Showing posts with label melora's thoughts & updates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label melora's thoughts & updates. Show all posts

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Still around



We bought a house and the inspector missed a lot of stuff (lesson learned: holy shit get 2 inspection companies) so for the past 2 months there's been a new level of chaos every week. This past week or so it was water damage at the house I'm living in thanks to the winter storms and the pump house at the new place rupturing. There's no water, there's only partial power, there's no roof, the fridge blew, there's mold, the inside is ripped up, everything costs more than twice of what it did and we were ill prepared, contractors are fighting with each other - every week it's an exciting new adventure!

Anyway, I was getting back to my emails and Zelda and then had to divert all my attention to this as well as still working on the estates of my mom and grandma, which shouldn't be this hard but I didn't realize how much death had become a money making industry for others, while also trying to figure out how I'm going to get surgery and which kind I need (my health is a rollercoaster as well), and how to mentally cope and stay proactive while watching my government fuel genocide, again, for a right wing government and fossil fuel access... again.

 

Saturday, December 30, 2023

I'm back to working on things as I can


I'm slowly working on getting back to people. I'm doing one thing at a time, so I do them right, and I'm trying to find a balance of doing them in the order of which they came in and urgency.




If you've been following on Twitter you know that I had a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer this year, and it turned out doctors had missed I actually had breast cancer. This happened while caretaking for my mom who was dying of cancer, and then she passed away. And that fucking sucks because my mom was such an incredibly special person. Then my grandma passed away. I'm in charge of both of their estates and for some reason that is vastly more work than one would imagine. I'm also going to need another major surgery because I grew a bunch of fibroids (lady-junk issues) causing me to be severely anemic for a few months now.
 

I also got diagnosed with Addison's Disease late last year. It's an autoimmune disorder where body kills your adrenal glands and you no longer make some of the hormones necessary for life. If you hear people say they can't function because they have "adrenal fatigue" it's like the severe version of that. It makes you horrifically fatigued and foggy headed. The good news is that you can just take the hormones you don't make but the bad news is is that the amount you need changes based on stress, sleep, environmental temperature, etc, and you kind of just have to guess if you need more. (Too much is bad for you as well.) There is no way to measure it outside of how you start to feel a few hours after you realize you needed more. It also means I don't really have a functioning immune system because it makes it so your T-cells don't want to fight infections, (even if you are taking the right amount of hormones your body simply doesn't act the same when you can't produce them yourself, as needed,) most specifically lung infections, and the hormones you have to take for it are also immunosuppressants: Double whammy. So I'm pretty much the boy in the bubble now. It's also going to make the upcoming surgery more risky for several reasons. I really wish hospital staff had to wear masks around people like me. You can ask but then you wake up from surgery and like half of them aren't wearing them any more.


I also just bought a house, which I've been dreaming of doing for a very long time now, and I was hoping it was move in ready so I could go and be closer to a good hospital and get the surgery I need... But it turns out the inspector missed it was absolutely coated in black mold and all that above means it will just kill me if I try to live in it. So, yeah, trying to figure that one out right now and all I can say is ...it's been a year.


Sunday, May 7, 2023

Two new interviews with me about Zelda art and preservation!

These were both really fun! I'm pretty shy but it was nice to continue push myself to be more public. Both cover the same subjects, which makes sense because retro Zelda art and archiving would be what to ask me about, but both still feel vastly different and wonderful. They both had some great questions.


First, this is amazing, I'm in a magazine! I was interviewed for Nintendo Force Magazine, a spiritual successor to Nintendo Power. As someone who is deeply in love with books and other publications this feels utterly surreal. You can purchase digital or physical copies here.




Second is an interview for Tokyo Game Life. This is a beautifully produced podcast from the heart of Japan. You can listen to my interview, and find their other episodes, here. I hope you enjoy it, I'm pretty shy about speaking for recordings so I hope I did alright. It was really fun!



Sunday, April 16, 2023

My surgery went well! Turns out I had cancer


I should have posted a few days ago. I traveled to have a double mastectomy earlier this month, it's a major surgery to prevent breast cancer in high risk individuals, which I am because it runs heavy in my family even though we don't have the currently known BRCA genes. When I was having my follow-up appointment with the surgeon to remove my drains and check in, the pathology report came back and showed I actually already had a 2 cm lump of cancer. Imaging I had done twice in the past 5 months prior had actually missed it. The most amazing news is that the surgery got it all and I don't need any further treatment.

I'm glad I did this because I may have gone another 2 years without imaging, thinking I was cancer free. Interestingly 2 mammograms also missed my mom's breast cancer, which is one of the reasons I didn't trust them and wanted to do this.

Anyway, I had a lot of valid concerns before surgery and several surgeons had implied I shouldn't do it and there would be no benefit. So I looked around until I found one that I felt saw me as a person. But there were reasons I was still pretty concerned about it. I have an autoimmune disorder that makes the possibility of dying during surgery far more likely for me and it also makes infection more likely. I also went years without most of the use of my arms and was concerned that this could cause issues in them again. There was also a good chance I would not have felt well, in various ways, for months after the surgery. Currently it looks like all the work and planning I, and my doctors, put in to make sure this went well means I've avoided absolutely every complication possible and have been in practically no pain. Only the arm stretches I need to do hurt. But I took a total of maybe 6 Tylenol after surgery, and I'm not even sure I needed them- I mostly just wanted to help prevent swelling. 

This is wonderful not only because I feel amazing and now know, without any doubt, that I absolutely the right choice: but it means I can be back to working on the site! Which also brings me endless joy.

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

I might be scarce for a while

Alright, I'm getting ready to travel for a major surgery and really have no idea what recovery will be like for me. I might be able to type and do some stuff pretty soon afterwards. Or... not. It really varies from person to person. So I hope it all goes well and I see everyone in 2-3ish weeks! But I don't know. I've also only posted about this a little but my mom has stage IV cancer (terminal cancer) and she is also going to be traveling for a last ditch treatment. I'm pretty worried about both of us because I have an autoimmune disorder called Addison's disease, which means my immune system already doesn't work well, and also means I'm on immunosuppressants or my body starts to shut down, and my mom is obviously at high risk because of her cancer treatments and immune system as well. So... wish us luck? I'm pretty fucking nervous for both of us. I'd wait on getting surgery until after hers but the mask mandates in hospitals is going to end, and I already use to get sick for weeks every time I had to go to a hospital, and I can't wear an N95 the whole time I'm recovering: so hearing about the end to the mandates means that this is basically my last shot to even have a shot. I'm also expecting there's a decent probability I might not see my mom again after this weekend since she has to fly long distance to a specialist center, and can't even be vaccinated because she has a history of severe adverse reactions to vaccines. (She actually tried even though she knew this, it did not go well.) So, anyway, I'm kind of a mess. 

Sunday, March 19, 2023

2 Years of me being back!



It's officially been 2 years now since I have been back to working on Zelda content! If you were around in the community in the early 2000's, or even 2011ish, you may have caught my other big bursts of work, but disability and website issues built up and took me away from it all. Thank you to everyone that checked in over the years though, one day it finally clicked that I really do want to be back here working on all this with everyone else. It's been really fun being back. I can not believe how wonderful the gaming and preservation community and enthusiasts are. We have found so many cool things together, we have gotten so many more works translated, we have discovered so much lost material. All of you are so amazing and I hope even some of this has brought people even a drop of the joy it has brought me. 



I'm going to try to post more on other social media, not just twitter, and I want to try to start fixing up my actual site at some point, but for now I am just going to keep scanning to try to make sure these things aren't lost forever. We need a library for old Zelda works, there's too much left to be discovered from them, and I can't wait to see what working towards that future holds.

~Melora

Sunday, October 30, 2022

Sorry for the absence

Update February 8, 2023: Turns out that the reason I've had a hard time getting much done since last summer is because I'm going through the beginning stages of Addison's Disease. This is a rare, often life altering and deadly, autoimmune disorder where my body attacks my adrenal glands and, eventually, I will stop producing essential hormones. The fix is simple in theory: you just take the hormones your body is no longer able to produce. The devil is in the details though but, hopefully, I'll still be working away on scans and official art with just some hiccups happening in the background. People with it, on the right doses of the right medications, can apparently live fairly normal lives and lifespans so... here we go!


Update Jan 22, 2023: It was a nightmare to try to work on a macbook, it takes me days to accomplish tasks that only take a few hours on a PC, so I just gave up and decided to play videogames until my back got better. It's mid January now, 2023, and I'm finally starting to be able to sit at a desk again so hopefully I'll be working again soon. Spinal disk injuries are simply slow to heal.


I also think my anxiety and lack of energy and brain fog may have just been my thyroid medication needing to be on a higher dose. Now that that is being adjusted it's going away and I'm actually able to focus on tasks like I could before.


Original Post October 2022: I'm setting up a new laptop so I can work on things again!

If you follow me on twitter you'll see that I've been taking care of my mom, who has terminal cancer, for the past year and a half. For a little while, in the past few months, my anxiety and ADHD started to get bad and I stopped being able to focus on anything but her. It started to level out but one thing I didn't post about, until yesterday, is that I hurt my back a few weeks ago and have basically been stuck in bed ever since. I can't actually sit in a chair because the pressure on the hurt spot in my spine is unbearable so I finally decided I just need to set everything up so I can work on things in bed. Honestly I thought it would heal up on its own after 5 weeks, because that often happens, so I didn't try to make any accommodations to work on things because I thought I would be able to go back to my normal set-up. So basically I just played a whole lot of videogames (mainly finished a bunch of projects in my Minecraft world, lol.) But now it's clear I might be this way for quite a bit and I'm super tired of not making any progress on Zelda preservation, translations, and art. It's honestly driving me crazy. So I'm sucking it up and am going to make it work somehow.


I also got a new backup drive that's HUGE. Somehow I managed to fill up my last new one, that was 2TB, in just a few months  of scanning and downloading scans and art. lol, whoops! So over the next few days I will be moving files and trying to get back to people and organize my mind so I can figure out where I left off and where I need to start up again.

Friday, December 3, 2021

I've spent 20 years being told the manga doesn't matter and I'm over it:

I always hear "Why isn't this manga more well known"... "this is such obscure material, that's why no one ever talked about it" etc.

Oh man guys... I really tried and it really shouldn't be.

Cool little fun things like this shouldn't be new to you either. We should have been having so much fun exploring all of this stuff for years now.

So a little backstory here: People who would link to my site on most of the big Zelda forums, back around 2002-2006, wanting to discuss some of the really cool and relevant topics found in the manga or gamebooks, would get their posts deleted and told not to bring it up again. "Zelda manga isn't a real Zelda topic," "Don't link to her site, it's not a real Zelda site and not relevant to Zelda discussion" they said... as they would discuss the Valiant Comics and cartoons. My site and this subject matter was effectively banned from being posted about or linked to on many of the major Zelda sites and Zelda forums. It was serious gatekeeping. When people would recommend my site be nominated for awards, they were told it wasn't allowed. Back in the early days Zelda Wiki wouldn't allow links to it or info from it, saying it wasn't really relevant content and that I hosted material still in print (I did not. In fact I worked hard to get it brought out officially in other languages.  No, really, here is Himekawa talking about it recently) while the site linked to other sites that continued to host other still-in-print works or US comics. It was weird times. I have a lot of webmaster friends that will vouch for how bizzare it was and how accurate this tale is. Anyway. Because of this continued gatekeeping we have absolutely missed out on so much. It was all kind of hushed away, a collective "we don't talk about this seriously in regards to the series," mood settled over much of the community.

I am so tired of pretending it doesn't matter simply because, historically, some people have been so loud and hostile towards anything they don't personally like.

Look, maybe you just don't like the manga. That's fine! Oddly, I'm not a giant manga fan either. I'm an art fan. I've just come to realize, in my 30 year long obsessive quest to find rare Zelda art material, that it's absolutely incredibly interesting in the context of the series. It's actually important. Maybe you would feel this way too if you spent some time on it. But why should you, you ask?

Why should we consider manga relevant to the creative development of the Zelda games? Especially if you don't really like it? 

Because someone likes manga. A lot. Enough that that's what he left art school wanting to do. Let's look at who that is:

Why is how he feels important?
It's not like his love of exploration as a child affected the course of the series or anything either...

I can't imagine why a guy who obviously REALLY likes manga, and grew up in a culture that is surrounded by comics to a vastly greater extent than most of the rest of the world, would check out manga based on his games, especially after he had only made 1-2 Zelda games... Come on! Seriously? I mean, everyone always wonders why Link has hot pink hair in LttP. It's a question that's gotten asked non-stop for decades. Everyone ends up saying Link had pink hair because it needed to share the exact pink with the rabbit, which by the way doesn't even share the same pink, but you know... it could never be because there were 2 years of really good monthly Zelda manga magazines on the shelves where Link had hot pink hair: in 1986-1988, well before LttP was released. So... why isn't that a consideration for you on that topic? Because... manga is just that invalid to you (or those before you) as a creative source of inspiration? Should it be?

Seriously: the burden of proof should be on the people who claim there is no way it could matter. Go to and art school and ask all the people there how they feel about that claim. Or a game dev studio and do the same. If you don't know anyone with extensive knowledge of both, feel free to ask me though and I can get you a shit-ton of responses for you. But I don't really even need to and neither do you because:

Let's look at whom else may have read some Zelda manga and had it create everlasting waves in the Zelda series...

"This guy? If I don't like manga then why would what influences him be important either," a great number of people have apparently muttered.


Well, let's see what he has to say... From this source I uploaded in 2005 

-----

Eiji Aonuma: In Ocarina of Time, as in most Zelda, we have created a large number of tribes, like the Goron who live in the mountains or the Zoras, people from the water. For the episode "The Wind Waker”, when we chose to situate the action in the middle of the ocean, we immediately felt the need to create a race that can move through the air. During long trips offshore, we needed faster characters capable of transmitting information to Link. It was at that moment that I remembered Watatara clan, you had invented for the adaptation of "Ocarina of Time." In short, I digress a bit about the initials but we are inspired by your work to give birth to Rito Race, creatures that are half-man half-bird that can move very quickly with their wings.

-----

Nagano (Himekawa): Frankly, we would be so happy if the creative Nintendo could learn from our manga to realize their games! To participate in the development of a Zelda, even indirectly, we would be mad with joy.

Eiji Aonuma: Well I can tell you, you’re already a great help! I've seen guys in my team who for a little help from mental exertion were taking their break by reading manga Akira Himekawa (laughs)! You have a knack for telling wonderful stories to us that is very useful. I, for example, I love your adaptation of the title "Four Swords Adventures". Yet, the content has so much more to do with then the original. In the original, four Link’s have the same expressions and the same reactions. Once they are passed in your hand, one will be impressed by how you came to give so many different personalities to each Link. You really did a good job on this subject, which is undeniable. The pages are yet in black and white but you can easily divide each Link by their given personality.

-----

Well. Huh. ...maybe... hop on this train because it's obviously fun and relevant. Or, at least... Stop gatekeeping? You don't have to enjoy manga or gamebooks but you're preventing people from discussing and discovering the history and context of the series by continuously dismissing it.

-----

A special shoutout to Mike Damiani, TSA, The Silent Assassin, for being "that guy" and to the massive numbers of people in the community who continued to support him even after these shows of extremely toxic behavior directed specifically towards women and "non-canon" content. You absolutely gave him the power to create an incredibly hostile environment. He posted so many rants like this on his Zelda page, ZHQ2/The Hylia:


(Context for what he's saying here: He was mad at me for refusing to remove an image of 2 adult men kissing from my site (he equated being gay to being a pedophile. I do not know why he thought he had the right to dictate what I had posted on my site but he got very serious about it and sent dozens of messages trying to explain it. Which I should still have catalogued on my first forum's backup. Hey, what can I say, I'm an archivist at heart) and for pointing out that the gallery "he scanned" was actually just my scans. He was stealing from, and then bashing, some of these other sites too and had been called out. He ended up doing this kind of thing to a lot of people in the Zelda community. until I guess he finally just burned all his bridges. But sadly people chose to support him as one of the biggest community leaders for years rather than draw a line at his clear and upfront damaging behavior.)

Though 80% of the people pictured here are awesome.

When I went away due to the gatekeeping, my health, and Mike's barrage of attacks, the site was down for a bit and when I put it back online (while still very disabled) it was not indexed well for newer search engines. For years the community had been discouraged from linking to these works, shouted down and shamed for talking about it because of stuff like that, so this content just became obscured. It's that easy. 

This has been your intro into the early history of Zelda fandom and why you probably don't know about content that's been online for 20 years.

-----

Anyway, with all that bullshit out of the way, as very clear tale about why I'm not going to just meekly pretend I'm not be excited about this stuff anymore like I use to, I'll probably start making short posts showing some of the fun ideas that first appeared in the various volumes of Japanese manga, gamebooks, and novels and I'm fucking psyched about it!!


The manga, gamebooks, and novels are clearly a part of the history of Hyrule. If you have hang-ups about why you feel otherwise, question those. To start: all you need to do is look at what traditionally inspires creative minds working in the industry.



Edit: *cough* Miyamoto was probably never creatively influenced by manga *cough*



Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Why did Link have Hot Pink Hair in A Link to the Past?

The world may never know. ...Unless we look at several years of monthly manga magazine covers from just a 3 years earlier, from early 1986 until late 1988. I don't know though, I've never heard of game developers who also like comics... and certainly not ones about the game they made. It's not like Miyamoto was trying to be a manga artist before he joined Nintendo or anything ...and I really doubt any of them would like one of the best comics ever made for the series. And thus it will forever remain a mystery 


Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, in One Pack Comics, by Ran Maru

ゼルダの伝説, わんぱっくコミックス,  乱丸


There's also some other other magazine art that's kind of fun. The first 2 are a hot pink haired female Link from Shonen Captain (Monthly Magazine) May 18, 1986. 3rd image unknown but it comes from this video. EDIT: I have found, and made, 2400dpi scans of this art of her.





Anyway, just a guess. Maybe we could agree that hot pink is just a great color too. #plink

Edit: There was a giant fanart challenge thanks to @Aeyga_X based on my scans and she was dubbed "Linka" by fans


Also, I saw this said a lot: "16-bit" is about the processor, it doesn't mean 16 colors. Though, yes! Some of the modes for the SNES topped out at 16 colors per sprite/tile, and LttP is an example of the use of one of those, so I could see how people could get confused. Source 1. Source 2. But, no, it wasn't pink because the bunny was pink and it "needed to be the same color for technical reasons" ...because, even if (?) that were true for some reason, the rabbit's color of pink wasn't even the same as his hair. (Thank you to whomever made this graphic, I couldn't find the source to credit) 


Update: Just to keep all of the Pink Haired Link images in one place, here's a cool feature from a Famitsu issue from 1992





I've had that manga online for ages, on the old main site, (the better scans on archive.org are new,) but so many fans and other sites in the early days would blow off the manga (and my scanning work and site*) as "not real Zelda content" -so it's just been overlooked for 35 years when this question would get asked. Which is a huge shame. Wanpakku, Naughty Comics, sometimes translated as One Pack, was a  division of Tokuma Shoten: the publisher Nintendo always officially used back then. And Wanpakku did the Japanese version of Tips and Tactics that Nintendo translated and released officially in the US


Edit 2: Okay, guys, turns out pink haired female Link from 1986 (May 25, 1986 and May 18, 1986) is as official as the Itoh art from Tips and Tactics because she IS in the Japanese version of Tips and Tactics. This kind of changes the way I'm thinking about her, I no longer thing she was just a mistake made by a comic magazine's walkthrough artist like I originally did.

Tips and Tactics was released by Nintendo of America in 1987 and calls itself the "US edition" "Translation of HISSYOU HINTBON Originally published in 1986 by Tokuma Shoten"

Both publishing companies, Wanpakku (the maker of this guide) and Shonen Captain, where she appeared, were owned by the publisher Tokuma Shoten: and Nintendo worked with them a LOT back then.




Here are the 2 manga pages with pink-haired Link and a fairy that were left out, along with some of the Itoh art, of the US edition: 



Edit 3: Slightly different but here's a cute pink-haired Princess Zelda from a Famicom magazine "ファミコン決定版(1986-07-20)"


Wednesday, October 27, 2021

My Favorite Miyamoto Zelda Quotes

If you don't know me then just let me say I really do spend as much time as I can backpacking and hiking. So, one day, I was talking about why I love Breath of the Wild and the very early Zelda games and one of my oldest and best Zelda friends, Max, started posting some of the best Miyamoto quotes and I felt like I needed to gush about them a little more.



"Zelda has an epic story and all, but the truth is, to me it’s all about hiking. (laughs)" - Shigeru Miyamoto, 1998... "I think it's clear that Melora, too, is all about hiking xD " -Max
I mean, it's no wonder to me that the guy who created Zelda would speak to my soul like this!

"The spirit, the state of mind of a kid when he enters a cave alone must be realized in the game. Going in, he must feel the cold air around him. He must discover a branch off to one side and decide whether to explore it or not. Sometimes he loses his way." - Miyamoto

 


"When I was a child, I went hiking and found a lake. It was quite a surprise for me to stumble upon it. When I traveled around the country without a map, trying to find my way, stumbling on amazing things as I went, I realized how it felt to go on an adventure like this."

"When I went to the university at Kanazawa, it was a totally strange city for me. I liked walking very much, and whenever I did, something would happen. I would pass through a tunnel and the scene was quite changed when I came out."

 

"I was living in an apartment in Kyoto, and nearby was a building that had a small manhole cover mounted in the wall. I walked by it every day and I noticed it. I wondered, why is a manhole on the wall? Where does it lead?"

 

"I want people to get really into the geography [...], since I think it’s a really natural thing to be able to look around while you’re walking. At first when we were developing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I even proposed using a first-person perspective.

 

"I wanted to create a game where the player could experience the feeling of exploration as he travels about the world, becoming familiar with the history of the land and the natural world he inhabits."