kaigou | read

Reading: Still working my way through The Spear Cuts Through Water--somewhere past the halfway point now.

Watching: I finished my Guardian rewatch!

scruloose and I finished season 1 of Kingdom and did indeed opt to hold off on season 2 until after we finish season 2 of The Last of Us. (Is Kingdom complete at two seasons? Anyone know offhand? Fear of spoilers makes me not want to search up the info.) We also saw the season premiere of TLoU and the first episode of The Pitt.

Playing: Because the evil 368chickens game keeps track and springs the number on you when you beat it, I know that when I finally rescued 368 chickens a few days ago it was after 454 tries. And for reasons that are not clear to me, the victory screen (at least in the browser version) also informs you that you can't play anymore and is all that shows if you reload. (There are ways around it, of course--incognito tabs, simply using a different browser, whatever--but it just seems weird to me. I have thus far avoided going back to it, but that just means returning to my default couple of games that I play endlessly when my brain is completely incapable of focus but needs to be doing something. >.<)

Adulting: Mid-week,

scruloose and I took the day off for my birthday and both dropped off our tax documents with our tax guy (bless our tax guy) and voted in the federal election at the Elections Canada office. I'm glad we got the voting taken care of so early--sounds like lineups for advance polls have been unusually lengthy this weekend (and here's hoping that's a good sign for the outcome!).

( under the cut: fruit and meat consumption (separately) )

mood okay

firecat

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/judge-blocks-passport-ban-citing

There’s lots to like in this temporary ruling, but the bit that makes my geeky soul sing is where the judge bases her ruling in part on the ban violating the Paperwork Reduction Act.

edenfalling

Survived tax day. Was utterly useless at the rental office the following day, but I did manage to do some actual work on Thursday and Friday.

Packed a couple more boxes of books. Probably ought to assembled some more empty boxes and start sorting through clothes and kitchen paraphernalia.

Hmm. I should probably also weed my filing cabinet. I am 100% sure I don't need to bring all those papers with me to Minnesota.

But tomorrow is mostly for unwinding. I will resume productivity Sunday afternoon, after treating myself to brunch.

mood calm
location ithaca, ny

geraineon

I'm gonna slap my extremely lazy/quick translation of one small section of the JP launch event for Love and Deepspace from last year on here because, why not. Let's not waste my (minimal effort) TL!

Video: https://www.youtube.com/live/9rzip0vXOFQ?t=3200s

Note: The guests are the voice actors for the first three love interests (LI) in the game, Xavier (CV: Kobayashi Yusuke), Zayne (CV: Satou Takuya) and Rafayel (CV: Tachibana Shinnosuke). They are asked to demonstrate the features in the games, and Kobayashi Yusuke was showing one of the Kindled Moments in the cards. Kindled Moments are basically a snippet of a scene that is done with extra care that shows moments of intimacy with the LIs. He chose a card where his character, Xavier, is wearing bunny ears and tail. The video is set to start around the time the Kindled Moment starts. I might or might not come back to this to clean up and add more time-stamps and IDK if I wanna TL the rest of it, but hey, if anyone stumbles upon this and has a request and don't mind my super, super rough TL, let me know what timestamps you want translated (or summarized). And if you have corrections, let me know too.

( Very rough translation under the cut )

brithistorian

A. and I finished Person of Interest tonight.

( Spoiler-y things behind a cut... )

Now that I've finished it, I can dive into the wiki and the fanfic without worrying about getting spoiled. I'll probably even write some fanfic of my own — based on the parts of the show I enjoyed most and the style of fanfic I tend to write, expect my fanfic to be "season 3 forever."

At any rate, I really enjoyed the series, I simultaneously wish there had been more of it and am glad that it didn't go on so far that it wore out its welcome, and I recommend it to those of you who haven't seen it!

brithistorian

In an article in the March 2025 issue of Multilingual magazine, I learned that while there's a sizable minority in Spain who speak Catalan, very few of those people are monolingual in Catalan. Therefore, it's common for Spanish publishers to buy both the Spanish and Catalan translation rights for a book but only produce a Spanish edition. They thus get most of the Catalan readers (because most of them also read Spanish) without the expense of producing a Catalan edition and without the chance that someone else will produce a Catalan edition and cut into their sales. This strikes me as yet another of those things that's a best practice within the "rules" of capitalism while at the same time being a generally scummy thing to do.

brainwane

Over in this MetaFilter thread I've been going on and on about:

the books use the medium of prose well, including unreliable narration; how can the TV series adapt that? can it?

the bookending of the two big rescues at the start and end of All Systems Red, and how Wells describes people helping each other overcome their automatic patterns

etc.

I welcome your thoughts! I have spent like 3 hours this week talking about this stuff and would happily talk 3 more.

hokuton_punch

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mood excited

cyphomandra

What I really want to do is either play a new Horizon game or a new FFVII game, and the world has yet to cater to my whims. (Horizon III Nemesis does have a trailer but no release date, and part 3 of FFVII is another two years away at least). In the meantime I am doing a hard mode playthrough of FFVII Rebirth, which is indeed hard (no items for healing, tougher enemies etc). I’m up to chapter 12 and I can actually feel myself getting better at playing it - especially blocking, which in most fighting games I neglect in favour of stuffing myself with food/healing items to regain HP - and I do love everybody in the game. Do I love them enough to attempt platinum? Hmm. It is less a question of my undying affection and more my doubt in my ability to conquer ALL of the minigames. I am still traumatised by the piano and I have yet to get better than a B on Two Legs, plus I am avoiding that Shinra Party Animal sidequest at the Saucer that is All Minigames.

For contrast, I then played through Thank Goodness You’re Here!, which is a totally barmy surrealist dark comedy where you play as a (literally) tiny junior salesman, sent to the northern English town of Barnsworth to solve all their problems. It is disturbingly brilliant and very funny (and very, very, localised). Then I played The Stanley Parable, which is also disturbingly brilliant and about agency in gaming, and then I decided to go for something slightly less disturbing and played Astro Bot.

This cheerful platformer won GOTY last year and it is, indeed, fantastically well-designed (the haptic feedback is incredible) and a lot of fun to play. You are a tiny Sony bot who has crashlanded on a planet with your damaged PS5 spaceship, and you need to gather up your scattered bot colleagues from various other worlds and repair your spaceship. It is a love letter to Sony games, with bots and souvenirs taken from their extensive back catalogue. After each system boss, you get a world based on a franchise (Uncharted, God of War etc) and the last one I unlocked was Horizon, where I play as an AloyBot with bow & arrows, clambering up a Tallneck, zooming through cauldrons, and battling giant robots, with intermittent clusters of focal ghosts and even what I think is a skeletal bot Sobeck on a bench with flowers at the end.

I am not a natural platformer but I played this determinedly until I had the 300 bots needed to get all the achievements. I still have three levels I haven’t done in the main game (there are speed levels coming out as DLC), but they are unforgiving ones where you have to get every single move right, with no checkpoints, and the amount of actual enjoyment I get out of them diminishes. But it’s such an easy game to pick up, and so enjoyable.

I had planned to replay Horizon Forbidden West after that (especially due to the AloyBot!) but then Playstation Plus put out Dragon Age: The Veilguard as their March free game. This is a game that was in development for a long time, initially intended as a multiplayer before switching to solo RPG, and it’s been hit heavily by culture warriors on release aggrieved mainly by the nonbinary companion and the character customiser, all of which makes it a little difficult to judge. And my background with the series is patchy; I played Origins once and liked it a lot, despite feeling burnt out on conventional western fantasy (Mass Effect was more appealing on that front), I played DAII for a bit (maybe until the first major timeskip?) and then put it down for too long, and then I played quite a bit of Inquisition but could not get the hang of the combat when it came to fighting bosses and left it unfinished.

I am now in the final few act of Veilguard and I do like it but it definitely has issues. ( Discussion, no major plot spoilers but includes details of character selection and companions. )

I do think it's taken an unfair battering online, but I don't think I'm going to do much with it once I finish other than look up all the possible endings. It does make me want to go back and finish one of the others, though.

umadoshi

Cooking/Baking: Biweekly banana bread-making yesterday, with a few dollops of applesauce to make up for being a banana short of the eight we usually use. I've also been experimenting with a bit of xanthan gum, which Kas and Ginny suggested a little while back when we mentioned how low the loaves are. The height is, to be fair, largely due to how little flour there actually is--about three and a half cups of oat flour for four loaves--but I think the xanthan gum is helping them rise a bit more.

And today there's a batch of black beans (starting from a pound or so of dried, soaked overnight) on the stove, following the ingredient suggestions

genarti posted for me on Mastodon a while back.

When placing a grocery order yesterday, we took a stab at meal planning for the week for the first time in...um...a while. Beans and rice tonight (and then beans in lunches, probably), and hopefully Chinese BBQ in a couple of days (which is dinner for two nights), and I think we settled on doing a pork shoulder at some point. Maybe we'll manage to dig through the freezer usefully and cook some things from it over the upcoming four-day weekend.

Meat-puppetry (and Cat Herding): I opted to sign up for the provincial health portal to access my records, and my recent A1C result is 5.9--the absolute highest it can be without crossing into (according to Canada) the ~prediabetic~ range, and up from the 5.8 I had in December. I was afraid it would be higher, so this is still a relief, but I need to renew my efforts at increasing how much moving around I do. Hopefully the end of winter will help a bit.

Yesterday the blues were scrapping and came tearing around the corner and under my feet as I was mid-step, and suddenly I was on the extremely hard kitchen floor (and scared that I'd actually stepped on Yona, but it seems like I didn't; both blues seem entirely unhurt). I'm mostly unscathed, thankfully--I took most of the brunt on my shin, not a knee, and didn't bash my head on the edge of the counter, so I'm counting myself very lucky. It's just a bit sore today.

The blues were both understandably spooked--poor Sinha's tail went all bottle-brush for a bit!--but Jinksy immediately hopped out of the box he'd been in and ran over to inspect me and make sure I was okay. There were many headbumps and much sniffing and some little licks. He's such a ridiculously good cat. (He doesn't really like being around Sinha--understandably, given what a terror baby!Sinha was to him and how much Sinha pesters him to this day--but if our high-strung little dragon is freaked out or distressed, most times Jinksy will still run over and check him out and be comforting.)

Planning: We both booked my birthday off, more just to not have to work on it than to do anything terribly exciting. But we reserved a car so we can do some erranding ranging from (hopefully) advance voting and dropping off our taxes info to picking up the aforementioned Chinese BBQ and cake. (Theoretically, a couple slices of different flavors. We'll see what the bakery I have in mind has on offer.)

mood hungry

umadoshi

Fangirling: Last week was Feed's fifteenth anniversary (!), which reminded me that I keep vaguely meaning to post what there is of my unfinished post-Feed(-but-spoilery-for-Deadline) AU.

Reading: Let's see! I finished Ann Aguirre's Strange Love and enjoyed it, although I don't feel a burning need to seek out the book(s) that follow it. I followed that with KJ Charles' Spectred Isle, and I'll probably keep an eye out for its sequel; Charles' books are always a good time.

Now I'm (I think) maybe a sixth of the way into The Spear Cuts Through Water (Simon Jimenez), and I think I'm basically following what's going on. (?) It's beautifully written and layered in ways that I'm not finding the easiest to follow so far.

Watching: Only four episodes left of my Guardian rewatch! So close to finished!

scruloose and I are three or four episodes into Kingdom now; I'm not sure if we're going to keep going once we finish season 1 and watch it concurrently with The Last of Us or put it on hold and come back for season 2 after season 2 of TLoU. So many zombies.

(Between The Last of Us and all the talk I've been seeing about The Pitt, I might opt to reactivate our Crave membership for a month or two. [If "reactivate" is the right word when it's "we got a six-month trial for it at some point, so we have an account already, but I'm not sure we ever actually watched anything on it." I sifted through their catalogue a few days ago, and there are quite a few things that are on my to-watch list, but the overall size of the collection seems way smaller than Netflix Canada's, which is unfortunate.)

And in the name of trying something lighter with shorter episodes, we also watched ep. 1 of Superstore, which completely failed to grab me. But it's the pilot episode of a sitcom, and I haven't actually heard much about the show, so I have no idea how representative it is. (Sometimes I think about season 1 of Parks and Recreation and how there would have been no chance in hell that I'd keep watching after even its first episode if I hadn't heard repeatedly that it wasn't representative. And even then, the only reason I didn't skip ahead to season 2--and I am not exactly prone to skipping things--was that season 1 was so mercifully shot.)

Playing: I saw 368 Chickens mentioned repeatedly on Bluesky the other day, so I tried it, and have since lost...I don't know how much time to it, because calculating the amount of time I lose to idle games when my brain needs to be doing something but isn't actually up to anything is a horrifying prospect. But it's a change of pace from my usual online Boggle game or the Tents and Trees (or is it the other way around?) app, even if I'm not very good at it. I think my best so far is only just below 200.

mood busy

hokuton_punch

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mood contemplative

brithistorian

Just discovered today that a cough and flu-like symptoms, which I've been experiencing for the past few days, are a fairly common side effect of the antiseizure med I'm on. Mere words cannot express how unthrilled I am by this. I want to post things other than my medical problems, and to read the things that you all post and leave you comments on them, but right now I have neither the time nor the energy to do so. But please, know that the desire is there: If you've done well recently, consider me as having congratulated you. Conversely, if things have gone badly for you, consider me as having commiserated. In the meantime, I'll actually be over here doing the bare minimum I have to do to make it through day-to-day life, then going to bed early. (Which in and of itself should tell you how badly I'm doing, given my oft-stated resentment of the need to sleep.)

hokuton_punch

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

mood excited

edenfalling

On Tuesday, Landlord Dude asked if he could drop by my apartment on Wednesday or Friday to take some photos for use in advertising the unit. I said Wednesday was no good, but Friday was fine.

So I did NOT put off my laundry another week and instead washed everything on Wednesday, as well as tidied a bit. Thursday I did more tidying, put away all the clean laundry, and also baked snickerdoodles for a memorial service because I promised to do that a couple weeks ago and didn't remember until Thursday morning. (This is how me promising cookies for memorial services always goes.)

Then this morning I ran a dustmop across a bunch of surfaces and tidied a couple more things.

Hopefully he will get decent photos!

He also mentioned that he will have to start showing the apartment, which is fair. I do want to get some of the stuff I have been boxing up (or collecting for donation) OUT prior to any strangers tromping around, but that's not really under my control, so whatever.

Three more days at Not the IRS (Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday) and I will be DONE!!! for the year. I don't know if I want to do taxes next year in Minnesota -- on the one hand, I do enjoy the work, but on the other hand, it is a logistical pain in the neck and runs me ragged for 3.5 months of the year. Ah well. We'll see how job searching goes in general before I make a decision on that front.

(Apparently my dad has said that he expects me to live in their basement for 2 to 12 months, which seems like a reasonable range. We all hope it's closer to 2 months, but he suggested that it would be fine for me to lurk in their basement and finish a BA in accounting while doing taxes on the side rather than dive straight into the job market. TBH I would prefer to have a steady job and do school on the side a couple years from now when I am eligible for cheap in-state tuition rates, but. Y'know. Who can say what will make the most sense in six months? *waves hands at the general state of the world*)

mood tired
location rental company office

firecat

I’ll take “Weird little knowledge gaps” for 500, Alex

I have listened to “In A Gadda da Vida” more or less since it first came out and I was today days old when I realized the phrase comes from “in the Garden of Eden.”

firecat

It showed up in three posts in a row on my reading list. Who am I to ignore what the cool kids are doing?

PS: *squeee!!!*

Watch on YouTube

brithistorian

I was posting a comment this morning and attempted to refer to someone's Threads handle using the standard @ notation, and I noticed that when I did, it showed using in the posted comment as a DW username. For example:

brithistorian. I didn't do that by using the DW account link button or the html tags. I typed "@" and then "brithistorian" with no space between. Now that I know that I can do that, it's useful, but coming as a surprise, it was rather unwelcome.

whois

锴 angry fishtrap 狗

to remember

"When you make the finding yourself— even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light— you'll never forget it." —Carl Sagan

October 2016

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
						1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31

summary

umadoshi - Weekly proof of life: media, adulting, food
firecat - Judge rules against anti-trans passport ban
edenfalling - tiny update
geraineon - Lazy TL of the kindled moment in the LaDS JP launch stream
brithistorian - Series final reaction — Person of Interest
brithistorian - Interesting translation fact I learned this week
brainwane - Discussing the upcoming Murderbot TV show
hokuton_punch - Casefic Exchange 2025 Letter
cyphomandra - Gaming Tuesday
umadoshi - Weekly proof of life: other stuff
umadoshi - Weekly proof of life got long, so this is the media intake part
hokuton_punch - (no subject)
brithistorian - Ain't that a kick in the head
hokuton_punch - Sakura Exchange Letter 2025
edenfalling - bits and pieces of the moving process
firecat - (no subject)
firecat - anticipation
brithistorian - Oddity of Dreamwidth formatting

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