(no subject)

[zen_monk]

 Since I've been seeing the meme posted by owlmoose  lately on DW, what better way to have people catch up to me than by participating? 

Where do you hang out online?

Tumblr, but mostly on mobile and usually just lurking. So I guess not so much hanging out than it is that I have a presence in the form of active reblogs and some comments spattered here and there. I actually started being more chatty with my Free Company in Final Fantasy XIV over on the Balmung server, and in another FC in Diabolos. I also go on WeChat and on Facebook, but not so much as suddenly family members are present and I don't wish to take in more career advice than I want to.

What are you reading?


I started to read The Last Man by Mary Shelley that I lifted from my housemate so that I could read while I work (surreptitiously). It's a really interesting read about "The Future!!!" from an early Romanticist perspective, though it's not a lot of "The Future!!!" in it aside from the presence of hot air balloons for the first half. It's largely a criticism about Romanticism ideals and attitudes, and mostly a self-insert of Mary Shelley (as a male protagonist) and her husband (as the male "best friend" of the protagonist). And like most English Romantic novels, features the virtues of English society as it tries to persevere and surpass the scary Orient in the form of conquering Turkey and liberating Greece (the acceptable exotic place). 

I've also started reading "The Lies of Locke Lamora" by Scott Lynch to get started on the Gentlemen Bastard series, but it's been slow reading so far. Mostly on my part, as I was really busy with my summer job. 

What are you watching?

Everyone must watch "The Grand Hotel" that's available on Netflix, the most popular European show of a Spanish telenovela set in early 20th century Spain of the intrigues of the hotel staff and the families who own the hotel in some form or another. There is murder, missing people, and a determined brother who made himself employed as a butler in order to find his sister, the maid who is the foundation of all the family drama that could ruin the hotel and everyone within it. 

It is also extremely beautiful. I now want all my fandoms to have a Hotel AU featuring murder, forbidden love between the classes, and the lives of the servants as they try to assert themselves.

I have also kept up watching "Saint Seiya: Soul of Gold" which is a semi-canon continuation of the Saint Seiya series. Web series anime is..... some varying quality. But I noticed it has much more acceptable animation quality of some consistency compared to the other Toei web-animation series Sailor Moon Crystal.

What are you making?

Recently, I got an unpaid internship annotating English grammar youtube videos for the tutoring website Questive. I mark down the timestamps of when a subject changes in the video, like for Indefinite Pronouns, and at the end make up some questions for the viewer to answer below it. I have sporadically rp-ed as Kain Highwind on Tumblr, but I've been very inactive on it lately. I also had a Lenna Tycoon muse, but that also had been inactive. Ahh, my life is my work but it's not even the paid kind. 

What are you squeeing about today?

A fanartist I follow on Tumblr had an ask about what they think about the levels of stubbornness between Tifa and Lightning, and concluded in the tags why there isn't any TifLight/Farronhart work available, and I've been mentally squeeing over the pairing in solidarity of her tags. 

My fandom life is suddenly absurdly small compared to last year. 

If you could rope old fandom friends into a new fandom, it would be.....

In my heart of hearts, I want Dissidia fandom to still be a thing and find a community therein (mostly for the women, and that I wished their narratives were better than what they were given, even though it didn't diminish how I felt about their roles). What I am hoping to be more active in are fandoms that I used to be in and want a community again, which are the Persona (3 and 4) fandom and I guess Sailor Moon. Nostalgia has a way of having a comfortable base to put my feet in. And they are reasonably popular enough to have some familiarity in it to make such transitions possible :D

I should really watch/read/dive into _______ and then come talk to you about it!

I feel like I should go back into Dragon Age fandom, though I am more interested in things that don't relate to the player character as I am to other aspects of the world. Also FFXIV, but I'm still playing catchup to the plot stuff of that game. Also Gentlemen Bastards for some folks who are into that, which seemed itself a neat thing. I also want to start watching some of the superhero shoes that are on tv right now, namely The Flash and Agents of SHIELD, so that I'm still peripherally in the Marvel and DC fandom, especially when Vixen's show is on and that there's new developments regarding the topic of Inhumans. 

What else is on your mind?

I'm really glad to be back home with my family.
 

Comments

[novel_machinist]

I'm in love with Dragon Age. Just FYI

[zen_monk]

I'm always here for Dwarven and Elf lore, of which the former never gets explored upon ever again, damn dirty developers.

[novel_machinist]

O
M
F
G

DO YOU WANNA TALK ABOUT DWARVES WITH ME OH MY GOD PLEASE TALK ABOUT DWARVES WITHME. HOW FAR ARE YOU WHAT CAN WE TALK ABOUT DO YOU MIND SPOILERS?!

...I mean. Oh, yeah, well, sure, dwarves are cool I guess.

[zen_monk]

kay so like, I'm only up to obtaining Skyhold in Inquisition, but I am totally up to speed on Dwarves in Origins and in DAII, which as far as i know, is the extent of dwarven lore so far, lolsob.

I'm just like, when do we know that having a Harrowmont or a Bhelen government yielded changes that we can actually see? What about like the implications of a Dwarven Warden and Inquisitor who change the lives of everyone around them even though they are stripped of their agency and power in their origin stories. Or the fact that Dagna is a dwarf who is so interested in magic and the Fade that she provides the one voice who sees magic as a wondrous phenomenon and not just as a phenomenon representative of the ways that people are chained and tied together.

[novel_machinist]

oh no, my dear. Descent is ALL DORFS ALL THE TIME. It's BEAUTIFUL.

You'll see some of that in Inquisition, particularly with the Descent. And Dagna shows up in Skyhold (AND HARDING) Inquisition is big on Dorfs. Did you do the expansion any?

[zen_monk]

Harding and Dagna are my favorite and it may also be because that they are Ali Hillis and Laura Bailey so it's like the Farron sisters reunited if FFXIII is about dragons.

I've not done the Expansion yet, but Awakening i was halfway done with so Segrun is also my top list of fave dwarfs. It's funny how the most interesting people in Dragon Age are the dwarves, imo, and it's seems to me because they carry a lot of weight in their characterization alongside the whole complex society they live in. But you don't always see their stamp anywhere in Inquisition (at least so far) and I'm hoping that there would be more focus on them if not on the other countries.

[novel_machinist]

YOU CAN DATE SCOUT HARDING!!! SHE IS THE BESTEST EVER *clears throat* There's alllso a spoiler, so you'll have to highlight this, but it's the cutest fucking spoiler ever If you don't date Sera she dates Dagna and calls her "Widdle" and it's THE CUTEST THING EVER

AHEM

Anyway, Segrun is amazing and beautiful. In witch Hunt you get to go into the Deep Roads again and see a lot of elven ruins in the thaigs. The lines between where the dwarves and where the elves are is a bit muddy and this is amazingly interesting to me! It's pretty common game knowledge that the dwarves and Tevinter have had major trade for a very long time, and now that I know what I know about the elves, I have to wonder what else they had their hands in.

In the Descent quest you get to hang out with the Legion of the Dead (Renn and Valta = ♥). You hang out with Shaper Valta and she's amazing, she has such wonderful insight and banter. The game also acknowledges if you yourself are playing a dwarf. Dwarven lore is just so chock full of interesting things. The balance of the Caste system against what the ancient elves had and against what humans and Qunari have now is really just... OH so fun.

In Inquisition you see dwarven ruins on the surface!

The whole idea of "we lost most of what we had and now we're kinda doing it wrong" is really pervasive in almost every race. But with the dwarves a Shaper can actually erase you from history and erase your accomplishments if they FEEL like it. A Casteless dwarf is literally not a person because they are erased from the Shaperate's files. It's verymuch at a whim. One of the things Valta mentions is that if you don't want to erase something then you can be moved from your position.

And I haven't even touched Sandal yet. While he doesn't show up in Descent, you can pick up a note of his in Trespasser. Given his connection to magic I'm really hoping he shows up in DA4.

[lassarina]

I'm here for DA and Gentlemen Bastards and Dissidia, just sayin'.

[zen_monk]

How far are you in DA? And any hype for Y'shtola being rep for FFXIV in the upcoming Dissidia arcade game? Cuz i'm very excited for that.

[lassarina]

I've done Origins and 2, need to play Awakening and have just pried Inquisition out of my husband's clutches. :)

I'm....awful at paying attention to hype because I've just accepted that there are games from certain publishers/devs I will simply buy. I'm a failgamer.

[zen_monk]

Sometimes i get this knee-jerk reaction against hype where I deny all kinds of interest to it :P This is in contradiction to the indignation I feel when all the internet squee about it and I can't really bring myself to go to spoilers about it. To this day, I still don't know the full details of DAI's plot, even though I know about the huge wingdings.

I will say that DAO and DA2 are ones where I place my heart closest towards (and to extension what progress I did in Awakening). The character flaws in a lot of folks are what appeal to me the most, if that makes sense, even when they're turn-offs most of the time, e.g. everything Oghren and.... multitude of others. Which makes dealing with these people as your personal companions and friends interesting since sometimes they'd be the people who aren't your companions in other games, or would be the NPCs. Realizing I like characters like that kind of made me retroactively enjoy the cast of XIII and onwards more since I used to have more contradicting feelings toward them

btw, XIII trilogy was both amazing and confounding mostly because it's a lot of "hey this is good plot" and also a lot of "why not more good plot???"

[sathari]

I am all about the awesome ladies in Dissidia, I am just sayin'.

[zen_monk]

I like it a lot more when the narrative actually made them into a clique- oh wait, they hadn't, why Squeenix why, the audience for Light/Tifa is strong in Pixiv.