Canvas Kingdom > About

Hi, I'm Mei! In this box you'll learn some stuff about me!

• I go by she/her pronouns!
• If this page is up to date, I'm 23 years old!
• I love rabbits of all kinds! My favorite kind has to be lops, but flemmish giants and himalayans are also very good.
• My main hobby is playing video games! I'm not very good at them, but I can still have fun.
• I like writing and making small games! You can find my Itch account on my sites page!
• I'm a big fan of surreal aesthetics, but also cutesy, pixel and a bit of y2k!

Next I'll talk a bit about some of my specific interests! Some of them are small, some of them are reocurring, and you'll easily be able to tell which is which by how many words I spend talking about them. I'll start by listing my always-interests, then I can maybe start adding to this page as I consume more media. Or maybe not. I'm still experimenting with what kind of pages I want on my website. But anyways, here they come!

My favorite game in the world! It's not that good, and it's not the game I've had the most memorable or emotional experiences with, but it's one I hold dear.

Though I'm unfortunately not very creative nowadays, I was super into games that let me create as a kid. I mean "create" in the broad sense — my main reason for buying a DS as a kid was that I thought being able to draw on the screen to give Wario different power ups in Wario: Master of Disguise was the coolest thing ever.

Imagine my surprise then, when one day I'm playing this random game I found somewhere, and I accidentally select a menu option that lets me completely alter the creature I'm playing as, including their attacks, walk cycle, voice type and the very 3D model itself. My mind was blown and the game would never leave my brain.

It's just a very cozy game to me! The arts and crafts themed environments and texturing, the aforementioned 3D modeling system that's hard to master but easy to make something funny in, the amazing music by Yasunori Mitsuda, there's a lot to like. Though the series is pretty much dead now with Taito's failed attempt to make the next installment into a gacha, it will always hold a place in my heart.

And who knows? The drawing engine — Teddy by Takeo Igarashi — is... I wouldn't really say open-source since I don't see the code anywhere, but the website has a pretty comprehensive looking technical description paper. And there's a comercial Unity Engine asset based on it, so you could make the next Graffiti Kingdom!

What is there to say about Minecraft at this point that hasn't been said before? You mine and you craft, you fight and build and customize and do anything you want to. A lot of people say the core gameplay is kind of bland — and it kinda is! For me, Minecraft is the game equivalent of a dollhouse or a Lego set. You can either let your imagination run wild and make your own fun with vanilla, or download mods that'll help you build your own experience.

I do both! Sometimes I really just want a vanilla Minecraft experience. No overcomplicated tech mods, no flashy tools and bosses, absolutely no increased difficulty. Just me, the default wood planks and the procedurally generated world. I'm not very good at building even after all these years, so I use vanilla playthroughs to practice and try out new styles in a more relaxed environment. I've tried doing themed playthroughs and multiplayer words, but so far I haven't been able to play from start to "finish" (Ender Dragon + Wither) on Vanilla.

Maybe someday my dream of having a Hermitcraft-like multiplayer experience will come true... even though I don't really watch them anymore and don't have enough experiene or resources or people willing to start something on that large of a scale.

But most of the time I'm playing a tech focused mod or modpack, really. In the past I used to dabble with Industrialcraft, Buildcraft, Better Than Wolves and other Tekkit adjacent mods. Nowadays I'm a big fan of the Create mod! It has a bit of a learning curve, but the whole mechanical power deal feels very intuitive and easy to build larger projects with. I have minimal experience with Immersive Engineering and Botania, and absolutely no idea what I'm doing when it comes to Mekanism and Applied Energistics.

There's so much Sonic. So, so much. 2D, 3D, comics, shows, movies, Twitter, Sonic Channel, curry, lore, world. It's like a little theme park where you can pick your favorite kind of experience within a set world or theming. You don't even have to actually consume Sonic media if you want — you could spend days on the Sonic wiki and learn as much as you can without having touched a single game. I'd still urge you to actually play at least one game, because they're fun, but you could!

I lean more towards the 3D games. I occasionally have fun with 2D as well, but they don't really connect to me. A lot of them are solid, but I feel like I enjoy them because they're solid and not because I'm particularly into them. The 3D ones are considerably more experimental and kind of change genre every time, but that's what I like about them! My favorite of the 2D games just so happens to be Sonic CD, which is very unique (I'd say experimental but it was like the 3rd sonic game ever) in its own right. Other than that, Sonic Riders is my favorite spin-off game! The Babylon Rogues are my favorite team in the series too.

I'm also very interested in the comics! I've been following the IDW commic so far and it's very good. It doesn't have a feeling of extensive worldbuilding as much as Archie, but the stories it tells are very interesting and the art is super pretty. Speaking of Archie... I still kind of want to read through them all, but it's incredibly daunting. It's messy, the quality varies so much between the different artists and writers, and... Ken Penders. But I think it truly has that feel of a whole new world since the lore is original and constantly built upon.

I think the world is what draws me in the most. I've made a couple of Sonic OCs that I really want to revamp and flesh out more, and I'm really enjoy fan content that captures this same vibe of a complex yet cohesive world.

I'm a big fan of farming games in general, but the Rune Factory series is my favorite by far. It's basically Harvest Moon with more RPG elements, and that in of itself makes it a more concrete experience to me, but I really do enjoy the vibes in general. Being a stranger with amnesia in all of the games, you not only build relationships with people as well as your own identity and how you express it in your choice of weapons and crops. It's... not that deep, to be honest, I'm giving it more meaning than the games really do, but it's nice.

Rune Factory Frontier is my favorite and it has such a cozy vibe to it. That game is kind of a nightmare to play due to the runey system — it basically decreases your crop growing speed unless you balance the number of the different kinds of runeys in all maps of the main village, and the reward for doing so perfectly isn't actually given to you because of a bug in the code. You have to take car of all that daily, lest your runeys overeat themselves overnight and you have to scrounge for the survivors. But! The environments are super pretty, the music is super pretty, and the characters are all interesting to me. They have varying levels of depth to them admittedly (my bachelorette of choice, Cinnamon, has no events at all between meeting and marying), but they're all so unique and feel like they've got a lot going on.

I've finished Rune Factory 4 Special as well! The vibes are... less attractive to me, honestly. The characters all feel like they've got a certain "gimmick" to them instead of an actual personality, and the choice of having you start out as a prince/princess makes me feel disconnected from everyone else instead of the opposite. But the gameplay is the most solid out of all of them so far, and the environments are still gorgeous. The music is fine, a lot of it is recycled from other games, but that's a Rune Factory tradition.

I've also tried playing Rune Factory 1, but I haven't finished it yet. It's just... the first Rune Factory. It has a lot of mechanics that haven't been fully developed yet and is missing some quality of life changes introduced later on in the series. The action queueing system with the touch screen is really interesting to me, but the queue is so small that there's not much different between using it and doing everything manually like a traditional farming game. Other than that, I'm looking forward to the upcoming remake of Rune Factory 3, and I plan on playing Oceans/Tides of Destiny at some point too.

Rune Factory 5 is, unfortunately, a game that was made. You can read about my exact feelings towards this game here (spoilers for the ending).

My favorite anime of all time! Dennou Coil (Dennoh? Den-noh?) is in my opinion a very overlooked anime and one that deserves the spotlight. It was directed by Mitsuo Iso, who previously worked on other notable sci-fi anime such as Ghost in the Shell, FLCL and of course, Neon Genesis Evangelion. It tells the story of a group of kids who live in a world where those Google AR glasses took off and became the basis of modern technology, allowing them to do feats such as own virtual pets and participate in techology-augmented detective work and scavenger hunting.

I won't go in much detail about it, I have a whole zine piece comparing it to another famous sci-fi anime, Serial Experiments Lain, which you can read here. It does contain a lot of spoilers, though, so I'll summarize the main point I made in that article.

In a weird and kind of roundabout way, I guess it's in big part because the technology is used in such a way that makes the more slice-of-life parts of the anime still able to resonate no matter how futuristic it looks. For example, there is a virtual object called "meta-bug" that the characters use as currency to buy a variety of illegal items such as beams and barriers. These "meta-bugs" live in location that are not frequently visited by humans, such as the backside of shrines and scrapyards. This effectively mirrors the real life act of collecting bugs, which used to be a very popular hobby in Japan. The modernization and debugging of the AR internet system, then, mirrors the industrialization of rural areas in the way that rid of most kinds of bugs and makes going outside somewhat more dangerous (spoilers).

It also works for extending situations that wouldn't be possible in physical reality, such as having something actually happen when you perform a series of steps for a ritual that is supposed to reveal mementos of the dead. The thing that happens is getting an email, so it's not too outlandish in terms of what technology is capable of in that universe, so it feels natural in a way.

The pacing on the latter half of the show feels very inconsistent, but it's still such a cozy rewatch for me every time. Even the filler episodes are fun too!

An extremely close second for my favorite anime (sometimes it is, depends), it's definitely the one that had the bigger impact on me. Nowadays it's common to talk about Madoka Magica with a certain air of cynicism, believing it's responsible for the wave of bad "edgy" magical girl anime we've seen in the years following its original release. It's not even the first anime to have a darker twist in the genre, though. And I do think it holds up pretty well! Even if I do love to joke that Gen Urobuchi loves to see women suffering.

Well, it is true that it's a story about girls suffering. But also their struggles, sacrifices, emotions, relationships, loves and hates. The entire point of the story to me is that, despite there existing a system entirely built on the basis that girls must suffer for society to continue on, they're able to find out about its inner workings and dismantle it using the same unfair and nonsensical rules that make it up.

I can see why a lot of people might think that the Rebellion movie contradicts these themes in the way that it makes the suffering go on for another 2 hour round, only then for it to be imposed again by one of the characters that has suffered the most and should be the one most against using the old system as a basis for a new one, even if it's beneficial in theory. And... yeah, I can't argue about that.

I think it's a case of "logical endpoint" vs "emotional closure". Not spoiling Rebellion if you still somehow need to watch it, so I'll use another example: having Ash lose the Pokémon League time and time again is the logical conclusion of the shows' seasons, since he needs to have a reason to keep on battling, but it's not the outcome that provides the most emotional closure because we've grown attached to Ash and we want to see him win!

Homura's actions at the end of the movie are the logical conclusion of the amount of trauma she has gone through her entire life, but it doesn't offer the emotional closure that a definitive happy ending would provide. It's up to each one of us to decide which of these outcomes we value the most. And hey! New movie's dropping... sometime, so maybe we'll finally get the emotional closure we've ben waiting for!

Or maybe not. We certainly won't be spared from women suffering if Gen Urobuchi has any say in it.

I never finished Friendship is Magic. The farthest I got has to be the middle of season 2 or 3, and I've tried rewatching it recently and so far I'm only at the middle of season 1. I'll dare to admit what many won't: this show is past my age range, and that affects my viewing experience. Is it still true that it's possible for adults to enjoy this show? Absolutely. I do enjoy the show. I just have a hard time watching it. A lot of the friendship lessons didn't age the best (the whole episode with the indigenous people... yeah). While it's certainly never too late to learn friendship lessons, I think nowadays I'd need to have them packaged in the form of therapy sessions instead of a horse show.

No, I think the most impactful thing for me about the show isn't the show itself, but the general culture and transformative works that have come out of it. It's well known at this point that bronies came about because 4channers decided to ironically watch the show, not because someone suddenly realized how much potential it had or whatever the old story goes. But that doesn't diminish the impact it had! The fact that this show made to sell merch was able to genuinely move people from the cesspool of the internet who weren't even giving it a honest chance proves that much.

What got me back into MLP was undeniably Vylet Pony and their works, more specifically the song Antonymph. This song in particular doesn't have much to do with the show itself, but it has such a sweet and earnest message. From the description of the video:

"ANTONYMPH is about indulging your passions and fixations, regardless of if some internet rando wastes their time berating you for it. There's so many things in the world and online to fall in love with and to find happiness in, and you should never feel ashamed of it if your intentions are genuine." (This is just a small part of the description, I recommend giving the whole thing a read)

From there I found their works such as Nonexistent Meet-Cute and Familiar Feelings that directly comment and reinterpret events from the show. They also have a couple albums dedicated to their OCs like Fairytails and Fish Whisperer, which I also really enjoy. I haven't read all of the lore since it's scattered throughout video descriptions and other pages and such, but it's all really interesting to me. The universe itself has a lot of potential to insert yourself into, with the three different kinds of ponies (and other cool animals), the whole deal with cutie marks, the somewhat generic mythological elements that make more standard fantasy narratives possible within it.

The new Netflix show has the horses use smartphones, so there's that too. The whole premise of G5 is that Twilight Sparkle somehow failed to stop racism and had to seal all magic away to force ponies to behave instead of teaching them that racism is wrong. That one is even more unwatchable to me, since they try to do a Zootopia-like racism metaphor narrative in a universe that wasn't really designed to do it in the way that they want to. I've been keeping an eye on the comics though, since it's set in the same universe as G4 but many years after. They've already shown the G4 main characters in flashbacks, and Discord was there since he's immortal. I'm excited to see what they do with these characters, and the universe itself still has some potential (that they're probably not gonna explore) that I might explore with some OCs.

In 2012, I watched a video on retro anime games. There was a SNES game based on this series included. I noticed there were yokai in them, and I loved yokai as a kid, so I went to investigate. It was hard to find subtitled episodes back then, so I torrented a couple episodes from the 60's series and it became my background obsession to this day.

It's so interesting to me how different the adaptations are from each other. The manga and Hakaba 2008 have Kitaro be this sort of trickster, a literal kid who is just as bratty and mischievous as someone with his powers and inability to die would realistically be. The other anime adaptations have him be this sort of guardian entity that protects the yokai and human worlds from collapsing into each other. He is more responsible and has a more pleasant personality, and though to me he feels kind of dulled down from his original depictions, I can appreciate both versions for the different scenarios they cause and interact with.

As much as I didn't like the 2018 anime for the complete lack of a personality on Kitaro and the puzzling politics that felt like they were avoiding saying anything too strongly most of the time, I reall wish it was more successful so more Kitaro media could get a spotlight and get translated. It's so fascinating that one of the most popular series in all of Japan, big enough to have entire museums and exhibits dedicated to the author, had virtually no impact on the west at all. The only Kitaro game that was officially localized had all mentions of the franchise scrubbed and was renamed Ninja Kid (NES).

I kind of understand, though. Localizing it would be difficult since it's an instrinsically Japanese series. The originals were "made" (long story) after WW2 and caused a sort of renaissance of yokai media. There's always been social commentary with themes such as westernization and industrialization, corporate greed, living as a minority among others. And in the case of 2018's Kitaro, uh... Phones good or bad? There are a couple good episodes like the Kappa one, train to hell, and the one where they straight up expose Japanese war crimes in Papua New Guinea on screen. It's just wild to me that these seem to be intermixed with "the bean yokai are dying because people are eating more western cream desserts".

Also, Kitaro went to the Vietnam War. Really. The fact that "Mizuki would later claim in interviews that he didn't really understand the war at the time and believed the Americans to be the aggressors in the conflict" makes this the funniest Kitaro media ever made.

The developers behind Anodyne 2 and Sephonie, some of my favorite games! I don't have much to say about them here because I've already made blog posts about both of those games, which you can find here and here.

This one has a lot of scenes that didn't age well, so I feel kind of hesitant putting it in my interests at all. But I still think it's really fun to get a glimpse into early 2000's Japan's Otaku culture. The main characters are all losers and annoying in their own unique ways, and yet the show still manages to feel very cozy sometimes. Mixed feelings about Nidaime, mostly negative.

Even though Digimon images are plastered all over my home page, I forgot to put this here at first. That's because I don't really have that much to say about it. I like Digimon! I watched Frontier and Data Squad as a kid, and started watching Tamers (haven't finished yet) and Ghost Game (not caught up) last year-ish. Digimon is always there whenever I need. It's got cool tech, awesome designs and decently fun games. Digimon to me is like going to the ice cream stand. I'm not the biggest fan of ice cream in the world, but I still like it and I'll go there to browse the new flavors once in a while.

I like them. =)

Here's some other pages where I share my thoughts about things I like:

• Music
• Unfiction