praze • Notes

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.

Fic writing

WIP edits: I’m on chapter 36! We’re in the Calm Lands now so it feels pretty close to the end, although the lads still have to go to Zanarkand and back to the Calm Lands, and then One Very Special Boy has to make that same journey a second time. I have some more editing tasks to do after I get to the end of this pass through the full thing, but they won’t take as long to do, so it seems like the beginning of 2025 could be a sensible time to start posting. (This is likely to be as wild and inaccurate a guess as all previous guesses.)
Started writing three short fics [everything is a short fic compared with the WIP], none of which is finished yet, and only one of which is an FFX fic … it’s pretty easy to guess what canon the other two are for.

Films

We watched Seven Samurai because I’m now obsessed with samurai or something. It was really good. Got a few more Kurosawa films queued up, although my rate of film consumption is legendarily low.

Gaming

I never played Brave Exvius much, but for some reason the EoS announcement made me think: fuck it, I’m going to download the JP version of FF Record Keeper. It was actually a great time to go back to it, because they rereleased a few old alternate costumes as part of the tenth anniversary content, and among them, the young Auron costume! My vague memory of the global version and rudimentary Japanese abilities are allowing me to make some progress, although I’m not sure how soon I’ll be able to get to the more difficult dungeons. This is partly because I have no regard for building a balanced team and I just shove whatever resources I get at my faves.
Rise Of The Ronin: beat it at the end of the month, still going so I can complete some of the postgame content + max out bonds with all my best boys and girls. I am writing some kind of review of this game that I will soon post. It will be long.

Home

The saga of getting the outside gas pipe replaced has finally come to an end. It ended up being a birthday treat for ~lissajous, who is a huge fan of gas pipes, both outside and otherwise. Positive consequence: we now have an undamaged outside gas pipe. Negative consequence: we no longer have an excuse for putting off getting the roof looked at.
I’m having a go at some fandom-themed cross-stitch and may one day share the results if they’re not too horrendous.

Music

I now understand why people think the FF16 soundtrack was so good and it’s because they’re comparing it with the soundtracks of non-Final Fantasy games, which are in fact trash [I am exaggerating for comic effect]. There is only one remotely good piece of music in the Rise Of The Ronin soundtrack, and it’s the love theme.
Singing activities have restarted after the summer.
Went to see the Bootleg Beatles; good fun even if they did sully the encore with Hey Jude, which ~lissajous and I love to talk smack about. The best bit of the show was the period footage they played in the transitions, though … I’m just so fascinated by the sixties help.

Reading

Finished Candide, very good and funny as long as you can get past the period-typical racism and sexism, also contains some excellent “troubled master/competent servant” potential so I duly nominated it for /yuletide.
It took months more than it should have, but I finally finished Dawn of the future, the FF15 tie-in story collection.
Finished A monk’s guide to a clean house and mind by Shoukei Matsumoto/Ian Samhammer. I’m sorry but I don’t think my house or mind will be any cleaner.
Read 3 books for work.

Techbro

As described, replaced the Pleroma instance on the server with GoToSocial.
Put together an unforthcoming sticky for my bookmarks collection. One day I will tackle the tags in some kind of systematic way; until then, it is a mess.
Copied a couple of old journal memes to the notes section of my site, paving the way for participating in more of them in the future.
Made a small change to my fic archive code so it now displays wordcounts for each fandom on the fandoms page. Interestingly (zzz), I’ve posted 89 FFX fics for just over 112k words, but only 39 FF6 fics for very nearly the same amount. Apparently I was more into writing long stuff in my FF6 phase? The WIP will take the FFX count up to nearly 500k though, ha.

Work

Trying to write so I have something to show for my research leave.
Found out yesterday that our MA programme, which was anticipated to go up from 6 to about 15 students in its second year, has actually gone down to … 3 students. Egg on all our faces.

Upcoming

Japanese lessons restart next week. I’m probably ok on vocabulary because I’ve been using a spaced repetition app to keep up with it, but I think I’ve actually forgotten anything remotely grammatical. Brought my notes from the last three terms of classes home with the intent of doing a big cram this weekend. This is probably too ambitious.
We’re going to the annual “local pro classical orchestra plays 90s dance music” event next weekend, which should be good. The last one I attended was in 2016 when I was just a tiny baby.
Going to see Jon Ronson speaking a couple of days after that, so we’ll get to hear all about the terrible state of society. I’ve been a fan since his Guardian column in the mid-noughties, which I was definitely too young to be reading.
Speaking at a conference down south in field X halfway through the month, which will undoubtedly be excruciating because nobody in X cares about my subfields Y and Z … this is another “something to show for my research leave” exercise. Fortunately I’m in an orchestra concert on day two of the conference, so I have an excuse to just attend day one and then hurry home.
As ever, I have various ambitious plans for things I want to put on my website. Maybe some of them will indeed be on said website by the end of the month.

Let one in at a time