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Welcome to the Mira Nela September 17th , 2024

Hey, how’s that for a segue away from space cowboy hats? More space cowboy shit!

The crew of the Mira Nela. From left to right: Jinko, AJ, Fint, Mellow.

So earlier this year I was simultaneously working on some animation tests using Flash and Photoshop for shits and giggles and a longform edit of Risk of Rain 2 that I was making for a group of my friends. The RoR2 edit is probably worth its own post but for the sake of post brevity it was taking way. Too. Fucking. Long. The good ol’ combination of procrastination and easy distractions kept futzing with what I wanted to do with the video, leading it to pass deadline after deadline that I set for myself to make sure that I didn’t waste everyone’s time and effort that they put into the project.

Midway through the edit I had the grand idea to add even more to the pile of things I wanted to do: Make more longform edits of this friend group playing games, but also have this out-of-frame story going on to test my limited animation abilities. And so the idea of the Mira Nela Communications Coalition kinda just popped into my mind while I was cooking fajitas one day.

The Mira Nela Communications Coalition (MNCC, or “mink!”) was this grand idea to have all of us play a character in this big space story involving the Mira Nela, a communications craft that would be on this multi-decade long journey to establish contact with a colony of scientists in some galaxy somewhere without any FTL travel in the universe. My character – this time being Jinko and not Polsku – would start the story in cryogenic storage until the rest of the crew thawed my skinny ass out and then they would just offer to play Call of Duty or something. Some shit like “hey fuckass, I know you just stopped being a human icicle, but like, we need a 4th for DMZ. Can you hurry up a bit?” Then it’d just be kinda small story arcs at the beginning and end of each episode.

I barely even got the idea explained to that friend group before I just kinda lost all interest yet again. I managed to sort-of explain the concept to one of them I think, and they seemed a bit jazzed about the idea I think? All I know is I got the RoR2 video done and took a trip to Chicago and we haven’t seriously talked for about a month now so uhhh…

♫ Guess who burnt that bridge by being a lazy fucking idiot… ♫

So all I’ve got to speak of that project now is the above image, a silhouetted render of the Mira Nela ship, a bunch of half-ideas for episodes, and an inside joke about how nobody touches the rifles of a specific purple cat. One idea in particular for an episode I really wanted to do is one where the crew arrives at a far-flung space station (still a fair distance from their target, mind you) only to find out the company funding their expedition, the Kodaspace Corporation, went completely bankrupt pretty much the day they set off from Earth. The anti-climactic joke of the hour there would be that they weren’t going to be paid anyway so they might as well keep the ship and keep trucking towards the colony.

Top: A panning render of the ship's lower hull.
Bottom: The decal of ship's designation and ID. There's that Firefly influence.

But as with most projects I come up with, it’s not going to see any sort of completion.

Anyways, I’ll be pushing out a CD mix tomorrow or the day after. I need to mess with the code a bit to have it hotlink the little audio snippets outside of this web domain. I’ll also need to come up with a CD case design and a set of lightscribe artwork. I’ll be seeing you then!