all the pandas were wearing sombreros
Apr. 29th, 2026 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proustbotCirca 2020, I played The Temple of No, a piss-take Twine game by Stanley co-creator William Pugh, and at that time, I found it unpleasantly meanspirited about the mid-2010s indie video-game scene. (In retrospect, I can probably be a little more charitable to the game, since maybe it was harder to see at the time that the mid-2010s indie video-game scene was not going to survive Gamergate Shit. Maybe, in the context of that 2016 release, being mean about the conventions of twee indie Twine games was a little less like kicking a defenseless puppy. Couldn't say, since I only stumbled across the smoking wreckage of that world several years later.)
This is a long way of saying that when The Stanley Parable first booted up, I felt a very familiar sense of irritation at the game's tone of smug superiority. I've been here before, and I did not like it then either. The premise of the game is that the unseen narrator tells you what to do, and if you don't do it, the narrator scrambles to narrate your increasingly unconventional actions. The game becomes a one-sided dialogue: the narrator-god cajoles you and berates you and begs you, and you-the-player seek to thwart or surprise the narrator-god by "breaking" standard video-game rules as you run through bland office hallways. You stand unmoving in a broom closet, and the narrator bewails the fact that you're not playing the game in the "right" way, and haha, isn't it funny. It is, in short, the kind of hacky metatextual humor that seems brilliant when you watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the first time as a kid but which has diminishing returns thereafter.
However, as you accumulate endings and false starts, the game gets better. It becomes clear that the narrator is just as trapped as Stanley, despite his seeming omnipotence. A couple of the endings allow a third character to enter the story -- which, in the context of the game's empty and claustrophobic environment, feels genuinely shocking when it happens. After an hour of The Stanley Parable, I was bored; after two hours, I was newly invested in testing the limits of what I could do in the game. Going through the "museum" ending to read about the development process made me appreciate that the game was maybe somewhat more thoughtful than I had originally believed.
After three hours, I stopped playing and uninstalled the game. In conclusion: hmmm! Not my fave, but I see the vision. I played the original vanilla release, but I'd be interested in eventually playing 2022's "ultra deluxe" edition, which apparently offers a little more progression structure to the game. But I'm in no hurry, so I'll give it some time. Five years sounds about right.
(However, now I'm reading reviews for The Temple of No, and apparently I was exquisitely correct when I thought it sucked. Always nice to be vindicated on a Hater Take!)
No One Is Allowed To Ask What Inspired Me To Make This Entry.
Apr. 29th, 2026 06:42 pmrionaleonhartHere are my thoughts on the masturbation habits of the characters of The Goes Wrong Show.
( Surprisingly few of these characters actually masturbate. )
I briefly considered posting this under access lock, but I've decided to make it a public entry because my housemates have a right to see it and laugh at me.
Clean Install
Apr. 29th, 2026 10:59 amkradeelavI thought it'd be fun to make a transparent list of tweaks, programs, and bookmarks that i'm importing over. one or two might be redacted but this is pretty reflective of my daily tool setup other than gaming which is relegated to the steam deck. :) Items in blue are mission-critical to my workflow.
( Read more... )
In which there are fact, fiction, and downright forgery
Apr. 29th, 2026 02:08 pmspiralsheep- Current reading quotation 2: "Normal is playing dress-up."
- Current reading quotation 3: "Bröstvårta Nipple
I must have been very distracted as a child not to have noticed this. We must, as a people, hold nipples in very low regard in Sweden."
- Books read to end of April 2026, part half of two: 45
37. The Book Forger, by Joseph Hone, 2024, non-fiction, fictionalised biography, history, crime, 4/5
Well-researched and, frankly, fun true crime book in which the main crime is forgery used to defraud rich people, with secondary crimes of stealing from the British Museum (oh, the irony!).
I have two nitpicks:
Firstly, the author has chosen to write-up this material in a style occasionally dramatising incidents according to the conventions of prose fiction (with people's thoughts & descriptions of facial expressions &c), which some readers might reasonably object to as populist entertainment rather than strictly biographical history. I didn't mind in this case as Hone is a good enough history writer to get away with it. He also presents his takes without giving equal weight to other opinions, but he does acknowledge that other interpretations have been made and signposts them for readers - with references.
Secondly, Hone also very much wants to present his two protagonists as heroes detecting the villainous antagonist but this presents a problem because Pollard was not a heroic person. He failed to work at school and college, and was ushered into a scholarship and degree at Oxford through the intervention of his influential father. He betrayed his wife, Kay Beauchamp (a teacher and elected local councillor), and his erstwhile friends and colleagues by spying on them for MI5 and providing regular detailed reports of their activities. The only actual evidence Hone provides to angle Pollard as a hero rather than a selfish scumbag involves Hone pretending that Beauchamp and her communist circles were behaving badly by... publishing a mass circulation national newspaper (oh noes!) and... someone who suggested opposing the violent expansionism of Imperial Japan, exactly like those other well known commies the British Empire and Winston Churchill (lmao).
[/nitpicks]
38. The Last Enchanted Places, by Ian Bradley, 2026, non-fiction travel, 4/5
A guide to 18 European spa towns: 7 in Britain, 4 in Germany, 3 in Czechia, 2 in Austria, and 1 each in Belgium and Switzerland. Descriptions of each town including their history and the current availability of water cures, by drinking or dunking, along with the author's memoirs of his own pilgrimages to the waters. At the end of each section is a list of 6 things to do and relevant novels to read whilst in town.
Bradley, a minister in the Church of Scotland, has a very British sense of humour about his beloved spas:
( Quotations unsuitable for readers of a delicate disposition. )
( Three delightful children's books, offered as an apology for the above quotations. )
Books read, late April
Apr. 29th, 2026 07:33 ammrissaPosting a bit early because I will be on vacation until it's time to do another one of these, and doing a whole month at once is too daunting.
K.J. Charles, Unfit to Print. Quite short mystery and m/m romance, with intense conversations between the characters about what kinds of pornography are and are not exploitative. Not going to be a favorite but interesting at what it's doing.
Agatha Christie, The Unexpected Guest. Kindle. I've read Agatha Christies before, and this sure is one. Absolutely chock full of loathsome people and not particularly great about disability. Jazz hands.
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Kindle. I finished reading this just so I could complain about it accurately. My God what a terrible book. I wonder if I should be skeptical of all "new histories of the world." I suspect so. The thing is that he does such a completely terrible job of actually talking about the Silk Road that this is still largely a book about the British and American empires, but not a detailed accounting of their presence in the region. Partition of India? never met her. Chinese Communist Revolution and Cultural Revolution? how could that possibly matter, probably not worth the time. What. Sir. So many things I would like to know about Central Asia and still do not know, because Frankopan fundamentally does not care. Not at all recommended, I read it so you don't have to.
Alaya Dawn Johnson, Reconstruction: Stories. Kindle. Some really lovely and vividly written stories here. Not all to my taste, but it's rare that a collection is.
Ariel Kaplan, The Kingdom of Almonds. I really just love getting to write "the thrilling conclusion." I really do. Don't start here! This is the third book in its series, it is the thrilling conclusion! Start at the beginning, the beginning is still in print, and this is going to wrap things up nicely but you won't know how nicely if you don't read the whole thing.
E.C.R. Lorac, Death Came Softly and The Case in the Clinic. Kindle. Cromulent and satisfying Golden Age mysteries, with Golden Age assumptions but not as bad as in your average, oh, say...Agatha Christie.
Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: An American Life. Kindle. Well-done bio of a fascinating person, lots of what was going on with the Transcendentalists, early American feminism, loads of people you'll want to know about and then Fuller herself trying to fight her way through a system entirely not set up for people even remotely like her. She's part of how that changed, and she died a horrible death fairly early all things considered, and Marshall handles that reasonably as well.
David Thomas Moore, ed., Not So Stories. Kindle. The real stand-out piece for me in this book was Cassandra Khaw's, which opened the volume. What a banger of a story, and how perfectly she nailed the Kipling-but-modern brief. Worth the entire price of admission. (Okay, this was a library book, so my price of admission was free. Still, though.)
Anthony Price, The Hour of the Donkey, The Old Vengeful, and Gunner Kelly. Rereads. I am finding the middle of this series less compelling on reread than the early part. I don't remember the individual late volumes well enough to say whether it just went off a cliff never to return or whether it will bounce back a bit before the end. One of the problems is that I am just not that keen on his WWII stories (The Hour of the Donkey), and he keeps trying to write women and doing it badly. Anthony, apparently you spend all your time with plain women thinking how plain they are, but it turns out that many of them have other things on their mind, and thank God for that. Sigh.
Una L. Silberrad, Princess Puck. Kindle. What a weird title, it's a nickname that one character gives the protagonist and only he uses. This feels like...it feels like it's got the plot of a Victorian novel but even though Queen Victoria has just died five minutes ago, Silberrad can no longer really take some of the Victorian axioms quite seriously. She is very thoroughly an Edwardian at this point, in all the ways that felt modern and challenging at the time, and as much as I love a good Victorian novel, I'm all for it.
Maggie Smith, Good Bones. Kindle. I always feel odd when the best poems in a volume are the ones that got widespread reprinting, but I think that's the case here. And...good? that many people should have seen the best of what's in this? I guess?
D.E. Stevenson, Spring Magic. Kindle. This is such an interesting reminder that during WWII people were still writing upbeat contemporary novels sometimes. A young woman goes and finds a life by herself, away from the crushing control of her aunt, near a military outpost during World War II, and nearly all the other characters are highly involved with the war. But it doesn't have that fraught feeling that books with that plot would have if the war in question was over. We have to be sure that the proper characters will have a quite nice time, because the target readers are in the same situation and would prefer to think more about introducing small children to hermit crabs, figuring out something useful to do, and resolving romantic difficulties than about, hey, did you know that death is imminent? So. Possibly instructive for the present moment in some moods. Not a hugely important book, which is fine, they don't all have to be.
Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds. Kindle. Dischism is when the author's interiority intrudes on the narrative, and gosh were there several moments when I could see Trollope's own mental state peaking through regarding the titular objects. "She was tired of the Eustace diamonds." "He wished he had never heard of the Eustace diamonds." Shh, it's okay, Anthony, we get it. Because yes, this is not a title tossed off about something that's only peripheral to the story. The Eustace diamonds are absolutely central to the narrative. The thing that's fascinating to me is that the entire plot depends on a sensibility about heirloom and ownership that was as completely foreign to me as if the characters had been going into kemmer and acquiring gender. They are fighting about whether the titular diamonds are properly the property of a toddler or of the mother who has full physical custody of him. And Trollope makes that fight clear! It's just: wow okay what a world and what assumptions.
Darcie Wilde, The Secret of the Lost Pearls. Kindle. This is not the last in this series, but it's the last one I got a chance to read, and honestly I think it's the weakest of the lot. Wilde (Sarah Zettel) still and always has a very readable prose voice, but it felt a bit more scattered to me than the others--so if you're reading this series in order and wonder if it's going downhill, no, it's just that it's quite hard to keep the exact same level for a long series.
One Of These Doesn't Feature Robert At All, And Everyone Is Very Impressed By My Restraint.
Apr. 29th, 2026 11:34 amrionaleonhart( Assorted Goes Wrong ficlets, including crossovers with Final Fantasy VIII and Death Note. )
I had a lot of fun writing these! But apparently I cannot be trusted to stick to the actual details of a fic request.
it is a dire time to be a Blockbuster employee
Apr. 28th, 2026 09:40 pmproustbotWe're going on another movie outing on Thursday.
Project Hail Mary (2026) -- In adapting the book, the movie wisely identifies the best part (Rocky) and gets us there as swiftly as possible. In fact, for most of the runtime, I was wondering if the movie should have completely jettisoned all the bummer flashbacks to Earth (if only because Rocky is absent from them). Then we got to the final grim reveal of how Grace originally boarded the spaceship, and I felt a lot more charitable in retrospect to all the Earth scenes setting up the earlier dominoes.
But Rocky is the best part. They did a great job making a giant faceless rock-crab adorable and lovable.
UPDATE: Just looked up my own description of reading the book back in 2024 and laughed with delight at my own sick burns: On one hand, I find the tone of constant, self-conscious, and near-manic problem-solving to be fairly stupid, since those parts often read like extended word problems for sixth-graders who are bad at science and slow at reading.
[ MSC ] Tellius Roundup
Apr. 28th, 2026 09:31 pmkradeelav posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
fire_emblemIn the rebound of coming back to FE9/10 and making doujinshi, there's a fair number of meta-adjacent goodies I've found or created, listed below.
- Radiant Dawn Extended Script (EN translation) - while hunting around for the untouched FE9 & FE10 JP scripts plus supports (also the FE10 extended JP version), i found this person’s FE10 JP extended script translation (context, mediafire download). readers, you would be shocked at how much more new (con)text there is.
- PoR/RD Upscaled UI - Upscaled user interface images of both games. Created and compiled by the creator at the link. (Contact me via email if the link's broken.)
- Zihark fanshrine - Classic web 1.0 html/css fanshrine for the character; a spiritual successor to the old deviantART club I (also) used to run back in the day. Still maintained;
- Tellius Location Resource - A 54 page Fire Emblem: Tellius resource with a travel time cheat sheet, labeled map routes for both games, and collected backgrounds/CG/map layouts organized by location. For any fanwork needs from one fan to another. Different versions are available to download:
📁 all files (individual jpg & pdfs)
🔗 high res pdf (139 MB)
🔗 low res pdf (20.5 MB)
- tellius.tumblr.com - a lovely, long-running archival blog that has a breathtaking selection of fanworks from both JP (and mostly these days) EN sides of fandom. Has quite a few fanworks that are no longer online.