brettimaeus – Brettimaeus

L.A. Noire: Cold Cases and Car Races

Created: 8 Jan 2018

WHAT’S THAT? YOU GAMERS COULDN’T GO ANOTHER DAY WITHOUT THIS EXACT VIDEO IN YOUR LIFE? Only so happy to be of service.

Yeah, so my friend @vigilantefridge (AKA PoppyJR, the ARMS EVO world champion himself) and I had been planning to do a playthrough of L.A. Noire for years. I believe the original reason was “because John Noble is in it.”

So when we finally got a chance this past January, I set up a Blue Snowball mic and recorded it. However, I deleted that footage when trying to migrate hard drives. Then, the mic wasn’t recording. Then yeah everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.

We waited a week, then continued the playthrough, with no choice but to accept that we were going to be missing the footage for the entire first 1/5th of the game. But we persevered!!!

We managed to beat the game at 6AM the night before I had to work an 8-hour shift of lifeguarding, and he had to pack to leave for EVO Japan. We both survived without sleep, don’t worry.

The very next night I stayed up compiling the footage and scanning for moments that were highlight-worthy, and slapped this video together in one sitting, while everything was still fresh in my mind.

Then PoppyJR suggested we commission someone to make a little intro for it (in the style of Two Best Friends Play) and I thought “Who better than my artist girlfriend?” Her art is at @CupidDissolvi on twitter, please check her out and give her some love. She was the perfect pick for the job, and I insisted she not give me a bf discount because her prices are just that fair.

Interesting notes:

We actually recorded ourselves playing the RE7 DLCs before we ever touched L.A. Noire
The loss of that footage is a greater tragedy than any other in the troubled production history of this video

Little Diddy

Created 15 Sep. 2017

This was easily one of the best self-contained jokes on my first mashup album, and I figured it deserved it’s own brief video. There isn’t much about it’s production to describe.

I took old character art of Diddy Kong from the 90s, and colorized them in Photoshop to look like the even older photographs. I think the combination of the crappy early CG work and the coloration is a real nice effect:

The glorious full pic.

Then I just masked them into the Jack and Diane music video frame by frame, recalling many of the techniques I learned in making JoJo’s Bebop Adventure. Simple, a little time-consuming, and always worth it.

I realized I’d be wise to sit on it until my second album was prep’d (which it finally is). Please look forward!

Poe Rey Mi Fa Solo Ren Poe

Created: Jan 2016

Say what you will of The Force Awakens, its premiere was one of the most memorable experiences I’ll ever have. I saw it with all my friends, opening night, in a PACKED theatre. And it was fun!

The next month, I was still thinking about it somehow, so I scribbled this down in a notebook (a physical one, so I have no idea where it is). Felt like a god damn genius until I realized I had no way to make an actual song out of it, since I didn’t know anything about music.

Fast forward two years. I’ve now put out… two… albums. And made a handful of original songs.

And Episode VIII is finally here! Now seemed like the perfect time to resurrect the idea. It turned out great! Well, the song at least. IDK about the visuals I just kinda threw them together.

Lyrics:

Po, can steer, a rebel ship
Rey, a budding padawan
Maz, the wise, and ancient one
Finn, a soldier on the run
So, an old retired rogue
Lo, a name to follow So
Ren, his somewhat evil son

And that brings us back to
Po
Rey
Maz
Finn
So
Lo
Ren
Po

Let’s go again, shall we?
But this time, lets incorporate some corporate market research!

Po, who’s queer, for Finn in fics
Rey, the super Mary Sue
Maz, who must, be Yoda’s clone
Finn, who’s only in for goofs
So, Harrison Ford is back?
Lo, and behold a short contract
Ren… whose real name… is Ben

And that brings us back to
Star
Wars
Will
Make
Lots
Of
Money

Interesting notes:

I, no joke, recorded the vocals in a studio.
I made the instrumental from completely free VSTs I got online, and I am rather proud of it.

Overwatch and the Curse of the Pro Lucio

Created: 26 Nov 2016

On nearly the one-year anniversary of this video’s creation, I’m finally posting it. This video was made feverishly in a single night, as an experiment with highly edited gameplay content. It was preceded by my Battlefield 4 LP… succeeded by my Dark Souls 3 video… and concurrent with this video on my second channel, which came from the same Pro Lucio gaming sessions.

But I never posted it, because I wanted to keep it as a backup video if I ever had a slow month. I did have plenty of slow months over the past 12… but it never felt like the right time. So here it is after a year!

Interesting note:

I used Ask DNA because I was playing that song on loop the entire night we recorded that Overwatch footage.

Evil Within 2 Trailer | With Original 1992 Version of Ordinary World

Originally created: 28 June 2017

Alright Imma be honest, I just wanted to flex my audio editing muscles for once. I mixed all the audio in Adobe Audition (I was also using it at the time to mix my mashup album, The Book of Genre). I downloaded hundreds of sfx from www.freesound.org …THEN I LOST THEM.

Hit a serious snag in development, in which I lost a lot of my progress, saved versions of the file, and downloaded sfx. That damn Halloween-video curse struck again, as last seen on the Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared Movie. Anyway, I let it rest for a long time before deciding to resurrect it from the dead (heheh, geddit).

Everything past 1:13 was done more recently, and more quickly; so if it seems rougher that’s why. I was rusty, and I really didn’t want to drag out the production of the video any longer than I had to, especially after that unpleasant snag. Still pretty okay with how it came out, and definitely proud of a lot of the audio mixing in the first half! Had fun with it too, and that’s the important. aprta oh sh looks elike my tpying is cuscred tooo

Interesting notes:

I did not plan on this being a follow-up to my FFXV Stand By Me video but the fact that it worked out like that makes me very happy.
I tried to make the sfx keep in line with the rhythm of the song, and it mostly works!

Fried Raiden for Breakfast

A nlovely fanfic I started writing years ago. Then I lost it, but for some reason I couldn’t get it out of my head so I rewrote it last week.

SO basically in an effort to lube up my desire to write and make myself think significantly less highly of my writing, I will be doing weekly installments of this dumb as shit series of Metal Gear fanfictions. I think this is perfect because Metal Gear’s already dumb as shit and treating it with a stream-of-consciousness Khonjin House-esque wacky tonality will be the perfect way to shit out something every week, because it can be the worst shit ever, and I can leave it wherever I want or make an episode as short as I fuckin’ need if I can’t find the time to write one week. Anyway, the point is, it doesn’t matter how shitty it is I’m gonna be shitting it out once a week because that’s what I told myself I’d do and if I start slowing down instead of speeding up then I’ll fall right off the train and onto the train tracks and it’ll be so easy to just sit there on the train tracks instead of catching another train so take it away Raiden:

The Raiden phone buzzed, alerting him
that he must go to New Zealand for his new mission. Raiden checked
the time. Yup, it was still the year 2033. He’d been contently
fucking murdering people for 19 years. Making people stop living was
a heck of a living, but he reminded himself that he was doing it all
for his family, who happened to be living in New Zealand so he would
get to see them while he was there so that was really good.

He took a public flight and had his
knees cramped by the seat in front of him, so he stabbed his high
frequency blade through the back of the cushion to kill the person
sitting there and then chopped the seat up by its roots and kicked it
away. A flight attendant reminded him that murder wasn’t actually
legal. He excused himself by saying that he’d actually forgotten,
since he was really used to murdering people basically weekly, and
everyone found that understandable until he started arguing that
since they were also over international waters the rules shouldn’t
apply anyway. Considering there are no countries where murder isn’t
legal, it didn’t seem like a defensible argument, and perhaps even
weakened his original point. Raiden resisted the urge to murder them
for attacking his opinions, and therefore himself as a person.

The plane touched down and Raiden
sprinted to Rose’s house in a couple minutes. He kicked the front
door off its hinges and shouted “RRRRRROOOOOOSSSEE????” From the
kitchen, he heard a counter-shout, “No blood on the carpet!” He
took mild offense that she would just assume he had blood on him, but
he did have to swipe his sword outside the front door and paint the
sidewalk and hedges with some chunky blood, so he didn’t utter a
retort. Wait! That’s the only greeting he got??

“Rose, I- I’m home!” Stammered
Raiden, attempting to catch a verbal consolation prize.

-To Be Continued

The End of the Road/Hitting the Road

Week #7

Just a quick little thing I wrote. OH WAIT IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN POSTED A WEEK AGO BUT I’M A FRAUD WHO’S CLEARYL LOSING INTEREST IN THIS BLOG JUST LIKE I SAID I WOULD. OH FUCK, NO, I WAS ENJOYING THIS FOR A BIT. HAVING CREATIVE STUFF ONLINE BESIDES VIDEOS FELT REALLY GOOD.

My comeback will be in the month of November. In the meantime, take two posts as penance.

I spent the first 10 years of my life
in the state of Iowa. The same house was my home those 10 years, and
the same backyard to that house was my best friend’s backyard. We
literally shared the same backyard. We could walk out our back doors
and walk across a stretch of grass to see each other. This may even
be why we were such good friends, after all, our personalities
didn’t mesh.

In retrospect, that boy, Mike, was not
my type. He was into all the trappings of adulthood and manhood and
the gangsta hood, where I was very much content to stay a child
forever. I was a kid who wouldn’t play in the mud because it was
gross, he was the opposite. In elementary school, I played Mario, he
played Call of Duty.

However, as much evidence as there is
to the contrary, I will never doubt that our friendship was genuine.
Because when the day came for my 10 years in Iowa to end, when I
learned I’d have to spent my 11th year in Georgia, Mike was the one
who cried. Not I, the effeminate one, but he, who’s father was the
face of stoicism. I could tell he would have preferred not to show
that kind of weakness, which made it all the more honest that he
would anyway.

first fanifc

Heyo here’s fanfiction I wrote last year I guess Don’t Read It

So I show up on a bus in Beach city and
get off and I’m hungry so I go get a pizza at the fish pizza place. I
walk in and Ronaldo is on his latop bloggin about keping tBeach City
weuird. I compliment his blog as a huge fan and point out that he’s
getting pizza on his keyboard. We establsich good rapport by this,
and I sit down and order my pizza.

Outside, throught the glass doors and
windows I see Lapis Lazuli land. She’s the hottest ever, and I turn
to Ronaldo to make eye contact. He’s as excited as me, and asks if I
want to see some fanart he drew of Lapis. I say yeah I look at fanart
of Lapis all the time. So he turns his laptops toward me and show me
the fanart.

In it, Lapis is crying a river, she is
hugging Japser, and she has blue nail paint. I am repulsed at this
ruination of my waifu, an d proceed to don my opinion pants.

I state that there’s nothing
particularly wrong with the anatomy, but the coloration makes her
look too intense and removes the cuteness from her. He says he didn’t
want her to look so cute, and I say he’s a heckin moron.

I roll with it, pointing out that her
nail polish is uncomfortable and doesn’t fit the charaacter. He says
we don’t actually know enoughtabout the character to say that
she’dnever wear nail polish and I say he’s right but I hate the nail
polish and wouldn’t want any waifus to wear it. If she wore stuff
like that I’d feel uncomfortable and not want to hold her hand as
much.

Ronaldo retorts this by scrolling to
the next piece of fanart. Lapis is waering high heels, earrings, and
has a shoulder tatto o visible under her roughly torn blue dress.

All purity is gone from this world and
I feel the urge to vomit. The red lipstick he’s drawn on her makes me
wanna never kiss her for sure. no thanks. And the high heels what
even. Can you imagine flying around with those big old things
throwing off your balance.?

Lapis kicks the glass door from the
outside in, and shatters it, then channels the water in the laptop
molecule4s to make the laptoip explode. She gives me a deadpan thumbs
up and reminds me that my seemingly contrarian opinions about
fasshion are at least coming from an honest place, and that as long
as I can communicate that to real girls they won’t hold it against
me, even though it comes across very prejudiced against those who
fall out of line with my picky tastes.

Nier Automata Analysis

I finished Nier: Automata’s Ending E this past week, at which point the game instantly became one of my favorites of all time. I can’t be sure, but the entire game suddenly seemed structured, brilliantly, around the player’s choice in this segment, which completely justified the problems I’d had with the story up to that point. Here’s a very brief piece I wrote about it, which I thought was worth sharing:

The first 2 playthroughs of Nier: Automata set up a world with meaningfulness everywhere. Machines talk about their interests/hobbies, what keeps them going in life, and who they care about.

Then the 3rd playthrough serves to tear that all down in one fell swoop. Every “meaningful” thing you might have cared about is killed or driven to madness (I.E. the two main characters). In the end, nothing mattered and everyone dies. And if it had really ended there, it would have been outright nihilistic. But it doesn’t end there. Everything actually hinges on Ending E.

After being presented with so much definitive evidence in Routes C/D that things were meaningless, the game literally asks you if you care enough about what you’ve seen to fight anyway. Because ultimately, caring about things and fighting for them is the meaning of life. As long as we have each other, and we care enough about each other to make sacrifices for each other, then the hardships of the world are worth attempting to conquer, even knowing that they will never be conquered. That’s proven by the poetic savior of other players, who literally had to sacrifice something they cared about deeply, their invested playtime, in order to save strangers going through the same existensial crisis. It’s one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced in a video game, the only one that’s ever made me cry, and it’s a fucking minimalist shmup segment.

Cat Lady

Week #4

Lucy is a character I want to detail in a variety of stories, many of which will feature her friend Britt. I’m not confident I have their character’s nailed down, which is why I need to do so. They’re somewhat important.

This story is the first, and it might be a standout. After a full night of racking my brain for ideas, I slammed these thousand words down in an hour. So it’s coming from a rather visceral place that you can probably read into. I haven’t edited it, and I likely won’t? because of course I need to be willing to crap this stuff out and never look back. So here’s to that. *clinks licorice tea glass against monitor, spiliing tea on my keyboard*

When
Lucy was a kid, her neighbors asked her to catsit for 2 weeks while
they were out town. Every day when she came home from school, even
though she had homework to get to, she would go straight into the
living room to pet the cat. Her mom would seize the opportunity to
ask her how her day went, and she would give a brief summary before
bringing up her homework and excusing herself. For the first week
this was the case. But finals were next week, and she needed to make
use of all the time available to her, so over the weekend, Lucy
locked herself in her room to study.

The
goings were rough, and the word problems were tough, but Lucy
carefully staved off distractions. She put her phone on silent and
her laptop on airplane mode, and even then she found herself
rereading sentences until they stuck. But she was as in the zone as
she could be, and that’s what counted.

Then
her mom called up to remind her about the cat. The call ripped her
from her state of zen. She realized there were responsibilities at
conflict here. But her work took greater precedence, so she called
back down to her mother and said she couldn’t come at the moment. Her
mom’s cry of “awww,” was cut off by Lucy closing the door. She
resumed her study. It took her about an hour to reenter her zen
state, but once she had things went swimmingly. She finished
reviewing her Geography flash cards at 8:00 PM, but she still had 3
subjects to go that Saturday evening.

And
her mom called up to remind her about the cat. It needed it’s food
and water changed, not to mention some attention. This frustrated
Lucy greatly, but she knew it was getting late, and she was better
off finishing that chore before continuing into the night. She ran
down the stairs to the living room and grabbed the bowls from the
corner. Her mom greeted her with delight, thanking her for being
responsible. Lucy silently cleaned and refilled the bowls in the
kitchen, then brought them back for the cat. Her mom said, “I think
you’d better give him some pets before you run back off again. He
misses you.”

Lucy
stared at her, then at the cat, who was already busy chowing down his
food. “Wish I could mom, but I gotta get back to work.” She
headed back upstairs, somewhat abject, and got to getting back to
work.

THE
NEXT DAY, SUNDAY MORNING

Lucy
woke with her face in a textbook, and her mom poking her shoulder.
“Hey you,” she remarked, “The cat’s downstairs if you want a
good wake-up from him…”

Lucy
blinked at her, half-processing. “That- That was a plenty good
*yawn* wake-up right there, mom. I gotta find where I left off.”
Lucy had intended to pull an all-nighter. She’d lost a lot of ground
overnight, and she wasn’t even sure how much yet. That made her
grouchy enough as is, not to mention the uncomfortable, unsatisfying
desk-sleep she’d gotten.

Her
mother frowned at her. “Alright, well don’t deprive yourself of
sleep and snuggles just for this.” She left Lucy alone, thank god.

Lucy
buckled down. She cracked open boxes of cereal to eat raw, as
substitutes for meals. She peed in the crappy, tiny upstairs bathroom
instead of the one downstairs she usually used. And she focused all
her efforts on staying in the zen zone of her room.

But
her mom called up to remind her about the cat. Lucy snapped to look
at the clock, it was somehow 6 PM. Her mom called “Hey sweetie, I
think the cat wants some love!”

“Love!?
It wants, love??” She shouted back.

“Yeah,
is that too much to ask?” Coerced her mother.

“Yeah!!!
Right now it is!”

“Well
that’s too bad! Come down hear and show him some attention.”

Lucy’s
eyes widened in frustration. She closed her laptop, snatched it up,
and stormed down the stairs with it under her arm. As she entered the
living room, her mother once again greeted her with delight. Lucy
once again said nothing. She looked around the room for the cat, and
found it cowering underneath the pedals of the exercise bike. She
dropped her laptop on the couch, went over to the cat, and sat
criss-cross applesauce next to it, facing away from her mom. The cat
slinked away.

Her
mother spoke up. “Boy a real grumpus, aren’t we?”

Lucy’s
mouth tightened. “Yeah. Now’s not a good time for this, I think.”

“What?
Of course it is. Here, if you turn around you can watch TV with me
while you pet him.”

Lucy
turned around and saw the Big Bang Theory was on. That was the last
straw.

“Mom,
I’m busy!”

“Oh
come on, you’re always busy. I’ve seen you all of five minutes
today.”

Lucy
stared at her mom, overcome with the feeling that she was being
extremely selfish. She decided to get up and leave. As if reading her
mind, her mom asked her if she could perform a favor. Lucy asked
what. She said the neighbors were posting online about missing their
precious cat.

“…And?”
said Lucy.

“Can
you take a picture of him, for me to send them?”

“Why
can’t you take a picture mom?” she asked

“Well,
you’re better with technology…”

Lucy
stared at her mom, sitting on the couch with iPad outstretched in a
trap. She looked back at the cat and realized he’d escaped to the
opposite corner of the room. He was in the jumpy sort of mood that
would make this job very difficult. She got up, took the iPad, and
set about trying to take a picture of him. The light was low, and the
iPad’s camera sucked, so her mom rephrased that goal to a good
picture of him.

After
a while of giving angling advice from the peanut gallery, which made
Lucy fume, her mother got up to help corral him into a good spot in
the center of the room. Their combined efforts were enough to get
some acceptable products, ready for shipping to the lonely set of
parents who’d missed their fur-baby. But it took a half-hour which
felt to Lucy like an epoch.

She
passed the iPad back to her mom, who admitted she could go upstairs
now. Lucy rebutted “I’d go upstairs anyway, thanks. I told
you I was busy mom!”

“Well,
thanks for sacrificing your precious
time.” thanked her mother.