got_quiet

Hello! I'm Lea/GQ. I am mostly into Video Games, but also watch Anime sometimes, and read books. Fandomwise I am chilling deep in m/m land.

My fandom coming of age was anime fandom in like 2003. Expect old otaku behavior here.

Here is stuff I love and want to talk about! Bold is stuff I'm more fannishly active about.

Anime/Cartoons: Gungrave, Gankutsuou, Chiharafuru, Demon Hunters, Haikyuu, Ghibli, Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki Kun, Arcane, Metalocalypse

Video Games: Overwatch (including the esports scene), Hades, Dragon Age, Nu:Carnival, Honkai Star Rail, Against the Storm, Disco Elysium, Long Gone Days, Banner Saga, interactive fiction, and lots of indy games! I post visual novel reviews on a community sideblog playingstory

Books: The Tarot Sequence, Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Les Mis, Whyborne and Griffin, Italo Calvino, Natsume Soseki, and lots of M/M

Movies: Inception, Thor's part of the MCU

Find me @

alliwantisallofthis or my fanart spam sideblog vidyamen(I can't draw though T_T).
gotquiet or xelamz for the spicier stuff.

Other hobbies I like to write about: Japanese learning, Japanese tea ceremony, collecting ephemera like book plates, and worldbuilding.

Most of my posts are public! Feel free to subscribe without asking. I only subscribe back for fandom blogs. Blogs that are almost exclusively personal or very negative in tone I will probably not follow, sorry. If you are interested in my approach to commenting/dreamwidth interaction, more detailed info is in my profile.

I write almost exclusively about fandom and not too much about real life things. I do flock personal posts but if you ask for access I will probably give it to you.

if you don't like typos, I am so, so sorry.

I picked up these two CDs at the CD exchange a while back (when I got that Dream Theater album) but now I'm gonna review them. Tl;dr my music sniffing nose did it's job this time. I've picked up a few duds by just buying used CDs completely blind but I guess judging music by it's cover works well enough.

First CD is Prorok Ilja by Patriarch. It turns out this is kind of a group I have already heard. Many years ago for a fandom gift box someone recommended to me the band Batushka, which I enjoyed a lot, and this group is some sort of splinter group that happened after a rights fight. The tone is the same. Orthodox church vibes slathered in black metal and noise. This has been my play on repeat car CD since I got it.

The other CD I got I lost, and I don't remember the name of the band, so I guess I'll have to come back to that when it surfaces.

I've been reading a lot of Arcane fic, though the frantic pace at which I'm doing this has started to slow down a little, so I'm working on something of a "rec" list. It's more of a review list because some of the fic I've enjoyed I've enjoyed despite some rather significant issues, sometimes even with basic SPAG, but imo while it's certainly rude to give an unsolicited critique to an author, the personal journal is fair game.

And I have picked up another batch of snacks from the Eastern European shop. And, good news, the wall of snacks actually has a back side, so there are double the snacks that I originally thought! The bad news is I forgot entirely which ones I had gotten, or which ones I liked or didn't like. I stuck to the newly discovered back wall to prevent dupes.

Today I tried Gulliver from AVK. I didn't notice when I grabbed it, but it's a vegan chocolate bar, which on AVK's website says was developed well before veganism was popular. So it's a hipster vegan bar. It was also twice as big as all the other snacks, and is part of the "wafer covered in chocolate" family. Inside the wafer there is more chocolate, like a mouse, so this was a very rich candy and the 6" bar was more than enough for me. To likely no one's surprise, the quality of the chocolate is significantly better than our counter options here in the US.

I also tried a chocolate flavor frozen cheese curd snack. I think I liked it more than the orange even though the orange was good. It was chocolatey but not too rich or sweet. I'm becoming a real convert to these things, but I don't think they're easy to find without a specialty grocery like this nearby.

Since I am avoiding a deadline at the moment I spent all night making up a random list of 100 items of formative media modeled after

queenlua 's list of 100 books. I started out with books, but hitting 100 titles that really had a notable impact on me was impossible, largely because my memory is not strong enough for me to recall enough of them and also because I read a lot of schlock that doesn't linger. So instead it's Books, Movies, TV, and Games (and 3 bands).

This list is here. Looking it over it's a whacky mix of stuff that grabbed me at an early age but never would have otherwise made a dent (most of the movies) or stuff that really changed my brain one way or another. There are a few books on there that suck ass but my reading them still resulted in a permanent change in brain chemistry, so they stand with the rest. I also tried to stick to a single instance within a group. So, not every Ghibli film, not every Blizzard game, etc., just representative or particularly notable titles.

If you decide to join me in wasting some time let me know how many you matched with and if there's stuff you have strong opinions about or find intriguing.

I'm sure when I wake up tomorrow I'm going to think, "Why is X not on the list?!"

ETA:

I did in fact realize there were two things that absolutely should have been on the list.

The first is Anne Fausto-Sterling's Myths of Gender, which had a massive effect on my understanding of society's understanding of gender. The other is Language in Thought and Action by Hayakawa, which first got me into linguistics and probably turned me into a total sophomoric ass sometimes re. semantics.

Haven't been doing much besides work. I haven't had a chance to lay back and just play a visual novel in such a long time man. More than a whole year ago I was almost done with all the BLM games, like there's 1 left, and I haven't been able to close it out. Someone needs to dissect my brain and figure out what's wrong with it.

I ended up posting a fic. I was trying to get a beta for it but it didn't work out so obviously reading it back I realize some things need fixing, so I'll edit it a little I guess.

thefridayfive
1. How often do you typically shower/bath? ATM Every other day or every three days when I'm really feeling like a gremlin. When I'm not as despondent it's every day but real talk that hasn't been for a while.
2. Do you prefer showering or taking a bath? I prefer the Japanese style where you take a shower and then soak for as long as you can stand it. The bathrooms in the US don't really make this easy so I don't bother and just shower.
3. What's the longest you've ever gone without a shower/bath? In high school my depression manifested as a complete neglect of hygiene so I'm sure I managed to go for more than a week.
4. What's your favorite personal hygiene product? I use a bar of soap and whatever shampoo seems cheap but not complete ass and that's it. My soap smells good though.
5. Do you shave your legs and/or beard? If so, how often? Don't shave. One small blessing of not having facial hair.

Checking the other replies it seems not washing every day is kind of standard! I've read diaries from the 1930s that kept track of housework every day and they often also seemed to wash up every 3 days or so. Kind of interesting!

I went back to the Eastern European grocery store last week and picked up more candy! This time the theme was fruit instead of wafers. I'm also too lazy to provide the Cyrillic this time, because I'm currently overwhelmed with unfun work already. But in exchange I'm adding links to pictures.

---

Svitlogor'ye cheese curd snacks. In the shop they were called "cheese cakes" because I guess "curd snack" is not something an American would jump up for. And the one I tried was more sour than I expected a cheese cake to be, but it was still delicious and I can see why they're so popular. I got an orange flavor one and it was very orangy and zesty. They are also kept cold and are kind of fill an ice cream niche. Would buy again. I'm also unduly proud of myself for being able to read the wrapper, because the company title is written in italics which are hard as fuck for a noob to recognize. According to Wikipedia they are extremely popular in Eastern Europe.

Pekarro Orange. Continuing the orange theme. This is an oreo shaped snack. The cookies are vanilla and the creme is orange flavored. It tastes exactly how the description suggests imo and since I like orange flavor I was pleased with this.

Prihot'. This seems to mean whim or fad which both made the candy hard to find and is suitable for a little bite sized treat I guess. It's back to the staples of wafers and chocolate, with a sort of chocolate sauce filling. Nothing special, but also I could eat five million of them without realizing it probably.

Krasniy Mak. I did not manage to read the italics on this wrapper T_T so I had to do a little poking around. Luckily the company that made it was printed in standard script. Roshen is a Ukranian company that specializes in chocolate and this was just a chocolate inside a chocolate. That is too much chocolate for me, but it was still definitely better than a Hersheys.

Sufle by Pokrovsk. I guess it literally means Souffle? It's a combo of a marshmallow type layer, and a jam (this one was strawberry) encased in chocolate. A little overly sweet for me and the Jam part was kind of wetter than I would like.

Macul Rosu - According to the description I found, this is "chocolate coated sweets made of grinded cocoa mass, cocoa butter, peanuts, wafer crumbs, coconut oil and crystals of caramel mass." The texture reminds me a lot of Halva, which I don't like, so this goes to the bottom of the list for me. This candy comes from Moldova though which is pretty cool! I don't think I've had a natively Moldovan candy before.

Chuvs - The wafers have returned! This one is a big square chunk of strawberry jelly wrapped in wafer and chocolate. There is supposed to be peanuts in there too though they're minimal. I liked this one a lot because it had a firmer chewy texture, though after going through this batch I'm thinking the fruit based candies are a little too sweet for me.

Konti Stefaniya - A cherry in chocolate type candy but there is no cherry, only cherry flavored goo, and the chocolate is thick and as a bit of a grainier texture inside. It wasn't as intense as the liqueur cherry candy I got last time so I liked it more.

---

I think I have one more round before I've pretty much exhausted the candy options on the candy wall.

I managed to very quickly play a small handful of games during the recent Next Fest. I’m skipping the games that were either trash or just not notable. Here are a few that I thought were kind of ok, but nothing stood out this time.

( Read more... )

TBH my mental has been in freefall since November and no guesses for why that is, so I'm mostly posting to force myself into something resembling activity.

I haven't had much time to play many NextFest games. I've got about an hour every night to chill and the rest is work. (FML) But I still am playing a little because if I don't I'm just going to burn out. So here's some quick reviews.

( Demo Reviews )

---
The only two gachas I'm spending time with atm are Honkai Star Rail and Nu:Carnival. The current HSR storyline is boring me to death. There's a hint of something interesting there, but I find myself putting the dialog on auto and getting distracted with something during this update. I know it's a meme and people argue about whether the game has "too much yapping" or its just that gamers can't read, but as a gamer who reads a fuck ton, I'm firmly in the "too much yapping" camp at this point. I'm kind of interested in Mydei's whole thing but it comes out in between minutes worth of ambiguity, repetition, and just not interesting stuff. Also the appearance of yet another tiny child girl person is another nail in the coffin of my interest. I still kind of like the combat and some of the side content and am just sort of chewing through the plot very slowly because I can't be assed to engage with it, so I'm not really at a point where I'm quitting, but I'm very meh on it all.

Nu:Carni also came out with an update, and since it's the anniversary we get some big changes, namely a "cabin" system. It took me a while to figure out how to use it, which is honestly a little janky, and I don't think I'm going to spend too much time with it. However, the thing I like about the game is the story. Contrary to HSR the event stories are the best part of this game. They're humorous, and dramatic, and take good advantage of the lovable personalities of all of the clan members. I love how much of the writing is the clan members interacting with each other instead of just focusing on Eiden too. He doesn't show up in this story for multiple chapters even! I always play right through all the available plot rooms when a new event comes out because they're engrossing, and I never get tired of the clan getting possessive and protective of Eiden.

( Spoilers for the Hades update under the cut )

I've been struggling to find new music. I rely on youtube too much nowadays and that algorithm is awful for any sort of discovery, and I've never been dialed in to the music scene, so decided to just go back to the tired and true method of stopping by a record store and pulling some random CDs from the just in bins. The store near me has changed a lot in the past 5 or so years. There used to be a lot more CDs, but now a significant chunk, like 60% or more, is dedicated to records, which I never cared about. And the metal section has shrunk by half.

I ended up picking up three albums from the new in the shop section. The only one I've listened to so far is Dream Theater's new album, Parasomnia. Scenes from a Memory is one of my favorite albums of all time, which makes DT one of my favorite bands of all time. This album was classic DT, but almost too much so. I've only listened to it a couple times while in the car, and while I'm definitely enjoying it it isn't blowing me away. It feels a bit too familiar and not quite pushing hard enough to do something new and interesting. I would probably prefer to listen to Scenes from a Memory again if given the choice.

Digging through the CDs I also remembered how much of a pain it is to get a good sense of whether or not I might like music based only on the hints provided on the CD case. The genres "pop," "rock," and "metal" are entirely inadequate when what I'm looking for is prog, mathcore, and complex drum and bass.

Anyway after all that I'm back to listening to an album from 1999. I'm hoping the other two CDs I got reveal something new for me.

If anyone has some rec for music with some good, complex instrumentality and fucked up time signatures, hit me up!

I saw the new seasons of Castlevania a few weeks ago. I honestly don't remember a whole lot of the first season, but remembered the gist enough to catch up quickly, and enjoyed this season more all around. The animation felt better, especially the combat, Alucard being there always improves things, and there was not as much of the singing, which I hated in season 1. I think the night creatures plot was the weakest part of the whole thing. For the majority of their screen time they just stood around. But enjoyed Maria's arc and how bloodthirsty she became, and how real her anger was, Annette's spirit journey was extremely cool and her romance with Richter was sweet, and Drolta made for a great villain.

Olorox and Mizrak certainly look hot together, but their relationship didn't quite click for me. Theoretically their whole dynamic would be right up my alley, but for most of the show I think Mizrak's attitude towards Olorox was leaving me cold. Maybe he cared a lot for him, but there wasn't enough going on between them for their relationship to get to the point where I wanted it to either get messier or be fixed completely. Obviously where they left it has added the complications that I was hoping for, but it was a bit late in the game at that point and I though Richter and Annette were a more interesting couple. They're both young adults who have had to grow up very fast, but still hold on to a spark of innocence that make their feelings for each other sweet.

I haven't been playing that many games because IRL is hitting me pretty hard, but I have snuck a few in. My friends picked up Enshrouded and no-lifed it for a couple weeks. I couldn't really join them. All I had the time to do was dip in, pick up a bunch of hand-me-down equipment and follow around on a few quests. Maybe in the far future I'll have time to sit down and really explore, because it seems like it has developed into a robust open world survival game with some fun exploration aspects. The thing that makes me hesitate to try a solo game is that it seems to have more involved crafting than I would prefer.

The other game we've been playing is Ravenswatch, It's a action RPG rougelike with a decent multiplayer support. A lot of people immediately compare it to Hades, and while it has some minor similarities in the sense that you are a top down, have about 4 abilities to upgrade and modify and go through three maps worth of major phases. But the game is slower, more punishing, has fewer (basically 0) out of round mechanics, and focuses a lot more on the footsies. Also rather than going into lots of small rooms you're given a large map and tasked with prioritizing points of interested within a certain time limit. It's a tough game and seems more reliant on crafting a proper build, but it's also a fun challenge with lots of variety in playstyle among the different characters (all derived from fairytales and myth) and smooth combat. I enjoy a good footsies challenge and the multiplayer reminds me just a little of the good old WoW days. Even though there are no roles per se you can prioritize a support build in a variety of ways and there are synergies.

Since I don't have as much time to play as my friends, who have all maxed out most of the characters, I'm just slowly working on learning Aladdin, who is broken in a multiplayer environment, as he makes resources rain down on everyone else. So while by the end of the game I am largely gimped build wise, feeding everyone else trivializes the content anyway. As I am someone with a giving nature it's fun to listen to my friend's expressions of awe and disbelief as they hit new personal records in crit damage lol.

Things IRL are miserable and the firehose is full of shit right now so here's a youtube channel that just talks about company cats and dogs in Japan. You don't really need to know any Japanese to know that what they're talking about is the cute pets. If I weren't a cheap traveler and Hakone weren't more of a resort town than a place I'd ever end up for business I'd definitely stay here.

A game dev union in France is organizing some strike actions (See here), and they are raising funds for their strike fund with an itch.io bundle. I'm all for contributing to labor action, so here's the link.

There's an Eastern Europe grocery right next to a place where I have started to go for an errand. Every time I pass it I think to myself, I should check it out, but I am usually in a rush. This weekend I had some time and the curiosity had finally gotten the better of me, so I decided to poke my head in. Going in I'm instantly reminded of the tiny little Chinese groceries we used to go to growing up, where absolutely everything was an import, there wasn't a word of English anywhere, and the guy behind the counter didn't say a word of English too. Except in this case 99% of everything was in Cyrillic. The lady behind the counter kept saying things to me in Russian (maybe Ukrainian, I can't make the distinction =x) and then swapped to English when my answer was not satisfying. She did not smile a single time. I enjoyed the whole encounter.

There was an entire shelf for pickled mushrooms. There were like 10 different types of sour creams. I got two so I could compare the styles. There were snacks and a lot of preserved fish, and Kyiv style cured meats. I don't know what makes them Kyiv style, but I do know they were like half the price of the soppressata at the Italian grocers so I had to give it a shot and it was tasty! There was also a big wall of individual tiny candies. They weren't exactly cheap at $8 a pound, but I figured I might as well go a head and try them out.

I wrote up a little review of each of them, and used that as an excuse to practice My Cyrillic typing skills... but I don't think I'll every get used to the Cyrillic layout. I can't turn an f into an a or a o into a j in my mind easily. So if I ever get to the point where I am writing in Russian beyond the bare elementary level I will probably have to stick to the less efficient but less brain busting QWERTY with modifications. Also please forgive incorrect transliteration, I really am a Cyrillic noob.

Anyway here's some random Eastern European candy reviews.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: full

The Snowflake Challenge is over so my posts will probably drop off again. I am however in one of the rare lulls at work so I might still have time to keep posting about random stuff. We'll see. I always like the Challenge, because even though interactions can be brief and don't always lead to longer term associations, it's nice to have little chats that make this place feel a little bit more like a community, and to see what is going on outside my little bubble. A random and probably obvious observation - people have a lot of different fandoms out there! This is something I obviously know intellectually, but it's interesting to me that once I step out of the tag centered, algorithmic, build your dashboard world of tumblr and into spaces that are more for fandom at large, the stuff I'm interested in can disappear and be replaced by a bunch of stuff I've either never heard of or haven't thought of in over a decade. As someone who very rarely falls into fandoms with live actors, I forget how much of that space fandom occupies.

I picked up a couple of interesting recs from other people, so I'm putting them here to refer to later, and because maybe someone else would be interested too.

Madame Magenta (recced by

shipperslist ) - A podcast that looks like it will be hilarious, if the web design is any indication. The premise also gives me Thrilling Adventure Hour vibes, which is a show I loved.

Dead Plate (recced by

bedes ) - A free VN with a cool art style and a weird premise that includes cannibalism? I am intrigued.

I'm also slowly going through the friending meme and checking out posts that others have made throughout the challenge. I figure if I would enjoy replies well after the fact, other people would too.

I am back on the wagon of being a good student, sort of.

After a brief hiatus with my book club because I was too busy, I'm back to reading Momo no Kanzume by Sakura Momoko.

( Read more... )

---

I'm also back to studying tea.

( Read more... )

With the turning of the seasons we are going to a whole new process, and I'm going to have to learn how to serve koicha for the first time. Koicha is something that everyday people almost never see. It's 10 times thicker than the usual whisked tea, and much harder to prepare correctly. It just keeps getting harder.

For Challenge 14:

In your own space, create your own fandom challenge.

I'm going to steal something from previous snowflake challenges and hope it doesn't come up in the last two days.

Please give a picture of or describe something close to you in the following categories. They can be physical objects or you can think more metaphorically. You can reply here or in your own journal.

Something Blue:
Something Red:
Something New:
Something Old:
Something to be kept forever:
Something to be discarded:

My answers

( Read more... )

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of gingerbread Christmas trees, a silver ball, a tea light candle and a white confectionary snowflake on a beige falling-snowflakes background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

This is actually a timely challenge, because I've been thinking I wanted to make a post that's just, "Everyone talk about Arcane with me, please, I beg you." The post I've been envisioning started out a little more whiny, because I just don't know where to nerd out about things with other people anymore. But I'm going to bite my tongue with my complaints about social media platforms these days and instead invite anyone who's interested to give me their Arcane takes/feels.

Got recs for fic or artists? Got a character you want to talk more about? Want to link some meta you or someone else has written? Want to list out some headcanons? Just have a topic you want to chatter about? Want to talk about what did and didn't work for you S2? Please go nuts!

Here are some prompts, but no one has to stick to these. Anything goes if it's Arcane or LoL lore related here.

What sort of "missing scenes" do you wish we had gotten?
What did you come away shipping, if anything, and what attracted you to the ship?
If you are a Jayvik fan, were you a day one truther? Did you come in from the old LoL pairing? Was it S2 that convinced you? How much of the old Vikjayce characterization do you like to see in fanworks if at all?
What are your thoughts on Maddie and Caitlyn? I kind of love them as a pairing? I think Maddie alone is an extremely interesting character. She was a double agent the whole time but her loyalty to Noxus is sexy, and I'm intrigued by the scene in which she's encouraging Caitlyn to end the lockdown of the undercity, or at least reminding her that the option is there. I wonder what her angle was there. And Cait could not have more clearly been using Maddie as a rebound, but if Vi had somehow been permanently off the table, say in the AU where she was dead, would she have maybe taken the relationship more seriously?

I keep saying to myself I need to make some Arcane icons so I should get to that...

Challenge 12 is Create a Rec Countdown.

I tried to do this challenge following the suggested wording of "x everyone should x" and found it was actually impossible for me. The overly literal part of my brain kept going, "Does everyone have to try this, though? Surely it simply isn't of value to some people. This seems so aggressive." So I'm trying to just ignore that part of my brain and will try reccing stuff just from vibes and enthusiasm. It's also hard for me not to just rec the same things I did in previous years, because to be honest I am very slow to pick up new favorite things, so the categories are a little weird this time.

( The Recs )

I'm skipping a few Snowflake Challenges because I still don't have time for anything at all ever auuugh.

So,

Challenge 11 - Share your love for a trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme.
It's hard for me to pick one thing I like cause I have pretty broad tastes. I'm trying to think of bulletproof tropes, and maybe there are a few. Amnesia, alternate selves meeting, and similar "new first times" is one trope that I enjoy a lot. It's often a way for characters to see new sides of each other that may have been hidden from them, and for characters that play things close to the chest to find themselves in situations where they need to be more forthcoming, or where the politeness of not trying to investigate a relationship goes away as one character needs to understand what the circumstances of their new existence now are. I often like characters that struggle to be open about their feelings, so this is one of those mechanisms through which they can be released from that. And the idea of getting to try again, getting to meet someone again, getting to confess again, getting to apologize again, is another reason I find those sorts of stories so appealing. They can be a vehicle for a lot of catharsis.

I'm also a big fan of bad ends and tragedies, which I don't really see all that often anymore. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right fandoms! Back in Inception there were a few where the ending was suicide, and there are sometimes whump fic that hit the right spot in this regard (though they often tend to trigger a different type of satisfaction.) I have never experienced ASMR and in fact have a rage reaction to most ASMR triggers, but when I read a tragic story where everything is going to shit, people are making terrible choices and suffering for it, no matter how hard someone tries it's not going to work out, and so on, if it can get me weeping and hits the right spot, I actually experience a full-body tingling sensation that is the closest I've ever gotten to what people try to say ASMR does to them. So I love tragedies or even tearjerkers that pull out in the end and try to make a happier ending.

Also, I finally filled out the end of year survey that I usual do:

( Read more... )

Things have been so exceedingly busy at home that I still haven't made a nice little year in review post. I think the dust is starting to settle so maybe I'll get a chance to do that. I'm also constantly behind on the Snowflake Challenge.

( Snowflake Challenge 5-8 )

Something about the rich text editor is going wild right now. Including a user link to the Snowflake Challenge was causing some massive errors.

I decided to do something for Snowflake Challenge 2 after all. Instead of giving an origin narrative which I already sort of did, I figured I'd just throw in a few random memories of my earliest relationships with media. This is almost all stuff that happened before I hit high school, lots of it was before I turned ten.

Content warning for mentions of real-life sexual abuse (not mine) in a weird context.

( Snowflake Challenge 2 )

Challenge 3

I'm sure I've changed my mind about lots of things but not much comes to mind. I've changed my mind about Blizzard as a company, but this has less to do with my re-evaluating the facts than the facts themselves changing or becoming public. I guess the biggest change in my opinions has been the merit of live action shows. When I was a kid I believed that they were inherently inferior to animated shows because the presence of an actor meant that the purity of the story was diluted by an extra layer of interpretation or something. I've matured up and now appreciate that actors are artists in their own right that can elevate a work but still generally prefer media that doesn't involve live acting.

Challenge 4
This is the New Year's Resolution Challenge.
I have no resolutions for this year. The ones I set I never meet so I'm just going to stop setting them. I am a little too trampled by 2024 to really be thinking about 2025 right now anyway. Maybe... cut down on internet fucking around still.

( Resolution Review )

So that's why my resolution this year is no resolutions. Fuck it, this is a cheat year.

Current Mood: cranky

December fucked me up. In a good way, but god damn. I had like a single week home and not a single weekend free due to work travel and holiday chaos.

I had my last business trip of the year and it was a doozy. First was Hong Kong, which I was visiting for the very first time, and then I took a quick trip to Japan to do some work, but only for like 3 days.

It's been a long time since I've been somewhere completely new to me. Hong Kong gave me an opportunity to engage with a place with fresh eyes again, which is something I haven't really gotten to do in over a decade, as my work takes me to the same places over and over again, typically. A few quick observations:

( Hong Kong Musing )

Japan was a super short trip. I tried to get a day in Osaka to see a friend, but fucked up the schedule and had only less than 24 hours. I did get to see my friend but had to jump on the Shinkansen immediately after and get to work, which was exhausting after having just flown in from Hong Kong and spent half a week working. When these trips happen I lose not just a week+ of my time, but I also usually get no weekend. Sometimes I'm out two weekends. This trip I didn't really have a free day outside of work until right before Christmas, at which point I was with family, so actually last weekend was the first time since November that I wasn't traveling or working or both.

( Japan Travel and Goods )

Other stuff has been going on. For example Jayvik has grabbed me by the neck and is choking me out atm, but this post is long enough so I'll post a more fannish update later.

Meanwhile, the Snowflake Challenge is starting up again. I am very much not ready. Time needs to slow the fuck down. But Challenge 2 is an old one about my fan origin story, which never really changes, so I'll just link the post I made last year about that.

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