HELLO! It's MONDAY! The day after I always say I'm gonna write a Patreon post. Oh well.

THE JLPT

I spent most of last week cramming for the JLPT N5 that took place yesterday. I took 3 more practice tests courtesy of bunpro.jp and was feeling pretty good about it! I was consistently scoring above an 80%... but buddy... I was NOT prepared....

There was some surprise road work in Philly, so my friend and I who were taking it together ending up getting there later than we wanted and had to run full-speed across the Villanova campus to make it on time. I'm not... the best runner in the world, so for the entire first "Vocabulary" portion of the test, I was wheezing and coughing and choking down snot. At the first break, I was able to go spit a big loogie into the toilet and drink some water though, and that pretty much took care of it.

Let me tell you, though... that listening portion of the test was MONSTROUS. I'm sure if you have any level of actual fluency, it was probably baby-mode, but it was considerably harder than any practice test I have taken up to this point. I really struggled through it and I'm 100% sure I got a good number of the questions wrong. I'm actually kinda suspecting I'm going to fail the whole test based on just bombing the listening portion... which... is really quite disappointing, but I've made my peace with it. The only thing to be done is to study harder, right? Pass or fail, the results mean the same thing: I need to practice my listening comprehension a LOT more.

FURTHER LANGUAGE NONSENSE

So, now that I'm on night shift, I'm going to adopt a slow-but reasonable pace of learning new material. I'm gonna shoot for 4 new kanji, 4 new vocab and 2 grammar points every day to add to my various SRS and Anki decks. It doesn't sound like a lot, but over a year or two, that's a LOT of new material. My intention is to start.... TONIGHT!

TEA

I've gotten into drinking tea, to get away from soda. It's nice. I like it. :)

PIXEL ART

I GOT SOME NEW ART TO SHOWS YA.

Wow, how about that.

Nagumo from CITY! I'm a huge CITY fan, if it wasn't obvious.

Sometimes I see how much attention drawing pixel art portraits gets me on social medias and I consider becoming evil and pivoting to only doing that... but NO NO! I must stay the course and continue to make music for my band and work on Negative Reverie too...

...speaking of which...

THE PART WHERE I TALK ABOUT NEGATIVE REVERIE

Still tileset time... it's such a drag, but... idk it can be kind of zen just drawing building interiors for hours on end. Look at this fancy apartment living room!

FANCY!

And how about this fancy bedroom, attached to that fancy living room!

WOW! Is that a poster of a termite's head on the wall above the bed? YES!

...and then, of course, no set of video game background tiles is complete without a giant pulsating sphincter!

Keeping it TIGHT!

Lastly, is the inside of a urban transit train car. Which... is nice.

Efficient!

My plan this week is... to draw MORE TILES! Which, obviously, is going to be the plan for a while. Wish me luck, eh?

Also I did make a few adjustments to the game itself, so here's a tiny lil gitcommit dump for this week:

New "Steel" color palette, added tiles to "Freedom_Heights", added "Underground Tunnel" tileset, added labels and new portraits to the first person section, Apparently I created an empty script just called "label"... maybe this was an accident..., added Gisele's Apartment. added the HR elevator cutscene area, added Amphora graphics

A LIL SUM'N EXTRA

Extremely cool guy and ZAKU photographer MAL4M has been 3D modeling Vuota from Negative Reverie in Blender on his twitch channel!

Is there anything he can't do... (no)

Anyway, he's an extremely cool guy and probably the most talented person I have ever met in my whole life, so definitely give him a follow on Twitch and Bluesky. He's always working on something new and deep.

OK THAT'S IT

AAaaaAAAaAAaaAAaand that's all, folks! I'll see y'all next week! Hopefully I'll be back to posting every Sunday and should have some more... tiles... to show you!! Have fun and be safe this week! Consider eating a sandwich with chips AND pickles on it. It's incredible.

Hell yeah.