A Blog

It’s finally happening. I’m putting my novel Hallowed up online, to read and to listen. New chapters will go up on the 1st and 15th of each month!

Read: https://hallowed.byanyothername.me/

Listen: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB2qD4_oHoa2pAPkkT2tmhT0mLcYVqMe

Guess what the four paths in this game are named.

Verdant Wind

Crimson Flower

Silver Snow

Azure Moon

Today I learned that the hamburger button (the menu icon with the three horizontal lines) first appeared in the Xerox Star, the 1981 computer that originated the WIMP interface and many other things we consider quintessential to the personal computer to this day. This makes the hamburger icon about as old as the mouse cursor.

It was used again in Windows 1 (1985), and in roughly the same location as where we’d expect to find it today. After that, as screens got larger and screen real estate became less precious, the menu icon disappeared in favor of simply displaying the menu options horizontally across the top of the screen or window.

Sometimes you realize you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, and your side projects have become more stress/work than they’re worth. Sometimes you gotta re-evaluate which side projects you wanna keep.

Me: “Okay I’m a little short for getting my house to win the House Cup, but--”

Dumbledore: “lol nah fam have 100 points for no reason.”

Tutorial: Idk what people are complaining about. Sure, there’s an energy system, but that’s to be expected of a game like this.

Being attacked by devil’s snare: Okay it’s kinda dumb that I have to wait like an hour to save myself from strangulation, but gameplay and story segregation I guess.

Second potions class, where I have to get five stars (meaning spend a lot of energy), but I also have to do it within an hour: THIS GAME IS THE DEVIL.

The poor, eager for what seemed like easy money, lined up at the laughter farms like they had never lined up at the blood banks. Just a few minutes of laughter, squeezed in at lunch, between a hastily devoured sandwich and a hurried return to work. But the laughter couldn’t be forced -- it had to be genuine -- and so a second market grew in materials designed to elicit quick, easy laughs.

Let’s talk about League’s hottest avian couple and their names in Chinese.

Xayah - 霞 (xiá): The character 霞 is used to refer to dusk or dawn, or more precisely, the beautiful orange/pink/purple colors of the sky and the clouds. This translation probably came about as a combination of the sound of Xayah’s name and color of her feathers, though I do wonder if it was decided upon before or after the Cosmic Dawn/Cosmic Dusk launch skins.

Rakan - 洛 (luò): 洛 is the name of a river (洛河, literally Luo River). More famously, there is a city along the bank of said river called 洛阳 (Luoyang), which is what the character 洛 is most closely associated with. The second character in 洛阳 means “sun”, and 洛 is pronounced the same way as 落, which means “to descend”, and so the city’s name as a whole is a homophone for “sunset”. Again, this association with the sun is probably due to the color of Rakan’s feathers, as well as linking him with Xayah and potentially their launch skins.