Large City In “Things Happen” Shock

• Wrote one very short fic about Braska being kind of out of it  U   ☉  245w.
• In “first pass through WIP edits” news, I’m about a third of the way through! During this phase I’m changing anything that stands out to me and checking setting descriptions are consistent with the source material (i.e. playing parts of FFX/X-2 yet again, yeeeooo), while also tagging certain recurring themes that come up. Once I’m through the whole thing (in four months’ time, if I continue at the current rate, but maybe I can speed up) I’ll run an Emacs function I’ve written that exports an HTML file for each of the tagged themes and includes only the relevant paragraphs. Basically I’m rolling my own version of Scrivener or whatever, idk. I also made some pages on my website describing the fic at great length, which I’m not linking to directly because lol cringe, but … they are easy to find.

• 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

• Part of our wee trip to London was in service of resurrecting an old tradition of going to a couple of the BBC Proms with my mother. This year we took ~lissajous for his first Proms experience and saw some a cappella stuff and Mahler 5, then Mrs P went home and without her we went to Verdi’s requiem and then to a Nick Drake tribute concert, which was mostly lost on me, but I’m told ~lissajous liked it. I spent most of the Verdi distracted because I was 80% sure I was standing behind an old university friend whom I last saw six years ago, but despite this person looking exactly like her from the back, having the same dress sense and mannerisms, and being accompanied by a man who looked reasonably like her husband based on my vague memory of meeting him six years ago, and being the sort of 30-ish-year-old who would go to a classical music concert, when she turned around it was somebody else.
• My grandmother was strangely adamant that I should listen to Messiaen’s Turangalîla symphony, which was at the Proms a few days after we got home, so I fired up Radio 3 and did so. It was definitely good stuff but, imo, overshadowed by the first piece in the concert, the premiere of Anna Clyne’s “The gorgeous nothings”, a setting of some Emily Dickinson poems for choir and orchestra and “live electronics”. (The Guardian’s reviewer appears to disagree with me on this.)
• Another contemporary classical piece I enjoyed listening to this month was Sunrise through the dusty nebula by Hannah Peel.
• I’ve resolved to listen to music on vinyl/CDs instead of relying on a glut of arcane MP3s and other similarly poor-quality non-backed-up, space-wasting files on my hard drive. Towards the end of June I bought myself a CD player and attached it to the hifi, and wrote a wee Python script to let me scrobble CDs to last.fm as I play them with minimal fuss. Our hifi is old and shite and the speakers enjoy randomly cutting out from time to time, but even with those disadvantages it’s so much nicer than listening to the aforementioned MP3s, because, idk, sound. So I took back my old CD collection from my mum’s house, and then spent quite a lot of time in secondhand music shops while we were in London with the main aim of reconstructing my parents’ own individual collections, i.e. Pink Floyd, The Byrds, Bach, David Bowie, Simon & Garfunkel on one side, and Massive Attack, Kraftwerk, Hawkwind, obscure Celtic trad on the other. This Guardian article about CD collections is less of a “why do it be like it do” deep dive than I was hoping for, but it was published at an appropriate time.

• Read a good (and free) book on working-class Cornish theatre in the 1980s.
• And volume 1 of L’arabe du futur, also very good, now I just need to buy the remaining five volumes for … like a hundred quid.
• My dad was clearing out some of his thousands of books at the exact time we visited, so I now possess a few random books about (checks notes) cultural history and New Labour, the latter being my guilty pleasure or something I guess?

A selection of random stuff I saw and enjoyed on the internet this month, not necessarily from this month, mostly on Tumblr:

• FF6 gif, Mobliz. (lol this is from 2022 ok)
• Short article on the gentrification and technologisation of the Avignon arts festival [in French].
• Art of a Jolteon and a Rotom in the city.
• End of FF15 gifset, 10/10 sad men.
• Cool scans from the Pokémon Adventures manga (my boy Ditto is there being cute as usual 💜).
• Windows Operating With Emacs Enhancements – I need to try this out at work so I don’t keep getting bamboozled by Ctrl+Y not being the universal “paste” shortcut, etc. (This seems not to be a problem on my Linux laptop but I guess I don’t really use any programs except Emacs if I’m not required to for work purposes, so … that would explain it.)

A few website updates:

• Finished adding stuff from the FF16 DLCs to my text collection, barring a few rare items I’ll have to pick up on the long-awaited second playthrough (er, when I’ve played that other game, and that one, and that one, and oh look whoops it’s 2056 and FF17 is about to be released by our friends at Square Enix Ubisoft-Activision).
• Moved the site to a new server, which resulted in having to guess most of a nginx configuration (the old server ran Apache), but this was surprisingly successful. After that I set up proper integration with Bridgy Fed, so the site can be followed in various ways now.
• Added some more substance to the FFX index page, which now contains a silly piece of JavaScript saying how many days it is since this game invaded my brain.
• Set up a cronjob to regenerate the sitemap.

Non-website stuff:

• Bridged dailyffx to Bluesky.
• I don’t want to have a presence on Bluesky or Tumblr but at least those platforms have the good grace to provide RSS feeds, so I’ve added a few accounts to my feed reader and am enjoying seeing non-algorithmically determined content from people who aren’t big fediverse Linux FOSS neckbeards like myself.
• On that note, I actually don’t read my Dreamwidth reading page at all these days because I just follow all the journals I want to follow via RSS. Dreamwidth is a mediocre feed reader but an excellent feed generator, and it’s much easier to have everything in the same place imo.

• It’s quiet season and nobody’s around (in accordance with which I took half of July off myself, so I could, as noted, go to concerts and buy secondhand CDs).
• Took delivery of a book containing a chapter I wrote (that’s good) and almost as soon as I looked at it I found a typo (that’s bad), but then I found one in another chapter as well so it wasn’t entirely the fault of my own apparently sub-par proofreading skills (that’s good??).

• I might join a webring or two. I’ve revised my opinion, I think? I don’t want my site to be indexed by search engines (hence add_header X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow, nosnippet, noarchive";), but I’m kind of ok with the thought of it being discovered by human beings, and have managed to convince myself that webrings aren’t bad in the way Discord servers are bad. I need to spend more time pondering this at great length and in insufferable detail, but that could be a thing, idk.
• Playing the Enigma Variations next Saturday, should be a good English time. Hopefully I will get to play my actual instrument for this instead of doing another stint as NI’s okayest timpanist.
• Then a week or so after that we’re seeing KK’s Priest, the second best priest in the country! (The better one is no longer in the country but they still count.)