It is the distant promise

I got a notification from a five year old Discord server,
which said—“Two vast, contextless infodumps
continue in their channels. Near them, in #nsfw-selfies,
half buried a sultry lewd resides, whose smile,
and wink, and glower of hot command
tell that its taker well our passions read
which yet survive, in 🔥 and 🥵 reacts,
a year of flirts, mere months of happy dating.
And in #meetups, from three years ago, these words appear:
"Yeah, we should definitely do that again, now that Covid's dying down!
I miss you all so much!"

Evidently I have some feelings about "queer community", I dunno.

I finally watched it this past weekend, and it was a pretty good time! Now I want to talk to people about it, and part of me is still imagining that I'm living in 2000-or-so where every other nerd I met read at least seven of these books before boredomquitting.

( No real spoilers, just vibes )

But yeah, on another topic, if you're wondering why you haven't seen me much around here, it turns out writing long-form isn't one of my strengths, especially when more than one person might read it? Seriously, it's a struggle not to give every post the overthinking I'd give to an academic paper.

I'm not gone, though! Just quiet.

Nona the Ninth is coming out in less than a week, and I have these sorta-dueling fan theories in my brain that I feel like I just need write down for posterity.

( Spoilers for Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth )

The problem, though, is that I can't see how these fit together! But, damn, if I have guessed correctly about both of them (and who knows what the odds of that are; it's not like this has been a series with an easy-to-guess trajectory), I'm real curious about how Tamsyn Muir is going to thread that needle.

EDIT: I love how I was super wrong about both of these! Well done, self, keep it up as we wait for Alecto.

An inconsequential thing that's taking up too much of my brain right now: Xenoblade Chronicles 3 came out, and I see a bunch of people talking about it, and I'm so pointlessly torn.

I've never played a Xenoblade, but I have played Xenogears and all three Xenosagas-- during emotionally sensitive periods of my life, no less. I have some dang pathways carved into my brain for these long, overwrought games, and I can't look at those screencaps and see those videos and read those tantalizing setting details and feel nothing.

But I'm older now, and I have a busy life, and if I'm going to try to make room for a 100+ hour JRPG in it, I feel like it should be a step above yet another extremely heterosexual story about how actually the world is being run by these bizarro secret organizations, but also the angry people out to overthrow these secret organizations must be stopped, and anyway after being jerked around for ~80% of the game you'll finally be able to beat up the right people in a way that represents Love and also Humans Finding The Future For Themselves.

Not that I know for certain that Xenoblade 3 is that thing. But, you know. I am not bereft of pattern-matching ability. And I've seen reviews complain of clumsy, unsubtle writing and also that thing where you defeat the boss and then the cutscene shows the boss defeating you; I can tell when the golden apple has not fallen far from the tree of mythical significance.

Honestly I was entirely ready to pass on this one, and then I learned that ( mild premise spoilers, I think? ) And, dammit, that is entirely my jam! *sighs*

I'm not getting pulled in quite that easily, though. I have plenty of shorter, probably better games to play first. And I think it'll take at least two non-collaborating enthusiastic friends' reviews to make a sucker out of me this time.

And of course I know it'll never be as good as Xenogenesis.

So some Twitter discussion made me finally find the words for a Problem I have with FFVII's place in our culture-- the fandom, the sequels/spinoffs, etc., not the game itself. I might have complained about this to some of you before, in worse words, but I don't think I've done so here?

This will of course spoil the hell out of the game, which... I can see the temptation to declare that this doesn't matter for a game that old, but I also like introducing people to old games, so maybe it does? ( Use your own judgment when deciding whether you care. )

Yesterday a friend of mine posted this really excellent analysis of a pernicious myth about trans people: specifically, the idea that trans men are be especially masculine and trans women are especially feminine. The short version is that it comes from decades of dealing with terrible doctors. This isn't quite news to me, but it's the first time I've seen all this information in one place. (There's a video at the top of the article which is pretty much identical in content, so read or watch as is your preference.)

I remember seeing no reason to question this myth way back in the late 90s, when I learned that being trans is a thing-- some of you were there then, and you might remember it as well? Since then I've learned just how much subtle damage said myth causes, so I really want to spread this article around. And yet... that friend of mine posted it to Facebook, and despite Facebook having a really convenient reshare functionality, I still haven't decided whether it's a good idea to actually post it there myself.

I don't have the problem of hordes of conservative family members or old high school friends that a lot of people do with Facebook, but there are still quite a few people (family, super old friends, academic colleagues) whose knowledge about trans people I have no assurances of. And I don't want them skimming this article (or watching half the video), getting quotations from terrible people and/or stories of trans people, er, studying for the test, and taking it as justification for an inability to take trans people seriously that I didn't known they had.

And it's infuriating that I have to do this sort of cost-benefit analysis, you know? As though I'm in any way qualified to weigh the possible outcomes of what I do or don't post on friggin' Facebook! And I realize that Real Activists put tons of effort into tuning their messages for casual consumption by ignorant people all the time-- I'll bet they wouldn't use words like "ignorant", for instance-- so it's hardly like this is a dilemma no one else has ever faced. It's just... a reminder of the gaps between people, I guess.

Today's great idea: an 80s cartoon version of Xenogears, in the style of Transformers, He-Man/She-Ra, Thundercats, and so on.

Every episode would have some number of the wacky cast of Solaris villains hatching a ridiculous scheme to be foiled by our heroes, but not before someone (often Bart or Dan) learns a valuable lesson. No one would ever die, or even attack someone with a lethal weapon, so it would need a lot of plots where someone gets captured. The main story would advance only at the beginning and end of a season, and not by much. Religious references would get awkwardly talked around.

You have to admit that Xenogears is alarmingly well-suited for this genre. And it could work with any of the Episodes! (Though you'd have to invent more characters the further back in time you go.)

That "post the month's best Twitter links to DW/LJ" experiment back in 2011 was clearly a failure, but maybe I can make short link posts more often?

• A friend of tim's is raising money for electrolysis (in part needed for safety reasons). I seem to recall that some of you might have an interest in helping out a trans person in need?


• If you want to engage in some over-the-top, police-mocking criminal antics, this is how you should do it. Seriously, this is one hero/sidekick pair away from being a DS adventure game. There was even a cat!


• Speaking of cats, here is a livestream of some amazing kittens.


• Wednesday's Dinosaur Comic was pretty great.

And on the subject of DS adventure games, I finally started the fourth Professor Layton game. The localization is often hilarious - in a way that makes me think the translators were having a lot of fun - but beneath that and the Scooby-Doo-esque elements of the plot it seems surprisingly dark at times. (Or maybe I'm just inclined to view the Layton games this way after the third one and given my thoughts on academia.) Anyway, so far I'm liking Emmy (though the game could still ruin this), and the puzzles seem on the whole better integrated with the story/exploration parts of the game than they have in the past.

(Maybe this will be the year I finally increase my posting frequency? It is ridiculous how much I overthink what I say here, since by now more people read what I post on basically any other site.)

Friends on LiveJournal: you may have read that there is now an lj-spoiler tag, which is a bit like lj-cut except that it appears everywhere (in comments, in posts whether or not you're on a journal/friends or entry page) and that it's JavaScript based, replacing itself with its contents when clicked. Which could be nice, except it doesn't fail gracefully at all: as noted here, if someone is reading your supposedly protected spoilers with JavaScript turned off, in a comment notification email, or some other way that bypasses JavaScript, not only will they see the spoiler in the clear, but they will get no indication that there was ever a spoiler tag to begin with.

Maybe LJ will fix this, although I'm not holding my breath. In the mean time, if you use this tag, you should probably still indicate somewhere in the text of the post that spoilers are forthcoming, and maybe put the tag as its own paragraph to gives some pre-spoiler space to whoever's getting email notifications. Also, maybe spread the word to your fandom communities, if any of you actually still follow fandom communities on LiveJournal?

(It probably doesn't need to be said, but this is another great example of how Dreamwidth and LiveJournal have very different approaches to new features.)

Maybe you've already heard - or maybe you don't know because, like, no one is telling you - but, in an interview (Japanese only, alas) about the upcoming Frontier Gate, Konami revealed that the Suikoden team has been disbanded for a few years now. Of course, that doesn't absolutely mean there will never be another Suikoden game, but it sure sounds to me like Konami has decided that The Series Has Become Unprofitable, and in any event we should not be holding our breath for a Suikoden VI announcement.

Obviously this makes me sad. But it doesn't make me sad in quite the way - or to the degree - you might expect on the grounds that it's news about a favorite series being likely over without any opportunity for closure. This comment I left elsewhere sums up my feelings pretty well, I think: ( I sure do ramble on about video games. )