look on my works ye mighty, and despair

We finished watching Bungo Stray Dogs, which is now onto its second season and a different main arc. Combined with our enjoyment of Yuri on Ice, that gives us two current animes to try and keep up with! We were also keeping up with two things last season, this is amazing since I think of myself as madly behind the times with anime viewing. We are finally shelling out for a Crunchyroll sub, as well -- we've been using guest passes until now, but they ran out last week and, well, we probably should pay for it at this point, especially since we can't obsessively rewatch Valvrave without a premium account. We're told that Crunchyroll actually distributes sub fees based on what you watch, which I very much approve of! I like the idea that our money isn't being thrown at shows we don't care about, especially given how much awful stuff there is on there.

The PS4 Pez bought me has really changed our viewing habits, I think. It has Netflix and Crunchyroll and Amazon video as apps. I mean, our TV gives us apps too; BBC iPlayer and 4onDemand and so on, but we don't switch to those nearly as often as we switch to watch things on the PS4. And we do still watch a lot of random TV as background noise, but we watch far more stuff by choice than we used to. On Sunday night we watched Amelie, which Pez hadn't seen before, and which I like a great deal -- I own it on DVD, but somehow actually putting it on as a DVD is so much more deliberate an action than just streaming it via the PS4.

Speaking of the PS4: on Sunday I played FFXIV almost all day. I finished the Ixali beastquest chain! And I crafted and crafted and crafted and so I am now at least level 15 in all the crafting professions. This makes it easier to do *all* crafting projects, because of the extra skills you unlock at level 15. My level 45 carpenter can easily now push out high-level bows and fishing rods and also *furniture*. Furniture sells for a lot of in-game money as well as being nice in my own apartment; I burnt ~300k on resources for the crafting binge and drained my funds but after my retainers sold a few things I'm back up to ~280k already. Very tempted to go botany-mad for wood this evening, so I can make more furniture.

(Work has been crazybusy. And today we went to the gym and I put up all my weights to be hard, to the point where I was actually out of breath after my circuit on the resistance training machines. I am very tired. FFXIV seems like a good, non-efforty way to burn my evening. :D)

Today Microsoft emailed me to say YOUR ACCOUNT BALANCE IS EXPIRING WARNING WARNING. I had nearly 11 quid on my account when I checked, so I snagged the Nier DLC that I kept meaning to pick up, and Jade Empire because I am apparently Bioware's bitch. Meanwhile the new Blur album came out and I have a copy so I should really listen to that (I'm a dreadfully lazy Blur fan these days). I suspect I'm slightly more excited about the Shouta Aoi and Lagrange Point albums, honestly? Truly, I have gone over to the dark side of weebishness.

The past week of work was ridiculous and exhausting; it's a now three-day weekend and MCM gave out a load of Coscraft vouchers to past winners on Friday so I suspect Monday is also going to be painful. Whee. I really am tempted to spend a lot of this weekend hibernating with videogames and books. However, I will attempt to at least start Dito's hoodie, or the waistcoat for Druitt. Even small bits of progress are progress, right?

Also: Hong Kong in (just over) a month! I'm starting to get excited for the food and clothing already.

digiguy was here for the weekend! We did four photoshoots (Fire Emblem: Awakening, Persona 3&4 (which possibly makes it Persona Q?), Amnesia and Dangan Ronpa). My main impression from looking at the results is that I really need to get back on the diet, I'm ~ten kilos above my lightest weight -- which, yes, is a lot -- and I can see it everywhere including my face and it ages me quite a lot. Sigh. We still managed to get some nice photos, though!

Our cats were *bastards* though, waking him up and pestering him overnight. Poor Digi.

I also finished the first labyrinth in Persona Q and so my Persona 4 party has met up with the Persona 3 team. Seeing Akihiko and Kanji arm-wrestling in the hanging-out screen gives me warm fuzzy feelings.

I also started bought and played through the various routes in Coming Out On Top, which is a porny gay dating sim (I'll link to the same review a friend did). It's charming and quirky, and has great writing and actual enthusiastic consent and multi-racial representation and a bunch of excellent things. But it also left me without any sense of risk for most of it -- as in, I felt it was always easy to spot the ways to not progress relationships -- and the main character in particular fell into the usual dating sim trope of being generic for the sake of being identifiable-with. I had a good time playing the game and will probably play any additional content that gets released, but it felt like a game to play and then mostly quietly forget about. Except for the goldfish.

2014 was an up-and-down year, like 2013 before it. Breaking it down:

( Work )
( Health )
( Travel )
( Home )
( Music )
( Cosplay )
( Fandom )
( Books/manga/comics )
( Videogames )
( TV/Film/anime )
( Theatre and Ballet )
( Other )

My posting here dropped off sharply, sigh. I was mostly on Tumblr this year, and a little on Facebook and Twitter (I am massively throttling twitter participation and basically don't add people any more; I do not want it to become my primary social outlet because I dislike the length restriction).

But I'll, uh. Try to post here more, again, at least.

All this week I managed to think it was today but the Damon Albert @ Royal Albert Hall concert is actually next weekend (good thing I realised this morning, whee). Which -- though I'm extremely hyped for the concert -- is kinda awesome! Unexpectedly free weekend where we don't have to travel to London at all! Pez and I are considering hiking out tomorrow to get dim sum at the only decent place in Colchester environs that does it, instead; that'll probably involve getting a taxi there and/or back, but it'll be worth it.

Other plans I have involve actually playing at least one of the videogames I have piling up here. Just from this week I have Hadean Lands and the beta of Elegy for a Dead World plus the new game from the creator of To the Moon, and I still keep meaning to pick up things like Mass Effect 3 again. And I have untold dozens of games sitting in my Steam library to play. Who was that old me who used to have the attention span and unbroken chunks of time with which to play through JRPGs over and over? These are games I actively want to play, but... it just keeps not happening. SOON.

WaniKani level 10 reached! This is pretty awesome, seriously, I can read all sorts of things I couldn't before. Largely I mean song titles since that's what I tend to idly see most often, but possibly I should pick up some doujinshis one of these days and see if I can read anything (from previous experience with squinting at handwritten Japanese the issue will be identifying the fricking hiragana, not the kanji).

Meanwhile, Steam is having a summer sale! Oh dear.

Again, backdating so I can find this in future!

I enjoy reviewing these at the year's end.

( books and manga )
( videogames and other games )
( music )
( tv )
( film )
( cons, events, travelling )
( cosplay )
( other )

Finally - finally - playing the Telltale Back to the Future games. Gosh. This is hitting me right in the fandom nostalgia. I approve.

Also my Tumblr dash at the moment is like a cascade of Tenimyu Dream Live 2013 screencaps and gifs. It's awesome. Hooray for happy enthusiastic obsessive-fan people; you make me feel so much less crazy by contrast.

*screencaps some videos and queues up about a dozen photoposts for the next week on Tumblr, wonders where day went... oh*

Uh, meanwhile. The Steam sale comes to an end, and so I can stop lusting after more games than I will possible have time to play. Whew. I did get most of the little indie games I was curious about, though. And the Telltale bundle. Let's hope I find some time to actually play things.

In kitty news, Ja is now basically cured of his patches of baldness. Either it's the change in food, or it's because he's not getting to sleep against radiators (it couldn't be prevented, really, in the last place). He's still unpredictably prone to violence, but at least he's soft and fluffy to the touch. He and Mocha still fight, every so often, mostly around mealtimes. I do not forsee this changing, really. Sigh.

Edna and Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes is a creepy, silly, vaguely gorey-esque adventure game centred around a young girl in a convent school. It's very dark, with moments of deliciously grim humour, and a nice eye for the absurd. It has a bunch of little puzzles scattered throughout, none of which are very difficult, and all of which can be skipped. There's a sarcastic narrator speculating on Lillie's internal thought processes and suggesting inadvisable courses of action. There's a gorgeous soundtrack (the opening song is sung by the lead developer, I believe), and good voice acting almost all around (unlike Deponia by the same developer, where I had to quit after a while because I kept being jarred by sentences that seemed to have been read entirely out of any script context).

Lillie is an odd protagonist; she's mostly oblivious to how people regard her (she's bullied and in fact abused by the institution) and is upbeat and optimistic to the point where she literally cannot see the most horrific consequences of her actions. This is played for laughs at first, and then revisited a bit more deeply later on. As the player, however, you're pretty quickly aware of what is happening, and (if you're me) quickly get kind of sadistically invested in causing yet more mayhem. Later on, there's a lot of puzzles which involve unlocking certain 'banned' behaviours by exploring an alternate, Old-West-styled version of the game world and beating 'inner demons' by either finding a valid reason to perform the behaviour or else by tricking the demon into performing it. Usually this involves more violence and destruction. Once a banned behaviour is unlocked, you can use that behaviour to advance through other parts of the game.

I think my main problem with the game is how little impact the player has on what happens. Lillie has lots of obvious little goals to achieve as she goes, but the overall plot is really just 'things happen to you' in a long queue: it's entertaining, but you don't really feel much of a sense of agency (which may be the point, considering Lillie's life before the beginning of the game). The ending comes down to a simple three-way branch; I tried all three and wished they'd been a little longer, honestly.

A good game, still! I always like a nice dose of cheerful craziness.

(also, I appear to now be cosplaying from To The Moon at Ayacon! Because I just needed a simple cosplay for the third day, and Dr Neil is too fun to pass up ♥)

All Life is Yours to Miss - Excellent, warming, funny Harry/Draco fic by saras_girl. With adorable pet giant beetle action.

This story, courtesy of ooshiny. I can't help but picture the couple having a brief discussion along the lines of 'shall we give him a lift? seems like sort of a wasted journey if we don't.'

This photo -- I just love reading Yoshiki's facebook posts, really: sometimes he's taking moodily-lit topless photos and claiming to be a vampire and then sometimes he's all 'yay, giant robot!'

Also: friendly kitties, having our giant fan on the table to provide a nice breeze, and poking at the shiny things on Steam.

And finally: full gay marriage now being made legal in the UK. The Bill is expected to receive Royal Assent as soon as Wednesday 17 July and the first full marriages of same-sex couples will take place in England and Wales in spring 2014.

Hair has been successfully shortened with lots of layers and choppiness! Lots of stylist-wrangling needed as always (Pez had the same thing, in the seat next to me: a lot of 'no, really, shorter, honestly'). I, uh, also took the thinning scissors to the back of it myself after we got home, because I am just never quite happy with haircuts other people give me. Photos will probably go on facebook tomorrow; the cut's good but she didn't style it the way I probably will. We had lunch with our friend Chelsea (and her mother and sister) afterwards; so much chicken.

The Steam sale has been taunting me. I don't really need new games, I don't have time to play the ones I own already really. I did snag The Cave and Civilization V despite that, since they were super-temptingly priced, and the sale also reminded me to update my actual Steam wishlist a bit. Edit: ha, and of course what has just come on sale is The Witcher and The Witcher 2, damn you Steam. I'll try and resist.

The heat is sucking all my will-to-do-things out of me. I just want to emulate the cats and sprawl out somewhere. Ugh.

Ib's skirt is finished! And so is the cravat. I've bought the socks, I can borrow a shirt from Pez and she also has eminently suitable shoes. All that's left is the wig, and I need to wait for our next wig delivery to snag a base in the right colour. Huzzah, three-day costume creation.

(Masa's Hi Jump concert video was a fine soundtrack for today's cosplay work, incidentally.)

I got a message from the library today telling me that one of my reservations was available to collect! I'd reserved it approximately 8 months ago, and had in fact bought the book in the interim period, but hey, it was a nice thought. It did remind me that the library existed, and that a couple of books I wanted to read were probably available to borrow, and indeed, the book I'd been eyeing in the bookstore a few minutes before was there on the shelf when I looked. Libraries are awesome.

Last night I made most of a pleated skirt (for Ib)! I'll try and finish that up tonight; I need to buy a zip and some interfacing for the waistband before I can do much more with it.

I think we've decided not to do our Attack on Titan cosplays at Aya; the maneuver gear is not going to be sturdy enough for us to get it there without worrying about it, and we don't want to do a half-assed job of the cosplay. I guess we'll probably rewear our Dangan Ronpa ones instead, unless last-minute inspiration strikes. All the shifting plans!

And today that Reuenthal/Mittermeyer sidestory stageplay DVD finally turned up (along with a Masa concert DVD, yay). Muahaha. Just looking at the pictures on the back cover is making me amused. Not sure when we'll have time to actually sit down and watch it, but we'll find time.

Yesterday I styled my wig, folded some fabric, ripped more Saito Kazuyoshi albums onto my ipod (they arrived! but the DVDs I ordered at the same time haven't yet, boo) and played a bunch of Persona 4 Golden. A pretty good day, really.

Wimbledon has started again! And Nadal's already bombed out. It's going to be an interesting year, I think.

Kitties are peacefully asleep in different corners of the same room. Ja growls a bit every so often (if he feels trapped, generally, and this morning after he woke up to find himself still here) and hisses when Mocha's too close for his taste. Mocha hisses back a bit if he gets in her face about it, but otherwise has been lounging around with a supremely chilled attitude, generally from a careful distance. I'm quite impressed by how laid-back she's being, actually. We kept them separate overnight, just in case, though, and will again for a while.

Meanwhile, playing Persona 4 Golden and reading a bunch of kinkmeme fics yesterday evening (and very early this morning, mm jetlag-induced-stupid-waking-hours) has given me all the fandom feels again. Dojima/coffee-mug may be my new favourite ship.

A lazy Saturday in the Pez/Storme household: Pez spends all day making acrylic swords, and I spend all day playing on my Vita, writing or listening to music. I did watch Doctor Who (it's the first episode I've seen for about two series). It seemed okay. I think I needed more pre-existing affection for (or interest in) Clara for it to really work. Ah well.

We also watched Eurovision, which was a fine combination of boring, competent, quirky, dreadful, and HILARIOUS songs as usual. My 12 points went to Romania for the high-pitched Dark Lord on a box, followed by Greece for free alcohol and silly dancing men in skirts. Then some points to Ireland for all the tattooed homoeroticism, to Azerbaijan for the man mirror-dancing in a cramped box and to Iceland for sending Thor. Bonnie Tyler was predictably boring and low-scoring; being the UK entry seems to make even quite good musicians into snoozefests. The actual winner was NorwayDenmark with a reasonably generic power ballad, sigh. Europe, you disappoint me.

Sweden's interval comedy song was hilarious and brilliant, the cover of Abba's The Winner Takes It All was lovely, and their points-presenter was decked out in full visual kei style. Goddamn, Sweden, you know how to host a show (even if your greenroom host was an idiot).

I caved into the gadget lust. I squinted at my finances until I could pretend it was a sensible decision and then bought a PS Vita (it makes a little more sense to buy it now because that means I'll have it to play on the flight to HK next week; yes, that's pretty much my entire justification). And I gave into Amazon's years of pestering and signed up for a one-month trial of Prime too, so the Vita will be here tomorrow! Persona 4 Golden is also ordered and will apparently be dispatched tomorrow. Yay!

I also picked up the task I started 3 years ago of condensing down my music collection by getting rid of jewel cases. I've done A through G, and that fills 75% of one big storage wallet (with slightly more than one shoe box full of liner notes etc). It feels like a worthwhile task; we *really* need space, especially for Coscraft stock. I'll fill up that last 25% tomorrow, and then I guess I'll buy more storage wallets when I get *back* from Hong Kong.

Yay, a lovely day of fabric shopping! We managed to snag coffee with thephoenixboy (and some cosplayer friends of ours who were also fabric shopping) and then we headed into Chinatown for dinner and bubble tea with kedi_kedi. I need to provide Ayla with a couple of stage plays, because they are magnificent and she should experience their fabulousness. We managed to obtain fabrics for Ib, Persona 4 and Attack on Titan, plus some random gold and silver leather. Alas, it's the wrong time of year for cloak fabrics, but I'm sure we'll find something sooner or later.

Now we are at home, and there is tea. And soon, sleep.

Finally got so frustrated with Persona 3's apparent lack of any impending plot that I gave up and just read this Let's Play instead, followed by this Let's Play of the other half/part/game of Persona 3: FES.

Conclusion: I can absolutely see why people like Persona 3 so much. I can also tell that playing any more of it would have gotten me frustrated and angry to the point of not enjoying it, and stopping when I did was for the best. The plot gets interesting, but it's such a slow burn before it kicks off and, honestly, fatigue systems are up there with hunger systems on my 'do not restrict my playstyle using this' hatelist. Plus I seem to be exactly the wrong audience for 90% of the music -- a few tracks are great, but the battle and dungeon musics are dreadful. As it is, reading the LP meant I came out the other side with an appreciation for the art and the relationships and the characters, and the LPer has an enthusiasm for the whole fusion/persona creation system that was very endearing. And the game is fundamentally about teenagers shooting themselves in the face. So, yay?

(I still prefer Persona 4, which has serious gameplay issues but at least NO GODDAMN FATIGUE SYSTEM.)