renegadefolkhero

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This week found me in an Ikea parking lot in South Philly with stars in my eyes as I loaded my car with the good shit 🌿 by which I mean a $300 Valevåg mattress. I managed to give myself something resembling a sports injury from playing Silksong, and it turns out that the healing touch I needed was some decent fucking sleep. I hope everyone who wants a new mattress is blessed with the means to get one, because damn. What a difference.

veryroundbird

we had the baby btw. he's like a year old now? how did that even happen

vriddy

letzan talks about f/f fandoms currently in flux (growing rapidly or post-peak) and asks for f/f recs for them. Have a look at the post to see what they are and if you might have recs to share! Some of the fandoms include The Pitt, Stranger Things, and others.
There was a hiccup around posting/commenting via email on Dreamwidth for about a day at the end of May, see this post on dw_maintenance. If you used email to post around May 31st/June 1st, double-check it went through!
Via charliejane_feed, I enjoyed this rant about escapism. Don't let only the haters write and enjoy the wish fulfilment stories!

anneapocalypse

Fandom: Final Fantasy XIV
Rating: Mature
Archive Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Urianger Augurelt/Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn, Urianger Augurelt & Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn, Ardbert & Urianger Augurelt, Unrealized Ardbert/Urianger Augurelt, Pre-Urianger Augurelt/Warrior of Light
Characters: Urianger Augurelt, Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn, Ardbert Hylfyst, Elidibus, Unukalhai, Tataru Taru, Minfilia Warde, Warrior of Light, Dewlala Dewla, Y'shtola Rhul, Yugiri Mistwalker, Thancred Waters, J'Rhoomale, Blanhaerz, Lamimi, Naillebert, Haneko Burneko
Additional Tags: Grief/Mourning, Angst, Religion, Isolation, Loneliness, Patch 3.4: Soul Surrender Spoilers (Final Fantasy XIV), Elezen Warrior of Light, Female Warrior of Light, Canon-Typical Violence, Guilt, Emotional Repression, Child Neglect, Childhood Memories, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Series: With Lilies and With Laurel
Length: 92,000 words
Chapter: 15/15 COMPLETE!

Summary:

Heartbroken after the loss of his dearest companion, Urianger labors to save two worlds in which he has never felt more alone.

Notes:

If you're new here, please start with Chapter 1!

Final Fantasy XIV is owned by Square Enix. This is a non-commercial work of fanfiction.

( Read on AO3 )

( ...or below! )

lassarina

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

vriddy

Community Thursday challenge: every Thursday, try to make an effort to engage with a community on Dreamwidth, whether that's posting, commenting, promoting, etc.

Over the last week...

Commented on

booknook (reading!)

Commented on

common_nature (trees!)

Commented on

everykindofcraft (journals!)

Commented on

smallweb (guestbooks!)

dorchadas

Congratulations, Laila!

2026-06-02 - Laila's preschool graduation

With two of her teachers, Ms. Flores on the left and Ms. Bel on the right.

It went pretty well, all things considered. There was a cute dance performance to Tchaikovsky's "Waltz of the Flowers" that Laila sadly did not get to participate in--we saw her just sitting in the audience and weren't sure why she wasn't on stage until we remembered that she had a fall risk and wasn't even allowed to climb stairs herself without someone holding her hand until the end of May, so dancing and spinning on stage is definitely something that the school wouldn't have let her do. She did okay watching the performance until the certificate ceremony started and she noticed us in the audience, then she wanted to come sit by us and started crying on stage. Emoji Kawaii heart

But she got her certificate and came over to us after. She had a little school bus toy that the bus driver must have given her in the morning.

For a little bit she was shy with her teachers, but she gave them all hugs before we left. Her teachers asked us if she was going to be at the same school the next year and we sadly had to tell them that she wouldn't, since we don't live in the school zone and we'd have to put her into the lottery and try to get her in. They tried to tell us to ask the principle for a special exception, but it's really nice to be able to walk Laila to school and have school be just a few minutes' walk away. And Laila did have a good time at her old school, but I'm glad she had such a good time at her new school for the short time she was there.

Now to Laila's first summer vacation!

Bonus: Two of Laila's classmates, Malachi Faust and Lottie Cornelius, should team up to fight crime.

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: Tchaikovsky - Waltz of the Flowers

vriddy

Volume 6 is coming out next week with a character profile I'm excited to read, so finally getting back on track for the volume 5 extras :D Not that I wasn't excited about RIRIKA AND HIDAKA'S PROFILES!!!! either but it's been strange times, fandom-wise. This was done a bit more hastily than the previous ones, if you spot any extra weirdness lemme know.

( K-9: NEW ITEM!! )

( Ririka's profile )

( Hidaka's profile )

( 4-koma: Wanted list )

( 4-koma: Pickiness…? )

( 4-koma: Proof )

( 4-koma: Produce! )

( Bonus illustration: New teacher Ren Hizuki's supplementary classes )

Current Mood: accomplished

chuckro

Another handheld by a new developer and direct competition to Anbernic’s XX line. It’s got a 4 inch, 4:3 screen. It’s got an HDMI-out and a standard headphone jack. It’s got a good layout and is very comfortable to hold. (It’s a little hefty, but feels solid.) The build quality is very good and it’s nice to play on. The gimmick is the custom faceplate and d-pad that you can swap out. (It’s unclear if they’re ever going to make any other faceplates, though. And honestly, that’s not much of a gimmick.)

( Read more... )

Overall: If you want to play SNES, Genesis and PS1, it’s a lovely device. It’s comfortable to hold, great frontend, decent battery, nice screen and beautiful emulation. But it doesn’t have a good place in my ecosystem because I have smaller, more pocketable devices that cover the same range of systems (or better) and larger, even more comfortable devices that play higher-end systems.

chuckro

This is an Android-based handheld that’s clearly looking to be a direct competitor to Retroid, as it very closely resembles the Retroid Pockets 4-6. Power-wise it’s somewhere around the Pocket 4, in theory able to play PSP and Gamecube well and handle some light PS2 games.

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Overall: Retroid devices generally give you a very good bang for your buck, with the tradeoff being that you need to spend a lot of time setting then up: Installing emulators, importing roms, fiddling with settings, etc etc. This is even moreso, as it’s one of the strongest systems at the $100 price point (with decent build quality and ergonomics, to boot) but there’s a lot of work involved in getting it to an ideal. I think I’m going to use it mostly to play sideloaded hacked Android games until it dies or I decide to pass it on.

anneapocalypse

It's been so interesting replaying Stormblood because I am remembering how much I actually like Zenos as a character in Stormblood.

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rynling

Birds Watching (on Steam here) is a one-hour walking sim about a man who talks to birds while an apocalyptic disaster unfolds around him.

( Read more... )

Since a leisurely run through the game takes a little less than an hour, I played it twice, and I have no regrets. Though the slightly murky lo-fi graphics caused a bit of trouble during my first playthrough, I appreciated the unique texture of the visual atmosphere more the second time around, when I was able to find significantly more birds to talk with. As something of an added bonus, the alternate reading of the game suggested by a reveal toward the end casts all the conversations in an interesting new light that’s worth a second playthrough to appreciate and enjoy, I think.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

rynling

Promise Mascot Agency (on Steam here) is a retro nostalgia third-person driving sim / visual novel / card deck builder where you play as a yakuza enforcer running a talent agency for sentient mascot characters out of a love hotel in a small rural town, and...

...and you know what, let's just end this post there. This game is like someone took the best parts of the Yakuza series and boiled them down into concentrate, and it has some of the most entertaining writing I've seen in a video game in a good long time. I don't dislike Dispatch, but I also feel like Promise Mascot Agency is what Dispatch wishes it could be. It also has strong Persona 4 vibes, but if Persona 4 had a difficult time during the pandemic and came out completely cracked on the other side. I'm legit surprised by how good this game is.

dorchadas

I mentioned in our recent Laila update that we were trying to teach her to stay in her room in the morning for a bit until an alarm went off, so that she wouldn't come waking us up at 5:30 a.m. The very first day she heard the alarm of Jake from Yoto saying "Wakey wakey! Rise and shine!" we heard her get really quiet in her room and she kept bringing it up during the day. The next few days it was rough, and we ended up having to turn off the alarm because she wasn't in her room at the time when it went off. She was pretty sad about that, but we told her, you have to be in your room at the right time if you want to hear Jake say "Wakey wakey!"

Well, after those first few days of difficulty she took to it without any problems and hasn't been coming in to get us before 6:15 a.m. (the time we set the alarm for--we're planning to gradually creep it forward to 6:30 a.m. and leave it there). It worked so well in fact that today I woke up naturally, went to check my watch, and was surprised to see it was 6:57 a.m.! I immediately got up and ran into Laila's room to see if anything had happened to her but as soon as I opened the door I saw her lying in bed, wrapped in blankets, awake, and she said to me, "Jake said wakey wakey!"

Well, the bus comes at 7:25 a.m. so we had to hurry her out of bed and through her morning routine quickly and get her on the bus, which we did. And I'm feeling well rested thanks to an extra 45 minutes of sleep. But this does mean I can't rely on Laila to be our alarm anymore and will have to start setting my own regardless.

Hoisted by our own petard. Emoji Kawaii frog

Current Mood: rejuvenated
Current Music: Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail - Awakening (Shadow Lord)

catness

In preparation for moving, I unearthed my old mini laptop (Dell Inspiron Mini) I totally forgot about. It got a lot of action back in the good old days, but now, with the discontinued Ubuntu 14.04, it couldn't be let out on the big bad Internet. Sadly, upgrade options are very limited, because it's 32-bit, and only has 1Gb of memory, and some CPU idiosyncrasies, so most of the distros do not even boot.

I found a super-lightweight Debian-based distro AntiX. It settled comfortably on the laptop, with IceWM window manager. It's minimalistic (didn't even support the desktop backgrounds by default, but I found a workaround), but reasonably easy to configure, and the laptop really flies (it was rather sluggish with Ubuntu). I installed Palemoon (a lightweight version of Firefox) and Lucid Emacs (a lightweight version of Emacs). With Lucid Emacs, it was a battle, as it requires a systemd dependency, and AntiX are anti-systemd out of principle. But Gemini assured me this dependency is not actually needed, and showed me how to create a FAKE systemd package, and a FAKE EMPTY libsystemd.so and it worked! LMAO, so crazy and unhinged.

The keyboard is really comfortable, but the question is, what I can actually use the laptop for, besides writing? Web browsing is a nope, because most sites use sophisticated Javascript, not supported by Palemoon (and neither by old Firefox). Then I had a bright idea to use it for gamedev prototyping, and generally messing around. So I installed:

1. Aseprite - there is a 32-bit version in the package, but it's compiled against newer GlibC so it doesn't run. Gemini showed me how to unpack a .deb package, and to get a standalone GlibC package and to bundle it together with Aseprite binaries, and it's mindboggling but it works!

2. LÖVE 2D, a simple 2d Lua-based gamedev framework, always wanted to try it out. Worked out of the box, just needed a Mesa env variable override.

3. Allegro, a low-level framework in C, I recalled the name from

symbioid's posts. Most of the packages worked, except for the audio, which depends on pulseaudio which depends on systemd. Gemini assured me that Allegro works fine with pure ALSA, and showed me how to create a fake libpulse package, and the tutorial game works fine, sprites and sfx and all. (I'm becoming an expert package counterfeiter ;)

LibSDL didn't work, required too many dependencies besides systemd, and I didn't feel like encumbering my little beast with all this crap, but I might try to untangle the mess someday.

Still not convinced how usable is the Mini in the long run. Surely it makes much more sense to bring a proper laptop on vacation, or an iPad... But I have LOADS of fun tinkering with it, much more than expected... and this alone justifies the waste of time ;)

Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Mini Mini Mini (KMFDM)

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

chuckro

The “Dragon” series of games are generally differentiated by their art style (“8-bit remade as 16-bit chonky pixel graphics”) and plots revolving around the thee kingdoms of humans, elves and dwarves that don’t get along but need to unite against a threat. In this case, the demon king who was sealed 100 years ago is going to break free, so the descendants of the original heroes are sent to investigate. Unfortunately, the human prince is a weenie (doubly problematic because the human hero was responsible for sealing the demon, and the human kingdom is supreme because of it), so he sends a strong commoner and his competent retainer in his place.

( Read more... )

Overall: This is a very “by the numbers” jrpg, probably needlessly complex and a little longer than it needs to be, given the simplicity of the plot and the relative shallowness of the characters. It’s not bad, it’s not great, it’s playable but forgettable.

vriddy

General status:

I'm not reaching my GYWO monthly goal this month either after all, but I'm close! I ended up re-writing a difficult scene several times. The first version was from the perspective of the victim. The second from the perspective of the perpetrator, who likely has the more interesting PoV after all the plotting we've seen. But that attempt didn't work out well... I would really like to keep the crime committer sympathetic at least somewhat, but it felt kind of horrific and clinical while drenched in guilt and a bit off in tone with the rest. I ended up blocked on the next scene, but with a kind of feeling that felt more like a "going down the wrong path" warning rather than a problem with the new scene I was supposed to edit. So I went back. Focused a bit less on the logistics. Lot less guilt, too, she's got nothing personal against the guy. And then, I guess, a confident, gentle -- nearly tender -- non-lethal stabbing lol. I'll have to see if it works on reread later, but I think tomorrow I'll be able to move forward. I hope.

I want to improve the ergonomics for my desk. Once I figured out the angle for the scene, I wrote most of it quite feverishly this morning but in addition to the headache after focusing for that long, my forearm and elbow hurt and tingled for nearly one hour after. I don't really know where to start though... Like I know the whole 90 degrees whatever thing but I guess I ended up slouching anyway... Maybe I should velcro my back and wrists into Appropriate Position... Pointers to beginner, non-overwhelming tips very welcome.

If I counted the deleted version, I'd reach my word count but I guess I'm back to not counting deleted words... I guess the scene didn't feel usable or salvageable overall, even as a future reference? I took a Scrivener snapshot before rewriting it, but I didn't save it in the Scenes Graveyard for reference. I might have counted it if I'd done that? Obviously, I still learnt from it, but, I don't know. There's something that doesn't click well with my brain when it comes to deleted words. I need to think about it more.

Next week: