Final Fantasy Fun

... I'm back from visiting family up north, laden with pokemon gleaned from the frozen wastes. I now have even more respect for those still playing this silly game in rural areas with no gyms and maybe one pokestop within a several mile radius.

Those were wonderful walks in the snow. I snapped some amusing photos of various mons jumping about in real wintry landscapes, as well as photos of real critters like chickadees and my parents' redoubtable cat in the snow, but I'm glad to be back in the warm.

Visiting parents gives me almost no time to do anything creative (or at least, by the time I have time, it's late and I am out of spoons for anything but mindless gaming).

For one of the chapters I posted while I was away, I treid to draw a Dramatic Auron Combat Pose. Apparently 3 years of drawing/painting still life has not adequately prepared me to draw dynamic action scenes... yet. His pose wasn't too bad, but I crashed and burned trying to draw the iron giant and forest behind him.

I am itching to try again, and also to redraw the ship in last Friday's illustration, which I could probably do better. But I should move ahead before redoing things already done.

Besides PGo, I've been pecking away at FFRK but no longer worry about using up all my stamina points. I'm bummed that I misread the deadline for a relic draw and amassed the 50 mythril needed for it just after the draw for Lulu's ultra weapon closed.

Looking on my reading page, I see several friends doing a "Snowflake" prompt of some sort that includes fic recs and other fandom-related stuff. I'm randomly seconding owlmoose desire for more Paine/Nooj, which is a ship she taught me to appreciate many years ago. Also, sarasa_cat has some good shortfic writing community recs.

On hellsite, Tumblr has finally given us a tool to see which posts it's flagged, and I'm amused to report that "I am happy Walter wants to arouse me" got flagged (but was unflagged on appeal).

O'm setting up my blog so that the next two chapters of Love Her and Despair will post on Fridays while I'm away. (I hope.) I need to make a new illustration for Chapter 3. I should have time once I get there, and Dreamwidth's image uploader is a lot more versatile than it used to be.

I have some wonderful new follows from the_great_tumblr_purge! Welcome, everybody!

In Pokemon Go news, there was a new raid boss today I had forgotten was imminent. Luckily, I finished packing and uploading artwork for a calendar I'm giving as a present* around 6, went out to get some nosh, and noticed weird bosses had sprouted on all the gyms around me. I checked in on Discord, found out where local players were congregating, and did 3 quick raids. I am spoiled to be living in geek suburbia. Tomorrow I go out into the wilderness, where there is Not A Whole Hell of a Lot.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper is doing its usual holiday fest. Holiday-themed Hymn of the Fayth works surprisingly well, but is a bit mindboggling..

*There was a Lulu portrait and a Porg on it, plus the ink drawing of Auron on the dock from the last chapter of LHAD. I need to draw more regularly.

Okay, enough chatter, or I ain't gonna get these chapters up. Cheers!

Tumblr format drives me mad, and yet I find myself participating in discussions there instead of fomenting them here, because that's where fandom is. I do love the images, but I wish meta and fanfic would stay here.

It's a viscous cycle, pun intended.

I can't believe I posted a ficbit there this weekend. Granted, it was not very GOOD, and will never be finished since I abandoned it years ago after it trailed away into mush and poorly-justified erotica. (Giftfic ships should never be forced. Luckily, it was going to be a surprise giftfic, so no one but me is disappointed. Well, almost no one. *apologetic smile at MintyWolf*)

i've been feeling abysmally low lately, due to the usual convergence of too many inconvenient health issues plus pain plus worries about elder statescat who is... once again reminding me to treasure her for the time we've got left together.

Dear friends of an online friend...

When I see variations of "feel better soon!" on the journal of someone who's just won the Arthritis Prize, I feel sad.

Okay, no, I feel irritation.

( ranty rant rant )

For someone with chronic illness, feel better is only, ever, a relative term.

And I feel sad seeing someone else discovering it.

And mad at myself for not knowing what words can comfort or help or cheer up somebody going through a bad spell.

From the unsung hero of the space program, the International Space Station, which deserves a helluva lot more press than it gets...

(be sure to click HD, and possibly fullscreen, if you have the bandwidth)

There's this old Japanese (?) brazier that's been kicking around in my family forever.
I assumed it was the four seasons kanji, but now that I look more closely, it isn't. Translation? ("Made in Japan for tourists, contains lead, do not use" was my mother's theory).



Oops. Upside-down, isn't it?

Is it just me, or is LJ refusing to take any input or edits? It's been glitching for me since Friday, but I haven't been able to edit or update (apart from one cross-post squirting through from DW) for a couple days now.

For the record, my last post should say "Final Fantasy Review Project" not "FFX Review project" -- mugs' initiative is for ALL Final Fantasy fandom. My bad.

I wish I were comfortable on DW. Its rich text editor does odd things, I'm missing icons, and, most importantly, I've been laaaaazy on learning how to skin / theme to my satisfaction. It's silly, but my writing and comfort zone are strongly tied to the visual interface (not only because my vision is 20-60, uncorrectable, and these teeny little letters in Dreamwidth's input box are a NIGHTMARE.) An interface I don't love nags at me like a mosquito bite. [ETA: Okay, there. I have changed the theme and dinked with the CSS. Much better.]

Nevertheless, I'm glad it exists, since I don't trust LJ.

Q: is there some way to force DW not to notify you every time a cross-post is successfully posted? I don't really need the notifications to start with, and with my bad habit of editing/tweaking posts after publication, I get yet another PM for every edit. I've got 80 on the first page of my inbox right now with no human contact mixed in.

As a result, I keep ignoring my inbox.

I just wanted cumuluscastle to see where her painting is now. It's under UV-shielded glass, just to make sure, although the room only gets indirect and tree-filtered sunlight.  

There is a distinct lack of cat on the perch, simply because I broke out the camera. Imagine a cat.
Aha. Behold a cat. Within scritch range when mousing. (If image is broken, it's here. What gives,DW?)




P.S. Why is FFXIII so painfully flawed yet excellent in parts? It reminds me of X-2; a curate's egg. Which is unsurprising, as they came up with XIII while working on X-2. 

I finally finished. Without spoilers, I will say that (a) Fang/Vanille pretty much makes up for any of the game's shortcomings for me (CANON! PLOT-ESSENTIAL F/F CANON!), and (b) it's a shame Vanille's voice was the one "miss" on the English dub. Her seiyu is better. But Fang's ...wow. 

Note: Please no late-FFXIII spoilers in replies; at least one person reading this hasn't finished.

So, mad Russians finally drive me to Dreamwidth. I've always felt favorably about it, since most of the FF gang has migrated. I'm just bummed because I had my LJ set up exactly the way I like it, and it's a permanent account, so, all the icons forever. But usericons are minor.

I shall of course cross-post, and keep checking LJ -- in fact I'm still checking LJ first, before DW, because my brain is hard-wired to think of LJ as "home base." But I don't trust its stability. From now on I shall treat DW as the primary account and LJ as the mirror.

So there's that.

Second thing is that I'm playing my way through FFXIII, finally. I meant to keep a game journal, but, well, I didn't. It is such a curate's egg of a game, but for the most part I'm enjoying it. I want to tell heavenscalyx to play it, except portions of it would make her and Rose scream. But there is a canon lesbian relationship in the party, at least as canon as Sailor Moon (original, not English dub). It's a pity one of the pair is a bit of a sap, but I am happily focusing on their ship and not the parts of the game that work less well for me. I am relieved that several of the characters have turned out to be less annoying than they were for the first hour of playing time.

And, oh, Fang. Square finally gave me the female character I have been waiting for. Except I wish she had magic, too, but I guess that would be too much Mary Sue in one package.

Also, is it my imagination, or was someone dressing Lightning in Utena clothes? Plus roses and rose petals.

I'm up to, uh, the Palamecia, Luck Be a Lady bit. Trying to figure out which combinations of characters are useful and failing miserably...I keep running around in the first spot where you're allowed to mix and match teams, and dying because I've screwed up. I did too much level-grinding with Lightning + Fang + Hope and learned every way to use them, and now it seems like trying any other party, I'm missing all my favorite tools.

LHAD is jammed like 20 keys of a typewriter smacked there by an exuberant 6-year-old. I'm half regretting posting the last chapter: I loved the first half of it, with the gang gathered on the bridge of the airship decompressing, and that was fresh, new, scene so easy to write. The second half was difficult because I'd written Lulu Post-Sin 4 years ago, almost the first thing I ever wrote, and I've had years and years to build up various alternate versions of that moment, each of which had some emotional punch, but trying to pick and choose and stitch together all of them, I feel like I lost something. I'm almost tempted to retcon and post the original version of that scene, if it would let me move forward. So frustrating. I fear it may be that way all the way to the end. I wrote early drafts of the concluding chapters first, and I find the part of a story i've written and visualized and imagined the longest is the hardest to write when I get to it, because I wind up trying to connect all the patchwork pieces, favorite moments and cool lines of dialog like a quilt, instead of blazing a path forward.

I didn't realize how deaf I was.

I just picked up a set of $30 headphones that have a bit more oomph to them, popped in a video from my "Adrenaline" playlist that I use to get myself prepped before writing a fight sequence, and...

EARS FLAT AGAINST SKULL.

My eyeballs are rolling around a bit, I think. Is this what the world sounds like to most of you?!!!

Good grief.

I now have to play all my games again with these headphones. I do have stereo speakers, but by the time the sound reaches my ears, it's a bit muddy. I have to use subtitles when watching most movies to understand the more softspoken lines.