The Bog

If you're wondering why I'm posting a ton of fic all of a sudden, it's because I'm going through my WIP backlog, picking out stuff that is mostly done, and trying to finish and post it without worrying too much about whether or not it's perfect. I've gotten really hung up on editing and re-editing and re-re-editing things lately, as well as just hitting a wall on something and never really trying to overcome it (even when all the story really needed was one more scene, or even a couple paragraphs).

I'm really trying to get over that kind of thing and start being able to consider stuff DONE, especially in the absence of an actual deadline. (People tell you to set a deadline yourself, but that doesn't work for me -- I know the guy who set those deadlines and she's full of shit.)

Some of this I've been sitting on for AGES. Like, I think there's an FF14 fic in the pile that I started writing when Stormblood was the current expansion. When I say I have a problem with not being able to finish things I mean it is a SERIOUS problem.

On another note, it's Four Job Fiesta season, which I totally forgot about! I would like to do at least one run this year, but it'll probably be later into the Fiesta -- maybe as late as mid-August. The fiesta ends on August 31st, but at this point I can beat FF5 in a few days, give or take, so that shouldn't be an issue. Not sure what kind of run I want to do... Leaning towards just a regular old vanilla run, which I haven't done in a long time, but last time I tried a no750 and a 750 run (fighter-style jobs only and wizard-style jobs only, basically) but due to accidents of RNG I ended up with weird, somewhat out of theme parties both times. So maybe I'll redo one of those.

I feel like I need to start posting about RPG design more often, as it's something I think about a lot, and I feel like there's not a lot of discussion about the genre artistically that I actually like or even respect, lol. (That sounds so mean but it's true I guess.) And a lot of the stuff that is good and thoughtful tends to focus more on the story to the exclusion of mechanics. IDK if my commentary is like, much better but at least *I* like it, so that counts for something.

Dawntrail is coming out soon, and it feels like Endwalker just released. I think time moves too fast for me. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it.

I also realized I never posted a breakdown of my cosplay? I genuinely thought I did, and I can't find the extensive writeup I did, so...I think I saved it somewhere, so hopefully I can dig it up. It's a literal whole year later but I think it's probably worth reading.

Went around putting some subscription money into things I actually use and like, which includes this site. Because I've been thinking a lot about, idk. The old internet and wanting to make better stuff.

There was a Twitter post by another manga editor that was like, "I wonder what percentage of my job is typing stuff like "ball sack" or "blow job" into merriam-webster.com" and I think about that like, literally every time I look up anything there now, so I had to make this icon. For work posts, I guess. It was between this or a screenshot of a chart showing JPN to US bra size conversions, an invaluable resource in my line of work.

There is no Merriam-Webster accepted spelling of "ball sack" by the way so feel free to run wild. The playing field is wide open.

I've spent all day trying to fill out a series bible retroactively for something I'm working on, since there's a multivolume gap that predates me starting the project that I can no longer handwave, and also the whole thing has gotten so complicated it needs to be completely reorganized. Honestly, its a nightmare and I don't know how anybody with a series bigger than this keeps everything straight.

Currently it's a regular old Excel spreadsheet and I am honestly considering taking up maintaining the fan wiki, since I genuinely think it would be easier to reference in a pinch. Also this series is actually popular enough to have a fan wiki, which despite having been doing this for some years now I'm still astounded that I'm in charge of something popular enough to have a fan wiki.

Had a moment of pure unadulterated terror the other day when I thought I'd left a notebook at the bookstore where I was hanging out and writing with a friend. A notebook containing a lot of things (including part of a personal essay and a draft of an extremely sappy H/C story) but primarily almost the entire text of the Nier Automata necrophilia fic I wrote for Nonconathon.

I eventually did find it in my apartment, thankfully, but MAN of all the things to lose.

Why was I writing Nier Automata necrophilia porn longhand in a notebook? idk I like cute pens and what else am I gonna use them for. Journalling? For my mental health???

All that's left of this cosplay for the con next week is the wig. I'm super nervous about styling wigs because, you know, they don't...grow back, if you cut them. And I'm so bad with anything hair related, styling-wise.

I also forgot to get spirit gum REMOVER for the elf ears, just the adhesive, so...YOLO, I guess. The ears are comically huge but that's a feature of the character and hopefully it'll look cute.

I am like SICK with nerves though. It's been so long since I've cosplayed and the outfit isn't as accurate as I could make it (I am just handwaving the shoes and I genuinely just skipped the embelishment on the back of the jacket. I did this with my previous cosplay too, funnily enough, but that character was also wearing a scarf that completely obscured the design unless you happened to be standing in such a way that the scarf fluttered in the breeze) and I'm just. I dunno.

I've posted essentially this exact same complaint a million times but it keeps not going away.

Me and my friend are going to Omega Mart before the con though and I'm ultra hype about it. Omega Mart seems like the distillation of all the stuff I like about theme parks but not attached to a monolithic corporate IP behemoth. There's something about fictional environment crafted in real life that I just love -- I get SO excited about even the shittiest walk-through haunted house (although I AM sad that so many of them are zombie-themed these days...like I get that it's popular and the costuming/acting is pretty easy but "zombie apocalypse" stuff leaves me so cold. It's hard being SO invested in "undead" as a concept and also hating 90% of the modern interpretation of the topic lolsob). I would just love to see more fun locations to play around in that aren't Halloween pop-up operations (as much as I love Halloween pop-up operations, one time I legitimately started crying in a Spirit Halloween because the vibes were so good) and aren't megacorp-funded machines to drain the wallets of parents with 5 year olds.

Playing Octopath Traveler a little more, progressing stories and getting party banters for the first time and: yes! I love these! there need to be more though. Also I feel like they should take place in a location instead of in a black void but. I dunno, I'm torn between being disappointed by the low level of interaction and fully understanding on a bone-deep level how much WORK it would be to add more, so I'm reluctant to complain. Even a completely linear RPG with zero variables has a truly insane amount of text in it. The rest of the game is just SO good, though, that it makes that one flaw more glaring. Like, the game looks great, it's maybe the best designed turn-based game I've played in god knows how long, I'm really enjoying the character's stories...it's just that one thing.

Cyrus/Therion was my first shipping instinct, which I chalked up to personal biases regarding thieves and scholars, but actually it appears to be the second most popular pairing on AO3 which is. Interesting. It's also funny how just starting with a different character seems to change your perception of the story -- skimming summaries it seems like there are a decent amount of fics that involve Therion breaking into Cyrus's office in Atlasdam, which I initially considered some kind of AU until I realized that if you STARTED as Therion and recruited Cyrus later rather than the other way around, that would be like...a pretty reasonable thing to have happened.

Meanwhile I am obsessed with the fact that in MY playthrough, Therion apparently talked to Cyrus at a shitty bar in Boulderfall and was like "Hey, you wanna help me break into a house?" and Cyrus, who I have to stress is a history professor on sabbatical*, apparently was like "Oh, absolutely."

Cyrus as main character is just like, down for anything to an almost comical degree. Gotta respect a man with zero qualms about helping a sex worker commit murders though. A true feminist ally.










* he is also a wizard but you know, RPGs

Because I have felt like talking about myself. From corpsebrigadier and kradeelav.

Also, doll pics.

( Answering questions rules actually )

I'm not gonna tag anybody just do it if you want lol.

EDIT: Fixed the link to the pic of my Cult of the Lamb doll

Will probably start crossposting my fic from AO3 to here at some point. Waffling about the idea of having a separate fic journal/community but I kind of like the idea of being able to post whatever even if its not "archive quality" and I feel like a separate thing would just become Archive: A Realm Reborn.

I've also been around a very long time and writing fic for a very long time and it's just like. Really hard to look at my writing from more than a few years ago, let alone close to a decade or more. Like I literally have trouble even looking at it directly; one time I wanted to lift a few lines from something I wrote in like 2011 and it took me like a week to work up the mental fortitude to work through a few thousand words to find the stuff I wanted. It's like staring directly at the sun, if the sun were cringe.

There are also fandoms I just don't want to engage with anymore, to varying degrees of seriousness. World of Warcraft, for example, was a thing I just grew to actively dislike but I might still like a couple of things I wrote for it if I went back and read them now, and while the company that makes the game is shit my main objections to engaging with the fandom itself is that I just don't like the story (although I used to get really, REALLY mad about the way the narrative went with the Forsaken, like "whoa I need to step back" kind of mad, because IDK I over-identify with zombies this is just a thing I do).

On the other hand, back in the 200X era I wrote a handful of Roman literature RPF fics and quite frankly that stuff is literally painful for me to read, an awkward relic of a time before I crashed and burned academically and had all these hopes and aspirations that belonged to functionally a different person. Ironically those are my fics that get the most interaction, so OTHER people clearly like them and I'm glad, but I would rather just forget they exist.

I feel like my interests used to be just way classier in general, and I guess another advantage of a personal fic archive is that somebody won't be crawling the tag for some Capital L Literature fandom, see one of my old stories, and then be extremely disappointed all of my work in that area is old enough to be in middle school and most of my recent output is video game characters doing things to each other that are varying degrees of objectionable. Like I used to live atop an ivory tower and while the tower is still there I currently live in the bottom of a swamp. I personally like it here but I could understand if someone came to see what the tower-dweller was up to and found themselves knee deep in mud.

Part of me worries that all this shuffling around is a way of avoiding actually WORKING on anything creative, but. Eh it's not like I don't find those anyway.

Given the miniscule level of scrutiny this account gets/will get in the forseeable future I don't think I'll be posting much that's access locked, and also I want this to be mostly fandom/creative thoughts and I just wanna post about stuff without worrying about who's seeing what.

I do write/read/etc a lot of what one might consider "extreme" content (noncon, guro, shota, incest, monsterfucking, pretty envelope-pushing horror) but if I'm talking about that in any detail I'll put it under a cut. This isn't remotely the only thing I make or post about but, I guess I don't want people to be surprised if it comes up, or if you click on my AO3 profile and the tags are a total disaster area.

I used to run a guro fanwork fest and a guro discussion comm, both of which I ghosted pretty severely half a decade ago but the discussion comm apparently gets posts occasionally, so I might transfer it over to this account and keep hold of it/try to generate discussion there idk. How does this shit work.

I think the thing that I would most likely to lock would be posts about my work, since I'm credited under my Real Name for those and I just am not super fond of the idea of being widely associated with that here. (This of course doesn't mean I'm not proud of my work! I just, I dunno. I don't like being stared at.)

I'm thinking of archiving my fanfic somewhere in addition AO3 just in the interest of...being a good internet user rather than relying on huge centralized sites all the time, but I don't know if I'm going to use a Neocities site or this DW account or what. DW has the advantage that I can sorta post snippets or half-formed things without feeling like I'm clogging the place up, and I have a whole bunch of fragments right now for whatever reason (I'm a slow writer and this is the first time in like a decade I've been in a fandom that actually gets consistent updates, for one, lol). Neocities can be a nice fancy oldschool archive, and I can categorize stuff however I want.

EDIT: When I say "dark sicko shit isn't the only stuff I make or enjoy", I mean I recently almost started crying on-stream because I got so emotional about heroic knights doing good deeds, so it's really kind of a Dr Jekyll and Mr Edgelord situation in my brain, lol.