got_quiet

I am very backlogged on posts I meant to make but now it feels like to time to make them has passed. I did just finish a book though so here's what I thought of that at least.

Charmed and Dangerous is an anthology of m/m fantasy. I picked it up because I was looking up books by Ginn Hale, and this one listed her as one of the contributors. Tl;dr is it's good. The stories are urban fantasy types, for the most part, and aside from a couple stories I liked them all. Decent variety of plots and pairings within the relatively narrow genre of m/m fantasy romance. For a more thorough review:

( Read more... )

I haven't been reading as much this year as last. My concentration has been hard to wrangle for a while. And it was not particularly well wrangled before. But I did finish a decent Sci-Fi book recently.

( Some book, show, and music reviews )

So in my last post I mentioned that I had seen a Haikyuu movie and I just assumed that it was old content, but after chatting with my brother about it he was like, uh, no, none of that is in the anime, you watched something completely new. Welp, lol.

My only excuse is that
1) It's been a long time since I saw the series.
2) The movie starts with a flashback scene and there are many flashbacks throughout
3) The last anime movie I saw was a rehash so I thought that was maybe a thing and
4) look, a lot of volley ball games look the same ok?

But no. The Battle of the Trash Bin was COMPLETELY NEW CONTENT and I was just watching it the whole time going "oh it's interesting how they're kind of mixing the old episodes, oh I don't remember this scene huh I guess it's been a while." I fucking gaslit myself.

So yeah, I actually saw a BRAND NEW Haikyuu movie! And I should probably watch the series again or something so I remember the whole context behind the match, or at least the tournament arc.

Even though it's been a month, I'm just now trying to get in order the things I brought back from Japan. So here's part 2 of that, all the fannish stickers and paper I got.

( Graphic Heavy )

Current Mood: silly

Eugh god.

Jet lag is such a pain in the ass. The worst part about it (I might be repeating myself here but I am sooo jet lagged I don't care) is when I come back it takes forever to recover because I've got nothing going on at home and can just pass out at 5PM every day after work. So it's been a while since I came back from my last trip to Japan and I'm still fighting off sleep during the sunlight hours so I don't wake up at midnight like I have the last few days. Even though I've been trying to stay up things are just not resetting.

Here's a review: Spending 18 hours in transit sucks ass.

But going to Japan is still worth it. This trip was part leisure and part business. It's very rare that I get to Japan twice in so short a time span. It will be a few years before I get the chance to go again. And this time I was solo for a large portion instead of hanging out with family, so since I didn't need to worry about anyone but myself on the leisure leg I went a liiiiiiittle bit wild on the merch. Compared to some people I'm sure I was still modest about it but since I don't buy too much stuff during regular times coming back with a pile of things this time felt like a major splurge. I ended up picking up some cheap kimono, and some tea supplies.

( Books I bought )

Current Mood: sleepy

I have "finished" Baldur's Gate 3. That is, I got to an ending credits, at least.

My first run ended kind of like this:

( Tav's End )

---

So now that my first playthrough is over I got some takeaways:

( Companions and a few other things )

Stuff Tav did and did not do

( Choices Made )

So now, eventually, I'm going to roll a Durge and romance Gale. I'm not sure what sort of Durge I'm going to roll. I want something with high charisma so I can see all of the stuff I couldn't by being a tongue tied little murder machine, but I don't care too much for the CHA class options. I thought maybe a Male Drow Monk. Or if Cha a Male Drow Paladin. Are those allowed? Probably? I'm also not sure if I want to be good or evil. My Tav was, theoretically, good in that he worked for the good guys, even if he wasn't nice about it. So I didn't see any of the evil bits. I don't know how happy Gale would be about such a route though.

I'm curious as to what people thing are things that shouldn't be missed in the game, now that I've gone through once with a minimum of spoilers. Are there any interactions or scenes or things that were your favorite? Is there a companion interaction that you love to see? I'm going to go back to my plethora of Tav saves too and poke around some options. I don't know if I want to just hit an ending with a Thrall!Astarion and Human!Tav or go even further back and see if I can't get Astarion ascended, as he probably should have been in this run.

But for now I'm a little burnt out on BG3. The game is too damn big, so the save scumming and rerolling will have to wait for a while.

Little late but I've lost the plot this month.

1. Your favorite book? Kokoro. I don't tend to reread books but I've reread this one a number of times. I'm due for another read soon I think. I want to try it in Japanese someday.

2. Your favorite movie? I tend to say Laputa, but I don't know that I really have one. I'm not a massive movie watcher. The only movie I got super fannish about was Inception, so maybe that one? But I also don't think it was the best movie I watched, just the one that created the most interesting playground.

3. Your least favorite adaptation of a book to a movie? Les Mis was pretty bad, but Phantom of the Opera hit me at a time when I wasn't jaded enough to endure it, so I'mma go with that one.

4. Your least favorite adaptation ever of anything to a movie? The Dragon Ball Z Movie was certainly the worst one I'd ever experienced personally.

5. Your first ever novel/comic book/movie character crush? Well my first cartoon crush was Puck from Gargoyles. I also had a thing for Shawdowspawn from the Thieves' World series.

Current Mood: exhausted

Some spoilers below. TL;DR as a third book in a trilogy it was more of the same, which basically means it was good and fun though the plot was a little bit of a mess. I think it's a solid fantasy romance series, even if it's maybe not my favorite thing.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: relaxed

( Baldur's Gate Spoilers for Astarion's Route )

Now that I've finished that quest, I went to youtube to check out different possible outcomes.

( A funny youtube video )

I'm finally out of the damn Shadowlands.
( Some quest griping. )

---
Anyway everything else went relatively smoothly.
( Tav's most recent questionable decisions )

I'm taking a break from the BG3 grind to check out all the demos on Steam's Next Fest as is tradition. Here's what I've played so far and how I liked em. I've been extra picky about games this time and with only a couple of gigs on my HD (BG3 is sooo big) I simply could not try some of the larger demos, so I haven't run into that many complete duds.

The Good:

( Read more... )

The OK:

( Read more... )

The Not Good:

( Read more... )

During the Snowflake Challenge I was thinking of linking to my old Anidb account, which is largely unused, but then I went and looked it up, and read the reviews that high school me had left on a few things, many, many years ago, and decided no, let's not show this to people.

--
Anyway, Snowflake Madness is over, so it's time to start making posts about Baldur's Gate 3. The below is going to be spoilerific, so here is the more spoiler free reaction first. The game is very good but almost too long, The choices and relationships are also excellent, especially for a mainstream RPG, but I am maybe a little spoiled by Visual Novels and still think that they do a better job with some of the elements of narrative.

I've been playing without too much save scumming. A couple times a sequence has felt a little unfair, or the consequences of certain choices did not seem properly clarified, but for the most part, I have rolled with the very many punches that have come my Tav's way, and it's worked out.

Here's my Tav.

And his guardian. I didn't realize I was making his hair quite that red. But they're a good looking pair anyway.

My Tav's a human fighter, career grave robber and small time enforcer operating on the outskirts of Balder's Gate. He's not an evil guy, per se, but I am playing him as someone with an extremely small "us" circle as opposed to the "them" that he doesn't mind fucking over. Once he likes someone he's willing to literally commit murder for them, but he won't go out of his way to be mean, but he's also not going to try super hard to help those in need either.

My faves have been Astarion, Gale, and Lae'zel, in no particular order. Astarion was the early bird, so to speak, so he got Tav's worm. This made Gale very sad and me sad by proxy so I'm fighting the urge to roll a Tav to romance Gale now.
The spoilery part:

( The Going So Far )
---
My feelings about the companions:

( Read more... )
----
Some choices made:
( Read more... )

Challenge #14

Try something new
I considered trying to set up a trading page for sidequest but I noped out when I saw a bunch of php so I'm still not doing any of the TCG stuff yet, even though I like collecting pixels. Someday I'll have the energy to set something up.

Instead I just opened up the Cambio Fude that I bought in Japan and tried it out for the first time. It's actually an amazing pen. The ink flow is great and completely wasted on me, who has ass handwriting no matter the language. But I'm working on it...

Challenge #15

Fandom Snowflake Challenge's 2023 Fandom Wrapped!

Your top 5 fandoms for 2023 were:

Overwatch League by a long shot
Honkai Starrail slipped into second starting at the end of the year
Well behind that is probably Whyborne and Griffin just because the fandom is very small
Visual Novels generally, though I don't actively participate in any fandom culture around them
Divinity: Original Sin II ... which again, really enjoyed the game but didn't really touch the fandom.

Your top 5 fandom spaces (Discord, Twitter, etc.) in 2023 were:

Dreamwidth, which has been a deliberate choice. I feel like I finally accomplished feeling settled here last year.
Tumblr, still my favorite of the "socials"
Reddit, though with OWL dead my site use is dropping off a lot.
Twitter, because I still don't know a better place for fanart
Discord. I'm not active in many fandom discords but I do have friends discords that I spend a lot of time in.

The top 5 things you did to contribute to fandom in 2023 were:

I wrote 2 whole ficlets for fandom giftbox/trees lol.
A bunch of VN reviews?
Honestly I'm a fandom consumer, not a maker.

Your top 5 most appreciated fandom contributions were:

Leaving genuinely thankful and enthusiastic comments on fic?
Again, I'm just chilling here, I contribute by trying not to be an asshole.

Bonus questions: Your fandom personality in 2023 was:
Fanart hoarder, devourer of published m/m, r/CompetitiveOverwatch shitposter

In 2023, you discovered:
Libby is very powerful and very dangerous.

Your fandom home in 2023 was:
Still anonmemes.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a chubby brown and red bird surrounded by falling snow. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Rec some fan works

Fanart:

Dreamwidth is unfortunately not great at reccing fanart. So I think the easiest thing to do is just link to my fanart only tumblr. There's a lot of Cole/Reaper, also Thorki, Castlevania, Disco Elysium, Hades, Dishonored, and Baldur's Gate is starting to creep in now too.

Also here is a nice Than/Zag on a date comic.

Fanfic:

I didn't read that much fanfic this year, but I did get some wonderful gifts for fandom giftbox and fandomtrees, and more people should read them!

The Tarot Sequence - Rune/Addam/Brand - i'll show you some rhythm by egelantier. The trio go on a date to a club and Brand does some dancing.
Whyborne & Griffin - Communion by Island_of_Reil. A smutty missing scene from Griffin's PoV, of their marriage night.
Inception - Arthur/Cobb - is it real? (i can feel it) by ropememory. A fic of Arthur and Cobb's first meeting.

And an old yuletide gift that deserves many more views as it is a hilarious romp:

Metalocalypse x Werewolf - Dethspiral by violeteyes - A werewolf infiltrates the mansion and chaos ensues.

And some Overwatch Vids:

If I were given the power to mind control the world into getting into a single thing it would have been the Overwatch League.

This an OW AMV that uses the cinematics, so no game knowledge needed, just vibes!

The big part of the esports side was the human element though. Subetai put out some great videos highlighting that part back when the matches were on LAN.

Fans who watch this video see every shot and know the whole, emotional story behind them, but with the League now dead, these stories are probably doomed to be forgotten. Now I'm making myself sad.

And finally, a sendoff to the league with contributions by a lot of the live talent. It's the best highlight reel of the 6th and final Overwatch League Finals. Zoe's speech in the end had 10,000 people weeping let me tell you:

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of metallic snowflake and ornaments. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge 12 - Share a personal win

My biggest win last year was paying off my student loans. It's a morbid thing to say but it's true that that the federal response to COVID was a miraculous windfall for a lot of people who's primary source of misery was their student loans, and I was one of those people. Suspending the interest meant I didn't feel like I was on the edge of homelessness anymore and could start saving up over 1/3 more of my paycheck. And even though we didn't get any permanent forgiveness, the time bought by the interest suspension was literally all I needed to be able to make a single payment when interest returned and wipe the whole thing away. I think I saved at least 20k by being able to do this. I'm in such a better financial position right now that it isn't even funny.

I've been popcorning the recent mess with the Hugos. The Hugos have been on my shitlist ever since a number of the people associated with them showed their asses over the Ao3 win. I may have duked it out with a few of them on File 770 back then and my takeaway in the end was that while I have never cared for awards to begin with, I disregarded the Hugos completely, in particular.

So I haven't spent much time absorbing the details of the current fuckup. There is a write up here outlining some of the many questionable datapoints in the voting, but more amusing to me is that the response by those who ostensibly represent the Hugos is just as dumb and annoying as it was a few years ago. In particular the chair of the Mark Protection Committee whining about how they just can't protect their trademark in any way, they just can't! has got me rolling.

The org is simultaneously so desperate to be respected and obeyed, and so desperate to avoid accountability and be seen as just a bunch of hapless guys who can't do shit. They can't have their cake and eat it too but they are trying real hard.

Anyway my point is I just won a Hugo and everyone else did too. Congratulations!

Challenge 10: Five things!

The open-endedness of this challenge caused me to go off the rails, so here's 5x5 things. Are they my favorites? The most recent? Recommendations? Even I don't know, honestly.

5 Games

( Read more... )

5 Songs

( Read more... )

5 Ships

( Read more... )
5 Arists (may be NSFW)

( Read more... )
5 Youtube Channels

( Read more... )

And Challenge 11: Make a Fanwork

It used this as an opportunity to finally make some icons out of the Nu:Carnival screenshots I've been collecting. I need to screenshot more liberally but here is the first batch. Feel free to take any if you like them.

( Read more... )

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of snow-covered trees and an old barn in the background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge 9: Rec Us Your Newest Thing.

My most recent fandom thing is Baldur's Gate because I'm in the middle of it. However, it's not like that game is struggling to find its audience, and I am much more eager to get a few people into the book series I finished reading just before I started playing BG3.

If you are into M/M stories, and like the romance to support a fantasy adventure with danger, battles, interesting worldbuilding, and a variety of pairings, check out Lord of the White Hell.

( May I interest you in some M/M fantasy books? )

So if you're looking for a fun fantasy series to read I strongly recommend this one. You can find links to the books on the author's website.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of ice covered tree branches and falling snowflakes on a blue background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge 8: Talk about a current fannish project

I don't have that much in the way of fannish products. I'm not typically producing anything. I guess the most relevant thing I'm doing is reviewing Visual Novels over on

playingstory . I'm almost completely through all the VNs from the BLM bundle. I have a possible six games to go, assuming that all of them are actually Visual Novels and not something else, actually, which many under the VN tag are. I was hoping to have that finished up by the end of last year, but juusst missed and am now distracted by Balders Gate 3, haha.

Once I have played all the VNs in the bundle, I have a master post already mostly written out in which I give out "awards" to the games I enjoyed the most for one thing or another, and will be offering to give away some of the games via a steam code or similar to give back to the indies who made those games and donated to the cause. I'm hoping this will happen by the end of winter, but I think it depends somewhat on how soon I extricate myself from Baldur's Gate.

The other project that I actually work on with some mild consistency is my worldbuilding, but I don't consider that fannish activity. It's just sort of creative work. I've been lazy about organizing everything into something legible so maybe I'll work on that today a little.

And even further from fandom but also on a more fannish vein(?) I'm practicing Hakobi Usucha Ro, which is sort of an early fundamental form for tea practice. It looks like this:

Watch on YouTube

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner featuring an image of a fir bough with a white ball ornament and a glass vial. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge 7: Make a list of fannish and/or creative resources.

Fannish Resources I Created:

The BLM Visual Novel discovery tool I started this last year for the Snowflake Challenge. I've updated it this year to include some more games (5) and added a "no preferences" option to each question. Not every game labeled as a Visual Novel offered through the BLM bundle is included (Just the ones I thought rec worthy) but there are still 31 games to choose from. So if you bought the BLM bundle in 2020 and are trying to decide what's worth playing, maybe this will help!

The Bigass Fantasyland Challenge I created a series of worldbuilding prompts for a writing challenge on Gaia Online in 2010. I've been meaning to move it to a slightly more secure place, or maybe make a little ebook out of it or something. But for today's challenge I finally finished transferring it to neocities. The formatting is eh, but it's at least a step. There are almost 500 worldbuilding prompts here. It'd like to create a randomizer, or something more extensible, but haven't prioritized this in a long time.

Fannish Resources I Use

4thewords - Definitely the #1 fandom related tool I use. It's a writing tool where you fight monsters that represent a word count goal and a time limit, and you gain things like clothes for your avatar or furniture for your home by beating the monsters. I'm on a 1136 days streak writing there. However, 99% of those words are personal journaling and writing reviews, only 1% is fanfiction or anything like that.

Librarything - I have been using librarything to keep track of the books I own and read for about 15 years. On top of managing my own library, I catalog for the legacy library project which creates catalogs of historical figures if we have a record of what they owned. Want to know what was on Susan B. Anthony's shelves? You can just check out her account on librarything! There are also groups if you want to chat with people, and fun with stats. For example the vu et nul autre section will tell you which books you and only one other person own.

As a platform for books I like it a lot more than goodreads (I don't use goodreads) because 1: fuck Amazon, and 2: librarything has a web 1.0 vibe and is relatively disconnected from the social net. It's a great site for people who think tinkering with data is a nice evening activity.

https://randombundlegame.com/ - After the BLM Bundle came out, sifting through the hundreds of entries to find something worth trying was a real chore, so a beautiful soul created a search tool that lets you filter by many facets to actually find something in that massive pile. It has been updated to include many of the major bundles that followed after the BLM Bundle's success as well. I wouldn't be able to work through all the Visual Novels in the bundle if it weren't for this tool (and I don't understand why itch.io can't provide something native that works like this >.<).

Challenge #6

In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

Oh ho ho, what a coincidence that today I was relistening to my playlist of 82 different varieties of the song Stars from Les Miserables. That's right 82 versions of the same damn song, which I collected in a fevered passion over a decade ago. The large number is mostly because the song has been translated into many different languages, so I actually have very few "amateur" tracks included. Anyway I found a new version as I was writing this post so now the list is 83 tracks long.

The playlist is connected to a RL google account (that it appears I can't obfuscate because google is doing evil now) so I won't link it directly, but here are my favorites.

Phillip Quast 10th Anniversary Concert - The standard to which I judge all other versions. Phillip Quast is my Javert and the 10th Anniversary Concert is my Les Mis musical. I honestly get weirded out when I see the scenes beyond the musical pieces lol.

Stars in Polish, "Gwiazdy" - Sung by Łukasz Dziedzic. He's got a perfectly powerful voice for the role.

Stars in Japanese "Hoshi Yo" - Sung by Takeshi Kawaguchi. Fun fact, the guy who played Valjean in the Japanese production was none other than Chairman Kaga of Iron Chef fame.

Stars in Chinese "繁星满天" - This one is a fan production, but I don't think there is an official Chinese production. Maybe someday!

As to why I like this particular track, I think it perfectly encapsulates Javert's character, and is his best solo song in the play.

Also, in the 10th anniversary concert video, right before Quast is up to sing this song, Colm Wilkinson gives him a little pat on the leg for encouragement and that little gesture has kept the fires burning in my little shipper heart for literal decades. Every once in a while I go back to youtube rips of the VHS to take another look.

To illustrate just how nuts that is, here is a screenshot of the pat.

a blurry image

Can you make anything out there? I absolutely can't, but I remember the VHS tape, and I know what those little blurry dots are doing, and that's enough lol.

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got_quiet

May 2025

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Recent Entries

Charmed and Dangerous

Stuff I've been consuming

Waaiiiit a second...

The anime plunder

Japan Again!

BG3 Run 1 Complete

Friday Five

A Power Unbound

Astarion...

Goodbye Shadowlands, you asshole

Steam Next Fest

Baldur's Gate 3 So Far

Snowflake Challenge 14 and 15

Snowflake Challenge 13

Snowflake Challenge 12 + Hugos lol

Snowflake Challenge 10 and 11

Snowflake Challenge 9

Snowflake Challenge 8

Snowflake Challenge 7

Snowflake Challenge 6

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