Did you get a good feel for riding the winds?

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:

Fic writing
  • Wrote one Auron/Jecht fic for a prompt on meme, “the best way to get over someone”  M   ♂  416w.
  • WIP editing: I’m on chapter 25. I managed to speed up around the beginning of the month but then got slower again, because most of my free time seems to have gone the way of a certain PS5 game (about which more below).
Gaming
  • Completed the Blueberry Dex in Pokémon Violet. I’m impressed that the game is for all intents and purposes complete and yet there’s still more stuff to do; I’m excited to invite all the auld lads to the clubroom and see their extra dialogue (especially my dear Hassel). The Indigo Disk characters are great, Drayton and Lacey in particular. I feel bad for liking fuckboy toothpaste-hair Drayton, but you know what, I like fuckboy toothpaste-hair Drayton and I should say it.
  • More significantly, I’ve become consumed by Rise Of The Ronin. I’m learning a lot about 19th-century Japan despite the large amount of artistic licence taken by the developers; there’s a great roster of characters. But, because I am fundamentally shallow, one of my very favourite things about this game is that I made my character look like Braska’s pilgrimage-era Auron and so I get to see my blorbo of all blorbos in Situations. I’ve captured so much footage of him ughhhh. This is my phone background now (I promise it looks better not zoomed in). Why am I like this and why is he like this.
Items
  • Remember when I had some kind of moral objection to ordering fan-made merchandise online, hahaha who was that person. Yeah so I bought the Auron one of these, because there’s so little Auron stuff out there. Also picked up this wee Locke that I’d had my eye on for a while.
  • I also gave in to my most fundamental desires and made myself a wee young Auron … charm, I guess? Obviously nobody makes merchandise of this incarnation of him, so it was DIY or bust. I put some holographic film on the front so this photo of it looks a bit odd, but this video gives a better impression.
Music
  • Saw KK’s Priest; it was a good metal evening but felt very different from seeing Actual Priest earlier this year, mostly because the earlier event was at a much larger venue with two big-name support bands, and this one was in a very small place close to home with some unknowns (including, er, three of the people in KK’s actual band). Also kind of just made me wish I was in the same room as Richie Faulkner again, sorreeee. I am the opposite of every middle-aged man in a YouTube comments section.
  • Went to see some fin-de-siècle French music in a concert that was supposedly part of the BBC Proms despite being several hundred miles away from the Albert Hall. The accompanist was a contemporary of mine at university, so it’s nice to see he’s doing well as a professional.
  • Played the Enigma Variations, which I was sure I’d never played before, but we apparently did them in a concert in 2019 and I’d erased this part of the programme from my mind?? Amazing.
  • Orchestra restarted after the summer break. We’re doing film music, which we all love to complain about. I’m in the weird position of having played a lot of this stuff more than my colleagues have, which is very much not the case when we do the standard classical repertoire – although maybe, per the previous point, I just play it and forget about it.
  • I’m enjoying listening to my CD collection. For some reason my mum sent me a copy of a Byrds compilation CD that we used to listen to a lot back in the day. Good stuff even if I do persist in semi-seriously getting them mixed up with Simon and Garfunkel.
  • Rising From Ruins is perpetually stuck in my head, and I know it won’t be gone until I finish that game.
Reading
  • Finished Coin locker babies by Ryo Murakami, in translation (needless to say). Extremely bizarre and ludicrous, great stuff.
  • Read The gate to women’s country by Sheri S. Tepper; I think I’ve finally worked out why I fail to get into a lot of SF despite repeatedly trying, and it’s because anything that leans heavily on This World Is Different From Our Own runs the risk of that side of things overshadowing the human element in terms of how I absorb the content as a reader. If there’s a lot of complex worldbuilding, especially if it’s on the scientific side, I can easily find that distracting when what I want is explorations of how human relationships and society are affected by fundamental, world-changing developments in technology, natural disasters, enormous cultural shifts etc. (I know the two things can be done at once … this is a me problem, I guess.) This book delivered! I read it relatively quickly and very much enjoyed it.
  • Finished Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, also a great read but in a somewhat depressing “state of the modern world” sense.
  • Also read 7 books for work (not typical, but this isn’t a typical work season).
Recs
Techbro
  • Finally moved from Google Drive to Syncthing and I’m very impressed by it so far. My work computer refuses to communicate with others outside its own network, but seeing as my phone is connected to the office wifi any time I’m there anyway, it can just sync stuff from that. I need to work out some alternative storage/browsing method for photos, but this is a major step in degooglisation.
  • Joined some fanlistings and added their buttons to my about page.
  • Made a lot of small changes to the site, mostly involving adding <meta> tags, as semi-comprehensibly described in my previous post.
  • Moved the Dermot Morgan content to its own subdomain; while I don’t mind people finding their way to that material from my main site, as evidenced by the fact that I’m linking it in this very sentence, I’m less comfortable with the idea of people finding that side of things first and then coming to the rest of my stuff afterwards. Nginx redirects and sed were the MVPs in this process.
  • As some links in this post attest … I am making rather heavier use of Tumblr than I have in the past 7 years. Like a lumbering, socially deficient dinosaur, I have attempted to interact with people once or twice, people who may even be reading these very words. My following activity still takes place via RSS, but I am actually posting now, albeit on a single-issue blog (the issue being anything tangentially related to my WIP); look, I needed somewhere to put all my Rise Of The Ronin screenshots. Predictably, I made my own theme from scratch, because I love CSS more than life itself. Anyway if you can stomach even more Auron content from me it’s here.
  • Offline, I wrote a wee “on this day” script that looks back through journal files from previous years. Apparently on 1 September 2022 I was thinking about how great Dreamwidth was (lol rip), on 1 September 2021 I linked this video with the comment “the only final fantasy ten i recognise” (I mean, at least I’m consistent about one thing), and on 1 September 2010 I started my last year of school and had a driving lesson … cripes.
Work
  • Research leave commenced at the beginning of the month; it lasts until the start of January. I’m sure everything relating to the imminent semester is chaos as usual, but I have no need to be aware of it. Bliss.
  • Submitted an article to a journal and got an email back the very next day with the subject line “Your submission has been unsubmitted” … thought that was kind of quick for a rejection, but it turned out it was just because I hadn’t included my name on the manuscript and they wanted me to send an edited Word (boo) file. I feel like they could maybe work on their email templates.
  • Got asked to contribute a couple of chapters to the new edition of one of the standard reference books in my field, which is pretty cool (besides the “actually writing them” part). (Actually I pretend academic writing is a chore but it’s probably my favourite part of the job … also rediscovering fic writing back in 2020 and getting practice that way made the academic writing process much easier and faster for me. Just saying.)
Upcoming
  • The post-Citrus Con mood is “might commission some fanart of my ship”. Idk, we’ll see. There are two artists I’ve got my eye on who I know used to draw the characters a lot in the past, so they obviously know them; that feels like it could be a good place to start.
  • My next major coding project is a reading tracker based on my existing files. I’m saying so here because maybe that will force me to start work on it in September? Lots of people who are mostly part of the fandomsphere have posted about their interesting web projects here, and I’m looking forward to browsing through those and potentially contributing.
  • Thinking about posting some miscellaneous creative outputs on my site including such highlights of my later teenage years as a remix of Banquo’s soliloquy from the first scene of Macbeth, and a catalogue of wild boar. I’m not sure whether I’ll actually do this, but I’ll certainly think about how it would work.
  • /no_true_pair has started but I ambitiously signed up with non-FFX characters … we’ll see.
  • Choirs start back this month.
  • Going to see the Bootleg Beatles next week, who are apparently very convincing.
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