Oh boy, it's the funny weed number, and a great excuse to yap about some recent stuff.

1. Thank you for the watches. I don't think I'll ever really be able to fully process just how many people 420 is. I always appreciate the number going up whether it be views, watchers, or favourites as it's just kinda neat to watch, but I want to give an extra special thanks to those who leave respectful comments. Nothing makes my day quite like posting something I commissioned, or something I helped work on, and seeing people take time out of their day to comment on it. Whether it be on the character, the scene, or the artist's technique, it makes me smile every time. So thank you :]

2. Angels with Scaly Wings. You're watching me (presumably), you like dragons, I like dragons, you know what AWSW is. On August 14th, patch 1.17 was released on Steam which introduced French as a language option into the game. I helped do that! -- I joined late into the translation project, but still, the culmination of over a year of translation efforts by volunteers was transitioned from being a workshop mod, into being a part of the base game. Below is my memoir of the project, if you care to read it:

I joined after the majority of the translations were done, so my job was to translate a few things, review my assigned translation files for errors, and just generally make sure things were in order. It didn't take long to finish all the translations & reviewing, but we needed a way to take the translation files and implement them into the game. I had some experience with modding at the time, so I picked up the mantle.

The code part was shockingly simple. The real bump-in-the-road was when the translations simply didn't work. Fortunately for me, I had a secret weapon called: Someone who knew way more shit than me (4onen). The easy fixes were thing like some translations being labelled "french_tl" and others "french_translation". The hard fix was finding snippets of text that were untranslated, or broken because they were updated after the translation file was made. Onen, with his immense expertise bending Ren'Py to his will, created a tool for me that programatically looked for all such cases and it worked beautifully. I took the info it spat out to fix some hashes here, add some translations there, and everything was working.

After that was done, I contacted Saunders about adding it to the base game. He wanted the mod to be on the workshop for a bit to iron out the kinks, so I jumped through the hoops to put it on the workshop. It laid there (mostly) dormant for 2 and a half years, only receiving a couple updates, but accumulating 86 unique subscribers. As of August 17th 2024, it's a permanent part of the game, and something I can point to as an "Oh I helped make that!". It's hard to describe the weird mix of being proud of it, but also knowing that I could do so much better, almost 5 years later. Oh well.

3. I wanna wrap up this journal talking about "The future of my channel". Aspen was never meant to be 'me' as much as she is associated with me today. Aspen was meant to be a character in a story that was never written. Although I'll never escape the moss allegations, I have been building up a lot more lore behind the scenes for her and other characters that have yet to be drawn. I've commissioned  Lin_FluffyDragon to draw the 2nd lore-accurate Aspen piece, which will come paired with a short story in the description. It's something I've seen  HeatSeekerDiin do a lot for the pieces they've commissioned, and it's something I've always wanted to do because of how much more it makes me appreciate the art. I'm still humming and hawing over making a visual novel at some point, but for now, I'll commit to this short story.

If you read this entire journal, I really appreciate it. I didn't think I'd have so much to say when I first thought about making a post with all the lil happenings in my life, but here we are. Thank you again for 420 watchers, and [TODO: end this journal in a really cool way]

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