May 2025

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Sunday, January 4th, 2026 08:39 pm
Spirit City Lofi Sessions is a productivity game but I'm including it anyway :P

Actual puzzle games: Strange Antiquities, Mega Mosaic, Botany Manor, Logiart Grimoire, The Roottrees are Dead
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Friday, January 2nd, 2026 11:59 pm
Heads-up re LiveJournal, if you haven't heard: if you still have stuff you care about there, you should probably save it now.

Yuletide reveal: I wrote A Night at the Opera for [archiveofourown.org profile] mage-pie. I already knew them from Discord, and their prompts were very much in line with what I wanted to write. Good experience.

Tonight I unplugged my desktop, opened up the case, and gave it a clean. I am happy to say that it booted again afterwards. I haven't yet dared to try Hollow Knight again since, though. (What prompted me to do this was having the computer spontaneously shut down twice while I was playing Hollow Knight. In the same region.[*] It's a hot day, and heat plus not having cleaned the case since mumbleevermumble plus spontaneous shutdown while playing a game made me think "overheating".)

[* City of Tears, near the Watcher's Spire.]
Thursday, January 1st, 2026 11:50 pm
[not the usual 'things' post, but I'm hoping to do one such post once a week this year, and this is close enough.]

I finished reading Rivers Solomon's The Deep, went for a walk, mostly-assembled[*] the flatpack garden bench I bought back in November, did a bunch of weeding and tomato bondage[**], and played a few hours of Hollow Knight[***].

[* Some of the holes for the screws did not seem to have been drilled at quite the right angle, and I wasn't able to screw them in far enough even when I decided to stick a hex bit on my impact driver and use that. Which worked great for the ones on the right side, but the ones on the left side wouldn't go in any further than they already had, and as a bonus I stripped the screw heads. Ugh.]

[** Green tomatoes sighted! Now slightly further off the ground than before I tied them up!]

[Located the map to Fog Canyon, found Queen's Gardens, accidentally had my second altercation with Hornet (I beat her in Greenpath a long time ago), got my carapace handed to me and decided I was not ready for that fight yet, attempted and soundly failed at the Delicate Flower quest, and beat Uumuu and Elder Hu.]

Hope everyone else's new year is good so far.
Tuesday, December 30th, 2025 11:54 pm
Hi everyone. Sorry I've fallen off the posting again.

Here are some Yuletide recs:

Imperial Radch/Translation State - Ann Leckie: a perfect preservation (so we’ll never fall apart). If you haven't read Translation State yet, then I strongly recommend not reading this fic until you've read canon. Otherwise, recommended. (I was the recipient.)

The Lottery - Shirley Jackson/The New Yorker RPF: Why one small American town won’t stop stoning its residents to death

Goose of Soulmate Enforcement trope/Original Fic: #footscraygoose (Especially recommended for people from Melbourne)

Prophet - Sin Blaché & Helen Macdonald: Wrong Choice

The Raven Tower - Ann Leckie: k2, p2, yo, k2tog

Columbo, Princess Bride (1987)
The Princess Murdered

France's language watchdog has told government officials to use French fetish terms... (News Satire): Les immortels au service de la petite mort

Chalion/Les Mis: The Truth that Once Was Spoken
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Monday, December 29th, 2025 01:55 am
a thick tangle of holly, with shiny green leaves and red berries

It’s the liminal days. I’m catching up on holiday correspondence and visits, restarting non-holiday things that got dropped (e.g. going to the gym), and eating a lot of delicious leftovers and improvised meals.

Sang and I watched Carol, and keep meaning to rewatch The Lion in Winter but also keep diverting or downgrading, twice to sample the gay Hallmark Christmas movies (The Holiday Sitter and Friends and Family Christmas so far), which are better than anticipated.

I’m working on a fic and a risograph print (they are not related to each other). There are many other things– piano, getting more flexible, drawing– that I’d like to practice steadily, but haven’t yet found where to work them in. I also browse rescue dogs on the internet.

I’m reading Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and deeply happy that it’s 650 pages long so I get to read it for a long time. Conversely, all my favorite books of 2025 are picture books.

2025 has been a lot. My father died in February and was buried in a military cemetery; we also held a public memorial service for him in June. I retired from the university in September. Sang and I traveled to Japan for several weeks after that. My youngest aunt, energetic and vivacious as always in June, was taken down by pancreatic cancer and died on Thanksgiving. A less eventful 2026 would be just fine. I could find a lot of joys in homebody life with outdoor walks.


This post originates at everyday though not every day. Comments welcome here or there.

Thursday, December 25th, 2025 02:10 pm
During the family Christmas Zoom call Mum asked if I had any recs for historical computer games in which the protagonist does not commit acts of violence. When I asked what kinds of gameplay she enjoyed she just said "nothing too hard".

So here's what I came up with after exploring the historical and education tags on steam, if anyone has any recs or anti-recs please let me know!
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