Four months later

It's been a bit since I've blogged about anything. A combination of having done a lot of things that are unfinished, and also of having taken a break from doing things for a bit after that. But I want to talk about what I did during these past few months anyways!

Here's the summary of this blog post. Feel free to skip through the sections that don't interest you as much.

Monthly blog posts

A week or so ago, I figured out that, whew, it's been a while since I wrote anything in this blog. I'm not sure if it's the longest break yet (probably not, actually, I'm pretty sure I went longer without posting last year around the same period even) but it's still kind of uncomfortable. So I posted on Discord about maybe doing something about it.

The reason I haven't written anything as a blog post is because of a combination of two things. First, I don't have anything "finished enough" to talk about, as in, I have a lot of things that are still very much ongoing. So it's kind of hard to talk about it when it's still in flux. Second, and more importantly, I have basically taken a break from projects since... Mid-to-late June? A combination of maybe doing too much for too long, and of having less focus available to spend on things during evenings and weekends (and also summer, the worst season), basically made me stop creating stuff that I would want to show off.

But also, thinking back about it (and especially while thinking about making this blog post), a lot of stuff happened during that time regardless of whether I "created content" or not.

So, I want to write about things regardless of whether I created things and I want to show off that thing. As such, I'm trying to create a kind of... Format, for recap posts like these? Maybe try to make it a monthly thing (as in, if I didn't post anything for a month, I make one of these posts). This way, breaks during blog posts would stay short, and I would have an opportunity to feel like things are moving.

In terms of structure, I was thinking of something like:

1. Ongoing projects (one thing per project), if there's any to mention

2. Random things that I thought about and want to talk about

3. Media that I saw during that time and/or want to talk about as well

For this blog post, I happen to have a lot of things to say and talk about. I'd say, since it covers four months, there's probably around four times the amount of things I would normally talk about. Hopefully, future "monthly posts" will be easier to digest than this, but who knows how that would look.

Galactic Empire Remake: Plan and progress

As a reminder, Galactic Empire is the game I made for the March 2026 NSFW Bondage Game Jam, volume 3.

I've announced, about a month after the end of the game jam, that I'm working on a "remake" of that project. I had already started work on it at this point, but I was trying to keep it lowkey, and kind of "drop" it all at once when it was finshed. But that wasn't really doable, because the remake turned way too big in terms of content...

The first thing is, of course, a complete redo of the graphics. This is a before/after of the spaceship and of the player model:

I actually got a lot of help on the concept art and design side of things from NightingaleTide, who drew some excellent concept arts and help with a lot of the ideas that made their way into the remake. Not everything is in yet, but a lot of it ended up already implemented.

This is far from done, but it's actually a very good start. I completely reworked the characters, clothes, expressions, and the player's spaceship, I've partly redone the space station and enemy spaceships, and I've even started on a bunch of alternative "brainwashing stations" for the space station. It's all very cool stuff, graphically speaking.

The second thing was to try to introduce "cool looking" diagetic (meaning: in-game) UIs. Control panels, things like that. With a bit of help for NightingaleTide for the character graphics, I ended up with this:

There's many variants, including controls for small-scale automation and things like that, and this overall is a very cool mechanism.

But then I kind of... Got lost. Using the UI as a basis, I tried to completely rework the stimulation/tools system, created two different NPC behavior models for how to handle it, and none of them really "fit" as more than a toy thing. I got stuck on that part around mid-June, and then I kind of didn't continue working on the remake at all since then.

And I still don't have much in terms of idea for this that isn't either needlessly tedious or annoyingly trivial. I haven't thought about it much for a while, at this point, but it's one of the major hurdles that I still have to solve.

The other major hurdle is the space stuff. I had a vague plan of replacing the galaxy map with a "galactic areas" map with several "systems" per area, that you can 'easily' warp between, and then larger connecting gates between the areas that are harder to travel between. A bit like Mass Effect, I guess. I did think about a variety of ways to make that work, but none that I really liked either. Something to think about some more as well.

I have started a rework of the controls (there's now a fully 'normal' TPS camera for the player walking around, for example), but that's also still partial, as the mobile controls in general aren't done. And I haven't started on the rework of the various UIs to make them easy to use on mobile either. So, yeah, lots of work to do there still.

The combat also needs a pass, both in terms of gameplay (I don't want to make it a very long gameplay phase, but I do want to make it a bit more entertaining than standing still) and in terms of what happens during it (again, I got lovely concept arts from Tide, and I just haven't implemented that in-game yet). That means there's another small chunk of work there.

And of course, there's the redo of the space assets that is still left. I can't model a 3D spaceship well, and I still haven't learned how to do that.

The original plan was basically: do all of the above before July, and then start on the NPCs and quests to make it all "lived in". Obviously, that's no longer happening ; I don't even know if I'm actually going to finish the full rework at this point? Maybe I'll just focus on a "graphically improved" version instead, with some more quests and NPCs and things like that in it, and that's about it. Or maybe I'll pull through and do the whole rework.

Anyways, I'll keep y'all updated if there's change about this. It's more of a depressing update than I expected (I was excited about finishing this quickly, and it's clear that I will not be doing that), but that's what happens with projects like these.

Random bondage-themed coding game prototype

During the late May/early June period, there was a random idea floated around on the DiD Games discord server: what about a coding game (a game that is played by writing gamified code) but bondage-themed?

I actually found the idea very funny, so I made a prototype in a few hours and posted it to the Discord server ; to obviously mixed reactions, but it wasn't supposed to be an actual thing.

Following this prototype, I had the dumbest vision: "a chastity belt that unlocks after 1000 orgasms, but the counter overflows at 255, so it stays locked".

And then, I remembered Potion Craft (2022), and I had another idea that I thought could work.

It started with some lore, which is rare enough for me to be mentioned (I usually start more from the visuals/game idea than the lore):

What if, in a fantasy world, there was an artificer that managed to make "programmable magic crystals" (basically working like early computers). She tries to sell them, but nobody really needs them (because, well, magic is a thing, so there's no need for computers).

So, she rebrands to selling "magical programmable sex & bondage machines", basically used for self-bondage shenanigans, and then immediately makes bank that way.

The idea is simple: you get clients, they have a specific request. You get the hardware for that request, including various tech components (arousal, orgasm counter, timer, remote, etc...). Then, once you've assembled your machine, you write the program for it. You can (but you don't have to) test it on yourself, and when you're sure it works, you call the client back and then you get your sale.

I made a second prototype for this idea.

And then, what do you know. I got stuck working on a "behavior simulation" of the arousal system. Thankfully, for this one, I ended up pulling back fairly quickly.

It's very much a rough idea. I haven't coded the clients coming in, or the delivery system, yet. But it's still an idea! I might finish it one day.

Musings about Project Mirabelle

I haven't touched anything in Project Mirabelle proper for the past six months, now. And the only thing I did since them was to quickly prototype a stealth shadows idea back in mid-April, with very mixed results visually.

It's been quite a long time since I made progress on Mirabelle overall, and part of that is because, well... I don't have many ideas of what to add to it. Sure, I have tech ideas to test with it, and things that aren't quite done and that I would want to finish, but no feature that I'm really hyped about adding and that I really want to see in it.

A lot of the "hype ideas" I have are also too large-scale for me to easily make them happen.

I kind of wonder if it isn't time for me to start creating a world and quests for Mirabelle. Something big, that I can just add things into. Just, basically, turn it into a writing project. I think there's enough in it for that ; there's no combat, which is the biggest issue with making a game out of it, and there isn't really any "inventory system", but maybe these aren't needed to make a story thing happen.

I think I'm just mostly ready to start learning how to make large-scale quests, and how to design characters that the player would care about. It's not something I have experience with, and Mirabelle could be the testing ground for that.

I dunno. It's just random ideas at this point.

Writing projects (I guess I should finally talk about KPDH)

I don't really talk about writing projects publicly. I sometimes mention something in a random Discord convo when it really grips me, but mostly, I just write things down when I really need to, and then leave it alone for a few weeks/months/years, and then come back to it and continue it.

I have dozens of fairly advanced short stories that I haven't touched for a while. This isn't something that bothers me, it's just how I tend to do things.

Three of these are fanfiction for K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025).

I discovered KPDH about six months after everyone, mostly because I was bored one evening and it got recommended by a bunch of people and one of my favourite fanfic authors was starting to repost stuff about it as well. I really liked it.

And then I read some KPDH fanfiction.

Now, the thing about fanfics, for me, is that it usually isn't my thing. I don't consume fanfics of most media I enjoy, because fanfics means that it's other people's interpretations of the characters that live in your head. And it's hard to for me to reconcile both views and enjoy the work as a result.

This is the case for She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018) fanfiction for me. I can only enjoy these fanfics sometimes ; I do really, really like the ones I like (including everything by the fanfic author mentioned above, who has a great understanding of Catra, Adora, and their dynamic, but really all of the characters, to the point that all other interpretations feel... wrong? At least weird), but I really dislike the ones I don't like, to the point of not having a great time even when the story is good.

KPDH fanfic is different. Because, somehow, for some reason, everyone* has (more or less) the same interpretation of all of the characters, and the variations really don't feel as "character-breaking" as they usually would be in SPOP.

(*sidenote: by "everyone" here, I mean mostly Polytrix (Mira/Rumi/Zoey) writers. Rujinu writers are... Harder to agree with for me, let's say - and yeah I know that technically Jinu is written as Rumi's romantic interest in the movie, but come on, that girl isn't actually in a state to be able to have a romantic interest in anyone at any point of that movie. I don't tend to read these as a result.)

I think this is because the KPDH story is based a lot around the characters' feelings? Well, the story is obviously plot-driven, but the characters themselves (Rumi, Mira, Zoey, Jinu, Celine, Bobby) are all written around what they feel about the ongoing story, and a lot of the screentime is characters talking about their feelings, and that kind of narrows their personality options so that they're all super obvious and consistent. The variations end up being "fairly minor" backstory stuff (which can be very different and lead to a lot of various outcomes, but that's the point of a fic).

So, at this point, I have easily read over a thousand different KPDH fanfics. I would have half a dozen hard recommendations, but I'll limit myself to say that How (not) to solve a scandal is the most insane piece of social media writing I have ever read and I enjoyed every moment of it. And also that caution: two person lift required is a very sweet story, despite barely being a KPDH story (beyond the character personalities I guess). And also that lonely lavender bones is an amazing prequel+sequel fic character study of Rumi, whose backdrop leans heavily into the graphically described gross and painful aspect of having rapidly healing injuries and trying to mend them while having to hide them, and honestly I didn't expect to like it so much even if it's a really squimish read on many points.

Anyways, back to fanfiction writing.

I have technically written fanfiction before, but these were a specific kind of not-really-fanfic called an "quest omake". A quest omake is something that's written as being an alternative path to a live quest, sometimes by the author of the quest but (in this context) not only, fanfiction also works. And a live quest is a story written serially a few paragraphs at a time, that is often written "live" by the author as the discussion happens, and with audience participation (in varied amounts depending of the quest) for the continuation of the story. Or to put it another way, a live quest is basically a TTRPG session, but where the DM controls all of the characters and writes down the entire session as a story as it happens, while an audience of readers are chatting along and occasionally is asked to vote on things or suggest options for what to do next. This kind of writing can happen either in generic forums, or in specialized sites. So, anyways, given that media format, while quest omakes are still very much fanfiction of something written by someone else (the quest's author), it feels different to me because of the audience-driven choices, live discussion, live speculation, and live writing parts of the quest as a while. So, a quest omake is just chatting and thinking about alternate paths, but taken to the extreme of "writing down that option" ; it is very much in line with how live quest media exists in general.

Meanwhile, the KPDH fanfiction I've drafted is very much fanfiction in the original sense. The story is not in dialog with the media, but it is written around the media itself ; it's filling up pieces of the story that makes sense with what's given, but explore the characters in different ways that what was intended by the original media. And, more importantly, they're all fics that I wish someone else had written, but since nobody did it, well. "Guess Ima have to do it myself", as they say (IDK who says that).

One of them (the second one) is basically finished, and sits at 4.2k words. There's just quite a lot of small things in it that I'm not happy with. I try to rework it every now and then, add or remove or reword stuff to make it flow better, but the basic structure has been done for a while, and I'm at the "reread it just for fun" point of editing, so it's well on its way.

The third one is basically a companion piece to the second one above, and a social media-formatted story. It's experimental, and I'm not sure I want to finish it ; it was a cool exploration of the social media aspect of the second fanfic, and I think it would be a very fun read if I could make it work, but I just... Don't have the knowledge required for crafting interesting online interactions, and don't have the skill to create continuous personalities that show up in 280-character posts and that stay consistent. Basically, I think that what I've written so far has a lot of very cool ideas in it, but I'm not good enough to execute on them. Maybe I'll revisit it when I get better at it, who knows, but it's on the backburner at this point.

And the first one is kind of in a weird place. It's heavily unfinished, it's also heavily planned out. It's the one that, out of all of them, I'm the most "I want to read this" about. It's the one that I've read the most things that are "close but not close enough" about it for that feeling to stay. I also haven't really touched it for a while, because, IDK. It's hard to write correctly. It's a 5+1 fic (5 times a thing doesn't happen, 1 time it happens ; a common trope), it's also a character study for all of the KPDH main cast, and it's also just sweet overall. And sometimes, I feel I like it more because it's in my head and not written down. I dunno.

So, yeah, that's my rambling about KPDH fiction and my own writing ideas for that.

Another project I have been working on is a mind-control heavy dungeon exploration fantasy story, but a very slow burn story and very worldbuilding-heavy while being character and event-driven. I'm basically done with the whole cool half of the story (it's 12k words so far). I'm having difficulty finding how to continue, and then finish, it (for various reasons). Maybe I'll have an illumination one day, but for now, it's dormant. I might write a prequel to it though, but if I do so, it would turn into an actual novel. Maybe it would help to do that.

I've also been thinking about revisiting some other, older projects (including a cyberpunk one that's planned as an actual novel, even if it's going to have fetish elements in it). But since that happens whenever I want to write and it's not something I try to force, it doesn't really matter.

Tech ramblings: Fediverse vs Atmosphere blog idea

Lately, I've thought a lot about the Fediverse (Mastodon and friends), and the Atmosphere (Bluesky and friends), and how that relates to publishing content on the web. I won't say much about it here though, for a simple reason.

I've started a draft of a full blog post about this.

It's not really a technical blog, I think, except for the part where it is. It's also not really a community question, except for the part where it is. It's a weird blog post, lying somewhere on the limit of philosophy, societal ramblings, and content ownership.

I don't know whether I'll finish this blog post. If I don't, I might post snippets of it in a future blog entry, I guess. For now, it's in the pile of 20XX blog posts alongside a couple of others that I want to finish one day.

Tech ramblings: LLMs, AI labeling, and the boring web

That part is, I guess, kind of rambling all over the place and kind of a bit complicated to make sense of even for me.

First of all, I have a point of view about LLMs that I think isn't expressed enough. It can be summed up as this:

"LLMs can replace every job involving writing text (if we manage to fix the fact that they're not able to replace every job involving writing text)"

I'm not sure I'm very clear about it, but basically: LLMs replacing anything is dependent on LLMs actually being able to replace the thing. They currently can't do that for most (almost all) content, and maybe they will one day, and maybe they won't ; but there's no point talking about the technology like it already had gotten to this point. It's annoying, irritating, and derails arguments. Talking about potential future tech is fine, but we're not constantly talking about the imminent collapse of the fossil fuel industry once fusion plants come online, because fusion plants aren't about to come online. I wish there was the same level of common sense in LLM and AI discourse in general.

Now, there's another issue lately with LLMs, and this one is real and already there: creating a large amount of written content has become extremely cheap.

Five years ago, a wall of text meant that someone had taken the time to write it all, word by word and key by key, because they wanted to go through the effort of writing that text. Nowadays, a wall of text has a 50-50 chance of meaning that someone couldn't be arsed to read the reply that the LLM gave them, and dumped it onto you (the reader) to maybe make sense of it.

And the more time passes, the more that ratio shifts away from 50-50 and closer to 90-10.

Unfortunately, AI labeling and disclosure for text content hasn't been a thing, and it's now unlikely to start happening. This means that, in the future, the value of reading a chunk of text found on the web is about to tend towards zero.

I don't like what this will do about learning things.

Recounting lived experiences from experts were the main ways to create engaging content about trivial things. I'm the kind of person who has watched the oral history of Chuck Peddle twice and enjoyed it both times, because it's full of that ; trivial anecdotes that build a wealth of knowledge you can peer into and learn things from yourself.

This is also, to some extent and with my own hope, what I want these blog posts to be. They are updates about the game projects I make, of course, and the fact they're NSFW and bondage-themed projects has its own appeal, but also they're little bits of trivia about how to do that thing, or how to approach that issue, or something I noticed while doing a thing, or what I got out of trying to do it. Hopefully, someone stumbling upon this blog and reading through it would be happy to learn about that, or at least could be interested in it. Maybe it'll even help someone do something one day, in an unexpected way. Who knows.

But online content in general has changed. Nowadays, I see an article pushed up on HN or on Bubbles that seems about a cool topic, and I open it, and it's just an AI generated summary of that topic made to be vaguely engaging and pretty to look at. It's uninteresting, it's bland, there's no experience or ideas to be gleaned from that, and it's boring.

It's also the future of the web. The boring web.

LLMs are already allergic to making interesting NSFW content. Sure, Grok will happily roleplay with you about blowjobs, but it's not actually allowed to be creative or interesting about it. You can't really interact about NSFW game design concepts with an AI, it will either shut you down outright, or it will guide you to some concepts that are so bland and uninteresting, might as well remove the NSFW part and make shovelware out of the result.

I'd argue that it's the same for all other kind of interesting, nerdy content. The moment you add an LLM into the mix, the result becomes bland. The engagement is kept to the form, the coat of paint over the wikipedia article it's retelling to you (without linking to any source). There's no anecdotes because the models can't have these, unless someone wrote them in a blog post ten years ago and that post happened to be dropped into the context window of the LLM when its harness scrapped the web for relevant things ; but even that is disappearing as slop is SEOmaxxing results to the point of AI contexts being filled by AI-generated articles retelling it the things it already knows.

There's a trend of human-labeling, to counteract this. "This blog post has been written without any AI" is now worn as a badge of honor, but... It's also not the solution, is it? People can write great articles talking about the things they did, and use AI assistance to improve the coat of paint without removing what's good about their original content. And people can make bland, surface-level posts that don't add anything to the discussion without using a single AI-generated token in the process. Human labeling ensures that the output won't be pure slop, but not that it will be good ; and avoiding anything that AI touched will prevent you from seeing actually good stuff from people who either don't know better or don't care about the use of LLMs.

There's also the small web, touted as a possible solution.

I like the small web, and other similar concepts. I've recently been thinking again about the Gemini Protocol (nothing to do with Google's AI stuff, the Protocol predates that shit by half a decade), and that it could be interesting to republish my blog posts (and project list) using that ; it wouldn't even be that hard, just tedious to make.

But it's also not the solution. The web, after all, is about, the web. The connections between disparate content, connected together by hyperlinks woven naturally between related content. It's also the interested audience, the people who want to learn things, the people who want to make things and show them to others. And people won't try to learn by using a custom browser to connect to a random server using the gemini protocol, even if the protocol somehow still exists in ten years ; and people won't try to learn by trolling through the small web and its webrings. People will try to learn with the full, world wide web, the same way people learned to learn since the mid-90s and the start of search engines.

And it won't work anymore. Because the results will be slop, either generated directly as the result of their query, or bubbled up to the top right below the automated bullshit they're served with.

I don't know anymore. I'm frustrated. The web is becoming boring, not because cool stuff isn't being made, but because it can't be discovered anymore. Audience is money, so getting your attention is more important than making something deserving that attention in the first place. Self-improvement of the creator doesn't matter in a vacuum, you either turn whatever you create into a marketable product and push to advertise it, or you make things that do not aim to make money and therefore will stay forgotten.

Also, for the record, this post (and all of the other posts on this blog) has been written without AI. Or autocomplete. And often without even an actual graphical interface. Right now, I'm using nano, and my fingers, to write these words, on a laptop running Void that has no X nor Wayland server installed. Most of the time, I'll use VSCode instead, if I'm on a computer powerful enough to run that, but the copilot features of VSCode on all of my things have been disabled on it from the moment they introduced that option (the "turn off all of the AI crap" toggle in VSCode is great, though with the pace Microsoft has been moving things forward, I'm sure it won't last another year).

Game that I played: X4: Foundations

Ah, X4.

I have 57 hours in it. Which is low for that game. But I also started playing on June 26th, and the last time I launched it was on July 5th. So, it's not an amazing amount of playtime, but it's a lot in quite a short time.

I really find X4 impressive for the sense of scale it manages to bring. It also has a surprising number of main missions, even if I have a lot of issues with the quests themselves. The space combat is flawed, but it's still quite functional and it's pretty fun (at least the first few times). The economics of the game, however, is hopelessly broken (which is a shame since that's the whole point of the game, no? But well, it's something that I already knew about when going into it, so I'm not surprised).

I know I haven't even explored ten percent of the game, right now. But I'm not continuing, because the game got kind of repetitive in terms of what you need to do, and also it didn't get repetitive enough to the point that strategies to deal with the repetitive things kept working, and also I couldn't destroy that fucking Xenon I that decided to pop into Hatikvah's Choice for some reason and now my main station (not my HQ but the one I was actually developing) is not protected. And breaking down a I with a medium ship is much harder than breaking down a K, and the other factions aren't helping anymore for some reason despite me having super high relations with everyone, and... Yeah, it's all kind of very stupid.

I'm sure an expert could pinpoint to what I'm doing wrong, there probably is an obscure mechanic somewhere that I'm not triggering that prevents a defence force to be built up, or there's maybe a way to force something to happen using an option somewhere and I don't know what that is, or I'm actually supposed to abandon my base and rebuild better somewhere else the moment an I pops up. Or maybe the latest 9.0 update broke something irreversibly if you don't have the Terran DLC installed and it had not been patched by the time I picked up the game again.

But, that's the issue: after hours of enjoying it, I'm no longer having fun playing X4 because of that situation.

X4 is such a weird game. It's an "everything" game, but as a result, it feels weirdly like a "nothing" game. It's a combat game, except at some point, it asks you to not do combat anymore and to send ships to fight for you instead. It's an economics game, except for the part where you can't actually easily participate in the economy without wrecking it. It's a RPG, except you're not actually a character you can roleplay with, and it's not really something the game wants you to do, and you often don't really have choices beyond "start the mission" or "don't". It's a grand strategy game, I guess, except you need to play for twenty hours to get to the point when it starts to become one, and even then, it's weirdly shallow.

Also, X4 has the ability to have custom logos. And NightingaleTide made a great UI graphic for one of the new brainwashing stations in the Galactic Empire remake. So I swapped my in-game logo to a (lightly edited) version of one of these. It almost blends in too, as long as you don't look too close at the drawing :)

So, basically, yeah. I don't know if I'm going to recommend X4 to anyone, but if it's a game for you, you'll love it.

Series that I saw: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

I don't really know what to say about Edgerunners. It's a series I watched because I was bored, and it was vaguely recommended to me before, and that was about it.

I liked it. I didn't love it, but it is a good piece of media. The animations especially are very cool.

I've mentioned that on Discord after watching it, but I've been kind of spoiled in terms of cyberpunk content. My first exposure to cyberpunk content was a very good and hot erotic mind-control story called Honeypot: Regression, and almost immediately after that, I read Neuromancer (once of the original books about the cyberpunk idea, from the late 70s I believe).

I have good memories of Neuromancer, but it's also a flawed book in many ways (which inspired me to write a cyberpunk story myself that wouldn't be as flawed, see above the mention in the writing projects). Still, I know enough about cyberpunk ideas to not be impressed by the basics anymore. And I think Edgerunners relied on that "wow" factor a bit too much, maybe.

I haven't played Cyberpunk 2077 ; and I haven't played any Cyberpunk TTRPG campaigns. So the universe itself is new to me.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners didn't really resonate with me because the story was kind of bland. It kind of (only kind of) ended up being something I liked because it stuck the landing, but the fact that there was no guarantee about that ending kind of soured my experience before that (given the direction it was going towards, I was sure it was going to fall on its face at the end ; so I'm glad it didn't but it's not really that helpful that it didn't for the rest of my experience).

If there's something that I really enjoyed about having watched Edgerunners, it's that it has reminded me of what I love about cyberpunk settings. I just wish that there was a way to experience something like Edgerunners but that would actually fit better with my tastes ; unfortunately, I'm not expecting even the game to provide that. So it seems I sill will have to write it myself.

I might play the game anyways, one day. But I still haven't touched The Witcher 3 even after all of this time, so no promises on it.

Series that I saw: The Amazing Digital Circus

So, TADC.

I stayed out of all of it for the longest time, and then watched it all at once... Soon after the final episode was published online? Or at least around that time?

After watching it, I was kind of... IDK, disappointed, I guess, about it. It was great, it's really well made (both technically and in terms of writing), and I did enjoy it a lit, but it also wasn't... Quite at the level I expected it to get, from all that I had heard. I didn't quite get what made everyone say that this series was great.

So I thought that, well, it was a good series, but maybe it just wasn't for me.

And then, a couple of weeks afterwards, I watched the whole series again.

And then I watched it a third time, as part of TBSkyen's reaction/technical analysis/media analysis videos (that I also binged). (I also ended up watching TBSkyen's KPDH analysis, which brings my watches of KPDH to 5 I believe, but that's unrelated).

After having watched it three times, I think The Amazing Digital Circus is a series that stays with you even if you don't expect it to. The main plot itself isn't really, IDK, groundbreaking? I clocked it very early, and it wasn't amazing, and I think that was part of what my original disappointment was made of. But focusing on the plot makes you miss the forest for the trees.

The Amazing Digital Circus doesn't work on plot, the plot is at best the framing for the actual stuff to happen. The story of the series is stored in the characters. The part that really matters to you, the viewer, is the small character moments, that are put together to create an entire interconnection of personalities, and where you will end up feeling at least something about every one of them, positive, negative, and often both. It's basically exactly what fanfic does usually cover, but as part of the media itself.

(speaking of fanfic, TADC is a piece of media where I also don't resonate much with the fanfic scene around it. Probably for the same reason as SPOP, though I haven't even found an author whose work I really liked, so IDK. It's also hard for me to find a reason to read TADC fanfic, so IDK.)

TADC thrives on subverting expectations, that's what it did from the start and I don't know why I'm surprised that this is also what it did as a whole to me. But at least, I think I get it, now.

I'd heavily recommend TADC to anyone that can stand the somewhat-internet-y humor it is wrapped into.

Conclusion

There's actually a couple of other topics that I thought about while making this post, but I think it's also getting long enough like that.

Given how my summer has been going so far, I think the next post will be another monthly blog post like this one. Hopefully, I'll be less rambly about things in it, and maybe I'll have content to talk about again (though I really have no guarantees about that). But it should at least be shorter, having less months to summarize like that.

Take care, and see you next time!