I do hope you realise that I’m going to end up using this as the basis for a post, right? And probably a very odd one at that…

That’s a quote from an e-mail I sent in reply to an e-mail from Author over a week ago now. Little did I know precisely how odd this was going to end up being…

Obviously, I neglected to inform him of exactly what I was doing (although he did say “Be my guest”…)

I guess I should go back to the start, which would be the last UIMC post I made here. In the text of that post, I made reference to the Lolikit fanart I’d thrown up – to be exact, I mentioned that I “find it kind of amusing that my completely arbitrary choice of colouring seems to have stuck though.”

I was pretty surprised to wake up the next morning to find some e-mail in my inbox. Well, e-mail other than comments, anyway – my BW address isn’t actually published anywhere, so it’s only people I’ve e-mailed from that account, or those whose blogs I’ve commented on, that would be able to find that address out.

Anyway, that mail consisted of a quick couple of lines about Lolikits mascot (which, I must clarify, I only did a fanart of and was merely amused that others following suit stuck with the same colour scheme, given that LKs original art was in B&W). But, it did end with the line…

How much do I have to pay you to launch a better image than TJ Han hoisted upon me?

I didn’t actually know what he was talking about – I though he was going on about Tripeman for a while, until he clarified that he was referring to his image as a sniper. I wasn’t actually all that aware of it, myself – I seem to remember DS having done a comic about it, but that was about it. Honestly, though, give his old, anonymous, comment-free ways, it isn’t really a stretch to see what tj_han was thinking with that one.

Anyway, it’s kind of dangerous to get that kind of thought into my head. This lead me to thinking. Thinking and pondering. I mean, what kind of image do most anime bloggers have? The only ones I can remember who have attempted, or had foist upon them, some kind of image would be Impz (trap), Lolikit (possible trap) and Xebek (Xeby-chan) – all of which are kind of girly. I guess that fits the typical Japanese mould – after all, they do turn things like Windows and Airplanes into girls. The path was becoming, if not obvious, then blatantly engraved on my mind – there had to be an Author-tan.

With this in mind, I started to think about what an Author-tan would entail. The list I came up with was along the lines of:

– Russian Hat.
– A Blue “γ‚’”, because that’s his icon on Animenano.
– Flat-chested for possible trapiness.
– Mechanical Pencil
– Shoulder-length hair (just because it means I don’t have to draw in ears ^^;). I did think about making it grey, given Author is, comparatively, older than most anime bloggers, but it looked a little weird, so I went for a slightly blacker tinge.
– Gradient-shaded hair (it’s the whole Manabi-thing).

And that was about all I could come up with at the time. So, I took all of that, shoved it in the mental blender, and thrust it from the end of a 0.5mm mechanical pencil onto paper (and, later, onto the computer), and out popped this.

Urrr, yeah.

I’m expecting that no-one is enough of a pencil otaku to notice the deliberate error (are there even pencil otaku?). The pencil itself is a Pentel A300 series, and has been used as (a) I had one to hand whilst drawing, and (b) I kind of like them.

The thing is, this is a 0.3mm pencil. Although I knew it was a different colour (my 0.5mm one is Black), it wasn’t until later I discovered that the 0.7mm pencil (which, apparently, is Authors choice of pencil lead size) was blue. Oh well. Personally, I tend to use 0.5mm lead for most things.

Anyway, before I continue, have another picture.

Right, now, I guess this isn’t really all that odd, and two images certainly wouldn’t go to explain why I’ve gone for over a week without a word on the UIMC front (or even any other post). Well, unfortunately for Author, at this point my mind started to drift back to the whole sniping thing. Which lead me to doodling more.

Which lead me to think about doing a shooting gallery.

This, of course, isn’t something what would take too long – I’d already been messing around with Pygame, and throwing together a few blogosphere references into a crappy little game isn’t something that should take more than an evening, right?

Well, it wouldn’t, but the fact that this is a whole week later probably makes it clear that I complicated the matter, largely by introducing RenPy into the mix. So, after far too much work, I ended up with this…

Errr, yeah, quite. At this point, it’s pretty much got nothing to do with Author at all, having completely gotten away from the original point. Ooops.

At this point, I’m just kind of fed-up with the whole affair – it’s ended up eating whole days of my time, for something what’s really not all that interesting, nor all that complete (at the very least, it could use some music ^^;). So, I’m just posting this up now. It’s Rapidshare’d, I’m afraid (it’s about 30mb, and that’s with me not having left a bunch of .psd files in the game directory this time), and I can’t say I’ve tried it on anything other than two Windows boxes (neither of which are particularly old), so I can’t guarantee it’s performance, or even if it’ll run, on other systems, but whatever. You are probably better off it doesn’t.

I have had a quick run through every path, and it was working last I checked, but I won’t pretend I wasn’t fixing a few typos and images whilst I was going, and as such might have broken something in the process ^^;

Anyway, for anyone who wants to take a look at the thing…

Windows
Linux x86
Mac

RenPy packages everything for you, so that’s why there’s Linux and Mac versions, but I have no idea if they’ll actually work.

Anyway, that’s quite enough of all this. I’m off to bed.