Lynn | Settiai (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
settiai) wrote2025-04-22 10:12 pm
settiai) wrote2025-04-22 10:12 pm
Entry tags:
Road Not Taken
I was feeling nostalgic, so I pulled up Road Not Taken and played it for a little while earlier. It took a bit to get back into the swing of things, but I started to remember some of the hidden details and combinations after a while.
It's been ages since the last time I played, and I'd forgotten just how much I love it. It's so helpful if I want to turn off my brain for a little while. I can't believe it's been over a decade since it was first released.
It's been ages since the last time I played, and I'd forgotten just how much I love it. It's so helpful if I want to turn off my brain for a little while. I can't believe it's been over a decade since it was first released.
The Gauche in the Machine (china_shop) wrote2025-04-22 06:20 pm
china_shop) wrote2025-04-22 06:20 pmEntry tags:
Me-and-media update
Previous poll review
In the vegetables poll, 90.4% of respondents clicked fresh vegetables (bought), 46.2% clicked frozen vegetables, and 44.2% clicked fresh vegetables (homegrown). I was surprised; I thought more people would go frozen for the convenience. (I wonder what that says, if anything, about Dreamwidth demographics.)
In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 78.8%, followed by a tie between "hanging in there until things settle down and I can sort my life out" and "sunbeams playing in a tree, daring each other to peek around the shadowed side" with 63.5% each. Thank you for your votes!
Reading
Still going on The Horse and His Boy (I am slow and distractable) and the Guardian novel read-along (it's on a schedule). Nothing in audio.
Kdramas
We started Tale of the Nine Tailed, a sweeping epic about a powerful immortal, the reincarnated love of his life, and his bratty younger brother. (Nothing at all like Guardian the novel, why do you ask?) I'm hoping it has enough plot and worldbuilding to hold Andrew's interest; he gets bored during extended romance scenes.
More of Sell Your Haunted House with Pru. And in solo-watching, I started Heesu in Class 2; it's pretty adorable, but also Heesu is the living embodiment of Idiots In Love, and sometimes I have to watch through my fingers.
Other TV
This week's Doctor Who
Episode 1 of Sherlock & Daughter. We were just going to try out the first ten minutes to get a sense of it, but we ended up watching the whole episode. I can forgive Holmes for being a grumpy old man when he has a reason for it.
Our Deadloch rewatch-with-a-friend continues, plus Jentry Chau vs the Underworld, about which I still have no opinion.
My sister and I watched Into the Night (1985 film; Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, and a vast number of film directors as extras, the only one of whom I knew on sight was Jim Henson). The caper was silly, and the romance plotline was very thin, but Goldblum and Pfeiffer are so watchable that it hung together despite the weird pacing when it lingered on random extras we were supposed to recognise. Lovely to see David Bowie in a small (albeit violently psychotic) role.
Guardian/Fandom
I archived my Murderbot flashficlet, and wow, Murderbot fans are generous with their kudosing. *hearts so much* (In my experience, some fandoms are just more kudosy than others.)
Audio entertainment
I listened my way through all of The Setup, a romance audiodrama about Juan, an anxious art museum curator in NYC, and Fernando, the con artist who's trying to steal a painting. It's great! I'm really into it. And then I got to the end of the available episodes and realised it's not finished yet, ahhhhh! I need to check these things before I start!
(Is it just me or are depictions of anxiety becoming more common in romances? I feel like there's some wish fulfilment going on: people longing to meet The One who is hot, super into them, and will also be incredibly kind and patient and give them effective tips for handling their panic attacks. Not that romances aren't all about wish fulfilment, so why not? Add dimensions to your dream partner!)
Writing/making things
My little 4k exchange fic is becoming somewhat tortured by all the writing advice I'm trying to enact on it. Hopefully I'm not engineering the spark out of the thing. Also, hopefully I emerge from this process wiser and more capable. (It could happen!) Note to self: this story still doesn't have an ending, oops.
Other than that, I'm spending a lot of my life rolling around in meta discussions, yay!
Life/health/mental state things
Oh, look, let's not even talk about it. /o\
Note to self: I had a flu jab on Saturday.
Online life
I'm switching ISPs on Friday. Wish me luck! If I disappear off the face of the internet, that will be why.
Food
Today marks my first attempt at baked potatoes in the slow cooker. *fingers crossed* I forgot to prickle them with a fork before I wrapped them in foil, so who knows.
Good things
Fandom. Writing. Lunchtime dumplings on the back deck. Cephalopod plushies. Queer audiodramas. Friends coming over to watch stuff. Guardian. Home-made salsa. Trivia quizzes. Music and kindness and laughter and love.
In the vegetables poll, 90.4% of respondents clicked fresh vegetables (bought), 46.2% clicked frozen vegetables, and 44.2% clicked fresh vegetables (homegrown). I was surprised; I thought more people would go frozen for the convenience. (I wonder what that says, if anything, about Dreamwidth demographics.)
In ticky-boxes, hugs came first with 78.8%, followed by a tie between "hanging in there until things settle down and I can sort my life out" and "sunbeams playing in a tree, daring each other to peek around the shadowed side" with 63.5% each. Thank you for your votes!
Reading
Still going on The Horse and His Boy (I am slow and distractable) and the Guardian novel read-along (it's on a schedule). Nothing in audio.
Kdramas
We started Tale of the Nine Tailed, a sweeping epic about a powerful immortal, the reincarnated love of his life, and his bratty younger brother. (Nothing at all like Guardian the novel, why do you ask?) I'm hoping it has enough plot and worldbuilding to hold Andrew's interest; he gets bored during extended romance scenes.
More of Sell Your Haunted House with Pru. And in solo-watching, I started Heesu in Class 2; it's pretty adorable, but also Heesu is the living embodiment of Idiots In Love, and sometimes I have to watch through my fingers.
Other TV
This week's Doctor Who
was very silly and meta, set against a background of ominous racism. Hm. But I did enjoy the jokes, and Belinda is great.
Episode 1 of Sherlock & Daughter. We were just going to try out the first ten minutes to get a sense of it, but we ended up watching the whole episode. I can forgive Holmes for being a grumpy old man when he has a reason for it.
Our Deadloch rewatch-with-a-friend continues, plus Jentry Chau vs the Underworld, about which I still have no opinion.
My sister and I watched Into the Night (1985 film; Michelle Pfeiffer, Jeff Goldblum, and a vast number of film directors as extras, the only one of whom I knew on sight was Jim Henson). The caper was silly, and the romance plotline was very thin, but Goldblum and Pfeiffer are so watchable that it hung together despite the weird pacing when it lingered on random extras we were supposed to recognise. Lovely to see David Bowie in a small (albeit violently psychotic) role.
Guardian/Fandom
I archived my Murderbot flashficlet, and wow, Murderbot fans are generous with their kudosing. *hearts so much* (In my experience, some fandoms are just more kudosy than others.)
Audio entertainment
I listened my way through all of The Setup, a romance audiodrama about Juan, an anxious art museum curator in NYC, and Fernando, the con artist who's trying to steal a painting. It's great! I'm really into it. And then I got to the end of the available episodes and realised it's not finished yet, ahhhhh! I need to check these things before I start!
(Is it just me or are depictions of anxiety becoming more common in romances? I feel like there's some wish fulfilment going on: people longing to meet The One who is hot, super into them, and will also be incredibly kind and patient and give them effective tips for handling their panic attacks. Not that romances aren't all about wish fulfilment, so why not? Add dimensions to your dream partner!)
Writing/making things
My little 4k exchange fic is becoming somewhat tortured by all the writing advice I'm trying to enact on it. Hopefully I'm not engineering the spark out of the thing. Also, hopefully I emerge from this process wiser and more capable. (It could happen!) Note to self: this story still doesn't have an ending, oops.
Other than that, I'm spending a lot of my life rolling around in meta discussions, yay!
Life/health/mental state things
Oh, look, let's not even talk about it. /o\
Note to self: I had a flu jab on Saturday.
Online life
I'm switching ISPs on Friday. Wish me luck! If I disappear off the face of the internet, that will be why.
Food
Today marks my first attempt at baked potatoes in the slow cooker. *fingers crossed* I forgot to prickle them with a fork before I wrapped them in foil, so who knows.
Good things
Fandom. Writing. Lunchtime dumplings on the back deck. Cephalopod plushies. Queer audiodramas. Friends coming over to watch stuff. Guardian. Home-made salsa. Trivia quizzes. Music and kindness and laughter and love.
Poll #33020 face blindness extrapolation
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43
Do you have face-blindness?
View Answers
yes
2 (4.7%)
technically no, but it's not unusual for me to get people confused
23 (53.5%)
especially when they're dressed the same
14 (32.6%)
no
12 (27.9%)
I mix up similar usernames
14 (32.6%)
honestly, they don't have to be that similar
12 (27.9%)
other
1 (2.3%)
ticky-box full of black cats slinking mysteriously in the shadows
28 (65.1%)
ticky-box full of starting a howl
15 (34.9%)
ticky-box of overthinking
21 (48.8%)
ticky-box full of squirrel-dragons with floofy tails, guarding their golden acorns
21 (48.8%)
ticky-box full of hugs
33 (76.7%)
The Gauche in the Machine (china_shop) wrote2025-04-21 05:44 pm
china_shop) wrote2025-04-21 05:44 pmEntry tags:
Come speak to me of Second Person POV
The Writing Excuses podcast is doing a series on voice (first, third limited, third omniscient), and mostly their discussions have been great. I've enjoyed them a lot. But I found today's episode on second person (2ndPOV) unsatisfying. They got distracted talking about video games, TTRPG, online recipe essays, and Youtube influencers, and when they did discuss fictional prose, they seemed to think the "you" character had to be a reader stand-in. (Or maybe I misunderstood? Quite possible!) Anyway, now I'm itching to procrastinate on my story talk with like-minded souls about the joys of second person.
Note: If you not into 2ndPOV, that's totally cool. Each to their own! But please don't chime in to tell me or explain why; I'm not interested in defending it today.
( Rambling, so much rambling. )
ION, Andrew sent me a link to Secrets of Writing Snappy Dialogue (Banter) (Youtube video). At first I was resistant, but then I watched it and now I'm overhauling my 4k fic AGAIN. This is killing me, lol.
Note: If you not into 2ndPOV, that's totally cool. Each to their own! But please don't chime in to tell me or explain why; I'm not interested in defending it today.
( Rambling, so much rambling. )
ION, Andrew sent me a link to Secrets of Writing Snappy Dialogue (Banter) (Youtube video). At first I was resistant, but then I watched it and now I'm overhauling my 4k fic AGAIN. This is killing me, lol.
lightreads (lightreads) wrote2025-04-20 01:27 pm
lightreads) wrote2025-04-20 01:27 pmEntry tags:
Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai
Bitter Medicine
3.5/5. Urban romantasy about two fae-blooded people (well, technically she’s descended from a Chinese medicine god and he’s a half-elf), one a talented artist and magician, the other a sort of enforcer cursed with a terrible reputation and an actual curse.
I liked thiseven though it’s het. The emotional beats are complex and thoughtful, and the writing is pleasant. Also, it’s so nice to have a romantasy about goddamn adults, you know? I mean, in this case they are both over a hundred, so they’d better be by now, but you know how it is.
Marking down for that thing where, if I poke the worldbuilding, it doesn’t so much poke back as jiggle alarmingly. There are fundamental facts about how this fantastical modern world works that I do not understand at all. So just go in with those senses turned down and you’ll have a good time, kay?
Content notes: Violence, magically-enforced obedience, shitty parents
3.5/5. Urban romantasy about two fae-blooded people (well, technically she’s descended from a Chinese medicine god and he’s a half-elf), one a talented artist and magician, the other a sort of enforcer cursed with a terrible reputation and an actual curse.
I liked this
Marking down for that thing where, if I poke the worldbuilding, it doesn’t so much poke back as jiggle alarmingly. There are fundamental facts about how this fantastical modern world works that I do not understand at all. So just go in with those senses turned down and you’ll have a good time, kay?
Content notes: Violence, magically-enforced obedience, shitty parents
lightreads (lightreads) wrote2025-04-19 01:47 pm
lightreads) wrote2025-04-19 01:47 pmEntry tags:
Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Shroud
4/5. Our narrator, vassal of a future space exploring hell corporate, tells the story of how she survived many days on the surface of a mysterious and deeply hostile moon, populated by inexplicable and frightening life forms. Then things get weirder.
Good standalone scifi with a long section of survival horror. This makes an interesting companion to Alien Clay, another recent book of his. Both are about humans who are powerless within an oppressive and unfair human system, and how they encounter terrifying alien life, and how those aliens embody another way of being sentient in a radical departure from the human way, and what that illuminates. The two books come at that story from very different angles, but to interesting effect alone and together.
Content notes: Death, corporate dehumanization, the existential horror of alien consciousness
4/5. Our narrator, vassal of a future space exploring hell corporate, tells the story of how she survived many days on the surface of a mysterious and deeply hostile moon, populated by inexplicable and frightening life forms. Then things get weirder.
Good standalone scifi with a long section of survival horror. This makes an interesting companion to Alien Clay, another recent book of his. Both are about humans who are powerless within an oppressive and unfair human system, and how they encounter terrifying alien life, and how those aliens embody another way of being sentient in a radical departure from the human way, and what that illuminates. The two books come at that story from very different angles, but to interesting effect alone and together.
Content notes: Death, corporate dehumanization, the existential horror of alien consciousness
Lynn | Settiai (settiai) wrote2025-04-18 11:54 am
settiai) wrote2025-04-18 11:54 am
Entry tags:
Long(ish) Weekend
Since a number of staff at Unnamed Nonprofit are either Christian or Jewish, they've announced that they're closing the office at lunchtime today. Which, you know, as someone who isn't celebrating a holiday at the moment? That's still a nice little treat for me.
I finished my fourth Dragon Age: The Veilguard playthrough last night, so I think that I'm going to pick back up with my fifth one (which is in Act 2 right now) for a bit and then maybe switch to Baldur's Gate 3. D&D is cancelled again tonight because it's the DM's spouse's birthday, so I can properly settle in to play for hours which is something I haven't had the time to do in ages.
I finished my fourth Dragon Age: The Veilguard playthrough last night, so I think that I'm going to pick back up with my fifth one (which is in Act 2 right now) for a bit and then maybe switch to Baldur's Gate 3. D&D is cancelled again tonight because it's the DM's spouse's birthday, so I can properly settle in to play for hours which is something I haven't had the time to do in ages.
Cara Marie (caramarie) wrote2025-04-18 08:07 pm
caramarie) wrote2025-04-18 08:07 pmEntry tags:
Two Korean films with serial killers
Midnight (2021)
Thriller about a young Deaf woman who becomes the target of a serial killer.The film plays a lot with perceptions – Kyung-mi who seems sweet and obliging, but happily insults her company’s clients in sign language knowing they can’t understand her. Do-shik the serial killer being a presentable young man and thus assumed to be a reliable witness – more so than Kyung-mi and her mother, in dealing with the cops.
( Read more... )
I Saw the Devil (2010)
I guess this technically is also a thriller! I feel like it’s more honest to just call it torture porn, though. Well made torture porn, sure, but it is what it is.Here we also have a serial killer targeting young women, but our protagonist is not one of the targets, but the fiancé of one of the murdered women. He does in fact cry a single tear when her body is discovered. And them decides to get revenge.
( Read more... )
Lynn | Settiai (settiai) wrote2025-04-16 10:50 am
settiai) wrote2025-04-16 10:50 am
Entry tags:
Dragon Age: The Veilguard - Banter
I found a perfect place to do some banter farming in Dragon Age: The Veilguard, so I settled in to max out all of the possible conversations between various pairs of characters off-and-on over the past almost-a-week before starting endgame in my most recent playthrough.
There was so much dialogue that I've never encountered before. Even with characters who I've frequently had together in my party in previous playthroughs, I was getting to conversations that I never heard in previous ones. There's just so much potential banter that's never played for me because I didn't have two specific characters in the party together for long enough, and it was lovely to hear it all. And I'm sure there's still more banter that I've missed that's only available earlier in the game.
( Nothing really spoilery, but under the cut to be safe. )
It definitely makes some of the potential choices in the game even more bittersweet, hearing just how close some of the team members are to each other based on their conversations and teasing of each other.
There was so much dialogue that I've never encountered before. Even with characters who I've frequently had together in my party in previous playthroughs, I was getting to conversations that I never heard in previous ones. There's just so much potential banter that's never played for me because I didn't have two specific characters in the party together for long enough, and it was lovely to hear it all. And I'm sure there's still more banter that I've missed that's only available earlier in the game.
( Nothing really spoilery, but under the cut to be safe. )
It definitely makes some of the potential choices in the game even more bittersweet, hearing just how close some of the team members are to each other based on their conversations and teasing of each other.