The Layout Crisis: The Collapse Of Anime’s Traditional Immersion, And The Attempts To Build It Anew

As two respectable efforts set two decades apart, it’s easy to compare the differences in their production and see how those hint at the changes in anime altogether. Indeed, Tokyo Mew Mew New’s stock footage is often more dazzling than any burst of animation in the original, as anime has evolved in this flashy direction. Is there a price to pay for that, though? The answer is yes, with an arguably much larger gap in the quality of the layouts in each version. Despite the early 00s being a rocky period for anime in its own right due to the digital transition, and this series being far from the greatest example of immersive composition, this understated quality of the animation is simply worlds apart. As I pointed it out, multiple people reached out with a reasonable question: if this is as representative of a trend as I made out to be, why was it something that sounds as fundamental and in theory undemanding as the framing of a shot that took such a huge hit in quality? Shouldn’t the fancy animation be the victim of this alleged decay instead? To understand that, we have to catch up with the industry’s mentality, history, and practices that enabled that cohesive immersion in the first place.

An article that explains the complex behind-the-scenes forces behind why newer anime (including reboots of old anime) seem to have less interesting cinematography than shows of similar caliber in the 90's and 2000's.

There is in fact a part of me that would like to see reboots or sequels to certain shows (yes, even as big-name franchise IPs choke us to death on endless sequels and reboots and spinoffs...), because i want to see some of those characters and ideas explored again, through a different artistic and thematic lens. If it's bad, I think, we can just forget it existed in a few years. But... so many magical girl anime reboots, I've noticed in particular, have visibly suffered from these issues. Sailor Moon Crystal, Tokyo Mew Mew New, Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card... they just don't look as good. The characters are intricately drawn, pristine and on-model... and the shows as a whole feel visually dead compared to their predecessors.

It's very hard to talk about the biggest thing that bothers me with Princess Tutu's ending.

( It's not the Fakiru cockblock that bothers me, actually. )

( Rue in the coffin. )

( Content warning: Discussion of implied sexual assault. )

While I consider Stardew Valley a better purchase than The Sims 4, as all of its content additions have been completely free, and it being a more focused farming simulator is probably better for people who enjoy farming play than relying on Sims 4's expansions (most prominently Seasons and Cottage Living, to a lesser extent Eco Lifestyle and Horse Ranch), sometimes I do like certain details of how interconnected systems can be in the Sims.

For example: beekeeping. In Stardew, beehouses are just kind of an object that generates honey every few days, requiring no maintenance. They benefit from being placed near different kind of flowers, with certain flowers resulting in more valuable honey, but they don't really benefit the crops (aka, the main thing of Stardew) themselves. In addition, it kind of becomes more effective to just plant a single, valuable flower (such as a Fairy Rose) near a large number of bee-boxes for them to all benefit from its honey, which feels... slightly backwards, to me?

In TS4: Seasons, bee boxes have more needs to tend to, which is fine for the hobby-garden scope of agriculture in the sims - plants are also more fine-grained, mechanically, with you leveling up individual planted crops via fertilizing to increase their output quality, planting those higher-level crops so you don't have to go through the process of evolving future harvestibles, tending to not just watering but also weeding and pests, etc.

But what I really like about TS4 bee boxes is the nature of how they "plug into" the Gardening skill. Bee boxes in the Sims 4, unlike the ones in Stardew Valley, do not yield more valuable honey near fancier crops - honey value is affected entirely by the friendship and mood of the hive. Rather, bees provide a small fertilizer bonus (pretty sure it's supposed to represent pollination, but internally it's considered fertilizer) that stacks with sim-planted fertilizer. This means bee boxes passively help you "evolve" (level up to higher crop quality) your crops, all while providing their own produce (not just honey, but beeswax if candle-making is available) that can be sold raw, eaten, used in cooking or crafting, etc.

As Carl's Guide notes:

Bee boxes are perfect for gardening. They affect plants up to 5 squares away in all four directions. You can cover a huge area (about 20 plants) with one bee box so long as you plant around it. With 2-3 boxes strategically placed you could cover 60 plants. The bee box lend an aura that grants a small fertilizer bonus to all nearby plants, which stacks with regular fertilizer. This leaves you free to use your best fertilizer on your best plants. All of this happens automatically, just care for your bees so they don't slow down the gardening process (the animation of being stung gets tedious if you're caring for a large garden with angry bees around). So the drawback is there - you have to work with the bees to make this a good thing, but your reward is honey and free fertilization bonuses that will evolve your plants to Perfect albeit slowly.

So, think about the gameplay incentives created. A single bee-box surrounded by planters feels more ludo-narratively correct than a bunch of bee boxes around a single flower...

It's also very satisfying to see the animation of the bees flying over every planter box "in range" to "pollinate" the garden, and know it's doing something to boot!

Then you bring in how horse manure (Horse Ranch in TS4, Pets in TS3) is some of the best fertilizer in both Sims games that have horses...

I think it would be neat if ConcernedApe allowed bee boxes in his own game to provide some benefits to crop quality in their "pollination radius", as well as benefiting themselves from flowers in that radius. I would feel more inclined to actually use them habitually then, I think.

Lately, in Zoo Tycoon 2, I've gotten very fond of setting up a desert exhibit as my first exhibit.

I want to show you the Animal Attractiveness Reference Chart. This determines how much guests are "attracted" to the direction of certain animal exhibits.

Okay, so here's the animals we'll be looking at:

• Dromedary Camel: 0.5 stars, $1,250
• Scimitar Horned Oryx: 1 star, $2,000
• Addax: 2 stars, $5,500
• Fennec Fox: 2 stars, $5,500

An adult Dromedary Camel has an attractiveness of 0, like most other low-cost animals, but a baby Dromedary has an attractiveness of 20, where most low-cost babies have an attractiveness of only 5. This makes baby camels disproportionately good at drawing guests towards them, and thus it's wise to place your food court stands, restrooms, gift carts, etc near the camels, so that they get lots of guests visiting them.

The Scimitar Horned Oryx has 0 attractiveness as an adult, and only 5 attractiveness as a baby. However, it's one of the two earliest available Endangered or Critically Endangered animals in the game, which can be quite useful for certain challenges and campaigns. The other endangered animal unlocked in this tier of zoo fame is the Green Sea Turtle, and you may not feel up to designing a tank to accommodate it... especially when Tank Filters are only unlocked at 3 stars.

Addaxes are crazy powerful in terms of guest attraction for their cost. Baby Addaxes, at 145 attractiveness, are only five points below baby Giant Pandas and Orcas, or adult Tyrannosauruses and adult Great White Sharks. These, are, for the record, all highly expensive 5 star animals, costing $45,000, $50,000, or even $80,000 per pop. Adult Addaxes, at 95 attractiveness, are also disproportionately popular, being only five points below adult panda bears, adult orcas, baby T-Rexes, and baby great whites in guest attractiveness. They are a cheap way to control guest behavior, even late into a save file where they have to compete with the rarest and most charismatic megafauna. I do not know why they're coded like this. Also, they're endangered, like the oryx, making them good for completing campaigns and challenges involving endangered species.

Fennec Foxes have an attractiveness of 30. Their babies, however, have an attractiveness of 85 - just as appealing to guests as Red Panda and Triceratops babies are, which are expensive late-game animals (though not 5 star animals). So they're not quite as powerful at drawing guests towards them as an Addax, but... they have a lot of toys they can play with, which generally makes them more entertaining than most ungulates. You can cohabitate them with the ungulates, or you can keep them in their own little exhibit nearby.

Thus, build a desert exhibit near your earliest food court, keep it stocked with a breeding population of some cheap animals, and you will ensure it maintains business even late into your zoo's career.

I wonder if anyone's written anything on the evolution of the monster-as-contamination concept?

The Haitian zombie isn't spread through bites or disease; it's a spell cast on a person or their corpse; then again, the Hollywood zombie is really more an alternate branch of European vampire than it is a legit evolution of Haitian folklore. Werewolves in European folklore are usually attributed to curses cast on a person or deals with the devil; often, a transformative amulet like a strap of wolf-skin is involved with the latter. Vampires probably come the closest to being associated with bite-based transmission in their pre-literary, pre-filmic form, as their association with disease (victims falling ill and dying in attested cases) far predates their modern associations with sexual transgression.

In the modern euro-American popular culture, the trifecta of zombie, werewolf, and vampire are all so associated with bite-based transmission that not being spread like a disease is considered a subversion of expectations. The zombie is most often treated as literally a disease, with as much acknowledgement of magic stripped from their invocation as possible, but the werewolf and especially the vampire often invoke the symptoms and imagery of disease - the pale, white skin of the victorian-onwards vamp (as opposed to the ruddy faces of the folkloric vampire) is borrowed from victorian tuberculosis victims, the 80's and 90's slew of vampires weaving in anxieties about AIDs.

I feel like the slew of alien sci-fi monsters that assimilate flesh or parasitize hosts to reproduce also have some relationship to this trope complex...

Doing the snowflake challenge would have been a good way to meet people...

But I've been stressed out lately. X(

Also, my autobiographical memory is... extremely poor. Apparently some of the things I don't remember at all but my family do are... evidence that my kindergarten teachers abused me, so my memory being fucking shot might be a trauma thing? Or it might just be me being kind of dumb. I can remember factoids, the kind of information you read in books, but not very much about my own life, even relatively recent things.

That makes it really hard to recount my fandom history! Was the first thing I sought out "fandom" content for The Lion King, or Harry Potter? When did I get into Ace Attorney, and how? Was my first anime Princess Tutu, or Yugioh (1998)¹? How was I interacting with the communities? It's part of why I fret a lot about archival of fandom history and information about canons... my memory isn't good enough to be reliable as a source on what the internet was like back in the 00's, even though I want to be able to compare and contrast then and now.

It can be very frustrating. People always tell me that if I can't remember something, it must not be important to me, but even things I desperately want to remember, like dead family members or old friendships, slip through my fingers... but god if I can't tell you some random minutae about Zoo Tycoon or animal biology I learned prior to puberty, huh.

---

1: I'm a freak who went straight from LittleKuriboh's "Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series" to watching Season Zero because the card games looked boring, the shadow games looked cool, and I thought Duel Monster's art style was uglier than Season Zero's. Sorry everyone.

The Gentrification of Videogame History, by Felipe Pepe

Last year, the New Taipei City Youth Library organised an exposition about the Golden Age of RPGs, celebrating games from 1980 to 1999.

It had all the classics you might expect — Wizardry, Ultima, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Diablo, Fallout, Chrono Trigger, Baldur’s Gate, etc… But also many you probably never heard about, such as Legend of the Sword and Fairy, Xuan-Yuan Sword, Heroes of Jin Yong and The Twin Heroes.

You see, during the late 90s and early 00s, Taiwan was a powerhouse of game development, arguably only behind the US & Japan. They produced hundreds of games, played by millions of Chinese language speakers, going as far as influencing local literature and TV. Modern hits like Naraka: Bladepoint are openly advertised as spiritual successors of that lineage.

But we don’t talk about Taiwanese games. For a myriad of reasons, from language barriers to plain old sinophobia, they are not part of the “video game canon”. They don’t matter, it’s a small, local thing.

And is not just Taiwan.

An article about how non-American videogames, and ways of playing games, get erased by American cultural hedgemony.

Well, let's make what we can of it.

I posted a new chapter of my Princess Tutu postcanon fanfic tonight.

Feeling happy about that!

People who don't play petz will probably be confused by this, so here's a quote from the Crushing Petz genetics guide:

The Coat Colors slots correspond to the 1-5 FurColorTraits under [Fur Color Areas] in the LNZ. Some of the colors you see in these slots in GenePoolz won't appear on your petz depending on their species, breed, or markings, and no breed utilizes all five Fur Color Areas at once - most dog coats only use slots 1, 2, and 5, while Calico coats use slots 1 through 4, more than any other breed.

Box 1 from the left is the base coat color in all breeds. Boxes 2 through 4 correspond to certain marking colors. In dogz box 2 is the color of spots, socks, halfie markings, and so on. Note that paintball markings like spots and patches are programmed not to visibly change color on the pet however - only coat markings like the halfie marking will show this color. Box 5 is jowl color in dogz and some cat breeds.

The Box 5 jowl color will never mutate, so your purebred Bulldogs or Mutts will only ever have grey jowls. If you wanted a Mutt with white jowls, you would need to mix a Dalmatian or Sheepdog into your line since they carry white in that 5th slot. The appearance of the jowls will also depend on coat type and the breed of the head. As you can see with the Bulldogs above, the grey jowls show up on the dog with the Dachshund coat, but aren't visible on the Dalmatian coat. If the dog with the Dachshund coat had a Dalmatian head instead, the grey wouldn't be visible because Dalmatian heads don't show a jowl marking either.

In catz the jowls can work a bit differently. The grey Alley muzzle is a marking tied to the Marking 2 slot, while Tabby and Siamese jowls are tied to the second Coat Color slot and thus are able to mutate. The B+W Shorthair and Maine Coon muzzle markings however are tied to the 5th Coat Color slot, so like dog jowls they will never mutate and can only inherit static colors from other breeds.

And with that here out of the way, here's the chart I made:

[Fur Color Areas] in Petz 3 Coat Patterns
Catz	visible fur slots					Dogz	visible fur slots
	Mutating				5 (jowl)		Mutating				5 (jowl)
Alley Cat	1					Bulldog	1				yes
B+W Shorthair	1	2			yes	Chihuahua	1
Calico	1	2	3	4		Dachshund	1	2			yes*
Chinchilla Persian	1					Dalmatian	1
Maine Coon	1	2			yes	Great Dane	1				yes
Orange Shorthair	1	2				Labrador	1
Persian	1					Mutt	1				yes
Russian Blue	1					Poodle	1	2			yes
Siamese	1	2				Scottie	1	2
Tabby	1	2				Sheepie	1	2
* Only visible in the “body black” variation of the dachshund, not brown or red.

Calicos, as Crush notes, display more color slots than any other official breed - displaying all four "mutating" slots. (There's a good reason calicos are the most popular purebred catz among breeders!) No PFM dog breed displays slots #3 or #4, though they can still mutate those slots invisibly. commander30 's collection of purebred calicos here on Dreamwidth is a great display how how much variety exists within purebred calicos due to their capacity for visible mutation. It also helps that the breed itself is attractively proportioned and is known for producing friendly and charming personalities, of course.

The dogz breeds with the most visible gene slots are Dachsund and Poodle. Since there's three other dogz breeds that have visible muzzle slots but no visible slot #2, and even breeds that don't display muzzle slots carry color alleles (often ones that breeds with visible muzzle slots never carry, like white, gold, or cream), dachshunds and poodles are potentially great to mix with other dogz breeds if you want to display interesting coat color combinations.

Alley cats, chinchilla Persians, Persians, Russian blues, chihuahuas, dalmatians, and Labradors all have "solid" coats, that can only display the slot #1 allele. Any additional colors on them (such as cream spots and grey muzzles on alleys, black spots and ears on dalmatians, or chest patches and boots on chihuahuas) are handled by the [Fur Markings] section, and are thus effectively a "layer" pasted over the base coat that cannot mutate into new colors; instead, they mutate "away" with a low marking factor.

Today I'm getting a new scanner! My old one is one my family has owned since the 90's... it worked well, but Windows 11 won't recognize it as a device, so...

Today I worked on some "hexing" (that's Petz modding.) Prism@RatShack made a breedable pig (that's actually modified directly off of Pig.dog, rather than off of a bulldog or other "normal" dog with pig rendering data shoved in) back in 2022, and I've been playing with using "Raw Lnz" (a feature hexers don't usually use, but that two official breeds use to affect the genetics of second-gens of a breed) to set up its genetics for better breedability. Hexing is a fascinating topic, and if anyone is ever curious, I'd be happy to answer questions to the best of my ability!

Also, I'd love to show everyone a wonderful and deeply earnest website/blog on the internet:

https://swanlovers.net/

Linda (the main site runner) and Rob (her husband) clearly adore swans, and make a lot of little observations about their experience with swans - how they experience illness, their body language, etc. Linda's typing style is a bit atypical for a blog of this sort, with lots of capitalized letters, but she does have Dyslexia, so I imagine that has some relationship to how the blog is written.

I Want to Share this Fact about myself.. I am Dyslexic.. (Sigh) Please, try to Read my Text with that Tid-Bit of Information in Mind. I can Proof Read and ReRead my Text 10 Times and still find “Oops,” when I go back and Read the Same Text 24 Hours Later.. a Week Later. Very Frustrating.