Status Report #8: 29th of June, 2025

Gotta say, this little bike was a good investment.

 Heya folks, Amalia here, and it's time for another status report!

 

Though uh, it feels like there's not -too- much to tell, this time. The blasted summer heat kinda slowed everything down, these past couple of weeks. Well anyway, let's start with our...

 

Musical projects

 Gonna be honest, while we did make some decent progress on our current song in the first of these two weeks (had the week off work, you see), this past week, we had a bit of a break.

It's just that we're now in that stage of summer where no matter -what-  you do, you'll be doing it with minimal energy, and possibly while sweating. Which isn't very conducive to good creative work. 😑

 

We did manage to give our Bass guitar a setup and do some practice on one of our keyboards at least, so we don't feel too guilty. 😛 

 

But yeah, gonna be looking towards more action in that regard again, going forward.

 

Our shorts project's been going alright, actually! One of them kinda exploded out of nowhere and got one-and-a-half-thousand views!

(It also got 2 dislikes vs. 1 like. Noteworthy, but well, feels like the sample size is too small to read anything much into that, just yet. 😉) 

 

Though some complications have arisen in that regard, too. Specifically, our editing software. We've been using CapCut for a good while, which is made by Bytedance, the TikTok people. It's brilliant editing software, in that it's simple and quick to use, and can produce cool results without being as fully-featured as other, more "professional" video editors. Perfect for someone like us, who's got every reason to produce video content (gotta get dem clicks to draw attention to our music!), but doesn't necessarily have that much passion for it. (We prefer doing audio and writing. Visual content isn't really our favourite.)

 

But yeah, unfortunately, CapCut's been going down the drain for a bit. 

 

See, first they massively increased their subscription prices, recently. We were actually thinking of going pro, but now that it's like 20-25 buckaroos a month for PC users, no thanks.

 

But now, it seems they even changed their EULA to basically vaguely suggest that everything you make using their software is their intellectual property. Which is, of course, utterly unacceptable.

 

So we're looking to switch editing software. We've been eyeing something called "Kdenlive", which is an open-source alternative for this kind of thing. Haven't tried it yet, shall get to that when we aren't being melted by the sun. 😉

 

But yeah, now for our...

 

 

Not-So-Musical projects!

 I mean, the heat didn't help there, either, but still, let's see...

 

First off, Black Square's Beechcraft Starship came out for MSFS 2020 and 20204!

 

Lookie here!

 

Not a bug, here. The left-hand CDU's failed.

 She's gorgeous to look at, sounds amazing, has incredibly in-depth systems simulation including hundreds of possible failures, and is generally a very interesting plane to fly, with a unique avionics suite to boot. We were hoping for a long time that this would be the best simulator aircraft we've ever flown, and we got what we hoped for. 😄

 

 You might have seen us gushing about it on social media when it came out, too. But yeah, so we've had some flights in that and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves with it.

 

In regards to video games, we've been playing Atomic Heart. Actually just finished the main game yesterday; Now playing the DLC.

 

Really rather got into that game, really. It's a bit like..... if Hideo Kojima were russian, and make Bioshock?

 

It's very surreal, at times almost like a soviet-themed Death Stranding, and with very Bioshock/System Shock/Prey-like gameplay.

They also recently announced a sequel, so...... yes, that's good. 😜 

 

 Also, the Steam summer sale is on! We got ourselves the Call To Arms games (See this Blog post for context!).

 

We also got the Wolfenstein games, because those are now uncensored in germany. We haven't played those before, not because we wanted to see Swastikas all over the place, but because the censored german versions were actually -only- playable in german.

I mean, being german, we obviously speak the language, but if you look at -anything- we put out, you'll likely suss out our language preferences. We don't even think or talk to each other in german.^^

 

Anyway, got some other games, too, like Trailmakers, a cool little vehicle builder that looks to strike a decent balance between creativity and useability. See, we love games like Stormworks and From the Depths in principle. Using self-designed vehicles for combat and/or missions is cool, but we simply don't have the time to spend 30+ hours on every new design. We'd rather have something a bit more accessible, and Trailmakers looks good for that.

 

But yeah, that'll be it for today's entry, i'd say. We'll aim for more music-making over the next couple of weeks, and also see if we can't write a new post or two on here.

 

Until then, have a lovely time, dear readers! 😉