Going it alone

Continuing the consolidation of my web presence onto praze.net, I’ve deleted/anonymised all my remaining fics on AO3 except the current WIP and also deleted my Dreamwidth account, I’m freee! A few things spurred this but particularly the fact that this month, for the first time, I experienced the entire cycle of fic posting/sharing/commenting, involving someone I’d never interacted with before, via decentralised means, which was excellent. I’ll have to write a real post about this at some point, but the gist is that being able to send a POST request from frontend JS is lifechanging actually. I may implement comments more widely on my website at some point in the future, but for now I’m enjoying being relatively difficult to communicate with.

Sort of related to this, I’ve updated my online “name” to one I’ve used in several previous stages of my life. I’d been using it for TCG stuff for a while and it felt good to use it elsewhere too. I kind of wish I wasn’t the kind of person who constantly interrogates their identity and the relationship between this and online presence etc., but … this is the way I’ve always been and it’ll probably continue to be the case indefinitely, so I guess the conclusion is “do what makes you happy, but bear in mind that what makes you happy in a few months may be completely different from what makes you happy now”.

1. Fic writing

  • Posted another 30k ish words of the long lad.
  • Took part in a Brassius x Hassel event. I’m in a big Pokémon phase right now (see below) but not hugely inspired to write fic for it, but this was well timed and Hassel has been a top blorbo recently. I loved setting the fic in Galar and using that as an excuse to talk about train delays … not to be a big unionist all of a sudden, but Galar is actually my favourite Pokémon region, even though nearly all the characters I care about are from gen 9.
  • Also for this year’s FF kiss battle, I wrote some Celes x Locke for the first time since 2020, ha, ha ha ha! This is probably connected to deleting my Dreamwidth account.

2. Gaming

  • Yeah so I’m actually obsessed with Pokémon at the moment. Not sure what has prompted this, but it’s just something that has periodically happened to me since about 2003.
  • The gen 5 event in Pokémon Go has been useful for Pokédex progress in that game, but has also left my miser-tier Home storage taken up by three useless and non-tradeable copies of Genesect … I get why they don’t let us transfer Go legendaries into the main games, but in the case of mythicals, combining that with “you can’t put these in the GTS” is a bit annoying. When they’re that difficult to obtain, you’d think they might let us just transfer them in anyway.
  • Caught Meloetta in Violet, what a bizarre set of instructions to follow. Missed out on the latest Iron Leaves event, however, because apparently there’s only a handful of Pokémon powerful enough to defeat it, and despite my best efforts at levelling one of them from 58 to 100 in a week I only managed to get it to 91.
  • Completed the Pokédexes in Pokémon Sword; got a copy of Shining Pearl in celebration. I’m at the fourth gym but trying to beat it with four Pokémon I moved in from Go so they’re all disobeying me … not particularly fruitful.
  • Also redesigned my Violet character, who is now extremely cute even if I say so myself etc.!

3. Home

  • Finally replaced a couple of the lightbulbs, but I failed to notice that another one was gone, so we’re going lightbulb shopping yet again today lol.
  • Finally [bis] cornered a man who is apparently going to fix our fence, although actually doing it is yet to happen.
  • Replaced my pyjamas because everything I had was becoming a biohazard; now I have this cute lad on me. I see he’s meant to be, as a friend’s husband once memorably put it, “a racist depiction of a Scotsman”, but @adt and I have taken to calling him a bison, mostly because we once had a great time watching an Arte documentary about bison.

5. Reading

  • Read two books for work, one fairly uninteresting and the other an absolutely slept on banger … nobody cares about this field except me and some old men, alas. Over the last couple of years I’ve been building my collection of the series and now I have all but one of them, so I’ve started reading them on the bus to/from work. Flawless.
  • Other than this I’m basically in a phase of reading like 6 books at the same time and finishing none of them. Started reading the iconic Roger Pearson’s biography of the equally iconic Voltaire, which is certainly Detailed although I’m impatient to get to the Candide bits.

6. Recs

6.1. Fanart etc.:

6.2. Techbro-ish stuff:

  • Venn diagrams in pure HTML/CSS: this is extremely cool, I need to think of something to venn immediately. I guess there are those three final fantasy ten characters constantly occupying my brain, hmmmmm.
  • A lighter YouTube embed, could be useful.
  • An Emacs package for evaluating XPath queries.
  • Elisp cheatsheet for Python programmers; I must remember this exists so that I a. don’t have to relearn elisp from scratch every time I want to write an Emacs function and b. might one day progress in my Python knowledge beyond “guess it’s time for a list of dictionaries”.
  • Nice post about using FanFicFare, including some of its advanced options, which I wasn’t aware of. Maybe one day FFF will actually work on my computer (having that thought reminds me that I really need to change distro, but there are so many things I have to do first, aaaargh).

6.3. Also this, why am I sharing this

  • Cannot stress enough that this video explains why I am the way I am.

7. Techbro

  • Edited my about page quite significantly, and made a few other cosmetic edits throughout the site.
  • Refactored my TCG site generator so it now takes about 2 minutes to build instead of about an hour. I need to do a proper readme/instructions at some point, but it’s certainly working very well for my own purposes.

8. Televisual

  • Took advantage of Pokémon Concierge being briefly on YouTube to watch it … wow, for once in my life I experienced Emotions, especially at the end of episode 4 even though what was going to happen was extremely obvious. Anyway it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, thank you for that.
  • Saw Ghost Strata (2019) at the cinema, although I was really there for the accompanying Mark Jenkin shorts, one of which taught me there are baljiow in County Cork, what, I’m obsessed with this?!

9. Work

  • Working more directly with people I hadn’t had much contact with before; I think I am gradually managing to convince them that I am actually competent.
  • We’re more than halfway through the teaching semester, bring it on!

10. Upcoming

  • One of my colleagues has invited all the young members of the department to her house for dinner … in academia “young” means under 40. @adt is also invited (I’m the only one of said youths with a partner lol). We’ll probably have a nice time but also yikes, have to appear relatively normal for a few hours.
  • Orchestra concert will be this month … will we be able to play Rachmaninov 2 by then? Because we certainly can’t play it now.
  • I have quite a few plans for website updating stuff, although who knows how much of it will happen. Now that I’m largely off other websites it seems more conceptually achievable though, I think.
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