This is basically the best idea.

I also feel strongly that somebody ought to incorporate some of the more traditional features of Lupercalia, i.e. hot naked guys hitting people with whips.

I've been playing this Diablo clone called Torchlight. There are 3 classes -- Fightguy, Rangeguy, and Alchemist (I can't remember the actual names of the others but that's basically what they are). Naturally, I rolled an Alchemist, because god forbid I ever hit anything with a physical object in an RPG.

In Torchlight, all classes have a pet. It starts as either a wolf or a lynx, depending upon which you select, but you can feed it fish to turn it into monsters. It basically performs standard action-RPG minion tasks, like attacking monsters and getting stuck around corners because of terrible pathing; more importanly, it has an inventory and you can send it back to town to sell your ludicrous amounts of loot so you can keep adventuring and get better loot with bigger numbers on it.

You can also equip it with a necklace and two rings (?????). And it can learn spells.

Spells are learned from scrolls that you find in the dungeon, and the first two I got were Summon Zombies and Summon Skeletal Archers.

OBVIOUSLY I taught them both to my cat. And their AI is such that they will keep casting spells periodically unless they run out of mana, so I basically have a permanent undead firing squad running around with me at all times. My Alchemist has no capacity to summon undead himself -- he just sits in the back and occasionally lobs lightning bolts while his necromancer cat and its unholy army rampages through the goblin warrens. Sometimes an enemy slips through the vanguard and I whack it with my vampiric staff to heal myself before setting it on fire.

Legends will be sung of Horst the lazy alchemist and Fluff, his amazing necro-cat.

UPDATE: I have discarded the vampiric staff in favor of dual-wielding lightning wands, presumably while a sweet guitar riff plays in the background.

I also received an item called "Expert Epic Double Barreled Hand Cannon of the Soldier" which probably stands as some kind of all-time achievement in bloated procedurally-generated item names. I vendored it.

So I was browsing The Cutting Room Floor, which is a really cool wiki of stuff that is accessible via hacking but never made it into the game proper. Apparently the following line was slated to appear in Final Fantasy 6:

"There's only one airship in the world. It's owned by a gambler, or should I say pirate...?"

1) OH MY GOD WHAT
2) My Homestuck-addled brain is imagining Setzer as a gambligant. Possibly in a petticoat.

Also, last night I was grating some ginger and I looked down and the peel of the ginger was sort of stained a reddish-pink. And I was like, huh, that's funny. And it was only a few minutes later that I realized I had actually grated my fingers and the reddish-pink tinge was actually blood.

Moral of the story: cooking while tipsy and tired is a poor decision.

Also, we now have a perma-cat. He's fluffy and black/white, and incredibly friendly. Sort of annoyingly friendly, actually, as he sometimes makes it hard to accomplish tasks that require a flat surface and manual dexterity. He has no name but Z has been calling him Max, which is good enough for me. You can pick him up and put him somewhere and he will stay there, which is not a thing I have ever seen cats do in my life.

I have cut my hair pretty drastically -- it's now a pixie cut, down from shoulder-length. I've wanted to do this for a long time and actually getting it done has totally changed my outlook about fashion. I feel super-confident about how I look all of a sudden, and I've started doing things like STYLING my hair and putting headbands in it and wearing makeup omg. I am learning about makeup, slowly, and so far it is really fun -- colors! on your FACE! -- but there's this psychological barrier to wearing it. I still sometimes feel like wearing makeup is sort of tantamount to saying that something is wrong with how I look without it -- which is of course not true, any more than wearing clothes means you hate how you look naked, but...I dunno, I guess making a major change in how you look is always stressful, and going from only costume-related makeup to occasionally -- GASP -- wearing it out on normal days at work is kind of a large change.

I also learned I do not know what color my eyes are. Are they hazel? I think they are hazel.

Hazel is not a real color.

This has been going around lately:

Pick up the nearest book to you. Turn to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life in 2012.

"You duly install the souls of the righteous in the abodes of bliss, and with your golden staff you marshal that shadowy herd, welcome alike to the gods above and those below."

(Horace, Ode 1.10, "Hymn to Mercury")

I...uh. Hm.

Well then.

This has not been a fantastic month for me in terms of dealing with life like a rational human being instead of some kind of efficiently-designed panic-creation engine.

I am feeling a little better now, and it is not without a little bit of self-consciousness that I say it's partially due to watching a live 3-hour glitch run of Earthbound during SpeedDemosArchive's charity speed run marathon (which, by the way, raised over $145k for the Prevent Cancer Foundation, hooray). The run was, as I said, a glitch run that only took 3 hours, so all kinds of crazy nonsense was happening and most of the game was skipped, but the final battle was there in its entirety and listening to the ending credits song still made me tear up a little.

I've been wanting to make a post about this game for a while. I could probably fill a book with all my feelings about it. The Mother series in general (and Mother 2/Earthbound in particular), despite being mostly known for their quirky humor and general randomness, are INCREDIBLY powerful games. Earthbound has gotten me through hard times with enough frequency that it probably counts as a religious text by now. And the donations that were rolling in during the Earthbound run were frequently accompanied by comments like "This game is so special to me" and "Earthbound changed my life", so I'm clearly not alone in this.

All the silly enemies and crazy puns and send-ups of classic RPG tropes -- the thing that Earthbound is famous for with people who have never really played it -- are actually part of a very serious message. A happy one, granted, but a serious message nonetheless.

Earthbound is about love. Just playing through the game, it's clear that it's a labor of love in the deepest sense of the word. It's a richly complex game, with absolutely enormous amounts of effort cleverly disguised behind a facade of simple graphics and bare-bones plot, and most of that complexity serves no purpose other than to make the player smile. It's a love letter to the video game genre, and to you the player.

I could write a book about the beautiful moments this game has to offer, but right now I want to talk about the final battle.

( Cut for TL;DR and spoilers )

Sorry for the rambling, but this is something I've been thinking about for a while -- why this game means so much to me, and to so many others. Reflexively I want to say it's not JUST a game, but it IS -- it's a video game, through and through, and the way it delivers its message is intricately bound up with the fact that it's a video game. This is a work that uses the medium of video games to their utmost in order to tell you a story that could not be told any other way.

And the story this game has to tell you is a beautiful and powerful one, in its own simple and strange manner.

If I could speak Japanese I'd write a letter to Shigesato Itoi to tell him how much his game means to me (he gets a lot of these letters, apparently, and loves every single one). In the meantime, I'll settle for listening to the message: in the end, hope and love are the only things you need to make the darkness tremble.

Oh my god I forgot to update this. Gah.


( Yuri Challenge Valentine's Letter )

Well, I am in the process of posting something I wrote a while ago for Bloody Valentine to AO3. I've hesitated posting it for a while because, yeah, it's probably the most violent and explicit thing I've ever written (and posted, I have smut I've written but never showed anyone because...yeah, I"m working on that, OK?) It's actually probably not more explicit than my last Asric/Jadaar fic, but the violent content sort of makes it FEEL more explicit, you know?

And I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a response fic of sorts.

I wrote this like a year ago and never posted the initial feelings I had that lead to the fic's creation in the first place, so I'd like to actually throw those out there. Consider this a tiny DVD commentary.

( This involves violence and rape so I'm putting it behind a cut. Also spoilers for the ending of Yume Nikki. )

I hope that wasn't too long-winded and/or preachy for what amounts to a 1k word kinkfic.

Also, I posted a cute and fluffy oldfic to balance it out. /o\ *hides*

I gave up on NaNoWriMo and my past couple of days have largely been this for (I think) unrelated reasons. So yeah. I guess that'll teach me to write historical stuff for NaNo. A lot of the time I'd either run into something that I knew nothing about and the knowledge that I was immensely ignorant really killed my desire to keep writing, or I'd look something up and WHOOPS I just spent three hours looking at pictures of clothes. Yeah.

I have not given up on the story but I have a shitload of reading to do.

I decided I needed to do some easy comfort writing and so I stopped working on my lighthearted historical fantasy NaNo and ended up writing, essentially, World of Warcraft torture porn. This is my easy comfort writing. What am I doing with my life.

My brain is too shot with crushing apathy right now for doing things more complex than "write Yuletide fic" and "read Homestuck" but I have also decided to do something about the maelstrom of my room. I might post pictures when I'm done because I think it'll be nice. I did that once before and it sort of motivated me to keep my room clean, so.

I am also planning on posting more meta in the future because I have been having some conversations with friends on other ends of fandom and watching the ever-ongoing OTW/AO3 mess and I realized I have a lot of feelings about fandom and what it means to me and why I'm mostly a video game fanperson these days. And maybe some thoughts about AO3's whole tagging system, though I think what I have to say has been adequately addressed by other people with more coding experience than me. But it's always nice to make a post where you can legit cite your master's degree to back up your Opinions.

Things That Are Making Me Happy Now:
- New coat has ruffles on it
- Legends of the Wulin has a release date (I should not keep getting excited about this because this is literally like the 5th time it's gotten one and I don't have the game yet, but I still do. EVERY TIME)
- Legit mechanical question I had for new Exalted game: "Does biting someone's tongue off while making out with them count as an unexpected attack?"
- Everything about the Infernals charms chapter
- Talked someone out of buying Terry Goodkind and into buying a better book at work
- I can draw skulls pretty damn well right now. I feel like I am all set to design some Death Knight tier gear.

Things That Are Not Making Me Happy:
- Rest of Infernals book
- We are supposed to have a Mo Willems display at work and we don't have the majority of the books, in a perfect world a bookstore not having copies of Don't Let the Pigeon Drive The Bus! and Knuffle Bunny would be actually illegal. I really like Mo Willems OK
- A long and dull list of psychological bullshit, you know how it goes
- The fact that I found the disembodied phrase "Poetry Ninjas!" in my notes for the latter half of Melody for Monsters and I absolutely do not remember what this means

HI! You are awesome!

( General Stuff )

Onto the fandoms!

( BlazBlue )

( Johannes Cabal series )

( Earthbound )

( Final Fantasy IV )

I have a Twitter now. It's largely fan-related. Anyone else on Twitter these days?

(I've had it from a little while but I'm still recovering from my burst of Jonathan Howard talked to me for 280 characters OMG. I do not deal well with celebrity, clearly, which means that Twitter is probably a dangerous endeavor, but w/e).

EDIT: I forgot to say that I am JackOfQuills on there (JackOfNone was taken and that is my new backup username).