Walking Over A Grave

I walked past my grandfather’s grave for the first time this week.

Content Warning: Family, graveyards

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Teaching myself cage sudoku feels like being a goddamn conspiracy theorist

Also, after 45 minutes of doing dick nothing, expecting me, a complete Digimon Newcomer, to pop off for look, it's Agumon! is so fucking tedious

45 minutes into Digimon Cyber Sleuth and it is literally all tutorial so far. 45 minutes, on a rail, with multiple long conversations.

Dev Pile: Constraint Cascades in Moonshiners

June involved writing an absolute spoonfull of stuff on the Moonshiners case study, and that involved revising it further and further. What I have here in this post, down below the fold, is one such example of a big chunk of case study writing, in the ‘pre-revision’ stage. An important part of this process is getting words out there, so I can refine them, and a big part of that for me is making sure that every day I can look back on it and say ‘oh hey, yeah, I wrote about a thousand goddamn words there.,’ Guess what you’re getting to see today, if you want to see my thinking before I’ve converted it into proper formal academic language? Yeah, it’s one of those!

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🐂

the website for every niche media that any freak can get free clout on by bothering to transcribe a wikipedia description to, and nobody gives enough of a shit about Eren the Southpaw to bother. Nobody wants to say that Eren the Southpaw has tropes.

I think few things can be as damning to comment on Eren the Southpaw than that it doesn't have a tvtropes page

I'm such a sucker for Big Choral Singing

https://youtu.be/H9o8OWVWOE0

Scrubs is a live-action anime about how doctors, people you trust to put their hands inside you and tinker with your ticker, are vividly hallucinating all the time

Story Pile: My Master Has No Tail (Manga)

My Master Has No Tail is a 2019 manga, which got a 2022 anime adaptation, making it one of a number of truly excellent anime in an excellent year of excellent anime. It’s the story of Mameda, a tanuki girl from a rural island, who travels to Osaka for an adventure of playful mischief! The problem is, this is the Taisho era of Japan (which is around 1912 to 1926), and her tricks are decidedly Meiji (which is the era before that). Turning leaves into coins meant more when the coins were important, but people check paper money for counterfeits, which ruins her plan. A spooky light on the road at night? That’s just a car, nobody’s that scared of it.

Distressed by her lack of success, Mameda winds up encountering rakugo theatre for the first time, and now I get to explain rakugo again.

Chances are good that you might, if you’re a big anime dork or general theatre nerd. Rakugo is a specific form of Japanese theatre, a formalised type of one-person performance where a storyteller relates common, familiar stories, reinvented and redelivered, and told with a standardised set of props and items, within specific limitations. It is an art form formalised beyond almost all western types of theatre, where even forms like opera with specific lyrics and performance rule at least let you choose to some extent where on the stage you’re going to do it. Rakugo, you gotta have your knees on one cushion.

My Akane-Banashi review

And like every major character headlining a manga series about rakugo, Mameda realises rakugo is awesome, and then begins the obligatory story of Trying To Get Into Rakugo, despite the forces stacked against her. The forces are her master, the woman whose rakugo she’s seeking to emulate.

If you’re sensitive to spoilers, I’m going to describe some of the events in the manga My Master Has No Tail, in a broad sense, and that means spoiling some of the events in the anime.

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via lunari (https://bsky.app/profile/309x.bsky.social) via Droid from GLC:

On a whim checked my local library for Alisdair Beckett King's first Montgomery Bonbon murder mystery book and it's a cracker. Very fun read.

The Pokédex Is For And By Kids

I am cursed, as a fan of things, to have too-strong a desire that what I talk about to be acceptably real.

This past week I saw someone in the Ranma ½ Subreddit forward a theory – well, not even, they asked if anyone else already had the same idea – that Ranma Saotome’s poor performance in school is not because he is kind of stupid and the storyteller is trying to communicate that with his stupid actions and the school results he has that look a lot like what a stupid person would get, but rather, because he’s actually very fluent in American English. Now, this is a beautiful theory. I really do mean it, and I have to assume this is an idea the person in question holds to because they can use that idea, in their head, to get something, to go somewhere. I could never come up with something so beautifully out-of-context.

That’s not to say I am unwhimsical when considering fiction! I have a tiny drop or two of whimsy, smeared about the edges and dull in all but the most potent of UV lights. Let me then present to you a completely unfounded opinion, of my own, about the Pokédex, in Pokemon.

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Woims!

I've got this sticker and I'm not sure what it represents. I think it's a Final Fantasy 14 map marker?

4e Design Philosophy

4th edition Dungeons & Dragons is an interesting platform to develop game material for. For a start it seems to be reasonably unpopular and the people who are looking for material for it don’t necessarily exist with the same attitude towards game design as I have.

On the other hand, it is a way to engage with a well-developed functional Dungeons & Dragons game without ever giving money to the people at Wizards of the Coast, who it seems have been doing some classic union busting nonsense lately and that sucks. I haven’t given Wizards any money for going on ten years now, I think, but that doesn’t stop me from being in their ecosystem and implicitly encouraging their presence in the hobby. To that end I just wanna remind people they abused Orion Black and they deadnamed employees who wanted to form a union.

What a bunch of pricks.

Anyway, I want to talk about some of my own philosophy for 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons.

[…]

I take great comfort in choosing to spend this month working hard on writing and not worrying about acquiring marvel cards for standard.

the second most-played card from marvel superheroes in standard is a one-of in the deck it goes in, that's funny

guess I should tag this as #microfiction