shoopuf launchin’

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Big news for Dan and Phil fans, am I right! I’ve been having a great time immersing myself in the phandom again like it’s 2016. @adt also seems to be becoming a fan (their only straight male viewer or whatever). Just as I don’t watch YouTubers but unflinchingly make an exception for D+P, I also don’t subscribe to Patreons but have naturally signed up to theirs.

1. Fic writing

  • Participated in /ficortreat, which is a great event model actually, essentially the inverse fandomtrees/giftboxes/stocking etc.. Lots of people asked for Pokémon fic, which was fun to write. I wrote 7 fics for a total of nearly 10k, so it was nice and productive.
  • The longboi continues … er everyone’s very sad I guess.
  • Got my /yuletide assignment and bought the game i’ll be writing for, so I intend to start playing that this week.

2. Gaming

  • @adt acquired an inexplicable but burning urge to play a Kirby game, so we’ve been co-opping on Kirby And The Forgotten Land, which is extremely cute. I always play as player two which means I have no particular significance (all around me are familiar faces …), although actually this suits me quite well as I’m not much of a platformer player, other than Sonic, which is allowed because gotta go fast.
  • Beat Pokémon Legends: Arceus, but I still need to go back to it to complete the Pokédex and so on (particularly because part of why I got this game was to pick up a few legendaries/mythicals I can’t get from the other Pokémon games in my possession … Shaymin my beloved …)

3. Home

  • We went to Carrickfergus a few Sundays ago; it’s one of several members of the “broadly loyalist towns that everyone tells you are shitholes” category, but as we typically find beauty in the mundane or whatever, we obviously had a great time there. We only saw about a third of the things we wanted to see, so a return visit is on the agenda. This appears to be the only picture I took lol … illustrating my point about the mundane, I suppose.

4. Music

  • The usual regular events have occurred, although I couldn’t get to the monthly evensong because I had an orchestra rehearsal to go to. This is actually fine because I prefer playing the (unnecessarily redacted large string instrument) to singing.
  • Did our American concert, which mostly went well.
  • Went to two concerts by the pros: the first had a commission by someone @adt went to school with, which we thought was pretty good, and also two certified bangers (the Emperor concerto and Tchaikovsky 4). The second one was all music I didn’t really know, but most of it was French so that gets my seal of approval.
  • This inspired me to listen to various pieces of French music last week, although I thought the selection on this album was actually a bit weak. I had a great time with Le bourgeois gentilhomme though, almost as great as when I read it when I was 17 and discovered the joy of premodern French literature, one of many things I should get back to.

5. Reading

  • Finished Politics on the edge by Rory Stewart: idk, it’s interesting being an Oxbridge graduate and gaining this insight into the fact that the country is run so shambolically, mostly by Oxbridge graduates … I think there is a certain mentality of “I’m going to personally make a thing happen because I want it to”, which somehow develops at those particular universities (and presumably at many of the schools that have traditionally sent a lot of pupils to them), and then leads to certain people becoming MPs, and to their subsequently making poorly thought through decisions as MPs. The positive word for it is “initiative”, I suppose, and the negative one is “entitlement”, but it’s something I really don’t see in my own students other than the very rare exception.
  • Acquired and read volume 5 of Chroniques de la mariée de Bretagne: looks like the lads are going either back to Brittany or to England in the next volume, either of which will be great. I’m still hoping my guy Gilbert pops up again though.
  • Back to Roger P’s book about Voltaire, which seems to be becoming more dense and intricate by the second … it sure would be nice to finish this dans les meilleurs délais.

6. Recs

7. Techbro

  • Did some edits to the GoToSocial templates and CSS to make it look as if my profile is part of this site. I still have to figure out how to potentially do this with individual statuses, and it would be nice to be able to make video work properly, but it seems to look decent.
  • Documented my Yuletide offer generator script so I won’t have to write it again from scratch next year (and maybe by then we’ll have something resembling a gaming PC so I might actually get to do a BL VN, sob).

8. Work

  • Had my annual review meeting, the same as ever.
  • Got a couple of writing things done over reading week (writing week??), fortunately.

9. Upcoming

  • Teaching will be over by the end of the month, yeeooo.
  • Two concerts coming up, of which one is boring music and is already sold out and the other is much more interesting music and will struggle to fill a standard-sized church hall, alas.
  • Maybe I’ll actually finish that /1character contribution this month …