often got disgusting.  And if I'm not mistaken, your brother simply "turning it down" may not really be an option.  Parent says it in the will, it's the named party's responsibility now.  And if he does turn it down, I imagine it'll be an absolute nightmare to try and pass the buck.  You can't just instantly name another executor, be it another family member or a third party like a bank.  No one wants that responsibility.  Still, definitely consult a probate attorney on that stuff if you can.  It won't be cheap, but not having to deal with the legal headaches is worth the price, especially if/when you're grieving.  When my dad passed away, I couldn't think straight for months. 

Losing a parent sucks.

Having a family who's apathetic, just wants to wipe their hands clean of everything, only comes together when it comes time to fight over the  estate/inheritance, and leaves the one decent person holding the bag sucks. 

All of the above?  Words can't describe the level of suck. 

Please tell me your mom left a will.  I don't envy anyone who has to step up and be the executor, especially if the deceased neglected to leave a will.  Because no will= shit show to the extreme.  Seriously, it's the legal shit following the death of a loved one that I think is more difficult to deal with than the emotional trauma. 

I've been mostly charting my book log in Discord, but I'm about 2/3's of the way through Three Musketeers. 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-xO72s5EBY Yeah, I loved this cartoon when I was a kid and it's a surprisingly good adaptation.  Go figure, huh?  And it's not lost on me that one of the lyrics in the theme song is about drinking beer and swearing they're faithful to the king. 

Next on my reading list, after I finish Three Musketeers, will be the Dragon Songs Saga quadrology by JC Kang.  I sampled this series earlier this summer and splurged a whopping 99 cents on the quadrology.  I liked what I sampled quite a bit.  It's interesting to read an epic fantasy with distinctly Asian flavors.  Most fantasy I've read has a medieval Europe foundation, yet this one (by an Asian author) features locales influenced by medieval China.  Okay, and one character (who's from a land reminiscent of India) is really cool and it's not easy to find Indian characters in multimedia who aren't dorknerdgeeky. 

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I'm getting stronger, more fit, all of that after years of setbacks.  Today I benched 2 sets of 5 at 150lbs, 2 sets of 5 at 160lbs, and 1 set of 5 at 170lbs.  I know that's not very impressive, but considering that earlier this year I could barely do one set of 5 at 155 I'm happy. 

I know I've been chronicling my "fit 'n healthy" journeys for a while, but 2012- 2015 were not great years for me.  After getting myself to a really awesome place, my old punk band broke up in 2012 and I ended up in another band that, while better, were a hard-drinking, hard partying band in which I fell back into some of my old bad habits that were my undoing from 2012- 2015.  I quit that band for the sake of my mental and physical health because I was running myself ragged with the relentless gigging schedule AND the hard partying.  But just as I was starting to get my life back in check, I developed a repetitive use injury that curbed my cycling summer 2015 and then my dad died in the fall of 2015.  The depression from all that hit me harder than I thought and it created another setback to my health (gained back a bunch of the weight I had worked so hard to lose) making it harder to get back to my old "fightin' self."  But this year, I've blasted through a bunch of obstacles, my life is in a positive new direction.  I'm mentally putting more into my workouts and my cycling than just going through the motions, I'm in a wonderful new musical project that  operates on my speed and leaves me feeling uplifted, my other dream regarding voiceover work is taking shape...

I may not get back to that 165lb "perfect weight" (hey, I am 40 after all and there is no stopping the aging process), but I am determined to get stronger/fitter and hopefully get myself down from 190lbs to 175lbs, and back into "L" shirts rather than "XL."