音時雨 ～Regentropfen～

前のポストからまた二ヶ月、でもこっちは結構働いてたので仕方ない。幸い、ようやく何かを書こうと決めた。
嬉しい。

まとめてのライナーノーツ♪（いっぱい溜まったね(；・∀・)

コインの６：この一枚から急に新しいMVPブラシを見つけた、テクスチャの仕上げには色々便利。人間性の玉がかわいい。
カップの５：ポーズ的には最初のデザインとちょっと違うけどまあまあ受ける。クリスマスと重なってなかなか完成できなかった。
ワンドの３：アズールのほうき星をも描きたかったけど、バランス的に悪く見えるのでやめた。そしてアズール帽子の元の姿では可愛くないので改造した。
カップのキング：水盆は究極のカップ！お人形ちゃんの服好き。使者たちの描きは面倒くさくてつい手抜きを‥
コインの１：構図はやや単純でキャラも背景も黒っぽいからとは言え、まさか２日で完成したとは！火の玉が微妙かなぁ‥
ソードのクイーン：3Dモデルのお陰でより似合うポーズが出来て嬉しい（最初に考えたポーズとぜんぜん違うけど）。時計塔の訳わからないアレコレが手抜きしたより自分イメージとか妄想したものとかもっと訳の分からないものになりきったけど、まあ、雰囲気が納得した。

(3枚の大+8枚の小)✕7＋最後の1枚＝全78枚のカード
こうすると描き進度的にはようやくスッキリした。
これを私は「７つの輪廻」と呼ぶ。
そして今の私はちょうど１つ目の輪廻を廻りきった。
最近だいぶ進んだので絶好調です（そして次のカードもデザイン完了）、今の私は一刻も早くこれを完成させたい気分です。

コキアさんとあきこさんとはるかさんの（まだ聞いていない）アルバムのこと。
結構長い間フォローしなかったので今一気に補完しようと大変の量になった。
コキアさん（pieces2とLighthouseやミニアルバム）は曲風は変わらなくてまず安定。はるかさん（MapleLeaf2やいろいろ）は曲によって好きだったり好きでなかったりすることも昔からとおんなじ。問題はあきこさんのあの超ボリュームCD六枚組+αのヤツ。一見見れば豪華と思うが曲リストを見たら全部オルゴール、しかも一枚目除いて新曲ほとんどなし！まあ、買わなくてよかった。

それで、↑を見た瞬間のインパクトはやばかった。
シード、そしてSee-Saw…だと？！
もう一度SEEDシリーズを見たくなった。
元々Destinyの方は全部見てないし、ストーリはほとんど何も覚えていない。
即座に知っているものをあげてみたら、FJY、See-Saw、あと石田彰（笑）。

「ソルトとサクリファイス」を終えたところ、総合的にいい。
意外と「Shadow Tactics blades of the shogun」が面白い。操作性は悪いけど、サウンドトラックが一目惚れするほど好きだった。
来月のフリープレイのやつもやりたかったので良かった。
昨年のPS+は損はなかったと思う、色々遊んで楽しかった。
そういえば、コキアさんの「Lighthouse」によってとあるゲームのテーマソングであることが分かった。あれはちょっと気になるので私もいつかやってみようかなぁ。PS+に加えればよかったなぁ。

最後の最後に、いつの間にかGoogle Docsには日本語文法校正機能が増えたの？！

When the time shifted one hour after (or maybe back??), my Jupiter didn't get synced until I noticed it 2 days later.
Didn't cause any problem as my other small devices synced immediately, and at such times, I was glad I have quite many analogous watches to remind me of the time change.

Guess one of the biggest online things was Youtube's anti-ad-blocker statement. Worse than PS+ that at least I get free games, paying much to only reduce ads is ridiculous. I'd be happy to pay if the year-pass price is as current monthly rate but that seems impossible to happen, nor that they'd reverse their detecting code after being burnt by angry people. All businesses are greedy.
So if no proper way to remove ads, I'll keep searching for alternatives -- haven't tried video downloading and just hope it's unaffected.
Nonetheless, the direct conclusion is I won't pay. I'd rather pay for a real working ad-blocker.

Meanwhile, I also noticed that the quality of originally uploaded videos, after being redownloaded from YouTube's built-in option, was dropped seriously. Not being a YouTuber and never realised this before. Good to learn from the last few weeks when I was organising my cat videos.
Which means, more storage for proper backups. At least my current 100GB is still fine, which is good.

Regarding this, it's all unpredictable, though I've been trying to keep it going on pace.
The motivation is always enough, but thanks to the detective/yakuza game I just finished (which will be mentioned later), it took longer than expected to finish this card.

Page der Stäbe

A staff card, so no one shall forget the legendary cane in BB.
Surely I'm biased in weapons I like, there are no drafted hammers/axes yet, if I remember right.. and there's nowhere to use them really, is there? (； ･`д･´)

Other quick notes on this one.
Plus, there were also a few trials:
Partial body presentation: first time not drawing a full body, indeed saved a lot of time and made things easier. Maybe my old works were all designed with a full body, or maybe not. Shall not be a concern of the present anyway. This shall be carried on in the future.
Outlines: one new attempt was to use brush instead of pen. But it didn't turn out well and made the drawing look dirty. Likely I'm more used to the anime-like style rather than a watercolour-mimic, so this isn't going to happen again.
Gradient map: Looks neat and good for one-tone colour application, but if used at the whole image level, it's more complicated to use and I'm more confident with choosing my desired shadow/highlight colours traditionally.
Draft: Just had a look at the original draft (which isn't like the final version at all), it was done in last year's middle of November. Last night I also finished posing the next card, which isn't like its original draft either. So there's no need to draft a whole project all at once, the thing I should have realised a year back. ┐(´д｀)┌
unsureness: I didn't know whatever the... things I was drawing in front of the fence, so I simply patched it up with dark lines and random brush messing around, and I'm not going to say I outlined it from mirrored view so the sleeves were reversed but I didn't bother to make further changes...

Spending roughly 48 hours in total, I finished the two "Judge Eyes" games with huge satisfaction.
However, I started first on normal but switched to EX easy at the end of chapter 1. The battle system is rubbish compared to any other action game I like so far. Till the very end I still don't know how to lock on, or maybe that feature actually doesn't exist (and of course I didn't pay much attention to reading tutorials). As the plot was so interesting, I was even irritated each time when encountered a fight.
The story of both are great, like watching a long series. I even wished it was not a game so I could relax and keep watching (but in that case I might miss some silly dialogues). 「バンがバンバンやって来やがる」にもすっごく笑った。
In addition, the "bad" guys, are also attractive (especially Soma's boss bgm is cool).
But today I'm not going to have any kind of review/analysis/etc. I just want to keep this image as my memory of how I enjoyed the two stories. They did a nice job of not letting me skip the ending staff roll ↓
A cat can melt a yakuza (too bad I couldn't capture the very very last moment of it). (ヽ´ω`)

Woke up at 9:04 and suddenly remembered there was a partial solar eclipse happening 10 minutes later.
The day was 70% sunny with many clouds, not completely cloudy so possible to have a look. However, there were no proper gears for viewing the sun, but I still managed to spot the partially eaten sun for a few quick seconds. Not very exciting, as expected, but also not bad to just have a look. The last time was roughly 6 years ago, also not very excited at all -- compared to a total eclipse, of course.

In contrast to a slightly darkened sun, it's this name that has been lingering around my mind for weeks.
Sirius.
Really learned this word from the Xiahou bros. Great sound does have his sword, indeed. So when I made the most recent card, The Star, I blended in the star while thinking of this exact one (what actually happened was google image showed me this star from the NASA site when I searched for some starry night reference).

XVII. Der STERN

The light effect was hard to draw, but guess that's all I could do.
For the background, I had to travel to the eternal city myself, which did take some detours because my current game progress was rather early, and the gargoyle duo was irritating but eventually managed by the help of summoned zombies. The background overall was so much easier to work with than the Maliketh arena for sure so I shall have no more complaints.

Going slower than the one-card-one-month pace, not only need to get more inspiration but also need to find smart ways to reduce the amount of drawing, by layout design, which I'll try to apply for the next card.
Guess my gallery will be filled with nothing but cosplay cards in the next few years. (¯―¯＊)

もう27時間なんかやめてもいいかな、だって最近ぜんぜんごく普通の時間帯にブログ書き込んだから。でも関数として保存たい、いつかまた使うかも。

あれはさて置き、今日はやはり新しいイラストです。
なんか80％は今年３月に描いておいたが、いろいろ遅れて今まで‥

『Zehn Schwerter』

つまり小アルカナ、ソードの10ですね。そしてこれも初めての小アルカナ。なぜ一番最初はこれを選んだ理由なんか、もう特に忘れてたけど。
ここではただカードの図面についてちょっと書きたいのです。
テーマは明らかにマリケスさま、でも獣フェーズは服装的に可愛するのが難しいので、一応司祭のローブでカーバ。で、十の剣だから、マリケス剣一本に、九本のかまいたちの赤黒き光波（？）を加えた形でなる。だって本気に十の剣を描くのが面倒いから。いい加減なところで折衷。┐(´ω｀)┌
最後に、やはり背景のコツがまだ掴んでないので難しい。

これをもって今は3/78が完成したので、めでたしめでたし。
でも先はまだまだ長い、ちゃんと知ってる。そして次のカードを異常なスビードで完成しているところですので、この企画を絶対に終わって見せる☆
（この次のカードを描いてる途中、急に気づいたこと、前作は二重ラインをかけるのをすっかり忘れてた！って、だから線は薄く感じるのね。が、時すでに遅し、もし未来のある日やり直す気になるのなら、またリメイクしよう‥）

ずっと前の問題だった、何故かリモートサイトでの管理人ログインのトークンチェックが成功しなくても管理画面の中身が丸見え。けどローカルホストのテストサイトでは全く同じコードで問題はなかった。PHPのバージョンと関係なさそうだったけど、何ヶ月かけても答えを見つけなかった。
でも、8月の終わり、29日の夜、謎はついに解けた。私は普段良く使う関数を一つのライブリファイルにまとめたので、迂闊でも他のなにかでも2つの連続改行をファイルの最後に打つことによって、余計な空白（元凶）を導入することになった。Phpではリンクリダイレクトの際にこれしちゃいけないと知ってるのに気づいてなかった。何故だろう、そしてなぜ連続改行打ったのだろう…これはこれは、まさに謎は謎を呼んでるのぉ。

9月9日のこと。
今使うメーディアサーバはパソコンでいろいろ欠点（主にcueの読み込み）があるから、致命傷ほどじゃないけどやはり使う気を損なう。で、急に思いついた、どうせホームネットワークだから、直接ハードディスクを共有すればいいんじゃん？！
と思って試したら、抜群だった。速度も安定だし、ちゃんとしたfb2kの機能全部使えるし。なぜその前にあれこれサポートソフトを必死に探してインストールしたの？
ホームネットワークならディスク共有に決まってる、少なくともパソコンの範囲で。(’д☆)ｷﾗｯ

ここで言う、宣言する、５月以来なにも書かなかったのは、決して大事なことはなかったじゃない。それどころか、大事なことはけっこうあった。けれど、ちょっとだけ沈黙に落ちた私は、何も書かないことを自ら選んだ。自分の記憶の中では、大事なことは忘れたりはしないと、これぐらいの自信があるから。わざわざ文字に表するは私のスタイルじゃない、もし後日に読んだらはずかしそうだから。

でもやはりブログのことを手放せない。一番一番大事なことではないことを記すには役に立つから、気分転換のついでにも。
だから今日は完成したばかりのイラスト周りに一言を残しておきたい――それより、このブログをイラスト専門にしたほうがストレス溜まれずに済むかもしれない、定期的に何かを書かなくていいから。

それはさて置き、ここで貼っておく。基本的にスムーズに進んだ一枚、『コントラダンサの夜』です↓

最初の切っ掛けは、とある日気まぐれで聞いた「Le Grand Tango」だった。
あのアルバムは結構前持っていたが、前に「Fugata」の一曲だけを一目惚れにしてそれ以外を全然注目してなかった。でもなぜだろう、あの日、あの曲は急に胸にキュンとした、そして間もなく一番のお気に入りになった。理由はたぶん、チェロのエロさかな、ピアノのパートも恰好よく混ざってるし、あと曲の長さ。いつも通りちゃんと言葉にしていられないけど。
構図的に、ちょっと違うイメージをやってみた。演奏している最中じゃなく、ただ楽器を軽く持っていたり触れていたりして、その「夜の静けさ」を強調したくて、まだ演奏が始めてない、あるいは終えたばかりの音のない瞬間を描いてみた。ラフの段階ではアルバムのジャケットのようなものを意識して描いたが、いつの間にか背景の赤いカーテンが自然に降りて小さなステージになった。実に面白い。
原曲はデュエットだからバイオリンの子は加えなかった。それに、本当は三人め構図はより面倒くさくなるし‥

色合いも一瞬で決めた。#BF2633×#161616、格好いい赤と黒にしかこの絵に似合わない！
タロットプロジェクトの一枚目から学んだ、コントラストを駆使して色をより鮮やかに見えるのスキルも今回大活躍。自分がまだソフトをうまく使えないかもしれないが、脳内にどんなに色を出しても、ブレンドすればその彩度が落ちる。コントラストなければどうにもできなかった。これを知って、前の作品をちょこちょこリマスターしたりリメイクしたりする考えもだんだん浮かび上がった。

驚いたと言いたくてもそうでもなく、今回案外頭脳を働かせたのはタイトルだった。普段ピンときた歌から生まれたイラストと違って、今回歌詞とかなんともなかったのです。というわけでほぼ一日かかってようやく決めたタイトルは、素朴すぎるかもしれない。でもこれも仕方がない。これでいい。

”その他いろいろ”

ちょうど一昨夜のこと、こいつはなんと可愛くカーテンの裏に隠れた‥尻尾が丸見えじゃん！(；´∀｀)

これから、またこのサイトを微調整したい。主にイメージのアップローダーをやりたいです。
うまく行けるように、経験値溜まりそう☆

これで全部。本当にもう自分が何を書いてるのかさえ分からないぐらいだ。けっこう長い間何も書かなかったから、日本語おかしくなったのかな‥

I had a vague idea a few years ago about accessing my EHD of music over my home network, but the search result at that moment was that a NAS would be necessary and that was too expensive and didn't sound flexible -- you don't want to spend a lot but gain no control over my entire CUE army.
Then suddenly a few years after, with a trigger I don't remember exactly, I returned to this topic. At least I got a quick answer that you can surely DIY your own media server, and there is free software around for this purpose.

Maybe I was simply annoyed by how I lacked control over my whole music library, which I'm not sure by how much it has expanded since getting my Jupiter laptop. Plus I've got more toys powered with AIMP to deal with the long-hated CUE on mobile devices, I wished I could play whatever was in my library without many tiresome delete/copy/paste processes.

The first try, the universal media server software, was actually a good one -- free and multi-OS support at least. However, my first impression was rather poor, mainly because I only tested its performance by accessing its IP. The built-in player was horribly lagging and totally rubbish at reading CUE. I'd accept the fact as the drawback of freeware, but other solutions I found, sadly, were worse and none had CUE support, even the paid version.

Since I don't hate DIY, I somehow imagined playing a music file -- at this point I already gave in that I'd lose CUE handling and would just play the whole track -- directly from its URL, assuming there's no internet speed issue.
This actually led me to a crazy weekend trying to find a solution to sharing my localhost across my network.
It did work eventually, so I'll have to put some records here for the next time.

1. in "httpd.conf" use ports 80 and 801 for my main and subsites.

Listen 80
Listen 801

2. in "httpd-vhosts.conf", set up servername for easy access. For some reason, the sub-site must have port 80.

<VirtualHost *:80>
	DocumentRoot "${POCCHONG}"
	ServerName pocchong.local
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80 *:801>
	DocumentRoot "D:/local/sandbox"
	ServerName sand.box
	<Directory />
		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
		AllowOverride All
		Require all granted
	</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

3. in "C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts", link the custom servernames to localhost.

127.0.0.1 pocchong.local
127.0.0.1 sand.box

After this, both servernames should be accessible by typing localhost:PORT, 127.0.0.1:PORT, 10.0.0.203:PORT (which is the current device IP within my network) or the custom server name.

To make it accessible within the local network, ensure there's no device-based security block:
Windows settings -> windows security -> firewall & network protection -> advanced settings -> local computer security drop down -> rules for receiving -> add new -> type: Port -> specific port: 80, 801 -> allow access/connection -> profile: check all -> add name/description

Now, from other devices, by typing 10.0.0.203:PORT should open corresponding website. Note that the IP may change over time.

Although this did NOT go well with my URL-based media server idea, it would be nice to use this for sharing large files without a USB.

Meanwhile, I searched for further alternative solutions, like using foobar2000 plugin to build a media server, but it didn't work as expected.
Eventually, I returned to UMS and gladly noticed fb2k did find it as a local server.
Problem solved. ┐(・__・)┌

The next task would be getting a budget computer + a decent hard drive to officially build up the server. Would be very interesting but that does mean another round of search, in the area of hardware and $$!.

End with tonight's entertainment:

It would definitely go much faster at this pace, but I also know this is definitely nothing but a temporary boost. However, this still shrank the total time by one whole month, which is great.

XVIII. Der MOND

The moon. The draft was quickly finalised when I was still working on the previous one, which fastened its finishing-up. Then, for this one, there were no big changes from the on-paper draft, and everything went smoothly as initially planned. The lake stage plus red moon plus the bride and plus the kris. It was at quite a late stage when I noticed there is a fairly large decorative thing for the bride dress around the neck, but that looks visually unclear, and also because I was lazy to meet her in game at the moment, I decided to omit that part -- I'm never aiming to be a precious cosplayer.
New things I tried this time, different brushes, splitting outline/base fills to layers by parts, and colour-tinted shadow effect. The trickiest part was rather the moon, as I couldn't find a good brush at first, and it's huge which ate up some of the resources.

I've just heard clipstudio got 2.0. May update to that version soon (maybe not?).

Again, the next card has been decided -- 10 swords + some maliketh touch (even the card after the next one! 7 cups + powder dust (??)), though I don't think I can get it done as quick as this one -- the background requires some time to figure out.

Another surprise was I gradually got used to first-person games. Having been playing Ghostwire for a week and now I'm able to handle hard mode. Still, I'm never a fan of 1st person and I doubt my brain can fit in any 1st person game. If they release a 3rd person patch (why have they got so many costumes in a 1st person game??) I might just buy the game in full but for now, I'll just enjoy my ps+ free offer.