got_quiet

• Our family dog was called Luke after Luke Skywalker. I think Marty after Marty McFly was also considered.
• Best boy of gaming probably has to go to the Mabari in Dragon Age: Origins who stayed in my party through my entire first playthrough and naturally was named Luke.
• My prefered starter Pokemon is always the grass types. Bulbasaur is king. However my preference was always for Digimon and Monster Rancher. The Monster Rancher game kind of sucked, or at least I didn't really have the patience for it, but it had this novel system on the PS2 where you got new monsters by inserting random CDs into the system, and some magic calculation would result in a new monster for you. I had a decent CD collection and I fed all of it into the game lol. That's the only thing I really remember about Monster Rancher. 
• My early internet life had a large chunk dedicated to the Petz games. There were websites dedicated to "breeders" who offered custom pet files for both breeds and individual pets that you could either take for free or literally put in an adoption application for. I never had a Petz page of my own but I kept track of about a dozen of them. There is a free executable of Petz 4 available now, but it's just not the same now that I'm not 14. 
• I think the gaming environment would be vastly improved if all fishing minigames were replaced with pet raising minigames. 

• 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?

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:

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.

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.

• 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.

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

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:

• 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!

Tl;dr because the below got a lot longer than I expected: I'm mostly just a blogger and member of the peanut gallery. I've written a few fic but mostly just like talking about stuff I like with other people and looking at nice art and reading the occasional fic. My fandoms are mostly video games, but I'm also into anime and cartoons, and sometimes fiction.

I tend to be a little nitpicky. I like complaining about things or being critical about them, but only in a well meaning way if that makes sense? I never expect others to share my views of media and don't think if something doesn't work for me it shouldn't work for anyone else. I just have a pessimistic nature I have never been able to completely tame.