Fine, Great

patch notes

• /status page is now HTML for better responsiveness
• site-wise, that’s basically it.
• like stuff has been happening ~behind-the-scenes~ but I think for my own sanity I am not even going to so much as tease at it, and it gets published when it gets published
• to je sve!

aimless prattling

jesus fucking christ, we’re nearing the end of the year again. lately I’ve been on a pokémon kick again, for no particular reason except that new mobile game go brr and its release roughly coincided with my relatively spontaneous involvement in a draft league.* Not coincidentally, my brain has been wanting something new to chew on—new-ish, I guess, as this ain’t my first pocket monster rodeo.

*For the record, I made it just past the group stage; won some battles I thought for sure I’d get curbstomped by, completely bombed others, and learned a ton both ways. It was fun! Personal highlights include flying honse (Tera Flying’d on a team which lacked Flying resists) and landing Toxic on a Tera Electric Shedinja. In the end I got eaten alive by a fish. Overall, A+ experience, would jump into the competitive battling deep end again.

Tangentially-related: I recently realized You’re gonna be the death of me is my first storytelling Project™ wholly separate from some kind of source media—as in, it’s not fanfic that, over several iterations of “what if XYZ thing completely removed from the source material happened?”, dropped custody of the serial numbers in the divorce. Also unlike other Projects™, it never really trailed off into the ether because I lost interest; I just went batshit on a Halloween special, started playing Omori shortly after that was finished, and the rest is history. (The last few blog posts discuss this whole shebang in more detail.)

Ygbtdm is an actual finished story, is what I’m getting at. The amount of “wait what’s supposed to happen here again” narrative fuzz in later chapters (a recurring backend Thing with my stories, as I like setting stuff up without necessarily knowing where it’s going) is fairly small and comes down to scene-specific detail & arrangement, instead of giant swaths of ????plot.

For all intents and purposes, picking that up again would be a cool and neat thing to do. But there’s also an Omorigame fanfic that I was like… -counts on fingers- 3/4ths?ish?? of the way through, and I know I can finish that, too. And also, in the process of revisiting one of my oldest thigns recently, over the past month I’ve been entertaining ideas of how to recreate that from the ground up, too.

My brain feels best when it’s given some sort of story to latch onto, whether my own or an existing media property, and it chews. Viciously. Currently it is in some sort of fuzzy limbo where it has all the options and yet, for lack of tether, none at all.

Conclusion: inconclusive. Only time can tell.

but until then.

Right, I think I started that section intending to do a more complete reflection of the year. Thing is, I can’t say there’s a ton there; there’s only so much I want about my offline life online, which means my candidates for review are… whatever I’ve been posting. But my digital output this year has been, uhh.

[hold music noise]
alternatively written: [In the amorphous space in which this blog post and its contents exist, a realm which has been spontaneously generated for the purposes of narrative humor, you begin to hear a generically-pleasant tune. It’s nothing you’ll remember after this interaction ends—as if it was, in fact, designed to be inoffensive for its duration, and then forgotten.

[Ah. Hold music. A generational classic.]

I digress.

---

I don’t know how to articulate my thoughts about the incredibly niche coelecanth that is roleplay on Dreamwidth dot org. In fact, the brackets above started to turn into a forced metaphor about the thing,* but it was only ever supposed to be a formatting demonstration, and the horse is best left unbeaten from there.

Anyway. It’s a digital space which exists, and which I technically still exist within; small menial tasks which actually help other people, let’s gooo! But I’ve had a good run on the RP end, and creative brain is itching to latch onto something else, so hopefully I’ll be back to drawing and webpage-coding and such and whatnot in 2025.

TL;DR i haven’t posted shit this year ✌️

things I don’t know where else to fit

1.

When I Win The World Ends is a fantastic fucking story. I haven’t actually finished it yet, but for whatever it’s worth, it’s been years since I read a longform fic in full (as opposed to like, getting really into a chapter or two, putting it down, and then never getting around to the rest), and I am voluntarily spacing out my chapter-reading of this one because I’m loving the ride and don’t want it to be over in a quickfire binge.
 “Okay, but what is it about??” → Having last finished Chapter 10 of 24, some bullet-point highlights:

• Pokémon battles (it is a fanfic), Smogon-style, written in a way that the turn-based strategy works in-universe—and makes sense to a reader with only passing competitive know-how (me, hi, hello). This might make you think the pace is slow and exposition-dump-heavy. You would be wrong! The tension is visceral.
• Seriously, I do not feel like I’m reading a fanfic. The prose quality is frankly enviable.
• “When I win, the world ends” says high-level tournament player who may or may not be an actual psychic. Said player is a chipper nihilist valley girl who plays using her dad’s spreadsheets (an affront to the sport, according to some in-universe commentators) and her own cold reads of the opposing trainer (a deeply unsettling experience, to those across the stands).
• We open with one of the more perturbed competitors, an abrasive hermit who can’t stand the glitz and glam of highly-public tournament life, yet inevitably manages to meet and clash and—gasp—converse with aforementioned valley girl anyway. The narrative viewpoint hops between the two of them, among other characters, and every single soul in this world-renowned setting is their own special brand of neurotic. This is a selling point to me personally.
• From a literary standpoint, it is just good. Do you enjoy stories where the curtains are not “just” blue? You will enjoy this writing. Every image is deliberate as it is evocative, from the peak where the mountain meets the moon to the streets where the lights are a little too far apart. Also, when you least expect it, it’s funny.
• There’s a cult!

Here’s the official description:

Once a year, the world’s best trainers compete for the title of World Champion. Toril, the favorite, has dedicated her life to battling. Aracely, the underdog, has not. In fact, she barely knows the rules. She didn’t even build her own team. She’s a mockery of the sacred bond between trainers and Pokémon, one Toril swears to eliminate.

But Aracely makes plays that shouldn’t be possible. She reads opponents as though reading their minds, predicts exactly what they’ll do. And now, she’s made another prediction, one far more unsettling: “When I win, the world ends.”

This story covers a tournament arc, features Smogon-style competitive Pokémon battles with real mechanics from the games, and includes both original and canon characters.

PDF and various platforms available on the author’s website. I’ve been reading on RoyalRoad; it can also be found on Ao3.

2.

RoyalRoad is a website that exists! So does SpaceBattles. I have barely touched them, but it’s like, oh yeah, fanfic exists on corners of the internet wholly removed from Ao3 and co. You’d think a stint on a semi-niche anime girl subreddit would’ve taught me that several years ago, but it’s cool to see there are more established places.

[guy who lives under a rock voice] Isn’t it cool and fascinating that people have lives and interests all over the place everywhere? Diversifying one’s social stream is good for the soul.

3.

Elsewhere on the internet, check out this neat hex-plant game. You, too, can make like a wayward slime mold trying to plot the most efficient way through the dark. Or just admire the pretty colors and watch numbers go up. Or—it’s open-ended. It’s fun. It somehow exists entirely in JavaScript on an HTML canvas. Mobile games wish they were on this level.

Something I picked up from a friend through RP is the use of text formatting to convey meaning. Which isn’t new to me, exactly; I’ve experimented with it here and there before. Speech bubbles, comics, integration of text and image in thereof and elsewhere—all continually relevant and recurring thoughts for me.

What interested me about this particular technique

is its disjointedness,

the way it forces your eyes to dart from one end

to the other

and back again,

occasionally with a respite,
but not much.

Now that I’ve typed it out on a thinner canvas, I’m certain I’ve seen similar in poetry before; still new to me, especially in prose, and especially for conveying internal narrative. The writer uses it to convey a character’s frayed and frenzied thoughts, to a remarkably poignant degree.

Or, in less pretentious terms, it fucking slaps.

And throw in color, and all bets are off.

Who needs speech bubbles, I wonder, when the decorative qualities of text are right there? It falters on screenreaders, which is as ever its own concern, but even there I believe there’s

a pause

with each new paragraph, and that’s got to count for something. Translation from the visual to the audial (well, translation in general, really) always necessitates some compromise.