Problems with Text-Hooking and Japanese Games

Now, normally this blog is the place where I play the smutty Japanese games and toss (oo-er missus)... um give out advice on how to play them if you can't read Japanese.  This time I'm going to flip it around to as I've been hitting a few problems with text-hooking and getting things to just damn work, and I'm wondering if any of you out there might have fixes for some of the problems I (and likely others) have been experiencing.

There hasn't been as much H-game content on here lately.  I think the Echidna Wars DX piece I blogged yesterday might have been the first for a while.  This is partly because Monster Girl Quest set the bar so high that there's only so many "generic RPG Maker clone with ten short vanilla H-scenes" games you can play before the novelty factor wears off.

A bigger problem has been the slow and steady degradation of the tech I use to extract and translate the Japanese text into something close enough to English to be able to follow what's going on.  If you don't know how it's done, I found this handy guide on hongfire to be very helpful when I was setting up things on my machine(s).  How it works in general is you create a shortcut for the game, go into properties and redirect the link to start AGTH first, AGTH copies the text to the clipboard, Translator Aggregator picks up whatever is in the clipboard and sends it off to various web sources to be machine translated.  What comes back isn't always that accurate of a translation, but it's usually close enough to be able to roughly follow what's going on (This was how I was able to create the enormous Let's Play series of Monmusu Quest: Paradox last year).

Unfortunately, time passes, software gets upgraded, compatibility problems arise, and trusty tools start to degrade.  Translator Aggregator used to link to multiple web sources such as Google, and between four or five sources it was usually possible to get a good translation of a passage.  Over time those web sources started blocking TA until currently there's only one, or maybe two of the sources still working.  It's still possible to 'read' whats going on, but it's fiddlier and some of the more complex RPGs such as the ROBF series become very difficult to play as the detailed instructions the player needs to follow in order to advance the plot end up being literally lost in translation.

Couldn't read it... :(

This is a relatively minor problem when compared to the games that use oddball engines where text hooking slides off.  Dieselmine's Monmusu! Reverse R*pe Academy looked interesting despite being a more standard visual novel than a game, but nope, AGTH couldn't hook in.  I could hook Succubus Rhapsodia, but that game suffers from a similar problem to the old Succubus Quest games - the combat spams so many lines of text to the clipboard that digging out the juicy stuff becomes a chore and the game loses its charm.  A shame as the artwork - especially the various succubus designs - looks fucking lush.  One I wouldn't mind seeing an English translation of, but I'm not sure whether the gameplay holds up well enough for there to be the demand to get someone to do this (as happened for the original MGQ and Violated Hero games).

Looks gorgeous, but too damn fiddly to really enjoy... :(

Unfortunately, on top of this, a recent Windows 10 update seems to have completely buggered either AGTH, some games, or how AGTH interacts with those games.  This seems to affect the various games built off RPG Maker engines.  Attempting to start them through AGTH results in the game crashing right after launch.  At first I thought I might be screwing up the settings somewhere, but a look around revealed some other people have been having similar problems and the cause might have been the recent Windows 10 anniversary update.

These are dark times indeed for monster girl hentai games enthusiasts...

To be honest, I've been bumbling around with the same translation setup for a while and it's inevitable it would reach the end of its natural life cycle.  The question is, what next?  I'm going to do some digging, but I thought I'd throw the question out on the off chance some of you might have already encountered and solved some of these problems.  Please chime in with useful advice and links in the comments below.

I suppose I could always get off my lazy ass and actually learn to read Japanese.

(remembers how bad he was in school at French and other languages.  weeps.)

Hentai Game Preview: Echidna Wars DX

Monster Girl/Vore fans might remember a game a while back called Millia Wars.  It was a 2D action game where you played a Magical Girl fighting off various ambulatory stomachs, slugs, and (the bit I was interested in) sexy monster girls in the form of lamia, harpy and arachne.

Now it looks like D-Gate/Camel is giving that a touch-up in the form of new artwork, new characters and new monsters and will be releasing it as Echidna Wars DX later this year.

I'm not sure, as I am unfortunately illiterate when it comes to reading Japanese, but I believe this is a collaboration between Camel and Asimofu, with Asimofu providing the new artwork.

When I saw the screenshots on Camel's blog I was originally sceptical.  The new artwork looked a little pixelly compared to the original.  Playing the trial version changed my mind.  The animations of the snake girl are gorgeous.  Not only that, but she has multiple animated grapple attacks and finishing moves as well.  What animation you get depends on how the lamia grabs you and whether the Magical Girl protagonist has any SP left.

Here's a look at some of those moves.

If she grabs you with her hands the magical girl goes in the vagina feet first.

A grab with the tail triggers a steamy bit of making out.

Run out of SP and that hand grab segues to a spot of sexy snake hula dancing with you inside her.

Let the tail grab you at zero SP and the poor magical girl heroine goes in head first for an intensive all over body-rub.

If, after this, the heroine still has some HP left, she will be pulled or spat out for further fun and games.  No HP and - gulp - down deeper she goes.

The new version looks interesting from the trial and I'm really keen to see what new tricks we'll see from the arachne and others when the final game comes out.

So, What Happened to October?

Those that have been following me for a while know by now I have an unnerving ability to fade out from time to time, with ideas not exactly reaching fruition...

There was a pile up of other work and responsibilities that ended up scuppering my plans for Literotica's Halloween Contest.  I couldn't clear it in time, so no story from me this year, sadly.  I think the idea I have for the contest period is pretty good, though, so I'm planning to run it next year, but with better advance planning to clear everything else off my table a couple of weeks before the contest starts.

The H-space Monster Girl Bestiary is going to be cut back slightly.  Trying to hit the weekly schedule was devouring all my writing time and giving me a false sense of accomplishment.  At the moment I've set aside one day a week to work on them.  I didn't get one finished for this week, but with a bit of luck it should be done for next week.

There will be a print version for Succubus Summoning 201.  The coverflat came in from the artist this week, but there were some issues on file size.  I'm looking to fix those over the weekend and I'll post here as soon as the print version goes live on Amazon.  Unfortunately, it will still be Print on Demand, and those are a little pricey compared to the usual mass-market paperbacks.

The big news is now that I've finally completed Succubus Summoning 201 and cleared my table of the other distractions (filing taxes etc), I'm finally able to start work on a novel idea I've been wanting to write for the past year or so.  I want to get the bulk of that done before the end of the year, so if the blog here goes a little quiet for a while, it's because there's a big juicy full-length novel on the way.

H-space MGB Story: Sex-Spawn Pit

They dropped SPC Stewart Peter Bate into the pit with Brown, Gomez and Schultz.

They were demons.  Not aliens, not exotic fauna, not HSIOs, not hindigs... demons.  Those idiot scientists hadn't opened a gate to a parallel dimension, they'd opened a gate to goddamned hell.  Bate was convinced of it.  Just look at them.  The women had red skin, horns, tails, and black bat wings.  The men, if they could be called that, were muscular brutes with the heads of horned goats or worse.

Despite them looking more human, Bate was more repulsed by the female ones.  They had a way of touching you that caused sin to burrow under the skin and bubble back up as unwholesome thoughts.

Demons.  Like out of the sermons of Pastor Jones back home.

The demons had captured them when FOB Helmuth had fallen.  Bate didn't remember much about it.  There had been some kind of weird pink fog.  He'd fallen asleep and while he was sleeping he'd had the hottest dream he'd ever experienced.  It had been shameless—him, the entire Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad.  Just thinking about it triggered a guilty throb in his junk.

On waking he'd found himself in chains and in the hands of these demons.  Along with the other captives, he'd been taken to a forsaken and unholy city in the middle of a desolate range of hills.  During the journey Bate had wondered if that pink fog had really been poison gas and now he was dead and in Hell.  He'd tried to live a good life, but he knew he'd made mistakes.

The soldiers looked at each other uneasily.  All four had been stripped naked by their captors before being thrown into the pit.

"They expect us to fight?" Brown said.

The pit was sunk into the floor, about ten feet deep.  The walls and floor were pinkish-brown and reminded Bate uncomfortably of flesh.  The hellish denizens standing and sitting around the pit were in raucous good spirits.  Bate saw something that could have been a clock.  On the wall below it was a large board with parallel lines drawn across it.  Strange symbols were chalked on the board that made Bate's eyes water just looking at them.

The pit and the way the demons were gathered around it like an audience reminded Bate of a sleazy show he'd seen at a biker dive out in San Leon.  They'd taken some kind of inflatable—like a kids' paddling pool but deeper—and poured in a thick layer of watery slurry.  Naked chicks had wrestled in it while the audience whooped and hollered.  The walls of this pit had a similar padded look and the floor beneath their feet was as spongy and bouncy as if they were standing on an inflatable.

Kinda...

The surfaces didn't look or feel like rubber.  To Bate they looked more like flesh, and every so often a little shudder would go through the walls and floor.  Like the pit was alive in some way.

The men glanced at each other warily while the demons watched in raucous anticipation.

What were they expected to do? Bate thought.  Wrestle?  Fight?  ...to the death?

A bell rang and the watching demons roared with excitement.  The pit the four men were standing in trembled.  They watched as one of the corners bulged outwards into the pit.  A split appeared at the apex of the bulge and resembled some kind of fleshy orifice.  Brown slurry oozed from the rupture as something resembling a dark brown blob pushed through from the other side.  The pit wall flexed and strained as if it was a living thing, although Bate couldn't tell whether the thing was giving birth or taking a shit.

Giving birth, maybe, he decided as the wall pushed out a large human-sized sac.  The membrane surrounding it was glossy with lubricating oils.  The sac slithered to the floor and ruptured, spilling out more fluids onto the already-slippery pit floor.  A humanoid figure—a young woman—struggled free of the membrane.  She was naked, hairless, and covered in slime.

She looked human.  More human than the horrors looking down on them anyway.  Another captive?  Had she been transported here in ways too foul to dwell upon?

Schultz thought so.  He saw a woman on the floor—shocked and catatonic—and his protective instincts kicked in.

"Are you okay, miss?" he asked as he held out a hand to her.

"Wait," Brown warned.

With good reason.  The girl lifted her head to reveal weird black eyes that were definitely not human.  She sprang at Schultz and wrapped her legs around his waist before her weight sent both toppling to the floor.

Bate watched it unfurl like he was watching a scene in a horror movie.  There was that same feeling of helplessness.  He knew the monster was going to pounce on its victim and he couldn't get there in time to stop it.

Of course, had this been a horror movie the demon girl would have torn out Schultz's throat with her fangs.  This being H-space, what followed was weirder than that.

The girl started fucking Schultz.  She lay on top of him and the round swell of her ass pumped up and down like she was a porno bunny.  Schultz resisted at first, and then he seemed to like what she was doing as he joined in until the two of them were writhing and grunting on the soft floor like a pair of porno bunnies.  The curvy little demon girl seemed indefatigable.  She kept bouncing up and down on top of him, cheered on by the demons looking down at them.

A sex show? Bate thought.  Was that all they wanted—humans for their live sex show?

No, it wasn't.

A gasp and a trembling of his ankles indicated Schultz had got a nut off.  Then the other soldiers noticed something weird seemed to be happening where Schultz's naked flesh met the floor of the pit.  At first it looked like the surface was stuck to him, then as if his skin was merging with it.  Schultz sank into the floor and seemed to spread out as the pit absorbed him.  The demon woman went with him, the round curves of her ass still bouncing up and down all the way.

A great cheer went up amongst the demons as Schultz was absorbed.  It was followed by furious haggling over who would be next.

The remaining three soldiers looked at each other.  Gomez hopped awkwardly from foot to foot as if he was terrified the floor might swallow him up at any moment.

They barely had a chance to ponder the awfulness of what had just happened before another shudder ran through the pit and a bulge appeared at the opposite corner.  The skin split and another slime-covered demon girl was squeezed out into the pit.  Like the other one she was lithe and curvaceous—a body most men would have described as sexy.

Brown snapped her neck.

The demon girl gave a disappointed sigh as she fell.  Her body sank into and was absorbed by the floor of the pit.

The three men glanced at each other.  They knew what they had to do.  They stood back to back in the center of the pit as another bulge formed on the pit wall.

Brown snapped her neck too.

And the one that followed.

After that the wall bulged in two places at once and two naked humanoid girls entered the pit.  Bate handled the second one.  Physically it was easy—the demon spawn were weaker even than the vulnerable naked girls they resembled.  Mentally...

It felt wrong.  Bate looked down at the lovely body crumpled up at his feet and felt sick inside.  Such a waste.

The demon girls didn't seem to care.  They didn't even cry out when they were killed.  As more entered the pit they stepped over their fallen sisters without so much as a second glance in their rush to hug, kiss, make love to the men currently killing them.  They seemed more like manikins made out of flesh.

This was so fucked up, Bate thought.

The walls churned in constant motion as more slits opened up and disgorged fresh naked women into the pit.  The men punched and kicked as they tried to keep the over-amorous women away from them.

"How many of these muthafucking things are there?" Brown said.  He sent one cartwheeling to the side of the pit with a roundhouse punch to her face.

Bate watched as another of the manikin-women was absorbed into the floor of the pit.  He had the horrible feeling the pit was merely recycling them to send wave after wave at the trapped men.

They got Gomez first.  He lost his balance on the shifting floor and two of the girls got their arms around him and pinned him back against one of the fleshy walls.  A third bent over and shoved her ass into Gomez's crotch.

Bate's attention was diverted by having to fend off the attentions of three more of the flesh-manikin women.  When he looked back he saw Gomez helplessly in the grip of the three women. The two pinning him to the wall kissed him on his cheeks and probed his ear with their tongues.  The third, having got Gomez's cock inside her, rocked back and forth into him.  She waggled her hips in an attempt to get him off.

It didn't take long.

Gomez let out a gasp as he came inside her.  Then the wall behind him softened and he was drawn into it.

That left two.

Bate drove his elbow into the face of one of the girls and felt her cheekbone give way beneath the impact.  Letting his martial arts training guide him, he grabbed her arm, broke it, and then sent her to the floor with a sweep of his leg.  The girl didn't cry out once.  She kept looking up at him with adoring eyes even with her right arm flopping uselessly with an additional joint broken into it.

Would you like me to bake those cookies you like, honey?

He saw the similarity in her face to his girlfriend waiting for him back home and something broke in his heart.

He couldn't do this.

He'd been trained to kill, but it was to kill other fighting men, not soft women who were only trying to embrace and kiss him.

Fuck it.  Bate held up his arms and let them swarm him.  He felt soft bodies press up against him and lascivious hands roam all over his naked flesh.  He didn't resist as they took him down to the soft floor.  Two of them lay on his arms and legs and whispered sweet nothings in his ear.  Another straddled him and impaled herself on his erection.  He felt her tightness wrapped all around his cock and then the pleasurable friction as she started to rise up and down.  Panting huskily, she bounced up and down on him and the soft surface they were lying on bounced with them like an inflatable mattress.

It wasn't just her either.  One of her friends stood astride his head and sat down, smothering his face between her luscious butt cheeks.  The last he saw before she buried him in pussy and ass was Brown bellowing as he tried to stay upright with at least four of the flesh-manikin girls clinging to his body.

Just give up, Bate thought.

This had to be better than the sickening crunches he felt when busting up their soft, lovely bodies.  It felt a damn site better.  The little porno bunny bouncing on his cock was so tight inside it took next to no time for her to get him off.  His body bucked and he gasped into the other girl's smothering pussy as he felt his cum well up inside his cock and burst out inside her like oil from a strike.

That felt a fuckton better.  The post-orgasmic glow was so relaxing it felt like he was melting into a blissful puddle.  Buried beneath soft nubile flesh he was drawn down to where it was warm, soft, and extremely comfortable.

Brief Update

I've been snowed under with non-writing related things for the past week or so and I'm off again for (other) work this weekend.  The Sex-Spawn Pit story (and others) is still on the in-progress pile.  The first draft is done, I just haven't finished typing up and editing, and likely won't have time before I leave.

Sorry to keep you all waiting in anticipation.  Hopefully I'll hit a more productive phase again once I've got this weekend out of the way.

H-space MGB Profile: Sex-Spawn Pit

Name:  Sex-Spawn Pit
Type:  I have no idea what this is, or even if it's an organism in any way we recognise the term.
Habitat:  Primarily HSIO urban centres, although some wild ones have been encountered underground.

Description:
A pit with flesh-covered walls about eight to ten feet deep.  Thick fibrous growths extend from the edge of the pit and connect to bulbous pod-like chambers partially buried in the ground.  The chambers are used to gestate and grow the sex spawn.  The spawn are not really offspring and instead function more like flesh manikins.  They are short-lived and resemble hairless human beings.  The sex-spawn pit appears to have some kind of mild telepathic or empathic ability to sense what individuals in its vicinity find sexually appealing and produces sex-spawn with bodies that cater to these desires.

Attack Strategy:
Anyone unfortunate enough to fall into a sex-spawn pit will be absorbed into the fleshy walls.  Bizarrely, this is a complex process that requires to the prey to be sexually aroused to the point of orgasm before the pit can absorb them.  In order to achieve this, the pit excretes its flesh manikins into the pit to copulate with the person or persons trapped within it.  The pit will continue to spawn manikins and send them into the pit until the captured men or women are overwhelmed and stimulated to orgasm.  At which point they are absorbed into the walls or floor and lost.

The higher HSIOs seem to enjoy throwing captives into these pits as a form of entertainment (our men should be fully aware by now of the futility of surrendering to the more intelligent HSIOs—these are alien organisms with a set of values completely at odds with our own).

Sex-spawn pits occurring in the wild will attempt to use their flesh manikins to lure or physically force passer-by's into the pit.  The flesh manikins themselves are weak and degrade quickly over time and distance from the pit that spawned them.

Countermeasures:
The sex-spawn pit is harmless unless fallen into.  Once inside, the slippery, undulating flesh walls make it very difficult to climb out of and the constant waves of amorous flesh manikins will eventually wear a person down and force them into sexual intercourse.

When under attack the pit will close and retract the gestation pods underground.  The pits are relatively easy to render harmless, but much more difficult to eradicate completely.  Pits reported as destroyed have been known to fully grow back after a week or two.

Threat Level:
Low.

Of more concern is how they came to exist, especially with their bizarre feeding cycle.  Are these organisms, or more akin to biological machines custom-created by the HSIOs to dispose of their enemies in ways the HSIOs find entertaining?

H-space MGB Story: Tar-Pillow Cushionblob

At first PFC Stewart Peter Bate was grateful he'd landed in something soft to break his fall.  Then he realized what he'd landed in...

Bate had been part of an explo patrol trying to determine the full extent of Lake Latex—that strange, apparently natural formation not far from FOB Rigg.  It looked like a lake of molten black rubber, but was not a body of water.  Whatever the lake was composed of, and it did feel remarkably similar to rubber, it was solid enough to walk upon.

Or rather, had been solid enough to walk upon for the two hours Bate had trudged across it.  Then he'd put his foot down on a patch that had turned out to be as unsubstantial as a soap bubble and plunged right through to a cavern beneath.

It was a long fall.  Long enough for Bate to fully contemplate the awful, likely leg-snapping impact about to happen to him.

And then his fall was miraculously broken by a big ball of soft material.  He sank into it and was brought to a gentle stop without any leg-snapping nastiness.  It did, however, leave him stuck waist-deep in the soft substance.

The cavern was lit up with an eerie blue glow.  Light enough to see that he'd fallen into a flattened ball of glossy black material.  The substance resembled the surface of Lake Latex, but was much softer.  And stickier.  When Bate placed his hands on the surface to try and pull himself out, they sank into the soft material and it took some effort to pull them back out.

This was awkward, he thought.  He'd survived the fall only to find himself stuck in a molten glob of black latex.

It was worse than that.  The surface started to move in front of him and extruded the top half of a naked woman with massive tits.  She looked like a naked woman in any case, albeit one covered all over in skintight black latex, even right down to her hair and eyes.

She batted her eyelashes sleepily at Bate.  "Hmm, what tasty little hunk has fallen into my lap?"

Bate felt a thrill of both anticipation and fear.  Fuck, he thought.  A slime girl.  He'd heard about them.  Weird H-space amoeboids that were able to take the form of sexy women.  Sometimes they forced men to have sex with them—that was where the thrill of anticipation came from.  Other times they ate them or worse—and that was the fear.

Bate thrashed and strained to pull himself free of the sticky mass.  The slime girl watched on with amusement.

"You're wasting your time," she said.  "My kind are known for being the stickiest and densest of the blob girls, and you've fallen right into the middle of me."

Bate stopped struggling.  She was right.  It felt like he'd fallen into a tar pit.

She looked at the ground around them.  It was black, polished and looked as hard as granite.  Then she looked up at where Bate had fallen through the surface of Lake Latex.

"Just think," she said.  "If I hadn't been here you would have hit that hard floor and broken to bits.  It's worth keeping that in mind when..."

The slime girl left the end of the sentence unfinished.  She lay on the edge of the flattened blob and ran a latex-clad finger over the latex surface as if it was the top sheet of a bed.

"When what?" Bate demanded.

"When what happens, happens," the slime girl said with a mysterious smile.

Bate felt the blob move all around him.  He was uncomfortably aware of its organic rather than inorganic nature.

"What do you mean, 'when what happens, happens'?"  Bate said.  He looked around himself as if he was standing in a shark tank.  "What are you going to do to me?"

The slime girl didn't answer him.  Bate felt soft pressure rub against his legs.  It felt like there were many warm hands down there, intimately massaging his legs.  He felt something goose him in a private place and flinched in surprise.

"Let's get down to it," the slime girl said.

She slipped into the main blob as though she was getting into hot tub with Bate.  At the same time, strong forces gripped Bate's legs.  No, it was the pants on his legs.  The fabric stretched, frayed, and gave as relentless forces ripped the clothing away from him.  His boots and underwear followed.  He felt the soft squishy interior of the blob right up against his exposed skin.

The slime girl, now seemingly submerged in the main blob up to her waist, moved close to Bate.  She peeled off his top and then put her arms around him in an embrace that had her sticky boobs squashed against his chest.  She leant in close and pressed her lips against Bate's in a sticky kiss.

Bate relaxed.  So she wanted to fuck him rather than eat him.

That was confirmed when he felt something tug gently at his exposed genitals.  Bate didn't know what that something was—Lips? Pussy?—only that it was soft, pleasant and he liked what it was doing.

He felt his cock lengthen as the slime girl used the pliable material of her body to coax out a full erection.  She broke off the kiss and stared at Bate with her full lips puffed up in a sultry pout.  The blob pulsed around them and Bate felt it press against his back, pushing him up against her warm body.  He smiled at her and then his mouth puckered up in an ooh of pleasure as the blob contracted and his erection sank deep into warm softness.

She came back in close, squashing her breasts against him and entwining her arms around his back.  The warm mass of her body massaged his legs, fondled his balls and pressed between his butt cheeks to rub against the sensitive part between testicles and anus.  Bate heard a loud squelchy sucking sound and his cock was seized by a pleasant tugging sensation.

The blob continued to pulsate and drive their bodies against each other.  Bate didn't have to exert any effort at all as his cock plunged back and forth into a soft gooey mass that sucked at him.

"This is the other thing my kind are known for," the slime girl said.  "We can generate a lot of suction on just the right part of the body."

The squelchy sucking sounds grew louder and the sucking sensation on Bate's erection intensified.  He felt it not just on his cock, but through his whole groin and right down in his balls.  It was like she couldn't wait for him to come and wanted to suck the sperm out of his balls right now.

It became academic.  Bate couldn't hold out any longer.  He groaned and shuddered in pleasure as he pumped a big creamy load right into her black heart.

If he thought her suction would stop with his release, he was mistaken.  If anything it grew stronger.  The glossy black material of her body started to creep up over Bate like a second skin.  He felt the warm substance of her body pressing all around him.

Bate thought his climax marked the peak of his pleasure.  The slime girl showed him there was another, much larger peak beyond it and remorselessly dragged him up it with the irresistible suction of her sticky black body.  She sucked him right up to that peak until Bate was experiencing another explosive ejaculation that set the whole of his body shivering in bliss.

Her glossy black surface crept up over Bate's body until only his face remained uncovered.  Within her mass, soft suction continued to pull on Bate's cock.  Now it really felt like she was sucking the sperm right out of his balls.

And maybe something else as well.

Bate was beyond noticing.  She sucked, squelched and squished him up to another unbelievable peak of pleasure, and this time the climax was such an intense explosion of bliss it was too much for Bate's mind to withstand.

Already expired in a final blast of ecstasy, Bate felt nothing as his face sank inwards.  The tar-pillow cushionblob sucked him inside out to expose and digest his soul.

"That was so much better than your body dashing to pieces on the rock floor, wouldn't you agree?" the slime girl said to the ichor-spattered bones as she excreted them out of the side of her body.



"Huff.  Hwargh.  Huwargh."

"Stewart!  Are you okay?"

"She turned me inside out.  I felt her turn me... him inside out."