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Most of my creative hobby time is being spent on coding at the moment, although this doesn’t seem to mean I’ve been doing huge amounts of it. Nonetheless I feel like I have most of what I need on this domain now. I was looking at the omg.lol suite out of interest the other day and realised I offer basically all those services to myself …. Nice.

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In service of fulfilling one or two of the subcomponents of my new year’s resolution to (largely metaphorically) “drink more tea”, I’ve been working on my suite of media trackers, which now broadly record everything I want them to, i.e. books, films, manga, games, and Pokémon. Apart from the last, all of them are based on my main set of journal files, which I’ve been keeping in the same format for about five years now. I think a lot of Emacs users have some kind of journal system based on using a single file for a month or a year, or logging items of the same type in the same file, but mine have always been based on a filetree that distinguishes years, then months, and lastly contains a different file for each day with anything related to that day contained within it. It seems that when I installed org-journal in 2022 I was already using this system and merely configured the package to work around it. Of course users of inferior text editors don’t tend to have the option to do this and just have to deal with whatever structure is imposed on them by the software, which is quite cringe actually.

With the help of org-capture I use these files to log pretty much everything, including my engagement with various forms of media but also brief private journal entries of the sort I might previously have overshared on social networks, archived posts from a variety of deleted and just-about-clinging-on microblogging services, places I visit (also tracked on this site), the complete record of all concerts and services I’ve sung/played in going back to 2009, and even typed-up entries from the physical planners I used between 2008 and early 2018 – the digitisation of these being a work in (very slow) progress. This list has ballooned over the years, as has the amount of time it takes Deft to initialise. When I started tracking all these things in a filetree I naturally had no idea that I might one day be using a. a big old Python script to put them on my website, and b. various org-capture templates to make recording everything easier too. It goes without saying that my Python and elisp skills weren’t at an adequate level to set this system up at the time, but several years of making increasingly bizarre static site generators have since honed them.

When I built the games tracker I based it on the (then brand new) Backloggery design; when I first made the book tracker I wondered about basing it on Goodreads, although enough of the Goodreads features were irrelevant or unnecessary for me to decide it wasn’t worth trying. Similarly, I briefly thought I could base the manga tracker on MyAnimeList before realising the way MAL displays statistics doesn’t really appeal to me. Everything except games (and Pokémon, on which more later) therefore shares a common design and looks the same as the rest of the site, which is probably a good thing. There are a few features I’m thinking about trying to implement in the future: perhaps some kind of area for brief reviews of books or films that might once have been monthly roundup material. Then again, I don’t know if I really want to share my opinions on media outside this household – apart from “I really really like final fantasy ten, oh god I like final fantasy ten so much,” you can have that one for free.

There’s also an argument for keeping all this light on features so as not to slow down the build process. Thanks to the life-changing firestarter package I have the build script set to run every time I save a journal file, but this conversely means I can’t really save more than one such file in the time it takes to run the script. Fortunately it only takes about five seconds to build everything and sync the pages to the server via rclone, but I don’t want it to get much slower than that. Possibly there is some refactoring that could be done à la swapping out lists of dictionaries for dictionaries of dictionaries, a nuance that was lost on me when I first started putting this together but has undoubtedly made the latest addition (the manga tracker) more efficient. I definitely and perhaps more urgently need to do something similar in my TCG site build script, which takes several minutes to run in its current state, plus several more microseconds every time I add another card to my heaving collection, no doubt.

Having synced the org-capture templates to my phone recently and made the various changes to my config that allow me to run Emacs on Android without errors, I can now track all this directly from my phone as well. I previously thought there was an issue with tab completion in the Android version, but thanks to our good friends at StackOverflow I learnt it was actually a problem with the keyboard I was using. Now that I’ve installed Unexpected Keyboard in its place, everything works as well as can be expected for a tiny touchscreen. The Python script that generates the HTML files also compiles lists of books, manga, and games in progress, which are then passed as completion lists to the org-capture templates. This minimises the chance of recording the same piece of media twice with slight variations in the name. For manga, I also have another file that lists each series along with the number of extant chapters and volumes. This requires manual updating when new chapters are released, which is a bit of a departure from the spirit of the whole endeavour (and certainly from the “drink more tea” ethos; you will have to take my word for this), but the alternative was to try finagling something involving making API calls to MyAnimeList, which definitely would have slowed things down and also would have relied on that website holding up-to-date versions of the relevant information, which seems not to be guaranteed based on my investigations.

“Ah, but you could have created an account on that website and updated the information yourself.”

Look, don’t make me tap the sign. (The sign reads “I will not make an Account on a Website”.)

I wrote quite a lot of the Pokémon tracker on Christmas Day on my phone, including most of the CSS, which was a predictably excruciating experience. This one is based on a single table that contains all my Pokémon across the different Switch games I own. If I move a Pokémon from one game to another or it levels up, I simply update the relevant cell in the table, and via firestarter the page is rebuilt when I save the file. I based the appearance of the page loosely on the Home mobile app and downloaded the images from Bulbagarden (”Bulgaria”, my phone helpfully suggests). The filters for restricting which Pokémon are displayed by level are very helpful for checking which of them I should be including in my party; they’re big fat dirty CSS, in the sense of “a big fat dirty beat”, and probably nobody should look at it unless they want to be horrified. The process of adding everything to the table also taught me that while I think I’m very witty with my incredibly obscure references that I use as sources of Pokémon nicknames, there are in fact a few nicknames that I’ve used more than once: Squeako (two Pikachu), Tavros (two Tauros), Hex, Spike, Xanthe, Bridget, Vilia, and three Brians.

• i mean guess who i’m thinking about
• THIRTY-FIVE years old
• re what’s got him so tortured can i interest you in a 350k+ fanfiction

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I realised I could leverage the combined power of <details> and CSS filters to create a lightbox without any need for JS, which is something I’ve been wishing I could do for months … so it turns out I could do it all along.

In principle, this is how it works:

• <summary> is a small version of the full image
• full image is contained in <details> and displayed in the centre of the viewport as large as possible when the <details> is open
• when <details> is open, <summary> expands to cover the whole screen behind the full image, so a click anywhere but on the image will close the <details> and therefore dismiss it
• when <details> is open, backdrop-filter is set on <summary> to blur the page behind, and overflow: hidden prevents scrolling
• the thumbnail image is also hidden (i.e. display: none) when the <details> is open to avoid it jumping around when the <summary> fills the screen

The CSS is here! There’s quite a lot at the start for resetting the appearance of <details> elements as my main and FFX CSS styles both alter them quite significantly. After that, though, it’s a pretty small number of declarations. The HTML is also simple:

<details class="lightbox"><summary><img src="URL of thumbnail image"></summary><img src="URL of big image" loading="lazy"></details>

Let’s see if it works on this page (if not I’ll edit the CSS again later lmao).

There’s also some CSS for making a “gallery”, which essentially displays a series of these lightbox <details> elements as a grid of 100 x 100 thumbnails when they’re wrapped in a <div class="gallery">. I’ve implemented this on my Rise Of The Ronin screenshots page.

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• 1
• or
• 35
• depending on how you count
• but the more inclusive phrasing “the internet” would have yielded the real answer which is
• 269
• don’t forget kids there is only One Website

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There’s been a meme going around Dreamwidth recently with the following rules:

How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fanwork title? One fanwork per line, “A” and “The” do not count for “a” and “t” (or their equivalent in other languages). Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fanwork count.

The problem with this is that I often avoid giving my fics titles, so I’ve adjusted the meme a bit to be about first lines instead. Also I reject the notion that articles should deserve special treatment. Being me, I wrote a Python script to parse my fic files and construct the list using the most recently updated fic starting with each letter, so I can rerun it at some unspecified point in the future and see how things have changed; it’s not particularly optimised but it does the job.

Here’s the list:

• “Auron,” said Braska, “I was thinking of going to the Night of Departed Souls this year.” (2025)
• Braska was once used to casting magic with his hands; that was before he began his summoner’s training. (2024)
• Coming back was a little harder each time. (2024)
• Dion’s convalescence had been long and troubling, with one day’s progress seemingly lost the next, the prince slow and quiet and sometimes barely even lucid. (2023)
• Emma’s partner Pokémon was an Eevee: it was a family tradition. (2021)
• “Fukuzawa-san recommended you to me,” said Ernest. (2025)
• Grace was finishing the washing up when Pad walked in, Mikey draped over his shoulder. (2021)
• “How does it feel?” says Auron. (2024)
• It would soon be winter. (2025)
• Jill was eleven, and a head taller than Dion at least. (2023)
• K: none
• Lulu had told her not to cry – but she couldn’t help it, knowing the part she had played in sending so many people to the Farplane. (2023)
• Masahiro arrived at his desk one morning to find a single red rose awaiting him. (2025)
• Noctis was already sitting outside when Prompto rose. (2025)
• “Oh!” said Laventon. (2025)
• Picture England in the first days of 1987. (2015)
• Q: none
• Robert normally avoided the poisoner; she was quite disconcerting. (2025)
• Spring had arrived in Bevelle. (2025)
• The door swung open at the gambling house. (2025)
• U: none
• Vargas had just knocked out the king of Figaro himself. (2021)
• “What’s up, Rei?” said Akari as Rei walked into the village. (2025)
• X: none
• “You look at me as if you expect me to slip,” they say, and it’s true. (2025)
• Zuke had anticipated spending the rest of his days quietly, atoning for his failures as a monk of Yevon. (2022)

Unsurprisingly when I’m basing this on first lines instead of titles, quite a few of the results happen to be the name of a character (no prizes for predicting the “A” and “B” ha). Anyway, that’s a score of 22/26 for a total of 269 fics. I’m amazed that we had to go back to 2015 for P (and relieved that this particular fic is not available for public consumption). Also quite surprised that FFX fics account for only seven of these, although of course most of my FFX writing recently has been One Fic (it’s S).

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Big news for Dan and Phil fans, am I right! I’ve been having a great time immersing myself in the phandom again like it’s 2016. @adt also seems to be becoming a fan (their only straight male viewer or whatever). Just as I don’t watch YouTubers but unflinchingly make an exception for D+P, I also don’t subscribe to Patreons but have naturally signed up to theirs.

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I’m doing the same thing for my /yuletide signup as last year, i.e. using the event as an excuse to find myself a new VN to buy and play over the course of November/December. Doing this last year got me a new blorbo, so it was successful on all fronts really.

Helpfully all the VNs in the tagset are marked with “(Visual Novel)” or something similar, so I wrote a Python script that gets them from a downloaded copy of the tagest page, then queries the VNDB API based on my inclusion criteria.

I need the following libraries: re for trimming the canon names from AO3; requests for making the API calls; BeautifulSoup for parsing the tagset HTML:

import re,requestsfrom bs4 import BeautifulSoup

I don’t want to have to play anything massively long as I’m on a deadline, so I’ll restrict it to VNs that are 45 hours or less.

maxhours = 45

Firstly extracting anything as a VN from the tagset and then stripping the title to just one of the piped alternatives where they exist:

with open("tagset.html","r") as tagset:    tagsoup = BeautifulSoup(tagset,"html.parser")    fandoms = tagsoup.find_all("li",class_="fandom")    vns = []    for fandom in fandoms:        title = fandom.find("h4")        if "Visual Novel" in title.text:            thetitle = re.sub(" \(.*Visual Novel.*\)\n.*\n.*","",re.sub(".* \| ","",title.text.strip()))            vns.append(thetitle)

Then looking each of these up via the API and applying a few filters using the syntax it provides: I want VNs available in English, originally in Japanese, and available on one of the platforms I have convenient access to at the moment (this doesn’t include PC, so a lot are excluded including apparently any BL VNs, unfortunately). After getting each result I exclude it if it’s over the 45 hours – this can’t be done when the initial search is performed as there’s no granular filter for length. I include the match from the tagset as part of the returned result to flag any cases where the search string has returned a false positive.

final = []for vn in vns:    x = requests.post("https://api.vndb.org/kana/vn",json={"filters":["and",["lang","=","en"],["search","=",vn],["olang","=","ja"],["or",["platform","=","ps4"],["platform","=","ps5"],["platform","=","swi"]]],"fields":"title, length_minutes, id"})    try:        for result in x.json()["results"]:            if result["length_minutes"] < (maxhours * 60):                final.append(result["title"] + ": https://vndb.org/" + result["id"] + " (" + vn + ")")    except requests.exceptions.JSONDecodeError:        pass

Then removing duplicates:

final = sorted(list(dict.fromkeys(final)))for vn in final:    print(vn)

Once I’d taken out the false positives, I was left with about 19 VNs, which I looked up on VNDB to find the ten that seemed most appealing. I’ll make those ten my Yuletide offer and then buy + play whichever ends up being my assignment.

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It’s time:

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Update about a month later: it’s put me at a disadvantage with regard to sharing my posts but I’m no longer using Bridgy Fed, so this is irrelevant now. The idea of relying on any form of “load-bearing infrastructure for the social web” is deeply unappealing to me.

The only reason I’d ever be tempted to set up a Bluesky account, or go through the whole “set up a PDS oh god my eyes are glazing over” thing, would be to repost nice art/techbro memes/et cetera, and it doesn’t really seem worth setting up a PDS oh god my eyes are glazing over for that. My “journal” posts are syndicated to the … cringe … ATmosphere by Bridgy Fed as long as they don’t have bad words in them or whatever it is that triggers the block on the crossposter. So I do kind of have a Bluesky “presence”, if not an actual account. I wouldn’t want to make a real account, even solely for reposting purposes, because I’m not about the “signing up for other people’s websites” life, but using that existing presence for reposts doesn’t seem completely objectionable when it’s there anyway.

Bridgy Fed does have support for reposts. If I enact a repost of something by writing a little bit of HTML that conforms to that syntax, and then send the webmention to Bridgy Fed, it should work in the same way that crossposting usually does. I didn’t want to make a separate page for every repost, because all I need to include for each one is the URL of the original and the time at which I’m reposting it. So I set up a page with a (hidden) <ul> with the class h-feed, put my h-card details and the Bridgy Fed link into that, and then added an <li> for each repost with the h-entry class, with the repost link and the time inside, marked up as required.

I wanted a way of adding new reposts to this file without having to go in and manually edit the HTML each time, so I eventually worked out a bash script that would do the following:

1. Read in the URL for the post I'm reposting.
2. Find a specific string in the “boosts” page (basically just a marker for the top of the h-feed), and then after that string append the <li>, marked up as required, adding the URL as the value of the href attribute and the current time formatted in the required way as the value of the datetime attribute.
   • String to get the timestamp: date +'%Y-%m-%d %T'
   • String to pass to sed: "s|<!-- sed -->|<!-- sed -->\n<li class=\"h-entry\"><a class=\"u-repost-of\" href=\"$post\"></a><time class=\"dt-published\" datetime=\"$timestamp\"></time></li>|g"
3. Send the webmention to Bridgy Fed using cURL.

The “sending the webmention” part was slightly more complex than I expected, because it looks like if you’ve already sent BF a webmention from a certain page, it ignores it on subsequent requests, which I guess makes sense. I somehow came up with the idea of appending ? + the current Unix timestamp to the URL to force BF or whatever’s sending the request to treat it as a new source. So this is read in as a variable in the same way: utime="$(date +%s)" and then $utime goes into the cURL command.

I saved this in a script in my home directory on the server, so all I need to do is ssh in using Termius and run ./boost.sh, paste in the URL of the post I want to repost at the prompt, and that should work! At least, it’s worked so far.

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I honestly meant to do this on Sunday, but I woke up and found myself obsessed with a. Pokémon and b. Python, so I spent most of the day playing Shining Pearl and indexing lists instead. Then I wrote some form of it on Monday evening, but it was taking so long that I then had to put it aside until Tuesday because I (annoyingly) seem to have a lot of things to say about various instances of media I have Consumed 🍽 recently. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

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Um … I said I was going to post some thoughts about Citrus Con and it’s been over a month how did that happen. I think I originally planned to structure this around some kind of grand narrative (dear diary, I have been plagued by various big brain thoughts recently …), but at this point, we’ll just see if I can coax it into something more substantial than bullet points. [Having written the below … yeah ok I definitely managed that. Incapable of not effortposting, I apologise to all and especially to my own self.]

I deleted my discord account in the great “fuck all of yiz” of 2024–5, but made a temporary one for Citrus Con because I was so sure I was going to have a good time based on the last one. And I did! Despite not being massively into smut on either the creation or the consumption side, and despite being perpetually unaware of what the popular BL canons are, it feels like this is the right kind of fandom space for me to hang out in. There were quite a few panels that focused on non-corporate ways of engaging with the internet, and some being run by people who clearly aren’t really in the independent web/fediverse/Dreamwidth space but had similar ideas to many of those of us who are: censorship is bad (cries in “recent internet news”), we need to encourage healthy connection online, et cetera. The small web meetup thread was also really lively. It kind of feels like we weird non-corporate internet nerds are taking over the fujoshi space, although I suppose that makes sense when the corporate side of the internet is so focused on amplifying profit-friendly content and shuttering the rest (cries for a second time in “recent internet news”). Maybe it’s that those of a fujoshi inclination [using this silly phraseology to avoid having to pluralise “fujoshi”] are driven to alternative methods of doing web things, and those of us who just like alternative methods of doing web things for the sake of it end up in close quarters with those on the fujoshi side, and we all become the best of friends. (But then I’ve always liked both doing niche things with computers and two men kissing, so explain that one.)

Something I loved about Citrus Con when I attended for the first time last year, and loved again this time, was the fact that it really celebrates amateurism. People create “bad” or at least unpolished fanworks, other people cheer them on – I feel like this isn’t seen much in mainstream fandom spaces, where the focus on metrics drives people to try and make their creations as professional-looking as possible (don’t get me started on my irrational hatred of those banners people make for when they share their fics on social media). The stuff we used to post online twenty years ago was often, by objective standards, not the result of skilled artistry – I mean, I was twelve years old, so obviously not in my case, but even among people who were already adults. I look back at old archives of FFX art and so much of it is badly drawn, I read old fics and they have terrible grammar and spelling, but people were having fun and creating stuff for the love of it. And we are amateurs, in the etymological sense – we should be doing this because we love it, we shouldn’t be writing any two guys fic for the popular fandoms that we don’t care about just to get “engagement” (and, er, raking in the advertising money for billionaire techbros? ok), we shouldn’t be creating a veneer of professionalism to fool people into clicking on bland fics in which nothing happens (consider the irreproachable grammar and punctuation of A “I”-generated fiction and the absolute nothingburger of content within). That’s why constructive criticism died: because if we’re putting our work out there with the underlying implication that it’s of professional quality, it’s expected that there should be no criticism at all. If it’s “bad” (in skill terms, not in morality terms), it’s failed and so have we, the named creator with a social media portfolio. And when we’re looking at other people’s fics and other people’s art, we know this, so we don’t give them constructive criticism either.

I’ve gone a bit off piste here (can’t help my innate tendency to circle back to “modern internet bad” … I guess there is a grand narrative after all), but what I wanted to say was that we don’t do fandom as a job – we do it as a way of connecting with people. And the two to three days of the anarcho-syndicalist Citrus Con utopia* are great at encouraging that, while the corporate structure of social media, supposedly built for us to connect with our fellow human beings, is actually, to coin a phrase, fucking shite.

*Having recently made the mistake of posting something in my usual flippant style in an online place where those replying (a certain community of velociraptors) seem to have thought I was deadly serious, I would like to clarify that I am not seriously attempting to assign a political ideology to a fandom event.

Something else I was thinking about at Citrus Con was the division between eastern and western fandom traditions – although to be clear, by “eastern fandom traditions” what I really mean is “traditions followed within western fandoms for eastern media”. I was first introduced to fandom through eastern media and while I didn’t start writing fic for eastern canons until many years later, I’ve always felt more at home using terms like “yaoi” than “slash”. There were a few people attending Citrus Con who appeared to be much more on the western fandom side and I did wonder what they were getting out of it … there was also a panel on “western BL” which I tuned into for about 10 minutes before deciding I had no interest in the media being discussed. I Guess I’m Just A Weeb (or more realistically, maybe the draw of American media for western fans is supposed to be that people find certain aspects of it relatable, and not being American, I don’t). But this made me think of the monopolistic fanfiction-archive-cum-semi-social-media-site (the one with three “A”s and an “O”). I was reading some of the early discussions in /otw​_news a while ago and I was struck by not only how western media-centric it was but also how little discussion of including eastern fandoms I found. There was a big debate about how the use of the phrase “media fandom” was seen to exclude RPF writers – and yeah, absolutely, I’ve written enough RPF myself to understand that. But there was nothing about how to account for the structural tropes of eastern fandoms – as we see today in the pretty abysmal tag wrangling decisions surrounding some canons. Somebody posted a list of existing fic archives to the comm early in the discussion and it contained only one multifandom archive for eastern fandoms and none in the fandom-specific section. (A couple of the comments then mention yaoi sites, although interestingly, they’re all in languages other than English, which seems to back up my “can’t relate to American media” theory.) I was thinking about these issues while redesigning my fic archive – I want to move away from the standardised (i.e. Americanised) terminology, so I’m using the terms BL and GL, using lemon and lime icons to mark sexual content, and generally taking inspiration from the eastern fandom archives of yore. And I think (quick, go back to the supposed subject of this post) Citrus Con empowered me to do that in a way.

It was the first time I’d used Discord since late 2024. I really left because I want to be minimally present on the corporate internet, but I also have a lot of unspecified hangups about engaging in online interaction so my engagement with Discord servers prior to the aforementioned “fuck all of yiz” had been steadily dwindling (something something FF16 fandom). Knowing the event was time-limited and so was my Discord account, which I deleted as soon as the con was over, meant I was much more relaxed about interacting with people. I used a lot of smile emojis of various kinds to help convey that I was just there to have a nice chill time, although I doubt there would have been any drama either way. I even did the occasional overshare (which, by my standards, consists of saying one single syllable relating to my physical and/or mental health. Yes I know I occasionally do that on this very website, like once a year or whatever, but I wish I wouldn’t). But it was all just in service of genuinely having a chat, and I know from experience that if this had been an ongoing thing I would have found it much more difficult to maintain my ability to participate.

The end of Citrus Con feels like the end of an in-person con. Everyone’s standing around having awkward but meaningful chats while the organisers turn the lights off and dismantle the stalls as a subtle and ineffective way of encouraging us to leave. I think that proves that they somehow manage to create an inclusive, exciting, “I’m in a conference centre with a load of other weirdos and I’m very tired” atmosphere. The variety of events they put on – watch parties, attendee-requested meetups, the artists’ alley stamp rally, the giveaway bot popping up in random channels, the session where everyone gets a common set of prompts and has to create something – I think that contributes to the feeling of actually being there. And I don’t really know whether that leads me into a nice conclusion for my grand narrative, with the obvious points already made (fuck the police; do stuff because you like it; capitalism bad as per; homogenisation of culture also bad), so I’ll go back to trying not to overshare my big brain thoughts and surely failing.

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Switched from Ubuntu to Debian on my laptop this weekend, long overdue. I was on Ubuntu 20.04, which was past the end of its support period, so instead of updating to 24.04 I thought I’d try Debian and then if it all went horribly wrong I could use it as an opportuniy to update Ubuntu anyway. I also wanted to take the chance to get away from Canonical, the bastards, et cetera! The VPS is on Debian and it’s never seemed massively different from what I was used to, so I felt confident enough that it would be usable.

With previous Linux installations I’ve been addled by my time as a ricing bro in 2018-ish and insisted on setting everything up from a set of install scripts and dOtFiLeS, but this time I thought … it’s been four years, let’s have a nice time making new decisions about how things should look. Let’s use an actual desktop environment instead of an extremely minimalistic window manager with no support for extremely basic functions (like, er, locking the screen when I close the laptop lid). I chose XFCE because it’s meant to be lightweight and robust; I’m not bothered by all that flashy GNOME stuff tbh.

 export PATH=~/.local/bin:$PATH# case-insensitive autocompleteautoload -Uz +X compinit && compinitzstyle ':completion:*' matcher-list 'm:{a-zA-Z}={A-Za-z}'zstyle ':completion:*' menu select# commandsalias gimp="~/.local/bin/GIMP-3.0.4-x86_64.AppImage"alias scrobble="python3 ~/Documents/proj/utils/scrobble.py"alias otd="python3 ~/Documents/proj/utils/otd.py"alias track="cd ~/Documents/proj/trackers && ./build.sh && cd -"alias updatesite="cd ~/Documents/proj/notes && ./build.sh && cd -"# prompt + tab titlesPS1="%~ %% "export PROMPT_COMMAND='printf "\033]0;%s\007" "${PWD/#$HOME/~}"'precmd() { eval "$PROMPT_COMMAND" }# this has to go lastsource /usr/share/zsh-syntax-highlighting/zsh-syntax-highlighting.zsh

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⬆ that’s the sound of a speeding train, which is also me, because I a. love public transport more than life itself and b. have done so many things in the last month!! I’m currently in Belgium for work, as indicated by my recent increasingly obscure and obnoxious fediverse posts, and a couple of weeks ago was in Portugal, also for work, which was less fun probably because I didn’t stow a small @adt in my suitcase, and, I suppose, because of the much more significant language barrier. Also attended two cons, the local in-person one where I got a nice Pokémon blind bag and some other shwag (consumerism … really the only reason why I attend this con given that I eschew all the cosplay and gaming aspects), and the hotly anticipated Citrus Con – about which I am writing a brief (almost entirely positive) review which will be posted, er, someday. As a result of said Citrus Con I also commissioned some fanart of my boys at last! And it happened to be taking place the weekend that I was recuperating from some unanticipated surgery (of the extremely minor variety … honestly even calling it surgery makes it sound more significant than it was) and wasn’t supposed to be on my feet much, so it was a good time to be spending more than two days in front of the computer screen constantly.

• from tomorrow’s chapter:
• He wondered whether Auron had contracted some kind of fever.
• lol sorry auron. it is time for you to Suffer

• canon divergence
• aka the theme of four out of my five longest fics not counting asal
• particularly the flavour of canon divergence that is like “how do we make things get back to how they are in canon”
• or like … things that seem like they’re going to be fixits and then get worse
• or things that seem like they’ll get worse but then end up as fixits

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The fourth of June, and I stumble into the roundup arena with unprecedented lateness. As a firm believer in separating work space and hobby space, I always roll my eyes at the “I’ve been really busy at work” excuse, actually, and enumerating the various exciting responsibilities I’ve had recently (chairing five meetings in the last two days, addressing people by their names as some kind of weird power move, etc.) doesn’t make it much better. Fortunately I really enjoy being busy and being able to enact weird power moves. On with the show.

Honestly the main non-work-related thing I’ve been thinking about since early May is the new FF MTG cards? I have preordered, um, a quantity of them. I don’t actually think I’ve ever seen an MTG card in the flesh despite its being the exemplary trading card game, so I have no idea what to expect in physical terms, but just give me some of these beautiful pictures, please.

• not as if i haven’t described this multiple times before
• most recently when i made the shrine
• but now i guess i can do it again tumblr tag-style …
• (yes i wrote a lot of lisp and css for this)
• so look. i saw this guy standing there looking menacing in the opening cinematic
• and i was like. “wow. this guy is definitely a villain.”
• and then he provided some vague guidance for c. 5 minutes before fucking off
• and THEN he turned up again literal hours later and was extremely stronk
• and THEN!!! he told everyone he was tired
• yeah i think i fell in love with him when he said he was tired
• idek
• but getting insights into what he was like as a younger (and somewhat more alive) man cemented it
• the tragic backstory … the hidden trauma … the unreasonable loyalty …
• the Tiredness
• i guess (shrug)

• terence
• wait i didn’t even see “what game”
• … Terence: The Game

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April turned out to be reasonably productive in various ways; I had a week off work after Easter so I spent a lot of time doing website stuff that week, and the impetus to do more of it seems to have remained with me.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

I figured out how to use my own domain as a Dreamwidth account via OpenID, in a way that should work for any static site! I initially thought it wouldn’t be possible without installing some incredibly complex OpenID server on the VPS, but then I realised you can delegate authentication to somewhere else just by setting a couple of lines in <head> on the index page. The only problem is that DW is about the only site left that cares about OpenID so it’s very hard to find a server, especially one with frictionless open registration. DW itself has an OpenID server, but I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to use DW to ouroborally log into itself via OpenID, haha. Then I remembered … LiveJournal.

I set up an LJ account with the username leggation (silly vaguely Rise of the Ronin-themed low-effort wordplay) using a burner email address, then I added these two lines to the <head> in index.html:

<link rel="openid.server" href="https://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml"><link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://leggation.livejournal.com">

Then I attempted to log into DW via OpenID, fully expecting it not to work, but amazingly, it did. I left a comment on someone’s journal (URL not shared to protect the innocent) and it displays tre.praze.net as the username and links to my site, aw yeahhh.

OpenID accounts can’t post journal entries, but they do seem to be able to do pretty much everything else. I’m still playing around with this, but here’s what I’ve discovered so far:

• I can join communities but not post to them.
• I do get the standard free account quota of 15 icons, and I can receive notifications (including to email) and track posts like any account.
• There is no easy way to link to the profile page; the link above with the user ID needs to be used. Taking the &t=I off the end stops it working, oddly.
• I can be granted access to other journals, and can also grant other accounts access to my journal even though it doesn’t exist, which is weird.
• I can’t buy anything in the shop; other accounts can’t buy anyting on my behalf either.
• The <user> tag doesn’t work for linking to my profile, but the option for external sites under “Linking” on the profile page works, i.e. <span style="white-space: nowrap;"><a href="https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=4225212&amp;t=I"><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png" alt="[identity profile]" width="16" height="16" style="vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;" /></a><a href="https://tre.praze.net/" rel="nofollow"><b>tre.praze.net</b></a></span>, resulting in tre.praze.net. It’s a bit misleading because the main link goes to my site instead of to the DW profile (seeing as my site effectively takes the role of the journal page), so I would maybe go for <span style="white-space:nowrap;"><a href="https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=4225212&amp;t=I"><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png" alt="Dreamwidth OpenID account" width="16" height="16" style="vertical-align:text-bottom;border:0;padding-right:1px;"><b>tre.praze.net</b></a></span> as a way of ensuring anyone who follows the link stays on DW.
• Edit: turns out I can use the <user> tag in the form of the incredibly intuitive <user name="ext_2615312">, a different number from the profile “user ID”

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

When I was looking for a way to implement comments on my fic archive, I found some instructions for using Discord webhooks to do so; it wasn’t this post but the vibe was similar. Using the method described, one sets up a private server and configures a webhook to post messages to a certain channel, and then one can include some JS on one’s site that sends a POST request to the webhook URL containing text captured in a form. It’s cleaner than a lot of alternative services and doesn’t require embedding any non-customisable cringe on one’s own site, and I used it for some time without any trouble.

But this still involves passing data through someone else’s server, and I was keen to delete my Discord account during the Great Account Deletion of 2024–5, so I was keen to find a way to replace this method. Eventually I came to a simple realisation: the POST request doesn’t have to go to a Discord webhook. It can in fact go to anything that accepts a POST request. It can go to a GoToSocial account.

I installed GoToSocial on the VPS in September 2024 to replace Pleroma as my fediverse instance of choice; it’s very lightweight and extremely robust. Like other fediverse software, GTS provides an API that allows posting from other sources as long as the user is in possession of an account-specific access token (the instructions for generating these are extremely convoluted and I kind of love that ngl). Posting to a GTS account can therefore be done by sending a POST request to the API. So using the general method for sending to Discord webhooks from a static site, we can swap out the Discord URL for the GTS API endpoint and include the access token, and then the content of whatever has been put into the form will be posted as a status by that account. I set up a specific GTS account to receive these form submissions, set it to manually approve follow requests and to post all statuses as followers-only, then approved only my own main account as a follower. So if someone posts a comment on any of my fics (and on some other pages on my site now that I’m starting to implement this elsewhere), that comment will show up in my fediverse feed but can’t be seen by anyone else until I manually post it on my site.

Like every weird workaroundy tech thing, this of course has some disadvantages:

• I have to manually post and format the comments – I mean, yeah, it’s a static site. I would have had to do the same with anything relying on webhooks or API calls. I get so few comments that this obviously isn’t an issue.
• This isn’t a fully static-site-based solution; if I wasn’t running a GTS instance, I wouldn’t be able to keep everything within my own server like this. If the purview of my administrative capacities extended only to, say, a handful of HTML pages on a Neocities subdomain, I would need to invoke something provided by a third party. But, just putting this out there, there’s nothing to stop someone in that position opening a similar “private” account on an open Mastodon instance and using that as the endpoint for receiving comments. Maybe that’s ethically preferable to using Discord, just saying.
• I’m exposing the GTS access token to anyone bold enough to Ctrl-U on a page with the comment form, so anyone can use it to make an API call to the instance and post a status from that account. As long as nobody posts “drop tables” or whatever, am i right … I mean, I’m reasonably sure the messages are sanitised and the only meaningful thing that can be done via the API without needing additional credentials is making posts, which only I will ever see.

Implementing this system on a given page in its most basic incarnation just needs two components, the first being the comment form:

<form id="theform" onsubmit="sendContact(event)" class="jsonly">  <input type="text" id="nameInput" required placeholder="Name">  <textarea id="messageInput" rows="5" maxlength="4800" required placeholder="Comment"></textarea>  <button type="submit">Submit</button></form>

and the second being the JavaScript that makes the API call:

<script>  async function sendContact(ev) {    ev.preventDefault();    const thePage = window.location.href;    const senderName = document.getElementById('nameInput').value;    const senderMessage = document.getElementById('messageInput').value;    const gtsUrl = 'https://{GoToSocial URL}/api/v1/statuses';    const response = await fetch(gtsUrl, {      method: 'POST',      headers: {	'Content-Type': 'application/json',	'Authorization': 'Bearer {access token}',      },      body: JSON.stringify({'status' : 'new comment on ' + thePage + ' from ' + senderName + '\n\n' + senderMessage}),    });    if (response.ok) {      alert('Comment submitted!');    } else {      alert('Comment failed to send for some reason!');    }    document.getElementById("theform").reset();  }</script>

I also like to hide the comment form and replace it with an apologetic message for anyone who has JavaScript disabled; I do this by adding <noscript><style>.jsonly{display:none;}</style></noscript> to the page head and then putting the jsonly class on the form element, and then adding something in its place using <noscript>. I think I picked this one up from the Fandom Coders discord server, back when I used Discord, lol.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

I think since FF16 it’s become pathologically impossible for me to develop an interest in media that actually have a fandom. The benefits of enjoying things that nobody else knows about are similar to the benefits of withdrawing from every online community and posting exclusively on one’s own website, and we know who loves to do that. On the other hand, Chroniques de la mariée de Bretagne was always going to be up my street, because it’s a manga (ticks the weeb box) set in 13th-century Brittany (ticks the “weeb about France and especially Brittany” box). Other things it features that I appreciate include swordfights, the Catholic church, internal colonialism, imperfect language acquisition, servants displaying ludicrous levels of loyalty towards their masters, and gender fuckery. In very general terms, there’s a similar vibe to Le loup blanc, which I enjoyed reading last year. I should probably make a list of books I’ve read that are set in Brittany and whether they’re Good or Bad, but it could probably be summed up as “Merlin’s wood is Bad and everything else is Good.”

A single volume of manga always seems very insubstantial to me because of how little text there is … I finished the first one in a couple of hours and it feels like the story is only just getting started, although I suppose that explains why so many manga series seem to go on for years and years. The French translation of volume 4 comes out next week and I’m almost certainly going to order it along with 2 and 3 from the fnac (there is no English translation and tbh I hope things stay that way). I’m looking forward to reading more of the series and having more thoughts about it, safe in the knowledge that I am unlikely to come across anyone else doing so.

My two favourite moments are the following:

An route. An route. This is so obscure and hilarious. (Also on the next page she asks him why his Breton is so bad and he’s like “I’m English” … 10/10, perfect.)

Their faces as they behold the most bishounen monk ever … I can’t. “Vous êtes… un moine ?” was basically also my reaction. Priceless.

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Really most of what I have done on the computer over the past 25 years or so is just implement various systems to organise my files in what I consider to be the optimum way. I feel like this is one of my principal hobbies … and yet, our house can most accurately be described as “random shite everywhere”. If only there was a way I could redirect this obsession towards physical objects.

Anyway, here are some things I did in March, many of which relate to organising files in one way or another.

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Admittedly, the more obvious question is perhaps not how but why. While testing the script below I came across a comment I’d left early in 2022 talking about how great Dreamwidth was and how I loved it so much, but I’m increasingly convinced that most of my opinions come with expiry dates. At that stage in my life I was very keen on the idea of seeking out anyone who’d ever written Final Fantasy fanfiction and having substantial conversations with them about minute details of the games, but over time the allure faded as I realised most of those people usually wanted to post about their lives instead … the blend of fandom talk and personal talk is something I find hard to navigate, this being one of the various reasons why I also deleted my Discord account a few months ago. I would actually like to talk to people about fandom stuff without having to be considered their “friend” first, but the reading-list access-list culture of Dreamwidth makes this difficult to do on personal journals. Moreover, most communities are extremely inactive such that when you get the occasional reply from a melter, it’s like 50% of any replies you get within a week, which is also not especially pleasant.

In general, I’ve been deleting my accounts on third-party websites where possible anyway, now that I can do pretty much everything I care about on my own domain. Dreamwidth is ultimately just another silo – one that doesn’t have advertising and tracking, sure, but still another American website with an infrastructure I am largely unable to modify and a set of intricate and confusing social norms (at least, such as I understand it, which is obviously what is most salient in terms of my own personal experience, even if those less neurotic than I am may have the good fortune to see it as 100% chill). As far as I’m aware, there has been limited discussion of implementing some federation-related features such as fediverse/ActivityPub compatibility and IndieAuth as a replacement for OpenID (which is pretty much dead, Ask Me How I Know), but these clearly aren’t priorities.

I always try to remove my posts from a given website before embarking on account deletion adventures, if the deletion process itself doesn’t wipe them for me (yes I went through every single Discord message I’d sent in each server and removed them one by one … fortunately I am not especially talkative). On Dreamwidth, comments from deleted accounts remain visible, but I really didn’t want to have my various hot takes floating around the internet in ways beyond my control for years afterwards, especially not associated with a username that people may be able to trace to me, and especially not when a number of the comments I left in 2022 were written with an “I want to be friends with everyone who has ever played a Final Fantasy game” mentality. People change, even within three years – oddly, though, one of the things that has never changed about me is my desire to delete my data as thoroughly as possible from websites I’m no longer using.

Dreamwidth has a “comment management” function, which shows users a list of their comments allowing quick access to them for deletion, but even for paid accounts it only shows the latest 150, including those that have already been deleted. This doesn’t allow us to make a huge amount of progress towards the goal of erasing our existence from Dreamwidth as thoroughly as possible. Instead, that goal has to be met with the assistance of two familiar methods: obscure use of the specific features the site itself provides, and … writing a weird Python script.

from selenium.common import exceptionsfrom selenium.webdriver.common.by import Byfrom selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keysfrom selenium import webdriverimport timetheuser = "USERNAME"thepass = "PASSWORD"targets = ["journal1","journal2","journal3","et cetera"] # just the username, no .dreamwidth.org, hyphens not underscoresstartyear = 2022 # year the first comments were leftbrowser = webdriver.Firefox()browser.get("https://www.dreamwidth.org/login")username = browser.find_element(By.ID,"user")username.send_keys(theuser)password = browser.find_element(By.ID,"lj_loginwidget_password")password.send_keys(thepass)password.send_keys(Keys.RETURN)time.sleep(5)for target in targets:    browser.get("https://" + target + ".dreamwidth.org")    time.sleep(3)    firstentry = browser.find_element(By.XPATH,"//h3[contains(@class,'entry-title') and not(contains(@class, 'sticky-entry-title'))]")    firstentry.click()    time.sleep(3)    date = browser.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME,"datetime")    try:        while (int(date.text[0:4])) >= startyear:            try:                expand = browser.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME,"expand_all")                expand.click()                time.sleep(5)            except:                pass            try:                deletes = browser.find_elements(By.CLASS_NAME,"delete_comment")            except:                deletes = []            if len(deletes) > 1:                goback = False            else:                goback = True            while len(deletes) > 0:                try:                    deletes[0].click()                    confirm = browser.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME,"ui-button")                    confirm.click()                except:                    deletes = []                time.sleep(2)            if goback:                try:                    thenext = browser.find_element(By.XPATH,"//li[contains(@class,'page-next') and not(contains(@class, 'disabled'))]")                    thenext.click()                except:                    backbutton = browser.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME,"link_prev")                    backbutton.click()            else:                browser.refresh()            try:                date = browser.find_element(By.CLASS_NAME,"datetime")            except:                date = 0                break            time.sleep(2)    except exceptions.StaleElementReferenceException:        time.sleep(10)browser.quit()

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Continuing the consolidation of my web presence onto praze.net, I’ve deleted/anonymised all my remaining fics on AO3 except the current WIP and also deleted my Dreamwidth account, I’m freee! A few things spurred this but particularly the fact that this month, for the first time, I experienced the entire cycle of fic posting/sharing/commenting, involving someone I’d never interacted with before, via decentralised means, which was excellent. I’ll have to write a real post about this at some point, but the gist is that being able to send a POST request from frontend JS is lifechanging actually. I may implement comments more widely on my website at some point in the future, but for now I’m enjoying being relatively difficult to communicate with.

Sort of related to this, I’ve updated my online “name” to one I’ve used in several previous stages of my life. I’d been using it for TCG stuff for a while and it felt good to use it elsewhere too. I kind of wish I wasn’t the kind of person who constantly interrogates their identity and the relationship between this and online presence etc., but … this is the way I’ve always been and it’ll probably continue to be the case indefinitely, so I guess the conclusion is “do what makes you happy, but bear in mind that what makes you happy in a few months may be completely different from what makes you happy now”.

2. Gaming

• Yeah so I’m actually obsessed with Pokémon at the moment. Not sure what has prompted this, but it’s just something that has periodically happened to me since about 2003.
• The gen 5 event in Pokémon Go has been useful for Pokédex progress in that game, but has also left my miser-tier Home storage taken up by three useless and non-tradeable copies of Genesect … I get why they don’t let us transfer Go legendaries into the main games, but in the case of mythicals, combining that with “you can’t put these in the GTS” is a bit annoying. When they’re that difficult to obtain, you’d think they might let us just transfer them in anyway.
• Caught Meloetta in Violet, what a bizarre set of instructions to follow. Missed out on the latest Iron Leaves event, however, because apparently there’s only a handful of Pokémon powerful enough to defeat it, and despite my best efforts at levelling one of them from 58 to 100 in a week I only managed to get it to 91.
• Completed the Pokédexes in Pokémon Sword; got a copy of Shining Pearl in celebration. I’m at the fourth gym but trying to beat it with four Pokémon I moved in from Go so they’re all disobeying me … not particularly fruitful.
• Also redesigned my Violet character, who is now extremely cute even if I say so myself etc.!

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A university friend emailed me after a 6+-year gap in our communications, but she wrote the subject line in title case and that’s been the main thing putting me off responding for nearly a month. So that’s where I’m at right now.

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I suspect there is some scholarly literature out there that deals with the position of the player character as subject in video games; it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently regarding Rise Of The Ronin. There are a lot of games where you follow the player character from behind, like every 3D final fantasy game; then there’s the subset of games where you can finely customise that character’s appearance; then there’s the subset of games where that character doesn’t have a canonical name and barely says anything, so pretty much all the conceptualisation of the character is the responsibility of the player.

Playing any third-person single-protagonist game puts the player in that weird space where in some ways you are the character and in other ways you’re not. It seems natural to say things like “I just called my horse” or whatever to describe the character’s actions, but equally natural to refer to the character with a sentence like “he’s not in a good way” at the same time. I think there’s then an extra layer of complexity when the customisability of the character allows them to be based on another person from another piece of media. I can think of my character as myself, in that I’m the one making the decisions about what he does and reacting to the situations he ends up in; I can think of him as the titular rising ronin who has no particular meaning outside the context of this specific game; at the same time I can think of him as that legendary guardian guy from that other game I have some interest in, what’s it called, final … imagination?

My dark fandom secret is that for the most part, I am deeply uninterested in OCs. I can get used to them in the context of a long fanfiction where their role is to interact with canon characters with the result that the latter are put into new and interesting situations, but that’s about it. I’ve seen very little Rise Of The Ronin fanfic, but most of which there is seems to be centred on the protagonist, which makes sense! There’s not much depth to any of the characters in the game, they don’t interact with each other that often, and when they do the protagonist always has some involvement. But because the protagonist is such a blank slate, without even a canonical name or gender, in these fics they always come off as an OC to me. My preferred way to write about the protagonist is to insist on using a descriptor such as “the Veiled Edge” instead of a name, and to theythem them in the way it’s done in the game. It’s actually quite nice to be playing a game set in the nineteenth century and see everyone being very woke about gender, even though it’s clearly just a result of the original being in Japanese.

I find /threesentenceficathon a nice way of testing out new fandoms for fic writing – it’s where I wrote my first tiny FFX fics all those (four) years ago – and I wrote a few Rise Of The Ronin fics for it a couple of weeks ago. I found myself defaulting to a second-person perspective for protagonist-centred stories because it’s a convenient way of not having to come down on any side of the fence regarding their name or gender, but now I’m wondering what that says about the assumed relationship between the protagonist and the player. Am I implicitly suggesting that due to the blank-slatacity of the character, they’re more an avatar of ourselves than, say, Tidus would be? I suppose there’s potential for that to be the case, but it’s not as if it has to be. And maybe related to this is the fact that when I write fic about the Rise Of The Ronin protagonist, I am very definitely not writing it about that aforementioned legendary guardian guy, you know the one, Alex or something. I seem to have no desire to bring him into another world where fic is concerned.

Something I do enjoy doing in fic writing is thinking about how to incorporate game mechanics in a logical way, and Rise Of The Ronin certainly has some pretty unrealistic game mechanics: nothing that’s particularly egregious by today’s gaming standards, but, er, you can completely change your appearance at will, and after a certain point, travel back in time to redo previous missions. I think this could definitely feed into a fun fic thing of some kind, although I don’t think I’d be able to bring myself to call it canon compliant.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

A fic meme that appeals to me more than the one that usually circulates on DW, most directly via ~javert but originally here, questions lightly edited because see post title.

How many fics did you work on in 2024?

15 that I posted, plus A Shot At Life, plus three things in my WIP document, plus one more WIP I remember working on but then deleting = 20.

What’s something new that you tried in a fic in 2024?

Pokémon fusion, picking up a canon specifically for an exchange, edging closer to kink than I had previously dared go; in as yet unposted material, egregious use of ligatures (Final Æon, etc.).

What piece of media inspired you the most? (This can be the fandom you wrote the most for, the one that spawned the most ideas, the one you thought about the most, etc.)

I don’t think I need to answer this question.

How many fandoms did you write for in 2024?

Four: FFX, Nightshade, FF16, plus Rise Of The Ronin WIPs.

What ships captured your heart?

Koto × Sana (Rise Of The Ronin) was the only new ship I wrote for (although nothing was posted). Femslash at last!

What characters captured your heart?

80% of my posted fics involved Auron, plus ça change.

Did you write for any new fandoms or ships in 2024?

I hadn’t written for Nightshade before. Two of my still unfinished WIPs are for Rise Of The Ronin, so that too.

What fic meant the most to you to write?

A Shot At Life … really just me living my truth and telling the story of the boyos as I want to see it.

What fic made you feel the happiest to work on?

Literally the same answer as to the above question.

What fic was the most satisfying to finish writing?

A Shot At Life because it’s so monstrously long.

What fic was the most difficult to write?

The two Rise Of The Ronin WIPs have been hard, actually, because I don’t really feel like I know the characters and their voices properly yet. This is why I haven’t made much progress with them.

What fic was the easiest to write?

A Shot At Life, because I planned it in extreme detail, and also because I had already got into the swing of its specific writing style, to the extent that I now need to remind myself not to drift into omniscient third person in everything else I write.

What were your shortest and longest fics posted in 2024?

Shortest: 31 words, for a challenge to write as short a fic as possible while also including references to pumpkins and fireflies. Not linking because cringe.

Longest: 1833 words, not very long at all; Auron/Braska sickfic.

What were your go-to writing songs?

I don’t usually listen to music while writing, it’s too interesting and distracting!

What was the hardest fic to title?

Unusually, 14 out of the 15 fics were posted on AO3 so I had to come up with titles for all of them, boo. The shortest is always the hardest.

What’s your favorite title of 2024?

The only one I included on my own archive was “Distraction”, but I don’t think that was particularly good. Usually I can only give good titles to fics that are at least a few thousand words long, which explains why none of these had titles I deemed good enough to display on my archive. But I actually think いただきます! was quite a nice title.

Share your favorite opening line

It’s always Jecht, isn’t it.

“Man,” said Jecht. “You know, I always thought of myself as a fire guy. You can tell I’m a fire guy, right, Auron? Or I could’ve been water, at least. Why is grass even a thing? Not like it can do anything. How’s this cat gonna fight, give everyone hay fever?”

Share your favorite ending line

My definition of “line” is apparently “three sentences at the end of a paragraph”.

Braska was merely grateful. Five aeons within him now, each proof that he had chosen the right path. The journey north awaited, and their vindication with it.

Share your favorite piece of dialogue

💋

“Um,” said Braska, “well …” He fiddled with his headdress. “I don’t think that was very sporting, Jecht. You hadn’t even spun it. You’re not supposed to choose the, er, the target yourself.”

“Fair,” said Jecht.

Share your funniest line

(dick emoji)

Auron rolls his eyes; he tugs the trousers down in a deliberately unsexy way. That’ll serve Jecht right, he thinks; for what, he’s not sure, but he definitely deserves it.

Or maybe this, which is just funny because the idea of clearing one’s throat in a refined manner is clearly ludicrous.

“But –” said Gekkamaru, and he found himself interrupted by the sound of someone clearing their throat in an undeniably refined manner.

What’s something that surprised you while you were working on a fic? Did it change the story?

I wouldn’t say there was anything in-universe that surprised me … I was surprised, after having produced relatively little for most of the year, that I managed to bring out three substantial-ish fics for the #ficwip all ships week.

What writing programs did you use? Did you write by hand?

I used (boo, hiss) Google Docs until I finished the draft of A Shot At Life. My main workflow now is Orgzly to draft (yes I almost always write on my phone), Emacs to edit and typeset. I haven’t written fic by hand since 2016 iirc (it continues to be literal drawerfic!).

If you had to choose one, what was THE most satisfying writing moment of your year?

Finishing the draft of A Shot At Life, obviously, quelle surprise! Also maybe receiving the copies of my actual book that was also published in 2024 lol.

Did you do anything special to celebrate finishing a fic?

I’ll save that for this December.

How did you recharge between fics?

I’m not sure there really is a “between fics”, given that A Shot At Life has been ongoing for nearly four years.

Did you create fanworks other than fic?

I semi-improvised a couple of brief piano arrangements of things from Final Fantasy soundtracks. I wrote some FFX meta. I cut out a picture of Auron, put it in a tiny frame, and stuck some stickers on it. I made a very small, very low-effort zine at Citrus Con. I spent literal hours recreating Auron, Braska, and Jecht in the Rise Of The Ronin character creator. I started at least one thing still in progress.

How many events did you take part in? (bangs, exchanges, ship weeks, zines, prompt memes, they all count!)

7: three #ficwip events, the traditional Kiss Battle, filled a few prompts on meme, one for /ffprompts, and /yuletide.

If this were an awards show, who would you thank?

@adt for putting up with me talking about Auron all the time and reading my chapters; anyone who shows the slightest interest in what I produce despite my efforts to be as cryptic and obscure as I possibly can.

What would you like to write in 2025?

Rise Of The Ronin fic, although I have already written and posted some in January! Yet more FFX meta.

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Following the ancient Ulster custom of “a year about”, we spent Christmas in my homeland with my family, which never amounts to much more than a miserable reminder that everyone is extremely old and only getting older (the youngest of them, my own mother, will be turning 70 this year). At least we got to catch up with the two schoolfriends I’m still in semi-regular contact with and their respective husbands, so we weren’t surrounded by the old and infirm 100% of the time.

Like the past couple of years, I’m not feeling particularly inclined towards celebrating the passing of the old year/the coming of the new by presenting detailed statistics about every insignificant thing I did in a given category during 2024, so instead, here are some men I enjoyed last year, and here are some things that seemed relevant in December:

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I feel like I spent a lot of November having various tedious thoughts about online spaces and my place within them (as if that’s not what I do every month anyway) … I don’t particularly want to go into detail about this, but in the new great categorisation of society into Bluesky enjoyers and Bluesky haters, I have found myself in the latter group. Accordingly I deleted my Bluesky account, and also, via some very tenuous logic, my Discord account. I’m sad to have left behind what I referred to in last month’s roundup as the only drama-free Discord server in the entire world, and also my extremely obscure reference of a username, but it is what it is.

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As an Emacs zealot, I used to use elfeed for subscribing to RSS feeds, but I wanted something that I could keep up with on my phone so I ended up installing Tiny Tiny RSS on a NearlyFreeSpeech “site”. TT-RSS has a lot of functionality that some RSS readers don’t, so probably not all of what I describe below is universally applicable.

I use Vivaldi as my web browser; the desktop version has a useful tool that shows when a site specifies a feed in its page source. Vivaldi also has a built-in feed reader, although it doesn’t sync across devices or do any of the useful filtering stuff TT-RSS does. Thunderbird has a reader too, as does Microsoft Outlook (lol) – generally, what I’m trying to say here is that there are a few options available for anyone who doesn’t want to set up a cronjob on the server/become an Emacs weirdo/etc.

Atom feeds are also a thing and I actually don’t know the difference. I have the internet at my disposal and could look it up. I probably will at some point; for now I choose to remain ignorant.

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October doings below:

2. Films

• For once I have attended the cinema. We saw Universal Language (2024) the other night, extremely entertaining, maybe the bizarrest film I’ve ever watched. I can’t explain the part I found funniest without making it seem incredibly laborious, but it was this:

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

NB:

• This only works for pages viewed in your journal style. People reading your posts on their reading pages won’t see your custom mood theme; for that reason, you should set a fallback from the publicly available mood themes.
• If you previously had a paid account and set a custom mood theme, you’ll keep using that theme until you change to a different one, even if your subscription ends.

function Entry::print_metadata() {    if (size $.metadata) {	var string position = ($*entry_metadata_position == "top") ? " top-metadata" : " bottom-metadata";	"""<div class="metadata$position">\n<ul>\n""";	foreach var string m ( [ "mood", "location", "music", "groups", "xpost" ] ) {		if ($.metadata{$m}) {		var string metadata_name = lang_metadata_title($m);		"""<li id="metadata-$m"><span class="metadata-label metadata-label-$m">$metadata_name</span> """;		if ($m == "mood") {		    " $.mood_icon ";		}		if ($m == "mood") {		    """<span class="mood-$.metadata{$m} metadata-item metadata-item-$m">$.metadata{$m}</span></li>\n""";		} else {		"""<span class="metadata-item metadata-item-$m">$.metadata{$m}</span></li>\n""";		  }	    }	 }	"</ul>\n</div>\n";    }}

layerinfo type = "theme";layerinfo name = "moods";function Entry::print_metadata() {    if (size $.metadata) {	var string position = ($*entry_metadata_position == "top") ? " top-metadata" : " bottom-metadata";	"""<div class="metadata$position">\n<ul>\n""";	foreach var string m ( [ "mood", "location", "music", "groups", "xpost" ] ) {		if ($.metadata{$m}) {		var string metadata_name = lang_metadata_title($m);		"""<li id="metadata-$m"><span class="metadata-label metadata-label-$m">$metadata_name</span> """;		if ($m == "mood") {		    " $.mood_icon ";		}		if ($m == "mood") {		    """<span class="mood-$.metadata{$m} metadata-item metadata-item-$m">$.metadata{$m}</span></li>\n""";		} else {		"""<span class="metadata-item metadata-item-$m">$.metadata{$m}</span></li>\n""";		  }	    }	 }	"</ul>\n</div>\n";    }}

.poster-YOURNAME li#metadata-mood img {  display: none;}

li#metadata-mood img {  display: none;}

.poster-YOURNAME .mood-okay:before {  content: url("IMAGEURL");}

.mood-okay:before {  content: url("IMAGEURL");}

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Below, the first batch of potentially more than one such batch of selected questions from that meme a few people have done. I’m going to leave out questions I don’t at least somewhat vibe with and alter wording as the mood takes me without commenting on it, as I think that’s more productive than highlighting the (no doubt very many) mismatches between the way the questions are phrased and my particular lived experience.

What’s changed about your fandom life in the last year? + Has social media caused you to stop liking any fandoms?

I’ve shifted the way I interact with people online towards posting on sites under my own domain first, and selectively using third-party websites to syndicate content/react to other people’s posts/dump large quantities of variable-quality game screenshots. This has allowed me to divorce fandom from the concept of social media (and, therefore, capitalism) as much as possible. Very much related to this: I’ve stopped trying to use fandom/generally being online as a way of making friends, because it rarely works for me. Some people appear to find making friends online much easier than making them irl … I just find it very hard in both settings tbh. There are some people I’ve met on the internet whom I would tentatively consider to be my friends, I guess, but now that I’m not deliberately setting out to befriend people I’m much more relaxed about being my ✨true self✨ and freely posting the various hot takes that would otherwise be chained up inside me, in the hope that people who don’t find their innermost thoughts reflected in my hastily composed output can be respectful enough not to cease all communication with me merely because we may have different opinions on one single thing. In terms of interacting with other people, I’m ignoring the complex social dance around (publicly) following and being followed and (my most hated word) Mutuals, and just commenting on things that I genuinely want to say something to, and saying the thing I genuinely want to say, subject to the Three Appropriate Checks For Basic Decency:

1. Could this response be construed as being in bad faith? (if so, consider a change of tone)
2. If I’m offering advice/factual information, is this something the OP seems to be looking for? (if not, consider a change of content)
3. Am I assuming that my interlocutor is a native speaker of English/familiar with my culture/able to interpret my naturally offbeat communication style with ease? Will there be a problem if they’re not? (if so, consider a change of tone and/or content)

Maybe commenting on others’ posts with abandon is what other people have done all along, idk, but not being beholden to “this person is in the Potential Online Friend category I need to interact with them in the following manner” means I can stop being neurotic about this particular imagined problem and redirect any neurosis towards other aspects of my life.

This time last year I was probably thinking about FF16 a lot … I probably would have gravitated away from it naturally anyway and returned to my true position of 100% Auron 100% Of The Time, but the comparatively little fandom drama that occurred nonetheless soured me on it immensely. I think I just have a low tolerance for apparently hivemindish fandom communities, perhaps because their nature flies in the face of everything I try to do to be a better person – for example, attempting to exercise some modicum of critical thought about the things I encounter in my life. This is why I don’t want any of my fandoms to be bigger, to be honest. I almost certainly wouldn’t be so attached to FFX if it wasn’t effectively discourse-free by virtue of all the discourse presumably having taken place on mailing lists 20 years ago and having blessedly failed to persist through to the present-day public internet.

What are the origins of your usernames?

I tend to use a different username on each platform because I enjoy obscurity, and many of them are actually, embarrassingly, the sort that would come close to deanoning me if I were to explain why I chose them, not that this is at all obvious from their external form. I have accordingly made a promise to myself not to overshare and must limit the list to the following:

• tobli (Dreamwidth): the name of a small humanoid creature from FFX-2 who likes to organise a lot of very ambitious and somewhat bizarre projects. I consider myself to be a small humanoid creature (I’m actually noticeably above average height for biologically female people in this part of the world, but I was very small as a child and that kind of thing never leaves you) and I like to organise a lot of very ambitious and somewhat bizarre projects.
• ovely (archiveofourown dot org): I created this account in 2015 to archive a kinkmeme fill, long since hidden away at a more enigmatic location, on which the prompter typoingly addressed me as “ovely a!anon”.
• spira.cedex (Discord): Spira is where FFX takes place and hence the location of my brain at most times. CEDEX is part of the French postcode system. This is probably my favourite username because it’s so stupidly obscure and combines two things that ought to have nothing to do with each other, a favourite activity of mine.
• fxrplane (Tumblr): I wanted to use some kind of FFX-related vocabulary for this, but because I was making the blog in 2024 and not 2008 every word I thought of was taken … then I remembered the cool and edgy trick of replacing some vowel with an x.
• fxrmain (Tumblr): this is my “main blog” in Tumblr account terms, I gave it this name because I am very funny and clever so I did.

I should probably go to bed and that means I should also probably post this now, otherwise it’ll never see the light of day. I may answer some more of these, or insidiously manipulate them to fit my own purposes, in a later post; then again, I may not. Who knows! I am actually just doing what I want, and I (somewhat presumptuously) think I’m even managing to do it without being an arsehole.

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Let me make this clear from the outset: I did in fact download the demo of Rise Of The Ronin, and then very soon afterwards buy the full game, principally so I could take advantage of the fine-grained character creator in order to obtain some screenshots of Auron and Braska in Situations. But of course I didn’t reckon on the same thing happening to me that happens every time I go near a game that has more than 1 gram of plot, i.e. developing an intense and probably brief obsession with it. This is why I don’t consume media very often.

Anyway, a brief synopsis of this PS5 game released in March of this year that apparently nobody in creative fandom circles has heard of: you’re a samurai in 19th-century Japan. People have different ideas about how the country should develop in response to contact with the west, and being a strong independent ronin, you somehow manage to make friends with people from all sides. Meanwhile, another samurai of your acquaintance is going around sowing the seeds of discord. As a result of all these shenanigans, you end up having to fight various people (often befriending them afterwards … or indeed befriend them and fight them afterwards … or, you know what, fight them and then befriend them and then fight them again, why not), scramble around on the rooftops, stroke a hundred cats, pursue several very low-commitment romantic attachments, and occasionally fling barrels of sake at random men for monetary reward. The answer to “can you pet the dog” is a resounding yes.

As @adt and I have sagely said to each other multiple times, with our characteristically great insight, this is not a final fantasy game. It is, in fact, the first PlayStation game I’ve played that isn’t one, which means I’ve had to temper my expectations regarding both graphics [see here for some good scenery gifs though!] and the profundity of character interactions/dialogue. The characters are actually pretty complex and do good stuff, but a lot of it is confined to cutscenes that feel quite separate from the gameplay; when the player character talks to NPCs, they just stand in place saying a few predefined and often clumsily expressed things, and while there are a few dialogue choices, these never have a huge effect on what actually happens. Certain characters can be romanced, which works like this: when you say things people agree with, they like you more. When you give them gifts, they also like you more (especially if it’s a gift they particularly enjoy; the game makes it very clear which these are). When they like you enough, you can ask them out. They will always say yes. Then you get a special accessory. If you enter relationships with more than one character at a time, they might get angry with you and eventually break it off with you. Otherwise, you can break up with them and they’re like “sure, that’s fine”. Then you go back to being good friends and they act like you were never a couple. If you’re still in the part of the game where they can be pursued (this varies according to the character), you can start the relationship again if you like and they will apparently be unaware you’ve had one already.

That said, the characters are predictably one of my big highlights of this game, because that’s the case for anything I ever get more than slightly interested in. I have to reiterate here that my player character was modelled after Auron (I switched to Braska for any particularly heterosexual moments), so realistically I was looking at him any time he was onscreen. Despite that, though, I did come to enjoy a substantial selection of the unnecessarily huge cast. The idea of this game is that the events and characters are based on real things and people from 19th-century Japan; some of the dates have been fiddled with to squeeze in a few people who weren’t exact contemporaries, but nearly all the characters are genuine historical figures. The one exception I’m aware of is Alexandria Moreau, who appears to be in the game just to fulfil the role of “big-breasted American lady”, and could have been left out, tbh.

Some I particularly enjoyed included:

• Ryoma Sakamoto: he is effectively the real protagonist, given that the player character’s favourite activity is standing around being taciturn and occasionally whipping their sword out. Everything he does is extremely cute. He just wants everyone in Japan to get along 🥲
• Fumi Sugi: also very cute, also wants everyone to get along, but in a less violent way.
• Shinsaku Tatsugi: takes his shamisen into battle because, idk, you never know when you need to drop a beat. Always seems annoyed to see the player character even after his affection level is maxed out … I know you love me really.
• Soji Okita: a small and cute man with a top-tier ponytail, Soft™ but nonetheless really obsessed with swords and loves fighting more than life itself.
• Sana Chiba: winner of “rise of the ronin’s most yandere character” award, does a great line in polearm combat.
• Koto Nakazawa: sword lady, need I say more.
• Takamori Saigo: a large man with a large dog. Likes talking about how much he likes dogs, a commendable pursuit.
• Jules Brunet: the game’s sole French character, I am contractually obliged to enjoy him.
• Ernest Satow: foremost British weeb of the nineteenth century. Has a habit of inviting people to his mansion for tea at inappropriate times. Also likes to rig said mansion with tripwires when he hears it’s going to be raided, because he’s a big nerd. Prime contender for the “poor little meow meow” category.
• the Bladesmith: looks like Judi Dench for no verifiable reason.

I appreciate how there doesn’t tend to be a clear sense of which faction is morally right as the game goes on; there’s one particular character who is gradually established as the obvious villain, but below that, you see aspects of the story from the perspectives of the different groups, and alliances are formed and broken as time goes on. This feels quite FF16-esque to me; there’s something equally FF16-esque about the fact that the player character has the option of hitting up all their friends for individual chats before the final battle, which gave the last part of the game a surprisingly large amount of emotional weight. This boyo can in fact be added to the list of games that nearly made me cry … iirc only FFX and FF16 share that honour. The list of games that actually made me cry is empty because I have a heart of stone.

I played the first mission of the game in normal mode, died several times but thought that was ok … then once the mission ended and we were just fighting very normal bog-standard enemies I was still dying several times, so I put it into easy mode there and then and never looked back. My conception of the combat is “press square until you’re being attacked, then press triangle instead”; it is in fact more complicated than this, but playing in easy mode and seeking out every possible sidequest means one ends up comfortably overlevelled. Judging by what I’ve seen of the fanbase I think there are actually a large number of people out there who care about builds and loadouts and all that shite … I’m sorry, my interest in combat is solely because it gives me new clothes for my character to wear.

On that note, the boys!

I’ve really enjoyed learning about Japanese history from this game, bearing in mind that a lot of the events are clearly heavily fictionalised. I think I would feel much less comfortable about doing so if the game hadn’t been made by a Japanese studio, given the subject matter. On a similar note, I appreciate how the game very anachronistically [as far as English goes] has everyone refer to the player-made characters as “they” at all times. The character creator does operate on the basis of a gender binary, but once you get into the game itself, this is irrelevant (including in terms of the romance options). The tiny amount of fanfiction I’ve seen seems to categorise the player characters as “male blade twin” and “female blade twin”, but I’m more inclined to stick with what the game itself does and just have everyone blithely theythem these characters (as well as not name them. There’s a point in the game where someone asks the protagonist their name and they straight up refuse to give it … my kind of shit).

The transformative fandom for this game is, as far as I can tell, effectively nonexistent. A handful of people posted enthusiastically about the game (mostly about Ryoma, which is valid) on tumblr in like April, the number of instances of fanfiction in the largest multifandom fic repository is in the single digits … there’s a discord for the game with nearly 300 members, but its sole concession to the idea that people might have what we could call a traditionally fannish approach to it is a channel called #fanart … which is … wait for it … Empty. There’s some good art on pixiv though! I didn’t think I was going to write fic, because, as discussed, I was just in it for screenshots of my lads, but as soon as I beat the game the other night I started writing two things … this is the fault of a. hot sword ladies and b. the post-credits scene fucking me up.

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My brain is 100% Rise Of The Ronin right now. Despite that, I somehow managed to do a smattering of non-samurai-related things in September.

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I replaced Pleroma with GoToSocial as my ActivityPub/fediverse software of choice last weekend; this was something I’d been thinking about for a while, but it ended up being necessary because the Pleroma instance experienced Some Kind Of Issue. I was going to write a bit more about that but it was boring, so tl;dr, if the server suddenly starts receiving like 70GB of incoming traffic per day instead of less than 1 and the CPU is consistently running at over 100%, it’s probably a good idea to stop the service and attempt to investigate sooner rather than later (not that my eventual attempts at investigations achieved very much). Also for reasons that I definitely don’t understand, you can’t make postgres databases smaller without making them bigger first.

GoToSocial has the following nice features:

• set language per post (I know Mastodon has this, but Pleroma doesn’t, which was a missed opportunity for me, læ grand·e plurilingue);
• admin-definable CSS themes, plus user-definable CSS on profiles (very Dreamwidth-esque);
• extreme legerity with no inbuilt web frontend other than static profile pages that don’t even show anything but original public posts;
• optional allowlist mode – I’ve turned this on and reached hitherto unparalleled depths of obscurity! We are federated with a whole 75 other instances!
• the next release will have per-post reply controls, which I’m very excited about.

The installation instructions were fairly piecemeal so I cobbled them together from various pages of documentation before attempting the install, but it all worked well and there was only one minor issue, which I got sorted pretty quickly. I also felt confident enough with setting this stuff up this time to enable split-domain federation, so even though GoToSocial is running on kes.praze.net, my fediverse handle dispenses with the subdomain and is just @tre@praze.net. I think about how cool this is every time I open my profile page! And I bothered to set up a reverse proxy as well, which was … probably a good idea.

The builtin CSS themes didn’t include anything adaptive so I combined the light and dark “blurple” themes using @media (prefers-color-scheme), and also added a few other things like hiding some of the post statistics and a wee notice imploring visitors to read the about page to understand some of the weirdnesses of GoToSocial. I’m generally a big fan of those weirdnesses; showing boosts on profile pages might have been nice, but they still show up on other instances and in third-party clients, so I’m not too bothered.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

Standout August event: Citrus Con last weekend. Attending was a last-minute decision for me, but it was great to be part of; it made me think a lot about fan culture and particularly about the value of amateurism in fandom, and how we can celebrate that effectively. The whole event was impressively well organised. If only there was an online Final Fantasy convention in the same style; I’d much rather have that than, um, the current incarnation of “MaineCon”.

Other things I did in August:

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I’m not especially on board with the idea that maintaining an independent website means that site has to look like something from the 2000s. The design of my site isn’t deliberately old-school; I don’t think it has massive 2024 vibes either, it’s just … whatever’s required to make it look reasonable. It has a built-in dark mode depending on device preferences, everything is mobile-friendly because most of my casual internet browsing happens on my phone, I occasionally make use of bizarre nested :has() and :not() selectors – yes I’m a CSS3 simp. That said, I try to avoid JavaScript where possible, and I try to remember to use <noscript> if I am implementing it, but that’s more because I want to minimise resource-intensiveness than some kind of statement about the aesthetic of the old web (whatever that may consist of).

Overall, I suppose I want my website to offer a pleasant browsing experience to humans. I don’t want it to extend that same kindness to crawlers and scrapers, on the other hand; it’s like the old classic “I don’t want to see or be seen by straight people” but instead of “straight people” it’s “search engines”. The location / block in my nginx configuration includes add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, nosnippet, noarchive";; now I just have to hope the robots will be nice to me and do as they’re told 😌. I also recently added add_header Referrer-Policy "no-referrer";, which, if I’ve succeeded in understanding increasingly obscure StackOverflow posts, should mean outgoing links from my site won’t tell other sites’ analytics services it’s the source of their traffic. I just think websites should be allowed to exist without informing others of their existence; just as humans should be allowed to look at websites without having their visits logged. If I ever put analytics on my site, please call the police because I’m acting under duress.

Mostly via YASnippet, I’m marking up new posts with microformats, which makes it easier to bridge them to the fediverse and generally comply with independent web principles; I also [went through every page and manually, sob] added OpenGraph meta elements to the page headers, so link previews show the title and an image when I’m sharing links to my site elsewhere. Discord embeds include the theme colour, which is neat, but leave out the description, possibly because I’ve combined name="description" and property="description" into the same tag, although I’m told this is a normal thing to do. Pleroma only seems to work if the trailing slash is included, which I suppose isn’t too great an inconvenience. Facebook works very well (not that I would ever share a link to my site on Realname Internet); Tumblr and Bluesky are similar.

Re Tumblr … I’ve been experimenting with it a lot recently. The announcement that they’re moving it to the WordPress backend perhaps suggests that they’re finally going to come good on that promise of fediverse integration from like two years ago. I had a wee go at integrating microformats into a Tumblr theme and bridging it to the Fediverse via Bridgy Fed, but switched it off after a few days, because it tends to obfuscate sources and doesn’t play well with the NPF (although, to be honest, what does). Obviously Tumblr is bad because it includes adverts and sells everyone’s data to A “I” developers and disables custom themes on new blogs by default; but the custom theme editor is much better than Dreamwidth’s, imo, the option to turn off reblogs on individual posts independently of whether those posts are public is a plus point over the fediverse services I’m familiar with, and the general customisation options are still far ahead of most other “sign up for a free account on this platform” services.

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As of (checks time) right this instant I’m apparently posting some kind of monthly roundup to my site, syndicating it to Dreamwidth using the most tedious and convoluted manual process in the world, all because I love to veer unpredictably between oversharing and taking fright at the mere thought of being perceived. Maybe I’ll do this again next month and in subsequent months thereafter, maybe I will once again decide I never want to communicate with another human, time will tell.

As months go, July was a fairly eventful and interesting one! Shoutout to big Keir for winning The Lection, which made me love the centrist Labour party for a week or something before I reradicalised myself by reading some issues of a socialist magazine my dad used to edit 45 years ago. @adt and I had a wee holiday, first to my homeland, then to London, a place where, as I was explaining to a colleague earlier today, things actually happen.

2. Gaming

• This month, I have been mostly playing Pokémon Violet, because for some reason I’m in a big Pokémon phase at the moment. I completed the base Pokédex at the weekend and the Kitakami Dex earlier this week, and now I’m working through the second DLC and enjoying the new quest mechanic. It’s (really not at all) strange how playing these games at a sensible time in their lifecycle and using the trading functions as intended actually makes it feasible to complete the Pokédex … funnily enough I had a lot more trouble with that back when I was playing the gen 3 games on an emulator in 2010 or whatever.
• I also finished FF7 Rebirth, but I’ve already written about that.
• And also the FF16 Leviathan DLC after hitting a brick wall with the boss several months earlier!
• Tried out the new demo of Rise of the Ronin (which I can’t not sing in my head to the tune of Rising From Ruins by my boyos Rob and the lads) … mostly because you play as a sad samurai whose appearance can be finely customised. I found myself somewhat able to cope with the combat after setting it to easy mode (😭), so the very next day I went to buy a copy of the full game in an “in and out of Cex in two minutes” experience that was not in fact the most unhinged thing I have done this month. Soon I will be studying certain FFX character models extremely closely while spending hours on the character creation screen, and that probably won’t be the most unhinged thing I do this month either.
• Also, that there final fantasy ten is now a distinguished old gentleperson of the age of twenty-three, to which I have already reacted as appropriately as I can:

“trémeur”

@tre@ple.praze.net

annual tradition part two: happy 23rd 🤯 anniv to my fave game, my otp, my principal blorbo. approx 3.5 years i have now spent in the iron grip of this small slice of the final fantasy franchise. if this game was a human and i could meet it in person i would address it with the following cordial greeting: how did you do that to my brain, you motherfucker.

19 July, 2024

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

I honestly don’t know what to say about this game, and that’s mostly because I started playing it the week it came out, i.e. right at the beginning of March, and I’ve just finished it today. It’s taken four months for me to play Rebirth and I’m not even a completionist. My approach to sidequests was the same as it is for most games that don’t grab me in a chokehold, i.e. do the ones that present themselves to me without my having to go looking for them, and aren’t extremely annoying to complete, so I’d guess I did 60–70% of the terrain stuff. Even with that this game dragged on and on with the strange sudden tonal shifts that a number of FF games are known for, making it hard to know what kind of emotional reaction the player was supposed to have.

I obviously don’t think those shifts are necessarily bad, because I do in fact play Final Fantasy games all the time. I guess they’re just much harder to pull off in an environment where a. the player already knows the story, or at least its main beats, and b. the protagonist’s mood and actions are equally erratic (for good reason). At least with Tidus, to pick a completely random protagonist of a game that I’m not at all obsessed with, there is some consistency in the way he reacts to what’s going on around him, and also, he’s a generally happy and optimistic person which means the more lighthearted moments can shine and the sadder ones hit hard, but in a good way. I suppose that kind of protagonist can also undergo a more satisfying journey from “naive but likeable young person” to “guy who has seen some shit and been forced to re-evaluate his life choices”, rather than just “He’s messed up! He’s still messed up!”. Maybe this is one of the reasons why I preferred Crisis Core to the original FF7.

The plot of that original FF7 struggled with the basic concept of making sense, and the same is true of Rebirth, although for different reasons, i.e. the multiverse. Some of the eccentricities of the original game have been smoothed over, with the result that regrettably, there are no longer characters called Chole and Ester. (Tangentially, it’s odd that NPCs in this universe often have quite ordinary names and then the party members have, like, uncanny valley names … quick, this child’s parents gave them a strange name, send them to the Shinra building to join up.)

Aerith spends most of the game being unnecessarily cryptic, a highly hypocritical thing for me to criticise as an Auron fan, but perhaps I’m predisposed to suspicion of Aerith as someone who prefers Tifa. The game seemed to have a pretty heavy Clerith agenda but that may also be a result of my preference, just like how Tories (RIP them amirite) think the BBC is too left-wing and socialists think the opposite. Speaking of characters gratuitously acting like Auron, Vincent did this par excellence, with the result that I was actually interested in his character for the first time. Every time he leant against a wall, folding his arms and frowning, I was like, that’s him! My boy!! The only drawback of this experience was that it made me wish I was looking at PS5-quality Auron instead.

I’ve maybe been slightly harsh on the length of this game because admittedly, I’ve been spending most of my free time working on the WIP/increasingly esoteric coding projects, and also recently found myself in the grip of a sudden Pokémon obsession a few weeks ago, and the FF16 DLC came out halfway through the process and I’m going to have to go back to that now and attempt the seemingly ungrindable Leviathan once again after noping out of it at the time. As a person who is deeply uninterested in loadouts and also too stupid to respond to visual clues with appropriately well-timed use of the block button, I tend to rely on grinding as an integral part of my gaming strategy, and I’m bitter about the fact that the Games Of Today seem to have stopped allowing players to use this technique. Rebirth has the side quests, which get you some of the way, but then it has the whole section at the end where you can’t go back into the open world, can’t go back to Chadley to take advantage of his supplies of useful materia, can’t have a nice break playing some Queen’s Blood, and eventually (in the entire last section) can’t even use random encounters to get stronk, because there aren’t any. Of course this also culminates in an extremely lengthy boss fight for which you have to ensure that every party member is appropriately equipped. I ended up doing the same thing that I did for the Yuffie DLC and turning the difficulty down to easy for the final boss, which then made it too easy and fairly anticlimactic. I just want to be able to level up a little bit and then go back in to attempt it again with the satisfaction of seeing that levelling make a small but significant difference, and I also want “it” not to last two hours.

Most amateur reviews of this game I’ve seen (I have not read professional reviews) have seemed fairly unequivocal: either it’s the best game of the past few years or it’s trash. Or maybe, because everyone else who started the game when it came out finished it months ago, I’ve forgotten the more nuanced ones. Either way, I suppose I’m broadly indifferent. It’s a very good game, and it’s obviously beautiful, as all big-budget modern games are. It’s quite clearly trying to be all things to all people and there was probably no way of remaking a game as iconic as this without doing that.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

Before the first backup:

mkdir /var/cache/pleroma-backupchown -R postgres:postgres /var/cache/pleroma-backup

Every time:

systemctl stop pleromacd /opt/pleromasudo -Hu postgres pg_dump -d pleroma --format=custom -f /var/cache/pleroma-backup/pleroma-20240505.pgdumpcp -r config/prod.secret.exs config/setup_db.psql uploads /var/cache/pleroma-backupcd /var/cache/pleroma-backupmkdir 20240505mv pleroma-20240505.pgdump config/prod.secret.exs proconfig/setup_db.psql uploads 20240505systemctl start pleroma

Starting Pleroma at this point caused issues but seems to have been because of some malformed lines at the end of config/prod.secret.exs regarding frontends – I commented these out and then it worked. Of course, there’s no need to start Pleroma at this point because we’re about to stop it again, but probably worth checking that there’s no issue with starting the service before attempting to update it, for that very reason.

Check for the latest tagged release here; in this case it was v2.6.2.

cd /opt/pleromasudo -Hu pleroma git pullsudo -Hu pleroma git checkout v2.6.2sudo -Hu pleroma MIX_ENV=prod mix deps.getsystemctl stop pleromasudo -Hu pleroma MIX_ENV=prod mix ecto.migrate

This will take several minutes.

systemctl start pleroma

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Apparently there’s some kind of cohost v. pillowfort beef going on, which is simultaneously entertaining and exhausting. I’ve never used either and don’t have any loyalties to declare; they both look more morally sound than Tumblr, I guess, but tbh the time in my life for signing up for services I don’t personally administer is over.

Via this drama I found out that there are apparently various utilities that generate html+css “for cohost”, bafflingly, as if cohost is the only space on the web that allows people to write html+css. Like … I don’t know how to tell you that every vanilla web page has this function. I guess everyone is just so socialmediapilled that they’re used to not having any control over text formatting? People are generating websites with some kind of soulless templating engine and are therefore unable to set the colour of a <span> or whatever? Everyone is learning frameworks without actually realising that everything they spit out is basically just HTML? Lads, you can literally just sign up for free and pseudonymous web hosting and type in whatever you like. Browsers are a miracle (let’s not talk about whatever Google is planning to do to Chrome, that discourse can stay on the fediverse where it belongs).

Anyway, “markdown plus” can do some fun stuff to text but the cohost-centredness of it is unnecessary. Just as the page that generates it can display the output without being part of the cohost.org domain, so can (whisper it) any webpage that allows inline CSS. The magic is worked by the processor itself, not by any kind of cohost-specific feature.

The obvious question: can these cool text effects be done on Dreamwidth? The answer: yes, with this One Weird Trick. The animations don’t work properly unless a certain line of CSS is added to the style, which means they only load when pages are viewed in styles that contain that CSS. They’ll never load in the site style, which users can’t modify, and they won’t load in individual users’ styles unless the user has added that line in the custom CSS editor. The non-animated features, like coloured gradients and wide text, should work across the board, although the “add plaintext version” option should be unticked, as Dreamwidth doesn’t allow spans of text to be hidden in the way it outputs.

That line of CSS is the following:

@keyframes bounce{0%,to{transform:translateY(-25%);animation-timing-function:cubic-bezier(.8,0,1,1)}50%{transform:none;animation-timing-function:cubic-bezier(0,0,.2,1)}}@keyframes spin{to{transform:rotate(360deg)}}

I’ve added it to my own journal style [and site CSS], which means that […] you will be able to open the <details> element below and see some animated text.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

… actually, I wasn’t very clued up on video games in 2001, due to not owning any games consoles at the time. I did nonetheless come into possession of an iMac running one of the early versions of what was then known as Mac OS X (RIP king), and it came with a preinstalled RPG called Otto Matic.

In Otto Matic, you play the eponymous character, a robot who has been sent to Earth and then to a sequence of other planets in order to rescue humans from the Brain Aliens, which are trying to harvest human lives and then … actually I don’t know what they plan to do with them. But it’s bad, I guess! The Brain Aliens have scattered the humans across the galaxy in preparation for taking them to their own planet, Planet X. I don’t know why they didn’t just take them straight there. Otto is able to rescue humans and send them to his rocket just by touching them, which is convenient; the more central part of the gameplay consists of making your way across each planet, dealing with the array of malevolent forces that have taken up residence there, and getting to your rocket in order to blast off to the next one.

Bear in mind that at the age of 8 my sole gaming experience amounted to some minimal exposure to online flash games and a few hours playing Pokémon on friends’ borrowed GameBoys Advance. The computer briefly belonged to my dad before it was mine, and so my Otto Matic experience initially consisted of watching him play; he was familiar with strategy games (and is now that rare thing, a 74-year-old with a Steam account) but hadn’t played anything in this genre before, so it took him a while to get to the end of Earth. We were amazed to discover that that wasn’t the end of the game, but that there were in fact a whole nine other levels! The second one was much harder – I still remember from my days of obsessively reading the minuscule amount of Otto Matic meta available online that it’s understood to be the hardest level. My dad never succeeded in beating that one.

After the computer came into my possession (my dad’s main reason for passing it on and getting himself a new Windows machine was, hilariously, that it didn’t have a floppy disk drive), I gained the privilege of being able to play Otto Matic as much as I liked, or at least to play it as long as my mum wasn’t telling me to get “off the computer”. I have to admit that I was “on the computer” quite a lot. I still am. During a brief bout of internet access at this time I came across the cheat codes, which made it possible for me to play through the levels without dying constantly. It also made it possible to instantly complete a level as soon as you set foot in it: I tried this once, went through “completing” every level, reached the victory screen and then started crying because I was convinced that what I had done was deeply morally wrong.

It’s been at least fifteen years since I played this properly, but I still remember the names of all the planets! I’d love to know how many hours I sank into it at a formative age. The basic gameplay was “pick up weapons, use them to attack enemy aliens, pick up fuel, get to your rocket”, but each level had its own sections with different mechanics: riding around in the water attached to a magnet, opening doors by electrocuting them, luring some sentient hammers onto a patch of ice so they could break it, drinking potions and becoming enormous, zipwires, bumper cars. The bumper cars were my favourite: the level was meant to be a sort of fairground world, with sections that consisted of jumping across clouds while trying to avoid falling into oblivion. The music was also a banger!

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m describing this in the past tense when Otto Matic is now freely available for Windows, Mac and Linux. When the original development company was bought out or folded or whatever, they apparently gave permission to Some Guy to release a lot of their games open source for modern systems. I’ve tried it on my pretty mediocre Linux laptop and it runs beautifully; I need to get back to it at some point and see if the gaming experience I’ve since acquired will enable me to beat Planet Snoth at last.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

@adt has forbidden me from revealing spoilers about this almost eight-year-old game so I’m posting something brief and disorganised here instead of talking out loud about it:

Seeing as the game has been around a long time, I was aware of the major spoilers and decided to play Episode Ignis after completing chapter 9 despite the various warnings not to, mostly because the scene when Noctis wakes up after the Leviathan sequence is such a gutpunch (the closeup on Ignis’ fingers as he feels for the stool aaaah), and then the scene on the train after that with the tension and Gladio losing it at Noctis too, !!! I love these strained relationships. And then if you go into the buffet car and Ignis and Gladio are just sitting there and neither of them says anything … damn.

Episode Ignis itself: the gameplay?! Especially chapter 1? Honestly, this is everything I want from a game. I love jumping around the rooftops so much, and the combat system is simple enough for me to understand and be reasonably good at while not so easy that it gets uninteresting (meanwhile, Episode Gladio was too hard and I have not yet finished it 😔). I did all the extra bits and freed the whole city! The bastards kept coming back and taking parts of it again (in what I assume were unavoidable takeovers for plot reasons), but Venetian Hillary Clinton had better be pleased with me. I hated Altissia when we first arrived there because it took so long to work out how to get anywhere, then I started warming to it slightly once I started getting used to how the gondolas worked, but now I never want to traverse this or any other place by means other than parkour.

Tbh, knowing what would happen to Ignis made it more deliciously painful to experience this section given that all his abilities are based on agility and precision: is there any greater irony than “total clarity”? Every time a potentially damaging object went remotely near his face I was like “is this it?” I didn’t expect him to actually put on the Ring of the Lucii and induce irreversible physical damage to himself of his own accord. Mindblowing levels of loyalty right there (although I have no reason not to believe that Prompto and Gladio wouldn’t immediately do the same – all three of them would do anything to protect Noctis).

Ravus has a really good face and his anguished wails at the end were also good – the “DLC party members” roster has had a strong showing so far and he’s not even at the top of the list, because Cor “Very Little Screen Time” Leonis inexplicably remains my fave in this game! (I say “inexplicably”, but he’s a slightly older, somewhat aloof sword-wielding guy who everyone simps for, so … yeah.)

Returning to Ignis: I’m excited to see how the game will portray a main character with a newly acquired disability. I’m not going to pretend I have vast amounts of gaming experience, so I have no idea if this sort of thing is explored in games very much otherwise, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how it’s handled. I need to see if I can find any meta about FF15’s treatment of this topic. I’m also having Gladnis Thoughts right now, although who knows how long those will continue.

This wasn’t meant to be a “navelgazing about fandom” post, but it’s interesting that FF15 inspired an active fandom for such a long time while FF16 doesn’t seem to have had the same level of success. I think the individual characters are much more different and interesting in FF16, but I know not everyone shares that opinion! There’s definitely more development of the relationships between the characters in FF15, particularly among the four bros, partly because of the different way the battle system works. I was trying to decide which of the two systems I prefer, and I couldn’t choose one, but I do still want every game to be Parkour Ignis. FF16 undoubtedly succeeded in taking hold of me much more than FF15 has, but maybe that’s because it was brand new when I played it and there was a newly developing fandom to be part of. I’m enjoying the fact that I can take this one at a slower pace and not be influenced by fandom stuff as I play it.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

via a few people …

How many books did you read this year? Any trends in genre/length/themes/etc?

30, six of which were work-related. 16 were fiction, and only one was in French this year. 2022’s total was 24, so I’m pleased that I managed to beat that.

What are your Top 3 books that you read this year for the first time?

I rated three books five stars, so:

David Lodge, Small world: I read this right at the beginning of the year and barely remember it, but iirc it’s a novel about … petty personal drama among academics? If there are two things I love they’re a. rubbernecking and b. universities, so obviously this suited me.

Dave Eggers, The circle: a novel about social media being terrible, which I lapped up enthusiastically. This was so compelling that I actually read some of it in the office when I should have been working, and finished the whole thing in about three days even though it was nearly 500 pages.

Alan Booth, The roads to Sata: a really sensitive, nuanced travelogue from the 1980s about a journey made on foot through Japan. I find travel writing to be very hit and miss, but this was definitely a hit.

What’s a book you enjoyed more than you expected?

Georges Simenon, Le chien jaune: read mostly for Breizh Content, which ended up being thinner on the ground than I wanted, but I enjoyed the story and it made me concede that I should read more detective novels.

Which books most disappointed you this year?

Robert Holdstock, Merlin’s wood: also read for Breizh Content reasons, also lacked Breizh Content, but less forgivably because it was actually about magical, mystical stuff. Why do you need to concoct a mythology when there’s one right there! What are you doing!

Jay Asher, Thirteen reasons why: we watched the adaptation a few years ago and it was quite entertaining, but the novel turned out to be trash. This is why I don’t read (much) YA.

Did you reread any books? If so, which one was your favourite?

I reread all four of the Hunger Games books after going to see the new film in November. The prequel was my favourite because CS is so awful and gets whumped a lot, I love him.

Did you DNF any books?

Not as such, although there are a couple I started and haven’t gone back to for several months. But that’s not DNFing, that’s just taking a very long hiatus.

Did you start any books that you’d like to finish in the new year?

Those referred to in the previous question. One is The Canterbury tales, the other is a SF anthology from the mid-twentieth century.

Did you read any books outside of your usual preferred genre(s)?

As above, I don’t tend to read detectivey stuff, so Le chien jaune would probably be the main example.

What was your predominant format this year?

Probably ebooks on ReadEra on my phone. I do have an ancient Kindle, but my phone ended up being more convenient (and more suited to whatever eyesight issue I have that results in its being easier to read stuff from tiny screens).

What’s the longest book you read this year?

The Hunger Games prequel. Not counting rereads, it was the Eggers novel, The circle.

Did you reach your reading goal for this year (if you had one)?

My goal was to complete ~kingstoken’s 2023 book bingo and I actually fell short by six or seven squares, so no. However, I did read more than the 25 books the bingo requires, and more than last year’s total, so I’m happy enough with that. The bingo was mostly a way of structuring my reading without being completely overwhelmed by the size of the TBR list.

What books from your TBR did you not get to this year, but are excited to read in 2024? Do you have any other 2024 goals?

I have a few Final Fantasy tie-in novels that I’m looking forward to reading (Traces of two pasts, which I received as a Christmas present; the FF15 one, which will have to wait until I’ve finished playing the game; and the FF1/2/3 novelisation). Beyond that I have roughly 200 books in the “own but have not yet read” category, so … some of those, probably.

A 2024 goal that I’m concocting right now based on the above: I need to read more than one book in French, because only reading one book in French is pretty awful tbh.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

Started thinking about some kind of roadmap for moving away from Big Tech and centralised online accounts as much as possible … the experiences of building my own fic archive and setting up my own fediverse instance this year have been so unexpectedly successful that I’m now determined to self-host (for various definitions of the term self-host) wherever I reasonably can. It costs more money – more than nothing, sure, for whichever free online services I’m trying to replace – but I’ve come to the (not hugely original) conclusion that if you’re using an online platform and not paying for it in financial terms, you’re probably paying in something else, most probably having your data sold to advertisers. That’s why I just renewed my Dreamwidth subscription, after all!

Having said that, I’m not especially bothered about Big Tech having my data – they have everyone else’s too, and it’s impossible to avoid in this day and age. What I’m more concerned about is being at the mercy of others’ content moderation policies. I’m not really trying to store or share any content that’s particularly objectionable, but I still don’t like the idea of Google or whoever being able to make sudden decisions that affect my files and being equally able to implement these decisions in the blink of an eye – or just, er, losing a load of data, no big deal. This is also the reason I didn’t want to join anyone’s fediverse server but my own (have I mentioned I love running my own fediverse server??).

I’ve used Gmail as a primary email provider since 2007 (back when addresses had to be @googlemail.com in the UK for some kind of legal reasons), but I’m thinking of switching to Fastmail for at least some purposes, not least because I’d be able to use my own domain name in the address and I just think that’s kind of cool, sorry. Likewise I’m considering moving from Google Drive to NextCloud, which I’d have to install on a VPS. From what I’ve seen, that ought to take care of files/syncing, but also of photos, notes, and location tracking. I currently pay £15 a year for the 100GB tier of Google Drive, but since moving all remotely work-related files to Institutional OneDrive, I haven’t needed anything like that much. (Although I’m well aware that hosting 10GB or so of files on a VPS and running NextCloud on it would already cost significantly more than £15 a year, ha. Sure, they all bill in USD, which isn’t real money anyway. [For legal reasons, this is … etc.])

Another service I want to move away from is GitHub; I’ve been using their static site hosting service for my professional website since like 2016 when I didn’t have any particular knowledge about or interest in web hosting, and using them for actual git repositories as intended since shortly after that. My website is badly in need of a revamp and I want to get away from the .github.io domain because a. it seems a bit unprofessional and b. the .io TLD appears to be actually a bit yikes. […]

I’m planning, at some point down the line, to get myself a second domain name and set up a new professional site via NearlyFreeSpeech, which I continue to find a very reasonable hosting service. As for actual git repositories, I had a look into smaller self-hostable git services and found Gitea, which I managed to set up on a NFS production site today. So I’ve moved my git repositories out of the jaws of Microsoft and into the ever-expanding praze.net multiverse. They’re now here! (Links in previous DW posts have been updated because I’m neurotically passionate about avoiding linkrot.)

I’m making a note of how I installed Gitea on NFS here, because as with all these things, there were a few odd errors that had to be circumvented. I found a tutorial for this but it was posted four years ago and deals with a much earlier version of Gitea; quite a few of the steps had to be changed. Here’s what I did:

git clone https://github.com/go-gitea/giteacd giteagit checkout v1.19.4

v1.21.1 is the latest version; the docs didn’t say this, but it requires Node version 18, while I only have access to 16 on NFS. (This is one of the things that make installing stuff onto NFS servers a bit tricky at times – there’s no root access so you’re limited to the versions of utilities they provide. I guess I could have tried compiling Node 18 from source like an absolute mad lad, but that might well have caused more problems down the line. This is why I ended up setting up a VPS for Pleroma – doing it on NFS seemed impossible.) I tried v1.20.6 but make errored out before doing anything at all, so went back to v1.19.4 and that one worked.

Then:

TAGS="bindata sqlite sqlite_unlock_notify" make generate build

There were quite a few NPM warnings about things being deprecated while this went on – not surprising given the above.

Then:

mv gitea /home/protected/giteacd ..rm -rf giteacd /home/protectedtouch run-gitea.sh

The tutorial I was semi-following told me to echo a couple of lines into run-gitea.sh, but echo was giving me very bizarre errors – something to do with escaping, I think, but I couldn’t work out what needed to be escaped or how. So I just added the two lines using nano, viz.:

#!/bin/bashexec /home/protected/gitea

Then:

chmod a+x run-gitea.sh

The tutorial gave me the correct instructions for adding the daemon and proxy via the NFS control panel; there was no need to click start on the daemon, it just got going automatically. Then I completed the setup using the browser; /home/protected was already filled in in all the requisite places, although I had to select SQLite from the dropdown, which the tutorial didn’t highlight. I also ticked the box for “disable self-registration” because like my Pleroma instance, this is for nobody but me, me, me, and potentially @adt (if he wants).

I got to the tls-setup.sh part of the tutorial and couldn’t get it to work; I looked around the NFS forums with little success until I eventually realised I should also be checking the Gitea forums, and there I found the answer (tl;dr: you need to set up an additional proxy). After that, everything worked fine. I remain amazed that I can just type some characters into this server in New York that I’m SSHed into and … things are created. Magic.

I have a small number of gists on GitHub and need to decide what to do with those, but I’m feeling pretty good about hosting my own git repositories in the first instance!

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

A meme via many people. I wasn’t initially going to do this, because I looked back at the last five fics I’d written and the only available reaction was “oh. Dion Lesage,” but then on Saturday we went to see the new Hunger Games film (its actual title is too cringe to type I’m sorry) and then by last night I’d posted a non-Final Fantasy fic totally unprompted for the first time since July 2020, and a non-abandoned non-videogame fic unprompted for the first time since 2017! What is happening to me. (Answer: some posh blond guy is having a bad time.)

The rules: post the first and last lines of your last five fics, and little else.

19 November  G   ♂  2180

• First: “Where are you going?” says Sejanus, as his father’s car pulls up.
• Last: “Yeah,” Sejanus replies. “Tomorrow.”

11 October, “Job Interview”  U   ♂  1407

• First: At first, the knights of the Holy Order had been recruited from among His Highness and Sir Terence’s social circle.
• Last: Their commander, however, was a special case.

23 September  G   ♂  6161

• First: Dion’s convalescence had been long and troubling, with one day’s progress seemingly lost the next, the prince slow and quiet and sometimes barely even lucid.
• Last: “I will be by your side forever,” he promised. “I swear it in Greagor’s name.”

8 September  U   ☉  887

• First: Jill was eleven, and a head taller than Dion at least.
• Last: He was trying his best, after all, but there was always room to do better.

1 September  U   ☉  1171

• First: The Rosfield brothers had tasks they needed to see to, that was certain.
• Last: Beside him, Byron laughed, long and loud.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

*This is an obscure joke that nobody except @adt will understand, and I apologise. Seamus Heaney is not otherwise referred to in this post.

So, turns out I still have many Dreamwidth posts in various states of completion, mostly because my idea of a post is “write two thousand words about a handful of things that are vaguely related and then attempt to tie it all together neatly at the end” like I’m rector of the parish or some shit. At the same time I have Things I Want To Say About Fandom, which are much shorter, but which I also don’t post because I don’t think they’re high-effort enough. What I need to do is bite the bullet and start wading through the drafts I have, while also permitting myself the indulgence of making the odd contribution that isn’t in the length and format of an undergraduate essay. In this post I’m going to attempt to do both those things at once by filling in A Meme Most People Did Weeks Ago, while also making the occasional (occasionally lengthy) digression about other fandom-related stuff that’s been on my mind recently.

1. A Meme Most People Did Weeks Ago

1. How long have you been in fandom?

When I was at the stage in my life that required me to write those undergraduate essays, my favourite tutor once told me every essay question contains a supposition that needs to be taken apart. I think the flaw in the current question is clear enough, as it relates to something people opine about on DW frequently: what does being “in fandom” really mean? A lot of people tend to see it as requiring interaction with other fans, although I think my definition is looser than that: there are things I get obsessive about and suddenly I find myself needing to consume, create, and curate all possible content. The first time that happened that I remember, I was five, and I’ve remained fannish about a succession of things ever since, although there have been periods when that hasn’t extended to writing fic or similarly producing stuff.

2. Which fandoms are you in now?

So, this is where I talk about FF16 fandom! I think I was a bit premature before when I said everyone had moved on from it extremely quickly, because we were in that intermediate period where some people had finished the game and others were probably very invested but were trying to avoid spoilers, and now it seems like the fandom is settling down and solidifying a bit. I mean, there’s a kinkmeme now (hard mode: guess which prompts are mine; non-hard mode: I’m very vanilla), so that means it’s the cool new thing, right?

I mentioned before how weird it is to be in a new and popular fandom, particularly in that there’s an active Discord server not merely for the fandom itself but specifically for the main ship involving my fave. There are actually now two of those servers. I joined the second one because I couldn’t bear the thought of people saying things about Dion without being able to eavesdrop, but I don’t see a huge amount of point in its existence, tbh. The servers are:

a. The main server with nearly 300 members now. People talk about other ships, but there are dedicated threads for those now so it’s easy to ignore. A big emphasis on “everyone’s opinion is valid”, which is good, but that extends to banning discourse about other ships and even banning mentions of the fact that Rival Shippers have some of us blocked on twixtter (even me, and I never use that platform to express an individual thought, honest guv!). Even a message saying that “our ship” now has more fics on (boo, hiss) AO3 than the main canon couple was deleted because (paraphrasing) “some people don’t look at stats”. I do however appreciate the mod’s insistence that people not mention the server to the VAs … although I’m also sure Stewart Clarke has some awareness of the server’s existence … he’s like, the chief shitposter of the Dion fandom [endgame spoilers @ link], who also happens to be able to do the voice, lol.

b. The small “archive server” that currently has under 20 members. From what I was led to believe, this was meant for posting fan content without going into the long chains of discussion that always happen on the other server, and was also meant to be a more, er, drama-positive space (one of the people who set it up has flounced twice from the other server already and it hasn’t even been a month). But there still seems to be a lot of discussion (although at least it’s in dedicated channels) and none of it is drama (boo, what am I here for if not rubbernecking), and also, nobody posts any commentary on the stuff they “archive” so it’s completely unsearchable. (Also I’m irrationally annoyed by Mr Drama because he posted a load of links to fics on AO3 and then said he’d linked “every [ship]-centric fic”, as if that particular website is the only place people might deign to post it … this is a game I very much have skin in as I’ve posted D/T fics to a non-AO3 location so I’m incapable of being objective, but …)

Something that annoys me about people in both servers is the whole “I’m a fandom elder” mentality. Like, I’m 30 and I don’t consider myself to be “old” in fandom terms at all. Somebody made a remark about top/bottom discourse having been tiring “in the nineties”, and … mate, you’re thirty-two years old, I guarantee you were not discussing this in the nineties. The main mod of the big server is 26 and has taken to referring to herself as everyone’s mother, which I just can’t get on board with. There’s also at least one person aged under 18 in the larger server, which is a bit yikes, but they haven’t said anything for a while, so maybe they’ve … ahaha I’m gonna make the joke, I’m gonna do it … maybe they’ve gone back to playing Fortnite.

3. Do you create transformative works?

Yes.

4. What was your first fandom?

The live-action version of 101 Dalmatians, because I was five and had no taste. Apparently prior to this I was “obsessed” with Thomas the Tank Engine, but the dogs are the first thing I have records of having written fic for.

5. How often has fic made you cry?

Never. I very rarely cry these days, especially for media-related reasons. I didn’t even cry playing FFX: the closest I got was the lake scene on my second playthrough. I’ve been looking for an excuse to talk about the moments where I got misty-eyed in FF16, so here they are:

late-game spoilers

• Byron and Clive’s reunion, when Byron has a vision of fifteen-year-old Clive and is so overcome by emotion that he literally falls to his knees.
• Wade’s goodbye to Clive at the end of the final Wade-related sidequest. I just really love Wade!! Points at icon enthusiastically!!
• The line on Vivian’s chart between Clive and Jill saying “in love”. Like with the FFX lake scene, I’m always … secretly enamoured with the canon het couple, lol.

While I love both Auron and Dion probably more than all other characters in their respective games put together, nothing related to either of them has ever made me cry. ¯\ _(ツ)_/¯

6. Rec a fic that you love!

I’m just gorging myself on Dion-centric fics these days.

FF16 late-game spoilers

I’m not usually a fan of the “Dion and Terence adopt Kihel” take, although ~lavendre’s recent fic  T   ☉   ♂  7k+ kind of changed my mind on that? It’s gorgeous, anyway.

7. Who’s your ult OTP?

Auron/Braska, of course.

FF16 spoilers up to gaining Titan’s powers

… I did genuinely worry that Dion/Terence might take over, but there’s no contest. That said, I enjoy having two ships that currently loom large in my consciousness because of the differences between them: A/B is the “tragic because it’s probably unrequited and at least one of them dies” pairing, D/T is the “definitely requited and it’s not actually all that clear whether either of them dies” pairing. The similarities are probably why I like both, but the differences mean they’re both really appealing to think about for different reasons. Like, if I want to imagine a scenario that’s angsty because of miscommunication and uncertainty, give me A/B, but if I want two boys who are in love and know they are, it’s D/T. If it’s “yep, at least one of us is going to die at a specific point in time”, it’s A/B, but if it’s more of a “we may indeed die tragically at any moment, who knows” … etc.

8. Share a pic that would convince someone to fall for your current fandom!

Torgal is best boy. He is cute and also enormous.

9. Have you ever met a fandom friend IRL?

I went on holiday for two weeks with ficster28 in 2014. We hadn’t met before IRL, although we went to the same university (and the following year we ended up having tutorials together, in an extremely niche subject). We actually met through Tumblr, rather than through fandom specifically, although that definitely counts; at the time, she was big into Dan and Phil, although my Dan and Phil phase ended up being a couple of years later (more on that, in excruciating detail, below).

We didn’t really stay in touch after 2015, probably partly because it was a dodgy mental health time for both of us and we were two of the only three people taking this stupid exam on weird poetry written by medieval incels (disclaimer: I am not a literary scholar and this is probably a misrepresentation); I remember Gina noting that she was terrible at keeping friends once, and so am I, so when you have that in both directions it’s a recipe for disaster. Gina recently posted a new fic and I wondered about leaving a creepy comment (as I did a few years ago before noping out and deleting mine after she replied because I thought she was going to unwittingly doxx me), but it was a Harry Potter fic and I just couldn’t bring myself to.

10. What’s the last fandom merch or craft you got?

Ha, I very recently got myself an official Final Fantasy X wallet. It’s actually a designer wallet that I had to get imported from Japan via a proxy service, so it cost, er, quite a bit more than I’d normally spend on that sort of thing, but I’d been wanting a new one for a while because my previous one wasn’t androgynous enough to allow me to ✨live my truth✨, so this appeared at the right moment.

I’ve restrained myself from ordering any FF16 stuff from Japan, although in my weaker moments I’ve caught myself staring at the Dion coaster being resold for like 75 quid on eBay, sigh … as for the recently published artbook, I’m content to wait for the English edition unless someone tells me there are Wade pictures. If that’s the case I’ll just … walk to Japan and wrest it from the hands of an unsuspecting salesperson.

This is also the time to note that while I haven’t pre-ordered the Dion action figure, I’m definitely going to get it when it’s released. I have never been an action figure person before … and yet! I have never been remotely interested in blond men … and yet!!

11. Rare pairs, big ships, or gen?

Um, tragic master/servant? Sad brown-eyed men?

12. Are you multi-fandom or mono-fannish?

Final Fantasy.

13. When did you last travel for a con, concert, fanmeet, or cupsleeve event?

Like everyone who filled this in before, I have no idea what a cupsleeve event is. It was April for Final Symphony, but my mind is more occupied by the fact that we’re going to Kupocon in London next month. I’m still not sure whether I made a good decision regarding this because the new semester starts the day after we get back and student enrolment is always, as one of my colleagues put it last year, “a shitstorm”, but Yuna’s VA is going to be there and I think that’s what sealed the deal for me.

On that note, here’s an image from one of my four ongoing largescale FFX-related projects, and fortunately the only one with a deadline:

14. How did you get into your current fandom?

Ok so here’s the story of how I got into Final Fantasy. It’s long and I’m sorry. It’s also sort of about my career (somewhat embarrassingly), and also about three people who have been important in my life: two who I regret losing contact with, and one who, as I write this particular sentence, is sleeping in bed next to me. ☺

(subcut for length because this is almost two thousand words long I’m Sorry)

When I was eight, I made a friend who now goes by the name R online, and was more like me than anyone else I’d met before. We went to different secondary schools a few years later but still hung out a lot, which is pretty remarkable when, as noted above, I’m terrible at keeping friends. When we were about thirteen, we began hanging out on the internet a lot. R’s dad was actually a web developer, back in the noughties when I guess people just wrote raw HTML all the time (??), and R knew a lot about computers and internet culture, and in tandem with this developed an intense obsession with FF7 and particularly Sephiroth. This was not long after Advent Children had been released.

I didn’t have a PlayStation and was never really interested enough to find out anything about FF7 myself, but for a few months, R talked about it so much that I osmosed a few things. We used to listen to the Piano Collections and particularly One-Winged Angel, and I downloaded that track from some dodgy website and kept it in my iTunes and succession of iPods for years afterwards. (Tangent: I was really into Apple products for a while! My dad bought himself an iMac in 2001, quickly realised it was incompatible with most stuff he needed for work, and then passed it on to me; I had a great time. Mac OS X 10.1 is an Experience. I continued to be mostly a Mac user until 2018 at which point I became a FOSS neckbeard.)

I moved away for university and gradually fell out of touch with R afterwards (possibly the biggest regret of my life? but what can you do), and embarked upon my normie era: made a couple of very face-value friends, was mostly into choral singing (still am, but more … critically?), had a big normie boyfriend for a short time (the fact that we were mostly long-distance probably prolonged that time, tbh; also I can’t believe I went out with someone several inches taller than me! why would anyone do that), quite possibly didn’t develop any weird fandom obsessions at all for two or three years. I even considered myself a straight woman for a while, which is baffling. During this period, though, I met the above ficster28 and was drawn back into that life by … jealousy, I guess? Nothing but healthy emotions here.

So Gina is one of those people who has two separate online personalities. I kind of am too, in that I have a professional website and used to use twitxter for work, under my legal name, and then I also have my fandom persona on the Dreamwidth and on my website, where I try not to make it obvious which of the eight billion people on this earth is actually me. Gina makes the split in a different place: she’s content to associate most fandom stuff with her offline identity, but her RPF side is completely separate from that, which I guess is fair enough when all your family know your Tumblr URL. I met Gina through her main online identity (where she goes by her legal name), and didn’t come upon the Gina side of her until after our holiday together, when I was fascinated to find that there was a whole swathe of stuff I hadn’t been aware of before (including a fic she wrote in which the two of us appear  G   ♂  9k+). Most of it related to Dan and Phil; I was like ok, whatever.

Then about eighteen months later (let me pause here both to apologise and to promise this is still relevant to Final Fantasy), I was on Gina’s Tumblr and found myself getting kind of interested in Dan and Phil. I had been into much more problematic RPF previously (looking at you, coalition government) and had no qualms about getting invested in these lads, particularly when I found out about all the secrets and drama about a certain deleted video. At this time a new Dan and Phil forum was being set up and I was intrigued by the audacity of its members in starting a forum in 2016. I joined and became pretty active for a while. At that point in my life I was doing a master’s degree and was quite lonely, and my daily schedule soon became the following: morning: engage with Dan and Phil content; afternoon: write my thesis.

I had many years’ worth of Dan and Phil videos to catch up on, and noticed some familiar music in their early material: back in the day, they used to use a lot of music from FF7. The soundtrack of the infamous deleted video used Tifa’s Theme, and I had an “I know you” moment (kind of similar to that moment in FF16 where a certain Dominant is visited in his tent by … ok I’ll stop). After that I sought out the rest of the FF7 soundtrack, and came across the sheet music for the Piano Collections, and as soon as I attempted to play One-Winged Angel, I was like, oh. It’s this. It’s my childhood. My implicitly weebish teenage years that I suppressed! They’re back!

At around that time, after some uncertainty about my future, I discovered I’d be moving to the city in which I now live (the worst-kept secret on this journal, lol, I might as well just post my address at this point). I looked online to see if there were any orchestras I might join once I got here, and one of the top results on Google was for an orchestra that specialised in the music of video games. At this point in my life, I wasn’t much of a gamer beyond having occasionally borrowed R’s Pokémon games years earlier and going on Kongregate a lot as an undergraduate, but I knew about the FF7 soundtrack and therefore I knew game music was good.

It took about a year after I moved here for me to actually join the orchestra, because how do socialise, but once I did so I found that, shockingly, there were more people like me in the world, weird awkward nerds in their (then) early twenties. The orchestra itself turned out to be … not that good and pretty badly run, and there was eventually a lot of Drama, but they were fun people to hang out with, and back in the pre-Drama days we used to go for a drink after rehearsals. There was this … idk, this nerdy young IT man, haha, who lived in the same direction as me so we used to walk home together afterwards. I sometimes saw him on his way to work in the mornings and was like “oh! it’s my friend!”. At the time I was living in my own after a year of Social Anxiety Houseshare, and loved it. Anyway … not what this story is about, but a couple of months later we eventually got together, with some encouragement from a mutual friend in the orchestra who also got together with another girl in the orchestra at around the same time (they’re engaged now), and, yeah, now there’s this cute creature sleeping beside me!

A lot of the music we played in the orchestra was (often badly) arranged by members of the orchestra itself. I became very into orchestration for a while, and made a few arrangements; some of the pieces on my VGM page were originally written for the orchestra. The first arrangement I did was Tifa’s Theme; the peak of my Dan and Phil phase had passed, but it was a meaningful piece of music for me nonetheless. I then discovered that the original PC release of FF7 had had a MIDI soundtrack, and that this soundtrack was available online, so I started a project to convert all these MIDIs into nice-looking, playable sheet music (god, I started this in … 2017? and I still consider it an ongoing project … I’m actually really near the end, but One-Winged Angel is intimidating enough for me not to have touched it for several years). Around the time @adt and I got together, he bought himself a Nintendo Switch, and a year later when we moved in together I at last experienced the joy of being A Console Gamer. A year or so after that, I discovered FF7 was available on the Switch, and it was pretty clear that I had to play it after all these years of its being an important thing in my life.

I had no idea what was going on. I got maybe a third of the way through the game, realised I lacked most of the equipment and materia that would have made it somewhat playable, and then started following a walkthrough to the letter. Even though I lost my free will in the process, I ended up pretty much 100%ing the game because it was unlike any experience I’d had before. At this point it was early 2020, and I was finishing my PhD with a huge amount of uncertainty about what was coming next, especially given that it was, as stated, early 2020. I finished FF7 and then threw myself into playing Crisis Core on an emulator on my phone, probably as a coping mechanism. I briefly made a terrible career decision and moved to England, only to find the following day that there was an (at the time temporary) post available at the university I’d just left, and because of the vagaries of the recruitment process it was mine if I was happy enough to leave my new non-academic and probably slightly dodgy job in a new city where I didn’t know anyone. So obviously I accepted that right away.

Anyway, everything was very traumatic but fortunately I’d bought myself the GBA version of FF6 just before moving and consoled myself by playing it constantly on my Nintendo DS, and writing fic for the first time after a three-year break. I was amazed to find that FF6 took an even more vicelike grip on me than FF7 had. Everything about it was absolutely sublime. Like with FF7, I barely knew what I was doing and ended up gluing myself to a walkthrough halfway through, but this thing took hold of my brain for several months (and then I met FFX … they just get better!!).

When I returned home, I was adamant that I now needed to play every other Final Fantasy game in existence. That’s something I’m still working on, but … yeah, in conclusion, I hope this story has demonstrated that although I didn’t start playing these games until my mid-twenties, they mean an indescribably huge amount to me! Crikey. If you read all that … sorry again. How embarrassing.

15. What’s your favorite trope?

I really like “accidentally falling asleep on each other”. I also like this very specific ship dynamic that I may have just invented:

A: secretly pining for B and will do absolutely anything B asks, aware that B is having a Hard Time and doesn’t want to make it worse for them by confessing;
B: deeply troubled, relies on A for comfort to an extent that involves a lot of physical touching and sometimes kissing, but hasn’t paused for a moment to consider that they might actually be in love with A, and even after a third party points it out to them, is too mentally fucked up to come to any definite conclusion.

The “A” and “B” in that description are obviously not coincidental.

16. What are 3 tags that will make you click no matter what?

Final Fantasy X Series, Dion Lesage, Wade (Final Fantasy XVI).

17. Fav fest you’ve prompted/read/written for?

Semi-serious answer: /ffprompts, obviously. It is so great seeing various FF fics pop up on my reading page, and even more great seeing people commenting on each other’s stuff. It’s like a prompt comm where I’m interested in all the fills. (girl eating from all the different plates meme)

18. Share an upcoming fest you’re excited about!

I’m hoping to be similarly productive in /no-true-pair to last year, having signed up with all my FF16 faves (a few whose names end in “-on”, and miraculously, a few whose don’t)! I keep thinking I won’t manage it because of the aforementioned beginning of the semester, but then I remember the semester also started last September and I seemed to get on ok.

19. What’s your favorite episode, song, moment, etc. from your current fandom?

FF16 spoilers up to gaining Bahamut’s powers [but not actually Dion-related!]

“IS THIS THE CHILD YOU MADE WITH THE EMPEROR?!”

(Ben Starr delivers his lines so well and I found this to be a standout example!)

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

I set up my website in February 2022 and made some notes that I was intending to craft into a more cohesive post at the time. By this point it’s been over a year and strangely enough the below hasn’t taken the initiative to gain sentience and become more cohesive of its own accord (rude), but I don’t want it languishing in Google Keep forever, so with some light edits, here it is.

For hosting, I went with the legendarily non-user-friendly NearlyFreeSpeech, mostly because of their pricing structure (less traffic = less dolla) and also because I like a challenge. I’m not doing any backend stuff, I don’t even know what a PHP is, so the chances of needing support are minimal (unless I accidentally delete my subdomain, er, more on that later). First thing to do was set up the account and add some funds: I put 25 dollars in and nearly 20 of that went right away on domain registration and whois protection, which was fair enough. (After that I got two dollars back from typo bounty hunting – my true calling. Tell me you’re a humanities person who does computer stuff for a hobby without telling me you’re a … etc.) Since then, I’ve had it set up to email me whenever the funds go below 5 USD, which is ample time for me to put some more in. Over 15 months I’ve spent a grand total of $43.59 on this site, $27.26 of which has been domain registration, so I’m certainly happy enough with that.

I went for a non-production static site, because I don’t need any backend stuff and again, less dolla – basically, the kind of site I could host on GitHub Pages for free. So why didn’t I host it on GitHub Pages for free? I didn’t want to have to bother with git in a context where I’m not concerned about version control, there wasn’t much point in exposing the raw HTML (not that people can’t just ctrl-u for that, but there we are), I wanted it to play nicely with the domain name, which was easily registered through NFS, and after years of faffing around using Jekyll for my professional webpages due to Bad Decisions I just didn’t want to go near that here. Look, I just want to hand code everything like it’s 2002.

Next thing to do was register the domain name. Praze means “field” in that language I speak – an online garden for me to plant my shite in; .net is the best TLD, change my mind. For some reason the fact that you can just invent a subdomain on the control panel blew my mind. You can just will subdomains into existence, amazing. Tre is a variation on an online pseudonym I’ve been using for about ten years; I could have just shoved everything straight under praze.net but subdomains are a trademark of the Old Internet and, as mentioned above, it’s 2002. After that I was required to set tre.praze.net as the “canonical” URL for reasons I have forgotten but which were probably important.

The only way to upload/create content is via the command line (not pictured: me, rubbing my hands with techbro glee). NFS told me what the username and domain were for SSH and I made the inspired guess that the command was ssh username@domain and guess what, it was. The first thing to do was set up HTTPS, which, I discovered, is apparently actually called TLS. This was extremely easy (and free, even though it seems like most services force you to pay for it). When it came to adding actual content, the first thing I did was create some error pages. I had to make an .htaccess file for this, although I knew nothing about Apache and still don’t. I’m a bit suspicious of the way it looks (this is a note from last year and I’m not sure what I was referring to … potentially camel case??), but, Apache.

Moving stuff onto the server requires scp and putting in my SSH password every time, although maybe if I didn’t deliberately use a really minimal terminal emulator this wouldn’t be an issue. For editing pages that are already on the server I use Emacs on the terminal, which is also ok, but I wish I could use my usual GUI Emacs with everything how I want it … I’ve tried using tramp several times but it always hangs for me regardless of all the weird fixes I attempt for it.

If @adt ever wants his own space on the server, we have two options: 1, set up another site, although it would have to be a production one and would cost quite a bit more (although still, like, next to nothing). 2, keep stuff in the same site, turn off forced redirection and turn on alias-specific pages, then move all my stuff into a /tre subdirectory and his into an /adt one. I’m not sure how things would work regarding canonical URLs in this case – would we be able to set the bare domain as another alias? (This is irrelevant because if @adt ever does decide to get his own website he’ll definitely do something like build his own physical server to run it from and then deliberately install a bizarre operating system on it. Contrary to appearances I am not the techbro in this relationship.)

About a month in I accidentally deleted the subdomain, because you can do this in one click from the control panel. Getting it back was fine, although getting the TLS back took some time. But it returned eventually.

Now, over a year later, the site finally has a proper homepage. There are still lots of things I’d like to add but either haven’t thought through fully or just haven’t done enough work to share them yet. It’s a work in progress! Just a field for my shite.

If the formatting of this post seems odd or incomplete, try viewing the original on my site.

Only three years too late, but I finished FF7 Remake! Now just working my way through the wee Yuffie episode; it’s so nice to be back in Sector 7 pre-plate drop and just be seeing all the lads again.

Some miscellaneous thoughts I had while playing through (mostly just enthusing about all the characters I love):

• Aerith is done so well in this – just the right blend of sweet, sassy, and slightly unhinged. I realised this at the exact moment she said “shit” while she and Cloud were climbing over the rooftops. Perfect.
• Wedge is also excellent, and it’s so great how everyone just respects him so much. Another iconic line, of course: “Sorry about your ass.”
• I love how the plot point of the Wutai war is emphasised in this. In Crisis Core it sort of comes out of nowhere, and then you think back to the Wutai section in FF7 and think “oh, these guys were at war with Shinra just a few years ago? Why is there no evidence of this?” In Remake it felt much better integrated, especially the way Shinra were trying to connect Avalanche to Wutai and use that to dismiss Avalanche’s actual goals. I love the whole messy politics who’s-good-who’s-bad element of it (see also: FF12).
• The worldbuilding!! It’s so cool looking at all the posters around the slums and hearing all the conversations among the NPCs and just chilling under the plate (as circumstances allow, of course). I particularly enjoyed the slang they used, like “platies”; really felt like their lives had been properly fleshed out.
• I’ve never been a Reno fan, and yet after his fight with Cloud in the church, the scene where he’s injured and frustrated and the Shinra guys are calling him sir and he’s just snapping at them even while he can’t walk without their help … damn.
• As I previously said, I fucking love Cloud, and I especially love the bit where he’s being all serious with the kids about how he does the odd jobs For A Price, and then very carefully considers theirs and tells them with an entirely straight face that he’ll do it for three gil (from 3:56 in this video). Adorable. I literally clutched my hands to my chest.
• I have a note on my phone whose entire contents are “Biggs/Wedge/Ms Folia”. Honestly amazed that nobody has written anything for this yet.
• I wonder if anyone seriously uses the weapon upgrades screen; I just set every piece of equipment to balanced as soon as I got it. A few times I pressed cross instead of triangle by mistake, and ended up having to watch the unbelievably long sequence of the actual upgrades interface opening up, which gave me very strong vibes of the Crystarium in FF13, and became a big and very stupid personal inside joke as I found myself desperately mashing circle to try and get out of it without wasting time having to see the whole thing (which never worked).
• Loved Scotch and Kotch’s vibe. Excellent patter.
• Also, Reeve ❤ Still my favourite character in the FF7 universe, the one morally decent guy staying up late and getting stressed so he can bring down Shinra from within. Everyone talks shit about the part where Cait Sith sees the plate drop and does a dramatic clenched fist beat ground gesture, but the fact that It’s Actually Reeve just sustained me.
• Red XIII is also great. I love his banter with Barret, what a brilliant friendship. I didn’t mind that he wasn’t playable – I think it would have been too late in the game to add someone to the party properly – but I hope we get to control him in the next one.
• More in iconic lines: Barret’s “Up your ass!” Perfect.
• Hardest fight in the game: the fucking six-wheeled vehicle in the last chapter. I looked up some shitty corporate-website-hosted walkthrough (the downside of playing a game that came out in the 2020s) and it was like, “Don’t worry! This is much easier than the boss fights in chapter 17! 🙂” and then it took me about twenty attempts to get through it. Sephiroth was actually very easy in comparison: I just kept slapping Regen on everyone and Focused Thrusting him, and that was us.
• Very much support the scene where Heidegger approaches Rufus and says “Mr Vice President,” and then Tseng comes up on his other side and says, “Mr President”. So predictable but so great – I actually clapped my hands together and said “yes” out loud. Really I just like seeing Heidegger get rekt while Tseng comes out on top, because Tseng is my second favourite Shinra employee and Heidegger is a big bastard (although beaten to the Worst Shinra Executive prize, of course, by Palmer).
• Everyone talks about the implications of Zack apparently being alive in this timeline (on that note, I was honestly so delighted for Zack that he managed to fend off all those Shinra troops, that’s a guy who’s completed all the Crisis Core optional missions right there), but why is nobody pointing out that there are now two Clouds?! Isn’t that a bigger issue??

In conclusion, I’m looking forward to seeing how the unknown journey continues! Pretty much anything at all could happen now, so it’s going to be really interesting finding out where it all goes, especially with such excellent characterisation all round.

We also watched Advent Children last night; I’d seen it before but I was about fourteen and had no idea what a final fantasy seven was. I found it quite entertaining. I think it works best to perceive it as “here are some events that could conceivably happen after the end of FF7” rather than “this is the way things go after the game ends, this is the main set of circumstances affecting these characters’ lives”. Still on the lookout for Advent Children Complete, because I feel very cheated by not having had the pleasure of seeing the Turks with visible injuries.

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There’s now an official build of Emacs that runs natively on Android phones – I came across a brief post about this on one of the Emacs blogs last month, and tried it out yesterday. It’s working pretty well; there are some weirdnesses and limitations, but it certainly displays my org-agenda in a passable way, which is realistically going to be my main use-case. Going to meetings at work and needing to agree on dates and times for subsequent meetings is always a bit of a feat of guesswork when my agenda is only available at a computer, so this will definitely help with that.

Here’s what the agenda currently looks like on my phone (with a fairly limited set of files being displayed at the moment):

And for comparison, here it is on my laptop (with a slightly less limited set of files):

The setup process was actually smoother than I expected; the trickiest bit was wrangling file permissions on my phone to get the right stuff to sync properly, but it all seems to be working well for the moment. Here are a few notes I wanted to make on how this works:

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I’ve spent much of the weekend writing a couple of Emacs functions to automate certain elements of my fic formatting/uploading process; there’s nothing I love more than writing some extremely specific code that will be of no use to anybody but me. Here, nonetheless, are some notes on my new workflow for fic posting!

There are three Lisp functions (one of which I wrote a while ago, but I’ve now made some changes so it integrates better with the other stuff), and a Python script.

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I first played Crisis Core in the spring of 2020, on a PSP emulator on my phone, and while FF7 itself had been inspirational enough to get me following a walkthrough to the letter so I could 100% the game, Crisis Core was what really sucked me into the FF7 universe, and by extension, the Final Fantasy multiverse more generally. Sure, there’s some weird stuff going on with Genesis and plot points that aren’t explained in the absolutely clearest way, but, oh man, the characters, the setting, the emotions in this. Imagine a game so emotional that even the battle system itself is based on emotion; well, it’s this fucking game.

Zack Fair, what an angel. Hilariously, when I first played the opening chapters of Crisis Core back in the day I was like “who’s this annoying guy”, and somehow over the course of the game he succeeded in endearing himself to me … this time I just loved him from the start. The changes this lad goes through over the course of the game, my goodness; not just in terms of his attitude and his knowledge about everything that’s going on, but the way his appearance changes too as a physical manifestation of that. I think that really helps endear him to the player; that and the fact that he’s the only playable character; and that we get these glimpses of what happens offscreen during the DMW scenes, showing the way his relationships with the other characters evolve and how important they all are to him. Zack is one of those people who makes friends all over the shop and forms extremely strong bonds with them (not at all relatable), and you can tell that from these little flashes we see. And of course, all that makes the end even more tragic. Also, a man who openly cries!! ❤

Other characters whom I also love!! Cissnei is great, probably mostly because she’s so needlessly mysterious. Wee earnest Tseng, my boy!! Angeal: kind of love him, kind of think he looks like a Thunderbirds character, but I’ve always got time for a serious guy with black hair and a big sword, and the way Zack idolises him is so adorable. Even Sephiroth, who I’m normally very meh about – this playthrough really made me appreciate what an absolute tragedy he goes through. Like, by the time of FF7 proper he’s too far gone to be turned back from (checks notes) destroying the entire world, but in this – he’s strict and weird and untouchable but, to begin with, he’s actually kind of a nice person.

Some more miscellaneous thoughts before I talk about that other guy:

1. Why do SOLDIER members always assume the Tory power stance? I didn’t find an illustrative screencap, so trust me on this, but they’re all standing around on the SOLDIER floor with their legs splayed as far apart as possible.
2. Best entry in the soundtrack: Wandering on a Sunny Afternoon. But, specifically, the part that sounds like Renaissance Fair by the Byrds (1:01–1:31 at the first link). I don’t know what it is – maybe those sixths? – but I just love it so much. When I first played the game I was very ready to dismiss the OST as a non-Uematsu creation and therefore inferior, but to my chagrin I was forced to concede that it’s also really good.
3. What is the role of religion in the FF7 universe? Aerith grows her flowers in the church, which is pretty decrepit but doesn’t seem to be in danger of demolition (although I guess that’s part of the standard aesthetic under the plate), One of the Genesis fan club emails mentions holding a memorial for him outside the church, which suggests that religion has at least some significance for ordinary people, but it’s interesting that they don’t seem to have any desire to go inside. My guess is that religion was formerly quite widespread in Midgar, but Shinra have encouraged their people to turn away from it and towards science, a bit like in post-revolutionary France; so it’s pretty much dead above the plate, but present, if viewed as a bit old-fashioned, in the slums.

Ok, so … Cloud. He’s just so cute in this game: the way he idolises SOLDIER, his friendship with Zack, the way we can see that he’s actually pretty decent in combat but just isn’t in the same league as Zack et al. because he’s not a genetically modified superhuman. His fucking travelsickness, why is he so adorable. And the way Zack cares for him at the end, for so long … I ship it wholeheartedly. Cloud’s story is a bit like Sephiroth’s, in that Horrible Events force him to undergo a massive, heartbreaking personality shift, and it’s exactly what would happen, you know? Take a guy who’s kind of shy and insecure and give him the memories of a much more outgoing and relaxed guy and add a load of trauma, and you get someone really cold and closed-off because of how confused and hurt he is on the inside. Not that I don’t appreciate FF7 Cloud’s levels of sass, but when you think about the guy he used to be … time for more Emotions.

Obviously after I finished Crisis Core I was duty-bound to immediately start playing FF7 Remake (long overdue, I’m aware). I’m slightly alarmed by how difficult the battles seem to be already – the updated Crisis Core gameplay did a good job of preparing me for it, to some extent, but idk, everything seems to have a lot of HP. I’ll get over it … maybe when I get over the tragedy of “SOLDIER First Class” Cloud Strife. Honestly, the impact of going from Crisis Core to (what initially seems like) standard FF7, with those shots of Midgar at the beginning and Bombing Mission playing; as someone who cries at media about once every three years, I almost cried.

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I beat FF1, the GBA version! I’m adamant that the GBA releases of the 2D FF games are the superior ports, and constantly disappointed that FF3 was missed out – the pixel remaster is ok, and the new arrangements of the music from all six games is great, but I just think the GBA versions are so neat, so aesthetic (those battle backgrounds!), lovely font, nice and portable, still playable on my DS Lite, just a great experience all over. For FF1 I went with a warrior/warrior/red mage/monk party, which is probably a fairly standard choice, although if I were to play again I think I’d swap out the second warrior for another mage and then have one of the mages white and one black, just because I’d like to be able to use a bigger range of spells, and by the endgame my second warrior was mostly just throwing hi-potions anyway.

The storyline is minimal in this game – it’s basically “go to place, get item, go to place, get item” – but I couldn’t help constructing various headcanons about my party, none of whom are straight, two of whom are definitely himbos, etc., etc. It’s interesting and frustrating to experience some of the mechanics of early FF games – like curative spells just missing if the target gets KOd, instead of sensibly redirecting to someone else in the party – and I’m sure that’s even more the case for the NES version, as the amounts of HP, gil, etc. have been substantially adjusted for Dawn of Souls, presumably the result of many more years of experience on the part of the dev team. Regarding character levels, the walkthrough I was referring to says the following about the final boss:

The high 20s will make the game challenging but beatable, the low 30s will be fairly balanced, and the high 30s will near guarantee that you can succeed.

I’m guessing this is more geared towards the NES version, or that this was written by some Super Leet Gamer Bro, because firstly, by what sorcery would your characters be at such low levels – mine were in the sixties and I’d barely done any grinding, unless you count all the extra random encounters that resulted from getting lost on the overworld map several times – and secondly, even having them in the sixties didn’t exactly make it a walk in the park. Sure, the rehashed four fiends were pretty easy, but Garland himself was actually quite difficult and I had about seven game overs before I actually managed to win.

Anyway, it was fun! Looking forward to playing the second half of the cartridge, i.e. FF2. Playable characters with actual canonical names!!

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At some point in the last three or so years of using Emacs I seem to have become moderately competent in Lisp, or at least competent enough to use it for my own purposes, which mostly consist of “if this happens, output a string”. Now that I’ve got myself a DW subscription and increased the number of icons I have, er, tenfold, I’ve rewritten my icon selection script so it actually picks an icon that suits the post instead of just doing it alphabetically. Because I am a bit weird, I ran every single one of my previous posts through the new script and updated their icons with what it gave me. I think that’s called beta testing.

Another thing I’ve done is reorganised the files for my agenda, and added a few lines to my config that change which files are displayed according to where I am and what time it is. This is what I wrote:

(add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/music.org")(add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/admin.org")(if (atwork)    (progn      (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/work.org")      (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/acwri.org"))  (progn    (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/home.org")    (if (isworkday)        (if (< (string-to-number (format-time-string "%H")) 18)            (if (> (string-to-number (format-time-string "%H")) 7)                (progn                  (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/work.org")                  (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/acwri.org"))              (progn                (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/personal.org")                (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/habit.org")))          (progn            (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/personal.org")            (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/habit.org")))      (progn        (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/personal.org")        (add-to-list 'org-agenda-files "~/Documents/drive/org/calendar/habit.org")))))

(Yes, I’m aware that Lisp is a bizarre language. But I think progn is cute.)

Now that this is set up, along with another couple of functions I wrote called atwork and isworkday, work stuff only shows up if I’m at work, or at home during (roughly defined) working hours; personal stuff (games I need to play, fic I need to write) only shows up if I’m at home and it’s outside those hours; and home-related things (cleaning I need to do … with the best of intentions … argh) only shows up if I’m at home, regardless of the time of day. This is motivating me to add a lot more random shite to my personal and home todo lists, knowing that I (theoretically) won’t get distracted at work by certain fun fannish activities I’m supposed to be doing, and then, hopefully, actually being reminded to complete those fun fannish activities once I’m in free time mode.

By way of example, my agenda when I was at work on Tuesday looked like this:

And then, when I got home, it looked like this:

(The “Day 12” at the top is from another script I wrote, to remind me where I am in my menstrual cycle … seriously, I feel like Emacs has publicly advertised functions and packages for everything but this. It’s the Techbro Gender Curse: to my knowledge, literally all the famed Emacs users but one are cis men, so … yeah.)

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1. Arven, I’m sorry I ever slandered you. I love you and I love your big dog and I don’t care one single whit about gym badges, I’ll take your handmade ones over those any day, get rekt Nemona. … seriously, as soon as the big dog came out of his ball I dedicated myself to completing the Arven storyline before even setting foot in a gym or a Team Star base, and I’m pleased to say that despite consequently not being able to give commands to any Pokémon I’ve caught at above level 20, I’ve seen off four out of the five titans so far. It’ll be quite the grind preparing for the fifth one, but, look, I see a guy who openly cries and I’m immediately 😍. Good thing he’s not called Pepper like he is in Japanese, because that would be too adorable to handle. (Also I’ve been looking for come across some really cute Arven art and this one by dwsiknw is my favourite so far!)
2. The character creation screen looks like it’s going to let you be non-binary, in that you can pick a “boy base” or a “girl base” and then customise it with features of either, but then the game itself is Very Gendered in the way the player character is constantly referred to as (in my case) “Master Trem” – I do wonder if that’s just how the English localisation team decided to deal with “-san”, and if the Japanese version manages to get away with being a lot more vague in that respect. I just think it’s odd that the text of the game is so gendered when there isn’t the explicit “Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?” question of yore; having said that, I have no memory of how this was handled in Sword and Shield, so maybe they’re just doing the same thing again, but it does feel like the school setting turns the binarism up to 11.
3. Not having a PC with all the Pokémon in, and being able to access one’s entire inventory of Pokémon at any point, has radically changed my playstyle. Back in the day I would settle on a party of six and just level those up along the way, coming back to the PC later on to make a lacklustre attempt at levelling some of the others and inevitably abandon this shortly afterwards because there wasn’t any story left to keep me interested in the game. In Violet, I’m taking an agressively egalitarian approach, where I have a consistent lead Pokémon that actually does the fighting, and then the five behind it are my weakest. Every time one of those five levels up, I go into the boxes and switch it out for a weaker one. This is another reason why this playthrough is taking such a long time, and also why I’m going to find it very difficult to add any lower-level Pokémon to the dex later, so it’s really just a terrible idea on all fronts, but you know what, I want all the wee lads to have their time to shine.
4. I love how the music transitions properly as you go into battle, changing to the new theme at a point that makes sense based on the rhythm and harmony of the old one – it fits really well with the open-world aesthetic. Also the tunes are banging! The trainer battle theme really sounds like old school Pokémon battle music, but also really new and fresh at the same time, and the various wild battle themes are The Funk. Just very excellent.
5. Clavell is still great! That’s all I wanted to say.

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I […] caved and bought Pokémon Violet. I was aware of the various graphical issues, and it certainly feels a lot worse to play than gen 8, but some of the characters looked interesting and above all it’s set at a school which is the kind of content I absolutely lap up. I’ve only played up to the first Teams meeting with Professor Turo (or, as I like to call him, Professor Truro), but my verdict so far is: encountering Pokémon is great, your woman with the green hair is surprisingly wholesome, Clavell has Mr Rin vibes, Arven is so far less relevant to my interests than I thought he’d be (perhaps this will change?), Penny is excellent. Also the bread dog!! In some ways, this is proof that they are scraping the bottom of the barrel for new Pokémon, but also, bread dog.

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I spent basically all 2021 playing FFX. I started on the 2nd of January, sent @adt a very innocuous text saying “final fantasy ten seems to have a more interesting story than nine so far”, and then two months later I was fully obsessed with it.

I intended to move on to twelve as a sort of new year’s resolution; it actually took me a while to bring myself to do it. Prior to ten, my big FF obsession was six, and when ten took hold of my brain my obsessiveness about six suddenly waned; and I really didn’t want this to happen again. My concern was that either I’d be disappointed by twelve, or it would consume me to the extent that I forgot about ten – which was a kind of ridiculous thought, because (bangs fists on table) I’m so into it.

Case in point: this post is turning out to be about final fantasy ten when it’s supposed to be about final fantasy twelve, damn it! Wtf, me! Ok, not doing that anymore, I promise.

So! I’ll admit it was a slow start; I’ve been playing this since fairly early in the year and have only just got to the end, but over the last month or so I’ve been really into it. I’m not sure at what point in the game that happened – possibly around Archades. Look, I love how the localisation uses different accents for the different regions (even if I do have some weird instinct to say “blimey, guvnor” every time a member of the Archadian army opens his mouth), I love Cids of all kinds, and I particularly love the weird circle of moogles in Old Archades who sing their rhyme in an extremely creepy way: it gives me a big English folk horror vibe, which is something other FF games sadly lack.

I’m pleased to announce that my favourite character in this game is not a Sad Man but is in fact a Sad Woman, a certain Lady Ashe. Look, I just like people who are hot and grieving, I guess. Basch does a great job of filling the “serious, facially scarred, and ambiguously old” niche, though, and shipping-wise, I’m leaning towards pairing those two together so they can have an extremely miserable time. Ashe/Vaan is also fun to think about! Other characters who are great: Larsa, who talks and acts in no way like a twelve-year-old. I was extremely confused about his age and gender when he first appeared, and I still can’t not headcanon that he’s trans and approximately twenty. “Surprisingly rude” is also the best line in the game and nobody can tell me otherwise.

Something that turned me off FF12 initially was the amount of Sheer Lore in this game. Having not played other Ivalice stuff beyond about the first five minutes of FF Tactics (where, on reflection, I think it was the, er, tactics that turned me off – I just want to hit stuff with my big sword), I was a bit overwhelmed by just how much was going on. I didn’t actually pay a lot of attention to the cutscenes until I got properly invested in the game; what kept my interest was actually the battle system. Never would have seen this coming, but turns out I absolutely love gambits. I did come to appreciate the lore later on, though, especially the way that the various factions have complicated alliances with each other, and also how there are multiple sentient races all coexisting as part of the same society. Especially the seeq, absolute best boys. I just don’t know if I’m yet secure enough lore-wise to write fic for this game, but I’ll read some of what’s out there and see how things go.

Obligatory closing paragraph about the music, as it’s a huge part of the FF games for me, for various reasons (one day when I’m feeling particularly boring I’ll write a very long post about that). From what I’d heard of the twelve stuff before actually playing the game, I’d never found it that amazing. Uematsu’s style is very driven by catchy melodies and exciting rhythms, and the FF12 soundtrack is very much not like that; it’s much more in the standard game OST mould, imo, in that it aims more at “creating an atmosphere” than at “providing everyone with a cool and memorable tune”. I can play a lot of Uematsu stuff by ear after hearing it a couple of times – it’s memorable and the tunes work in the way you’d expect them to – but even after hours of running around the Westersand or wherever, I wouldn’t be able to do that for the stuff in this OST. That said, I think the music fits really well with the game, and I enjoyed spotting what seem to be quotations of various classical things (more, I’m sure, if I was the absolute beast of an expert on the western musical canon that my ninety-year-old grandmother is). Quite apart from that, there are also those two notes in Ashe’s theme that are perfection. Two notes! How is this possible!

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I came across Final Fantasy Record Keeper in the summer of 2020. You can tell, because my most powerful character in the game is Locke, and at the time I was knee-deep in FF6 obsession.

That attack stat tho

I tried out FFRK, FFBE, and DFFOO all at around the same time, and my impressions were as follows:

• DFFOO: unremarkable music, uninteresting art style, why is everyone from Type-0;
• FFBE: great art, great OST, enormous downloads every time I want to play it, very confusing gacha that makes no sense;
• FFRK: cool pixel art, nice (although sometimes questionable) arrangements of existing soundtracks, somewhat understandable mechanics; in general, Solid.

Those impressions changed a bit over time, and once I learnt that ✨✨ a certain High Summoner ✨✨ would be coming to DFFOO in (checks calendar) like two weeks omg, I obviously got a lot more invested in that one, but for a long time Record Keeper was my go-to. In fact, it was what I turned to to keep me sane in the first perplexing year of my new job; I would run through a couple of dungeons when I needed a quick break. So thanks, I guess.

When I downloaded the game, it was just before they ended support for languages other than English. My phone is in French for bants, so I had a few pleasant weeks of learning the French characters’ names (Linoa 👀), but starting to get into it at a time when that was about to happen did kind of suggest the game was on its way out. The official end of service announcement the other day wasn’t really surprising, but, you know, it’s kind of sad.

Once I’d levelled up enough characters, my go-to party in FFRK was effectively “fave from each game”, with those games being six, seven, eight, nine and ten. That made my lineup Locke, Cid H (problematic fave), Fujin (absolute icon I wish I could get away with only saying one word at a time), Freya, Auron. Over time, Auron grew to be the one I favoured most (ahem), and despite being a free-to-play evangelist, I managed to get all his soul breaks … a mere few days before they released, like, another four of them and I only pulled three. But, you know, I have all his soul breaks but one, that’s not bad going. (Perpetually disappointed that I was never playing at a time when the young Auron wardrobe record was available, though, because that’s something I actually would have spent money on … same goes if they ever release a young Auron costume in DFFOO … yes I will give you thirty-two of your English pounds for some slightly different pixels, if those pixels are “my boy with two eyes and slightly longer hair”.)

Once I started playing some of the harder content I realised I, er, actually needed someone in my party who could do white magic, and by this time I was knee-deep in FFX so I swapped out problematic fave for Yuna, and that’s been my main party since. For posterity:

Da boyz

Also, I appreciate how this game allows me to stare at a nice picture of young Auron. I mean, I know this is just taken from FFX, but it’s like basically the highest-quality (and yet still terrible) image of him that exists? Amazing.

is that … angeal hewley

(Also, again … why is Jecht referred to as “young”? He’s five years older than Auron at the absolute minimum, lads, come on.)

Anyway, the FFBE WotV FFX collab is back on, so I guess I’m downloading that now? Just want Auron in all possible formats tbh. Life comes at you fast.

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I’ll admit that I don’t usually read self-published books, which perhaps makes me some kind of snob. I also don’t tend to read memoirs, or to write anything approaching book reviews. Yet, while I haven’t read a huge number of books this year, two of them do in fact happen to be self-published memoirs, and here I am spewing out some thoughts about the first one. Bonus: I read the book, and actually wrote most of the below, in January, so do I even have clear memories of any of it at this point, probably not.

The book in question is called Lesbian crush diaries: School, bulimia, France. There are probably countless books out there about experiencing confusing same-sex attraction as a teenager, but I was drawn to this one (actually a trilogy, but released as a single ebook) because of, er, certain parallels with my own life, the one I’ll be most forthcoming about being the narrator-protagonist Natasha’s obsession with one of her secondary school teachers. (Given the title, I should probably point out that I do not have experience with eating disorders.)

From the age of twelve to seventeen, I had this … thing for one of my teachers that completely consumed me, to the point of basically dictating my main extracurricular interests, which university I attended, significant elements of my worldview at the time … wild. Adolescence is just such a bizarre phase of life and I fervently hope never to have to interact with anyone aged under eighteen ever again. But when the internet rabbit hole revealed to me that not only had someone had similar experiences twenty years earlier, but had actually published a book about it, I obviously had to seek it out. There are moments in the first part of LCD that are excruciatingly relatable: the parts where Natasha makes reference to, like, the weird dichotomy of wanting to see the person and to avoid them at the same time, taking particular routes through the school because she knew exactly when her teacher would be passing through, paying so much attention to what she wore, second-guessing everything she said … awful. Knowing all this useless stuff about her. God, yes. Did I honestly waste five years of my life doing this?

As the book went on and moved into Natasha’s university years, her experiences became a lot less similar to my own: not that that’s a bad thing, but I guess it was maybe a shock that someone I’d had this secret taboo thing in common with then turned out to be very unlike me, I suppose. In the early stages I was thinking, cripes, she’s even weirder than I was: the things she was doing in her first year at university reached a level of obsessiveness that was utterly beyond me. But at the same time she seems to have been developing into something resembling a normal twenty-year-old: doing a terrible job at work, going out to bars, getting chatted up by lads, which was very much not what I was up to at that time. The most outrageous thing I did that year was attend a sum total of one house party (the second of my entire life) and get very drunk (for about the third time in my entire life).

The writing style was a bit frustrating at times. It’s obviously impossible to know how much these diary entries have been edited – they’re clearly selected highlights regardless, as the first few years pass by very quickly. The diaries start when Natasha is thirteen or fourteen, and either she was an extremely good writer for that age, or the material has been heavily spruced up. But the style doesn’t ever really evolve much beyond that. Natasha often appears to have a very detached, emotionless reaction in the way she relates events, which restricts the narrative’s ability to be engaging, and I’m saying this as someone whose favourite activity is avoiding emotions at all costs.

Several of the lesbian-leaning characters in the book reveal that they’ve experienced the same crush on a teacher phenomenon. This is such a perennial feature of being a non-heterosexual teenager and I’m honestly bewildered by the fact that it isn’t more of a known thing in media. It seems as if the only people who know about it are those of us who had the misfortune to experience it: I suppose we all tried to keep it secret, although I didn’t have much success with that at the time, and Natasha clearly doesn’t here either. Something I found interesting was the way these characters all define their sexualities differently: one is confident that she is a lesbian, another decides she’s straight, Natasha herself goes through a phase of describing herself as “heterosexual and homoemotional”, although the author of the book seems to identify unequivocally as a lesbian today. Natasha kisses many more men in the book than I have in my life, even though I legit thought I was straight until I was about 22 (which clearly makes no sense given the above … that’s some tasty denial), but that’s probably more a function of my personality than my sexuality.

In conclusion: the first volume was worth reading given my own experiences, but I didn’t find the rest particularly engaging. Having said that, the writing was a lot better than the other self-published memoir I’ve read recently, which will perhaps be the subject of another non-review.

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Last time, we finished off the music itself, but the final chapter of the creating nice sheet music from GBA soundtracks story is mostly focused on making sure the score and parts look good …

First thing to do here is combine double wind parts on the score. This can be a long and tedious process, but fortunately the only instrumentt there are two of in this case is the horns.

Legend has it this process is easier in Dorico, but I’ve been overenthusiastically using Sibelius since 2008 so I’m locked in now.

Next thing: cues. Rehearsal marks would also happen here but I don’t usually bother using them, especially for these short pieces. I would normally add a cue if an instrument ever has at least four full bars of rests; looking through the example, that affects both horns, trumpet, timpani, second violins, and violas. “Paste as cue” does this fairly effectively – I just pick whatever’s likely to come through most in terms of melody for the preceding bar or so. That gives us a nice cued passage that shows up in the parts but not in the score:

The last thing to do on the full score before having a look through the parts is just general layout tweaks: first select all and go to Appearance > Reset Note Spacing (this doesn’t normally do much unless there’s been a lot of experimenting with key signatures during the process). Then select all bars except the first one and do another ctrl-shift-alt-h to get rid of empty staves on pages after the first one. Opinions vary on this, and it was once the cause of what I recall as an impassioned debate with the conductor of the community video game orchestra I used to prepare scores for (although tbh it was probably just him telling me to do it the other way and me, with a single tear rolling down my face, replying “ok”). But this is purely for my enjoyment so we’re going with the hiding empty bars option here.

Then select all again and go to Layout > Optimise. This often messes up parts that are across two staves, especially where there are cross-staff notes: the harp part in this case. This line obviously needs fixing, for example:

After manual adjustment it looks much more sensible. Sibelius puts things it thinks are overlapping with other things in red, but lads, these are fine, stop it.

Zoom out to full pages and manually adjust again to minimise whitespace, and now the full score is done. Now it’s time to sort the parts, some of which unfortunately has to be done on separate occasions for each individual part, but at least there’s a bit that can be sorted for all of them first, which is: go to Parts > Part Appearance > All Parts, and in the Layout section click Auto Breaks. Leave “at or before” selected but uncheck all the boxes underneath it (which makes no sense, but there we are); also uncheck “add warnings at difficult page turns”.

Now comes the opening each part in turn bit: for each part, select all and go to Layout > Optimise again. For the harp part, this will probably result in creating more problems instead of providing solutions, so that one can be manually adjusted instead.

That’s it!

This is where PDFs of the score and parts get exported, along with the audio file. Back in the safety of Linux, I can easily apply a fade-out to the audio using sox IN.mp3 OUT.mp3 fade 0 0 5 (although I more often than not forget to).

Here’s a brief comparison of the “before” and “after” audio.

Before (i.e. the imported MIDI), with some incorrect instrument mappings and balance issues:

After, with … well idk, I just hope this is better, I guess:

You can view the full score here, and download the parts here.

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Finally installed emacs27 on my laptop today, mostly because there were a couple of packages I wanted to try out (lastfm.el apparently works with emacs26, but I had no luck with it). Unfortunately this broke xresources-theme – no idea why this is … it’s a shame not to get nice colours that match my window borders etc., but I installed another nice theme instead.

I had a much bigger problem with actually uninstalling emacs26 in the first place and thought for a moment that I’d somehow fucked up my entire laptop and would never be able to use Emacs ever again (tbh, the worst news imaginable). Solution to this: uninstall emacs26 and emacs26-common first, ffs.

Once it was actually installed I had enormous issues with plank, which took a huge amount of fiddling around to solve, and I annoyingly ended up finding the answer in a throwaway comment on a StackExchange post that didn’t even look particularly relevant. Because I’m about to do all this all over again on my desktop PC (😬), this is what should be in /usr/share/applications/emacs27.desktop (the issues turned out to be with Exec and Icon, not StartupWMClass):

[Desktop Entry]Name=EmacsGenericName=Text EditorComment=Edit textMimeType=text/english;text/plain;text/x-makefile;text/x-c++hdr;text/x-c++src;text/x-chdr;text/x-csrc;text/x-java;text/x-moc;text/x-pascal;text/x-tcl;text/x-tex;application/x-shellscript;text/x-c;text/x-c++;Exec=emacs %FIcon=emacsType=ApplicationTerminal=falseCategories=Development;TextEditor;StartupWMClass=emacsKeywords=Text;Editor;

Also been updating my Dreamwidth posting function to make it extra tasty so I’ve spent several hours struggling through Lisp code. I have one more thing to attempt to implement, but it’s even more ambitious than the rest so I’m attempting to save it for later.

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Back at it! I thought I’d finish this tonight but it turns out what I originally estimated would be part 3 is actually going to be parts three and four. Tonight’s work was mostly on the audio, next time will concentrate on the last bits of the visual stuff.

So after making it look somewhat nice, the next thing to do is go through each part and put in some articulation. There are different things to consider for different instruments: winds need breaths here and there while strings can play long phrases; woodwinds can do long slurs, but on string instruments a slur normally means play in a single bow, so theirs have to be shorter. So in places where we have two parts playing the same tune, there will nonetheless be subtle differences, like this:

I did a bit of playing around with the distribution of parts, for the sake of balance: took some of the top Gs out of the flute, as they stood out a bit too much, and then moved a lot of the second violin stuff into a new viola part to make it sound less harsh in the lower register. This also solved an issue I had at the end of the middle section where the violin parts had to switch from one role to another with a bit of overlap: now the second violins can cover the end of one section while the first violins and violas move on to the beginning of the next one.

After adding some articulations to the melody, I checked them against the real thing. This is also a good point to fill in dynamics, but really, apart from the ends of phrases tapering off, there aren’t that many of those here.

Then I looked at the various parts sharing the bassline; the main thing that came up was that the bassoon part needed an extra note added to the end of the phrases to finish them off completely, instead of just having a nonuplet that segues abruptly into nothing.

Then the harp part: most of this was just distributing stuff across the staves, treble notes in the treble, bass notes in the bass. The switch to the middle section illustrates this nicely (the dynamics are wrongly aligned here but we’ll fix that later).

For the drum kit, I ended up putting the echo back in on the snare after listening to the original again. There are various ways of writing out drum parts but I went for my usual “hands in voice 1, feet in voice 2” option, and added the kick to the accented snare beats to give them a bit more body (and to make the music easier to read – and I also lengthened some of the note values to help with this, which is a special advantage of drum parts).

After all this stuff, the next thing is to do the dynamics more thoroughly, mostly for the sake of balance. At this point I ended up redistributing the upper strings in places to give some of the higher viola notes to the second violins, just so they have a bit more power, and this also gives the second violins something to do (i.e. a single note to play) during what would have been very long rests.

Once that distraction was over, back to the dynamics … as I said, there aren’t many of them in this, but I put a few crescendi and diminuendi in the middle section just to highlight the natural contours of the phrases and to make it a bit more interesting.

In audio terms, we now have the finished product:

Visually, there are still a few things to sort out, which I’ll leave for part four.

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Ok! My indulgence in this niche hobby continues.

A reminder of where we were at last time:

The first thing to do here is sort out the metronome mark: we’re in 12/8 so it should be using dotted crotchets. Time for some maths … 128 crotchets equals 256 quavers equals 85 and a third dotted crotchets. The closest standard metronome mark to this is 84, so we’ll stick that in.

Next thing is to listen to the real thing to check what kind of instruments we should be using. After listening a few times I’ve got some ideas of what I want in there: the Pokémon tracks often go for a less realistic sound so it’s more a case of making an appropriate decision than finding correct answers. I can plug these into the Sibelius file and have a listen to see if it roughly sounds like the real track. Note to self: you need to have earphones in by this point at the very latest, laptop speakers are no good.

After doing that I have a somewhat passable version:

This is currently for the following instruments: flute; clarinet; bassoon; trumpet; two horns; timpani; drum set; shaker; harp; two violin sections (one possibly to be replaced by viola but we’ll see); cello. That doesn’t seem particularly outrageous.

Next we add all those as new instruments, redo the quaver rest in the upbeat bar (Sibelius always gets a bit confused by these), and then copy over the material from the old staves to the new ones with the assistance of Focus on Staves. Delete all the old parts as you go. I’m splitting the bass part over a couple of instruments, so this is the one that takes the most work at this point; the rest are mostly just a straightforward copy and paste for now.

This is as good a time as any to add the title and composer and import a nice house style. Here’s what the first page looks like after doing that:

And here’s what it sounds like (pretty similar to the previous version, the main difference is that I’ve got more stuff on the bass part so it comes through better):

This is still far from finished! It’s in an almost decent state but it still needs to be made into Actual Music by adding dynamics and articulations, as well as sensible ways of shaping phrases for the various instruments – and there are a few more visual edits to come as well. On to part 3 (quite possibly tomorrow).

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Who is this tutorial for? I mean, who else owns this specific version of the quite expensive program Sibelius (to be precise, the 2018 edition), knows the principal rules of music engraving, and is interested in (points at title) creating nice sheet music from GBA soundtracks? Me. It’s me. This is so I don’t forget how to do this.

Ok, unfortunately you need to use Windows for this. First, download GBAMusRiper and the .gba rom you’re ripping from. Put them in a folder together, open up PowerShell and navigate into it, then run .\gba_mus_riper [ROM].gba. This creates a new folder with all the midi files inside, as well as a .sf2 file, which is apparently a soundbank. I don’t know what that is, but I think it’s the thing those people on YouTube use to make this stuff.

I’ve been mostly doing this with FF6 so far, but for the purposes of this guide I’m using a Pokémon Emerald rom, which will be interesting because a lot of the instruments in the Pokémon games are less realistic so I’m going to have to make actual Creative Decisions about how to represent them. I don’t need to worry about that until later anyway! I’m going to do Route 113, for the sole reason that it’s a banger.

A lot of the tracks in the folder are just junk. I got 609 tracks and there definitely aren’t that many in the Pokémon RSE OST, lol. Sort them by size and delete any that are a couple of kilobytes or less because they’re probably just sound effects. Having done that I now have 193 tracks, which is still a lot. Some of them could be duplicates and maybe some could be meant to be layered over each other? FF6 definitely didn’t do that but who knows what Pokémon does.

After opening loads of the files I’ve established that the one I want is song418.mid. This is where I open the file in Sibelius. Change some of the notation settings in the import dialog, otherwise there may be issues regarding tuplets crossing barlines if there’s an upbeat bar. Set the shortest note to the smallest available value i.e. a demisemiquaver.

When we open the file, it looks like this:

And it sounds, I’m afraid, like this:

It’s pretty terrible for now. Fear not!

First thing to do: structural edits. This one is in 12/8 but Sibelius has assumed 4/4 here. It’s also supposed to start with a quaver upbeat, but Sibelius assumes it starts at the beginning of a bar. Change the time signature to 12/8 with a quaver upbeat (via Time Signature > More Options). Then cut and paste all the music back a quaver. We might as well also set the key signature (B minor) at this point.

Most game tracks loop; those boxes in the image tell us where the loop starts and ends. The first box is the beginning of the track, the second is the start of the loop, and there’ll be one at the end for the end of the loop. We can put in repeat signs where the loop starts and ends, and then go to Edit Hit Points (alt-shift-p) and click Delete all to get rid of the boxes. Also delete any MIDI messages here (the lists of numbers in bold). Make sure View Hidden Objects is turned on so you can see where these are.

Next we need to quantise everything manually. Go through each instrument track and listen to it – then edit it so that what you see matches what you hear. This will mostly affect rhythms, but you can also do dynamics and enharmonic notes at this point. Some notes may be almost inaudible – they’re just there for an echo effect. You can just get rid of those.

Here’s how the timpani part looks to start with:

And here it is afterwards, much more normal looking:

Some of the instruments will sound very weird – NotePerformer always makes synths really out of tune for some reason – so just replace them with pianos if so.

These are the kind of things that can come up during this process (and did, in this example):

• Short notes – can often just make these staccato;
• Written out acciacciaturas need to be made into real ones;
• Tuplets need to be written out properly.

The track marked “Solo” is clearly a percussion track because it doesn’t fit harmonically with the rest at all, so I’ll change that to “drum set” for now and deal with the actual instruments once I compare this with the real thing.

Once all that’s done, select everything, open the inspector (ctrl+shift+i) and under Playback, uncheck Live velocity, Live start position, and Live duration.This is now what it looks like:

And this is what it sounds like:

This is closer to what it should be! More to follow.

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Contrary to all expectations I did actually find myself at a record shop on Record Store Day, where for just five quid I picked up a not egregiously worn copy of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Love Beach. I was particularly intrigued to hear this after reading that it was “downright pathetic, stale and full of ennui” – ELP are one of my favourite bands so I couldn’t wait to hear what mediocre music by them sounded like.

Having listened yesterday … “stale and full of ennui” is spot on, but also, I like it. I mean, I’d prefer ELP’s take on slightly shitty pop music to the take of most other bands, because it’s still prog even if the prog is watered down and the lyrics (insofar as I even pay attention to those) are surprisingly mundane coming from Peter “will no one lay the laurel wreath / when silence drowns the screams” Sinfield.

Some thoughts on each track:

All I Want Is You – quite nice, interesting drum fills, doesn’t seem particularly proggy in terms of rhythms/harmonies. Makes me think of the OTP despite very tenuous relevance because I’m trash, so I guess that means I like it.

Love Beach – I like the riff, but the mood of this is pretty similar to All I Want Is You, and one of the things prog albums normally deliver on is Variety. I do enjoy the I-iv progression [1] (although it’s like the only point of harmonic interest in the whole song) and there are some cool lyrics (“out of reach of the eagle’s eyes”), but overall, shrug.

Taste Of My Love – this seems like a more interesting track (although starting in the same key as the previous one is a big eyebrow raise moment) – the opening in particular is a great example of how prog can use elements of English folk music very effectively, which makes me wonder how much creative potential they actually lost by making this album in the Bahamas, so far from the environment that created prog in the first place. Some good synths towards the end and appropriately edgy in places.

The Gambler – in some ways this is much more like a lot of older ELP stuff, very story-driven and solid, reminiscent of songs like Jeremy Bender, but that kind of thing has never been my favourite part of their output. Some tasty drum moments though, and a very good sound on the solo.

For You – this one is more prog in the true sense, with a long instrumental introduction showing off the guys’ technical skill really nicely. Some cool use of accelerandi, nice sixths, the i–VI–i progression is a favourite [2], although the lyrics are a bit trite (“we loved so hard we shook the stars above”).

Canario – best track on the album. ELP’s covers of classical pieces are always excellent and this is no exception. Very tasty descending sequences [3], really delicious synth sounds. Once it gets to the part that alternates between 6/8 and 3/4 feel it gets very reminiscent of another excellent prog adaptation of a classical-ish piece (America by The Nice, featuring, of course, Keith Emerson), in both rhythm and harmony, and that’s no bad thing.

Side 2 consists entirely of Memoirs Of An Officer And A Gentleman, which has four sections:

Prologue/The Education Of A Gentleman – ok, ok, right from the chords at the beginning [4], and then those raised fourths once the drums come in: that is ELP (or maybe just a sign that I prefer Emerson’s stuff to Lake’s, ha). Again, given where the album was recorded, the thematic material in the lyrics is very interesting, and I do wonder how it came about – a cursory glance at Wikipedia tells me that Sinfield was from that public-school background, but Emerson seems not to have been.

Love At First Sight – really very nice despite being so lyric-driven and therefore not really my kind of thing. The piano part is varied enough to stay interesting (and, lol, is in places very much like the prelude of a certain game series – not surprising when Uematsu does cite ELP among his influences). The buildup with the guitar and drums fits very well with the progression of the lyrics, and the line “yes, I do; yes, I will” – despite seeming very cringe when written down – is actually very appropriately set and delivered.

Letters From The Front – there are some very cool Sounds at the beginning of this one that remind me of something modernist – possibly the third movement of Electric Counterpoint by Steve Reich?? I don’t know but it’s good. (And that stack of fourths, ahem.) Compared with the previous section, the setting of the lyrics is a bit of a letdown – the first verse is extremely heavy-handed in terms of exposition, and I’d expect a big emotional climax at the point where, you know, his wife leaves him, but despite the very abrupt tonal shift I think it gets a bit buried.

Honourable Company – not particularly harmonically interesting, but some nice cosmic synths, and a “march” being (mostly) in 3/4 is peak prog (especially when the odd bar isn’t). The Rule Britannia quote works nicely, and along with the lack of emotion in the track, underscores the final sentiment of the lyrics of the previous section, where it turns out that war is the only thing left for the guy.

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I mean, I said some of this stuff in a post not all that long ago, but … it’s a meme now so I get to say it again, right? (seen here and there, most recently via ~silveredeye)

1. First Name:

One that very few people have, especially in this part of the country, so obviously I’m not sharing it. I never really felt like my name was “me”, but I’ve come to like it more recently because a. it’s from my home culture, which is very important to me, and b. it reveals absolutely nothing about any gender I may or may not be in possession of.

2. Age:

I’m 28. I will never tell anyone when my birthday is unless I absolutely have to, but I don’t mind people online knowing my age as, like, an integer.

3. Location:

Northern Ireland 💖

4. Occupation:

University lecturer (I believe this is what the merricans would call a “tenure-track assistant professor”).

5. Significant Other:

@adt, who is currently attempting to learn how to ceilidh dance from a YouTube video.

6. Kids:

An emphatic no.

7. Siblings:

None, and my partner doesn’t have any either. Tbh the thought of having that kind of close relationship with someone from early childhood onwards is kind of baffling to me.

8. Pets:

None. We had a few when I was growing up, but it’s not a path I can see us taking in the immediate future. I just enjoy interacting with random cats I come across in the neighbourhood, and that fulfils my need to touch a soft thing without any of the emotional commitment.

9. List the 3 biggest things going on in your life:

Work (mostly article revisions and my “how to be a lecturer” assignment over the next couple of weeks); trying very unsuccessfully to buy a house; practising the piano before I play it at a friend’s wedding on Friday.

10. Where and for what did you go to school?

An ancient university [this is the actual legit term I’m sorry] to study X and Y, then a plate-glass university where I did a master’s in Y, then a red brick university where my PhD was nominally in X but in fact very much not about X at all and much more about Y but in fact mostly about Z. Now I work in a department of X specialising in Y and wondering whether I will ever be able to sneak Z into the curriculum.

11. Parents:

Both my partner and I have parents who are unusually old for people of our age. […]

12. Who are some of your closest friends?

I’ve never really had many close friends, but beyond the boy, I would say the closest friends I have are the two members of my PhD cohort who are still in NI and whom I meet up with occasionally, and the friend whose wedding I’m going to on Friday, who doesn’t live nearby but has somehow managed to maintain relations with someone as socially deficient as I am for nearly twenty years now.

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Judging by reactions on twitter it seems like the new version of FF6 is where the pixel remasters hit their peak, just as FF6 itself was, unsurprisingly, the zenith of the original 2D era. I haven’t actually bought the game because I’d rather dedicate my FF time to playing new stuff than start 6 again, but it eventually occurred to me that the soundtrack would be on YouTube somewhere [timestamps refer to this video for anyone playing along at home], and … out of everything about these games, it’s the music that got me into them and continues to be the most important aspect of them to me. So, tbh, getting to listen to this is the main draw of these remastered versions as far as I’m concerned.

When I first played FF6 in 2020, that soundtrack already felt familiar. I listened to the whole thing every day for at least a week; I loved tracks like Setzer’s theme days before I actually got to the part of the game where Setzer appears (and turned out to be like my least favourite of the playable characters oops lol). FF6 kickstarted my proper FF obsession, and that soundtrack was what got me hooked. I have listened to various remixes and covers of parts of it since then, and I certainly haven’t loved every one of them, but I knew this iteration would be a banger for the simple reason that it’s in the spirit of the original game. This soundtrack is what the FF6 soundtrack would have been if FF6 had first been released in 2022 instead of 1994. It conveys the feelings and the atmospheres that Uematsu was attempting to portray on nineties hardware, in the way they can be conveyed 28 years down the line. Listening to this soundtrack, you understand why Uematsu made those decisions about instrumentation and tonalities and articulation at that time, because – this is like how the original soundtrack would have sounded in his head, before it had to be compressed into (googles) 64 kilobytes.

I could honestly provide some specific compliment about every single track in this, because they are all excellent, but some examples that really illustrate what I was going on about in the previous paragraph: Kefka’s theme 14:47–17:39 sounds so clowny and grotesque and made me realise, oh yes, that’s why the melody randomly jumps from one instrument to another; Cyan’s theme 26:03–27:26 actually made me feel things other than indifference towards Cyan’s theme and Cyan (amazing tbh); the upper strings in The Serpent Trench 36:20–38:36 actually sound like running water, and the brass is also so inexplicably effective for conveying the right atmosphere for that journey down the river – this track has real Moldau energy. In other news, that staccato top note 50:53 in the melody of Terra’s theme made me literally go “oh!” out loud, but, and I cannot stress this enough, it Works.

My biggest beef with most remixes of this stuff is that in trying to modernise the sound, a lot of people seem to be tempted to add some additional countermelody or extra section or, in actually quite a lot of cases, make the whole thing into a Big Orchestration. And yes, the countermelodies and extra sections do occur in a few of these (um … Forever Rachel? 57:35–58:03 Excuse me??), but they are tasteful and understated and they don’t detract from the original. As for the orchestrations … I’m sorry, but it is so good to be able to listen to a version of the opera 1:01:58–1:17:27 that isn’t a big bombastic Distant Worlds version. I have a, er, complicated relationship with this part of the soundtrack, and I think this is possibly the only version of it other than the original that I have actually been able to fully enjoy. My favourite moment, possibly my favourite part of the entire Pixel Remaster soundtrack, is where the strings come in for the second statement of the waltz theme, 1:11:28–1:12:03 and … that reharmonisation. This sounds like an actual waltz that people would have been dancing to in the late nineteenth century. That fucking perfect cadence onto I7!!! 1:11:42–1:11:45 D e l i c i o u s. Also … this is again the first version of the opera that hasn’t entirely missed the point of Celes’ aria. Honestly, every time I hear this sung by a real person, the singer is Celebrated Mezzo Soprano, and it actually sounds like opera – which totally ignores the fact that in the game it’s meant to be sung by Celes, a (presumably) untrained singer. The voice we hear should be clear and pure, and yet in all these covers, it’s just … Not. Honestly, I was actually nervous when I was about to listen to the new version, because this has been done so many times that I kind of thought the actual game developers might go down the same route, but … no!! They actually get it! The people who make the game understand the point of the very game they are making, shocking, I know.

Searching For Friends, 1:47:27–1:49:50 my favourite from the original soundtrack: actually, I was a bit surprised by how this one started off, but that buildup 1:48:43–1:48:47 into where the first melody comes back in the strings, and then that triplet in the brass 1:48:54 … omg sign me up. Also, literally the first fifteen seconds of Kefka’s Tower: 1:57:30–1:57:45 that’s it. That’s The Sound.

Apparently the cool thing to do on the onlines is to be very lukewarm about the new version of Dancing Mad 1:59:32–2:17:07 … ok, so. Lads. This track is like … a historically informed performance. It’s like some musicologist sat down in a seventeenth-century library with the original SPC file (I have no idea what file format the SNES actually used, we’re going with this one), and wrote a PhD thesis on Dancing Mad with a 200-page appendix consisting of their reconstruction of the score of Dancing Mad, and then a period orchestra took that score of Dancing Mad and made a recording of Dancing Mad. This is the Bärenreiter Urtext edition of Dancing Mad. If you want a “big beats are the best, get high all the time” version of Dancing Mad, go and listen to the (excellent) Black Mages one, or like, one of the very many other covers of this track that exist. If you want what was originally intended: that, yet again, is what the Pixel Remaster version is. Prior to the last section in particular, 1:59:32–2:11:03 it just sounds like someone is sitting in a deserted cathedral playing the organ in a vaguely evil manner, and … isn’t that what Kefka’s doing? Isn’t he, as it were, the phantom of the opera? (I have never seen The Phantom Of The Opera, in case that’s not obvious.)

In conclusion: sign 👏 me 👏 the 👏 fuck 👏 up. I just wish it was common practice to publish the original sheet music from all these orchestral game soundtracks, because I’m not spending 200 quid on a necklace or whatever other “premium” merchandise Square Enix seems to enjoy releasing, but yes, I would pay a substantial amount for the official as-played sheet music where it exists.

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They’ve made a big fancy new exhibition at the studios where Game of Thrones was filmed. The boy is an enormous fan so his parents got us tickets for Christmas, and we went down there yesterday and left three hours later with some Thoughts.

So this place has been open two weeks. And yes, it’s a very good, very thorough look at the show and has some great location models, concept art, sets, a lot of costumes, weapons (these were our favourite, lol), the Iron Throne, etc. I had this feeling, though, that there was something kind of … off. The whole thing seemed very slick, very professional, very Financed, with a few teething issues: there was this weird moment right at the beginning where we watched a sort of introductory video, narrated in Nathalie Emmanuel’s British drama school accent, and then stood around awkwardly while the wee girl letting us in said “well, do yous dare go beyond the Wall?” and then fumbled with the ropes that very much didn’t need to be there before we all filed through into the start of the exhibition proper.

But that wasn’t the problem, although I guess the extraneous ropes were symptomatic of it. There were a lot of barriers, actually, sometimes at quite a distance from the exhibits. There were tiny signs on the ground by the various costumes on display that said which character the costume belonged to; but as we were physically forced to keep our distance, and the lighting was fairly low, and the contrast between the text and the background on those signs was actually quite minimal, most of them were effectively impossible to read. Sure, it’s been open two weeks, this is the sort of thing a visitor feedback form could address. Strange thing, though, there were no visitor feedback forms.

I’ll come back to that. I’m circling around the problem here, picking a few things out to illustrate what the overall issue really was (imo), not necessarily in the order we encountered them, but just in a way that seems to make some logical sense. Here’s a more fundamental issue: the exhibition felt very superficial. There were set models, there was concept art, there were mockups of some of the working areas on set with desks and tools and buckets of fake blood (we also found it fascinating that there are two different varieties of fake blood. I promise violence isn’t the only thing we’re interested in). There were videos that occasionally showed a bit of behind-the-scenes footage, the unedited version of a shot with the green screen, and then even more occasionally cut to what was actually aired. Those rare moments were probably the most interesting part of the exhibition, because they actually gave some idea of the process. But aside from that, that element of things was … kind of lacking. There was no technical detail about what was really involved in making the show. No sense of the number of people and the range of roles behind the scenes, the cost, the time it took, the environmental impact – and I’m sure it would have been difficult to frame the last one of these in a positive way, but some sense of the material scale of the show surely would have helped understand what an enormous operation it was. (Compare this with the Titanic museum 30 miles up the road, which locals love to slam, but actually has a really informative opening section all about the context, going into enormous detail about Belfast in the early 20th century and how shipbuilding shaped the city.) The section that came closest to giving us a bit more substance relating to the process was the prosthetics room, but even there, the emphasis was more on finished pieces, and on “stand in front of this screen and let motion capture make you into the Night King”.

So, on that note, the interactive stuff. It was … it was of a kind. There were a few instances of the motion capture thing, where visitors could have themselves transformed into various armoured figures and then, idk, move about a bit I guess. There were some touchscreen panels where one could create a house sigil and have it displayed on a screen above one’s head for other visitors to gawp at. There was an “add your face to the Hall of Faces” room. There was green screen photography while waiting for the introductory film to start, and another opportunity for it in the gift shop where visitors sat on a replica Iron Throne. The actual Iron Throne was the last thing in the exhibition, though, so it did seem a bit of a letdown coming from there when the gift shop incarnation was about half the size. Anyway, all these activities have something in common. See, I would not normally be averse to engaging with interactive stuff in museums – I have fond memories of smelling the inferior socialist coffee beans at the DDR Museum in Berlin – but the thing that all these features had in common were that they were all … I mean, I don’t want to be putting on my “social media is bad” hat here, but … they were all based around, like, sharing yourself. Promoting yourself, even? They were all things that other people could watch you doing, and more often than not they included seeing your own face onscreen, and … I don’t particularly want to do that? I especially don’t want to upload my likeness onto the big Hall of Faces database so that, checks notes, Big Pharma can, er, steal my identity and inject Windows 11 into me. Joking aside, I both a. have strong feelings about droit à l’image, and b. am a private and inhibited person who doesn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of strangers.

Sure, normal people enjoy those activities, but I would have liked more of a range of interactive bits: going back to my criticism of the lack of details on process, it would have been cool to, idk, get to touch a half-made sword, and experience the feeling of “oh, some of these extremely realistic metal props are actually made of rubber”. Or to smell things, I am always game for smelling things; or like, stroking some nice fabric. I can assume that the focus on selfie culture-type activities was part of the general family-friendly vibe of the thing, which was also a slight mystery to us given that the show is basically about people killing and fucking each other. Bearing in mind that I’m biased in that I actively go out of my way to avoid having dealings with humans aged under 18, it did seem odd that children were so consciously catered for, and indeed that they were there at all in any significant number. There was a notable lack of emphasis on the said killing and fucking: a few scenes with some blood in the clips that were played, but they were certainly tame. We wondered, in fact, whether this is a sign of what Game Of Thrones, The Phenomenon, has become: has it gained such popularity that it’s transcended the “big fantasy show for nerds” category and moved into “big normal show for normal people” one? We kind of thought there’d be more people there like us, weird, somewhat ambiguously gendered (in my case), bespectacled (in the boy’s case) people who go around speaking to each other in low voices and read every word on every information panel. The way the staff interacted with us (or, er, tried to) certainly gave the impression that they weren’t expecting the visitors to be like that. I was quietly looking at some prosthetics and trying not to catch anyone’s eye when some guy approached me (the nerve!!) and started telling me Facts. I wondered whether he might be particularly inept at reading body language, but then realised from the number of staff who subsequently attempted to interact with us that they are clearly being told to speak to people even when those people probably don’t want to be spoken to. I was asked if I would like to have a photo on the tiny Iron Throne not once but twice, and as I remember it, we were practically ordered to do the Hall of Faces thing (an order that we ignored, obviously) – tbh, I find this much more of a problem than the mere Existence of those activities. I mean, sure, they don’t appeal to me, but I know a lot of people enjoy green screening themselves. It’s the fact that the staff members seem to assume that everyone will enjoy doing it that’s the issue.

Another guy spoke to us in the gift shop. I’ll come back to that; first, of course I have complaints about the gift shop itself, so here they are. The doors out of the exhibition shamelessly opened straight onto the back of the shop, which I totally expected by that point so wasn’t too bothered by. What I was bothered by was the range of merchandise. The contents of the gift shop were the following: T-shirts with house sigils on them, hoodies with house sigils on them, hats with house sigils on them, some coasters with Famous Lines on them, magnets, badges, bottle openers, and a single solitary book, which was in fact the exhibition guide. Out of these, and acknowledging that taste is subjective, I would say on reflection that some of the magnets and badges were not tasteless. I found it particularly puzzling that none of the actual ASOIAF books were for sale (and again, more on that later); and also that everything was like “stuff you wear” and “stuff you display”, which very tellingly ties in with the kind of interactive things that were on offer in the exhibition. There wasn’t even any stationery. There was also a distinct lack of items modelled on designs that were actually used in the show, which I thought could have been a unique and relatively tasteful option.

So back to the staff member who spoke to us while we were perusing the single book on offer. See, I had been wondering if there would be some kind of visitor feedback form at the end, particularly as this is a really new attraction where they’re clearly expecting international footfall (and even in the off season and in a mid-/post-pandemic context, it was notable that a lot of our fellow visitors appeared to have come over from England). I had anticipated being able to contribute my valid and useful point about some of the signage being impossible to read, and, I guess, write another 2000 words of non-actionable pseudo-intellectual critique. But there was no opportunity to provide any opinions in written form; this guy who spoke to us had clearly been designated the Feedback Man, as he asked whether we enjoyed the exhibition and what our favourite part was, but then … it didn’t go beyond that. He made a bit more awkward conversation with us (making people who are normally quite skilled in social interaction awkward is one of my special talents) and then admitted defeat with an “well, I’ll let yous get on”, and … very much did not give us the chance to offer any more substantial or negative comments.

And this, finally, brings me on to my concluding summative point, which is that, to put it briefly, the whole exhibition came across as extremely laudatory towards the show. And specifically the show. There was an oddly-worded information sign early on that tipped me off about the slight weirdness of all this: the producers were praised as “visionaries” who managed to do the hard work of persuading old curmudgeonly GRRM to let them adapt his minor works of literature into this wonderful breathtaking pinnacle of the cinematic œuvre. This was, iirc, the one direct reference to the books or their author in the entire exhibition, but certainly not the only instance of, as the kids would say, simping for the producers. There was also a clear focus on the later series of the show; I guess this could be because it was already an enormous phenomenon by the time these series were being filmed and there was maybe already an idea about gathering behind-the-scenes stuff for posterity, but combined with the scarcity of book mentions … Makes You Think.

Going back to that first point about not being allowed to go near things, being physically prevented from approaching stuff – I particularly felt that when we were shown Cersei’s big map of Westeros, which took up most of the room but was once again set apart from us by big metal bars cemented into the walls. Could we … could we not have walked on it? Could they not have painted it with some preservative lacquer, or even covered it with big Perspex sheets, and just … let us walk on it? Let our humble mortal feet experience the glory of treading Cersei’s big map? No, we sinful humans are worthy only of looking on from a distance. There must have been items that weren’t immensely valuable and/or necessary to preserve: surely there were multiple props, multiple copies of costumes, things from the show that we could have actually got away with laying a hand on. But the whole lot of it was presented as sacred objects, venerable fruit of the divine imaginations of the show’s creators, who had the good grace to come to this economically deprived and politically aberrant backwater and shower their bounty upon us. Like, I get that it was an excellent show, it won multiple awards, and the very person I attended the exhibition with is of the opinion that the early series of GoT constitute the best television ever made. But. Given that the exhibition was put on at and by the very studios that made this show, the superficial quality of the exhibits coupled with the adulatory attitude, just makes it, as I said, a bit … off.

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… so, the first draft of my current fanfiction WIP is mostly written. I need to add a lot more filler-type stuff, and that’ll necessitate going right back to the beginning and working through, having written the scenes out of order (not something I usually do, but this has been an Experience). For the same reason, I also need to homogenise the style. As there are three main characters – no prizes for guessing who those are – it doesn’t really work to write in the third-person limited style that most fiction is in these days. I am going to have to adopt some kind of omniscient narrator perspective, although it’s something I’m wholly unused to writing and reading.

My solution to this is to look at some celebrated omniscient-narrator literature (suggestions gratefully received!) and have a think about how it works. I made a list of some of the features I wanted to look out for, namely:

• Zooming in and out in time and space: progression between scenes, moving from detail to more superficial description
• Worldbuilding – when and how?
• Which characters’ minds do we have access to? Is there a difference between major and minor characters? Do we know what antagonists are thinking?

With this in mind, I kicked off today with The fellowship of the ring.

Here are my notes.

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I got a new laptop this week and decided to install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS seeing as this is the first new machine I’ve had since that version was released (well, I actually happened to get a new work PC recently as well, but I can only dream of being allowed to use Ubuntu on that, ha). It’s a Lenovo ThinkBook (i.e. the poor man’s ThinkPad) and I got it specifically for its compatibility with Linux seeing as that’s what I use most of the time. There was also some kind of Halloween sale on, not that there is anything intrinsically spooky about buying a new computer as far as I’m aware, but I won’t complain when it saved me a couple of hundred quid.

Tried my best to update my usual install script for 20.04 in advance, removing a couple of unnecessary PPAs, etc., although the main issue I ran into was that a couple of packages weren’t available in the 20.04 respositories and because I was trying to install everything using the same apt command the whole thing failed so none of the packages I wanted were installed, lol. I found a workaround for this after the fact but couldn’t even get sed to run properly so who knows. Anyway, installed them all afterwards and now everything is set up, even my fairly substantial music library (most of whose substance, I learnt during the transfer, consists of the vast majority of the Square Enix music catalogue).

A few things that caused issues, or didn’t work as I expected: