Tanjoubi Omedetou, Neko (Happy Birthday, Cats)!

This week, Boots and Mittens are somehow, unbelievably, SEVEN YEARS OLD. Time flies when you're having fun (and waking up humans at 3am).

I've heard that developmentally, cats reach the equivalent of 15 human years by the end of their first year, then 24 by the second, and then four years per year after that, which would make these two...44?? Holy catnip! That then begs the question, do cats have mid-life crises? (My guess is: probably not.)

Anyway, here's to many, many more!

Big In Japan?

I'm excited to announce that Second Player Score has started up a partnership with the Japan-based media company VisualReel Inc.!

As of now, they've produced a Japanese website for us (that you can see here), but there's much more to come. Could this be the Japan-related destiny I talked about in this post from a couple of years ago? Stay tuned!

Four-D Status Update

This is a status update on Four-D. Not Four-D, the music album*, but Four-D, the card game!

If you've been following this blog and are familiar with the SPS-Verse (formerly known as the SPSU), then you know that along with Second Player Score's fourth album (titled Four-D) there will be an accompanying card game that is also called Four-D. We actually designed and tested the base gameplay (which is similar to War or Trumps but with some fun extras) over two years ago but have recently gone back and started polishing up the finer details; most notably, the names of the individual elementals that the players use to "battle" or "challenge" each other (the final verb is still up for debate). With that, we now have an upgraded test deck - hand-scribbled by yours truly - that we have retested and found to be in proper working order. If all goes well, the card game will be released simultaneously with the music album in Summer 2022.

There's also supposed to be an accompanying light novel or novelette or novella that tells the story behind the songs on the album, but so far, that's been a bit more of a challenge... I actually wrote most of one draft, didn't like it, started over and wrote (and finished!) a completely new draft, didn't like it either, and am now wondering what direction it should take. We shall see. Either way, even if something doesn't come out at the same time as the album/card game, it'll eventually take shape and see the light of day in some form or another...

* For a status update on the album, see this post

The SPS-Verse

If you've been following this blog, then you're probably familiar with something called the SPSU, or Second Player Shared Universe. I first introduced it in this post from October 2018, where I described it as "the connecting hub and overarching umbrella for a number of related franchises that are all loosely centered around my band, Second Player Score." It was mentioned in passing a few more times after that before getting an update post a year later, where I described in further detail the ten different projects that made up the SPSU.

Since then, some of the projects have changed and evolved as their development has continued; for example, Four-D now features a nonbinary cat-person from another planet as its main protagonist, while 200BPM is now called CIVIL and has had its underlying story altered pretty significantly. Also, the SPSU itself has undergone a rebranding - it's now known as the SPS-Verse.

This change came about because, in the course of working on Joel Suzuki, Volume Six and Four-D concurrently (and also watching Loki on Disney+), I came to realize that all the different projects in the SPSU actually existed not in a universe, but a multiverse (also, "SPS-Verse" is more catchy and won't be confused with Southern Polytechnic State University).

Along with the new name comes a new description: "the SPS-Verse is a collection of interconnected original intellectual property franchises that each contain four elements: (1) music and media, such as film, TV, books, comics; (2) food & beverage; (3) toys, technology, and merchandise; and (4) philanthropy. The first three elements represent the individual strengths of each cofounder (meaning the guys in my band), while the fourth is a shared passion and interest."

Otherwise, our goal remains the same: to help make the world a more positive place through the proliferation of pop culture!