got_quiet

Life is messy right now hence the radio silence. A lot of my old habits were disrupted when we had to move and I'm not very good at righting behavioral digressions. On top of that I've been mulling over my feelings over how AI has consumed the free internet, and don't know that I enjoy putting anything I write out without some sort of AI mitigation. I'm thinking of friendslocking my entries for that reason, but then just giving access automatically to anyone who subscribes. Or, if there is some way to poison the text without causing accessibility issues that may be the way to go. I haven't decided yet.

Checking my last update... ugh it's been a while! And I have so many half complete drafts sitting in my blog file! Let me see if I can at least clear up a few things.

Picked up Sense Ultra which is a m/m gacha, only because it has match 3 and match 3 is my favorite casual mechanic. That combat part of the game is entertaining because of that. But Nu:Carni this ain't. The writing is significantly worse. Some part of it may be the translation, but the overall plot also has been jumping around without bothering too much with cohesion. And the sex scenes are kind of funny with how they're set up. The lore of the game involves the MC Cyan having to "purify" his harem by entering their "realms" and having sex with them. Which means the sex is often as a jarring interruption of some sort of action scene or otherwise removed from a smooth emotional progression. Like someone is fighting to the death and Cyan is like "I have to help!" and BAM! Sex scene.

And unlike Eiden who has a strong personality and who maintains that personality regardless of who he's with, Cyan's personality feels dramatically different when he's topping vs. when he's bottoming, which is a trope I kind of hate and also makes it hard to get a bead on who he actually is as a character.

The LIs are alright. It's early on and most of them feel a little flat or cliche, but the sexy parts are sexy so if you just want to be superficially horny there's content here. There's also an adopted brother LI who Cyan calls aniki when they’re banging and an LI who seems to want to top from the bottom and enjoys a little casual violence, so my tastes are being properly pandered to.

There is also a large cast of side characters, which is one of the only things I like more than Nu:Carni. Of course every minor character is part of a set pairing, but this means there are a handful of little romantic side stories that you can unlock, and because they don't need to figure Cyan into it this actually feel like more engaging and personable content. 

Pursuit of Jade

I’ve been watching this slowly with my roommates. I guess it was an extremely popular drama, but not paying attention to live action shows I had no idea until I started watching. I liked the first 5 or 6 episodes quite a bit because I prefer more down to earth local drama over high stakes upper class bullshit. Now that things have gotten into that upper class bullshit I feel like we need a conspiracy board to keep track of who is betraying who or whatever. My roommates were also like “that chick is totally pretending to be a boy” and I was like “there’s no fucking way, that’s a trope sure but like they’re not even trying” and then sure enough it turns out we were supposed to think this princess was pretending to be a male scholar. I do know that’s a trope.. but she was realllly not even trying!

Anyway, the whole show is ridiculous but in a self-aware fun way. Fan Chengyu is such an excellent Mary Sue type. We all love her and want her to collect a harem of men, although we know it isn't that sort of show. Every time she assures Xie Jiang that she'll take care of him we're like, just lean back and accept your babygirl fate, Xie Jiang! I was so disappointed when he finally went back to being Marquis and my interest is starting to die, but we'll probably keep on watching for a while more.

---

I've been spending waaaaaay too much time playing 33 Immortals. It's relatively simple but the boss fights are so satisfying when things come together. I am a tank enjoyer and my only gripe is that only the second boss really lets you lean into the tank play by intercepting and killing bullets. Otherwise it's mostly a game of everyone individually having to do well. My friends won't play it because it's too simple and a grind fest, but I find it meditative even though it is easy to die, so I've been trying to 100% it.

--- 

Saw Perfect Blue for the first time a little while ago. I was a little worried about just how much of a mindfuck it would be given its reputation, and then the first 20 minutes or so I kind of forgot its reputation and was like, "Well this seems somewhat straight forward" and then my brain got mentally boiled by the plot just getting more and more unhinged. All in all I thought it was a movie that well deserved its reputation as a classic. Was disturbing and interesting and a little funny and fucked up all at once. 

I know June is here, but I am still trying to decide on my New Year's resolution, technically. One of the options I was considering was to chip away at my to-read pile, which at this point now probably takes up two entire book cases thanks to my compulsion to purchase books and my habit of playing video games after work instead of reading. I am not making good headway on it so maybe I am thankful that it is not officially a New Year's resolution.

One of the books I meant to finish so I could remove it from the pile was a double feature of Evelyn Waugh, containing both A Handful of Dust and Decline and Fall. So far I've finished A Handful of Dust.

With one massive caveat I enjoyed it a lot. It's a caustic satire and on a superficial level fits neatly into the genre of Everyone Fucking Sucks. The absurdity of the plot and the playful way that Waugh lets the characters represent themselves as reasonable while the reader thinks, nah, you also suck, elevates it from that cliche.

( Read more... )

I will admit that I have a strong stomach for the bigotry that permeated literature from this time period. It also helps (???) that for the most part, you don't get jump scared with the blunt stuff until the very end of the story. I haven't read any other Waugh to know if this is one of his best as the introduction says, but I would say that it was better than 90% of what I end up reading nowadays.

Got Titanium Court and have been enjoying it. The core gameplay loop has two phases. the first is a match three where you get resources and manipulate a playing field to be layed out the way you want it for the second phases, which is something of an auto battler. Using the resources in the first phase you schedule a series of spells or summons and then the scene plays out without your input as enemies spawn or units collect resources. This rundown doesn't do the game justice though, because the brilliance of it is in the presentation. The premise is you find yourself at faerie court, and want to go home, but according to the court you are their queen and need to lead them to victory in war. What's the war about? Who knows. There is a mind bending juxtaposition of the hyper modern (foodball and baseball references are everywhere, everyone looks like a yuppie from the 2000s) and the classical fantasy (the faerie court is just how I like it: changeable, absurd, and imbued with a confident logic that none the less makes very little sense.) The castle you're stuck in ups and walks around, moving itself from engagement to engagement. The writing is top notch, full of whimsy, mischief, and fourth-wall-breaking gags. As an example, I had played the demo a few months ago, just bought the game recently, and when I came back the game was like, "Oh cool, you bought the game, great! Well here you are in your old save. Would you like a refresher on how the game is played?" And I was like, "Sure, thanks," and the game went, "Ok, so just delete this save and start from the beginning. That'll be a better refreshing than anything!" And then it throws you into the boss fight that the demo had stopped right before. 

This might sound malicious but the gameplay is simple on its face and the demo was not that long. There is still a lot of depth to actually playing the game, as the units you chose or the "job" you pick will significantly change what terrain benefits or hurts you, and there are a many sub objectives and a variety of challenges. I'm not very far in at all but there's often something brand new showing up in a level and a lot of fun banter to go with it.

And then there's the inter-gameloop segments. Much like the home bases in Hades, there's stuff to do in between runs that change with some frequency. A lot of times those elements come with their own very easy match three minigames which add a little interactability to what is otherwise a somewhat linear plot. I have so far tried and failed to get a single straight answer out of Puck, tried to help a cat get to the top of a shelf via a stacking puzzle (that you fuck up if you match three), gotten lost on a labyrinth, and chugged a Loving Baseball potion, which everyone was excited about because they didn't know what baseball was and wanted to find out what it was like loving something you had no exposure to. They also are very dismissive of idea that cars exist.

Looking at the recent patch notes, it looks like there is a lot of content that I haven't seen yet, so I'm excited.

With a puzzle type of game play, a lot of stuff to discover, and entertaining writing, I definitely recommend this game.

 

Haven't done one of these in a while.

1. What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college? Mostly around the early 00s.

2. What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style? I never gave much of a fuck about fashion at the time. I was goth adjacent and didn't have any clue what anyone else was doing with themselves. Youtube feeds me nostalgia videos about fashion in my teen years and it's like a primer on a foreign country. I guess... frosted tips were kind of weird in hindsight.

3. Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis? Not too much. Still listen to Dream Theater on occasion.

4. What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college? During high school I was depressed so had hip length hair that I rarely washed. In college I got myself together again. I also got my first short hair cut and that was a hilarious mistake because I went to some old lady who gave me an old lady haircut, but I simply had never been to a salon or anything and did not know how any of it worked. It grew out pretty fast at least.

5. What was/is "the cool thing to do" while in high school/college? I honestly have no fucking clue for high school. Whatever it was I wasn't doing it. In college it was of course drinking, but in my freshman year it was also a looooot of theft (I didn't participate with one major exception that almost got me kicked out of school.)

Saw Project Hail Mary with my housemates. We all enjoyed it a lot and I've been hovering up all the fan art on tumbler for it. But possibly weirdly one of my takeaways as I was watching was "Damn I'm depressed as fuck." It's one of the reasons I haven't posted much on here, even though life has been puttering on and there have been things to post about. I'm suffering from some terminal doomerism at the moment, so as much as I loved PHM the optimism was like sunshine hitting Gollum. Lots of spiritual hissing and spitting was going on as I was exposed to the joy on the screen. It kind of sucks when your own mentality reacts to a movie about saving the world with the thought, "yeah couldn't be us though we're all going to burn to death."

Anyway Project Hail Mary was a fun movie and kept the schlock to a very reasonable minimum and I am always a big fan of "Space human in over his head with enough of a combo of smart and fumbling to be both useful and friend shaped." I haven't read the book or seen/read any other of Weir's works. I don't know that I'll go out of my way to change that, but I might end up checking out the Martian now if I find myself with a few hours to kill. 

The movie is relatively new so I'm trying not to hit too many spoilers, but if anyone wants to chat me up in the comments I'm happy to go full spoiler mode. 

And I have a bunch of posts half written about other crap so this is me trying to get back into the habit, sorta.

There is another big bundle at Itch.io. This time proceeds go to support the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. The center has been at the front lines in combating the current administration's attack on Minnesotans, providing logistical and informational support to those targeted by ICE. As usual there are a handful of new games in this bundle in addition to megabundle staples. 

Even if game bundles are not your thing, if you want to support the victims of ICE in Minnesota right now the ILC is a good option for that. The news has moved away from the state now that the thuggery has gotten more understated, but a lot of people have suffered long term damage, both physically, to their livelihoods, and psychologically, and they continue to need support.

Tl;dr I got some Hades stuff for Christmas and a new mini phone.

( Read more... )

The phone has not, unfortunately helped me avoid doom scrolling, which was one of the reasons I got it. So I still need to work on that.

I've got a whopping 21k words in my "blog" file but everything is a half-formed thought or a restart and restatement. It's been a while since I posted cause my mind has been so scatter shot, so here's just a quick sort of year end update on one subject, gaming.

Dispatch

I played the demo of Dispatch during a Next Fest and was impressed by the high production values, but didn't buy the 1.0 release because as a general rule I don't buy things that aren't complete. Lucky me in this case, because it turned out to be an ultra het game. No hate, that's just not for me. I've watched a couple of Let's Plays which are entertaining for what they are, but I would be pretty annoyed constantly dodging the female LIs, so I'll probably leave it at that. Flambae's "You're a bitch" song has been living rent free in my mind for weeks now though.

Fellowship and Hades

I've basically been splitting my game time between Hades II, which I finally have the time to no-life, and Fellowship, which my friends have gotten deep into and I've kind of just been tagging along. I missed the original Hades ending so I don't know how bad it was, but the revision felt okayish as an initial ending. It's probably the weakest of SG's endings, some of which made me weep openly, but my enjoyment of Hades doesn't rely too much on the plot so whatevs. The runs are still a ton of fun, and I've hit a bit of a plateau at the final boss Rivals. Grandpa and Typhon are both laying the smackdown on me right now, but I'll get them eventually.

Fellowship we're riding on low eternals at the moment. My friends each have multiple alts but I'm just running Ardeos and refusing to swap because I don't have the bandwith to learn a new rotation. Plus his playstyle gives me old Shadow Priest vibes which I appreciate. My DPS on his is ass but like, ass that is just ok enough to be worth bringing while we're all painfully undergeared and pushing progression.

Stardew Valley

I've taken to playing this again during tabletop sessions. It's semi perfect in that I can still bascially pay attention to what's happening at the "table" but I'm not going insane with impatience as the group ponderously engages in this that or the other thing. It's a very slow group that sometimes will take over half an hour to even start due to technical difficulties, so if I don't have something to keep me from going nuts I'd have to quit. On my current run I'm only on year two, have romanced Elliot, and am trying to get away with minimal actual farming, which I actually don't really enjoy! But I've been meaning to go for a 100% eventually so maybe with enough boring tabletop games I will eventually get there. I've also been resisting the temptation to restart with a randomized Community Center because that sounds like fun.

Video Game Awards

Naturally I wanted Hades II to take away everything, but that was not going to happen. At least they got one thing. I think they should have gotten best Soundtrack too, but I will also admit to not having listened closely to E33's soundtrack enough to really have an opinion. I took a look at E33 back when it came out but was turned off by the art direction, so kind of miffed that it won for that also. It felt kind of gray and full of a lot of blury light, which is one of my least favorite aesthetics, and always looks kind of cheap to me. But I do like JRPGs so I may give it a shot eventually. I've also been curious about Kingdom Come Deliverance II, but when I'll find time for another big game I don't know. 

Year in Review

According to Steam I played 18 games, 7 of which were new, with Hades II, Fellowship, and Railroad Corporation as my respective top 3 of the year. The only gaming this doesn't really cover is Honkai Star Rail, which probably would end up in second place if it were counted. I didn't really play any Visual Novels at all this year. They kind of require me to be chill and relaxed in the later hours of the night, and that was an extremely rare event for this year. Here's a link to my Year in Steam and here's Steam's little monthly breakdown chart.



So that's been my last quarter in Gaming. 

I'm curious what everyone else's game of the year has been? Anything that surprised you for better or worse? Anything you're looking forward to for 2026?

Fandom Gift Basket is in its signup period. If you share any fandoms with me (and if you don't!) please consider signing up! I can never guarantee a gift or that it'll be good, but I always dig through all the baskets looking for someone I can write for. And if you don't share a fandom with me, still think about signing up. It's a very low pressure event. Signups close on the 5th.

IF Comp voting is also starting up. The more people vote the more likely the final rankings will make sense (probably). I think I'll have time to play the minimum five games as my chaos life is starting to settle down, so I'm looking forward to looking for the parser games and doing some old fashioned text based puzzles.

My room continues to look like a tornado tore through. I'm slowly unpacking boxes and putting things on shelves but there are not enough shelves. I've moved into a smaller space. And I don't have a separate closet for my mustier books either, which is a problem, because I do not like "the smell of books." That's the smell of respiratory distress. So there is still some problem solving to be done. 

I've been trying to sneak in reading some Jayvik fanfic now and then, but digging around for something that looks appealing has gotten hard. There's a lot of modern AU stuff which I don't care about. If it's smutty I'm not here for the PiV sex which lately feels like it's put 60% of fic out of the running. And the fanon characterization of Viktor as the straight man who worries about piddling things like safety and Jayce as manic pixie dream boy is fun in moderation but moderation only. None the less I am trying to go through the fic that were posted for the recent Jayvik exchange. 

This is one that I enjoyed. It's a Vikjayce fic where they've gotten older, wiser, and more tired: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66947971

While I have no interest in any of the games or anime or anything else, I'm enjoying the sudden mainstreaming of Uma Musume exclusively because suddenly random ass trivia about Japanese racehorses keep hitting my various socials. And I am a big fan of random anime turning people on to a hobby that they had never considered before (Chihayafuru my beloved). Coincidentally I'm not getting more Japanese language youtube vids on my feed which is a surprise bonus cause I can call this language practice now.

On a very related note, I finally blocked all youtube shorts via uBlock Origin. I'm not on ticktok, instagram, or whatever other sort of infinite scroll hellscape is out there but shorts got their claws into me because I do watch youtube vides often enough, and have not been able to stop making the mistake of clicking on a picture with a cat on it. For a while I was just telling youtube to hide shorts every time they came back, but even then I'd only ever remember to do this after realizing I'd lost another few hours of precious time, so today I was like, no more, and hopefully this will solve the problem.