nyoooom

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⬆ that’s the sound of a speeding train, which is also me, because I a. love public transport more than life itself and b. have done so many things in the last month!! I’m currently in Belgium for work, as indicated by my recent increasingly obscure and obnoxious fediverse posts, and a couple of weeks ago was in Portugal, also for work, which was less fun probably because I didn’t stow a small @adt in my suitcase, and, I suppose, because of the much more significant language barrier. Also attended two cons, the local in-person one where I got a nice Pokémon blind bag and some other shwag (consumerism … really the only reason why I attend this con given that I eschew all the cosplay and gaming aspects), and the hotly anticipated Citrus Con – about which I am writing a brief (almost entirely positive) review which will be posted, er, someday. As a result of said Citrus Con I also commissioned some fanart of my boys at last! And it happened to be taking place the weekend that I was recuperating from some unanticipated surgery (of the extremely minor variety … honestly even calling it surgery makes it sound more significant than it was) and wasn’t supposed to be on my feet much, so it was a good time to be spending more than two days in front of the computer screen constantly.

1. Fic writing

  • Four more chapters of A Shot At Life posted; we’ve passed the halfway point (maybe one day I will have time for other hobbies again … god …). Auron and Braska have progressed to the “probably non-sexual and not entirely consensual kissing” stage. Of Which There Will Be Much More.
  • I also wrote and posted a very stupid fic in 30 minutes for a Citrus Con event; currently an AO3 exclusive (against all my principles etc. etc.), but it’ll be on my site where it belongs once I next run the build script at the weekend.

2. Gaming

  • Finally finished the terf wizard school game! A (broadly neutral) review may be forthcoming if I ever have any non-editing-A-Shot-At-Life leisure time.
  • After looking for Eternal Sonata for ages, I actually found a copy courtesy of Obscure Old Games Reseller at the local con. Looking forward to (someday) playing a game that combines two of my interests, classical music and being a weeb.
  • Also started Dissidia NT in my continued quest to decrease the FF backlog … I’m really only in it for the cutscenes because I literally have no technique other than “approach someone and press square a lot”. Tbh it just makes me think of DFFOO and how much I miss the one game that made the OTP playable in three dimensions, so that’s sad, although here’s some relevant baseless speculation.

3. Home

  • We finally got the fence fixed (that’s good); now we have no excuse not to turn our joint attention to further activities in the home improvement sphere (that’s bad).
  • This is really not the right section to put this at all, mostly because it relates to being 500 miles away from home rn, but it reached thirty-six degrees here yesterday. The hottest I have been in my life, I’m sure. And there’s more of that to look forward to, thanks capitalism!!

4. Music

  • Choirs and orchestras are over for the summer, bar one forthcoming instance of “everyone gets together for a day to play Tchaikovsky 6 badly”. Meanwhile @adt has decided to take up the viola, being enabled by an acquaintance of ours whose house is full of random shite including a (seemingly quite decent) viola that he once bought for five pounds.
  • New obsession: Arensky’s string quartet no. 2, which I first listened to thanks to this Reddit comment.
  • Picked up various CDs of les incontournables de la musique classique during a visit to the Oxfam bookshop in town: Malcolm Arnold dances, Holst’s Planets, Rach 2, Faure’s and Verdi’s requiems, the New World symphony (which we will be playing this year … snore), some Rossini overtures.

5. Reading

  • Received quite a few books and manga volumes for my birthday to add to the interminable TBR list! Now that I’ve taken my wishlist(s) off Amazon, people are actually consenting to buy me secondhand stuff at last, hooray.
  • I also read/finished a lot of (mostly quite short) books, helped by the fact that I spent c. 5 hours in transit on the way back from Portugal and didn’t immediately fall asleep like I often do on planes/coaches:
    • Extremely online by Taylor Lorenz: about the evolution of social media since the mid-00s. Not the most coherent narrative (it read like a compilation of longform articles, which I don’t think it was, but the author’s background in journalism is pretty apparent) but some interesting stuff, including an account of the time 19 of Vine’s most popular creators demanded that Vine pay them a million USD a year each and then left the platform when they refused, which was probably responsible in large part for the eventual irrelevance and death of Vine (obligatory lol at the profit machine eating itself). Mostly devoid of critical commentary, although it wasn’t quite as vapid as McCulloch’s Because internet, of which I am an enormous hater.
    • The 7½ deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton: recommended by someone on Dreamwidth way back when. I put this aside for months before finishing it; this is not an ideal book to do this with, given the immense complexity of the narrative. This is the sort of novel people should make wikis about (compliment).
    • In the Valley of the Kings by Daniel Meyerson: an account of the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb recommended on meme also way back when, when I once expressed a strong craving for social histories of the topic. There were some weird inconsistencies in the style that made me wonder if it was self-published (apparently not though?), including various exhortations to be amazed by things as if it was a poor-quality undergraduate essay. The chronology was all over the place; a non-linear narrative can be done well but I don’t think that was the case in this particular example – I got to the end and felt like a lot of the account was missing.
    • Russian lyrics by Martha Dickinson Bianchi: extremely dated and occasionally difficult to understand given that it was a badly OCRed Project Gutenberg text.
    • The elephant in the room by Jon Ronson: a short account of some of the alt right’s activities during the first Trump campaign. Ronson has been one of my favourite writers for about 20 years (#limone) so I obviously enjoyed reading this, but it was a bit yikes at the end when he was like “don’t elect Trump or we’ll all be fucked”. A bit like when I visited the European parliament museum about a week after the Brexit vote … I’m probably thinking about this because I’m in Brussels again right now.
    • Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac: read for Breizh Content as are many things – not quite enough of it to satisfy, but it was a fun read. It was the first time I’d read any Beat Generation work – how shocked would the literary establishment have been by this kind of writing, crazy stuff. Not to sound like an enormous Youth, but it was also interesting to see what travelling was like in the days before being able to look up the train times sur l’appli SNCF.

6. Recs

  • Interesting article about MrBeast, the usual “the internet is shite and we are all fucked” warning applies.
  • Other than that I appear not to have bookmarked anything non-work-related recently … I need to get into the habit of bookmarking things instead of having 71 tabs open on my phone. But I might comment on these three-month-old Dreamwidth posts someday, you know!!!

7. Techbro

  • Reconfigured my about page into several pages: I both love and hate describing myself, so I am compelled to redo the whole thing every few months or so.
  • Wrote yet another static site generator to generate notes/blog/journal/whatever the fuck it is posts and RSS feed entries, including an option for “tumblr reblogs”, in my fave languages elisp and Python (and a bit of bash to tie it together). The RSS feed now contains the formatted full text of posts … so tasty. I probably need to integrate the FFX meta posts into this setup too, but I’ll worry about that later.
  • Added places of residence to the location tracker.

8. Work

  • Supposedly the academic year is over, but shockingly being in charge of exams means I am also in charge of summer resit exams … on the other hand, continuing to be unreasonably busy means it’s actually easier to get research done somehow. (I told a couple of colleagues today that I am “physically but not spiritually absent” this week, which was a hugely cringe thing to say, but basically sums up my approach to the current summer period given that I have so many things I need to get into a reasonable state of done-ness by the time we get into the semester.)

9. Upcoming

  • After the frantic nature of June, I can’t actually think of anything I have on the agenda for July (other than the necessary return from Belgium lol). Things I would like to do include updating my website (as usual) and reading manga.
  • Semi-signed up to a couple of fandom events for the first time in a while, so we’ll see if I get the time to do anything for those too.
  • Looking forward to those OTP commissions arriving! One is in the post right now … delicious.

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