got_quiet

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.



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 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.

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.

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.
 

 

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I'm also back to studying tea.

 

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.

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...

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:

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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.

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. Links are to reading lists for that fandom.

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.

RL stuff has been going on. I'm feeling better which is great, but also received critical psychic damage from the election which is not great. Been doing a lot of escapism lately as a result, so below is some stuff I've been reading, watching, and playing.

Red, White, and Royal Blue

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Arcane, Season 2

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Detroit: Become Human

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