其他

Site Updates (III)

by Morgane 2023年3月27日

Hi Everyone,

A few notes on where we are – yes, we’re still alive (laughs). However, there will be a few things changing going forward.

After much discussion, we’ve decided to part ways with Zero. The parting is mutually agreed upon, and we wish him well – this website, after all, and much of the project is his effort, and we couldn’t have accomplished anything without his contributions. 

This site – hon-haka – will remain an integral part of the circle in question. If Zero decides to proceed with other efforts – especially now that COVID is winding down – you can find it here. 

While Pacific will still be hosted here until such time that Zero decides to keep this site up, we’ve obtained a new domain (currently stec-hq.com) and have been slowly working to transfer things over. As it stands right now, everything is more or less archived properly over there. Future updates will also be posted there. 

As for Pacific itself – it’s been nearly a decade since we first started. We’ve seen the rise and fall of shipgirls as a whole as a genre, and our team is mostly out of student-hood and well into the respective next stages in our careers. Where we go forward from here is still something we’re still figuring out – but time is becoming increasingly a luxury for all of us. 

Be it creating content, utilizing additional resources (AI art, for instance), or how to better organize things, I think for me, at least, it’s … not quite the end of an era, but it is going to be change. After all, between health and personal reasons, things are very different nowadays then back when I was a student and burning the midnight oil at both ends.

I do think if I have more to say, I will. 😛 For now, however, I think it’s relevant for me to make this post – if for nothing else other than archival purposes. 

Best of luck to your endeavors!

Morgane & the Pacific group

前线来信·Mail call, 美舰本·Pacific

A History of Pacific

by Morgane 2022年8月15日

Hey everyone.

This isn’t an update like the type in which you’re used to seeing. More of a post where I’m dumping my thoughts out on a page. I think I’m feeling a little lost and confused at the moment, but that’s alright too – it’s what it is. 

The reason why I’m writing this post is frankly, a bit of a soul-searching moment. I don’t think I know what I’m doing at this point, and I’m not too sure if we (the English side of the circle) quite know either. 

We first started out creating artbooks featuring shipgirls – in the earliest days, ’14-’16, this was indeed the plan. At the time, we were interested in creating characters – with the secondary aim of having this generate something we can hold in our hands. I think in some ways, we still are – but motivation is admittedly lacking for many reasons. I can’t really speak for the others, but for me? More often than not, I felt like I would rather prefer to see if we can tell stories or build something with what we’ve got on hand. After all, we do have an awfully lot of shipgirls already.

Now, this is where the issue compounded. The “team” or “circle” – really now more of a band of friends – are huge fans of history, and so working on a world-building extension seemed to be the natural choice. However, as we dug and researched and attempted to craft the Pacific world, it was natural that this was going to be an endless project – there is always a new thing to look into, a new idea to be entertained, and a new concept to be tested. We were having fun – and still are!

But, when matters of real life – health, relationships, graduation, job-search, and more starts to hit – hobbies become hard to manage. It’s doubly difficult in cases like this where it feels like that I’m staring into an infinite kaleidoscope of possibilities. Triply hard, when even I’m feeling the burn-out from uncertainty.

So, what do we do now? 

I’m not too sure. Though we have plenty of ideas, I do think some sort of project that has a definite start and end is probably a good place to start (laughs). 

I expect this post to remain pinned until we figure out things. The site, too, is going to stay up. Exactly what we come up with next is going to require some thinking.

The nature of a “doujin” circle, as you know, is to do things that motivates us. Commercialization has plenty of perks, and even answering to an audience’s demands informally creates reinforcement that could be positive for the creators. Unfortunately, neither of those currently applies to us – we were, and are happy, with what we have so far.

So, is this a natural progression, given the finite lifespans of fandoms and interests? Is this a simple wintery hibernation, as we ponder and reflect? Is this going to be the start of something new altogether?

I honestly don’t know! 

But I think I’m excited to find out – whatever it might be.

未分类

Some organizational updates (II)

by Morgane 2022年12月18日

We’re still working out the details, but I wanted to leave everyone a note. It’s been a slow process mostly because I think relative to where we were years ago, many of us simply have less time to focus on hobby related stuff. But, it’s still moving along – I think once we iron out the kinks, we’ll be able to show what we’ve been working on (even if it’s right now just a copy of what we have right now).

Yes, we’ve been keeping an eye out on things – including the very hot talk nowadays about AI generated art and writing. I think it’s fascinating that we live in a world today where this is actually possible. What this means for us, for our hobbies, and indeed, our world today? Honestly not sure, but I invite you to take a positive attitude as we face the unknown. 

There’s a lot of uncertainty up ahead, and I don’t know what those might be in your lives. However, know that you have some well-wishers here – scattered all over the globe – in us, and we hope that the coming 2023 will be an even better year than you’ve had in 2022.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

未分类

Some organizational updates

by Morgane 2022年11月6日

We’re currently working out a few changes to the website and the circle’s operations. The team’s been bouncing ideas off of one another, and we thought it might be good to move Pacific onto a different site so Zero can be more flexible with implementing activities pertaining to the circle at large.

Most likely, we’ll move Pacific’s content (at least the English portions) over to a new domain, while leaving links behind to redirect things back and forth. Organization hasn’t been our strongest strength (xD), so we think this might help us get a bit more organized too. 

Stay tuned for now!