A Song in the Trees

Been keeping busy! My boss and I have been grinding away at a paper revision for our big project of the last few years. I spent a week and a half being very frustrated with the code to fine-tune one of our models in response to a reviewer comment... and it made no significant difference in the results in the end. Ah, well, it turns out like that sometimes. Also I learned that even our most technical person barely knows how to Git, so I now feel less bad that I can hardly muddle through anything more complicated than a basic commit.

In March, I went to skating Worlds with my mom and had a blast (at least with the skating - the organization was bad enough that I never want to go back to TD Garden again, and any events run by SKOB are on thin ice), will try to write up my impressions properly at some point. In terms of my personal skating, it turns out that I do need to get new boots AGAIN because I was right about being fit poorly, sigh, and probably at least semi-customs like I kept asking the fitter about. I've been putting off getting the process started because it's a lot of money, and at this point, it's hard not to worry that they are still not going to fit properly. But in better news, I just passed the Canasta Tango dance test and have signed up for my club's spring show. Several other people from my group lessons are going to be there, too, so we can cheer each other on :)

Z and I began house hunting because our lease is up soon and our landlord is putting where we live now up for sale, and we thought it would be nicer to have a place of our own if we could find one (and renting can start to feel like throwing money into a hole). After an intense few weeks of looking, we have found a place. It's close to where we live now! I can probably walk to the local library branch! The view from the front is amazing! We even got it under asking price when a few other places we looked at got bids way above the price and also way out of our budget! ...because we agreed to take on the expensive septic repairs in exchange for paying less. There's always something. We just had the inspection, and while it is a little depressing and nerve-wracking to hear all the things wrong with a house you're trying to buy given how much they cost, our inspector was very nice about explaining a lot of things for us.

During the trip to/from Boston and all the rides to houses (since Z was driving), I made it through a couple of library books. The first was the second book in Jonathon Stroud's latest series, The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne, which I quite enjoyed even though it's been ages since I read the first, and the other was Prairie Fires, an extremely detailed biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's very good if you are the kind of person who wants to read an extremely detailed biography of her, although at a certain point it becomes a biography of her daughter as well, and eventually I started to wish that the author would shut up about her because the hateboner was a lot. I also think that Lane sounds like a horrible person, but around the fifth time you're going after someone for her shitty writing practices or being terrible with money in a biography about her mother, I think you should maybe consider whether the comments need to be there. But there was a lot of information there; I liked the parts that gave greater context to her life, starting before she was born with the Dakota peoples and the families of her parents, and as a writer, I also found the discussion of how various events were treated differently in different manuscripts and drafts to be interesting.

And on the computer, I've gotten as far as Gongaga in FF7R - really lovely area, and I like how the music isn't the stereotypical 'jungle' music - but put that on pause because Oblivion Remaster came out of nowhere for the rest of this year's game budget 😅 Once I figured out the performance issues in the outdoor areas by getting the mod that force-disables the raytracing out there, it runs fine and looks beautiful. The autumnal area between Bruma and Chorrol in particular is gorgeous, especially when it's foggy and the sun is setting. I definitely have some things I would change further (let the women wear pants and men skirts, you cowards) but I appreciate the tweaks to the mini-game UIs and things like the Altmer being more golden-skinned rather than weirdly pink.

Might get one of the mods that evens out the level scaling, but I'm still pretty low-level and haven't felt the need yet. And judging by some of the comments on my Morrowind WIP, I think the release is making people think of the other TES games as well :) Need to keep hacking away at that... I expected that a small fandom wouldn't have a lot of people reading, but there's more enthusiasm for this ship than I had been hoping for! I'm hoping I can stick the landing on it since it's a slowburn fic, and I know those can sometimes get kind of frustrating if the burn stops going anywhere.

I went home for the end of the year. Z came with me for the first few days, but he left the day after Christmas and has been sending many, many pictures and videos of our cat. Our place is undergoing renovations by our landlord, so they've been cuddled up in the basement, and our kitty has many blankets to laze around in.

I've been babysitting some Very Important Code for work, but other than that, I took off all this week, and it's been nice to not do much of anything harder than cleaning up after dinner. Z had been on a big organizing binge before we had to move half our furniture for the renovations, so he also had a good break. We enjoyed a relaxing Christmas especially - my favorite moment was when Z opened the last card, which said something like 'Oh my! This gift wouldn't fit under the tree! A special delivery is incoming' and then I wheeled the box in on my parents' handcart because the box was a little too bulky to keep in the room. The look on his face was amazing :D Z also did a great job of picking out the Christmas mead for my mom, which we've been having at dinner.

On our drive down, I read most of a novella I had an ARC for (it was good) and I've also gotten through Captive Prince, which was a breezy read and certainly iddy in a lot of ways. My holds for the next two just came in this morning, so I'm looking forward to reading more of the story. I did wish it had been give a better edit to excise the repetition and the telling us that this is a deadly decadent court with schemey schemers, and maybe rework the action scenes, as I found them hard to follow. Still need to finish Frankenstein as well.

Overall, while I haven't read quite as many books this year - part of it was everything that happened over the summer, and part of it is that I'm spending more reading time in Japanese, where I'm much slower - I did a better at picking books that I really enjoyed this year compared to last year.

Z and I brought our Switch with us, and I've picked up Fire Emblem: Three Hopes again and am working on the Golden Wildfire route. Just needed a bit to remember all the game mechanics and controls! My dad likes watching me play it and seeing the very OTT battle scenes. And I've posted the first chapter of my Morrowind WIP; it's a little nerve-wracking to finally start posting it after keeping it to myself for so long, but I'm also glad to have part of it out there for people to read.

This weekend was somewhat more exciting than the last - Z and I got our fall vaccines (and joint aches to go with it, blegh), and I went to a community CPR class and bruised my hand practicing on the dummy. I didn't realize just how hard you need to shove! Definitely left an impression on me in case I need to attempt it on a real person one day. Also went to the OTW board meeting, which I'm not sure was worth it. Should I bother re-re-submitting the now kind of outdated question I put through their contact us form over a year ago, which was a question the previous board had already completely dodged answering when I asked it in a board meeting, especially when based on last night, they seem likely to tell me to send it to a committee instead? 🫠

I've been replaying Morrowind a lot lately, to the point where I'm half thinking of making a sideblog for it to reblog fanart and post all the 'look at the pretty sky and layered mountains!' screenshots I'm taking. It is both quite charming and also sometimes very much programmed and written in 2002. Still working on my mod configuration for combat that is actually fun more of the time, but there are some pretty good quest mods that I've enjoyed!

I was a little surprised at how much headspace it took over once I started playing in earnest - see how I suddenly wrote ten fics for it this summer - and we'll see if that lasts. Some of it is nostalgia, since Morrowind was my first Elder Scrolls back in the day, though I also loved Oblivion and Skyrim when they came out (which makes the fandom a bit annoying! I rapidly learned that clicking on a reddit thread has, like, a 30% chance that someone will start sneering about how DUMBED DOWN Skyrim is even if nobody mentioned the game) and would like to try playing Daggerfall Unity sometime. Of course, I have appreciation for different parts of the game now than I was a kid, and I think the fandom itself has also changed, because I read so much Morrowind fic on ff.net back in the day and certainly didn't see much picking up of the subtext around Dagoth Ur and Nerevar/the Nerevarine.

The amount of lore is fun, but I've found it also makes fic-writing a bit slow-going - it reminds me of when I was first getting YOI and would always end up with like 15 tabs of So You Want to Watch Figure Skating because I didn't know anything. But now it's 15 tabs of UESP articles and also their sources, since it is a good fan wiki but still a fan wiki. Like sometimes you see a line about how, say, Dunmer are accepting of polygamy, and the source is an esoteric in-universe religious document about how a god supposedly married three people together to found a religious warrior faction, which may or may not say anything about whether it was generally accepted and just not portrayed because of when the game came out.

I've been experimenting with a new personal wiki program to try and keep track of the things I need to keep looking up and stuff like that for longer fic. If it goes well, I think I'll switch my original works worldbuilding over to it, since the program I was using hasn't been updated in a long time and isn't the smoothest for editing. I'm also experimenting with trying to make the LanguageTool offline version more useful, because I would like a grammar checker that isn't relying on 'AI', which seems to be most of the other options. Adding an English ngrams package is supposed to help, but I haven't tried running it on much yet.

The other day, I had a dream that Z and I had adopted an adorable little calico kitten still small enough to fit into your hand. Coincidentally, a few days later we heard that a couple of our friends had adopted a kitten, although you need two hands to hold her. She is also very adorable. We may not have a new kitty, but we are teaching ours to jump through a hula hoop just because. He is not a smart cat, but if he's energetic enough, he'll hop through now! Except when he forgets the idea and tries to go around or bunt the hoop instead. (If he's not energetic enough, he'll high-step through it in a hilariously awkward way.)

I've been reading A City on Mars, which is a book about how going to live in space in large numbers is something we are very much unprepared to do right now on a number of axes and would probably suck in some big ways, and it's very interesting but also makes me want to play Starfield again. So far I haven't opened it back up again, but I have been playing other games.

A couple weekends ago, I had the idea to look up 'Katamari' on the Switch store, because I never had the chance to play the original, and downloaded the demo. I kid you not, it was the fastest I'd ever gone from excitement -> oh wow, this is actively not fun and I want to stop. I didn't even make it through the tutorial because the controls and camera were that incredibly jank. I don't care if the point of the game is to spend hours learning how to control it; I uninstalled it, then bought Untitled Goose Game instead and had a much better time. The ending sequence in particular was a ton of fun, and I never got tired of honking, lol.

I also recently played Chants of Sennaar, a language-themed game inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel. I was initially disappointed when it quickly became clear that it was not as similar to Heaven's Vault as I thought it would be, but once I accepted that it was less a learn-the-language game and more of a puzzle game with language as the theme, I enjoyed it a lot more. Overall, I had a great time - it kept me up too late a couple of nights in a row, and it has a beautiful art style with great use of color and varying perspective that (with one exception for me) managed to never be confusing. And for a puzzle game, it was generally pretty good at keeping the puzzles reasonable and giving the player context to help figure them out; there are stealth sections, which some people didn't seem to like, but those were also puzzles, and I didn't have much issue with them.

( Spoilery discussion )

I'll do my end-of-year writing meme in another post, but overall life things:

• I started my new job :)


• I had to wrestle with insurance for months on end :(


• I moved, which is now :) but was pretty :( through the process


• I got my arm fixed and another medical thing taken care of :)


• I went to Skate America :)

Overall, it was a good year for me. I do wish I had done more Japanese and more original writing, and I really wish I had been able to get back to skating earlier. Goals for this year, I guess.

A bit about the books I read:
I had a 50/50 ratio of nonfiction to fiction and also a perfect split in male vs female authors. My average rating on GR was noticeably down this year, which tracks with how I felt about the book-books I finished. Unfortunately, I think that was mostly due to the fiction books, as many of them ended up disappointing me. I found The Luzhin Defense boring after Luzhin grows up, I hated Wings by Julie Gonzalez so much for becoming a very obvious (even to me) Christian metaphor about how you just need to belieeeeve with a lazy ending that I am trying to figure out what to do with the book since I can't throw hardcovers in the recycling, and I was sad to be disappointed in Milky Way Railroad. Part of it may have been the translation, and I felt like I might have enjoyed it more if I had encountered it in a literature class, but as it was, it felt like either I was missing some important context or that it was a children's nonsense story but not as fun as Alice in Wonderland, and I definitely felt its being incomplete. I liked the imagery, but that was it.

My favorite book of the year was The Facemaker by Lindsey Fitzharris, though I also enormously enjoyed Dying Words by Nicholas Evans despite it being a little confused about its audience. My favorite fiction was The Changelings/Torikaebaya Monogatari, which I was glad to be able to obtain through ILL, and Despoilers of the Golden Empire, a scifi short story that's probably more fun if, like me, you know the twist before you begin. I also still have a lot of thoughts I need to get down about John Curry's biography.

Some of the games I played for the first time last year:
A bunch of itch.io games, either free or from the Ukraine bundle, many of which I enjoyed in the moment but most of which were not very memorable. The exception was Fit For a King, a game where you are a monarch who needs to find enough money to outspend your rival at a party, even if you have to go peering through every hidden passage and digging up graves to find it. Or have more fun talking to every person in the kingdom and changing the laws so you can marry everyone or everything. I think I spent an entire afternoon on it, and I had a blast.

Bury Me My Love was memorable for being a game that I enjoyed for its charming art and good writing before I found out it has an intentionally awful design choice that the devs claim is necessary because it is a Very Serious Game. That is, it has a bunch of endings it wants you to see, but as soon as you reach one, which I did about an hour in, you have to restart from the beginning with no way to speed up or skip text. While I would usually give a serious game some leeway on mechanics, 'you can't skip any text or rewind from an ending like in every other visual novel because Real Migrants don't get second chances :) but also we have twenty endings for you to experience! :)' just undermines the aim of their game.

Strange Horticulture was a game that should have been my jam, and I did enjoy playing it. But the gameplay mechanics and writing both fell a bit short for me. I loved the plant descriptions and the approach to quests, but I did not love having to manually label every plant as I discovered what it was. The map was so large that it was difficult to find things on it and yet ended up being mostly empty. None of the recurring characters were given enough depth to make them interesting to me; I think a smaller cast might have served it better. It's still a good game, just not one I'd rec enthusiastically.

The Red Strings Club was a cool, short cyberpunk game with lovely pixel art and an interesting mix of minigames, which I had previously played as they were also released separately. As you craft different cyborg implants to improve people's lives or try to extract information from people by mixing them drinks to activate different emotions, the game also asks you to ponder philosophical questions about human happiness, freedom, and technology. Would society be better if we went beyond antidepressants to something that meant we never felt pain or sadness? Should we use mind-control technology to stop rapes? Suicides? Racism? And even if so, is a giant megacorp the one to trust with that technology? Well, it's a cyperpunk game, so certainly not. (There is one instance of a trans person being deadnamed that I raised an eyebrow at, but I would note that one of the devs is trans and their inclusion of that moment was very deliberate.) I would recommend this, or any of Deconstructeam's free short games on itch.io as well.

Who's Lila is a game I looked at because it has a distinct 1-bit art style (like Obra Dinn) and picked up because it also has a unique gameplay mechanic: the main character struggles to express emotions, and when you converse with others, you have to manually manipulate his face into different expressions to control how he replies. It starts off seeming like a murder mystery, but it quickly goes off those rails into something much stranger. I managed to get by far one of the most confusing endings on my first go-through by missing a door in the art, but I kept going. I liked the themes about identity, although I'm not a fan of tarot motifs and that's also heavily featured. It's a game that made me want to hunt down every ending to figure out what was going on but resisted one final interpretation. I do think that it was too repetitive in parts (three endings are essentially the same except you take one action differently), although save-scumming helps a bit there. If you use saves well and are a fast reader, it's a shorter game than advertised - I did everything in under five hours - but those five hours stuck with me.

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist was hands-down my game of the year. While I do have some issues with the writing (should probably give that its own post sometime), it has gorgeous art, fun worldbuilding with its alien ecology, nails the 'just one more month' routine of raising sims, has the best gender system a game can have, and doesn't shy away from throwing some complexities into its utopian solarpunk world. I've played it at least four full times and gotten all the major endings. Most of the other child characters have very good development as they grow up, and the best of the romance scenes are amazing and drew me back to reread them multiple times. I also appreciate how easy it is to save scum, haha.

My Child Lebensborn was a game I played almost entirely on the last day of the year. It's another Serious Game, but unlike the above example, it uses its raising sim mechanics to complement the main theme of the game very well. You're the poor but happy adoptive parent of a child in 1950s Norway - a child who is half-German and born during the occupation, and nobody in town is happy about having a child of the enemy around. They go through some absolutely horrible experiences, and even if you're the best parent you can be, you can't stop it all from happening, because the abusers in town have locked onto a target that's entirely socially acceptable. The writing is very sensitive to the child and parent, and even those in town (who are themselves dealing with the trauma of WWII and taking it out in the worst way), and hits the emotional beats excellently, along with using interaction as a way to create emotional involvement in the player. I see the developers have a sequel in the works that's less about the historical backdrop of the Lebensborn children in Norway and more about helping the child cope with and heal from their experiences, and I'll definitely keep an eye out for it.

A pretty blue scarf appeared on the ground outside my apartment, and after it had been a day or two and nobody had come to reclaim it, I took it inside and threw it in my washing machine. Unfortunately, the fabric turned out to have a lot of small runs in it, and what I thought at first was dirt turned out to be weird brown shading. Thought I could maybe save the less brown flowers on it for applique or something, but it also smelled strangely like oil even after going through the machine twice, so alas. I tried.

Been playing some Harvest Moon Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns lately - I picked it up a while ago and then forgot about it - and I think it might be my favorite farming sim ever already. I like the mechanics, usual boring fishing aside, the character events have almost all been really fun so far, and I enjoy having multiple festivals and multiple towns with different themes. The two things that have impressed me the most so far are:
1) You have a family!!! Not just a blank-slate 'your dead grandpa owned a farm' backstory family, but one with personality and presence. They write you letters, and you can write letters to them. Your mom and sister even come to stay over once in a while!
2) As you gain reputation with the towns, you end up making actual changes to the infrastructure, and the characters' dialogue changes to recognize it. It really makes the world feel less static and like you're more of a part of the community, even if you character has only been there a few months, haha.
You can also have a pet capybara :D All the game needs is gay marriage and less Wayne.

I finished a YOI AMV that has been sitting on my brain for a couple of years. Probably devoted too much time to it this week, but it was a lot of fun to make, and I am quite happy with how it ended up. Editing it also had me ruminating a lot on what Victor might have been going through pre-canon and what parts of that could continue even after his romance with Yuuri, which is pretty relevant to the fic I'm writing.

(And editing in the younger Victor clips also made me think of how parts of FS fandom are weirdly - not necessarily that kind of weirdly - into kids who aren't even old enough for juniors and the way that coaches and parents can now push very young kids on social media in a way that just couldn't happen twenty years ago. I'm not against posting the occasional video, but there's a difference between celebrating your child and trying to build a brand off of them. And it's almost always jumps that get the real attention; people will repost a video of a nine-year-old girl trying ultra-hard jumps all over the place, which comes with its own issues, but how often do you see 'wow, look at the skating skills on this kid'? Sasha Trusova's parents started selling her biography when she was what, 15, 16? When she still hasn't won any championships yet? TBH, sometimes I even feel a little concerned about the junior GP videos when the participants are on the younger side; 13 still seems young for having thousands of strangers on the internet critiquing and stanning you.)

Speaking of figure skating! I watched some of the Lombardia Trophy this weekend when the stream stopped going out every thirty seconds, and while I am sad for Ivett Toth (I wonder if she's still struggling with post-Covid issues?), Katya Kurakova is looking good! There were some other interesting programs and music choices, too. The only thing I've watched out of Russian test skates was Misha's SP (okay considering they just switched it, but I wish Mishin had let him keep the Nutcracker program) and T/M's SP, which I saw praise for beforehand that I don't understand after watching it. Half the choreo is basic 'turn around and wave your arm on the ding', the other half is stolen from someone else, they at least took out the WE music so it's not a total Recycled Janny Music show but the music cut is both terribly done and terribly placed, and I guess the Pygmalion theme matches their emoting abilities but seemed kind of sexist. It made me feel like it was trying to be S/M's magical Olympic FS. I also saw Kanadai's new performances, and wow, I don't know much about ice dance, but they improved a lot from last year's Nationals. Really hoping they keep the matching ponytails/buns, too, because it's adorable *_*

Did another post about figure skaters for Pride Month this year. I think I came close to crying three or four times while writing it (because of the AIDS-related deaths). Have half a mind to get a Wikipedia account so I can add to some of their pages, as some were quite thin and they're not in any of the LGBT sportspeople (etc) categories.

Not much news of when I'll be able to get back to the rink myself except 'August, maybe, assuming that reopening doesn't fuck everything up and shut everything down again' (I confess to not having much hope on that one).

While I was waiting on my advisor to get back to me about something, I started playing through the itch.io BLM bundle I got. So far, it's been 50/50 'enjoy'/'why am I playing this', which isn't bad considering the huge number of games in there! And I see my advisor has now found enough time between meetings to read my thing and respond, so I should maybe get some work done before playing more.