Category: Catch-All

Fishing!

Luring and reeling it in.

Noctis uses his magic powers to pull his catch through the pier. Less danger of falling in I guess.

Noct: “Hey guys, come congratulate me already, will ya?”

Ignis: “Hurry up Prompto, we have to go admire his Majesty’s fish.”

You know I had to say it.

Ansel and photography musing (blogtalk)

When I’m using Ansel a lot while playing, this is what my dual monitor desktop space looks like:

Left side is the game on the 4kTV. Right side is the 1080 desktop with my main graphic editor and file manager open. This is to check screenshots in varying ways first, before moving/exiting the Ansel-camera in case I want to retry different angles/filters etc.

It occurred to me again how crazy it maybe all is, this odd hobby I’ve become fixated on. It’s a mental fixation akin to when I used to be outside with my 35mm SLR’s (and later DSLR’s) taking macros or whatever for hours, changing lenses and taking multiple photos of the same subject (bracketing, something I always did manually). If you’ve ever dabbled even semi-seriously in photography you know what I mean. Hand and knee arthritis has slowly reduced photography as a frequent hobby, and Ansel+FFXV oddly makes me feel like I’m “virtually” replicating the feeling of long photo walkabouts, only I don’t have to climb hills or carry a heavy camera bag/multiple lenses, tripods, flash units.

I could also talk a lot about the “rule of thirds” – which is more a general guide concept than a must-do rule (eg, sometimes it’s better to actually not use it) – but I’ll refrain. It is funny, however, how often I find myself loosely following the rule in game usage, without even realizing I’m doing it until later as I sift through a sessions results. Old habits never die, as they say.

But what all this does is make me wish I had an “8k” workspace. Do they make those yet? Also, I still need more Ansel games that I like. There aren’t many tho, sadly.

Mystery object in the sky

Guess what this is.

Yup, it flew to a clifftop and turned into one of those little guys.

Noticed at about the same time as downing the red giant. I guess this is the games way of having these guys enter into the battle area to keep the night fight going? I’m not sure. But usually don’t these imp-like guys sort of seep up from the ground instead? Weird.

A note on categories/tags

Removed the individual bro Categories. Reason for this is because the “tags” and even a general Search work just as well for finding images of your favorite things, so Category felt redundant. Any images that focus only on one character in some close-up/pose-ish fashion will generally be tagged with “portrait” as well as character name.


Sidenotes:
As mentioned in the About/FAQ, some weeks I can/will rapidly post a lot of images (I try to limit it to 5-6 blog entries per day but…). I spend more time moving the Ansel-camera around than I do actually playing the game which results in dozens/hundreds of screens all the time (did I mention Ansel screenshotting is an obsession?). So tags seems the most effective organization method. Although I wish the sidebar tag-list widget wasn’t so awkward looking. I wonder if there’s a plugin to change only that. 😛 (edit – there is, ha)

The Category “Mods” refers to posts re: my trying out mods or other pc cheats. I gave up on trying to work with the user-unfriendly and very limited skinning mod-tool that Square released (so many modeling issues and forcing users to compile mods non-locally/online, BAH). When the level editor comes out I may try diving into that, if it seems interesting and doesn’t suck donkey balls to use. We shall see.